Oops!

Seven months after Election Day, the Gallup folks have figured out how they missed Obama’s big win—-sort of. They have charts to explain about cell phones, land lines, time zones, what callers told them about their race and other high-tech stuff we civilians wouldn’t understand.

All this goes back to 1936 when a magazine Literary Digest, which had accurately forecast previous elections, predicted FDR would lose a reelection bid to Alf Landon, who ended up winning only Maine and Vermont in the most lopsided landslide ever. It turned out they had called up their own readers in days when poor people couldn’t afford magazine subscriptions and had no phones.

Gallup called it right with a smaller sampling and became a brand name.

The larger question here is about the picture of the world we are all getting, not only from pollsters but cable pundits, bloggers, tweeters and all the noisemaking apparatus that obscures a dwindling number of real journalists reporting hard facts in a real world.

Now polls picture the President as beleaguered by Benghazi, IRS scandals and other Issa noise, but is that what’s really going on?

Today’s sound bites show Michelle Obama being heckled by a Lesbian activist, which will generate tons of talk, but is anybody telling us what’s going on with the economy, the sequester and the President’s upcoming summit with the President of China?

In this hall of mirrors, where is reality? 

Irreverent Times for Sharpton

With the Trayvon Martin trial coming up, these should be heady days for Al Sharpton in his dual roles as anchor and agitator, but a confluence of events is raining on the Reverend’s parade.

His cable home MSNBC has fallen off a ratings cliff, and the New York Times has chosen to revisit, complete with video, the 1987 Tawana Brawley case which brought Sharpton notoriety he converted into fame, respectability and a 2004 Presidential run.

The new Times report calls the Brawley case “a hoax” about a 15-year-old African-American girl who, afraid of punishment for staying out late, smeared herself with feces and claimed she had been raped by white men. For months Sharpton, a street agitator, kept embellishing her story, naming law enforcement officers as the rapists and leading mob protests.

Now a meticulous report concludes: “After seven months, 6,000 pages of testimony and 180 witnesses, a grand jury found Ms. Brawley’s story to be a lie. Neither the police officer nor the district attorney accused by Ms. Brawley and Mr. Sharpton had been involved in any way.”

Sharpton was ordered to pay $80,000 for defamation, provided by what he described as “love offerings” from his admirers. For years afterward, the Reverend subsisted on odd donations, including

*$25,000 from folks seeking Harlem fast-fried franchises as the Reverend stood up for the “underchicken” and denounced Kentucky Fried Chicken’s fowl cruelty.

*A $100,000 misunderstanding that resulted in having to return Federal funding for his 2004 presidential campaign.

*$240,000 a year to do commercials for Loan Max, which he renounced after an uproar over the firm’s 360 percent-a-year interest charges that often resulted in taking away cars from the poor.

*The $1.9 million the National Action Network reported in 2002 mostly from unidentified contributors.

But all that was pin money until Sharpton used his radio show to drive Don Imus off NBC in 2007 and two years ago signed with the network’s cable outlet to host the 6 o’clock news.

When the Tawana Brawley scandal was playing out, I lived nearby in upstate New York when the Reverend was roiling the rural area only a few miles from FDR’s residence at Hyde Park and Eleanor Roosevelt’s cottage in Val-Kill.

History makes strange bedfellows.

Where is Issa's Edward R. Murrow?

If he persists in channeling Joe McCarthy, Darrell Issa deserves a new Edward R. Murrow to bring him down. When 60 Minutes gets tired of polishing up summer reruns, his CBS successors should give us a full portrait.

There is ample material. Issa keeps pushing himself into the national face with outrageous accusations, as McCarthy did, now branding Obama spokesman Jay Carney “a paid liar” over the IRS scandals, as Candy Crowley presses for a “direct link” to the President over actions of an agency branch office.

Democratic frustration comes, not with a bang, but a tweet by former White House senior adviser David Plouffe: “Strong words from Mr Grand Theft Auto and suspected arsonist/insurance swindler. And loose ethically today.”

Plouffe is just grazing a tip of the Issa iceberg: how an impecunious high-school dropout morphed into Congress’ richest man ($450 million) and, as chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, spends full-time not legislating or even investigating for legislation but endlessly prosecuting the Obama Administration for “crimes,” prompting the White House to keep defending itself as Issa himself in his earlier days was forced to do.

Issa, who now burrows into everyone’s life for political paydirt, is sensitive about his own transformation into a car-alarm magnate with a history of car theft, suspicious factory fires, alleged hostile takeovers at gunpoint and shady deals. When Ryan Lizza was reporting on him for the New Yorker two years ago, Issa balked at questions about all that. “Everyone has a past,” he grumped.

Just so. As Issa keeps pursuing his role as Lord High Executioner of everything Obama, his own history and ethics should not be sacrosanct. Or will we have to wait for someone like the starchy old New England attorney Joseph R. Welch, who started Joe McCarthy’s downfall by asking publicly, “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

With Issa, the more relevant question is did he ever have any.

A Priest Who Always Flew First-Class

Andrew M. Greeley has died at the age of 85, described by the New York Times as “Priest,  Author,  Scholar, Scold,” writer of 120 books including steamy novels, one of which was a best-seller.

Father Greeley was a combative polymath, often at odds with his Church’s hierarchy. A quarter of a century ago he denounced pedophile priests and later gave a million dollars from his book earnings to an organization for their victims.

Twenty years ago, we shared an airplane ride. He had been a guest speaker at the Magazine Publishers Association in Bermuda and somehow contrived to have my coach ticket upgraded so I could sit next to him in First Class. We spent the two hours parsing a new movie, Ingmar Bergman’s autobiographical masterwork “Fanny and Alexander,”  the shaping of an artist’s sensibility by his widowed mother’s remarriage to a tyrannical Lutheran bishop.

On our plane trip, we traded reactions to Bergman’s brilliant imagery including his boyhood refuge in the home of his grandmother’s Jewish lover and a wistful speech by his uncle about “the little world” of theater that their family inhabited:

“Therefore let us be happy while we are happy. Let us be kind, generous, affectionate and good. It is necessary and not at all shameful to take pleasure in the little world.”

In today’s scandal-plagued Catholic Church, Father Greeley in his prime would have been a rallying figure for dissidents. Even diminished by illness, he wrote his last book about the US in Iraq titled “A Stupid, Unjust and Criminal War.” 

Back in 1983 as we landed at Kennedy, I offered to share my taxi into Manhattan with the celebrity priest. “No, no.” he said. “You must ride with me. My publisher always sends a limousine.”

Even a non-believer can be sure that wherever Andrew Greeley now is, he is still going in style.

   

The Meaning of Bachmann's Departure

Her announced leave-taking from Congress brings a snarky rush over the Tea Party frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination only two years ago, but Michele Bachmann’s weird six years in the national spotlight deserve serious consideration as a symptom of the times.

How did a mouthy back bencher parlay ignorance that made Sarah Palin look like Winston Churchill into such prominence? And does her downfall amid murky misuse of campaign funds portend a continuing descent of the GOP into a diehard faction of the major party it once was?

From early 2007 when as a newly elected Congresswoman she groped GeorgeW. Bush after his State of the Union and would not let go, Bachmann was clearly more of a mental case than a rising political star, but the endless GOP 2011 debates allowed her to appear presidential alongside the likes of Herman Cain and Rick Perry.

The political system that produced FDR, JFK, Ike and Reagan was disgorging a freak show of anti-Obama venom that overrode all such mundane qualifications as wisdom, political knowhow and sanity. Even after Republicans settled for an Empty Suit Wall Streeter and failed to take the White House, the Tea Party held its grip on Boehner’s redoubt last November, but the signs of slippage keep coming.

Former GOP Sen. Lincoln Chafee is changing party affiliation to Democrat in his bid for reelection as Rhode Island Governor. Tea Party icon Jim DeMint has left the House of Representatives in favor of reformed Latin lover Mark Sanford, and now Bachmann steps aside to allow Minnesotans to vote for a candidate from planet Earth next year.

If the trend continues in 2014 voting, Barack Obama’s last two years in office as a lame duck could turn out his most productive—-and rational-—of all.

A Sharp Turn in the War on Terror

As the President eulogizes those who fought past and present wars, he also reminds us that a few days ago “I outlined the future of our fight against terrorism--the threats we face, and the way in which we will meet them.”

Amid Memorial Day parades, speeches and war movies on TV, Barack Obama declares that Americans’ post-9/11 mindset has to change: “Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue. But this war, like all wars, must end.”

But how?  “Neither I, nor any President, can promise the total defeat of terror. We will never erase the evil that lies in the hearts of some human beings, nor stamp out every danger to our open society.”

True, but how do we define evil acts? At what point does lethal madness become terror? If the Newtown killer had left behind any political babble, would he now be ranked with the brothers who perpetrated the Boston bombings? Where do we draw the lines?

The Obama speech, says one national security scholar, “delegitimizes the terrorists. They want to think of themselves as warriors. We want the world...not to think of them as terrorists defending Islam, but as people who are psychos. They are criminals."

In the New Yorker Jane Meyer underscores “the contrast between Bush’s swagger and Obama’s anguish over the difficult trade-offs that perpetual war poses to a free society...While Bush frequently seemed to take action without considering the underlying questions, Obama appears somewhat unsure of exactly what actions to take. That is not a bad thing: at least he is asking the right questions. In fact, by suggesting that, after a decade and seven thousand American and countless foreign lives lost, and a trillion dollars spent, it might be time to start downsizing the ‘war on terror,’ he is leading the national debate beyond where even most Democrats have dared to go.”

After the President consoles Oklahoma tornado survivors on a weekend of American remembrance of those who lose their lives to human violence, he will return to a Washington of man-made turmoil. Not the least of his challenges will be to make good on the effort to refocus homeland security away from total preoccupation with the Middle East.

There will and should be serious debate on relations with new governments there as well as use of drone strikes and the closing of Guantanamo. But it would be helpful to start focusing the war against terror on organized groups plotting violence and leave the tracking down and prevention where possible of acts by the criminally insane to those trained to deal with them.

  

Clobbered Comforter-in-Chief

When the eight years are over, Barack Obama may go down in history mostly for his grace as America’s designated mourner. This weekend it’s Oklahoma in the endless tour of body-count catastrophes natural and man-made.

As the President pursues ministerial duties, everyone else in Washington is consumed with efforts to defrock him for not preventing deaths at Benghazi or reining in bureaucratic scandals. Opponents have not yet found ways to tax him with hurricanes and tornadoes, but they must be trying to twist sequester results into White House blame.

In the larger sense, all this is a long wake for an America that almost was, where we used to bow our heads in prayer together after disasters with some awareness of common humanity in the face of a tenuous world and work to control our primitive impulses to destroy one another over ideological differences.

Among the many ironies swirling around the figure who started out to unite us all under the banner of “Yes We Can” is that he may end up delivering a eulogy for “No We Wouldn’t.”

Disneyland Diplomatic Disaster

The President will be meeting China’s President Xi Jinping for a summit in southern California next month, raising hopes it will go better than a bizarre Cold War flap over barring a Soviet leader from visiting Disneyland.

In 1959, Nikita Khrushchev came here in Eisenhower’s lame-duck days and, at his request, visited Hollywood where he happily mingled with Frank Sinatra, Shirley MacLaine and other stars on movie sets. But when he wanted to go to Disneyland, permission was denied for “security reasons.”

The volatile Khrushchev exploded, “I would very much like to go and see Disneyland. But then, we cannot guarantee your security, they say. Then what must I do? Commit suicide? What is it? Is there an epidemic of cholera there or something? Or have gangsters taken hold of the place that can destroy me?"

Three years later, when I was in California during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Hollywood people were sure that ICBMs were aimed at them and also been re-targeted from San Francisco. In the ensuing panic, they emptied supermarkets of toilet paper.

Now President Obama will be hosting his Chinese counterpart at a lavish private estate and will no doubt take him to Disneyland, if asked.

In these days of cyber-spying, what a foreign leader can see at a theme park is the least of American security worries in the face of new reports that Chinese hackers have breached Google’s servers and gained access to a database with years’ worth of information about American surveillance targets.

So enjoy the Magic Kingdom if you choose, Mr. Presidents, and settle in for serious talk about trade, tariffs and North Korea, among all those other issues that have morphed over the past six decades.

Talking Heads from the Wax Museum

Sunday brings White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer to five morning shows claiming the GOP is trying to “drag Washington into a swamp of partisan fishing expeditions, trumped-up hearings and false allegations.”

Pfeiffer’s Energizer Bunny Presidential defense counterpoints the usual suspects wheeled out from the punditry wax museum and animated with higher-volume loops of their usual spiels.

After Pfeiffer’s pitch on “Meet the Press,” David Gregory features a parade of Madame Tussaud figures starting with Mitch McConnell, frozen in his usual startled owl expression, barely moving his lips to  refute a 1987 tape of himself asserting that tax laws are “being abused not just by people on the right but most of the so-called charitable organizations who are involved...in arguable violations of their tax-free status and violations of the campaign laws...on the left.”

Facing voters next year, McConnell deviates only enough not to jump on the Benghazi bandwagon but insist that “getting to the bottom of this is an important investigation.”

On the following panel Peggy Noonan turns up her Rupert Murdochian pitch about the “worst Washington scandal since Watergate,” while sitting next to a Bob Woodward effigy mouthing the Obama blame for not being a strong enough President that is now his signature theme in the post-Nixon era.

To cap it all, David Gregory trots out a true figure from the is-he-still-alive-? past, Don Rumsfeld, to plug his new book about leadership.

Mellowed by being a great-grandfather, he is now snideness-free and advises, “If you foul up, tell the boss and correct it fast...Bad news doesn’t get better with time.”

If only he had told George W soon enough about al Qaeda and nuclear weapons in Iraq...

But that was then. Wasn’t it? 

Angelina Jolie's Preemptive Cancer Strike

The newest name in the annals of breast cancer brings back one from four decades ago that helped change how women—-and doctors-—viewed and treated the affliction. Angelina Jolie, meet Babette Rosmund.

Before 1970, mastectomy was the unquestioned answer for women diagnosed with the disease. Then a 50-year-old writer who had read a magazine article challenged the conventional wisdom.

In McCalls Rosmund learned from a column by Dr. William Nolen about the pioneering work of a Cleveland surgeon who performed lumpectomies, removing only the affected tissue and treating surrounding areas with radiation and chemotherapy.

When she refused to have her breasts removed, Rosmund’s doctor told her she would be “dead within three weeks.” She went to Cleveland, wrote an article about her experience and then a book. Rosmund died in 1997 at the age of 75; her breast cancer never recurred and the treatment she publicized became the standard for women.

Now in the age of advanced genetics, Jolie at 37 tells the world about her decision to undergo a preemptive double mastectomy after being told that she had “an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer” to avert the fate of her mother who died at 56.

Jolie’s choice and her openness about it are in the brave tradition of Betty Ford, who underwent surgery as First Lady and related all the details to encourage other women to seek detection and treatment.

But now the actress’ OpEd about her experience in the New York Times elicits concerns in the newspaper the following day:

“But some doctors also expressed worry that her disclosure could be misinterpreted by other women, fueling the trend toward mastectomies that are not medically necessary for many early-stage breast cancers. In recent years, doctors have reported a virtual epidemic of preventive mastectomies among women who have cancer in one breast and decide to remove the healthy one as well, even though they do not have genetic mutations that increase their risk and their odds of a second breast cancer are very low.”

On a subject affecting so many lives and families, it’s crucial to go beyond the headlines and make fully informed choices. Browsing the news is not enough.

Obama's Bush League Week

Democrats who have been wishing for years that their party turn as nastily combative as the GOP are getting a taste of what St. Teresa of Avila meant centuries ago by saying, “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.”

Suddenly the Obama White House is besieged by accusations of IRS targeting Tea Party groups and the Justice Department bugging the Associated Press just as the Benghazi talking points todo starts to lose steam.

The White House is on the defensive in the dirty-pool competition, recalling the scandals of Bush II’s final years--but with difference.

Disheartening as these revelations may be and as complex in the AP matter involving an imminent terror attack on American soil, they serve as reminders that bureaucracies can blunder in the Internet Age and the President has to be accountable for what they do.

But as Boehner et al bluster and call for heads to roll, perspective requires distinguishing between today’s furors about failed White House oversight and the Bush scandals emanating directly from the top: the outing of Valerie Plame by Cheney lapdog Scooter Libby and Karl Rove’s attempt, in concert with Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, to fire Bush’s own US Attorneys for not being zealous enough in prosecuting Democrats.

Even so, the new Washington narrative encourages a mindless equivalence between the two eras and undercuts any momentum the President may have been gathering in getting Washington to function at least at a minimum in days dominated by sequester and scandal.

Yet, as the Obama people work to clean up their own messes, there should be some alternative to turning away in disgust and saying, “To hell with them all.”  The differences remain.

Gnawing on the Benghazi Bone

In his 1950s heyday, Sen. Joe McCarthy snagged headlines with committee hearings on questions ranging from trivial (“Who promoted Peress?” an Army dentist in New Jersey) to global (“Who lost China?”). The subject was never the point. Uncovering “plots” and “traitors” was.

Darrell Issa is taking us back to that era. No doubt mistakes were made during the chaos of four American deaths in Benghazi, as they almost always are when there are no clear battle lines or enemies, but like McCarthy, Issa is on a mission of prosecution, not investigation.

Now John Boehner, sniffing political paydirt, joins the hunt by calling for release of White House e-mails to breathe new life into an attack on Obama’s reelection and a pre-emptive strike against Hillary Clinton in 2016—-a demagogic twofer if there ever was one.

Prosecutorial slickness has been upgraded since McCarthy’s days of blurting conflicting estimates of Communists in the State Department. Instead of a low-rent hack, we have Issa, the richest man in Congress who is smooth enough to banter regularly with Bill Maher despite iffy Wiki bread crumbs about his own past while amassing a fortune from car alarms.

With help from new aspirants like Marco Rubio and the old team of John McCain and Lindsey Graham, the GOP will wring the Benghazi sponge dry in media that still sees equivalency in two sides of every political argument without weighing their merits.

 In coming days, hearings will continue to produce a string of what blogger Kevin Jones calls “Nothingburgers” while hinting at deep dark plots. Those with long memories will recall that Joe McCarthy eventually ran out of prosecutorial gas and was censured by the Senate.

But his spirit lives on.

Paranoid Politics: J. Edgar to LaPierre

Seldom in history has file-keeping been a path to power, but last week’s NRA convention celebrated its chief clerk’s kind of national clout unseen since J. Edgar Hoover bullied the White House and Congress half a century ago.

Hoover and Wayne La Pierre, two bombastic file-keepers who rose to control those elected by voters through fear and blackmail, seized and held on to power to push the nation into diametrically opposed directions.

Hoover exploited anxieties over Cold War spying and domestic crime in a time of economic abundance to fuel paranoia and glorify government, his kind of secret policing, at the expense of civil liberties and individual rights.

LaPierre, in contrast, has taken advantage of economic adversity and lunatic nightmares about a minority President to make government itself the straw-man suppressor of citizens’ freedom to arm themselves with weapons of war.

What they have in common is practice of what historian Richard Hofstadter described as “the paranoid style in American politics,” which prompts a proponent to see “conspiracy in apocalyptic terms--he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization...he does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician.”

Beyond their divergent choice of devils, Hoover and LaPierre share a bone-deep racism, with J. Edgar attempting to hound Martin Luther King into suicide and the NRA pit bull exploiting racial fears about Barack Obama, while stoking anti-Muslim fallout over the Boston bombers.

When the Newtown horror prompted a public outcry over gun violence, the President’s push for the minimal sanity of background checks seemed possible, but with passage of time, a new poll now finds both Republican and Democratic voters saying that the GOP reflects their views on the subject and public desire for gun control waning.

If Clint Eastwood decides to follow his J. Edgar movie with one on LaPierre, he will have a candidate for the lead role in the empty chair he featured at the GOP convention last year.  

Fake Bonhomie Is Alive and Well

As a respite from All Boston Bombers All the Time, cable news turns to happy talk with the George W. Bush Library dedication and the annual Correspondents Dinner of media strivers basking in their own celebrity with fake self-deflation.

It’s enough to make an old journalist cry (Tom Brokaw stifled his tears by staying home rather than hobnobbing with Lindsay Lohan.)

With production help from Steven Spielberg, the President got more laughs than Conan O’Brien (“Some people think I don’t spend enough time with Congress. ‘Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell ?’ they ask. Really? Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?”)

The cable networks covered the speeches live but, for the full flavor of the event, C-Span showed the preening and mingling for hours before as would-be media stars and has-been pols babbled while looking over one another’s shoulders for bigger game. (Mrs. Newt Gingrich with her helmet of hair was towing her smiling mate like a beached whale.)

After the event, attendees left with a Hollywood junket-like swag bag of fragrance, snacks, candy, headbands  and other goodies.

Impressive, yes, but fake bonhomie had peaked earlier in the week at the Bush Library dedication where the former Presidents vied to rise above themselves in the glow of irrelevance while W maintained his “What? Me Worry?” smile with the certitude that his standing has nowhere to go but up, even as his mother blurts out about "too many Bushes" on TV.

All this may be cathartic, but why does it hurt so much when we laugh?

Week of Insane Fame

At 2:50 Boston fell briefly silent after seven days of shocked babble over madness that erupted from two young minds and brought America back to 9/11 and the vulnerability with which we live today.

Then, on TV screens an industry of terrorism “experts,” lawyers and politicians resumes billions-of-word explanations for the inexplicable, to create an illusion of making sense out of what defies sense, the inner darkness that now has the technological means to hold society hostage to its expression.

After the Newtown shootings, all eyes were on the victims and their grieving families, but the Marathon massacre has given the media what it truly craves—-explosions, smoke, crowd panic, surveillance pictures, urban lockdown, carjacking, a deadly cop shootout and finally a bloody prime-time TV climax to resolve their fears.

Now that imminent terror has subsided, obsessive rehash of the week’s details, speculation about the legal process to come and apparently rational dissection of what all the irrationality means will go on ad nauseum to distract Americans from what government can truly do to make life safer and fairer.

Already, Lindsey Graham and the political vampires are out to demand that the justice system re-brand two naturalized citizens as “enemy combatants” and skip all the civilized niceties as they themselves hold Washington hostage on gun control, immigration reform and undoing the damage of the sequester to air-traffic control and other public safety measures.

The lethal insanity of two murderous young brothers will continue to distract us from that of hundreds of politicians who have been elected and are being paid to do everything they can to keep us safe and secure.   

In my ninetieth year, I recall what happened in 1933, shortly before FDR was sworn into office. As the President-elect was being driven through Miami, a feeble-minded immigrant named Giuseppe Zangara stood on a wobbly folding chair and fired five shots at the open car. The Mayor of Chicago, riding on the running board, was killed.

In those days, we were shielded from news by the sparse details of radio bulletins and the delay of reading about it in the next day’s newspaper.

Zangara was arrested, tried and executed two months later. By then, FDR had been inaugurated and had launched his legislative push to repair the damage of the Depression.

We are so much better-informed today.

Boston Bombers Inspired by Netflix?

What sets off disordered minds? As the Tsarnaev manhunt winds down, a question arises about parallels between this week’s horrors and the 1997 movie, “Peacemaker,” which ends with a pair of Slavic brothers attempting to blow up the UN with a nuclear bomb.

Living and studying in Boston, could the Tsarnaevs have been inspired by a cultured figure in the film who teaches classical piano and is sent over the edge by the murder of his family in Bosnia and acquires a bomb for his backpack and with his brother slips into Manhattan to blow up the United Nations?

“I am not a monster,” says the bomber in a farewell tape, to explain his motive in bringing Muslim pain to America.

Bad art often inspires life which, unlike movies, has no George Clooney and Nicole Kidman to avert disaster at the last moment.

When the crisis is finally over, someone should check the Tsarnaev Netflix account to see if they watched “Peacemaker,” directed by a Steven Spielberg protégé and the first movie released by his Dreamworks studio 15 years ago.

If they did, we are a long way from ET and Close Encounters with amiable aliens.

Imbalance of Terror

Thousands who sweated and strained so long to train young bodies for excellence are overwhelmed in the national mind (who actually won the Marathon?) by the evil of one soul (certainly no more than a handful) exploding pressure cookers stuffed with nails and ball bearings.

The lopsided imbalance of life and death in Boston can never be redressed, despite the President’s emphasis on the courage of victims and responders as the search for the guilty goes on.

There can be no balancing of the books with retribution for such mindless murders and maiming, no matter what the identity or motives of whoever caused it.

The low-tech trappings suggest “amateur” terrorists rather than organized, but there is little consolation in considering how much worse the toll might have been at the hands of such as those who perpetrated 9/11.

In an interconnected world, there is at least faint hope of detecting in advance the movements of many. From one dark mind with knapsacks, there is nothing.

Those who ran the marathon will return to their homes all over the world, their usual joy in accomplishment forever shadowed. The rest of us will forget the race and await an explanation for the inexplicable.    

Update: As the search zeroes in on figures with knapsacks, the identity of the Marathon killers comes closer to the surface, but the heart of their darkness will remain elusive.

Gay Divorce

Whatever the Supreme Court decides, acceptance of same-sex marriage is now a fact of life but, amid so much furor pro and con, a social change that deserves consideration in context of what has been happening to American families since World War II.

If gay marriage is here, can gay divorce be far behind?

Fifty years ago, anthropologist Margaret Mead proposed that, with rising breakup rates, marriage be divided into two kinds: for the childless, a legal union easily dissolved (a “practice” or “student” marriage) followed by a renewed set of vows after children to bind couples more tightly to their responsibility as parents.  

Since then, couples living together without paperwork, both straight and gay, have more or less put the first half of Mead’s proposal into practice but no-fault divorce laws have failed to protect both parents and children from the financial and emotional savagery of state divorce statutes.

With same-sex marriage on the brink of acceptance, millions more will eventually find themselves not in the idealized Currier & Ives print they envision when taking their vows but a legal morass that can curdle love into conflict, pain and often financial ruin.

As American society takes an enormous leap forward into the future for a basic institution, would it be too much to ask for rethinking its failures of the past?   

Homophobia is not the only prejudice to be overcome.

A War That Never Should Have Been Waged

“Ten years after it began,” says a New York Times editorial, “the Iraq war still haunts the United States in the nearly 4,500 troops who died there; the more than 30,000 American wounded who have come home; the more than $2 trillion spent on combat operations and reconstruction, which inflated the deficit; and in the lessons learned about the limits of American leadership and power.”

From those years, there are regrets and mea culpas, but the lessons of Iraq are fading even as President Obama in Israel is mending fences over a continuing nuclear threat of Iran.

In 2000, a disputed election ended with seating the most radical government the US has ever had. After half a century of fear about Communist subversion, a small group of faceless ideologues came silently to power and brought us chaos.

Instead of spreading propaganda and fomenting unrest, they had met in paneled rooms, issued position papers no one read and, with the accidental help of a few dozen terrorists, took us into a pointless war to prove their twisted thesis, subverted our traditional liberties and created a crisis that any rational politician could have foreseen.

Their blueprint was a tract, issued just before Bush’s election, that looked like thousands of previous boring think-tank bloviations. Titled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources,” it advocated aggressive military action by the world’s only surviving superpower to shape the political universe.

“The Project for the New American Century” was no ordinary think tank. Its leading members included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Jeb Bush, Paul Wolfowitz and I. Lewis Libby.

In charge of finding a Bush running mate, Cheney selected himself and, for the new government, Libby as his Chief of Staff, Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense with Wolfowitz and others of his ilk as deputies.

Even so and with a puppet President to manipulate, they could not have put theory into practice. In their manifesto, they had acknowledged that their “policy of military strength and moral clarity may not be fashionable today.”

But 9/11 changed everything. The bluster could be transformed from words into action with Iraq as the laboratory, and in a climate of national trauma, sold to the American people as a “new product,” to the use the language of Bush’s Chief of Staff Andy Card.

We went to war in Iraq, not primarily to protect the interests of oil companies or to redress the failure of Bush’s father to topple Saddam Hussein but to bring into reality the strategic wet dream of armchair theorists without a minute of military experience.

On October 11, 2002 the Senate passed “H.J.Res. 114: A joint resolution to authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against Iraq” by a vote of 77 to 23.

What few knew then was that the Bush White House thought it had the right to go to war without consulting Congress and the measure was a pale version of what they really wanted.

Alberto Gonzales was the President’s counsel then and, according to then Sen. Chuck Hagel, wrote a memo saying, “You have all the powers you need.” Hagel asked the White House why the President would consider going to war “without Congress being with him.” As a result, “a few of us--Joe Biden, Dick Lugar, and I--were invited to discussions with the White House...

“Finally, begrudgingly, they sent over a resolution for Congress to approve. Well, it was astounding. It said they could go anywhere in the region...Sure as hell it was clear they meant the whole Middle East. It was anything they wanted.”

Hagel, Biden and Lugar “had to rewrite it...stripped the language the White House had set up and put our language in it.” That was what Congress approved and authorized a decade of the worst war in American history that began five months later.

“The Iraq war was unnecessary, costly and damaging on every level,” says today’s Times editorial. “It was based on faulty intelligence manipulated for ideological reasons. The terrible human and economic costs over the past 10 years show why that must never happen again.”

It should not, but in today’s ideological divide, can anyone guarantee that it won’t?

Selective Empathy Is a Start

Cynics are having a field day with Rob Portman’s sudden conversion to gay marriage based on his son’s sexuality: If only more Republicans could discover close relatives who are poor, Latino or otherwise disadvantaged...

Yet selective empathy is better than none and deserves more than a reflexive sneer. Contrast Portman’s response with another. Asked what he would do if a son of his were gay, Rick Santorum says he would still love him but urge him to lead a life of abstinence.

In a larger sense, close exposure to social “others” has always been part of the process of breaking down prejudice, which thrives on categorizing the unseen as less than human.

Portman’s conversion recalls the 1956 movie epic “Giant,” in which a Texas cattle baron treats Mexicans like slaves until his son marries one. He ends up in a fist fight with a lunchroom bigot before a final scene showing a white and a brown grandchild in playpens together.

Luckily most Americans have the heart and imagination to respect otherness without such close family encounters, but in advancing respect and equal treatment for everyone, does neatness really count?

Even as the Radical Right selects Marco Rubio and Rand Paul as their heroes at the CPAC convention, a celebrated neurosurgeon named Ben Carson, who grew up black and poor with a single mother in Chicago, excites their attention with conservative views on health care and the national debt, reminding them that in surgery all brains look the same.

If only Sarah Palin and Karl Rove could stop fighting long enough to let that lesson sink in, even selective empathy might do its work in starting to heal the American mind.

Cheney's Banality of Evil

Half a century ago, Hannah Arendt made a scholarly argument that crimes against humanity, like those of the Nazis, are carried out not by brilliant fanatics or sociopaths but ordinary people who accept twisted social premises and pursue them as normal.

A new documentary, “The World According to Dick Cheney,” updates that thesis with chilling echoes. Like Adolf Eichmann, the VP-to-be was a school dropout heading nowhere in life until he found his calling as an efficient functionary dedicated to self-advancement in a cutthroat bureaucracy.

Scenes of Cheney’s Wyoming youth recall the 1992 film “A River Runs Through It” about growing up in Montana where fly fishing was a religion, with a handsome boy playing football, wooing and winning the town beauty but failing to compete academically in college and working as a power-line lineman with drunk driving arrests before getting into politics.

The parallels here between Cheney and his benefactor George W. Bush are striking. Despite class differences, both were headed toward an alcoholic cliff until strong wives deflected them, Bush toward evangelical religion, Cheney into political in-fighting. In 2000, they were a perfect match of fake piety and ruthless ambition.

Now Cheney presents himself as the ultimate realist with disdain for such gauzy values as honor while protecting the nation from terrorists, glossing over deceit about Iraq’s nuclear weapons, Scooter Libby’s revenge outing of Valerie Plame and other criminal actions in office that ultimately led to estrangement even from Bush in the President’s second term.

In a world where recent history is instantly erased by 24/7 media, it’s good to be reminded of less than a decade ago when the most powerful man in America now tells us his favorite food is spaghetti and, when asked to name his faults, replies “Well, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my faults, I guess would be the answer.”

Neither did Eichmann, no doubt.

After Infallibility: Post-Papal Blog?

As a magazine editor,  I once negotiated for weeks with the Vatican to publish a Christmas message for women bylined by the Pope.

That memory stirs speculation about any public afterlife for the first former Pontiff in modern history. Now that the white smoke has risen, must Benedict XVI retreat into total silence and meditation?

His Twitter account has been closed, but is there no place for him as a venerable figure similar to other retired world leaders?

If Dick Cheney is now instructing us on honor and duty, would the world not benefit from a more qualified voice on spiritual matters?  

We’re not talking a Comedy Central roast here but, as Benedict’s senior, I can testify to the sudden psychological altitude drop when “former” is added to your name. After the reality of irrelevance sinks in, it can give way to a wistful desire to reconnect with a life’s work and tease out its meanings in retrospect.

When Benedict XVI returns from his stay at Castel Gondolfo to new quarters at the Vatican, his successor may want to rethink any reflexive decision to entomb him there for his remaining days.

As a self-described “pilgrim who is starting the last phase of his pilgrimage on this earth,” what Benedict discovers may well be worth sharing.  

If a post-Papal blog is permitted, the perfect name is available: “After Infallibility,” which on second thought might also serve others with a lifetime of deeply held beliefs.