Two Southwestern stars of the GOP, the Governor of Texas and the Senator from Oklahoma, are riding off in opposite ideological directions. Rick Perry, who keeps falling off his horse in the Republican debates, has now mounted a bucking bull by proposing a radical and, in some respects, clearly unconstitutional tearing down of the federal government, which includes making Congress work part-time with half pay and ending lifetime tenure of federal judges. (Lots of luck with those!) The Perry plan would...

For a long-time Democrat who loves his country much more than his party, it may seem like an agonizing choice: a sane Republican to oppose Barack Obama or one of the revolving front-runners who would be easier to beat next November. The question is brought on by the serial implosions of Bachmann, Perry, Cain et al with Newt being teed up for next 15 minutes of fame on the dog-and-pony debate circuit. The answer is easy. No American wants to play Russian roulette with the country’s future so, in...

The time for euphemisms is running out. What we are seeing is more like a social meltdown. A Pulitzer Prize-winning economic journalist writes about “The epic global leadership fail,” but the symptoms he cites, along with so many others, add up to a loss of the moral responsibility that used to be taken for granted as common decency: “The global financial system teeters on the edge of collapse because European politicians refused to tell citizens of their crumbling economies that they could...

The Penn State Scandal has many losers—-not the only the legendary coach who lost his job, his reputation and a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the university that fed on football and is now disgraced by it, a student body in shock and, beyond the campus, millions who have lost some of their innocence about an “amateur” game that, as years of covering up the crimes of a pedophile coach show, has more in common with corporate rather than academic ethics. Yet there is nothing new in the use of...

I know just how Rick Perry felt during his “brain freeze” the other night. As other GOP candidates were spewing out new versions of their non-sequiturs about Barack Obama and the economy, my eyes were drawn to the Texas governor every time the cameras showed him in a shot. A curious combination of expressions fleeted across his face, some of earnest determination to follow what another candidate was saying, at other times a kind of glazed look as if he were watching a foreign movie without subtitles. I...

Memo to Clint Eastwood: This admirer of your mature work is going to pass on the new Hoover movie. Even public monsters have inner lives, but some are beyond my capacity to care about, such as those of a man who built a self-glorifying empire by blackmail in Washington, ruining reputations, holding Presidents hostage in a personal police state and relentlessly hounding the century’s greatest exemplar of human decency, Martin Luther King. J. Edgar Hoover invented and promoted the image of tommy-gun...

From evidence so far, the Pizza Man’s skirt-chasing seems as random as his economic studies, making casual passes at objectives but cheerfully taking nein-nein-nein as a final answer and moving on to keep selling. After lurid testimony by Woman #4, which led the PBS NewsHour, #5 comes as a letdown, with Cain, after a speech in Egypt, asking to be set up with a woman in the audience, then trying to settle for a USAID worker and finally dining with a group, stiffing them (and ultimately taxpayers)...

I’ve just spent a week in that earlier America you love so much and, while the absence of politicians was a blessing, I would not recommend living in cold semi-darkness, feebly powered by an emergency generator that eats $100 a day of propane and engine oil (if you can get a delivery) without providing Internet, cable or phone service and, in many cases, enough juice to run an electric range. Even this weekend, well over 100,000 homes of my neighbors in the Northeast are still that way, evoking...

A year from today, Americans vote for a president again. Three years after the last ballot, even ardent Democrats and entranced Independents no longer have stars in their eyes. With no time for a honeymoon back then, how can voters be enthusiastic about renewing their vows with Barack Obama? For some, “consider the alternative” may be answer enough, but in fairness to the President—-and ourselves—-he deserves better than that. Campaigning back in 2007, Michelle Obama talked about her husband’s...

On Halloween weekend, Americans apparently are tired of all-tricks, no-treats on Capitol Hill, sending approval ratings down to the GOP’s favorite single digit while the President sees a slight gain in public favor. Gallup attributes the Obama bump to Iraq troop withdrawal, a rising stock market and that golden oldie, the death of a Mideast tyrant, reflecting Gadhafi’s demise as it did that of Osama bin Laden. Congress’ near-death experience requires little explanation as lawmakers stumble...

Democrats offer a $3 trillion debt reduction of tax increases and spending cuts, including as much as $500 billion in savings from Medicare, Medicaid and other social programs to revive the Obama-Boehner Grand Bargain on the debt ceiling that Eric Cantor and his Tea Party House cohorts torpedoed last summer. The proposal would include as much as $300 billion to stimulate the economy, but this would require Republicans to stop acting like spoiled Baby Boomers in a sandbox, clutching their favorite...

Hard times in the 1930s produced a golden age in Hollywood as Americans, helpless in real life, sought escape at neighborhood movie houses. Today, those Depression classics are being remade and brought into our living rooms to be sold as reality. The GOP is doing the horror films. Frankenstein has morphed into mad scientists working feverishly in the lab to animate a new Rick Perry from old political body parts but, even as the Creature starts to look plausible, it unexpectedly starts to babble about...

It ran only once 47 years ago, but a one-minute effort for LBJ’s 1964 reelection campaign was still being parsed this week at a college symposium as “the most negative political ad in American history.” During the network airing of a Hollywood biblical epic back then, amid cheery product pitches, suddenly there was the image of a little girl pulling petals from a daisy and counting erratically, to be replaced by a nuclear countdown as the camera zoomed in on her eye, froze and cut to a mushroom...

Second prize in the GOP presidential contest is a lucrative stint as a commentator for Fox News, and the Pizza Man has a lock on that, which makes it surprising that Karl Rove is the first to count him out as the nominee. Holding up a list of Cain flip-flops and walkbacks, his future colleague decrees that it “has created an image of him as not being up to this task. That’s really deadly.” But in the Fox alternate-reality stable, that’s no disqualification—-check out Sarah Palin, Mike...

Barack Obama has answered a question David Petraeus posed eight years ago. A division commander as the Iraq invasion began in 2003, the General was troubled about what a young Illinois legislator would call a dumb war, asking “Tell me how this ends.” Over 4400 American lives and more than a trillion dollars later, President Obama has replied to Petraeus by withdrawing all troops from Iraq by year’s end. In his Weekly Address, the President notes, “As we remove the last of our troops from...

Eric Cantor is a rising Washington star, as JFK was when he published his 1955 best seller about political fortitude. But sadly Cantor doesn’t have a stylish collaborator like Ted Sorensen, and his turgid essay on American success was scheduled for more turbulent times, producing a chapter to qualify for “Profiles in Caution.” At the Wharton School of Business yesterday, the House Majority Leader was to enlighten future tycoons about income inequality when his staff made the discovery that...

News from Libya provokes reactions as weird as the man himself: “CBS: Qaddafi. ABC: Gadhafi. NBC: Khaddafy,” tweets a White House correspondent. A satellite radio reporter adds: “Gadhafi is dead–someone reach into his wallet and look at his driver’s license so we finally know how to spell his last name!” Along with death jokes, a tyrant’s last minutes are on prime-time in a cellphone cinéma vérité montage for family viewing, a long way from early days of TV when Abraham...

A year ago, Washington rumors had Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton switching jobs for 2012, and that was before the Tea Party wrecking crew came in, brought government to a standstill and created an anti-Obama climate that threatens a hostile takeover of the White House next year. (President Perry? Cain? A compliant Romney?) The idea was dismissed out of hand back then, even though Bob Woodward, after months researching an Obama book, said, “It’s on the table. And some of Hillary Clinton’s...

The candidate who gained most from a Republican bickerfest in Las Vegas was the one who saved airfare and stayed in New Hampshire talking to voters face to face. At the very least, Jon Huntsman was not embarrassed by squabbling on the stage. It started with Rick Santorum introducing himself as someone who was going to catch the redeye to be with his daughter in the hospital and quickly went downhill in political relevance. Starting in poll-numbers order, Herman Cain took 999 heat but kept insisting...

Rupert Murdoch seems sufficiently recovered from his Fleet Street troubles to be tapping into the Wall Street protesters with the full weight of his attack journalism. Yesterday he takes down the Journal paywall to tell us all: “In interviews, protesters show that they are leftists out of step with most American voters. Yet Democrats are embracing them anyway.” A former Bill Clinton pollster, based on results of “the first systematic random sample” (oxymoron, anyone?), reports that “the...

Force-feeding was an unexpected subject this weekend as Herman Cain aces a “Meet the Press” grilling while gourmands stuff themselves with soon-to-be-illegal foie gras at a Los Angeles eat-in protest. David Gregory does little to ruffle the candidate’s smooth-as-pate patter, even as Associated Press reveals that Cain’s “economic ideas, support and organization have close ties to two billionaire brothers who bankroll right-leaning causes through their group Americans for Prosperity.” On...

Police arrested 175 Occupy Chicago protesters in Grant Park yesterday, recalling not only the night Barack Obama was elected but one when I was tear-gassed there 43 years ago. [corrected: see comments] “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible,” the President-elect told 250,000 celebrants three years ago, “who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy,...

With twelve months to go before The Election, Occupy Wall Street has to morph soon into more than a messy mirror image of the Tea Party without its political focus. Half a century ago the emotional energy of street theater protest was not enough to save America. We started the 1960s with a Cuban Missile Crisis victory of JFK followed by the Civil Right Act and Great Society dreams of LBJ, but the rage over Vietnam and what it did to the economy gave us Nixon, four more years of war and Watergate....

Mitt Romney is liked but not well-liked. Herman Cain could sell ice cubes to Eskimos. Images from post-World War II theater arise as “Death of a Salesman” meets “The Music Man” in a 21st century culture clash that defies rational explanation. Like “Dr.” Harold Hill, who sold band instruments and uniforms without knowing how to read music, Cain is dazzling even stubborn Iowans with his 9-9-9 version of “76 Trombones.” Alongside him, “inevitable candidate” Romney is looking like...

The next debate may have to carry fact-check subtitles but, to get the flavor of this one, the Caucus blog parses some of the more flagrant examples of Truthiness. My favorite is Newt Gingrich’s inversion of an advisory on prostate tests for men from a policy that could save lives and needless suffering into an example of Sarah Palin’s death panels, which was named “The Lie of the Year” in 2009 by an award-winning fact check site. But how to choose? Practically everything out of Michele Bachmann’s...