President McCain's Midterm Woes

If the 2008 presidential election had gone the other way, would there be a Tea Party today?

Unless the economy had magically recovered with nothing but tax cuts, a voter uprising seems inevitable. And would it have targeted only Congressional Democrats without spreading to "the treachery" of President John McCain, never accepted as a true believer by the Rush Limbaughs of his party and fervent followers of a Vice-President Sarah Palin?

A new Vanity Fair piece reports McCain's primary opponent in Arizona this year arguing "the country was better off with Obama as president than it would have been with an unreliably conservative McCain."

In office, the former maverick would have resisted a Detroit rescue, the stimulus and health care reform but arrived with the TARP bailout in place and irresistible momentum to do something in the face of economic collapse and soaring unemployment

After battles, cutbacks and veto threats, that "something" would surely have been enough government interference to rouse Tea Party patriots, particularly with their poster girl presiding over the Senate a heartbeat away.

In that event, Sarah Palin would surely have become the most activist VP since Dick Cheney--only not as loyal. Could she have resisted airing her campaign struggles in "Going Rogue" and sharing her thoughts with other Momma Grizzlies on Facebook?

What McCain called "background noise" when Palin's book appeared would have come front and center with her Congressional admirers like Jim DeMint, instead of predicting Obama's Waterloo, targeting their own President for defeat.

The blueprint for a GOP midterm revolt to take over the party and make McCain a one-termer would be in place. Karl Rove wrote it in 2000 to get W the Republican nomination, and one of its pillars was that five years as a POW had unhinged McCain.

A decade later, at 74, under the pressures of the Oval Office, that case would be easier to make, and there would be millions of Tea Party patriots out there making it.

Update: Back here, presumably on planet Earth, today's Sarah Palin has left McCain far behind and is pushing her 2012 electability with comparisons to...wait for it...Ronald Reagan The widow Nancy may have a word or two to say about that.

An Unspeakable Campaign Commercial

Here's an idea for a revolutionary ad: Candidate looks into the camera to say: "My opponent is a decent, honorable person, but we disagree on issues A, B and C. If you share my views, vote for me."

Don't look for this one any time soon, because truth in advertising would make it unairable: not only a shortage of honorable opponents but an absence of issues in the ritual disembowelment that is now passing for election campaigns.

In West Virginia, a Senate aspirant runs a "reality" spot of two guys in a diner badmouthing his opponent, the sitting governor, that turns out to have been shot in Philadelphia with professional actors reading from a script, dressed in "hicky" clothes prescribed by the casting director.

In Connecticut, Gail Collins notes, Linda McMahon "has already spent so much money that residents of this small state may be wondering why she keeps deluging them with mailings and TV ads instead of just buying everybody a car."

Aside from attacking the character of her opponent, the former wrestling promoter is a "total wimp when it comes to taking a political stand...Her response to virtually any controversial question is that the matter needs to be studied. If you asked her...whether restaurants should be allowed to serve fried puppies, her answer would probably be that it should be looked into."

Elsewhere, TV screens are filled not with debates about issues or paeans to the virtues of those who want to be in Congress but character shredding of whoever stands in the way.

Democrats are in triage mode for the final weeks as covert money unleashed by the Roberts Court's Citizens United decision fuels tons of money from unknowable sources in an effort to take away their control of both houses

But judging from what they have been doing so far, their commercials won't be adding much substance to the campaigns.

Update: Instead of being submitted for an Academy Award, the West Virginia commercial is being withdrawn, presumably out of embarrassment that Republicans couldn't find local residents to employ in smearing their Governor.

Economic Stimulus of October 2010

Congress is pumping money directly into the economy, but the bipartisan bonanza will end November 2nd.

Republican enthusiasts are spearheading this stimulus by a 7-1 margin of $80 million spent so far compared to $16 million at this point in 2006, with benefactors choosing anonymity far more than ever before.

Democrats may be catching up, raking in $16 million during September alone from small donations that could signify a stirring of the Obama base that has been bombarded with multiple e-mail requests for $5 apiece in recent months.

The irony here is that such relative pin money is being expended in a "debate" wherein both sides are treating the TARP bailout, which has just expired, as politically toxic, despite objective opinion that it kept the economy from going over a cliff.

What's worse is that American corporations are now sitting on their biggest pile of cash in decades--$1.6 trillion--at the expense of retirees and other savers, who are getting nothing in return for the money they prudently saved over a lifetime, and failing to use any of it for job creation.

What's holding the recovery back? Corporate heads must surely be cheered by the prospect that Republicans will be taking over at least one house of Congress, and that the President has signaled his intention to scale back his push for new legislation that might make them nervous.

At this point, only politicians and their backers are plowing money into the economy. Perhaps the answer is to make the election cycle permanent.

Then again, that won't work because it already is.

Christine O'Donnell's Campaign Candor

Apologies may be in order for calling the Delaware senatorial candidate "a content-free politician" as she starts filling in some of the blanks in her contested resume.

In the first campaign ad, she tells voters, "I am not a witch. I'm nothing you've heard...I am you." So much for previous statements about "dabbling" in witchcraft.

Her father straightens out family claims about his career as Bozo the Clown, divulging he was one of many, only "part-time" and not "official."

Next up for clarification: Her assertion in a 2006 debate that China was plotting to take over America and that she had classified information about it that she couldn't divulge.

No word on her statement that she decided not to become a Hare Krishna because "I love meatballs."

At this rate, Delaware voters should know all they need to know about their future Senator by November 2nd.

Palin, O'Donnell: The Politics of Pure Attitude

Sarah Palin took us halfway there, and now her Delaware clone is the final product--the completely content-free politician.

Disappearing for three weeks after a primary victory, Christine O'Donnell emerges at an invitation-only crowd of 100 supporters and, in a no-cal interview with AP, "vows to control her political message."

Decades ago, when Marshall McLuhan asserted the medium is the message, there was still room for debate of issues. Now, the president of a conservative policy group lauds O'Donnell for her "real gift for personal presentation,” grounded, “in the ease in which she gives her personal testimony.”

This sounds more like revival meeting fare than politics, but it is reality-based in a year when attitude is all in the electoral process.

The usually astute Peggy Noonan gets it totally wrong in claiming, "The Internet changed everything. Everyone has facts now, knows who voted how and why. New thought leaders spring up and lead in new directions. Total transparency leads to party fracturing. Information dings unity. We are in new territory."

The last thing O'Donnell represents is information and transparency. Forget all the sad history of, as Karl Rove put it, "saying nutty things," a fictionalized biography and psychiatrically shaky life as an unemployed 41-year-old woman who, when asked for the Senator she most admires, after a long pause names Jim DeMint.

Her South Carolina hero is a perfect example of the bipartisan weirdness that has infected the electoral process as he enrages fellow Republicans and, in his own campaign, coasts to reelection against a flaky Democrat who makes O'Donnell look like Winston Churchill.

Frank Rich sees in her a "Tea Party everywoman, who just may be the final ingredient needed to camouflage a billionaires’ coup as a populist surge. By the time her fans discover that any post-election cuts in government spending will be billed to them, and not the Tea Party’s shadowy backers, she’ll surely be settling her own debts with fat paychecks from 'Fox & Friends.'”

Perhaps, but in today's climate, she could be sitting in the United States Senate for the next six years, next to such policy savants as Sharron Angle, Rand Paul, Linda McMahon and Joe Miller.

If, as Democrats claim, they are closing "the enthusiasm gap," they had better do it fast.

Rahm, Rick and an Old, Old Story

As the President bids a warm farewell to his Chief of Staff, the news is all about...Rick Sanchez.

Who? A daytime CNN anchor vents his displeasure in a radio interview about Jon Stewart satirizing his work, escalates into an aria against "Jewish" control of his own network and is instantly fired.

Sanchez's sad fate intersects with a memory evoked by Rahm Emanuel's decision to run for Mayor of Chicago, a hereditary position held by the Daley family--of the 1968 Democratic Convention hosted by the current mayor's father, caught on camera yelling at the podium what lip readers decoded as "“[Bleep] you, you Jew son of a bitch! You lousy mother[bleep]er! Go home!"

Sen. Abraham Ribicoff had been impolitic enough, while making a presidential nominating speech, to criticize the "Gestapo tactics" of the Mayor's minions in the streets outside acting out what was later officially described as "a police riot."

As the first would-be Jewish Mayor of the Second City, Emanuel will be running against that backdrop of what Rick Sanchez now reminds us is not ancient history.

If anything, Sanchez's anti-Semitism is relatively pathetic, coming from a second-tier TV anchor out promoting a book unfortunately titled "Conventional Idiocy" after losing a briefly held prime-time slot.

If Jon Stewart is half the human being he seems to be, the Daily Show host should invite Sanchez for a "beer summit" on air and coax him to attend his "Rally to Restore Sanity" in Washington at month's end.

As for Rahm Emanuel, as he courts voters in the land of Daley and Blagojevich, he will need all his abrasive charm and a psychological suit of armor for the campaign.

Would, as they used to say in my old neighborhood, having one of our own take charge of an ungovernable city be "good for the Jews?" Or should we be taking it with that time-honored shrug, "Things could be worse"?

Tony Curtis

As he morphed from Bernie Schwartz, a Depression kid of my generation who believed in the immigrant dream and lived it, Tony Curtis, who died this week, never lost the exuberance that came from growing up in a time when everything seemed possible because life couldn't possibly get worse.

Unlike most of us, who counted on our brains to escape Bronx squalor, Bernie was also blessed with a pretty face and he made the most of it, graduating from Universal's good-looks can't-act mill, along with Rock Hudson and others, to make a star of himself by working hard and choosing his mentors wisely.

He shone as "a cookie laced with arsenic" in Burt Lancaster's "Sweet Smell of Success;" chained to Sidney Poitier in Stanley Kramer's "The Defiant Ones;" and, most of all, in drag and doing a Cary Grant impression to woo Marilyn Monroe in Billy Wilder's 1959 classic, "Some Like It Hot."

That year, on my first trip to Hollywood as a magazine editor, he was married to the lovely Janet Leigh, who had chided me when we met in New York for titling a piece about Tony, "I Grew Up Stealing," but relented and invited my family to visit.

My wife, new baby and I arrived at their Beverly Hills home with a circular driveway full of antique cars. Inside, we met the children, a sweet little girl named Kelly and a baby sister, Jamie Lee. As Janet took my wife on a tour of the house, Tony took me aside.

He gave me an abashed Bernie Schwartz smile and admitted he didn't know to make the martini my wife had asked for. I gave him a demonstration of the fine art of handling gin, vermouth and lemon peel, a social skill he would put to good use in the following decades as a suave international movie star.

He never stopped learning, as an actor and as a painter with enough skill to impress the Museum of Modern Art, even through a life filled with failed marriages, bad movies and a stay at the Betty Ford Center for drug and alcohol abuse.

That baby back then, Jamie Lee Curtis, now a movie star herself, estranged from him after her parents' divorce, now sums up Tony Curtis:

"My father leaves behind a legacy of great performances in movies and in his paintings and assemblages. He leaves behind children and their families who loved him and respected him and a wife and in-laws who were devoted to him. He also leaves behind fans all over the world."

R.I.P., Bernie.

That Bedfellows Thing

Eliot Spitzer, who resigned as governor of New York for patronizing prostitutes, will soon be seen on CNN weekday nights pontificating alongside a Foxy conservative co-anchor.

Meanwhile, the contest for his old job is making Spitzer look like a choirboy as the Republican candidate declares "off limits" any discussion of a daughter with another woman while married to the mother of his three children.

Carl Paladino's emergence as a Tea Party hero who wants to "take a bat" to traditional politicians has caused a crisis of conscience for Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, which loves angry GOP pols almost as much as sex scandals.

Now the would-be governor is threatening to "take out" a nosy Post editor, making it clear he is using the term in a Goodfellas sense rather than offering to share Chinese food with him. If the Post ends up endorsing Paladino, it could be a first in American journalism.

On the other coast, the gubernatorial issue is not who's been sharing the candidate's bed but who's been making it. Meg Whitman is explaining away an illegal immigrant who was her housekeeper for nine years until the eBay tycoon decided to run for office.

Firing her for self-protection was apparently OK, but turning her in, Whitman now says, would not have been the "right thing" to do, offering a new gloss on compassionate Conservatism.

All this induces nostalgia for North Carolina's outgoing governor, Mark Sanford, who had enough respect for voters to try to cover his tracks with that Appalachian Trail story as he sought true love in Argentina.

If the polls are right, his successor will be Nikki Haley, a Sarah Palin favorite, who had to overcome intra-Republican allegations of her own infidelity, to get the nomination.

Anyone who says "Politics makes strange bedfellows" will be taken out to the town square and horsewhipped.

Dialogue With Deaf Democrats

Barack Obama and Joe Biden are out replaying favorite scenes from 2008, but for crowds of Democrats and independent voters, it is as if the sound has been turned off. Their base has gone deaf.

"When I talk to Democrats around the country," the President says in a Rolling Stone interview, "I tell them, 'Guys, wake up here. We have accomplished an incredible amount in the most adverse circumstances imaginable.' I came in and had to prevent a Great Depression, restore the financial system so that it functions, and manage two wars."

He concedes "there were some areas where we could have picked a fight with Republicans that might have gotten our base feeling good, but would have resulted in us not getting legislation done."

Joe Biden, as is his wont, puts it more bluntly and tells Democrats to "stop whining."

But the epidemic of deaf, depressed Democrats is not likely to abate between now and November, and there is nothing in the new health care reforms to treat their condition.

If anything, the President's pyrrhic victory in passing that legislation, rather than concentrating on economic issues, is a root cause of his dilemma now--a year-long spectacle of Republicans yowling about "Obamacare" while Democrats butchered and bargained over thousands of incomprehensible pages to buy off their own dissidents.

If the White House had set out to stage scenes that would lead to voter disgust and disenchantment, the results couldn't have surpassed the months leading to passage of health care reform that few voters understand--leaving only images of an ugly process and few signs of the progress that the new laws represent.

Was passing something rather than nothing worth it? The President will be out claiming that, in the long run, it was. But even his most ardent admirers will have their doubts and may not be energized enough to avoid the looming debacle at the ballot boxes.

Symbolically, Rahm Emanuel who counseled against doing that is leaving the White House to run for Mayor of Chicago. The President should have taken the advice of his most obnoxious pol.

Update: If Democrats fail to rebound, it won't be for the President's lack of trying. He drew an "upbeat but controlled" crowd of 26,000 in Wisconsin yesterday, telling them:

"The prediction among the pundits is, there's going to be a bloodletting for Democrats. That's what they're saying in Washington. And the basis of their prediction is that all of you who worked so hard in 2008 aren't going to be as energized, aren't going to be as engaged...

"We cannot sit this one out. We can't let this country fall backward because the rest of us didn't care enough to fight."

Meanwhile, the worst Democratic candidate in memory, Michael Dukakis, who lost to Bush I in 1988, has dropped by the White House to remind them to "pound" the message that Republicans "want to go back and do exactly what got us in this mess in the first place."

Rah-rah.

Unhealthy American Appetites

Better a meal of vegetables where there is love than a fattened calf with hatred. -Proverbs 15:17

I say it's spinach and I say the hell with it. -cartoon caption, The New Yorker 1928

The nation's body and mind are moving in sync as Americans reject Michelle Obama's campaign to eat more vegetables even as they disdain her husband's recipe for a healthier polity.

More and more, taste buds and brain cells are responding less and less to subtleties. As the President's approval ratings hit a new low, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study shows Americans eating far less fruit and vegetables than a healthy diet requires, little more than they did a decade ago despite all efforts at public education.

In the population, women, older people and those with higher incomes tend to consume more vegetables, according to the CDC report, but overall the nation is eating no better than it's thinking, judging from recent election results that show a growing taste for political red meat and fiery spice.

If eating habits seem a shaky metaphor for state of mind, consider the Republicans' new "Pledge to America," a dish of reheated pablum from political hacks caught between the Democrats' diet of delayed gratification and the Tea Party's buffet of political junk food.

The dilemma is nothing new. Back in the good old days of the last century, the Reagan Administration tried to pass off ketchup as a vegetable for school lunches and George Bush I bravely announced, "I do not like broccoli and I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I’m President of the United States and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli."

A food marketer sums up the meaning of the CDC study, “Eating vegetables is a lot less fun than eating flavor-blasted Doritos."

Just so, but if there's any truth to the old saw, "You are what you eat," the new century is not looking good for a healthy America.

Murdoch Funds a War on Obama

They used to call the party out of power "the loyal opposition," but an Australian-born billionaire with Neanderthal politics and no journalistic scruples has changed all that.

Rupert Murdoch became an American citizen in 1985 so he could own TV stations here, and now as proprietor of Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, New York Post and more has turned his adopted country's mass communications powerhouse into a source of sleazy political power as well as profit.

As Glenn Beck's Dr. Frankenstein, Karl Rove's rehabilitator and Sarah Palin's sugar daddy, Murdoch has defined media deviancy down to the point where it matches the now rock-bottom ethical standards of politics.

One gauge of his dual motivation is reflected in the antics of the Journal, which Murdoch has put behind a pay wall online, but which in recent weeks has made freely available to all its most virulent attacks on Obama.

In today's edition alone, one columnist calls Barack Obama "kind of a jerk," another parses his "disastrous fall" and still another explains why "Connecticut voters want a smackdown of the president's policies."

But if would-be readers are interested in a critique of Stephen Hawking's views on God or what Congress should do about IPOs to help the American economy on "the road to recovery," they will have to pay Murdoch for the privilege.

In his full-bore attacks on Obama, there may be an element of the disappointed suitor for Murdoch, who courted him in 2008 and then even allowed his New York Post to endorse him.

"He is a rock star. It's fantastic," the media mogul said back then. "I am anxious to meet him. I want to see if he will walk the walk."

Two years later, Murdoch is busy giving Obama's ugliest attackers a free ride.

The War Behind the Endless Wars

From reports on Bob Woodward's new book, an old story emerges--how wars now take on a life of their own with the military pressing for more troops, handcuffing even a President desperate for a way out.

"I don't think you win this war," Woodward quotes Gen. David Petraeus. "I think you keep fighting. It's a little bit like Iraq, actually...Yes, there has been enormous progress in Iraq. But there are still horrific attacks in Iraq, and you have to stay vigilant. You have to stay after it. This is the kind of fight we're in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids' lives."

If that choice were put to a vote, how many Americans would support it?

Yet, under threat of even a single domestic attack, large or small, no President--particularly one under siege by Tea Party patriots--has the freedom to make rational decisions about Afghanistan and Iraq.

President Obama sounds like a man trying to persuade himself as he tells Woodward, "We can absorb a terrorist attack. We'll do everything we can to prevent it, but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever...we absorbed it and we are stronger."

But from reports of internecine struggles among Administration, diplomatic and military brass emerges the picture of a Commander-in-Chief politically trapped, against his better judgment, into investing more American lives and treasure in an endless and futile enterprise, held hostage by the threat that any terrorist act would translate a withdrawal into treason.

There is a nightmarish quality to Woodward's picture of the President pressing the Pentagon for an exit strategy without ever getting one and finally resorting to his own patchwork decision of sending more troops but putting an artificial and unrealistic expiration date on their stay.

There is an unnerving picture of the Mideast War poster boy, Gen. David Petraeus who, Woodward says, took Obama's decision as a "personal repudiation." Ironically, Petraeus, who later replaced Gen. Stanley McChrystal after being fired for allowing derisive comments about Administration figures, is quoted as saying he dislikes talking with David M. Axelrod, the president’s senior adviser, because he is “a complete spin doctor.”

As details of the Woodward book emerge, real spinning begins with Republicans claiming it shows the President as weak and political, while the White House insists that he comes across as "analytical, strategic, and decisive, with a broad view of history, national security, and his role."

But from the perspective of the rest of Americans trapped by all this posturing, Woodward's book has no winners or losers, only victims.

Jimmy Carter Tells Us Too Much

As President, he was the boring guy at a party who explains everything but gets little, least of all his own failure to connect with people. Three decades later, Jimmy Carter is still amiably garrulous.

If, during four years in the White House, he was always dictating his thoughts, why insist on sharing them now? On claiming that Ted Kennedy kept him from enacting health-care reform? Or bragging that "my role as a former president is probably superior to that of other presidents?”

Promoting his book, Carter, who gratuitously told Playboy before election that he "lusted in my heart" for other women, now flummoxes Jon Stewart, of all people, by trying to confess his own experience with self-pleasuring while alluding to a favored topic of Tea Party candidate Christine O'Donnell.

A fellow octogenarian can sympathize with his need to stay in the game, but younger generations should know this good-hearted but clueless president responded to an energy crisis and long gas lines by wearing a sweater on TV and talking about a "national malaise," backslapped the Russians and then cancelled our Olympic participation when they disappointed him, was unable to free American hostages for 444 days in Iran or stop Castro from exporting criminals and mental cases along with political dissidents to Florida with the Mariel boatlift.

As an ex-president, his humanitarian work is admirable but pales in scope next to Bill Clinton's. And when it goes beyond building homes for the poor, there is the same political naïveté that marked Carter's presidency as he bumbles through the Middle East and trades presidential prestige to free a single innocent American in North Korea.

As it happens, Jimmy Carter's umpteenth book coincides with a memoir by his running mate, Walter Mondale, a capable politician who was served up as a sacrificial lamb to Reagan in 1984.

“At heart, he was an engineer,” Mondale now tells the New Yorker about Carter. “He wanted to sit down and come up with the right answers, and then explain it. He didn’t like to do a lot of emotional public speaking.”

Most presidents learn quickly there are no "right answers," only complicated human transactions in connecting with people. Jimmy Carter never did.

Can Comedy Central Rally the Radical Middle?

When Americans badly needed a few laughs during the Great Depression, a cowboy comic named Will Rogers became a huge star--and influential public figure--by tweaking politicians and announcing, "I don't belong to any organized party, I'm a Democrat."

Now that Democrats and their independent ilk are even more disorganized and disheartened, here comes another comic calling for a "Rally to Restore Sanity" at the Washington Monument on October 30th.

After Glenn Beck's crowd scene at the nation's capital, Jon Stewart is organizing "people who've been too busy to go to rallies, who actually have lives and families and jobs." The effort may be starting out as a parody but could turn into a rallying point to counter Tea Party excesses.

The call to arms starts with the now classic "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!" and goes on to riff on it:

"Who among us has not wanted to open their window and shout that at the top of their lungs?

"Seriously, who?

"Because we're looking for those people. We're looking for the people who think shouting is annoying, counterproductive, and terrible for your throat; who feel that the loudest voices shouldn't be the only ones that get heard; and who believe that the only time it's appropriate to draw a Hitler mustache on someone is when that person is actually Hitler. Or Charlie Chaplin in certain roles."

Stewart, along with Stephen Colbert holding a mock counter-rally, have the star power to draw an enormous crowd, and there will be no shortage of big names eager to join them. A cameo by one from the White House is certainly not out of the question.

Striking back at the Tea Party with reasonable arguments is not likely to sway millions of voters. Holding its excesses up to ridicule may work better

As Will Rogers used to say, "People who fly into a rage always make a bad landing."

Update: As almost 100,000 write on Facebook that they are planning to attend, Democratic gurus, true to their nature, are finding reasons to worry about the Jon Stewart rally, citing "asymmetry" (say what?) between the "zealous" Tea Party turnouts and those who respond to "a very gifted satirist calling for everyone to just chill."

They may have failed to notice that, if Democrats were at any lower temperature this year, they would be eligible for cryogenic storage. Chilling would be hot stuff.

Sarah Palin's Body Snatchers

It's the 1950s again when atomic anxiety had kids ducking under school desks as Joe McCarthy et al were stalking Washington for subversives plotting to steal our liberties while Hollywood cheese showed aliens in aluminum suits invading the planet to steal our minds.

Sarah Palin's remake of The Body Snatchers has opened to sour reviews from both sides of the aisle but with a boffo start at the box office as veteran observers wonder if it has the legs to last through November when Tea Party preview enthusiasts thin out and mass audiences have to be won over.

Say what you will about her as an auteur, however, Palin is following the path of classic masters of mass fear, from Orson Welles' radio invasion by Martians to the makers of "Frankenstein" and "Dracula," who could create scary images in the minds of millions during hard times.

Purists may carp at stylistic touches such as the tacky Palin clone in the Delaware scene and Jim DeMint as an unconvincing Igor, but her feat in instantly assembling a U. S. Senator in Alaska out of body parts is a dazzling hommage to the original monster makers.

In the 1950s, politics and movies were still separate branches of the culture, even as Washington headline hunters borrowed Hollywood star power for their public floggings. Palin can now cast her productions with unknowns--no need for Sandra Bullock and such.

As this current reality show unreels nationally, new generations may take some comfort in recalling that the 1950s madness ended abruptly with Eisenhower Republicans taking back their party and JFK urging Americans to "ask not what your country can do for you—-ask what you can do for your country."

But that was in a simpler time. In the age of 3-D, how long will we all be trapped in this new horror show?

Update: In Washington's equivalent of an honorary Academy Award, the White House acknowledges Palin's box-office pow, with Press Secretary Robert Gibbs noting that she "very well could be the most formidable force in the Republican Party."

As Palin heads for the first 2012 primary state, Iowa, to speak at the annual Ronald Reagan (movies, again) Dinner, President Obama is now scheduled for a "small town event" there later in the month.

Mr. Deeds vs. Godzilla?

Ignorance-is-Bliss Senate Class of 2011

In a back-to-school speech, the President advises students to study and stay out of trouble: "That kind of discipline and drive--that kind of hard work--is absolutely essential for success."

He may want to save a tape of that exhortation for the new Congress next January, which could be posing for its class picture under a sign with its inspirational slogan, "We Won Because We're Not the Other Guy."

This year's ignorance-is-bliss election has reached a point of absurdity to revolt even Karl Rove, not hitherto known for a queasy stomach, who is now being attacked as "an establishment Beltway strategist" for "trashing" the Delaware primary winner on Fox News even as he joins the defeated candidate in not endorsing her and the Republican National Committee in not planning to fund her.

The State Party Chairman sums up the reaction: "I could buy a parrot and train it to say, ‘tax cuts,’ but at the end of the day, it’s still a parrot, not a conservative." This is sounding more like Monty Python than the GOP.

If today's voter mood persists, Sen. Christine O'Donnell of Delaware could join the Senate Class of 2011 along with Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Sen. Sharron Angle of Nevada, Sen. Carly Fiorina of California, Sen. Linda McMahon of Connecticut, Sen. Joe Miller of Alaska and other legislative virgins to spend the next six years doing something they have never done before that will directly affect the lives of all Americans.

Unless this prospect alarms enough voters between now and November, we could all be living in an interminable Monty Python skit, but this time all the parrots will be animated and squawking.

Term limits, anyone?

Steep Price of a Tea Party Free Lunch

Will the last of the primary season mark the end of an electoral temper tantrum or just a step on the way to a bigger one in November?

Light bulbs are going on for traditional Republicans who, after feasting on opinion polls and relishing a takeover of both houses of Congress, are beginning to see the steep price of a Tea Party free lunch.

On Fox News, conservative intellectual Charles Krauthammer smacks down Sarah Palin's backing of a Delaware Tea Party Senate candidate, calling it "disruptive and capricious. Bill Buckley had a rule that he always supported the most conservative candidate who was electable, otherwise the vote is simply self-indulgence."

But GOP alarm goes beyond electability in November. Even in victories, what will they have in new officeholders coming in on a tide of anger, with no legislative experience and only fervent promises to block government and dismantle it?

"If the current Republican Party regards every new bit of government action as a step on the road to serfdom," predicts David Brooks, "then the party will be taking this long, mainstream American tradition and exiling it from the G.O.P."

In such a know-nothing tide, Brooks foresees political, fiscal, policy and even intellectual tragedies: "Conservatism is supposed to be nonideological and context-driven. If all government action is automatically dismissed as quasi socialist, then there is no need to think. A pall of dogmatism will settle over the right."

Voting purely on emotion of any kind has a wasteful and destructive history. Liberals who relish the conservatives' dilemma this time may want to remember how in 2000 their idealistic ballots for Ralph Nader put George W. Bush into the White House.

And we all know how well that worked out for America.

Update: The "unelectable" Republican has won the Delaware Senate nomination, setting up a test for how strong the Tea Party brew will be in November, when the voting goes beyond the battle for the GOP's soul. Democrats would be well-advised to take nothing for granted in this topsy-turvy year

Melting Pot Meltdown

With anti-Muslim sentiment joining anti-Mexican immigrant bias and undisguised racism against the first black President, the American dream of assimilation seems to be falling apart.

Why is all this happening now when an even worse Depression and a wider war in the past century brought the country together, leading to the breakdown of discriminatory barriers in the decades that followed?

Blame it on Tea Party rage that elevates Boomer self-entitlement to patriotic fervor. Blame it on Republican surrender to corporate power that preys on the poor and middle-class and calls it free enterprise. Blame it on the 24/7 media and the Internet, which magnify the mindless at the expense of the meaningful.

Yet, for someone who has lived through both eras and spent a lifetime in journalistic search for understanding, those easy targets fail to explain all the differences.

From the start, America gloried in diversity. Emerson in his journals predicted that "the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles, and Cossacks, and all the European tribes--of the Africans, and of the Polynesians--will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature, which will be as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting-pot of the Dark Ages."

Emerson's smelting pot became "The Melting Pot" a century ago, incorporating each wave of immigrants into its promise of freedom and equality. As a child in the 1930s, I was part of a generation who expected to hoist ourselves into that Pot and splash around in its splendors. And so we did. Not without having to overcome prejudice and exclusion, but with a patriotic certainty in that American promise.

Those who excuse today's poisonous atmosphere point to hatred of "the Huns" in the first World War and internment of Japanese in the second, but those were true wars against nations of enemies unlike today's War on Terror, fighting ragtag collections of zealots who represent no country and certainly no religion but their own destructive madness.

In the second half of the last century, the Melting Pot metaphor morphed into a Salad Bowl of multiculturalism, but that was an attempt to preserve the best of old cultures as part of the new American ethos of inclusion and acceptance.

After living through all that hope and promise, it's painful to see so much being swept away by new generations who profited from that history but can't seem to understand how precious and fragile it is.

Small Favor

The angry prophet of Gainsville, Fla. has had a vision that "God is telling us to stop,” according to the media that had anointed him for his babble about burning Korans.

Unfazed by similar exhortations from President Obama, Gen. Petraeus, Sarah Palin and 99 percent of the civilized world and after trying to blackmail a Manhattan imam into canceling plans for the "Ground Zero Mosque" and after at least one death in Afghanistan during rioting over his announcement, this week's grabber of 15 minutes is retreating back into the alternate universe from which he came, assuring the world that his mission has been accomplished:

“We feel that whenever we started this out, one of our reasons was to show, to expose that there is an element of Islam is very dangerous and very radical. I feel that we have definitely accomplished that mission.”

No word from high-school classmate Rush Limbaugh about his reaction to the news about his fellow bigmouth.

9/11/2010

The "physical rebirth" of the World Trade Center, says a New York Times editorial, "is cause for celebration on this anniversary. It is a far more fitting way to defy the hate-filled extremists who attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, and to honor their victims, than to wallow in the intolerance and fear that have mushroomed across the nation."

When the planes hit the Twin Towers and the Pentagon that morning, I said to someone, "This is the worst day of my life."

I didn't know then what I meant, but it was as if the crust of the earth had suddenly cracked and we would never again feel safe going about our daily lives. Over time, that feeling has receded, but the world has not been the same since.

What we lost that day nine years ago is social trust--the sense of not having to be constantly on guard against the malice of unknown people who want to hurt or kill us for no personal reason whatsoever.

Before 9/11, we took for granted unspoken rules that protect us from the outside world: We could walk safely in front of cars that would stop for red lights, eat food that had passed through the hands of countless unseen people, hand over our children every day to strangers who would protect and nurture them.

We still do all that and more every day, but we can’t board a plane, go to a stadium or walk a crowded street with the same sense of security we had before 9/11/01.

Here at home, our public life has become meaner, coarser and, in this political season, we are not the people we were in the last century--fiercely opinionated, intensely competitive but optimistic and generous underneath it all.

If time heals all wounds, nine years is obviously not enough. How much is?

Party Time for bin Laden

Al Qaeda's Class of 2001 has much to celebrate this weekend on the anniversary of its biggest hits, not least of which is the fear and panic that has not only persisted but grown as a result of its 9/11 attacks.

Nine years later, Americans are divided by headline bigotry over building a mosque near Ground Zero while an ecclesiastical moron with a flock of fifty plans to mark the anniversary by burning the Koran despite bipartisan warnings by politicians and Gen. Petraeus that such antics could "endanger troops" and damage the war effort in Afghanistan.

What we have here is not a clash of cultures but the tyranny of lunatic fringes in which Osama bin Laden's fanatics on one side and U. S. counterparts of loudmouths who play into their hands hold millions of reasonable Muslims and Americans hostage to their attention-getting extremism.

The Koran-burners can't seem to grasp that incinerating the terrorists' holy book will offend not only them but the large majority of Muslims fighting them side by side with our own troops in the Middle East.

Speaking of loudmouths, Glenn Beck will be in Alaska to mark 9/11 by selling tickets for from $73 to $225 for some unspecified cause to an event that Sarah Palin promises will be "interesting and inspiring" for "patriots who will never forget."

In more solemn remembrance, President Obama will be laying a wreath at the Pentagon and Vice President Biden will attend services at the rubble of the World Trade Center in a show of respect to the innocent Americans who lost their lives nine years ago.

From whatever cave he is now occupying, Osama bin Laden will no doubt relish the divisive results of his strike at the American spirit, but his celebration should be tempered by the unique history of a nation that has overcome waves of religious intolerance and stupidity for centuries.

As book burners prepare for their work in Florida, another community--Hartford, Ct.--announces that it has invited local imams to perform Islamic invocations at its City Council meetings this month.

That may not match the heat of book-burning fires, but it will be a candle in the darkness.

Update: Two organizations, the Associated Press and Fox News, take a step toward media sanity by announcing they will not show the Koran burning on Saturday, if indeed it takes place.

If some journalistic purists find this to be "censorship," it may be useful to remember that news by definition is only a tiny fraction of what goes on all over the world and that editors have always made decisions about what's news and what isn't.

In the unfiltered world of the Internet, that function has been downgraded and has almost disappeared. Perhaps journalists should be grateful to the would-be Koran burners for the reminder that their judgment has not become totally irrelevant after all.

Obama Tries Out His Truman Act

Too little and too late, the President is out channeling the Harry Truman of 1948, who won with attacks on Republicans of a "Do Nothing Congress," inspiring the battle cry of "Give 'em Hell, Harry!"

But in personality and style, the urbane Barack Obama is ill-suited for the role of the cranky old man who turned around a sure-to-lose election back then. His Truman tryout yesterday evoked more laughter than cries of outrage:

"When it comes to just about everything we’ve done to strengthen our middle class, to rebuild our economy, almost every Republican in Congress says no. Even on things we usually agree on, they say no. If I said the sky was blue, they say no. If I said fish live in the sea, they’d say no. They just think it’s better to score political points before an election than to solve problems."

Claiming that critics "talk about me like a dog," he asserted: "They’re betting that between now and November, you’ll come down with a case of amnesia. They think you’ll forget what their agenda did to this country. They think you’ll just believe that they’ve changed. These are the folks whose policies helped devastate our middle class and drive our economy into a ditch. And now they’re asking you for the keys back."

The President was even willing to go personal, taking a swipe at John Boehner as "the Republican who thinks he’s going to take over as Speaker" dismissing the saving of teachers, police and firefighters from cuts as mere “government jobs.”

But less than two months before Election Day in a time when more and more early ballots are being cast, the polls keep looking worse and worse for Democrats.

In doing his Truman impersonation at this late date, the President may want to remember what Adlai Stevenson, a two-time loser, said in comparing himself to John F. Kennedy who won the White House:

"In classical times when Cicero had finished speaking, the people said, 'How well he spoke' but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, they said, 'Let us march.'"

This year voters certainly seem to be on the march--but not in Barack Obama's direction.

The Case for Being Caught Napping

A new survey shows that 34 percent of Americans take a daily snooze, setting off lively debate about the benefits to body and mind of a brief break from the pace of digital life.

Another study suggests that "an hour’s nap can dramatically boost and restore your brain power...it not only refreshes the mind but can make you smarter."

“Almost certainly," says a research psychologist, making the case against ceaseless stimulation, "downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories.”

If all this sounds like a rationalization for sloth, let me bear witness as an inveterate napper.

It began during World War II when trainees had to watch a weekly series of short films called “Why We Fight.” As a strident voice denounced Hitler and Hirohito to loud marching music, I sat at attention and slept. When the lights came on, I felt revived for more bayonet drills, calisthenics and obstacle courses.

I took that lesson into the working world now immortalized by "Mad Men." After acquiring an office with a couch, there were fewer two-martini lunches and more half-hour naps instead. More often than not, I woke up with answers to questions that had eluded me all morning.

The current upsurge in napping advocacy has even inspired a New York Times editorial:

"So why is it easier to find a coffee machine in the office than a spot for a doze? Perhaps the simplest answer is that sleep is so relentlessly personal. We are never more who we really are than when sound asleep, and being who we really are is something we’re supposed to do on our personal time.

"But let’s try to think of it this way. Plenty of us bring work home. Why not bring a little sleep to the office? It worked in kindergarten. It would work even better now."

So let the debate go on. Wake me when it's over.

Pitying Palin

A new Vanity Fair takedown disheartens an aged former editor who in his time has seen too many dreary "I didn't get the story because nobody would talk to me" magazine profiles.

"Even as Sarah Palin’s public voice grows louder," the magazine blurbs, "she has become increasingly secretive, walling herself off from old friends and associates, and attempting to enforce silence from those around her. Following the former Alaska governor’s road show, the author delves into the surreal new world Palin now inhabits--a place of fear, anger, and illusion, which has swallowed up the engaging, small-town hockey mom and her family--and the sadness she has left in her wake."

What follows the admission that "neither Palin nor her current staff would comment for this article" is a string of insights from former aides, "friends," hotel bellhops and her about-to-be biographer Joe McGinniss, who has rented a house next door, which may or may not have a view of the Palins' windows.

McGinniss was there at the dawn of peeping-Tom journalism with his "Selling of the President," which in 1968 supplanted as a best-seller Theodore White's meticulously reported series of "Making of the President" books during the Kennedy years.

The level of such reporting can be judged by his thesis then that Nixon's media handlers were manipulative geniuses when, in fact, they managed to spend millions turning his 15-point polling advantage after the conventions into a November victory by less than one percent.

McGinniss' book next year may very well make the Vanity Fair piece look like a valentine, but the meaning of both goes beyond the question of loving or hating their subject.

Sarah Palin, who has voluntarily made herself into a media creature by abandoning politics to make millions flaunting herself in public, is fair game as an object of reporting.

But what does it say about the thousands of words in Vanity Fair that Gail Collins' takeaway from the piece is that it "suggests that Palin does still cut costs by being an extremely bad tipper. The piece also resurrects the charge that she does not actually hunt, and claims that Todd had to scour the neighborhood to find some moose to put in that chili when a TV crew came to call"?

All this scrounging for Palinalia echoes the time of McGinnis' first book in the late 1960s when a would-be journalist named A. J. Weberman was featured in Esquire as a "garbologist," who reported on the rich and famous by rooting through their rubbish, reconstructing their inner lives from the evidence of egg shells, coffee grounds and discarded scrap paper.

As journalism, it also recalls the expression GIGO from the early days of judging the reliability of computer output--garbage in, garbage out.

Update: You can count on Sarah Palin to be abrasively annoying, even when she's in the right. Her reaction to the Vanity Fair piece is to blast "impotent, limp and gutless reporters" who use anonymous sources, thereby giving credence to all those reports therein about her hair-trigger temper. Her grievances could have been much better expressed without impugning the author's cojones or courage, but it doesn't seem to be in her emotional range to respond with more sorrow than anger.

Gates Near Tears

The most moving moment in ending America's combat mission in Iraq comes not from the President's touch-all-the-bases Oval Office speech but the stifled tears of a man who helped George W. Bush prosecute the war.

At an American Legion convention yesterday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates choked up as he said: "Today, at the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 4,427 American service members have died in Iraq, 3,502 of them killed in action; 34,265 have been wounded or injured. We must never forget."

Gates' emotion is a fitting response to the misbegotten invasion of a country that neither possessed weapons of mass destruction nor harbored 9/11 terrorists, as its justifiers--Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and, yes, Colin Powell--claimed in selling it to the American people.

Yet, in the Oval Office, Barack Obama was more circumspect:

"From this desk, seven and a half years ago, President Bush announced the beginning of military operations in Iraq. Much has changed since that night. A war to disarm a state became a fight against an insurgency. Terrorism and sectarian warfare threatened to tear Iraq apart. Thousands of Americans gave their lives; tens of thousands have been wounded. Our relations abroad were strained. Our unity at home was tested.

"These are the rough waters encountered during the course of one of America’s longest wars. Yet there has been one constant amidst those shifting tides. At every turn, America’s men and women in uniform have served with courage and resolve."

The President's cautious rhetoric is understandable, but his listless attempt to "turn the page" and link Iraq to the current operations in Afghanistan and even the struggling economy project not the passion of the man who promised Change but an embattled politician hitting talking points during an election year that threatens to disembowel his party.

The speech, says a New York Times editorial, "made us reflect on how little Mr. Bush accomplished by needlessly invading Iraq in March 2003--and then ludicrously declaring victory two months later."

"We," the Times adds about Obama's speech, "are puzzled about why he talks to Americans directly so rarely and with seeming reluctance...The country particularly needs to hear more from Mr. Obama about what he rightly called the most urgent task--'to restore our economy and put the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs back to work.'”

The country needs to hear more from the President in words that go beyond his by-the-numbers declamation yesterday. Perhaps Gates' near-weeping points the way for Barack Obama to share, in the poet's words, "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

Obama: Embracing the Orphan

Taking full blame for the Bay of Pigs debacle, JFK fell back on an old maxim, "Victory has a thousand fathers. Defeat is an orphan."

If the polls are right, Barack Obama has an unblessed event due in November, with no other claimants to paternity amid all the analysis of what when wrong in his love affair with the American people that looked so promising two years ago.

At this low point, he may want to look back at Kennedy's experience as a guide to dealing with adversity, admitting his part in it and putting the lessons learned to good use, as JFK did during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

With only nine weeks of campaigning left, the President will no doubt hammer away at the economic mess he inherited and the intractability of his GOP opposition: "We have spent the last 20 months governing. They spent the last 20 months politicking."

Yesterday, he raked Republicans for "pure partisan politics" in blocking his small-business assistance bill. True enough but, for a fearful and angry electorate craving relief and reassurance rather than explanations for its distress, that won't head off an Election Day disaster.

As the November train wreck comes closer, even sympathetic pundits are in despair. Paul Krugman foresees "a federal government paralyzed by an opposition with no interest in helping the president govern" and urges Obama, without hope that he will, to offer "major new initiatives on the economic front in particular, if only to shake up the political dynamic."

E. J. Dionne is more realistic in advising the President "to engage the nation in an extended dialogue about what holds all of his achievements together" and explain "why his attitude toward government makes more sense than the scattershot conservative attacks on everything Washington might do to improve the nation's lot."

More than that, Barack Obama must rise to the challenge by doing what he does best--creating a context for political dialogue, as he did during the campaign by converting the Jeremiah Wright embarrassment into an occasion for a deeper discussion of race.

The subject this time would be the role of government in Americans' lives, which has been left to Tea Party caricature as oppressive, with no appreciation of its unique power to overcome adversity and encourage social justice.

This would involve the President admitting his own shortcomings by acknowledging, for one example, how the good intentions of health care reform ended up with a "victory" at the expense of widespread public understanding and support as well as explaining how complicated and imperfect have been the workings of economic stimulus and government bailouts

John F. Kennedy grew in stature during his time in office. Taking full responsibility for the Bay of Pigs, he learned that "an error doesn't have to become a mistake unless you fail to admit it."

At this crossroads of his presidency, Barack Obama has to rise above the swarm of political pygmies that is dragging his administration down by engaging Americans in a discussion--and demonstration--of what real leadership involves.

He can start with an honest critique of his own.

Nightmare Knockoffs of King's Dream

What would he have made of these separate-but-unequal travesties of his historic moment?

Martin Luther King told a crowd at the Lincoln Memorial 47 years ago that "many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone."

Now, an "overwhelmingly white" sea of faces greets Rupert Murdoch's media minions Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin as they momentarily temper their hateful Tea Party rhetoric and try to hijack Dr. King's legacy by leaving their ugly protest signs behind to talk of a "religious revival" and an attempt to "restore America and restore her honor" in a coded attack on the nation's first African-American president and his policies.

Back then, King' s followers were fighting for the right to vote, send their children to unsegregated schools and sit next to white people in restaurants and buses. Today's "restore honor" patriots are complaining about budget deficits and government bailouts.

For their beliefs, civil rights protesters were attacked by police with billy clubs and high-pressure hoses while Dr. King spent nights in jail. For theirs, Beck and Palin have to endure million-dollar salaries from Fox News.

To counter their farce, there is a smaller African-American rally led by the Rev. Al Sharpton, the unchurched radio talk show host who subsists on "love offerings" in a long career of risking nothing but limited TV face time by turning up to pontificate about every racial event in the news.

All this posturing brings to mind the expression "cheap grace," coined by the German minister and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer in World War II to denote those who professed religious belief but managed to overlook the atrocities around them without personal risk.

For being outspoken when it really mattered, Bonhoeffer was disdained by his own church and hung by Hitler. Martin Luther King, who gave his life for what he believed, understood that kind of faith. He would not have been impressed with what went on in Washington this weekend.

Bogart, Sinatra and What's-His-Name

Approaching 86 next month, Lauren Bacall is making news again, telling all about her life in a second memoir and doing interviews to promote it.

Well, not quite all. In an hour on TCM, there is, of course, the story of her classic coupling with Humphrey Bogart and even a few words about an affair after Bogart's death with Frank Sinatra.

But not a word about Jason Robards, to whom she was married for eight years in the 1960s and with whom she had a child, the actor Sam Robards.

In airbrushing her life this way, Bacall is doing what living legends, and many of us lesser mortals, do--using selective memory to put bad times out of mind and make the best of what's left.

This story of her lost husband is a tribute to Lauren Bacall's toughness. In a fringe way, I can testify to that quality.

In 1966, as editor of McCall's, I had sent an interviewer to see her for a cover story. He overheard Bacall threatening to alter the anatomy of Robards for having an affair with his co-star in a play. Worried that references to him might soon be obsolete, we reduced them to a minimum.

When the piece appeared, Bacall called me in a rage. Why was there so much about Bogart and her affair with Sinatra and so little about her current husband? I could not bring myself to tell her.

Soon afterward, at a party I was talking to David Merrick, the producer of "Applause" in which she was then starring on Broadway. When Bacall came in, he said, "She's driving me crazy asking for vacation time." Merrick, for whom hard-nosed was a term of endearment, ducked away by asking my wife to dance.

Bacall greeted me with a minimum of warmth. "I know you're still sore," I said, "but I'm going to make it up to you. I'll convince Merrick to give you some time off."

"Time off!" she snorted, tilting her head toward the dance floor. "Watch your wife!"

We were friends again. Several years later, she divorced Robards and erased him from her legend.

Bogart fans watch "Casablanca" over and over again but, for real-life romance, nothing beats seeing him fall in love with that long-legged young beauty in "To Have and Have Not" and "The Big Sleep."

It's all there on the screen.

Reversal of the Alaska-Arizona Axis

In the scramble to make sense out of this week's primaries, a sidebar shows how far and how fast American politics has gone downhill in two years.

To keep the Republican nomination for a Senate seat he has held forever in Arizona, John McCain, who won nearly 60 million votes for president in 2008, had to spend $20 million, move far rightward on issues such as immigration and call in the help of Sarah Palin, the running mate he had plucked out of obscurity back then.

In Alaska, Palin, now the Tea Party kingmaker, did some plucking out of obscurity on her own by backing a totally unknown lawyer against Sen. Lisa Murkowski, hereditary holder of the seat, pulling off what Palin tweets as "a miracle on ice" unless absentee ballots take away Joe Miller's lead.

We are now in the era of disposable national politicians, to be created and used up like Kleenex (see Alvin Greene, the South Carolina Democratic candidate for Senate, an unknown self-financed veteran under indictment for showing pornography to a teenager or Republican Linda McMahon in Connecticut, experienced only in promoting wrestling "matches" with a predetermined result).

Democrats are so terrified of voter rage that they are running for reelection in disguise. See Robin Carnahan in Missouri calling "her opponent 'the very worst of Washington' for supporting the same financial services bailout that President Obama and most of the Democrats in Congress backed" and calling for extension of the Bush tax cuts.

But it is the Alaska-Arizona axis that outdoes all the other political freak shows this summer, underlining the rapid reversal of fortune that has overtaken the 2008 Republican running mates.

Barack Obama reached the White House promising change, but this is far from what he had in mind.

Slouching Out of Iraq

Generations of Americans have to take it on faith that wars can be won. Not since V-J Day in 1945 has there been dancing in our streets and strangers kissing in joy and relief.

With the mission in Baghdad far from accomplished, the last U. S. combat troops leave behind 4415 dead, billions of dollars spent (or stolen) and come home to a nation that is much less safe or united after seven years of sacrifice.

As the New York Times sums up the departing soldiers' mood, the war has been "not a glorious cause or... an adventure" but "a job that remains unfinished."

This echoes a Times report 35 years ago: "The last American troops left South Vietnam today, leaving behind an unfinished war that has deeply scarred this country and the United States.

"There was little emotion or joy as they brought to a close almost a decade of American military intervention."

The difference between then and now is that there is no foreseeable close. The 50,000 in so-called advise and assist brigades that remain behind, a military commander admits, although they "do not have a formal combat mission will, however, be combat capable. Some of those forces that will be embedded with Iraqi forces could indeed be drawn into combat."

What Barack Obama in his campaign called a "dumb war" is winding down not with a bang but a whimper of indefinite occupation in a country that was supposed to possess Weapons of Mass Destruction and to have harbored the 9/11 terrorists, neither of which turned out to be true.

With our human sacrifices continuing in Afghanistan, the American mood resembles that immortalized by William Butler Yeats at the end of World War II:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats ended "The Second Coming" with

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

In this century, a "rough beast" of anarchy is being gestated not only in the Middle East but here at home. Its coming is no cause for celebration.

Legal Victories of Shameless Liars

Truth may set you free, but lies are running a close second these days as Rod Blagojevich, Tom DeLay and a politician who falsely claimed to have won the Congressional Medal of Honor are doing well in the court system.

The legal principle involved in persuading only 11 of 12 jurors that Blago tried to sell Obama's Senate seat, according to Scott Turow, author of "Presumed Innocent," is that it's not enough to be caught with crumbs on your face next to an empty jar, after telling everybody how much you love cookies.

Being "crass and ham-handed" will not send you to the slammer when everybody in public life is selling out for campaign money.

Speaking of crass, this news comes as the Justice Department ends a six-year probe of Tom DeLay, the former GOP House leader who went on to fame on "Dancing With the Stars" until a stress fracture ended his second career.

Two of DeLay's aides were convicted of taking money from lobbyist Jack Abrahamoff, who also served time, but DeLay was nimble enough to evade Federal arraignment. He still has to tap-dance his way out of felony conspiracy charges in Texas for misusing campaign contributions but, in a climate where the U. S. Supreme Court is making even corporations safe in that area, the odds must be with him.

Meanwhile, a Court of Appeals strikes down the Stolen Valor Act, which makes it a crime to falsely claim a military decoration, freeing Xavier Alvarez, who was convicted of fibbing to voters about receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor while running for a California Water Board.

While denying that they were endorsing "an unbridled right to lie," the Court majority ruled that "society would be better off if Alvarez would stop spreading worthless, ridiculous, and offensive untruths.

"But, given our historical skepticism of permitting the government to police the line between truth and falsity, and between valuable speech and drivel, we presumptively protect all speech, including false statements, in order that clearly protected speech may flower in the shelter of the First Amendment."

Free speech proponents must be celebrating, as are Blagojevich, DeLay and all the other Pinocchios who populate our political life.

Panic Politics, Jittery Journalism

What W. H. Auden poetically called "The Age of Anxiety" at the dawn of the nuclear era is back to haunt us, a climate of constant dread where bad news always crowds out good.

Politicians, abetted by headline-hungry 24/7 media, inflate every occurrence into a crisis and, after each is resolved or fades away, go on to the next occasion for Chicken Little howls that the sky is falling.

After months of panic-mongering about the Gulf oil spill, the leak is now plugged and Adm. Chad Allen, who managed the response with firm leadership and candor (in contrast to Brownie's bumbling after Katrina), is ready to step down, an administrator is sorting out claims against BP and the President is taking his daughter for a dip to show that Florida beaches are safe

But the cleanup, serious as it is, will now go on under the news radar as headlines replace oil worries with a raging debate about whether or not Muslims should build a mosque near Ground Zero.

The subject of Anxiety--its nature, intensity and realistic connection to our lives--is less important than its effect on our nerve endings and the need for politicians and media people to keep their constituents stirred up.

Such attacks on the public's peace mind create an atmosphere in which it's hard to distinguish between what matters and what can be used to keep the anxiety pot boiling.

Little wonder that the President, in the face of still falling approval ratings, is sounding an election theme of "Don't give in to fear, let's reach for hope," telling voters, "The worst thing we could do is to go back to the very same policies that created this mess in the first place."

But will that message be heard?

Auden, who was a keen social critic as well as poet, once wrote, "Cocktail party chatter and journalism in the pejorative sense are two aspects of the same disease, what the Bible calls Idle Words for which at Judgment Day God will hold us accountable.

"Since the chatterer has nothing he really wishes to say, and the journalist nothing he wishes to write, it is of no consequence to either what words they actually use. In consequence, it is not long before they forget the exact meaning of words and their precise grammatical relations and, presently, without knowing it, are talking and writing nonsense."

In this new Age of Anxiety, politicians and media pundits are doing their best to drown us in scary nonsense.

Profile in Courage or Political Death Wish?

Barack Hussein Obama could have avoided this one, declaring the issue of a mosque near Ground Zero a local decision, as his Press Secretary has done for weeks, but the 44th President has taken his cue from the 35th by coming out in favor of building it.

In a "Profiles in Courage" moment, he declares: "Let me be clear: as a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country.

"That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in Lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable."

The most ardent Obama haters will have trouble finding political calculation in a position opposed by 68 percent of voters in a CNN poll as well as a range of noisy voices from Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin to the Anti-Defamation League.

Acknowledging the pain of the 9/11 families, the President sees a larger issue: “Al Qaeda’s cause is not Islam--it is a gross distortion of Islam. In fact, Al Qaeda has killed more Muslims than people of any other religion, and that list includes innocent Muslims who were killed on 9/11.”

At least one victim's survivor agrees with him. Charles Wolf, who lost his wife that day, argues that "we were attacked...because of all the tenets in the First Amendment, freedom of press, freedom of religion, freedom of speech. And for us to then roll back the freedom of religion, to me, is just falling right into their hands."

New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is not facing an angry electorate, has declared that denying the mosque would be "untrue to the best part of ourselves" and the firefighters and police killed in the World Trade Center: "We do not honor their lives by denying the very constitutional rights they died protecting."

Such large-heartedness is hard to sustain in the face of raw emotion, particularly for a president with falling approval ratings faced with loss of control in one or both houses of Congress only weeks from now.

His Profiles in Courage moment is remarkable, even though and perhaps particularly because so many will see it as a political Death Wish.

Good-Hearted Movie Bad Guy

This month TCM is showing the movies of Robert Ryan, who was almost always seen hating somebody--Jews in "Crossfire," women in "Clash by Night," Japanese-Americans in "Bad Day at Black Rock."

In that one, he faced off against Spencer Tracy, another Irish-American who a generation earlier had become a star as his polar opposite, playing heroic priests and self-sacrificing best friends.

But life rarely imitates art. One night in the 1960s, I ran into Ryan in Westport, Ct. at a dinner for Dr. Benjamin Spock for his opposition to the war in Vietnam.

Dr. Spock was flabbergasted that we had left our families on a Saturday night to honor him, but I was not surprised to see Ryan there. A World War II Marine veteran, the actor had vocally opposed McCarthyism, spoken out for civil rights and worked to ban nuclear weapons.

On the drive back to Manhattan, we spent an hour talking mostly about our admiration for Spock, who was risking his fame and would later be indicted for treason trying to save future generations.

I dropped Ryan off that night at the Dakota on the west side of Manhattan, where he lived with his wife and three children. A few years later, he died of lung cancer and his apartment was bought by John Lennon, bringing to mind Hemingway's remark that "the world kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry."

Seeing Robert Ryan's movies now is always a reminder of how different he was in life. He was a very good actor and an even better man.

The Rise of Sarah Palin Sexism

Momma grizzlies with moola are on the march, as Linda McMahon of Connecticut joins Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman of California in bicoastal bids for a hostile takeover of American government.

Since Sarah Palin wowed voters with a wisecrack about hockey moms as pit bulls with lipstick and went on to make a mouthy mint in the media from a lost election and an abandoned governorship, a new kind of political woman has emerged in America.

Far from the image of a pants-suited Hillary Clinton with the gravitas to govern on Day One, these candidates are capitalizing on anti-incumbent fervor, asking voters to trust their total lack of experience in the workings of the political process.

McMahon, who made a fortune as a wrestling promoter, is spending $50 million to strong-arm her way into the Senate while Fiorina, who was paid to go away as the chief executive of Hewlett Packard, is trying to unseat Barbara Boxer, one of the most respected legislative leaders in Washington.

Whitman, who got rich enabling people to sell one another junk on the Internet, wants to follow in the footsteps of Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose tenure should have made Californians wary of electing a political amateur.

Meanwhile, in the real world, Barack Obama has named two qualified women to the Supreme Court and appointed to his cabinet others such as Clinton, Kathleen Sebelius and Janet Napolitano.

But in that theme park called Palinworld, qualifications don't count.

Palin herself, we learn from another exemplar of 21st-century femininity, Arianna Huffington, is morphing into a Jungian archetype in our collective unconscious, one of those "universal images that have existed since the remotest times...deposits of the constantly repeated experiences of humanity."

All this has come to pass in less than two years, a Biblical span in the Internet era with the sacred scripture taking the form of a "Momma Grizzlies" video.

Lest we dismiss Palin as an entertainer, Huffington cites a Carl Jung warning that there are "explosive and dangerous forces hidden in the archetype come into action, frequently with unpredictable consequences. There is no lunacy people under the domination of an archetype will not fall prey to."

Dismissive critics of the Tea Party, take note.

Continuing Watergate Coverup

Richard Nixon's spirit lives on. Thirty-six years after the only presidential resignation ever, he is still with us as admirers try to hide evidence of his disgrace in the Nixon Library and Museum just as he himself did in the White House.

The Watergate room of the memorial is almost as blank as those missing Oval Office tapes in a to-do described by the New York Times after "the Nixon Foundation--a group of Nixon loyalists who controlled this museum until the National Archives took it over three years ago--described it as unfair and distorted, and requested that the archives not approve the exhibition until its objections are addressed."

In 1990, the Library had opened with ceremonies attended by three Republican presidents--Ford, Reagan and Bush I. What nobody noticed then was that Nixon had rewritten history, edited the crucial tapes and omitted any mention of the dirty tricks, break-ins and other illegal activities that led to his leaving office.

This whitewashed version of Watergate was seen by three million visitors before the Nixon shrine at his birthplace in Yorba Linda, California was transferred to the National Archives in 2007, which then ripped out the exhibits described by a scholar as "another Southern California theme park" with “a level of reality only slightly better than Disneyland."

Now, after the release of a flood of Nixon tapes revealing his raving paranoia, die-hard supporters are still claiming that their man has been maligned and his behavior was only par for the political course.

History disputes that but, in the face of Tea Party madness this year, Nixon could be retroactively rehabilitated in the future as a model of political sanity.

Notes on a Private Public Wedding

The long-running Clinton soap opera had its finest hour this weekend with a picture-book wedding that, for one octogenarian, evoked admiration for its restrained elegance and stirred half a century of memories.

Chelsea and Marc Mezvinsky were married a few miles down the road from a 1728 stone house in Dutchess County where I spent the first two decades of retirement.

But if the 2008 election had turned out differently, security considerations would have almost surely prompted the first daughter in history of two presidents to take her vows in the White House, where I attended Lynda Bird Johnson's nuptials in 1967.

A White House wedding has its own historical splendor, but as I recall, it was like being in a 3-D version of the TV Evening News, with all official Washington and a fair number of show business people milling around. (An image arises of Carol Channing, the original Broadway star of "Hello Dolly" in bright bloomers, carrying her own food in a plastic container.)

Chelsea Clinton, to her credit, opted for a more private affair, where the most notable celebrity sightings were of Ted Danson, Mary Steenburgen, Vernon Jordan and Madeleine Albright.

On Friday, the father of the bride went to lunch at Gigi Trattoria in Rhinebeck, where I dined every Saturday night for years and was surrounded by friends and family on my 80th birthday to eat Italian food created by Gianni Scapin, whose artistry was on display in the best American food movie ever, Stanley Tucci's 1996 "Big Night."

In this atmosphere, the Mezvinskys were married as privately as possible for a Presidential daughter by a minister and a rabbi, just as I was over 50 years ago to the mother of my children, whose genes come from a grandmother who belonged to the Daughters of the American Revolution and paternal grandparents who escaped the Holocaust by coming here after World War I.

In so many ways, the Chelsea Clinton wedding was a reminder of what Barack Obama unfortunately called "a mongrel people" on "The View" last week but is more rightly seen as an America that was once called "The Melting Pot" for multitudes seeking a better life in the freest country in the world and, despite the current furor over immigration, still is.