Quelling public panic is part of a President’s job description, but yesterday’s homeland security dog-and-pony show, while necessary, was not Barack Obama’s finest hour. He offered classic bromides–”The buck stops here” and “connecting the dots,” along with the newest, “systemic failure”–followed by a laundry list of proposed bureaucratic “improvements” to paper over the stark fact that predicting and preventing terrorism...

More than 50 million Americans a month board commercial airliners to go somewhere. In view of events from 9/11 to the recent Christmas Day unpleasantness, it may be time to revive memories of World War II posters asking, “Is your trip necessary?” Now that any demented fellow passenger could be planning to blow them out of the sky, the question comes back with renewed force. My own Luddite tendencies go back over half a century when, on a business flight, the thought occurred to me after...

“American history,” David Brooks proclaims, “is often driven by passionate outsiders who force themselves into the center of American life” as he predicts: “In the near term, the tea party tendency will dominate the Republican Party” just as “the hippies defined the 1960s; the feminists, the 1970s; the Christian conservatives, the 1980s.” Say what? A journalist-survivor of those decades finds that as dizzying an oversimplification of what happened back...

The immortal hand and eye that frame his symmetry are those of Annie Liebovitz for a naked-to-the-waist Vanity Fair cover as Tiger Woods enters the new decade, not as the unflappable figure addressing a golf ball on Sunday afternoon TV but as a subject of sermonizing for the morning political pundits. On Fox News, Brit Hume suggests that Buddhism may be below par for Woods’ moral crisis: “I don’t think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the...

Barack Obama and Rush Limbaugh will both be leaving Hawaii with a better prognosis for the new decade than events of the holiday season might have provided. If the Christmas Day body bomber had not been thwarted, the President’s vacation would have been cut short to lead the nation in mourning hundreds of victims of what he yesterday clearly attributed to terrorism: “Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula trained him, equipped him with those explosives and directed him to attack that plane...

From the blame scramble over the aborted Christmas bombing comes a CIA defense of the failure to ground Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. The New York Times quotes an anonymous official: “You had a young man who was becoming increasingly pious and was turning his back on his family’s wealthy lifestyle. That alone makes him neither St. Francis nor a dead-eyed killer. “Every piece of data, of course, looks different when you know the answer, as everyone does now.” By this smug reasoning, Osama bin...

“Passionate hatred,” Eric Hoffer wrote half a century ago, “can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance.” Days after a 23-year-old Nigerian demonstrates the enduring truth of this observation by Eisenhower’s favorite philosopher, along comes 68-year-old Dick Cheney to confirm its universality. The...

The terrorist who set his pants on fire on a crowded plane is a Christmas bookend to the Thanksgiving White House party-crashers–reminders that, as the Marx Brothers would put it, there is “no sanity clause” in our contract for security in today’s world. Both incidents undermine the belief that poverty and oppression are the main sources of danger, with the perpetrators turning to be scions of the wealthy, a Virginia vineyard owner and a Nigerian bank chairman. The other usual...

“Hiccups,” says the Mayo Clinic, “may result from a large meal, alcoholic beverages or sudden excitement,” which makes this the perfect-storm day for being afflicted. Fortunately, there is a sure-fire cure, passed on to me by (brace yourself for major name-drop) John F. Kennedy’s White House doctor, Janet Travell, an expert on muscle spasms who put him in a rocking chair and kept him from being bed-ridden. Years later, when I was helping Dr. Travell find a publisher...

As he assesses his performance in 2009, Barack Obama could claim he has been the victim of a bait-and-switch by Americans who voted him into office a year ago. Elected on a platform of Change, he was immediately asked to become the first responder to an economy falling apart. He is not copping that plea, but the case should be made over the yowling from the do-nothing Right. In a year-end interview, while defending himself on the health care imbroglio, the President notes that “the most important...

The Republican National Committee chairman, who has been charging audiences up to $20,000 a pop for his words of wisdom, offered up a free sample, accusing Democrats of being willing to “flip the bird to the American people” in the health care debate. Michael Steele’s elegant formulation came after Tom Coburn combined his credentials as an MD and evangelist on the Senate floor Sunday by suggesting, “What the American people ought to pray is that somebody can’t make the vote...

As Ben Bernanke, Time‘s Person of the Year, heads toward his second term as Chairman, there is no sign of relief for the most hapless victims of the bank bailouts–millions of retired Americans whose fixed incomes have plunged as a result of the Fed’s near-zero interest rates. In his cover interview, Bernanke explains that “convalescent” banks, which have been taking taxpayer nourishment for a year, are in “much better shape than they were. They are lending, but...

As Democrats worked feverishly to stuff Sen. Ben Nelson into his Christmas stocking, the President used his pre-holiday weekly address to hammer health insurer lobbyists and promise voters “the toughest measures we’ve ever taken to hold the insurance industry accountable.” The price for a Nelson this season was high, starting with possible restrictions by the states on abortion coverage and filling the package to the brim with what are delicately described as “other favors for...

As the century’s first decade winds down, what stands out to someone who has lived through many of them is how America’s problems today are being “solved” by angry confrontations, sour and inconsistent compromises, hopeless shrugs and variations thereof. Health care reform, the Afpak war, the crippled economy, the imperiled climate–all are being confronted, despite a rhetorically gifted president’s formulations, by a population that seems to have lost faith in...

A touch of farce is just what the Senate scrimmage needed, and Joe Lieberman provided it at yesterday’s White House meeting. While the President tried to get his dyslexic troops marching in the same direction for a final vote, the Senator from Self-Important Sanctimony made a bid for sympathy from the assembled colleagues he has been holding hostage. “What’s happening,” he said, “is not any fun for me.” Like the parent killer pleading for mercy as an orphan, Lieberman is now...

As Tiger Woods is pelted by wisecracks about dating women with 8X10 glossies and Gov. Mark Sanford’s wife decides to divorce him over his South American travels, the year’s body count is mounting for public figures brought down by failure to rein in their private parts. Such consequences of low behavior by men in high places (gender equality has not yet evolved enough to ensnare powerful women in sex scandals, but give them time), suggest guidelines for who gets away with what these days–and...

Watching President Obama on 60 Minutes recalls a memorable exchange from the 1987 movie, “Broadcast News,” in which Holly Hunter’s boss taunts her, “It must be nice to always believe you know better, to always think you’re the smartest person in the room.” With a stricken expression, she answers, “No. It’s awful.” Last night, as he was being pressed by Steve Kroft about the mess in Afghanistan, the President responded, not with dismay but beyond...

Ten months and trillions of dollars after taking office, Barack Obama has finally found a way to make Republicans happy: Go to Europe, do a Bush impersonation, order Freedom Fries and tell those pusillanimous peace-mongers they would be toast if Americans weren’t always ready to come over there and kill bad people. Dick Cheney hasn’t weighed in yet, but Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich are thrilled with the President’s Nobel speech. “I liked what he said,” says she about Obama’s proposal...

Accepting the Nobel Prize, Barack Obama deferred to “Schweitzer and King, Marshall and Mandela” as well as Ghandi and a long line of peacemakers in parsing the irony of a wartime leader being honored in their company, as he acknowledged “the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. “I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King said in this same ceremony years ago, ‘Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social...

Call me Ishmael if, as Barack Obama’s gets his peace prize, the possibility of another unlikely award doesn’t arise with the first academic appreciation of “Going Rogue” as a work of art. In his New York Times blog, Professor Stanley Fish makes the case for Sarah Palin’s mastery of the autobiographical form in delivering “the truth the genre promises…the truth about themselves–the kind of persons they are.” A liberal arts dean emeritus, Fish deconstructs...

President Obama seems ready to deliver on a threat Candidate Obama made over two years ago–that, if Pakistan doesn’t go after its terrorists, he will. The Surge in Afghanistan, according to White House leaks, comes with “a fairly bald warning that unless Pakistan moved quickly to act against two Taliban groups they have so far refused to attack, the United States was prepared to take unilateral action to expand Predator drone attacks beyond the tribal areas and, if needed, to resume...

As the public option starts to morph into an expansion of Medicare and Medicaid in the main tent, two Senate buffoons, Harry Reid and Joe Lieberman, are stepping up their side shows in the health care circus. The Majority Leader is dragging slavery and woman’s suffrage into the debate by invoking them as precedents for Republican resistance: “When this country belatedly recognized the wrongs of slavery, there were those who dug in their heels and said ‘slow down, it’s too...

Sixty eight years ago today, Americans suffered a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor that brought us into a world war that would last less than four years. This week, after months of debating, we took a step deeper into an eight-year war with no end in sight. On December 7, 1941, I was a college student with a part-time job in a hospital maternity ward showing fathers their new babies on the other side of a large picture window. Those babies are on Social Security now, grandparents themselves, some...

The image comes from Tom Friedman describing the Obama decision last week as like “an unemployed couple who just went out and decided to adopt a special-needs baby,” to which he might have added “from a family that deals drugs and rear it in a neighborhood where the kids steal each others’ lunch money.” All the President’s Men (and Hillary Clinton) are on the TV circuit to sell the Stop-and-Go Surge, along with senior media pundits to parse it, but the babble boils...

The question is timing. Why is Max Baucus, the Senate master of health care reform, telling the world on a Saturday morning that he “is currently in a mature and happy relationship with Melodee Hanes,” adding that “They are both divorced, and in no way was their relationship the cause of their respective divorces.” Well, yes, congratulations and all that, but why is the Senator’s office sending out this particular Hallmark card in the midst of weekend sessions to iron out the kinks...