The Tea Party won’t take yes for an answer. Even as the President caves in to their debt-ceiling demands, the Speaker of the House comes out like a ventriloquist’s dummy and demolishes the deal they were making. “I have decided,” John Boehner harrumphs, “to end discussions with the White House and begin conversations with the leaders of the Senate in an effort to find a path forward… “The president is emphatic that taxes have to be raised. As a former small businessman, I know tax...

The President has apparently caved in to Tea Party blackmail, the cliché about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory has become a working principle in Washington, and the future could be even worse. Behind news of ”a package calling for as much as $3 trillion in savings from substantial spending cuts and future revenue produced by a tax code overhaul” is the reality that Barack Obama, with his party controlling the Senate, has apparently given in to the intractability of those who were...

With their fabricated debt ceiling fiasco, the GOP has tested the President’s patience and not found it wanting. As the deadline nears, the question is: What will it take to enrage him? Barack Obama is edging into testy now: “This is actually a self-created crisis in some ways. It has to do with folks who are digging into set positions rather than saying how do we solve a problem.” But as polls show overwhelming majorities of voters worried and disgusted at Tea Party antics, why is their...

In the Parliamentary hearing about media misdeeds, Rupert Murdoch resembled his favorite American President. During eight years in office, George W. Bush, who called himself the Decider, never took responsibility for anything that went wrong. At the low point of the Iraq war, he would go only as far as to admit, “Mistakes were made.” In the same way, Murdoch and his son blame underlings for abuses of power, just as Bush let Scooter Libby, Alberto Gonzales and Karl Rove take the fall when things...

We have seen this movie before: the deranged figure threatening to take the plunge from on high as a negotiator tries to talk him down by taking all his rambling complaints seriously and trying to reason them away as if they were not totally loopy. Barack Obama keeps calmly engaging Congress, the would-be jumpers, with promises to work on grievances once they come in off the ledge, as the crowd below holds it breath, hoping for a happy outcome. Polling shows two-thirds of Americans, majorities of...

Politics and psychiatry converge as a conservative website reveals that the surging Republican candidate “frequently suffers from stress-induced medical episodes that…occur once a week on average and can ‘incapacitate’ her for days at time. On at least three occasions, Bachmann has landed in the hospital as a result.” Doubts about her state of mind keep multiplying after stories of her fervent prayer five years ago predicting an apocalypse: “Lord, the day is at hand. We are in the...

On the nation’s movie screens, the Sarah Palin-as-saint movie is running a dismal second to Harry Potter, but in Washington, the Tea Party is offering its own fantasy to entertain Americans until the economic apocalypse premiers on Aug. 2. “The House and Senate this week,” reports The Caucus, “plan to hold politically charged but largely symbolic votes on fiscal policy in what Congressional leaders hope is a prelude to moving ahead with a plan to increase the federal debt limit… “Given...

History provides perspective but can also bring distortion as a Pulitzer-Prize journalist now decides that John F. Kennedy “probably was the worst American president of the previous century.” After studying the period, the respected Thomas E. Ricks concludes: “In retrospect, he spent his 35 months in the White House stumbling from crisis to fiasco. He came into office and okayed the Bay of Pigs invasion. Then he went to a Vienna summit conference and got his clock cleaned by Khrushchev. That...

As the capitol shows signs of awakening from the debt-ceiling fever dream with face-saving aspirin for both sides, onlookers try to understand the pathology of it all. Like the final scene of “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” after crazed loyalties and pride have created carnage, a dazed survivor is left to wander through the wreckage, mumbling, “Madness, madness.” As the Chairman of the Fed describes failure to raise the debt limit as a “catastrophic…calamitous…self-inflicted...

A Republican has opened up a 47 to 39 percent lead over Barack Obama for 2012 in the latest Gallup Poll, but voters don’t know who he or she is. At this point in their reelection bids, both Bushes were leading generic opponents, even though George H. W. eventually lost to Bill Clinton while George W. defeated John Kerry. But now, in what the President agrees is a “stressed-out” nation, Americans are venting their anger at the man in the White House. Understandably so, but when the 2012 GOP...

For those who have been watching closely, Barack Obama has had it up to here with Eric Cantor for a long time, starting at least a year and a half before the President’s disgusted walkout this week. As far back as the White House Health Care Summit on February 25, 2010, the Leader of the Free World was lecturing the partisan pipsqueak on the difference between legislating and grandstanding. As Cantor parroted talking points behind a foot-high pile of papers, the President tartly dismissed “props...

To keep our heads from exploding over the debt-ceiling debacle, it’s time to turn back to figures who keep public life from being boring. After a summer of Charlie Sheen, Donald Trump, Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Anthony Weiner, Americans badly need a fresh dose of the peculiar and piquant to divert their attention. Michele Bachmann fills the bill so well that Jon Stewart devotes a long segment to having Jerry Seinfeld try to cure him of taking cheap shots at the “gay cures” of her therapist...

Tea Party terrorists elected last fall promised to change Washington, and they have—-turning it from a flawed vehicle that moves the nation’s business along, however bumpily, to a cockpit of fighting over a fabricated issue that is steering a shaky economy toward a smashup. The sorry spectacle has roused the largest American corporations to sound alarms and rating agencies to issue warnings about plummeting credit ratings for U.S. debt But GOP leaders, sitting up front, refuse to look ahead...

When John Boehner pulled back from his Grand Bargain with the President last weekend, the cynical suspected that he and Eric Cantor were playing good cop-bad cop. But it’s clear now that Boehner was being undermined by his own sidekick. Cantor is looking more and more like a young Richard Nixon. In 1952, when Nixon was on the GOP ticket with Ike before the Checkers speech, a Democratic volunteer asked, “What do we say when they ask exactly what’s wrong with him?” Someone suggested, “The...

Last week’s brief attempt at actual governing by both the White House and the GOP Congressional leadership in trying to “go big” on budget deficit and debt ceiling solutions dramatizes how dysfunctional Washington has become in six months of Tea Party madness. After two years of Democratic control and wall-to-wall Republican naysaying, the American economy was teetering toward recovery but now has to be kept from going off a cliff, as the leadership of both parties acknowledge. Why? John Boehner’s...

As the “Grand Bargain” unravels, both the President and the Speaker are taking heat from their true believers, but there is both irony and justice in John Boehner’s plight. A year and a half ago, he chose to wild-ride the Tea Party bronco all the way to November 2012 without getting the creature under control. Now, after stirring up all that dust about the debt limit, Boehner has to corral enough votes to avoid going over a cliff. “While some think that we can go past August 2nd,” he...

She came to the White House unexpectedly and never stopped being herself, unlike those before her who could have passed for inflatable life-sized dolls permanently positioned to stare adoringly at their husbands. Betty Ford spoke openly about everything, from equal rights for women to abortion to what she would do if her 18-year-old daughter were sexually active. Even more, by example, she went beyond politics and set new standards for openness about her own life. After a mastectomy for breast cancer,...

As Barack Obama beats the default drums louder, the White House and Congress are finally taking steps toward moving in concert instead of sitting on the sidelines vocalizing and tweeting at each other. Now the usual reliable sources whisper that the President “wants to move well beyond the $2 trillion in savings sought in earlier negotiations and seek perhaps twice as much over the next decade.” In the light of two and a half years of dysfunctional hoofing, can Obama and Boehner suddenly turn...

In 17 years since the O.J. trial, media fascination with murder has morphed from classic elements as fame, race and sexual rage to pathetic obsession with the death of a little girl and the guilt of her possibly disturbed young mother. Now the Casey Anthony verdict brings into focus the extent to which reality TV has infected the daylight hours, supplementing inexpensive adventure and talent shows with even cheaper studio sets and courtroom coverage. For weeks, CNN’s outpost HLN outranked Fox and...

Newt Gingrich may be on to something by making Alzheimer’s a campaign issue, although he could be going too far in trying to make voters forget about his crackpot Contract with America, Tiffany tabs and his latest wife’s terror campaign that led an entire staff to quit. Mitt Romney, as always, is testing the waters with a little senior moment of his own, forgetting he had to apologize for saying that Obama made the economy worse, and at a neighborhood holiday celebration, repeating the gaffe....

At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, just before the Soviets caved in, someone in the Oval Office exclaimed, “We’re eyeball to eyeball, and the other guy just blinked!” Now, as a deadline nears in the debt-ceiling staredown, Bill Clinton evokes that JFK era image and warns “the White House could blink. I hope that won’t happen. I don’t think they should blink.” The former President, who survived a Newt Gingrich government shutdown and won reelection, is advising...

The document Americans celebrate today starts with a cautionary note: “Prudence, indeed,” warns the Declaration of Independence, “will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” This serves well as a preamble to a ringing statement of our nation’s...

Celebrity independence is making Fourth of July weekend news as famous names couple and uncouple. In California, JFK’s niece takes steps to terminate the Terminator while 6000 miles away Princess Grace’s son enters wedlock in a low-budget version of the extravaganza that starred his mother, nee Grace Kelly, 55 years ago. Saving all this from utter cheesiness is the new British royal family, geographically and temporally between these extremes on what would have been Princess Diana’s 50th birthday...

Presidential courage can be a tricky question. The fuss over a TV anatomical reference to Barack Obama recalls the original Dick in American politics, Nixon, and how another President, LBJ, viewed his successor’s genital endowments–wrongly, as it turned out, based on his own Vietnam mistakes arising from confusion in that area. Depressed and unhappy in retirement, Johnson was still trying to understand what went wrong, when I saw and heard him analyze his successor Richard Nixon. “Not...

A new calendar page brings another GOP candidate as Rep. Thaddeus McCotter of Michigan arrives. He plays a star-spangled guitar, wants to repeal health care reform and is backing a $3500 annual tax deduction for pet owners. The Republican race is looking like one of those old mail-order book clubs that thrive on negative option. Once you sign up and send a buck for the first three or four choices, they automatically start shipping you each month’s new selection, unless you tell them to stop. Last...