For entertainment value, last night’s Iowa debate was irresistible as GOP wannabes finally realized that pounding the President is not enough to make any one of them stand out. So they finally took out after one another (Tim Pawlenty and Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul vs. Rick Santorum) and that ever-reliable villain, the media (Newt Gingrich belaboring Chris Wallace for gotcha questions to avoid talking about his campaign disasters). In the course of all this, they filled the screen with amusing but,...

Parasites are usually smaller than the hosts they feed off but, in this Republican pre-primary season, actual candidates are being afflicted with a giant publicity-sucking organism that attaches itself to their campaigns and draws away attention. After driving her bus tour into New Hampshire to overshadow Mitt Romney when he was making his presidential announcement, Sarah Palin is revving up the engines again to move into Iowa this weekend and rain on the parades of Michele Bachmann, Tim Pawlenty,...

Wishful thinking perhaps, but the tide of madness that has washed over Washington may be ebbing. A new CNN poll shows even more Americans want tax increases for the wealthy (63 percent) than major cuts in domestic spending (57 percent), leaving Republicans with the highest unfavorable ratings since the Clinton impeachment 13 years ago and Democrats gaining slightly in approval. Such fallout from the debt-ceiling debacle suggests that voters have finally seen the Tea Party’s true agenda, not of...

It’s looking like 1976 again. A nation suffering from political post-traumatic stress syndrome (Watergate then, the economy now) is shying away from more of the same in Washington and ready for a less polarizing president or, in a more cynical view, open to the idea of keeping the Oval Office vacant. Back then, enter Jimmy Carter, a peanut farmer who had gone to the Naval Academy and become governor of Georgia. His counterpart today is Mitt Romney, a Mormon missionary who made millions by cutting...

Our political warriors today have an instinct for their own jugulars, bleeding America with self-inflicted wounds in a time of turmoil. A century ago, Theodore Roosevelt famously said: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again...

Distressed by George W. Bush, even those of us who try to resist psychobabble eventually succumbed to seeing him as a reformed drunk who had found God and was punishing the nation with his uncomprehending new-found piety. Now Drew Westen, a practicing psychologist and political consultant, offers a diagnosis of Barack Obama that, in all fairness, deserves similar consideration–of how he took office in a frightening time when Americans “needed their president to tell them a story that made...

They just threw America’s credit rating off Boston harbor. The privately owned profit-making agency that fueled the economic crisis of 2008 by ranking Wall Street collections of junk-mortgages AAA has downgraded obligations of the United States to AA+, after a half-day delay to consider a Treasury Department notification of a $2 trillion error in their math. In the world we live in, this move will shake confidence not in Standard & Poors but the U.S. Even worse, the rationale for “the...

On this day sixty-six years ago, the world changed, but now hardly anyone remembers that the first atomic bomb in history was exploded over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. News traveled slowly those days. I was a 21-year-old soldier in southern Germany waiting to be sent to the Pacific for the invasion of Japan, and it was only days later we learned of a new weapon that had been used there. Without TV or Internet, the news conveyed no sense of a bomb that would eventually kill at least 90,000 people...

Decades ago, when I worked for one of America’s richest men, Norton Simon, he told me, “I stay out of the stock market. You could spend every hour trying to figure out what they’re thinking and still be wrong half the time.” That advice comes to mind as stocks continue to dive in the days after a “conservative victory” in the debt-ceiling fight that should have cheered up markets by avoiding a default, cutting government spending and preserving the heavy hitters’ tax cuts, with more...

In less than three years since his election was seen as the nation’s triumph over its own history, a combination of his own shortcomings, crushing economic challenges that destabilized the electorate and residual racism has put Barack Hussein Obama in danger of becoming a one-term president. At his birth 50 years ago, his parents’ marriage was illegal in 16 states of the Union. Now, at the low point of his tenure in the nation’s highest office, the President is still seen as illegitimate by...

“May you live in interesting times,” reputedly an ancient Chinese curse, comes to mind in the aftermath of this week’s fiasco as all signs point to hostage-taking as the new political norm rather than an aberration. “The debt ceiling should not be…used as a gun against the heads of the American people,” the President says, but Mitch McConnell sees it differently. “Never again,” the Senate GOP leader warns before untying the economy from the railroad tracks, “will any president,...

Now that it’s done, the President is calling the debt-ceiling deal “an important first step to ensuring that as a nation we live within our means,” but it looks more like falling off a political precipice. Even as he reiterates that “we can’t balance the budget on the backs of the very people who have borne the brunt of the recession,” Barack Obama says ruefully, “Voters may have chosen divided government, but they sure didn’t choose dysfunctional government.” Today, even divided...

By the end of the day, Congress and the President will have enacted legislation to take much more money out of the economy than the Stimulus bill put into it in February 2009 with tax cuts and infrastructure investments to offset the effects of a looming Depression. The $787 billion back then is dwarved by the estimated $2.5 trillion in cuts to the budget over a decade by an agreement that will be passed as the price of raising the debt ceiling. What’s changed since then is not the slow, precarious...

You have to bring back Groucho to explain this one. In a classic scene, he and Chico negotiate a contract by tearing off items from long sheets of paper until they are down to a sliver each. “If any of the parties to this agreement,” Groucho reads, “have been shown not to be in their right mind, this contract is automatically nullified. That’s in every contract—-it’s called a sanity clause. “You can’t fool me,” Chico answers, tearing it up. “There is no sanity clause.” As the...

This of all weekends might not be the time for this, but as George Will piles on with a column arguing that “government and the sectors it dominates have made themselves ludicrous” and “opened minds to the libertarians’ argument,” someone should defend a beleaguered political system that has kept this country the most free and prosperous in the world for centuries. In the 1950s, best-sellers like “The Hidden Persuaders” and “The Organization Man” excoriated Big Business as the root...

This time of year when people are away on vacation has always been known as the silly season for journalists. News is scarce, but time and space still have to be filled between commercials and ads, so they usually give us the odd, the trivial and outlandish. But no two-headed snakes or lions cuddling with lambs are needed this year. The Tea Party is serving up what John McCain calls the “bizarre-o” and providing headlines by the hour from Washington. Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell play out the...

George W. Bush’s Imperial Presidency is long gone, as Barack Obama pleads with the nation. “There are a lot of crises in the world that we can’t always predict or avoid,” he tells Americans after being missing in action all week. “This isn’t one of those crises… “If you want to see a bipartisan compromise, make a phone call, send an e-mail, tweet. Keep the pressure on Washington and we can get past this.” The man who killed Osama bin Laden only weeks ago is being held captive...

In Washington, they are reenacting a famous magazine cover, the National Lampoon of January 1973 with a gun pointed at a dog’s head and the caption, “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog.” The dog is the American economy, and Sarah Palin is urging her Tea Party friends to pull the trigger, with a Facebook post to “remember us ‘little people’ who believed in them, donated to their campaigns, spent hours tirelessly volunteering for them, and trusted them with our votes....

A Dow drop of almost 200 points Wednesday could be the first tremor of panicky bears preparing to escape an economic conflagration that Congress seems intent on setting off. Will the markets be full of investors with their hair on fire today or Monday as the debt-ceiling deadline looms? While the House and Senate continue to play chicken, Wall Street (Heaven help us all) looks like the last hope for sanity, as it was in September 2008 when the biggest single-day market crash ever spurred approval...

The titular head of the Republican Party, known for his short-fused temper, has exploded after two and a half years of volcanic quiescence. John McCain, who had to placate far-right opposition to keep his Senate seat last year, is finally blowing his lid over “Tea Party Hobbits” for their “foolish” and “deceiving” behavior in pushing a balanced-budget amendment. Moreover, he has also freed himself from being polite about his disastrous running mate by blasting “the kind of crack political...

The Speaker, with his feat of displeasing almost everyone in the debt-ceiling mess–the White House, Tea Party, GOP Senators, even the Congressional Budget Office–is earning his place in a volume that was in the making years ago to commemorate historic feats of mismanagement, “They Must Know What They’re Doing or They Wouldn’t Be Where They Are.” It would have honored the Captain of the Titanic, Herbert Hoover in the Great Depression, LBJ’s handling of the Vietnam War, and Jimmy...

As the President and the Speaker gave competing pitches on prime time, they were aiming at different audiences. Barack Obama was urging millions of indifferent Americans to pressure Congress against taking the economy over a cliff, while John Boehner was trying to keep a handful of his Tea Party mavericks in line for the same purpose. The chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee had already announced opposition to the Speaker’s two-step plan to raise the debt ceiling, with some members...

In Norway, a blond young man who might have stepped out of a Calvin Klein ad kills scores of people, most of them kids at a lakeside camp, to call attention to his 1500-page online rant, some of it plagiarized from the Unabomber. His politics are beside the point, as were those of the lunatic who shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in the head last January, killing six in Tuscon, including a nine-year-old girl. For such random slaughtering of innocents, the medium is the message: In the era of the Internet,...

Tomorrow’s headline, as written by the Tea Party, would be, “Congress Saves Economy; President Signs On.” As their bunch crowds the White House out of the driver’s seat on debt-ceiling negotiations, the Sunday talk shows are dominated by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Chief of Staff William Daley insisting that Barack Obama is still in the game, not only standing by to veto any loony compromise but still taking an active part in the talks. This spectacle of John Boehner presiding over...

Try this for perspective on the two great inevitabilities of life: At my birth, life expectancy was 58 years. For a baby today, it’s over 75. When I started earning in the Eisenhower era, the top tax rate was 84 percent rather than the current 35, and hardly anyone complained. The only audible grumbles came from cartoon figures in upper-crust men’s clubs and, on one occasion, John Wayne, the celluloid cowboy, whom I told, “If I could get millions for making faces at cameras, I wouldn’t...