A Twisted Case Against JFK

History provides perspective but can also bring distortion as a Pulitzer-Prize journalist now decides that John F. Kennedy “probably was the worst American president of the previous century.”

After studying the period, the respected Thomas E. Ricks concludes:

“In retrospect, he spent his 35 months in the White House stumbling from crisis to fiasco. He came into office and okayed the Bay of Pigs invasion. Then he went to a Vienna summit conference and got his clock cleaned by Khrushchev. That led to, among other things, the Cuban missile crisis and a whiff of nuclear apocalypse.

“Looming over it all is the American descent into Vietnam. The assassination of Vietnam's President Diem on Kennedy's watch may have been one of the two biggest mistakes of the war there. (The other was the decision to wage a war of attrition on the unexamined assumption that Hanoi would buckle under the pain.) I don't buy the theory promulgated by Robert McNamara and others that Kennedy would have kept U.S. troops out.”

For a journalist who saw JFK up close, this reads more like a prosecutor’s indictment than a historical judgment, much like blaming Barack Obama for everything he inherited from George W. Bush.

Kennedy did approve with misgivings the Bay of Pigs which was imminent when he took office, refused to escalate with air cover as the military pressed him to do and, when the operation failed, nevertheless took full responsibility (“Defeat is an orphan”), learning lessons that served him well in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The “whiff of nuclear apocalypse” was dispelled by his deft handling of that confrontation and led to concluding a nuclear test-ban treaty with the Soviet Union.

In Vietnam, JFK made mistakes in underestimating the unpopularity and corruption of the regime we were backing (Afghanistan, anyone?), but we had only a few thousand advisers there when he was killed. If he had lived, he undoubtedly “would have kept U.S. troops out.”

Ricks is entitled to his historical reading, and those of us who lived through that period may have our judgment warped by being exposed to Kennedy’s qualities of mind and heart.

In one of his last interviews, he told me, “Too many people want to blow up the world.” Far from “stumbling from crisis to fiasco,” he was doing everything humanly possible to avoid just that.

Washington Madness, Madness

As the capitol shows signs of awakening from the debt-ceiling fever dream with face-saving aspirin for both sides, onlookers try to understand the pathology of it all.

Like the final scene of “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” after crazed loyalties and pride have created carnage, a dazed survivor is left to wander through the wreckage, mumbling, “Madness, madness.”

As the Chairman of the Fed describes failure to raise the debt limit as a “catastrophic...calamitous...self-inflicted wound” to the economy, the President in his Weekly Address is virtually pleading for sanity:

“After all, we’ve worked together like that before. Ronald Reagan worked with Tip O’Neill and Democrats to cut spending, raise revenues, and reform Social Security. Bill Clinton worked with Newt Gingrich and Republicans to balance the budget and create surpluses. Nobody ever got everything they wanted. But they worked together. And they moved this country forward.

”That kind of cooperation should be the least you expect from us--not the most you expect from us.”

In a piece titled “Getting to Crazy,” Paul Krugman notes: “If a Republican president had managed to extract the kind of concessions on Medicare and Social Security that Mr. Obama is offering, it would have been considered a conservative triumph. But when those concessions come attached to minor increases in revenue, and more important, when they come from a Democratic president, the proposals become unacceptable plans to tax the life out of the U.S. economy.”

Washington insanity seems to be contagious as Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee finds racism in the madness.

"What is different about this president that should put him in a position that he should not receive the same kind of respectful treatment of when it is necessary to raise the debt limit in order to pay our bills, something required by both statute and the 14th amendment?

"I hope someone will say that what it appears to be is not in fact accurate. But historically it seems to be nothing more."

It’s long past time to start testing what’s in the D.C. drinking water.

Update: Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell are ready to unveil Plan B in the Senate to avoid default. But Tea Party honcho Jim DeMint pledges to kill it. Keep the straightjackets standing by.

Even John Boehner seems to be taking political tranquilizers as he claims Democrats "want to blame the economy on us and the reason default is no better an idea today than when Newt Gingrich tried it in 1995 is that it destroys your brand. It would give the president an opportunity to blame Republicans for a bad economy."

He's right. Crazy is not good advertising for a brand that wants to run the country.

President Generic

A Republican has opened up a 47 to 39 percent lead over Barack Obama for 2012 in the latest Gallup Poll, but voters don’t know who he or she is.

At this point in their reelection bids, both Bushes were leading generic opponents, even though George H. W. eventually lost to Bill Clinton while George W. defeated John Kerry.

But now, in what the President agrees is a “stressed-out” nation, Americans are venting their anger at the man in the White House.

Understandably so, but when the 2012 GOP challenger has a name and a face and, most important, a record and positions on issues, how will that translate into what they do at the ballot box?

The dilemma of the Republican field of has-beens and never-will-bes is reflected in the first campaign ad of Ron Paul, trying to portray the extreme libertarian as another Ronald Reagan. Lots of luck with that one.

Frontrunner (barely) Mitt Romney is still straddling every position in sight, but opponents are reviving the ads Ted Kennedy used to trounce him in 1994, showing that his vaunted business acumen consisted mostly of merging companies and eliminating jobs.

Michele Bachmann is still explaining away her weirdness, while Herman Cain is gagging on his gaffe about no Muslims in his cabinet and Tim Pawlenty is trying to find traction on anything.

In 1976, Jimmy Carter came out of nowhere to defeat Gerald Ford in an electorate that was disgusted by the aftermath of Watergate, but the prospects for a GOP President Generic next year are looking dimmer with each passing day.

Can you beat somebody with nobody?

Obama-Cantor Clash: An Old Story

For those who have been watching closely, Barack Obama has had it up to here with Eric Cantor for a long time, starting at least a year and a half before the President’s disgusted walkout this week.

As far back as the White House Health Care Summit on February 25, 2010, the Leader of the Free World was lecturing the partisan pipsqueak on the difference between legislating and grandstanding. As Cantor parroted talking points behind a foot-high pile of papers, the President tartly dismissed “props like these” and told him, “These are the political things we do that prevent us from having a conversation.”

Cantor had been squeezing maximum personal exposure out of the Summit for weeks, at first refusing to go, then signing a drop-dead letter with Boehner before the meeting and finally showing up that day on “Good Morning America” to bloviate on why it would fail.

Labeled “Dr. No” back then, Cantor has followed the same game plan in the debt ceiling debate, stalking out of the Biden negotiations to make headlines and hectoring the President at meetings ever since.

The New York Times’ Caucus blog offers a Democratic version of the Presidential walkout the other day:

“Let’s stop the catering to our bases. Let’s start compromising and solving this problem for the American people, because the clock is ticking, Mr. Obama told those assembled around the table.

“Mr. Cantor interrupted--rudely, according to the Democratic aides.

“We should pursue short-term debt ceiling increases, Mr. Cantor said.

“Mr. Obama rejected the idea.

“It’s not an acceptable outcome to have an extension of the debt ceiling that doesn’t get into 2013, the president said.

“Mr. Cantor tried two more times, interrupting the president to advocate for a stop-gap measure.

“’Enough is enough,’” the president said...

“Aides described Mr. Obama as animated and passionate.

“We have to get this solved for the American people, the president said. We have to be willing to compromise. It shouldn’t be about positioning and politics.”

The President then left the meeting, clearly annoyed at the one-note ideologue and self-promoter who has been dogging his steps for years now.

Misadventures of Michele and Murdoch

To keep our heads from exploding over the debt-ceiling debacle, it’s time to turn back to figures who keep public life from being boring. After a summer of Charlie Sheen, Donald Trump, Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Anthony Weiner, Americans badly need a fresh dose of the peculiar and piquant to divert their attention.

Michele Bachmann fills the bill so well that Jon Stewart devotes a long segment to having Jerry Seinfeld try to cure him of taking cheap shots at the “gay cures” of her therapist husband, even as the Iowa GOP frontrunner is backing off her screed denouncing homosexuality as slavery and now has to defend herself from charges of membership in a church that calls the Pope the Antichrist.

Unless Republicans lose their senses entirely and nominate her, however, Bachmann will be only a passing diversion compared to the emergence of Rupert Murdoch in all his slimy glory, not only in the British scandal that shut down his News of the World and blocked his BSkyB takeover but in a rising bipartisan clamor here over charges that his “journalists” hacked into voicemail accounts of 9/11 victims.

Republican Rep. Peter King is asking the FBI to investigate, as Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez writes to the Attorney General:

“It is horrifying to consider the possibility that the victims of the 9/11 tragedy would be victimized again by an international newspaper seeking information about their personal suffering.”

Murdoch isn’t running for president, but his standing in the media world is not looking too secure as politicians and real journalists start to sense that the Fox News emperor has no clothes.

Now, back to Boehner and Eric Cantor...

Heading for Economic 9/11 on 8/2

Tea Party terrorists elected last fall promised to change Washington, and they have—-turning it from a flawed vehicle that moves the nation’s business along, however bumpily, to a cockpit of fighting over a fabricated issue that is steering a shaky economy toward a smashup.

The sorry spectacle has roused the largest American corporations to sound alarms and rating agencies to issue warnings about plummeting credit ratings for U.S. debt

But GOP leaders, sitting up front, refuse to look ahead or even buckle their seat belts. John Boehner tells Fox News that “no one really knows what would happen” after August 2nd if no deal is reached but admits that a failure to do so could “spook the market, and you could have a real catastrophe.”

Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell is staring at the emergency exits and talking in tongues about a plan to let the President retake the controls for a time, while Republicans stand over him with box cutters.

In India, terrorists have set off real bombs in the financial district of Mumbai. Over here, you can blow up Wall Street by remote control from the Capitol building in Washington.

Update: The President reaches the end of his patience by walking out after Eric Cantor, the delusionary Tea Party champion, tells him, “We are very far apart right now. I don’t know if we can get there.”

Somebody should take away Cantor’s rubber gun and mask.

Or maybe not. “Eric Cantor Is the Democrats’ New Boogeyman,” reports the Caucus, potentially a very valuable symbol for the 2012 election cycle.

Eric Cantor's Nixon Act

When John Boehner pulled back from his Grand Bargain with the President last weekend, the cynical suspected that he and Eric Cantor were playing good cop-bad cop. But it’s clear now that Boehner was being undermined by his own sidekick.

Cantor is looking more and more like a young Richard Nixon. In 1952, when Nixon was on the GOP ticket with Ike before the Checkers speech, a Democratic volunteer asked, “What do we say when they ask exactly what’s wrong with him?”

Someone suggested, “The only answer to that is, if you don’t know, I’m sorry for you.”

From then until Watergate, Americans found answers to what the intuitive could see then in a recklessly ambitious young pol who would do anything to get ahead.

Now, as Cantor now embarrasses his boss John Boehner in the debt ceiling debate, that blind ambition is obvious again in another charisma-free climber with limited intelligence and no scruples.

There are always potential Nixons and Cantors around, but it takes a political crisis for them to emerge on the national stage. Nixon had the McCarthy era Communist scare to fuel his rise. Cantor has Tea Party anger and hatred of government.

After stalking out of the Biden talks to call attention to himself, the House Majority Leader, says one Washington observer, “has slipped into true madness” by now insisting that the GOP’s concession in negotiations is “the fact that we are even discussing voting for a debt ceiling increase.”

“Crazy like a fox” is closer to the truth, as Cantor positions himself to be the Tea Party hero no matter what compromise is finally reached, leaving Boehner to take the heat.

In 2008, Cantor’s staff spread false rumors that he was being vetted as a possible V.P., which the McCain people called “a complete and total joke.”

Nixon would have found that shrewd rather than funny.

Update: Cantor's gamble could easily backfire, as Matt Bai notes: "To the extent that Mr. Obama gets his message across more effectively, he hands Republicans the unenviable choice or either joining him in a comprehensive solution or looking self-interested for backing away and imperiling the economy.

"Does that mean voters won’t blame Mr. Obama for a crisis over the debt ceiling? It doesn’t. But they’ll probably blame Congress even more."

Grand Bargain Basement

Last week’s brief attempt at actual governing by both the White House and the GOP Congressional leadership in trying to “go big” on budget deficit and debt ceiling solutions dramatizes how dysfunctional Washington has become in six months of Tea Party madness.

After two years of Democratic control and wall-to-wall Republican naysaying, the American economy was teetering toward recovery but now has to be kept from going off a cliff, as the leadership of both parties acknowledge.

Why? John Boehner’s willingness to negotiate a Grand Bargain has been undermined by idiot ideologues in his own party, led by his own deputy Eric Cantor who makes Karl Rove look like a statesman.

The nation is careening toward a disastrous default because a moronic minority of newly elected anti-politicians has made a religious mission out of preserving the Bush tax cuts for billionaires while tearing down Medicare, Social Security and other safety nets for the most vulnerable Americans.

“No tax hikes” has become the mindless mantra for those who were elected to curb the excesses of government but have translated that into a mandate to destroy it.

“If not now, when?” the President asks Republican leaders but, for an answer, gets a Cantor monologue on going back to the patchwork compromises his minions had negotiated with the Vice President.

But Joe Biden has been working for the goals of Barack Obama, while Cantor has been undermining his own boss Boehner. If the government is to get past these distractions and start dealing with substantive issues again, the GOP has to clean out its bargain basement and get the House in working order again.

Update: The President turns up the heat on opponents about “massive, job-killing” tax hikes by emphasizing that any tax increases would only go into effect after 2013.

“No one is talking about raising taxes right now,” he says at a press conference. “I have bent over backwards to work with the Republicans that comes up with a formulation that doesn’t require them to vote sometime in the next month to increase taxes.”

For presidential hopefuls Like Michele Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty, he has no patience: “For them to say we shouldn’t be raising the debt ceiling is irresponsible. They know better.”

Boehner Falls Off His Horse

It’s enough to make a cowboy cry, seeing the Speaker drop the reins and let himself be pulled off his debt-deal mount by the Tea Party drunks in D.C.

“Despite good-faith efforts to find common ground,” John Boehner sobs, climbing down from a Grand Bargain, “the White House will not pursue a bigger debt reduction agreement without tax hikes. I believe the best approach may be to focus on producing a smaller measure...”

In this new definition of horse’s-ass leadership, the GOP chief is tethered to the “tax hike” post by his own deputy, Eric Cantor, and the rowdies behind him.

A White House spokesman responds regretfully, “Both parties have made real progress thus far, and to back off now will not only fail to solve our fiscal challenge, it will confirm the cynicism people have about politics in Washington. The president believes that now is the moment to rise above that cynicism and show the American people that we can still do big things.”

But you can’t do that riding backward.

Update: Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on “Face the Nation” restates the reality:

“I have to write 80 million checks a month to Americans, including 55 million Americans who depend on their Social Security check. We have to make principal payments or roll over $500 billion of debt in the month of August, about $87 billion in that first week in August.

“If they don’t act, then we face catastrophic damage to the American economy and the leadership, to their credit, and I mean Republicans and Democrats, fully understand that.”

If they do, why are they still horsing around?

Boehner on a Bucking Bronco

As the “Grand Bargain” unfolds, both the President and the Speaker are taking heat from their true believers, but there is both irony and justice in John Boehner’s plight.

A year and a half ago, he chose to wild-ride the Tea Party bronco all the way to November 2012 without getting the creature under control. Now, after stirring up all that dust about the debt limit, Boehner has to corral enough votes to avoid going over a cliff.

"While some think that we can go past August 2nd,” he says, with no embarrassment over having caused the crisis in the first place, “I frankly think it puts us in an awful lot of jeopardy and puts our economy in jeopardy risking even more jobs."

But Boehner is riding at the head of a 21st century Gang That Can’t Shoot Straight.

Michele Bachmann, playing Calamity Jane to his Wild Bill Hickcock, is riding off in the other direction, vowing in TV ads to vote “no” on any deal.

His shifty sidekick Eric Cantor, perhaps hoping eventually to unhorse his chief, is also veering off the path by having a spokesperson tell reporters that “the big deal as described by the president included $1.4 to $1.7 trillion in tax hikes and he doesn't support that and the House wouldn't support that.”

With friends like those, the old saying goes, you don’t need enemies.

Meanwhile, the President is getting static from his supporters as well. But being Democrats, there are no ultimatums and threats, just a letter urging him to stand firm on cutting entitlement benefits.

If and when Obama and Boehner finally get the debt ceiling bull into the barn, they will still be pursued by Tea Party vigilantes trying to burn it down.

Update: Boehner shouldn't "bet his majority on Mr. Obama's promises," says the Wall Street Journal, warning that "the only way he can avoid being taken for a ride by Democrats is if all parts of any deal are negotiated, voted on and then implemented immediately. Two men, one deal, once. Promises of future action aren't credible."

That kind of talk won't help the beleaguered Speaker.

The Betty Ford I Knew

She came to the White House unexpectedly and never stopped being herself, unlike those before her who could have passed for inflatable life-sized dolls permanently positioned to stare adoringly at their husbands.

Betty Ford spoke openly about everything, from equal rights for women to abortion to what she would do if her 18-year-old daughter were sexually active. Even more, by example, she went beyond politics and set new standards for openness about her own life.

After a mastectomy for breast cancer, she spoke about it in public and wrote an article for me in McCalls to encourage women to go for early screening.

Then, in July 1978, I published a piece, “Betty Ford: Her Long Struggle with a Lonely Marriage.” Mrs. Ford had just been hospitalized for addiction to alcohol and tranquilizers after years of suffering with a pinched nerve in her neck.

Knowing that pinched nerves often result from emotional stress, I asked Myra MacPherson, who knew Mrs. Ford well, to interview her friends, family and physicians about that possible explanation.

They told of her distress that, after looking forward to retirement togetherness after his Presidency, her husband was still away from home politicking 200 nights a year.

Our conclusion: “Like other wives of ambitious men, she had to raise her children with little emotional support from her husband. After 30 years, the price she has paid for a life of loneliness and stress is painfully clear to everyone—with the possible exception of the one person she needs most.”

The aftermath has stayed in my mind ever since.

Several years later, although anxious that Mrs. Ford might have been upset by our piece, I asked Myra MacPherson to interview her again.

“The reason I’m seeing you,” Mrs. Ford told her, “is that 1978 article. I sent copies of it to every politician’s wife I know.”

Betty Ford, who died today at 93, was one of the most honest and caring people ever to live in the White House

Murdoch's Pickpocket Journalism

He is unmasked not only as an opinionated mogul (pace Fox News) but mastermind to a den of thieves, a 21st century Fagin to the Artful Dodgers of his London gang of reporters stealing news not only from politicians and celebrities but the victims of tragedies while paying off Scotland Yard for protection.

This kind of electronic pickpocketing has led to criminal investigations and the closing of his tabloid News of the World, the only newspaper, as one observer puts it, to die of shame.

For those who see Murdoch’s holdings as boils on the backside of American journalism, his British embarrassment only underscores what he has insidiously been doing here.

At the risk of sounding starchy (critics, flail away!), Murdoch’s Fox gang is yet another expression of a rapacious mentality that is not satisfied to slant the news but bend it into total submission to his purposes. (Those with strong stomachs can Wiki that history for themselves.)

"I hunger for quality news,” Jay Rockefeller told a Senate Committee recently. “There's a little bug inside of me which wants to get the FCC to say to FOX and to MSNBC: 'Out. Off. End. Goodbye.' It would be a big favor to political discourse; our ability to do our work here in Congress, and to the American people."

But no legal disasters are going to slow up Murdoch here, as they are doing in Britain now.

Eternal banality, as well as vigilance, may be the true price of liberty, but it’s worth the effort to keep Rupert Murdoch from stealing our minds.

Trash Journalism Update: Star Magazine, founded by Murdoch to compete with the National Enquirer but later sold off, is reporting that Casey Anthony and her family have been offered $1 million to appear on the Jerry Springer Show.

If News of the World hadn’t gone under, it would have saved all that money by just tapping their phones.

Deficit Dance Begins

As Barack Obama beats the default drums louder, the White House and Congress are finally taking steps toward moving in concert instead of sitting on the sidelines vocalizing and tweeting at each other.

Now the usual reliable sources whisper that the President “wants to move well beyond the $2 trillion in savings sought in earlier negotiations and seek perhaps twice as much over the next decade.”

In the light of two and a half years of dysfunctional hoofing, can Obama and Boehner suddenly turn into Astaire and Rogers without tripping all over the feet of their party members?

As they prepare for serious steps, there is nervousness among Democrats that the President may go too far on Social Security while Republicans are worrying that their Speaker could stop moving to the right on tax increases.

Obama, the Washington Post reports, “is proposing significant reductions in Medicare spending and for the first time is offering to tackle the rising cost of Social Security...

“The move marks a major shift for the White House and could present a direct challenge to Democratic lawmakers who have vowed to protect health and retirement benefits from the assault on government spending.”

GOP stalwarts, while insisting they will remain firm on the Bush tax cuts, concede that “Boehner may be amenable to a solution that simplifies and lowers individual and corporate tax rates, while ending preferences, loopholes, and expenditures—including...subsidies for big oil companies--and perhaps other reforms to be named later.” In short, raising taxes while denying that you are.

As clumsy as these moves may seem, they are an advance over sitting on the sidelines with arms folded. Start the music, but don’t expect the choreography to be classic.

Washington Tweet Meet

The deficit impasse takes an ecclesiastical turn as GOP talking heads unveil yet another phrase to defend tax increases for what the President considers, although not nearly as pithily, to be the filthy rich.

The owners of private jets are “job creators,” according to Texas Sen. John Cornyn, a new sound bite to pair off with designation of Democratic efforts to raise taxes on billionaires as “job killers.” Sounds like a hell of a matchup!

As the President holds his first Twitter town meeting, he will be hard-pressed to match the Republican machine (pioneered by Frank Luntz) to churn out lies that can be sold as verities.

With the Obama penchant for serious, long-winded answers, the White House will be disadvantaged in the competition for reductive language that conceals rather than reveals.

Twitters away!

Update: Good news for brevity addicts--Joe Biden has a new Twitter account. Less good: His first two tweets are in the third person.

Murder, 21st Century Soap Opera

What, asks an old riddle, do you call a hundred lawyers under the ocean? A good start. Now, what do you call a thousand lawyers under glass? Cable TV news.

In 17 years since the O.J. trial, media fascination with murder has morphed from classic elements as fame, race and sexual rage to pathetic obsession with the death of a little girl and the guilt of her possibly disturbed young mother.

Now the Casey Anthony verdict brings into focus the extent to which reality TV has infected the daylight hours, supplementing inexpensive adventure and talent shows with even cheaper studio sets and courtroom coverage.

For weeks, CNN’s outpost HLN outranked Fox and other cable channels with its trial coverage and, after announcement of the verdict yesterday, CNN’s web site had a million live-video users, 30 times as high as its usual average.

Crime has become this century’s substitute for soap opera, dispensing with the need for writers, actors and other artifices, going right to the gut of the lonely, alienated homebound and bored office workers.

A Florida newspaper reports, “Thousands of people wrote letters to Anthony. Women mailed her magazines and books, asked her for dating advice. Men asked for her hand in marriage, told her she was beautiful, sent her money.” (Renee Zellweger in "Chicago," anyone?)

Now, there will be furious debate over the unexpected not-guilty verdicts and, on a more refined plane, about the exploitative role of the media in distorting the justice system, with Anthony’s chief electronic prosecutor Nancy Grace garnering even more attention with her outrage.

With social media involved, it will all seem very 21st century. But at bottom, will there be much difference from Nathanael West’s classic 1939 black comedy, “Day of the Locust,” originally titled “The Cheated,” in which an enraged crowd enacts its bottled-up feelings by rioting at a Hollywood premiere?

That, too, was a time of Depression and worldwide social upheaval.

Update: The Orlando soap opera moves to a new chapter with a four-year sentence and $4000 fine, a tap on the wrist when time served is included.

Even the closest viewers are confused as the New York Times at first reports the wrong parent-grandparent combination that concealed the child’s death in a family in which defense lawyers claimed their client “had been sexually abused by her father and had been taught to lie her entire life.”

The Partridge family, it wasn’t.

Giving Brains a Bad Name

Were the fireworks louder this year or what?

Newt Gingrich may be on to something by making Alzheimer’s a campaign issue, although he could be going too far in trying to make voters forget about his crackpot Contract with America, Tiffany tabs and his latest wife’s terror campaign that led an entire staff to quit.

Mitt Romney, as always, is testing the waters with a little senior moment of his own, forgetting he had to apologize for saying that Obama made the economy worse, and at a neighborhood holiday celebration, repeating the gaffe. Those who have been following him closely are not surprised, since he has had trouble remembering the names of other Republicans in the race.

Michele Bachmann seems to have an invisible edge in the mental health meltdown, with a clinical therapist and her husband of 32 years always at her side, often with arms wrapped around her.

All this, plus the intellectually challenged remainder of the field, leads David Brooks to conclude that the GOP is in the grip of “the mother of all no-brainers.”

The Republican Party, he decides, “may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.

“The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch in order to cut government by a foot, they will say no. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch to cut government by a yard, they will still say no.”

A Washington Post columnist suggests they could use “a mental health professional, preferably a specialist in the power of fixations, obsessions and the like. The GOP needs an intervention. It has become a cult.”

Such armchair analysis may be helpful but, if this Alice in Wonderland Tea Party continues through next year, it will be voters who need to have their heads examined.

JFK used to say "You can't beat brains," but he was living in a time before 24/7 idiocy had turn the mind of the body politic to mush.

Update: The diagnosis gets worse. Paul Ryan tells an interviewer about his proposed Medicare changes, “When the plan is described accurately, it actually polls very well.”

Add to GOP psychiatric symptoms “in total denial,” a condition that makes it near-impossible to treat delusions.

The President invites Republicans to discuss a “balanced approach” to the stalemate, but how do you do that with politicians who have become unhinged from reality.

Declaration Disclaimer: How Fast to Change?

The document Americans celebrate today starts with a cautionary note:

“Prudence, indeed,” warns the Declaration of Independence, “will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

This serves well as a preamble to a ringing statement of our nation’s right to free itself from British oppression, but a slight turn of the kaleidoscope can reveal that warning’s meaning for our national life today, both domestically and abroad.

After voting for Change less than three years ago, under pressure of economic and terrorist anxiety, Americans are now experiencing transformation at a rapid rate of “the forms to which they are accustomed” in both governing themselves and intervening in the affairs of other nations.

In Washington, the Tea Party shadow government has Congress and the White House locked in paralysis over its agenda with more to come, a minority as militant as George III’s redcoats and as oppressive.

In the Middle East, we are hip-deep in “abolishing the forms” of other governments, directly or not, with no clear statements of our national interests and timelines.

As we light barbecue grills and fireworks in congratulation of hard-won freedoms, it might be worth a moment’s pause to think about how fast we are burning them up today and why.

They are as easily lost not just with bangs but whimpers.

Historic Blink Time

At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, just before the Soviets caved in, someone in the Oval Office exclaimed, “We’re eyeball to eyeball, and the other guy just blinked!”

Now, as a deadline nears in the debt-ceiling staredown, Bill Clinton evokes that JFK era image and warns “the White House could blink. I hope that won't happen. I don't think they should blink."

The former President, who survived a Newt Gingrich government shutdown and won reelection, is advising Barack Obama not to back down to Boehner and McConnell, even though the price of standing firm could be high.

"You have to assume,” Clinton says, “that our credit rating will be downgraded and our interest rates will go up which will make the deficit problem worse and make it much more difficult to recover because it will be harder for people to get credit, even harder than it is now."

In his Weekly Address, the President is not wavering, noting that “It would be nice if we could keep every tax break, but we can’t afford them.”

Almost half a century ago, when Kennedy stood fast in their nuclear confrontation, the Soviets eventually stood down. Boehner and McConnell may want to note that Nikita Khrushchev had his own version of Tea Party hardheads in the Kremlin back then but decided that those who, in JFK’s words, “want to blow up the world,” should not have the final word.

Clinton and Obama would do well to remember that, too.

Update: Was there a GOP eyelid moving on the Sunday talk shows? Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl reiterates the party talking points but mentions “revenue raisers” as a euphemism for tax hikes and observes that “we’ll take the savings we can get now, and we will relitigate this as we get closer to the election.”

Blink?

Kennedy Freedom, Low-Rent Royal Wedding

Celebrity independence is making Fourth of July weekend news as famous names couple and uncouple.

In California, JFK’s niece takes steps to terminate the Terminator as her husband while 6000 miles away Princess Grace’s son enters wedlock in a low-budget version of the extravaganza that starred his mother, nee Grace Kelly, 55 years ago.

Saving all this from utter cheesiness is the new British royal family, geographically and temporally between these extremes on what would have been Princess Diana’s 50th birthday yesterday.

Only weeks after their own wedding, her son and his bride are in Canada playing out the sequel to their fairy-tale wedding, obscuring the tawdry tales of two 20th century princesses whose weddings captured the world’s imagination but did not live happily ever after, only until car crashes ended their sad stories violently.

What meaning can we find in the lives of those selected by birth or matrimony to give the rest of us vicarious dreams of glamor and grandeur at the eventual price of their own inner happiness?

In the last century, relatively unsophisticated media offered the full candy-box treatment, playing down the reality that movie star Grace Kelly was marrying a man she hardly knew and that virginal Diana Spencer was doing the same 26 years later.

Diana’s son seems to have escaped his mother’s fate by joining his life to a woman he has known well for years rather than a virtual stranger, but the show-biz glitz dominating the wedding of Grace’s son is not promising for the princely couple of an area the size of Central Park, whose domain is a tourist trap with a gambling casino.

Back here, Maria Shriver is in court, despite her Catholic faith, to shed the body-builder who became a movie star and then a political prince but remained a horny frog when the cameras were off.

Those in the media who amplify such spectacles, like Fourth of July fireworks, and those who consume them like the products of holiday barbecues, will shake their heads knowingly at these sad denouements and move on, feeling sated and superior to such superficiality.

But they are part of those pathetic stories, perhaps the most important part of them all.

Body Language on the Potomac

Presidential courage can be a tricky question.

The fuss over a TV anatomical reference to Barack Obama recalls the original Dick in American politics, Nixon, and how another President, LBJ, viewed his successor’s genital endowments--wrongly, as it turned out, based on his own Vietnam mistakes arising from confusion in that area.

Depressed and unhappy in retirement, Johnson was still trying to understand what went wrong, when I saw and heard him analyze his successor Richard Nixon.

"Not much here," LBJ said, pointing to his head and then his heart, "even less here," before lowering a hand below the belt and saying grudgingly, "But enough down there."

Johnson’s judgment was made in the aftermath of the quagmire he created by his stubborn refusal to become "the first American president to lose a war." He spent those final years confused by his own downfall from what he considered a gutsy stand.

Barack Obama’s problems today, however, come not from too much self-assertion, but too little and a more apt role model would be, not LBJ with his hubris, but Harry Truman with his feistiness in trying to blast through Congressional road blocks to saving the economy.

For five years after Johnson’s departure, Dick Nixon kept us bleeding blood and money in Vietnam by refusing to wimp out there. In today’s confrontation, Obama does not have that much time, no matter what pundits say about his guy behavior.

Hormonal metaphors won’t hurt.