Shock and Awe . . . Toppled statue . . . Mission Accomplished . . . Coalition of the Willing . . . Not enough troops . . . I sometimes wonder what Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Perle feel when they see a photograph like this one. Silly of me, I guess, but it’s my own way of trying to imagine whether they have the faintest understanding of the evil that their little adventure in Iraq unleashed. I suspect that they do understand in an abstract-ish sort of way. Even though their heads...

WHEN THE TRAIN / LEFT THE STATION / IT HAD TWO LIGHTS ON BEHIND / WELL, THE BLUE LIGHT WAS MY BLUES / AND THE RED LIGHT WAS MY MIND / ALL MY LOVE’S IN VAIN. – ROBERT JOHNSON Son House, the great blues singer and slide guitarist, delighted in telling people that when he first met Robert Johnson, he couldn’t play guitar to save his life. But the young man was persistent and after disappearing for a few months was again pestering House, Willie Brown and the other Mississippi Delta...

GEORGE WALKER BUSH: THEN AND NOW I had long planned to post an abridged text of George Bush’s 2000 Republican National Convention acceptance speech closer to Inauguration Day and compare his words with his deeds, but the post-mortems already are flying fast and furious. This includes a lot of revisionist clap-trap from conservative bloggers whose heads remain firmly up their backsides, including drivel to the effect that because Bush “is a kind and decent man” the excesses and...

I keep going back and forth on whether America’s Big three automakers should be bailed out. On the one hand, the collapse of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler would have an immense psychological impact in the depths of a recession, not to mention the loss of as many as 2.9 million jobs, according to one estimate. On the other hand, why reward managers and boards of directors so inept that they couldn’t figure out how to remain competitive over the 30 years since the Japanese Invasion...

I said from the moment it became obvious that Barack Obama would prevail that winning would be the easy part, and I have felt distinctly uncomfortable observing his first interactions as president-elect with George Bush and the Washington establishment. Part of that unease falls into the category of This Is Too Good To Be True, and it will be a while before I don’t wake up in the morning wondering if it is all a dream. The larger part of my unease is the reality that governing — you...

I think now, looking back, we did not fight the enemy; we fought ourselves. The enemy was in us. The war is over for me now, but it will always be there, the rest of my days. As I’m sure Elias will be, fighting with Barnes for what Rhah called “possession of my soul.” There are times since, I’ve felt like a child, born of those two fathers. But be that as it may, those of us who did make it have an obligation to build again. To teach others what we know, and to try with what’s...

To be an American (unlike being English or French) is precisely to image a destiny rather than to inherit one; since we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history. — LESLIE FIEDLER The tears of joy have dried. The stage in Grant Park has been taken down. The celebrations are history. As the dust settles from Election Day 2008 the biggest message is that the 1960s are now officially over. The Baby Boomers have passed the torch. We are finally...

THE MANOR AND THE MAN The people who populate Thrumpton Hall: A Memoir of Life in My Father’s House are eccentric English folk, but not in that lovable way so familiar to Americans from British television sitcoms. In fact, they are for the most part so pathetically dysfunctional that I initially couldn’t bring myself to review this offering by the prolific author Miranda Seymour. But because I was once in love with a house myself and the requited love that Seymour’s father had...

The people between John and Cindy McCain are actually smaller than they appear In principle, there was never anything particularly wrong with the political movement known as neoconservatism, which after all was a reaction to failed policies of the 1960s and 1970s. But neoconservatism had become so discredited by the time that Dick Cheney and others finished wringing the idealism out of it that even Francis Fukayama, the movement’s contemporary intellectual godfather, renounced the Bush Doctrine...

It was just fine with Barack Obama and John McCain that they could pretty much avoid talking about the Bush administration’s kangaroo court military tribunals and its embrace of torture during the presidential campaign. While these aspects of the U.S.’s so-called War on Terror were not a priority for voters who are beleaguered by a collapsed economy and wondering how to pay for their Uncle Leo’s thousand-dollar medications, the candidates also knew that there are no easy answers...

Barack Obama told daughters Malia and Sasha that “you have earned the new puppy that’s coming with us to the White House” during his victory speech Wednesday morning, a promise he presumably will have to keep since billions of people were looking on. A source close to the Obamas says that the new puppy probably won’t arrive until the spring and, when it does, presumably will have to be hypoallergenic. This is because Malia has allergies, so you can rule out a golden retriever,...

Having spent the better part of the first half of my life hiding my feelings, I figured out that being open emotionally is a key to good mental health, at least mine. As a consequence, I’ve spent the second half being straightforward when it comes to my gut, sometimes to the embarrassment of the people around me. So get out your hankies and read on. I’d already had some pretty good boo-hoos over the summer as Barack Obama’s impossible quest became improbable and then possible:...

I voted yesterday in the most important election of my lifetime after the most dramatic primary and general election campaign of my lifetime. And as I left the polling station and walked out into the chilly morning air, it all fell into place: Barack Obama represents what America once was and can stand for again. As well as this: Obama did not transcend race so much as make the case that he is the best man to lead America out of the wilderness. If that seems simplistic, it is. Because while the...

We will provide updates throughout the day until the polls begin closing in East Coast states. Please use the comments section to share your voting and other Election Day experiences. This post will be updated periodically and moved to the top of the site. There are newer posts below, so please keep scrolling. 6:00pm: Polls are closing in Indiana and parts of Kentucky. Virginia, South Carolina, Florida, and New Hampshire follow at 7:00; Ohio and West Virginia at 7:30; another 18 states at 8, including...

December 2007: Look Closely. Obama Certainly has aged. Us, too. Entire cyber-forests have been leveled in praise and condemnation of a man who in all likelihood will be president-elect when the sun comes up on Wednesday morning, so there’s not a whole lot more worth saying. In that spirit — and because your feckless . . . er, fearless correspondent is running on empty, herewith a review of what he wrote about Barack Obama over the past year as the impossible begat the unpredictable,...

“LOVE” SCULPTURE AT JFK PLAZA: WHAT? NO HOMELESS PEOPLE? Unless you’re one of the people whose car got turned over in the irrational urban exuberance following the Phillies’ World Series win on Wednesday night or stood helplessly on the platform as train after packed train rattled through your suburban station without stopping on Friday morning because of the immense victory parade downtown, you’re probably feeling pretty chuff about the city of Philadelphia right...

With the Fat Lady about to sing, the excuses for why John McCain’s campaign has sunk like a stone continue to fly fast and furious. I’ve been collecting the ripest of these excuses over at Kiko’s House in a daily feature titled “McCain-Palin Trainwreck Excuse du Jour.” Here are synopses and links to the most recent entries: McCain’s “strategy” of throwing everything against the wall and hoping that something will stick hasn’t worked. The campaign couldn’t...

Being a big believer that public-opinion polls are merely snapshots in time, I have been loath to cite let alone read too much into the blizzard of polls this fall. But the latest Gallup Poll using the traditional model is a shocker and, for all intents and purposes, a very real indication that Barack Obama has sealed the deal. Gallup’s traditional “likely voter” model is the most conservative of its polls in that it has been battle tested over and over in past elections and factors...

NEWARK, Del. — What to make of the fact that Joe Biden and his wife Jill are graduates of the University of Delaware, while both McCain campaign strategist Steve Schmidt and David Plouffe, his counterpart on the Obama campaign, are products of the university’s political science program? Probably not a whole lot beyond it being a pretty big coincidence for such a little state. In any event, it seems like years ago and not merely last October when the DF&C and I bumped into Biden...

THE EMOTIVE MARY AND PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (TOP) AND DR. ROBINSON AND MR. STEIN Halloween may be my favorite holiday and Frankenstein one of my favorite books. But there is a dirty little secret about the masterwork written by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in her late teens and first published anonymously in 1818 as Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus, and a colleague, Charlie Robinson, can now tell the tale after studying Shelley’s original notebooks at Oxford University’s venerable Bodleian...

THE SCENE OUTSIDE A HOUSE SOMEWHERE IN AMERICA

World champions (top) and The Wild Thing The Philadelphia Phillies’ last gasp as a World Series contender ended on a frigid late October evening in 1993 with one swing of the bat as the Blue Jays’ mighty Joe Carter launched a fastball hurled by reliever Mitch Williams into the left-field seats of Toronto’s Sky Dome for a walk-off three-run homer. Williams, known with an affection atypical of Philadelphia sports nuts as “The Wild Thing” for his habit of throwing the...

Lordy be! In only six days the angry mantra of the John McCain-Sarah Palin campaign will be silenced. You know the one I’m talking about: That some of us are not true Americans because of where we live, what we do for a living, where we went to school and, horror or horrors, because we support a Muslim terrorist for president. But you can bet your dangling chad that while we will be filling this welcome void by beginning the arduous task of pulling America from the smoldering ashes of the...

Charles Cullen is every hospital’s nightmare: A deranged nurse who methodically murders patients by giving them hard-to-detect overdoses of medications. Cullen, who was arrested in 2004 after a 16-year crime spree made considerably easier because a severe nursing shortage enabled him to go undetected as he moved from hospital to hospital, told authorities that he murdered as many as 45 patients at hospitals in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. As a result of Cullen cooperating with authorities...

. The most direct line to Washington for Sarah Palin is not being half of the terminally disastrous John McCain ticket but to appoint herself to Ted Stevens’ seat in the event that the disgraced Alaska senator is found guilty of making false financial disclosure form statements and has to resign. Well, Stevens was just found guilty on all seven counts. As it is, Palin could only appoint herself to Stevens’ seat if he wins a tough re-election fight against Democrat Mark Begich, by no means...