A full month after befouling coastal waters with an explosion of black sludge that is still gushing from the deep, oil company explainers are out to persuade the public it isn’t too bad after all (A BP honcho was soothingly omnipresent last night from the PBS News Hour to Anderson Cooper on CNN). Insult to injury comes to mind as industry flacks try to minimize environmental harm abetted by Washington bureaucrats with, the New York Times reports, “prominent oceanographers accusing the...

There is a Marxist explanation for all this. Groucho, of course, not Karl. In Indiana, a Republican Congressman resigns after promoting but not practicing abstinence with a woman on his staff. In Connecticut, a Democratic Senate aspirant is revealed as a Vietnam draft evader after years of “misspeaking” himself into the role of a war veteran. In Pennsylvania, a Republican-turned-Democrat is turned out by his new party after decades of bipartisan tap-dancing, as one of the state’s...

“If I did not think that the security of the United States and the safety of the American people were at stake in Afghanistan,” President Obama said almost six months ago, “I would gladly order every single one of our troops home tomorrow.” Now, a Kabul suicide bomber raises the toll of our dead there to more than 1,000 as threats of terrorism on American soil are clearly tied to Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Now, even the proprietor of the war, Gen. Stanley McChrystal admits...

If anti-incumbent fervor peaks in tomorrow’s primaries, the President will have to face squarely his own part in creating it with a Pyrrhic victory on health care. In yet another instant-history book on the Obama White House, Jonathan Alter reveals that Rahm Emanuel “begged” the President last summer to scale back the mess that Congressional Democrats were creating but was rebuffed. “This is about whether we’re going to get big things done,” the Change President...

Hamid Karzai is in Washington this week for another round of coddling an “ally” in the War of Terror who is conning us out of lives and money to preserve a shaky, corrupt regime. Afghanistan’s Caped Crusader will try to talk the Obama Administration out of diluting his stranglehold on the country by its emphasis on “empowering those at the provincial and district level,” as a US official tactfully puts it. Karzai, the Washington Post reports, has “bristled at suggestions…that...

The torrent of words about the new Supreme Court designee suggests that Barack Obama has come as close to choosing himself as is humanly possible. His former colleague on the University of Chicago Law School faculty, Elena Kagan is variously characterized as brilliant, ambitious, open-minded, pragmatic and progressive–qualities that carried the President into the White House but now have him besieged by criticism from the political Right and Left. In announcing the appointment, he cited her...

Voter vigilantes are out for blood, and they can’t wait for November to get it. That was the message Saturday from Utah as a Tea Party posse took over the state Republican convention and convicted three-term Sen. Bob Bennett of not being conservative enough. It was like a scene from the 1940 movie, “The Westerner,” in which Hanging Judge Roy Bean metes out summary justice to suspects in a saloon. Mitt Romney showed up to plead for the accused, but the rowdy jury convicted Bennett...

The annual rite of maternal flowers and phone calls coincides with the 50th birthday of an oral contraceptive to make motherhood optional for sexually active women. “Welcome to the post-pill paradise,” exulted a suburban wife to her lover in John Updike’s 1968 novel, “Couples,” celebrating the uncoupling of human lust from procreation. But some things happened along the way to sexual Nirvana. AIDS, for one. And then a 21st century social conservatism that reached its...

The stock market plunges, a monstrous oil spill threatens coastlines, terrorism comes to Times Square, even the Grand Ole Opry is underwater, but the man in the White House is not pushing any panic buttons. “Obama,” David Brooks opines, “is handling his role, which ranges from the marginal to the significant, in these events with calm professionalism. He’s active yet not annoying. He’s not taking credit for everything. He’s not creating friction by making any missteps. He...

As his magazine goes on the block, editor Jon Meacham calls Newsweek one of the few Catchers in the Rye between democracy and ignorance at the edge of a media cliff, a last bastion of reporting in what Jon Stewart describes a field of “aggregating, commenting, analyzing.” As at a wake, when the deceased’s glory days get more attention than those of terminal illness, Meacham’s appearance on the Daily Show last night is in itself evidence of eulogy hyperbole. His interview was...

We attack al Qaeda and the Taliban with Predator drones. They send us a hapless Shoe Bomber, a Christmas plane passenger with underwear that doesn’t explode and now the Times Square terrorist who parks a used car full of jerry-rigged junk and leaves a trail of bread crumbs that results in his capture 53 hour later. Yet, lopsided as this War on and of Terror may be technologically, the score has to be reckoned not only by body counts, which we have mercifully been spared, but the anxiety created...

With sanity and good sense so media rare these days, when Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck star in “The 100 Most Influential People in the World,” the loss of Bill Moyers’ voice on PBS every weekend is hard to bear. His retirement at 75 marks the last of a generation of 20th century journalists, inspired by Edward R. Murrow, dedicated not to getting the story first but getting it right, to concentrating on what used to be scoffed as “soft news” but, in today’s 24/7 flood...

Just another date night in 21st century America as Times Square is evacuated by a crude car bomb while the President delivers one-liners to black-tied media in Washington. “We are very lucky,” New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg tells a 2 a.m. press conference after the disarming of an amateurish device of gasoline, barbecue-grill propane and fireworks. “We avoided what could have been a very deadly event.” He is right, of course, in the might-have-been sense, had the “bomb” been the...

Barry Goldwater, who won 27 million American votes for president in 1964, once asked a WASP-only Arizona country club if he could play nine holes there since he was only half-Jewish. Now the Grand Canyon State is becoming a national symbol for prejudice as lawmakers not only mandate Gestapolike searches for illegal immigrants but crack down on teachers who fail to speak English with an impeccable accent. In Arizona’s search for security, Peggy Noonan finds a response to a federal government...

The campaign mantra of “Drill, baby, drill” has morphed back into its 1960′s civil-rights antecedent of “Burn, baby, burn” as the Coast Guard OKs controlled fires to slow 5000 gallons of oil a day spewing from an exploded rig to menace wildlife and fishing industries along the Gulf Coast. During the VP debate, Sarah Palin lectured Joe Biden when he minimized the importance of off-shore oil, “The chant is ‘drill, baby, drill.’ And that’s what we...

Fittingly enough for a bi-lingual issue, the debate over Arizona’s arrest-an-immigrant law is becoming a confusion of tongues with ideologues speaking in unfamiliar ways. While some Democrats unsurprisingly invoke Nazi Germany and apartheid, Republicans from Jeb Bush and Karl Rove to Tea Party hero Marco Rubio are groping for less flamboyant language to distance themselves from the effort to turn the American Melting Pot into a Grand Canyon of division. The Bush dynasty’s heir-in-waiting...

The theme of big-city indifference to the Good Samaritan narrative is back with the story of a stabbed man left dying and bleeding by New York City residents for more than an hour before anyone tried to help. Decades after 38 witnesses failed to call police in the now-legendary killing of Kitty Genovese in 1964, the death of a Guatemalan immigrant a week ago while trying to help a woman being attacked in the same borough of Queens reawakens debate about urban apathy in the face of violence. In the...

For outrageous behavior by American organizations, only underlings are punished. Just as top people escaped responsibility in the Abu Ghraib tortures, the sole culprit named so far in the massive Goldman Sachs fraud is a 31-year-old trader named Fabrice Tourre, who is on leave and facing Congressional grilling today. Even after filing civil charges, the SEC, according to a former government regulator, has not “kicked into gear fully, or they’d be naming [Chairman Lloyd] Blankfein and...

The most perplexing GOP politician is at it again, this time upending a “bipartisan” energy bill in a fit over Senate Democrats’ decision to take up immigration reform in the face of a harsh new law just passed in Arizona, the home state of his best friend, John McCain, who is fighting for reelection there. Lindsey Graham’s decision, which derails planned introduction today of a climate change bill, cosponsored by John Kerry and Joe Lieberman, is only the latest move in almost...

A new memoir by an old friend, Jules Feiffer, and a belated look at a movie about another, Julia Child, recall a time when we were all young and the world was opening up for us like a Cinemascope screen. Julia and Jules grew up on separate planets before ascending into the celebrity firmament. A sunny ultra-WASP California childhood led her to volunteer for service in World War II and, after rejection for being too tall, to join the OSS to work at spying in Asia, where she was cited for her “drive...

After a bipartisan blip on financial regulation in Washington, the President was in Manhattan yesterday, warning Wall Street, “A free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it.” This tough talk comes after his lofty Earth Day anniversary proclamation: “Forty years from today, when our children and grandchildren look back on what we did at this moment, let them say that we, too, met the challenges of our time and passed on a...

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, with the credibility of a Bush holdover, makes the startling point that the President’s victory on health care strengthens America on the world stage. “When others see the president as a winner or as somebody who has real authority in his own house,” Gates tells Thomas Friedman, “it absolutely makes a difference. “All you have to do is look at how many minority or weak coalition governments there are around the world who can’t deliver something...

On a day when dog-stomping videos get Constitutional protection, questions arise about how First Amendment freedoms may be exacerbating today’s political polarization. Americans have come a long way from 1923 when Time Magazine first appeared to save them from being confused by “the million little chaoses of raw news” with a Voice from Above to explain what it all means. Back then, A. J. Liebling could rightly conclude that freedom of the press was limited to those who own...

Eight of ten Americans distrust their government, a new Pew poll finds, concluding that “Politics has poisoned the well” in the era of “a dismal economy, an unhappy public, bitter partisan-based backlash, and epic discontent with Congress and elected officials.” In the face of such domestic bitterness, however, a BBC poll of 28 countries finds that, coinciding with Obama’s tenure, “America’s influence in the world is now seen as more positive than negative.”...

It’s come to this: The President is publicly calling the Senate Republican Leader a liar–and worse. In his weekly address, Barack Obama says flatly that, after meeting with “two dozen top Wall Street executives to talk about how to block progress” on financial industry regulation, Mitch McConnell “came out against the common-sense reforms we’ve proposed. In doing so, he made the cynical and deceptive assertion that reform would somehow enable future bailouts–when...