Tiger Woods, who named his yacht Privacy, was born half a century too late. As he laments the exposure of “matters that are intimate and within one’s family,” Woods’ pain recalls a time when two of the world’s most famous actors lived together on and off for decades with the full knowledge of and complicity by the media to keep their private lives private. As a magazine editor back then, I was involved in the final chapter of Katharine Hepburn’s life with Spencer...

“Did you notice,” E.J. Dionne asks, “that the president did not choose to quote any of his party’s own giants…? Instead, he quoted a Republican, Dwight D. Eisenhower.” For those who doubt that Barack Obama has anything in common with Ike, herewith the story of a memorable evening with the nation’s 34th president: In the summer of 1964 I fell in love with the man I had voted against twice. After Eisenhower’s retirement, I was one of a half dozen magazine...

When the President unveiled his vehicle for getting from here to there in Afghanistan last night, it was not, as W’s chief of staff described the Iraq invasion in 2002, a “new product” but an eight-year-old jalopy retooled for an even longer, bumpier ride. As Barack Obama “assumed full ownership,” there was no shortage of tire-kickers, starting with John McCain, who judges wars on durability (i.e., 100 years in Iraq). The President reportedly placated his rival in last...

Somewhere in an Afpak cave, the 9/11 mastermind must be smiling as the US takes the next big step in his “bleed-until-bankruptcy” plan to defeat the most powerful nation on earth. Today’s news should reassure Osama bin Laden (and/or his heirs) that the objectives he laid out in November 2004 are working out well–to gaslight his enemies into self-destruction, a term derived from an old movie to describe intimidation and psychological abuse through false information that clouds...

Pre-game coverage of the President’s speech at West Point tomorrow night is on track as White House spinners emphasize that he will “give a clear sense of both the time frame for action and how the war will eventually wind down.” Translated, this means that a 48-year-old man named Barack Obama will tell Americans how and why he is sending some 30,000 men and women, most of them younger than he is, to a place thousands of miles from home where they will kill people they don’t know...

What is as close as we’re going to get to a calling-to-account for the former Decider and his puppet Tony Blair for thousands of deaths in Iraq is unfolding, largely out of American media sight, before a panel of British nobles. The Chilcot inquiry is hearing from such witnesses as the then-Ambassador to the UN that he threatened to quit in the runup to the Iraq invasion over bulldozing from the Bush-Cheney White House. “The UK’s attempt to reconstitute a consensus,” says Sir Jeremy...

That photo of the Vice-President with his arms around a couple of grinning White House gate-crashers will do nicely as a symbol for Americans as they count their blessings, real and imagined, this weekend. While so many were getting their meals at homeless shelters, the headlines are devoted to the reality-show aspirants who breached the most secure location in the nation, decked out in finery and hair-styling that could have paid for hundreds of Thanksgiving dinners. Economic absurdity aside, how...

Hold the mayo for those sandwiches, and try this instead,

Next week Barack Obama will announce he is sending tens of thousands more troops to fight in Afghanistan as he prepares ten days later to accept the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway. This juxtaposition raises questions about the “new climate in international politics” for which the Nobel Committee has cited him, observing, “Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts.” But such instruments will not work against...

The weekend “victory” in the Senate has Pyrrhic written all over it as 2000 pages of proposed legislation is on its way to being held hostage by the likes of Joe Lieberman, Mary Landrieu, Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson et al. What we have now is an abortion of a bill that will only get worse as the back-alley bargaining goes on. Here’s a radical idea for the President of Change: Take most of it off the table until after next year’s elections and put your full weight behind another...

The day is here again, November 22nd. It’s been 46 years now and, for those well over that age, no less painful with the passage of time. His death was the first of a president in our living rooms–the motorcade, the rifle shots, the disarray in Dallas, the dazed swearing-in of his successor that night, the on-camera murder of the assassin two days later and then the funeral with our eyes and hearts transfixed by the beautiful young widow and two small children. We are so inured now to...

As Harry Reid pressures holiday-homebound Democrats to vote for a start of the Senate health care debate, Republican resisters have found a new weapon to use against the bill–a sudden deep concern about how it might threaten women’s bodies. Seizing on a quasi-government task force’s report this week recommending that annual mammograms start at 50 rather than 40, the GOP has gone into full outrage mode. “This is how rationing begins,” warns Rep. Marsha Blackburn. “This...

Now that she has smooched you-know-who this week, the talented Ms. Winfrey is ready to end the talk show that made her a billionaire and start the next phase of her life as a media mogul with a cable channel aptly named OWN. Like the would-be VP but for much longer and in a far different way, Oprah has been a phenomenon, rising from the depths of poverty to become an American icon with empathy, intelligence and enthusiasm, an Everywoman in constant battles to control her emotional life as well as...

Tomorrow, he turns 92 after passing another milestone as the longest-serving member of Congress in history, almost 57 years. With such longevity, Sen. Robert Byrd embodies almost a century of American history that transformed a nation of backwaters dotted by big cities into a metropolitan sprawl with access to 24/7 knowledge about the whole world. Byrd, a self-made man if there ever was one, started as a gas jockey and butcher in West Virginia during World War II, who discovered a taste and talent...

The more we learn about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the thinner the line stretches between ideology and mental illness, and the more troubling is the question of why, surrounded by psychiatrists, his potential for violence was not sufficiently recognized to remove him from his position as a healer of trauma victims. Yesterday brings a report that “military superiors repeatedly ignored or rebuffed his efforts to open criminal prosecutions of soldiers he claimed had confessed to ‘war crimes’...

Four decades after being tortured in a North Korean prison camp, John McCain is trapped in a slow drip of accusations from Sarah Palin as she embarks on weeks of media ubiquity to promote her aptly titled, “Going Rogue.” A New York Times review notes that “the most sustained and vehement barbs in this book are directed not at Democrats or liberals or the press, but at the McCain campaign. The very campaign that plucked her out of Alaska, anointed her the Republican vice-presidential...

A Congressman offers a lesson today about how politics and the media collude to distort rational discussion. In an Op Ed, Rep. Earl Blumenauer of Oregon explains how his bipartisan proposal to have Medicare pay for voluntary end-of-life discussions morphed into death panels: “I found it perverse that Medicare would pay for almost any medical procedure, yet not reimburse doctors for having a thoughtful conversation to prepare patients and families for the delicate, complex and emotionally demanding...

The attacks brought Americans together briefly, but the aftermath is still sowing division–as the decision of Attorney General Eric Holder to try five of the 9/11 terrorists in lower Manhattan brings conflict and confusion. On the surface, it’s hard to argue with Holder’s logic: “After eight years of delay, those allegedly responsible for the attacks of September 11th will finally face justice. They will be brought to New York–to New York–to answer for their alleged...

Barack Obama is doing what George W. Bush failed to do in Iraq–looking for “where the off-ramps are,” according to a White House official. As the President starts a nine-day Asia trip, he leaves behind the message that his Afghanistan decision has been strongly influenced by Karl Eikenberry, the US ambassador who was once military commander there, whose doubts about Hamid Karzai are reflected in a White House statement: “The President believes that we need to make clear to...

CNN has struck a blow for journalism on cable TV by forcing Lou Dobbs to take his “advocacy” elsewhere. Somewhere between the right-left divide of Fox News and MSNBC, the network has been comparatively fair-minded with the glaring exception of Dobbs, who occupied a unique spot of blowhard wrong-headedness on the political spectrum. When I started blogging in 2006, my second post was headed “Is Lou Dobbs Running for Something?” and noted: “A long-time Republican, defender...

As Decision Day nears and the President considers four options for Afghanistan, a question hovers over his agonizing: Is it a war or an endless occupation? Will 30, 40 or even 80,000 troops stabilize an unstable country with a corrupt government or, when turmoil persists, stir rage and hatred at Americans for making their people’s lives worse? We went in eight years ago to root out Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists but have succeeded mostly in squeezing them, like toothpaste in a tube, into border...

In his Ft. Hood eulogy yesterday, the President eloquently honored “men and women answering an extraordinary call–the call to serve their comrades, their communities, and their country. In an age of selfishness, they embody responsibility. In an era of division, they call upon us to come together. In a time of cynicism, they remind us of who we are as Americans… “Tomorrow is Veterans Day. It is a chance to pause, and to pay tribute–for students to learn of the struggles...

In the battle over health care, the Republican Right, after months of saying no to every Obama initiative from stimulus to bailouts, has gone on the offensive to slice and dice Americans into warring factions–young-old, men-women, rich-poor, anywhere fear and hatred can be stirred up. Sarah Palin, bless her feisty heart, started it all with “death panels,” but naysayers are now working the other side of the age divide. After warning the young that ObamaCare will kill their Granny,...

In moments of crisis, Gail Collins writes in the New York Times, “I generally recommend looking to see where Joe Lieberman is going. Then head the other way.” Such wrong-way reliability, which has made Lieberman a lodestar for the anxious and confused, delivered two gems yesterday–on the Ft. Hood massacre and health care reform. As investigators conclude that the shooting spree “was not part of a terrorist plot,” he announces that, as Senate Homeland Security chairman,...

When Arizona Republican John Shadegg used a seven-month-old baby as a prop during yesterday’s debate on health care, his symbolism was more apt than intended. What the House passed last night was a bowel movement of a bill diapered by competitive political posturing to cover a messy pile of mandates, entitlements, wishful savings and iffy tax changes. To call the legislative process that produced this excretion infantile insults the newborn. President Obama labeled last night’s achievement...