With debate leaders underplaying conflict, Michele Bachmann takes center stage to give an over-the-top performance worthy of Gloria Swanson in “Sunset Boulevard.” After Newt Gingrich twice accuses her of getting facts wrong, Bachmann harrumphs that “it’s outrageous to continue to say over and over through the debates that I don’t have my facts right when, as a matter of fact, I do. I am a serious candidate for president of the United States and my facts are accurate.” (“You’re Norma...

Our departure, after nine years, almost 4500 deaths and trillions of dollars, comes not with a bang but a whimper of exhaustion and relief. “Iraq will be tested in the days ahead,” says Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, “by terrorism, and by those who would seek to divide, by economic and social issues, by the demands of democracy itself.” No senior Iraqi official attends the ceremony of departure, marked by muted wishful thinking that contrasts with U.S. arrival of “shock and awe” to...

I dozed off last night watching one of those Liam Neeson action movies in which he wrecks cities for reasons too complicated to explain and switched channels to find more of the same in the Republican demolition derby. Ron Paul is surging in Iowa to bump the tailpipes of Gingrich and Romney while the first frontrunner Donald Trump has been waved off the track, canceling his debate and promising to “leave all of my options open because, above all else, we must make America great again!” In the...

After a year of being held hostage by Tea Party naysayers, the party that controls the White House and Senate is finally gift-wrapping a package of gotcha for their tormentors. At the President’s urging, Senate Majority Leader Reid has told Speaker Boehner he will not hold a vote this week on government spending until there is agreement on the payroll tax and unemployment compensation issues, for which House Republicans have insisted on paying with cuts for federal workers and Medicare beneficiaries...

Watching the President on 60 Minutes raises wonder at why more Americans aren’t rallying around this highly intelligent, energetic, fair-minded man. The answer may be in the question itself. Contrasting Barack Obama’s demeanor with the rage and unearned self-regard of his would-be successors, Congressional critics and Murdoch media attack dogs—-and his low-key response to that rabid criticism–may tell us as much about low approval ratings as his own performance. Informed of a new poll...

The least passionate segment of Saturday night’s debate was a brief round on personal family values. Without glancing at Gingrich, his adversaries gave toneless answers, citing their own long marriages and “character” as an issue, with only Rick Perry, suave as always, expanding on the subject: “Not only did I make a vow to my wife, but I made a vow to God. That’s pretty heavy lifting. That’s even stronger than a handshake in Texas…If you cheat on your wife, you’ll cheat on...

Newton’s First Law tells us objects stay at rest or continue in motion if nothing changes, an apt description of this year in American politics: an inert Congress and a careening GOP presidential race that keeps dropping former frontrunners off the turnip truck. This was not the kind of Change Barack Obama had in mind when he was elected, but he has now gone through three years of pushing legislation against wall-to-wall GOP resistance that hardened into stone after the 2010 Tea Party takeover...

The next two Republican debates, tonight and Thursday, “are shaping up to be the most important–and nasty–yet.” Both come only weeks before Iowa caucuses on January 3rd, with primaries soon after in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida. These debates, predicts the Caucus, “are likely to be slugfests as desperate candidates search for a magic bullet to improve their political fortunes in the short time that is left. “The best predictors for the tenor of a presidential debate...

This is the week Barack Obama declared political war on an obstructionist GOP, invoking Theodore Roosevelt. In Osawatomie, Kansas, the President cited TR who came there in 1910 and “was called a radical…a socialist—-even a communist. But today, we are a richer nation and a stronger democracy because of what he fought for in his last campaign: an eight-hour work day and a minimum wage for women—-insurance for the unemployed and for the elderly, and those with disabilities; political reform...

Mitt Romney has an uphill battle as he gets into the Fox cockpit to contest Newt Gingrich, whose cozy ties with proprietor Rupert Murdoch go back almost two decades. “I’ll be on Fox a lot because you guys matter when it comes to Republican primary voters,” Romney tells Neil Cavuto in an interview as polls show him far behind Gingrich among Fox-watching Iowa caucus-goers. Until he started running for President, the former Speaker was on the Fox payroll, but his shady relationship with Murdoch...

We lived in a different America then. News of the Japanese attack came from bulletins that broke into radio programs and was spread by word of mouth over the phone, on streets of cities and house to house in small towns. That Sunday, I was a 17-year-old college student with a part-time job in a New York hospital, standing next to a young man with a dazed grin, staring through a picture window at a nurse in a white mask holding up a swaddled armful inches from our eyes. She gently shook the sleeping...

Thinking about Newt is exhausting—-all those policy reversals, all that profiteering from disguised lobbying, all that adultery while impeaching Clinton, all those crackpot gimmicks posing as intellect. Yet, there are many hands on both sides of the political spectrum to do the heavy lifting of deconstructing him. Maureen Dowd takes a whack at it: “His mind is a jumble, an amateurish mess lacking impulse control. He plays air guitar with ideas, producing air ideas. He ejaculates concepts, notions...

Shame is dead or at least comatose as two public figures refuse to retreat into embarrassment over mounting evidence of their sexual misconduct. A would-be leader of the Free World, Herman Cain is surrounded by barbecue, bunting and bands in announcing “suspension” of his campaign after “continued hurt caused on me and my family” by numerous charges of harassing women as well as a long-term extramarital affair. Cain’s positive spin on disaster recalls a press conference decades ago by two...

If Americans could pick someone for the White House next year from a Chinese menu, what do opinion polls tell us about what they want? The seesawing Republican race, along with Obama’s falling favorables, suggest that voters’ appetites are more jaded than they have been for decades. But if they could pick and choose traits, what kind of composite President would we get? Resistance to Romney clearly shows a desire for something new, but if Gingrich is the answer, what’s the question? Newt’s...

Al Franken, who used to be a comic and perhaps still is, has created a holiday solution to the Senate’s civility shortage—-a “Secret Santa” exchange of gifts between the opposing parties. Just as in grade school, 21 Republicans and 37 Democrats have drawn names from a Santa hat and will present each other with gifts worth $10 or less in mid-December. That won’t violate lobbying laws, and there is something to be said for handing one another gift-wrapped packages instead of verbal hand grenades. In...

The final nail in the Cain campaign’s coffin is a disheartening reminder of how far Americans have come in being vulnerable to figures “telling public lies with the utmost sincerity.” Four years ago, John Edwards gave us a preview of hypocrisy taking a candidate close to the White House, but his mendacity was hidden by six years in the U.S. Senate and a substantive campaign, however undercut by his personal enrichment, to highlight growing income disparity in the nation. Herman Cain’s rise...

A tipping point in the Obama-bashing competition has now cost Mitt Romney endorsement by the only paper that counts in New Hampshire. “Newt Gingrich is by no means the perfect candidate,” says the Union Leader, adding “We would rather back someone with whom we may sometimes disagree than one who tells us what he thinks we want to hear.” This follows last week’s debate, where Ron Paul seemed beside himself at what others were saying, and even Michele Bachmann, Our Lady of the Ludicrous...

If you enjoyed how Ralph Nader put George W. Bush into the White House in 2000, you may love what a group called Americans Elect is trying to do in 2012. The well-financed effort wants a “wide-scale draft movement for presidential candidates,” but it looks more like hammering a “broken” political system and smashing it to smithereens. Americans Elect aims, not to create a new party, but hold a “convention on the Internet,” to take the choice away from primary voters and turn it over to...

Tired of sandwiches? Try this.

The President pardoned two birds yesterday after Congress went home for the holidays. In the annual White House rite, he acknowledged the other fowl escapees, noting that “some of you may know that recently I’ve been taking a series of executive actions that don’t require Congressional approval. “Well, here’s another one. We can’t wait to pardon these turkeys. Literally. Otherwise they’d end up next to the mashed potatoes and stuffing.” Aside from his swipe at Capitol Hill residents,...

He has been gone now longer than he lived—-48 years to 46–and, in these days of Washington impotence, must seem unreal to generations of American born after his time. A few years after the assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy wistfully told me that her husband was being remembered too much for how he died rather than what he had lived for. She was right. It was too soon then for Americans to appreciate what they had lost. In 1960, I had made an unintentional contribution to Kennedy’s election....

British and German heads of state met this week to bridge the gap between them and “tried to paper over divergent views on European policy that have sparked a war of words between politicians and media in both countries.” For someone who lived through World War II, the picture of David Cameron entreating Angela Merkel conjures up Neville Chamberlain trying to appease Hitler—-and failing to stop the slaughter of millions of innocents. Such blood memories may be impossible for most Americans...

An impression of Bumble the Beadle is Newt Gingrich’s latest turn in a one-man show of Dickens impressions as he tells Harvard students that he wants to turn schools into workhouses by hiring poor kids as janitors: “You’re in a school that is failing with a teacher that is failing…Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the schools.” With his doughy countenance, Gingrich is ideally suited...

Another Congressional “Perils of Pauline” episode unreels with the Supercommittee jalopy dangling over the edge of a cliff as members try to freeze the frame beyond next week’s deadline while ideologues left and right gabble about bad Grand Bargains, sequesters and the like. From the cheap seats in New Hampshire, Mitt Romney accuses Democrats of a “Faustian bargain.” Meanwhile, Sarah Palin throws both sides under her bus, appealing to ends of the political spectrum, the Tea Party...

As powers-that-be sweep away the Occupy movement, where does the animating spirit go now? With apologies to generations who have lodged “99 percent” into the American vocabulary, this will come as unwanted advice for those whose have made visible hidden rage against a financial system that brought the economy to its knees and still keeps profiting while the rest of us suffer. Even so, as a retiree, I can add my own victimhood credentials—-a return of near-zero on savings that used to supplement...