“The Washington Post’s ill-fated plan to sell sponsorships of off-the-record ’salons’ was an ethical lapse of monumental proportions.” So says the paper’s ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, in a long mea culpa this weekend, underscoring how economic pressures can bedevil even those whose main business asset is a reputation for probity. The lowliest staff member could have told the top people that it was not a good idea to ask $25,000 a head to attend “intimate...

The state of the economy is iffy at best but, less than six months after its passage, the market for badmouthing the stimulus bill is booming. On the left, Paul Krugman insists that a “bad employment report for June made it clear that the stimulus was, indeed, too small” and “damaged the credibility of the administration’s economic stewardship.” From right field, House Minority Whip Eric Cantor tells us “the stimulus or so-called stimulus plan that spent almost $800...

David Broder muses about exit strategies in public life: “Two vastly different public officials–Robert McNamara and Sarah Palin–shared the spotlight this past week, triggering fresh thoughts about one of the classic dilemmas of governmental careers: When and how do you quit?” Wrong question. What’s important is why. Coupling McNamara with Palin is less to the point than pairing him with Colin Powell, both honorable men serving presidents obsessed with fighting the wrong...

When a commission probes the economic meltdown, Michael Lewis’ Vanity Fair piece “The Man Who Crashed the World” will serve as a rough draft of what went wrong at AIG and started the financial landslide. In chronicling how the company built a tower of risk that tumbled around Wall Street’s ears, Lewis in passing reveals the role of Eliot Spitzer, then New York Attorney General, in enabling it all. Lewis’ close questioning of “the silent, shell-shocked traders of...

Sarah Palin and Mark Sanford, who won’t stop talking about the conjunction of their political and personal problems, are taking us into new territory where punditry has to give way to psychiatry to make sense of their bizarre behavior. Consider the National Institute of Mental Health’s definition of borderline personality disorder: “a serious mental illness characterized by pervasive instability in moods, interpersonal relationships, self-image, and behavior. This instability often...

Robert S. McNamara, who died today at 93, was the exemplar of American know-how gone awry in a world too complicated for the practical mindset that built the most powerful nation on earth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As one of JFK’s “whiz kids” who went on to become LBJ’s architect of the disastrous war in Vietnam, McNamara exemplified the limits of intellectual brilliance in a subtle and savage world. “What went wrong was a basic misunderstanding or...

The self-styled victim of “the politics of personal destruction” has struck back at her tormenters by leaving Alaska’s statehouse with trademark twinkly, crinkly aggression. Sarah Palin dropped her bombshell on the eve of a holiday weekend, sending TV’s talking heads scrambling back from vacation to studios or huffing over long-distance phone lines to parse her resignation. Their puzzled but predictable responses ranged from William Kristol and Mary Matalin hailing the move...

While Mark Sanford continues to go for his own jugular with new confessions that will force him out of office, there is news about his neighbor to the north, John Edwards, that should bury him politically once and for all. The two offer a fascinating contrast in self-destructive styles. Now that his erotic secrets are out, the South Carolina governor just can’t stop blabbing that he has “crossed lines” with other women, each revelation costing him the loss of more political allies,...

That new soap opera, “The Sanfords of South Carolina,” revives interest in a subject that intrigued me over decades of editing women’s magazines–the sexual politics of two-career marriages. Working with ambitious women in their twenties and thirties, I was struck by how different their lives were from the Father-knows-best ethos of earlier generations. They weren’t holding jobs, as most of their mothers did, only until they could start homemaking and procreating. In...

Members of the House Financial Services Committee were wheeling and dealing in the stocks of banks they were about to bail out last fall, a revelation that may test Congress’ rock-bottom approval ratings. Both Democrats and Republicans were scurrying to profit from cashing in or out, according to enterprising reporters from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, who mined disclosure forms for the fourth quarter of 2008: “Anticipating bargains or profits or just trying to unload before the bottom...

His passing is yet another reminder of how pop culture consumes its icons. At 50, Michael Jackson outlived Elvis by almost a decade, but neither was destined for the old age that Sinatra and Bing Crosby reached in an earlier era. When Presley died in 1974, he was a grotesque caricature of himself, obese and drug-damaged, planning a comeback tour, but a cynic called his sudden death on a bathroom floor “a great career move” for an entertainer who was barely able to stand up while slurring...

With ten percent of his term in office gone, Barack Obama is being graded from the left and right and, not surprisingly, found to be doing (1) not enough and (2) too much. (1) Paul Krugman faults him for “Not Enough Audacity,” praising “Barack the Policy Wonk, whose command of the issues–and ability to explain those issues in plain English–is a joy to behold” but faulting “Barack the Post-Partisan, who searches for common ground where none exists, and whose...

To a pair of ancient eyes, the fallen Governor of South Carolina has the hapless look of Edward VIII giving up the throne of England in 1936 for “the woman I love,” a man undone by unexpected passion after a lifetime of being trained to follow all the rules of a straight-laced society. The bizarre details of his downfall testify to the emotions that must have overcome Mark Sanford–an Eagle Scout on his way to a presidential nomination suddenly disappearing, on Father’s Day...

John McCain, who relaxed during last year’s campaign by improvising a “Bomb Iran” ditty, is back to lead a Republican chorus taunting Barack Obama as another Jimmy Carter. The tune is familiar, but the words are all wrong. Three decades ago, Carter dealt with a vulnerable revolution in Iran by fumbling every move from allowing the deposed Shah into the US to watching American Embassy hostages in Tehran paraded on TV for 444 days with time out for a lethally inept rescue attempt. Now,...

If you doubt that liberal and conservative have lost all meaning in the health care debate, consult the New York Times‘ columnists of those persuasions. On the left, Paul Krugman predicts reform “will be undermined by ‘centrist’ Democratic senators who either prevent the passage of a bill or insist on watering down key elements” … “What the balking Democrats seem most determined to do is to kill the public option, either by eliminating it or by carrying out...

After eight years in a Bush coma, Congress is busy “working” again and proving it doesn’t work. The health care debate is a classic of evasions, non-sequiturs, empty rhetoric and lobbyist lies to patch together reform that will look like a Frankenstein monster with a Dr. Strangelove deception at the heart. Despite public support for a government insurance plan, House and Senate members are going through contortions to craft something to look like one but guaranteed to fail. Even...

The escape of a New York Times reporter from seven months of captivity in Pakistan recalls the shock of Daniel Pearl’s beheading there seven years ago and prompts second thoughts about the uses of secrecy in a tell-all media age. Unlike Pearl’s captors, the kidnappers of David Rohde did not release videos of their work, and his family and employers chose to maintain secrecy in trying to arrange his release. “From the early days of this ordeal,” says Bill Keller, executive editor...

As Bush 41 jumps from a plane to celebrate his 85th birthday, Jimmy Carter, a few months younger, parachutes into the Middle East with his own foreign policy for the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and now Bush 43 is getting into the look-at-me act. “Just because you’re an old guy, you don’t have to sit around drooling in the corner,” the elder Bush said after landing safely in Kennebunkport last week. “Get out and do something. Get out and enjoy life.” Such fatherly...

After five months in office, his whirlwind presidency is taking a toll on the President in more ways than one. Worrying about the economy “keeps me awake at night,” he told an interviewer yesterday. At the same time, signs of Obama Fatigue are showing up among his own party in Congress over the massive muddle of health care reform. His tireless cheer-leading has failed to paper over Democratic differences and delayed markup this week of competing bills to expand coverage and rein in...

To post-election turmoil in Tehran, Washington reaction is shaping up as a classic round of mock macho, ranging from John McCain’s twittering down to Eric Cantor’s schoolyard taunting of the Obama Administration. Faced with the unknowable depth, duration and consequences of opposition to Ahmadinejad’s “victory,” the White House is limiting itself to expressions of concern and disapproval, but carefully avoiding an active role in fomenting discord in Iran. That’s...

News from two-thirds of the former Axis of Evil raises questions about whether US intelligence services are doing their jobs. How much do they really know about what’s going on in Iran and North Korea? The meaning of election results from Tehran and insight into Kim Jong-il’s successor are as opaque as they would have been in a world without air travel, computers, satellites and huge budgets for undercover agents. As they defend themselves over torturing prisoners who may or may not have...

The Great Cultural Divide has split wider open with the Queen of Low-Rent Resentment and the Sultan of Snark in open warfare, leaving those who still hope for rational public discourse waiting for it all to go away so we can talk about boring subjects like health care reform and saving the economy. Yet somewhere between Sarah Palin’s aggressive anti-elitism and David Letterman’s snidely assumed superiority, there is an issue beyond the need of politicians and media figures to keep calling...

With the killings of a Kansas abortion doctor and at the Holocaust Museum, group hatred in this year of Change was losing its bipartisan flavor, but here comes Barack Obama’s former pastor from stage left to restore some balance and, insofar as the subject allows, comic relief. As usual, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s entrance involves tongue-tripping. After telling a reporter that “Them Jews aren’t going to let him talk to me,” Rev. Wright has clarified his estrangement...

Old age is an education in asymmetry as the ratio of effort to result keeps worsening, as it takes many times the previous exertion to get a fraction of the results for the simplest act. In that light, what happened yesterday at the Holocaust Museum is a reminder that the rules of nature are not so simple: An 88-year-old with the strength to press a trigger kills a young man opening a door for him, terrifies thousands in the building and brings grief to millions, including the president of the United...

Like unreformed drunks, American banks want to settle their rehab bills and go back to the old ways–no government curfews or sobriety pledges for the likes of JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs et al as they rush to repay TARP billions and forget they were ever one step from being trampled by pink elephants. “These repayments,” says Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner in the cautious tones of an alcoholism counselor, “are an encouraging sign of financial repair, but we still have work...