Now that America’s Sweethearts are reunited and planning to wed, they will need household gifts beyond the usual place settings and silver. Herewith a few gift suggestions for well-wishers: *Caller ID to block incoming messages from anyone named Palin or Johnston. *His and her DVDs of the 2005 Jane Fonda movie, “Monster-in-Law.” *Subscriptions to Time and Newsweek to class up their coffee table by covering copies of Us, People and Playgirl for the filming of their new reality show. *Services...

Secrets are not what they used to be. The nation’s greatest storyteller has made us wait 100 years to find out what was in his heart, but LeBron James spilled the beans on a TV special after only weeks of teasing our interest in an era when everyone from Elizabeth Edwards to Levi Johnston is sharing. Isn’t it better this way? Mark Twain’s reticence recalls that memorable Jack Nicholson line in another American classic, “You can’t handle the truth.” But in the 21st...

In an interview on the PBS News Hour, the President’s Chief of Staff demonstrates the difference between being brainy and empathetic–a problem that is becoming crucial to the White House. On a mission to shore up Barack Obama’s image as a decisive leader, Rahm Emanuel patronizes Jim Lehrer, a journalistic icon, as he tries to pin down the President’s direct involvement in such issues as the Russian spy swap and the decision to sue Arizona over its punitive new immigration...

Tea Party people, who adore Colonial times, are acting out another of its iconic stories, a 21st century version of a spectral beheaded figure terrorizing politicians with fear of losing theirs. After the toppling of such a Senate stalwart as Utah’s Robert Bennett, the Republican Party itself is virtually headless, with Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney swiping at Chairman Michael Steele’s scalp while an unlikely coalition from Ron Paul and Ann Coulter to E. J. Dionne defends his misgivings...

Mixed political weather for the nation’s 234th birthday: Barack Obama basks in a solar future while Tea Party members gather to shake their fists at what they see as darkening skies. The President, in his weekly address, looks at Colorado, Arizona and Indiana, seeing “once-shuttered factories humming with new workers who are building solar panels and wind turbines, rolling up their sleeves to help America win the race for the clean energy economy.” But, in a USA Today poll, Tea...

John Boehner, who succeeded career exterminator Tom DeLay, is being bugged by insect metaphors. The House Minority Leader told a reporter the Wall Street reform bill was like using a nuclear weapon to kill an ant and was stump-jumped by the White House in Wisconsin. “He compared the financial crisis to an ant,” the President told a crowd. “The same financial crisis that led to the loss of nearly eight million jobs…that cost people their homes and their lives’ savings.” Meanwhile,...

The FBI and KBG are still playing the old games. The Bureau, which failed to anticipate the Times Square bomber, has been relentlessly tracking Russian agents posing as suburban homeowners for years, and the former spymaster Vladimir Putin is kvetching about it “Back at your home,” he tells another retiree, Bill Clinton, drawing a laugh, “the police went out of control throwing people in jail. But that’s the kind of job they have.” The indictment of 11 “deep...

While Barack Obama was doing his Donald Trump act telling Stanley McChrystal “You’re fired!” on TV, the winner of this season’s Afghanistan Apprentice show was at the President’s side solemn and expressionless. For Gen. David Petraeus, who had fainted earlier this month while testifying before the Senate, this new assignment comes as the 21st century definition of a good soldier saluting and doing his duty in the face of a personally devastating order. To start, the...

Two incidents of stripping public figures bare bracket the question of “the public’s right to know” in an era of redefining journalism–the downfall of Gen. McChrystal and an inconvenient possible truth about Al Gore as a Clintonesque groper. David Brooks asserts the General was done in by a cultural change that has elevated “private kvetching” by public officials to the forefront of the news, citing Theodore White’s “Making of the President” books...

For someone who served under Patton in World War II and lived through the MacArthur mess over Korea, the text of McChrystal’s self-immolation in Rolling Stone still comes as a mild shock–a hard-to-believe-it’s-not-parody of macho gone mad in an era when top generals have learned to be as smooth as Petraeus, who sold Bush’s Iraq Surge without getting his hair mussed by the media. McChrystal, on the other hand, revels in projecting a Neanderthal image, starting with his complaint...

Six decades after a commanding general lost his job for bad-mouthing Harry Truman’s conduct of the Korean War, another is in the White House today apologizing for deriding Obama officials over the conflict in Afghanistan. But Stanley McChrystal is no Douglas MacArthur, a mythic figure after his triumphal World War II return to the Philippines and a consummate military politician who played Congress like a violin in opposing his President’s caution over risking war with China in Korea. Dwight...

Opening his Fathers Day gifts, Barack Obama must be basking in a rare moment of unconditional love as his White House is engulfed in a rising spill of criticism and disapproval from all sides. After what Frank Rich terms a “doomed” speech on the Gulf gush, the President this weekend is being called, on the one hand, “snakebit” by Peggy Noonan, a speechwriter who ruined Bush I’s reelection chances by having him mouth “Read my lips, no new taxes” and, on the...

In the Oil Spill, the President is sounding like Ishmael but Americans want him to act more like Ahab. “My power is not limitless,” he told Gulf residents before The Speech last night. “I can’t dive down there and plug the hole. I can’t suck it up with a straw.” That exasperation is reflected in postmortems of his attempt to take political charge of an unmanageable mess that has inspired parallels with Melville’s saga of human hubris, a relentless search for oil leading...

As the war in Afghanistan worsens, its American proprietors have suddenly discovered that, far from being a quagmire, the country is a jackpot of “nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits…far beyond any previously known reserves.” Trumpeted in a front-page New York Times story, quoting Gen. David Petraeus no less, this “revelation” comes at a time when, the Washington Post points out, “Bad news from Afghanistan came in a steady stream last week,” including...

Helen Thomas and Queen Noor were in the news last week, American women of Middle East descent making career moves. Thomas, who has annoyed ten presidents with questions at White House press conferences, made the mistake of answering one herself and ended up unemployed shortly before her 90th birthday. Her Majesty, nee Lisa Halaby of Washington, widow of Jordan’s King Hussein, was in Hollywood to promote a movie she helped make with Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” producers...

In retrospect, George W. Bush was right when he described himself as a Uniter, not a Divider. He left office after bringing together Democrats and Independents under the banner of “Yes We Can” while Republicans campaigned as if he had never existed. A year and a half later, the dams of Bush government-in-denial have burst open to flood the political scene with economic and environmental disasters resulting from a Decider who spent eight years decreeing that regulation of anything was...

Another primary day, another occasion for voter disgust– today’s ballots will be parsed for the degree and direction of anti-incumbent rage as new polls show such passion at an all-time high. All this recalls the reaction of a social critic half a century ago to excoriation of those who produce mass entertainment as purveyors of junk: “Yes, but what about the people who consume all this swill, who choose the bad over the good, who don’t know or don’t care about the difference?” In...

George W. Bush was lucky. Over eight years, the so-called liberal media decided he was an incurable clod, mocked him as the self-described Decider and left his inner life alone. Not so with Barack Obama, for whom the Oil Spill has unleashed a new rush of psychobabble from the Left, with globs of comment about his detachment, over-rationality and rage deficit. As everyone from Maureen Dowd to Spike Lee urges the President to “go off,” his Press Secretary is reduced to defending the boss...

A decade ago, who would have thought Hillary and Bill would still be together as Tipper and Al end their forty-year marriage? In announcing their breakup, the Gores requested “respect for our privacy,” but that hasn’t stopped speculation about what happened to the man who might have been president if Bill Clinton had kept his pants zipped. The Gore news comes right after the premiere of an awful HBO movie titled “Special Relationship” that explores Tony Blair’s...

In the 1960s, an editor I knew proposed a snarky picture book to be titled “They Must Know What They’re Doing or They Wouldn’t Be Where They Are” that would show the captain of the Titanic, the designer of the Edsel, LBJ directing the Vietnam war and other examples of low acumen in high places. Since then, the list has grown with Nixon at Watergate, Jimmy Carter’s bumbling on the Tehran captives, George W’s Iraq occupation, Alan Greenspan handling the housing bubble,...

Now we have bipartisan embroidery of war records as the Republican candidate for the President’s former Senate seat in Illinois is caught giving himself a medal he didn’t get in Serbia, joining the Connecticut Democrat who retroactively imagined himself in Vietnam combat. On Memorial Day weekend, such false claims recall my World War II experiences with the subjects of heroism, cowardice and the reality between. As a 20-year-old foot soldier waiting for assignment in France, I was ordered...

The White House accepted full responsibility for a Gulf cleanup yesterday, but there was no outcry about the government takeover. Congressional Republicans were busy trying to repeal health care with marchers on Capitol Hill shouting “Kill the bill.” “The American people should know,” the President said, “that from the moment this disaster began, the federal government has been in charge of the response effort…BP is operating at our direction. Every key decision...

Up to now, there was only Joe Lieberman doing his Uriah Heep act for cable news cameras, but now the Nutmeg State has its own tent for November’s national circus to rival such freak-show attractions as the Kentucky ophthalmologist with tunnel vision and flashbacks to an imaginary past. The Connecticut Democratic front-runner suddenly morphs from a buttoned-down bureaucrat to the character in “Arsenic and Old Lace,” waving a wooden sword up the stairs yelling “Charge!”...

Today’s to-do over government recalls what a book publisher observed half a century ago, when exposes like “The Hidden Persuaders” and “The Organization Man” were topping best-seller lists, “Americans are always astonished and upset to discover that society is organized.” Back then, amid post-World War II prosperity, the “upset” over threats to individual freedom was mild and came from the Left. Now it has migrated Rightward and escalated into...

The Tea Party’s new hero has decided to emulate the 2008 Vice-Presidential candidate and avoid being grilled by annoying reporters, ducking his Meet the Press interview tomorrow. Pity, for unlike Sarah Palin, Rand Paul’s problem is not that he is clueless about issues but quite the opposite–he clearly has strong views on every subject. His recent mots about the 1964 Civil Rights Act infringing the rights of restaurants and the Obama White House picking on poor BP could be only the...