As the Bush Era recedes in the rear-view mirror, both friends and foes keep revisiting its glory days. The House Judiciary Committee makes public documents that show Karl Rove turning “law enforcement into a tool of partisan politics,” and Dick Cheney wants it known that George W. Bush went soft on him in their second term and “turned out to be more like an ordinary politician in the end.” The former Vice President’s rueful attitude will serve mainly to hype interest...

Back then, the White House was obsessed with enemies lists and conspiracies, now we have a President trying to calm crowds riled by the prospect of death panels and plots to steal its freedoms. As Obama’s approval ratings fall, pinpointing American paranoia is much harder than it was in the 1970s. Just as the social upheavals of the 1960s allowed Richard Nixon to play on the anxieties of what he called The Silent Majority, the Era of Change has stirred up primal fears among Americans who need...

The eulogies for Eunice Shriver as a tireless humanitarian bring to light again the story of a forgotten Kennedy, Rosemary, who was diagnosed as mentally retarded and, at the age of 23, underwent a lobotomy and spent the rest of her life in an institution. When JFK was on his way to the presidency, no one talked publicly about a sibling who did not fit into the picture of a large family of healthy, active achievers, but when he was in the White House, Eunice with his permission wrote a magazine article...

Nothing significant has happened, but suddenly the economy is looking better. Excitement over snippets of good news, or more accurately less-bad news, is underscoring how much of it all is psychological and suggesting that Obama’s aggressive stimulus attack, no matter how flawed, wasteful and even wrong-headed, has been crucial to keeping us from going over the edge. In the past few days, the usually sober New York Times has been agog with happy talk about the economic crisis, climaxed today...

Nora Ephron’s new movie recalls the morning Julia Child burned my breakfast toast. In the 1970s, her husband Paul and I were in their Cambridge kitchen talking heatedly about politics while Julia sort of tended the broiler but was more interested in leaning over to hear what we were saying. When smoke started pouring from the oven, she pulled out a tray and dumped the charred contents into the sink. “Ah, well,” she said smiling and slicing more bread, just like the French Chef...

The rowdiness will no doubt subside, but could civility save the “debate” over health care? The signs are not encouraging. Today the President devotes part of his weekly address to “dispelling the outlandish rumors that reform will promote euthanasia, cut Medicaid, or bring about a government takeover of health care. “That’s simply not true. This isn’t about putting government in charge of your health insurance; it’s about putting you in charge of your health insurance.” A...

Left and right, the ugly turn of American politics this month is provoking conflict about the conflict. Paul Krugman decries “recent town halls, where angry protesters–some of them, with no apparent sense of irony, shouting “This is America!”–have been drowning out, and in some cases threatening, members of Congress trying to talk about health reform.” Across the ideological divide, Peggy Noonan finds, “What the protesters are saying is, ‘You are terrifying...

Sonia Sotomayor is on her way to the Supreme Court as Laura Ling and Euna Lee are reunited with their families after being wrested from the grasp of Kim Jong-il. Yet the imagery of these triumphant women is blurred by double exposures from the past of men involved in their fates. Voting against Sotomayor’s confirmation today as the third woman and first person of Latino heritage on the Court will be John McCain, who incurred his party’s wrath by being soft on immigration and was defeated...

The Obama Administration is making an effort to “name and shame” them, but the vampires in banking and on Wall Street are still busy draining liquidity out of the American financial system. According to the McClatchy newspapers, “The first report under the Home Affordable Modification Program, involving more than 30 lenders that together collect payments on 85 percent of American mortgages, found an especially dismal performance by two major national banks–Bank of America...

Off-the-books diplomacy, recalling Bill Richardson’s career as an unofficial negotiator with Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic in the Clinton era, is back with the former President himself in North Korea to arrange release of two imprisoned American journalists, employees of a media unit headed by former VP Al Gore. Bill Clinton’s gig is complicated by his wife’s status as Secretary of State, giving new meaning to the expression “private channels.” All hands in...

August arrives with a dandy metaphor about the difference between the old journalism and the new–the New York Times‘ record-setting number of errors in reporting Walter Cronkite’s death juxtaposed against a blog frenzy over the news of a Sarah-Todd Palin divorce. Even for this traditional month of fake and flaky news, it’s an impressive start. The Times Public Editor tells us all, maybe more than we want to know, about seven corrections in what the newspaper printed about...

While the nation suffers a political migraine over health care reform, news spotlights an overlooked aspect of the mess–that the current system is turning doctors into thieves. Federal authorities yesterday arrested 30 physicians and other medical providers for $16 million of fraud as part of a series of crackdowns in what the FBI estimates to be between $60 and $100 billion a year of health care crime. The healers this time are accused, among other neat tricks, of billing Medicare for liquid...

While the President serves beer to Henry Louis Gates and James Crowley in the White House today, Lucia Whalen will be at work in Cambridge, pondering the lessons of her phone call to the police last week. In the aftermath of Barack Obama’s gaffe in saying the police acted “stupidly,” the White House is smoothing over the ensuing national rancor with a photo-op reconciliation for the principals in the confrontation without acknowledging the abuse that has been heaped on Ms. Whalen...

In a defining moment for the politics of Change, the President is facing a fight-or-flight choice against a coalition led by a powerful member of his own party. “Sometimes I get a little frustrated,” Barack Obama told a town hall yesterday, “because this is one of those situations where it’s so obvious that the system we have isn’t working well for too many people, and that we could be doing better.” Yet, as the President commands crowds and TV cameras, Max Baucus...

Politics’ loss is society’s gain as Sarah Palin stepped into her new career with “some straight talk” about the media and Hollywood. “You represent,” she told assembled journalists, “what could and should be a respected, honest profession, and what could and should be a cornerstone of our democracy–and that’s why our troops are willing to die for you. “So how about in honor of the American soldier you quit making things up?” She also...

As she steps down today as governor of Alaska, where is the Mouth That Roared headed? Political obscurity is a possible destination but, based on her 11-month performance since John McCain anointed her, that seems unlikely. A long-time Alaska Republican operative tells the Washington Post: “As the saying goes, the most dangerous place you can be is between a grizzly sow and her cub. But now I have to change that–it would be between [Palin] and a television camera.” The irony is...

This month, for the first time in decades, a payment I sent did not reach its recipient. This rare mishap was a reminder that good old reliable snail mail is in its death throes after 234 years of creating a national community out of isolated places thousands of miles apart, making a daily visit to the mailbox an adventure that brought the world to us with words on paper, many of them in the handwriting of people we love. The decline now is even faster than it was during the Great Depression as the...

In saying a policeman acted “stupidly” in arresting Henry Louis Gates Jr., President Obama has uncharacteristically inflamed a minor incident and revived last year’s idiotic debate about whether or not he is “black enough” to suit African-Americans or, on the other hand, too black for those who see the world primarily in racial terms. Until Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. became a campaign issue, Obama seemed intent on minimizing race and inviting voters to judge him as a “post-racial”...

Six months and counting, Obama’s Era of Change has reached a crucial point where the push against “politics as usual” has found a test case in health care reform At his press conference last night, the President observed that “if you don’t set deadlines in this town, things don’t happen. The default position is inertia, because doing something always creates some people who are unhappy. There’s always going to be some interest out there that decides: You...

The debate is heading for rock bottom. “If you like your plan,” Barack Obama promises for the umpteenth time in the Rose Garden yesterday, “you’ll be able to keep it. And each bill provides for a public option that will keep insurance companies honest, ensuring the competition necessary to make coverage affordable.” At tonight’s press conference, will someone please ask the President why, half a century after handing over health care to profit-making private insurers,...

Six months of scrambling on all fronts–bank bailouts, economic stimulus, climate change–have brought the President lower approval ratings from a public suffering from crisis overload and left him needing a Hail Mary pass to score on his key issue. “With skepticism about the president’s health-care reform effort mounting on Capitol Hill–even within his own party,” the Washington Post reports, “the White House has launched a new phase of its strategy designed...

For the oldest of us, the Evening News died yesterday, the “most trusted man in America” who came into our living rooms every weekday night and told us about what was happening beyond our own senses, “And that’s the way it is.” For two tumultuous decades, before 24/7 cable and the Internet, Walter Cronkite was the face of the news, mediating between millions of Americans and the raw chaos of events, ordering the flood of words and pictures into a hierarchy of importance...

Forty years ago this weekend, two events marked the end of the Kennedy era–Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, as JFK had promised, and his brother Ted drove off a bridge at Chappaquiddick to signify the end of Camelot. “I believe,” President John F. Kennedy had told Congress the year Barack Obama was born, “that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.” For those...

The House proposal to raise taxes on the very rich to help cover health insurance for all brings into focus what has been a hidden issue in the debate until now: Should medical care be a right guaranteed to all by all, as education, safety in the streets and freedom from foreign invasion now are as part of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? If government pays for the schooling of Americans and their safety in the streets, is it any less logical to consider protection from life-threatening...

As the Sotomayor Show drones on, Democrats and Republicans are pushing dueling plot lines–an American dream of minority upward mobility vs. the Conservative nightmare of activist judges tilting the scales in favor of it (see firemen, New Haven). Behind these postures is the reality that Supreme Court confirmations are now TV soap operas in which politicians emote to their core constituencies on the way to what only Lindsey Graham openly acknowledges as Judge Sotomayor’s predetermined...