The heart sinks at the ongoing struggle of a President who exalts American decency trying to maintain it in fighting enemies imbued with the holiness of a cause that sanctions any and all abuses of human beings. The inner conflict is crystallized in his decision yesterday to resist court-ordered release of photographs showing alleged torture of Mideast detainees following a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the American Civil Liberties Union. Publication, he says, would be of no benefit...

The cover of Sunday’s New York Times Magazine in jangled hand-printing reads “I have sat in shrinks’ offices going on four decades now and talked about my wish to die the way other people might talk about their wish to find a lover.” These words surround a small dark snapshot of a woman’s face looking at the camera in utter despair. I know that face, just as I know something about the feeling those words describe. A quarter of a century ago, the writer, Daphne Merkin,...

The health-care finals started in Washington this week with the Obama home team hosting the all-stars who have made the American medical system one of the most expensive and least effective in the world. The name of the game is cooperation as insurers, drug makers, hospitals et al come to the White House reportedly to announce “a voluntary plan to hold costs down, which health care industry officials involved in the effort say could save a family of four $2,500 a year in the fifth year, and...

His brother’s death this weekend, coming right after the suspension of Manny Ramirez for drug use, recalls Joe DiMaggio as an American hero in a different century and a different world. Dom, who died at 92, was one of three sons of an Italian immigrant fisherman to become major league baseball players and, like Joe, an All-Star. Family fame notwithstanding, after Pearl Harbor, the elder DiMaggios had to register as enemy aliens, were not allowed to travel more than five miles from home and...

As Barack Obama, who changed the face of America’s executive branch, prepares to name his first Supreme Court justice, speculation focuses as much on demography as it did during his presidential campaign last year. Does he “have to” name a woman? Will his choice be a Hispanic woman or perhaps a Lesbian? Is political correctness running amok? Not if you look back at Supreme Court history which, before the nasty Bork confirmation fight in 1987, is widely believed to have been beyond...

Congress is pushing through a 9/11-like bipartisan commission to root through the ruins of the economy, discover what happened and figure out how to avoid another meltdown, and the White House has signaled its approval. With Democrats and Republicans already arguing over how many members each will pick, it promises to be an exercise in finger-pointing unless the lead investigators are imbued with the zeal and bite of the Pecora Commission that unearthed the causes of the 1929 market crash. Back then,...

The flogging of John Edwards in the public square, aka the New York Times, raises the question of what relevance marital fidelity has to the qualifications of an American president. Trust and truth-telling come to mind, of course, but it gets more complicated in looking back. JFK famously cheated on his wife, while Richard Nixon, as far as we know, was a faithful husband while betraying the country. Jimmy Carter told Playboy he “lusted in my heart” but presumably overcame his desires...

The process may tell us as much as the results, which are finally due later this week after many false starts. The delays themselves indicate the government is negotiating stress-test grades with the recipients, and now a series of leaks has economists worried about the manipulation that is going on. What kind of truth will we see in this hall of mirrors? Two headlines in the Wall Street Journal today encapsulate the doubts and fears: “More Banks Will Need Capital” and “We Can’t...

How much time on earth is enough? How good does it have to be? What price are we willing to pay for it? For decades, Americans have been debating when life begins, but now come the questions about the last days, as Barack Obama raises the hard fact that “those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill.” As usual, he sees the issue in human terms, recalling that “when my grandmother got very ill during the campaign, she...

In his 2007 book about the Supreme Court, “The Nine,” Jeffery Toobin wrote about David Souter’s reaction to the decision that gave George W. Bush the presidency: “His whole life was being a judge. He came from a tradition where the independence of the judiciary was the foundation of the rule of law. And Souter believed Bush v. Gore mocked that tradition. His colleagues’ actions were so transparently, so crudely partisan that Souter thought he might not be able to serve with...

His press conferences are dazzling performances, but to get a glimpse of Barack Obama in the round takes the oldest journalistic setting of all, an extended one-on-one interview by David Leonhardt for this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. Under questioning to show his state of mind rather than elicit sound bites, we get a picture of how the President sees the economic crisis in the long run beyond the bailouts and fixes. “The critics have said, you’re doing too much, you can’t do...

Willie Sutton said he robbed banks because that’s where the money is, but it was never their money. They only handle and maneuver it around, like parking lot attendants. Yet, according to Sen. Dick Durbin, after smashing up financial vehicles and taking taxpayer billions for repairs, when it comes to the US Senate, banks “frankly own the place.” As he tried unsuccessfully to line up votes to help avoid foreclosures in bankruptcy, Durbin told voters that though it’s “hard...

On the evidence of his press conference, our president of 100 days seems so right for this critical time that it tempts a secular humanist to suspect Barack Obama came to power, not just by the natural selection of a brutal political campaign, but some more mysterious process of intelligent design. How else to explain the qualities of mind and heart, and the eloquence to express them, that arrived in the White House just in time to deal with what he rightly calls “the worst economic crisis...

The news today will be about Barack Obama’s whirlwind energy steering the Ship of State for the first 100 days, but below the water line, the crew is still seriously undermanned. The Cabinet was finally filled yesterday as the President swore in Kathleen Sebelius amid a swine flu scare and an impending Congressional battle over health care reform but, in true Washington tradition, the New York Times reports, “no cabinet department right now has even a third of its top appointees in place.” Secretary...

She is something new in the White House. Take it from someone who has met and known First Ladies over five decades, from Mamie Eisenhower on. Michelle Obama is the first product of a Women’s Movement sensibility, if not its ethos. Like her husband, she is not rooted in how things were before the 1960s, and her amazing popularity reflects that change. Unlike Hillary Clinton, she has not pushed openly into policy but, unlike Laura Bush, she has not stayed in the shadows as the traditional supportive...

As the furor over AIG bonuses fades, Paul Krugman today points to a real outrage: “pay at investment banks, after dipping last year, is soaring again–right back up to 2007 levels.” Such a symbol for unquenchable Wall Street greed may serve a political turning point just as did Ronald Reagan’s Welfare Queen who drove a Cadillac three decades ago–with a number of added ironies. Unlike the Great Communicator’s character who was never found to exist, today’s...

Pakistan is looking like Cuba in the 1950s and Iran in the ’70s as armed zealots start to take over a country without the will to resist. Accusing Pakistani leaders of “basically abdicating to the Taliban and the extremists,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sounded the alarm yesterday before the House Foreign Affairs Committee: “We cannot underscore the seriousness of the existential threat posed to the state of Pakistan by continuing advances, now within hours of Islamabad,...

The continuing national debate is getting more and more self-righteous as Americans look for absolutes in a world of moral murk. Dick Cheney emerges from his psychic cave to insist that torture works, but he has no standing after eight years of secrecy and ruthlessness. Barack Obama tells us we are not the kind of people who torture on principle but refuses to punish those who did while believing they had a legal right to do so. Now we are rooting through the moral wreckage for evidence of whether...

“Obama is positioning the Democrats as the party of order, responsibility and small-town values,” David Brooks writes in the New York Times today. “If he pulls this mantle away from the Republicans, it would be the greatest train robbery in American politics.” Where the conservative Brooks sees theft, the less ideological may find an expectable reaction to eight years of Bush lawlessness and loony laissez-faire. There is an indication of this in new Gallup figures on the relative...

Dick Cheney tells Fox News that President Obama’s handshake with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez could lead “foes” of the U.S. to “think they’re dealing with a weak president.” Lyndon Johnson’s appraisal of Richard Nixon comes to mind in this growing debate about President Obama’s toughness or lack thereof. “Not much here,” said LBJ, pointing at his head. “Even less here,” touching his heart, then lowering a hand to below his belt: “But...

She has become a stereotypical figure–loved or reviled, depending on the beholder’s politics–but the other day, for a brief moment, Sarah Palin let herself be seen as a human being with complicated emotions. The Alaska governor made news by telling a right-to-life meeting that, after learning of abnormalities in the child she was bearing last year, she had for “a fleeting moment” considered abortion. Palin was emphasizing that she had decided to have the baby, but her...

The lawyers wrote the torture memos, but the medical profession was there to implement them. According to the Washington Post, “documents show a steady stream of psychologists, physicians and other health officials who both kept detainees alive and actively participated in designing the interrogation program and monitoring its implementation… “Most of the psychologists were contract employees of the CIA, according to intelligence officials familiar with the program.” The...

“President Obama Ordered the Killing of Three Black Muslim Kids” is his own headline for this week’s Rush Limbaugh rant about the weekend rescue of Capt. Richard Phillips from Indian Ocean pirates: “You know what we have learned about the Somali pirates, the merchant marine organizers that were wiped out at the order of Barack Obama, you know what we learned about them? They were teenagers. The Somali pirates, the merchant marine organizers who took a US merchant captain...

As Fox News, the Wall Street Journal et al are heavy-breathing about Tea Party protests on Tax Day, Gallup discloses that Americans’ “Views of Income Taxes Among Most Positive Since 1956.” But reality is no more a deterrent for Rupert Murdoch than it was for William Randolph Hearst when he was stirring up the Spanish-American War in 1898 with a drumbeat of scare headlines. To a message from artist Frederick Remington reporting “There is no war,” Hearst famously replied,...

Pervez Musharraf and George W. Bush are gone, but the game goes on as, in the wake of $7.5 billion in new aid by the Obama Administration, the Pakistani prime minister complains of a “trust deficit” by US benefactors. The shell game over Islamist extremists that began after 9/11 is looking even worse. In proposing increased aid, President Obama said he expected Pakistan security forces to crack down on terrorists in tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. What he got was an agreement by the...