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...

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...