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.

Double Harrumph on the WikiLeak

Washington reaction to the Afghan document dump is solidifying into "How dared they release official secrets!" combined with "Nothing new here, we knew all that."

Politicians of all stripes are embracing both harrumphs. Unblessed-by-Wikileaks media people tend to favor the latter. But behind such butt-covering responses are issues that will take time to sort out.

One of the leakees, David Leigh of The Guardian, points out that "a game-changing thing has happened. We didn't leak this material. And, actually, WikiLeaks didn't leak this material. This material was leaked by some military source who had access to industrial quantities of electronic information that you can get out and leak across the planet in seconds."

The newspapers involved did the traditional journalistic scut work of verifying authenticity of the material, scrubbing it of any obvious security hazards and trying to put it all in context.

But clearly this will not end there. The floodgates have been opened, apparently by some low-level military clerk, and soon there may be platoons of "whistle blowers" online with more data than any filter, mainstream or otherwise, can responsibly handle.

Such journalistic anarchy, no matter how trumpeted as freedom of information, will not offset the official fictions that are constantly being leaked by those in power but combine with them to raise public confusion to new levels.

Beyond the question of government secrecy is the dismissive argument that the documents reveal "nothing new." Yet, as James Fallows observes, "information that may be old news to insiders may seem a revelation to the broader public. Whether from George W. Bush or Barack Obama, presidential speeches about Afghanistan have not emphasized the mixed loyalties of the Pakistani security services, the frustrations of dealing with tribal leaders and corrupt officials, the extent of civilian casualties, and other items that, according to insiders, 'everyone' already knows."

Fading public support for the Afghan war will almost surely be further eroded by this week's headlines, as reflected in the deeper-than-ever Democratic split yesterday in funding what seems a never-ending drain on the American economy in hard times.

In all this, 21st century politics and journalism are being derailed by speed bumps never before seen on the Information Highway.

The Pentagon Papers Redux

With eerie echoes of 1971, when the leak of secret files confirmed what Americans had long suspected about the disastrous war in Vietnam, the unauthorized release of 92,000 classified documents provides a first-hand picture of its 21st century counterpart in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Back then, the Pentagon Papers marked the beginning of the end in Southeast Asia, amid a swirl of legal battles over government secrecy and the rights of a free press to report what officials were hiding.

Now, the documents made public by WikiLeaks, according to the New York Times, provide "an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal," showing "in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001."

In Vietnam, LBJ's official fiction was that American blood and treasure there were preventing the spread of Communism in a Domino Theory, hiding the more realistic motive of avoiding a humiliating defeat, which was only delayed by Nixon duplicity for four more years.

In Afghanistan, Bush's war on terrorism, adopted and expanded by Obama, is proving even more dubious as the new documents confirm "strong suspicions that Pakistan’s military spy service has guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion a year from Washington for its help combating the militants."

The coming days will bring a howling argument over "media treason" in reporting on secret documents, just as the Pentagon Papers did four decades ago, but the simple fact back then was that telling the American people the truth helped to turn public opinion against a bad war.

Now, as then, nothing is more important than that.

Update: The White House points out that Wikileaks is "not an objective news organization" and notes that most of the memos predate the Obama presidency as National Security Adviser Gen. James Jones "strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security."

All this is par for the course but, in the coming days, the inescapable fact is that Afghanistan is a disaster that Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, sums up:

"The war...is not succeeding and is not worth waging in this way. The time has come to scale back U.S. objectives and sharply reduce U.S. involvement on the ground. Afghanistan is claiming too many American lives, requiring too much attention, and absorbing too many resources. The sooner we accept that Afghanistan is less a problem to be fixed than a situation to be managed, the better."

Sherrod Case: Defining Decency Down

There is no Atticus Finch or Joseph Welch in all this. On the 50th anniversary of "To Kill a Mockingbird," we are back in a time when McCarthyism played on fears to spread hatred and destroy lives of people in public life.

The President, who won an election by putting the Civil Rights era behind him, will have to revisit that time before his birth and make things right not only with Shirley Sherrod but generations of Americans who have struggled for decency not only in race relations but political discourse.

In his campaign speech after the Rev. Jeremiah Wright uproar, candidate Obama offered a vision beyond "politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism," but his first year and a half in office, to his evident dismay, have been dominated by that and much more.

“We are getting used to a lot of behavior that is not good for us,” the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in 1993 in his now-famous American Scholar article, “Defining Deviancy Down,” arguing that society keeps adjusting for the amount of unacceptable conduct it can tolerate.

The Sherrod case defines not only deviancy but decency down. It takes us from Rev. Wright's inflammatory videos, which actually existed, to a distortingly edited version of the impassioned speech of a woman who has fought for social justice to make her appear prejudiced.

Such slime would have been unworthy of passing comment if it had not triggered, in this era of debate about Tea Party racism, instant overreaction not only by the NAACP but Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, who ran briefly for President on a platform of bringing "good judgment" to government.

To their credit, Secretary Vilsack and the White House are trying to make amends to Ms. Sherrod, but who will remind all involved, in the words of Joe Welch, to recall our "sense of decency at long last" and to remember the lesson of Harper Lee's novel, that to destroy innocent life is a sin?

Obama's "Death of a Salesman" Problem

With falling approval ratings, Barack Obama is getting advice from all sides on how to "save" his presidency.

In the latest round of parsing by pundits, Richard Cohen of the Washington Post concludes: "The bank bailout averted a financial crackup and the stimulus package pulled the economy back from the abyss. Along with reform of the financial industry and health care, these are considerable achievements. Only the voters disagree."

The reason? "No one is accusing Obama of being likable. He is not unlikable, but he lacks Reagan's (or Bill Clinton's) warmth."

This is straight out of the Willy Loman School of Getting Ahead in Life. The protagonist of Arthur Miller's 1949 indictment of false American values, "Death of a Salesman," assures his sons they will succeed, even though they are not matching the high grades of their cousin who is "liked but not well-liked," as they are.

What would it take for Barack Obama to become as "well-liked" as Reagan and Clinton? The answers from political "experts" are all over the lot--from changing his rhetoric to doubling the size of the space program.

But all this advice misses the point. In the eras of Reagan and Clinton, free of wars on terror and inherited economic disaster, there was time to sell their "Morning in America" and "I feel your pain" personas.

Since Obama took the oath, his has been a fingers-in-the-dike presidency from bank bailouts to stopping oil spills, exacerbated by crisis-creating at warp speed by souped-up media. (Witness the Shirley Sherrod disgrace that, in the past two days, has usurped attention from months of work by the White House and Congress on financial reform.)

"Attention must be paid," wails Willy Loman's wife about the fate of an American failure in the last century. Little did her creator dream that, in this new one, too much misdirected attention would be more of a tragedy than the lack of it.

Drowning in News

A century ago, Americans spent only a few minutes a day learning about the world beyond their own senses--"the unseen environment," as Walter Lippmann put it in his 1922 study, "Public Opinion."

Back then, he despaired of "the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify...we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience, or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond our reach."

Now a rising 24/7 flood of news brings the unseen crashing into their heads, but are "better-informed" Americans better equipped to make decisions in a democratic society?

If Lippmann were alive, his despair would deepen at a New York Times report on "the state of the media business these days: frantic and fatigued. Young journalists who once dreamed of trotting the globe in pursuit of a story are instead shackled to their computers, where they try to eke out a fresh thought or be first to report even the smallest nugget of news...

"Tracking how many people view articles, and then rewarding--or shaming--writers based on those results has become increasingly common in old and new media newsrooms."

Such emphasis on quantity over quality has only shortened shrunken attention spans, leaving wired Americans more stuffed with information and starved for understanding than ever before, like Strasbourg geese being force-fed not for their own nutrition but the profit motives of the feeders.

On the Times opinion page, Paul Krugman derides "the pundit delusion, the belief that the stuff of daily political reporting--who won the news cycle, who had the snappiest comeback--actually matters."

But Krugman finds no solace in "the fact that 'ephemera' don’t matter...that voters aren’t swayed by cheap tricks. Unfortunately, however, the evidence suggests that issues don’t matter either, in part because voters are often deeply ill informed."

So here we are, after a century of technological innovation, the most highly informed citizenry in history, reacting to crises with not much more understanding than cave dwellers--and much the same superstition and fear.

A Line Between Racism and Disrespect

The NAACP is pursuing its own mandate in "condemning racism within the Tea Party movement" while a Congresswoman stirs members by proclaiming, "Those who used to wear sheets are now being able to walk down the aisle and speak as a patriot because you will not speak loudly about the lack of integrity of this movement."

Garbled syntax aside, is raising racism to the top of issues presented by the Tea Party in the best interests of the first African-American president or the dangers facing American democracy now?

Barack Obama's election did not end racism in America, so it is no surprise that mouthy morons like Glenn Beck would accuse him of "a deep-seated hatred for white people" or loony Rep. Steve King would discover "a default mechanism in him that breaks down the side of race--on the side that favors the black person."

In normal times, such disgusting rhetoric would be background static, but economic anxiety has pushed fear to the forefront, just as it did during the Great Depression against FDR, who famously had to defend even his dog Fala against partisan attacks.

But the main issue now is not fringe hatred of the President's skin color but the climate of disrespect for his office that has been fostered by wall-to-wall Republican opposition in Congress, powered by persistent attacks not only on his policies but the motives behind them.

Conservative Columnist Charles Krauthammer interprets Obama's response to inherited economic chaos as a "structural alteration of the U.S. budget. The stimulus, the vast expansion of domestic spending, the creation of ruinous deficits as far as the eye can see are not easily reversed."

A sane debate over this assertion would be healthy for American democracy in this election year, but on both sides of the ideological spectrum, there are only accusations and personal attacks.

Oddly enough, David Brooks sheds light on all this in parsing the rants of actor Mel Gibson as part of a change in self-esteem in which an overwhelming majority of Americans now consider themselves "an important person," as opposed to a fraction who did sixty years ago. In Gibson's rage, Brooks notes:

"It is striking how morally righteous he is...It is striking how quickly he reverts to the vocabulary of purity and disgust. It is striking how much he believes he deserves. It is striking how much he seems to derive satisfaction from his own righteous indignation."

Gibson's self-importance, however loathsome, is at least fueled by his moviemaking success but, in this era of Baby Boomer narcissism, what entitles his Tea Party counterparts to vent so disrespectfully against the President of the United States?

Bridal Registry for Bristol

Now that America's Sweethearts are reunited and planning to wed, they will need household gifts beyond the usual place settings and silver. Herewith a few gift suggestions for well-wishers:

*Caller ID to block incoming messages from anyone named Palin or Johnston.

*His and her DVDs of the 2005 Jane Fonda movie, "Monster-in-Law."

*Subscriptions to Time and Newsweek to class up their coffee table by covering copies of Us, People and Playgirl for the filming of their new reality show.

*Services of a new ghost writer for Bristol's paid speeches on teen-age pregnancy to finesse the fact that it can lead to fame, fortune and magazine covers.

*Personal trainers to help them memorize passages from next year's new Sarah Palin book, "America by Heart: Reflections on Faith, Family and Flag," in time for the 2012 Republican Convention.

In their statement on the news, the elder Palins said, "We pray that, as a couple, Bristol and Levi's relationship matures into one that will allow Tripp to grow up graced with two loving parents in his life."

And perhaps the greatest gift of all, a little privacy.

Century of Truth, Mark Twain to LeBron

Secrets are not what they used to be. The nation's greatest storyteller has made us wait 100 years to find out what was in his heart, but LeBron James spilled the beans on a TV special after only weeks of teasing our interest in an era when everyone from Elizabeth Edwards to Levi Johnston is sharing.

Isn't it better this way? Mark Twain's reticence recalls that memorable Jack Nicholson line in another American classic, "You can't handle the truth." But in the 21st century, we can not only handle but package and promote it in media that Mark Twain only vaguely foresaw.

Before his death in 1910, the creator of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn instructed publishers of his memoirs that "all sound and sane expressions of opinion must be left out...There may be a market for that kind of wares a century from now. There is no hurry. Wait and see.”

A hundred years later, is there ever! In a time of 24/7 exposure, his unexpurgated truths will be competing on the best-seller lists with those of Chelsea Handler, author of "My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands" and an unforgettable sequel, "Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang."

There won't be any carnal revelations in the three volumes of unvarnished Mark Twain, but advance word from the University of California Press suggests no shortage of relevance to our times.

There is a foreshadowing of today's populist rage against Wall Street, as Twain notes dryly: “The world believes that the elder Rockefeller is worth a billion dollars. He pays taxes on two million and a half.”

Twain's opposition to intervention in Cuba and the Philippines was known in his own time, but not the angry designation of American troops overseas as "our uniformed assassins." In the days of Iraq and Afghanistan, the New York Times notes, such remarks "would probably lead the right wing to question the patriotism of this most American of American writers."

But not to worry. Those who are outraged by such old-fashioned truth-telling will have Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Karl Rove to comfort them with contrary views, and they won't have to wait 100 years to find out what they are.

Aren't we lucky?

Rahm's Charm Offensive

In an interview on the PBS News Hour, the President's Chief of Staff demonstrates the difference between being brainy and empathic--a problem that is becoming crucial to the White House.

On a mission to shore up Barack Obama's image as a decisive leader, Rahm Emanuel patronizes Jim Lehrer, a journalistic icon, as he tries to pin down the President's direct involvement in such issues as the Russian spy swap and the decision to sue Arizona over its punitive new immigration law.

Verbally juggling an imperceptible difference between the Chief Executive's "approval of" and "being briefed" on Justice Department decisions (to avoid saying the President ordered or signed off on the actions), Emanuel ends up, under Lehrer's persistent questioning, telling him, "I feel like I'm dealing with my children on their homework."

It's tempting to see such bad behavior as a matter of temperament or as a generational difference between Emanuel, a brash 59-year-old Boomer, and Lehrer, 76, a former Marine who, as a Dallas reporter, spent a week in 1963 covering the death of a President.

But the encounter suggests something more--the inability of the Obama White House to surmount an emotional tide of disapproval in the wake of a struggling economy, two ongoing wars and an environmental disaster that is being seen 24/7 on TV screens.

After sparring with Lehrer, Emanuel makes a plausible case for Presidential decisiveness in dealing with the financial crisis, the Detroit rescue and even McChrystal's firing, while grudgingly acknowledging public unhappiness: "It is understandable for their frustration because of their own economic conditions."

But the approval numbers and the November election polls won't be changed by such rational analysis. Barack Obama is not a Bill Clinton "I feel your pain" president but, with a Rahm Emanuel face for his Administration, he won't get very far making the case that, although things are still bad, they would have been much worse if he had not done what he did.

As he has been doing on the stump this week, the President is better off doing that himself.

GOP Headless Horseman

Tea Party people, who adore Colonial times, are acting out another of its iconic stories, a 21st century version of a spectral beheaded figure terrorizing politicians with fear of losing theirs.

After the toppling of such a Senate stalwart as Utah's Robert Bennett, the Republican Party itself is virtually headless, with Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney swiping at Chairman Michael Steele's scalp while an unlikely coalition from Ron Paul and Ann Coulter to E. J. Dionne defends his misgivings if not his historically inaccurate maundering about Afghanistan.

Washington Irving's tale lampooned early American fear and superstition with a ghostly foreign mercenary carrying his severed head driving off the local schoolteacher Ichabod Crane, while slyly suggesting with a shattered pumpkin at the site that it was all the dirty work of a rival for the hand of the local beauty

The current GOP split, emanating from the same dread of the unknown, is turning out to be a much more complicated story about social upheaval and primal lust.

Democrats, with their tenuous grip on Congress, have the most to lose this fall but what Republicans win could resemble that shattered pumpkin, a useless new crop of lawmakers elected not to solve problems but to resist spending money on any of them.

The now departing Sen, Robert Bennett sums it up: "My biggest concern is that we are not addressing the real issues...politics is divided between the great issues and the great diversions. And we're spending all of the time arguing about the great diversions.

"We're in a global world. We have a different kind of economy...The percentage of people in the working force is shrinking. And then, when you add to all of that the entitlement programs, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, you end up...with a financial circumstance that is unsustainable.

"And that's what we should be focusing on, and not arguing about all of the specific mistakes that President Obama is making. Every administration makes specific mistakes that are fun to argue about, but here are the big issues going ignored."

Bennett won't be there to help Congress keeps its head next year after the Tea Party finishes its work of replacing whatever brains remain in Washington with politicians created like carved pumpkins to mesmerize voters but with nothing inside.

Sunny President in a Clouded Country

Mixed political weather for the nation's 234th birthday: Barack Obama basks in a solar future while Tea Party members gather to shake their fists at what they see as darkening skies.

The President, in his weekly address, looks at Colorado, Arizona and Indiana, seeing "once-shuttered factories humming with new workers who are building solar panels and wind turbines, rolling up their sleeves to help America win the race for the clean energy economy."

But, in a USA Today poll, Tea Party adherents find nothing on the horizon but gathering clouds in the "firm conviction that the federal government has gotten too big and too powerful and a fear that the nation faces great peril.

"Nine in 10 are unhappy with the country's direction and see the federal debt as an ominous threat to its future. Almost as many say neither President Obama nor most members of Congress deserve re-election."

At rallies in Atlanta, San Antonio and elsewhere, glass-half-empty grumblers will observe the holiday by remembering only what the Founding Fathers did to gain independence rather than how hard they worked to make something lasting of it.

The government those disaffected now revile went on from throwing tea overboard to crafting a union that in the past century, as the President puts it, "mustered a sense of common purpose to overcome Depression and fear itself...that embraced a call to greatness and saved the world from tyranny...that turns times of trial into times of triumph."

For perspective, Tea Party followers may want to ponder a new survey of historians who now rank Barack Obama as the 15th best president ever for his "imagination, communication and intelligence."

They may also want to examine what new spectral technology has revealed about what Thomas Jefferson crossed out while writing the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson changed his designation of Americans as "subjects" with "citizens," a status that implies responsibilities as well as grievances.

As they hammered out the final draft, the Founding Fathers made many other changes, including one Jefferson regretted most, deleting a rueful expression of pain at parting from the country of their origin: "We might have been a free and great people together."

In a time of growing division, Americans would do well to recall that sentiment about human unity as they celebrate freedom.

Capitol Hill Pest Control

John Boehner, who succeeded career exterminator Tom DeLay, is being bugged by insect metaphors.

The House Minority Leader told a reporter the Wall Street reform bill was like using a nuclear weapon to kill an ant and was stump-jumped by the White House in Wisconsin.

"He compared the financial crisis to an ant," the President told a crowd. "The same financial crisis that led to the loss of nearly eight million jobs...that cost people their homes and their lives' savings."

Meanwhile, from the other direction, GOP Congressman turned cable host Joe Scarborough says Boehner is not a busy bee, that "you can see him around town...Every Republican I talk to says John Boehner, by 5 or 6 o’clock at night, you can see him at bars. He is not a hard worker.”

If Boehner is laid back about legislating, he is a grasshopper for fund-raising, attending a daily average of 1.25 such events so far this year, while finding time between tanning sessions to sign a petition to repeal health care reform in its entirety.

At the same time, there are signs of disorder in the GOP's own hive. Boehner's sidekick Eric Cantor is creating a buzz among the WASP set, with his scurrying, according to a House colleague, to become "the first Jewish Republican something...first Jewish Republican speaker, the first Jewish Republican vice president or first Jewish Republican president.”

If all this insect behavior persists, calling back DeLay for pest control advice may not be enough. Sounds like a case for the bio-exorcist from "Beetlejuice."

News from the Cold War Nursing Home

The FBI and KBG are still playing the old games.

The Bureau, which failed to anticipate the Times Square bomber, has been relentlessly tracking Russian agents posing as suburban homeowners for years, and the former spymaster Vladimir Putin is kvetching about it

"Back at your home," he tells another retiree, Bill Clinton, drawing a laugh, "the police went out of control throwing people in jail. But that's the kind of job they have."

The indictment of 11 "deep cover" agents recalls the days when Americans were kept aware of potentially dangerous neighbors by that expert on secret lives, J. Edgar Hoover.

The news has a Rip Van Winkle feel to it, as if the FBI were awakening from a decades-long nap, unaware of this month's visit by the Russian president, who was warmly greeted in the White House, shared cheeseburgers with the President and was given a tour of Silicon Valley as well as the 21st-century imperative of derailing Middle East terrorism rather than Communist subversion.

Thousands of surveillance hours produced not charges of espionage but of acting as "unauthorized foreign agents and conspiracy to commit money laundering"--not quite as alarming as planting bombs in midtown Manhattan, but in the arcane world of spycraft, who can tell?

The indicated conspirators spent years living in American suburbs while, according to prosecutors, penetrating American “policy making circles.”

They did their undercover work well, according to neighbors interviewed by the New York Times: "They raised children, went to work in the city each day, talked the small talk with neighbors about yard work and overpriced contractors. In short, they could have been any family in any suburb in America."

The only mystery about them is what kind of spying they did, but the Justice Department is keeping us in suspense about that until their trials begin.

Until or unless there are nefarious revelations then, the whole thing is reminiscent, on both sides of the international intrigue, of the case of Lt. Haroo Onoda, who was arrested in 1972 after hiding in a remote Philippine island for 29 years not knowing that World War II had ended.

Some people always get the news late.

The Self-Education of Robert Byrd

He will be remembered as the nation's longest-serving lawmaker ever, a Ku Klux Klan bigot who lived long enough to back an African-American president, a patriot who tried to stop his country from starting a disastrous war in Iraq and, above all, someone who never stopped learning.

A self-made man if there ever was one, Robert Byrd, who died today at 92, started as a gas jockey and butcher in West Virginia during World War II, who discovered a taste and talent for politics by joining the Ku Klux Klan at the age of 24 and rising to the position of Exalted Cyclops.

His worldview then is reflected in a 1944 letter: "I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side... Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds."

But in May 2008, Sen. Robert Byrd was endorsing an African-American candidate as "a shining young statesman, who possesses the personal temperament and courage necessary to extricate our country from this costly misadventure in Iraq, and to lead our nation at this challenging time in history. Barack Obama is a noble-hearted patriot and humble Christian, and he has my full faith and support."

In his journey from benighted to Obama, Byrd's finest hour came on the eve of the Iraq invasion in 2002 when he warned:

"Why are we being hounded into action on a resolution that turns over to President Bush the Congress's Constitutional power to declare war? This resolution would authorize the president to use the military forces of this nation wherever, whenever and however he determines, and for as long as he determines, if he can somehow make a connection to Iraq. It is a blank check."

An advocate of lifelong education, Robert Byrd practiced what he preached, becoming the only member of Congress ever to put himself through law school while in office. It's hard to imagine any of the current or future crop of blowhards doing anything like that.

R.I.P., Senator.

Bad News for a Good Soldier

While Barack Obama was doing his Donald Trump act telling Stanley McChrystal "You're fired!" on TV, the winner of this season's Afghanistan Apprentice show was at the President's side solemn and expressionless.

For Gen. David Petraeus, who had fainted earlier this month while testifying before the Senate, this new assignment comes as the 21st century definition of a good soldier saluting and doing his duty in the face of a personally devastating order.

To start, the 57-year-old general is leaving a comfortable office job in Florida to take a step down in the hierarchy to command a military/political mess that will put him under 24/7 pressure. This return to the line of fire comes less than a year after being diagnosed with prostate cancer and undergoing radiation treatment for it.

"The challenges of Afghanistan," notes Chris Cillizza in the Washington Post, "mean that Petraeus is risking the reputation he earned in Iraq as one of the greatest generals of his generation for what is, at best, a jump ball. The move feels even more dicey considering Petraeus's alternative: polishing his legacy at Centcom on the way to the chairmanship of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"Finally, Petraeus has been regarded in some GOP circles as the best (only?) candidate with a chance of beating Obama in 2012. While that has always been a long shot, it now seems like a no-shot."

Finally, and most crucial, the General is under pressure to appear to be implementing a policy that has been losing public favor and political support while at the same time managing Karzai in Kabul with the same iron fist in a velvet glove that he used on al-Maliki in Baghdad.

At the coming Senate hearings, Petraeus will have to show deference to his Commander-in-Chief and cope with GOP grandstanding about the dangers of Obama's 2011 deadline to start winding down America's longest war ever. His tap-dancing skills will be put to their severest test.

When David Howell Petraeus was graduating with honors from West Point in 1974 as the Vietnam War was becoming history, could he have imagined ending his career in an atmosphere where generals are being asked not just to fight their country's battles but "act like modern viceroys, overseeing military operations and major economic development efforts" and "play dominant roles in the internal politics of the countries where their troops fight?"

As JFK used to say, life is unfair but the best American leaders find a way to deal with it.

Exposure, Indecent and Otherwise

Two incidents of stripping public figures bare bracket the question of "the public's right to know" in an era of redefining journalism--the downfall of Gen. McChrystal and an inconvenient possible truth about Al Gore as a Clintonesque groper.

David Brooks asserts the General was done in by a cultural change that has elevated "private kvetching" by public officials to the forefront of the news, citing Theodore White's "Making of the President" books in the 1960s as a turning point.

He concludes that "the exposure ethos, with its relentless emphasis on destroying privacy and exposing impurities, has chased good people from public life, undermined public faith in institutions and elevated the trivial over the important."

For a participant and close observer of all this, that misses the main point--an evolution that has taken journalism from helplessly reporting official lies (as in Sen. Joe McCarthy's wild claims) to digging for the truth behind them (Woodward and Bernstein) to, in the age of the Internet, of swamping us 24/7 with facts, factoids and fake news.

If anything, the McChrystal saga illustrates, not the overwhelming of public privacy, but a classic journalistic mission, particularly of magazines with the luxury of time to do it, of finding and showing the truth behind officially constructed facades.

Over the past year, the General's insubordination was one of those truths struggling to be seen, going back to last fall when he went public to pressure the President's decision of more troops for Afghanistan, to the point of being indirectly reprimanded by the Secretary of Defense.

McChrystal's arrogance, far from being what Brooks terms a harmless outlet to "let off steam," was part of a campaign to pressure an ambivalent President into making a major commitment of lives and money to what many, if not most Americans, consider a losing cause.

What Michael Hastings showed in Rolling Stone will probably win a National Magazine Award, for the same reasons that I, as a judge 40 years ago, voted to give one to the New Yorker for Richard Harris' reporting on what John Mitchell was doing to corrupt the Justice Department, long before the Watergate scandal broke.

All the way down at the other end of the news food chain is a National Enquirer revelation that Al Gore may or may not have acted like a jerk while getting a massage in Portland, Oregon four years ago.

Do we really need to know the details of that? Or does that come under the heading of giving people the privacy, by Brooks' definition, to let off steam?

Macho Gone Mad

"The Runaway General" may soon be gone, but a mystery will remain.

For someone who served under Patton in World War II and lived through the MacArthur mess over Korea, the text of McChrystal's self-immolation in Rolling Stone still comes as a mild shock--a hard-to-believe-it's-not-parody of macho gone mad in an era when top generals have learned to be as smooth as Petraeus, who sold Bush's Iraq Surge without getting his hair mussed by the media.

McChrystal, on the other hand, revels in projecting a Neanderthal image, starting with his complaint about being "screwed into" attending a formal Paris dinner described as "gay" by his aide. "I'd rather," the General says, "have my ass kicked by a roomful of people than go out to this."

The next night, for his wedding anniversary, McChrystal herds his wife and staff to an Irish pub, the "least Gucci" place in Paris. ("He once took me to a Jack in the Box when I was dressed in formal wear," she recalls.)

There is something more than meat-and-potatoes, man's man stuff going on here. Behind all the contempt for civilians, there is amped-up posturing to separate McChrystal from his picture of a sissified, latte-drinking elite thwarting a right-thinking man of action from doing the right thing.

But McChrystal has been as clueless about what to do in Afghanistan as the politicians he despises. His damn-the-torpedoes act has produced no positive results, and the postponing of a proposed offensive in Kandehar was the result of conditions on the ground, not civilian interference.

In his frustration, the Runaway General has been trying to escape the reality that Afghanistan can't be bulldozed by his counterinsurgency strategy, no matter how macho the trappings. Whatever his immediate fate, McChrystal has served his country well by dramatizing that.

Update: The President played his Commander-in-Chief card today, firing the General and replacing him with his polar opposite, Gen. Petraeus. Now McChrystal can start planning his ballsy memoirs to explain how Afghanistan could have been saved if he and his crew hadn't been forced to endure all those gay dinners in Paris on the taxpayers' dime.

McChrystal's MacArthur Act

Six decades after a commanding general lost his job for bad-mouthing Harry Truman's conduct of the Korean War, another is in the White House today apologizing for deriding Obama officials over the conflict in Afghanistan.

But Stanley McChrystal is no Douglas MacArthur, a mythic figure after his triumphal World War II return to the Philippines and a consummate military politician who played Congress like a violin in opposing his President's caution over risking war with China in Korea.

Dwight Eisenhower, who served under him before becoming Supreme Commander, once noted that in the 1930s, "I studied acting under MacArthur."

With none of his predecessor's charisma, McChrystal is in trouble, not for disagreeing over policy but for demeaning Administration officials who have urged caution in Afghanistan during a Rolling Stone interview.

"Are you asking me about Vice President Biden?" McChrystal is quoted as asking the reporter at one point, laughing. "Who's that?" as an aide chimed in, "Biden? Did you say Bite Me?"

This kind of low-rent pique, also directed at Ambassador Karl Eikenberry and Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke, is a far cry from MacArthur's eloquent but wrong-headed advocacy of widening the Korean War, warning that "if we lose the war to communism in Asia the fall of Europe is inevitable, win it and Europe most probably would avoid war and yet preserve freedom...There is no substitute for victory."

"Victory" in Afghanistan is an even murkier concept than it was in Korea back then, and it makes matters worse to have the American commander playing for cheap laughs at the expense of his Commander-in-Chief's political team.

McChrystal will no doubt escape MacArthur's fate of being fired for insubordination, but as he promises to button his lip in the future, he may want recall his role model's famous farewell to Congress:

"When I joined the Army...it was the fulfillment of all of my boyish hopes and dreams. The world has turned over many times since I took the oath on the plain at West Point, and the hopes and dreams have long since vanished, but I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular barrack ballads of that day which proclaimed most proudly that 'old soldiers never die; they just fade away.'"

For McChrystal, a little fading away right now would be a good idea.

Piling on the President

Opening his Fathers Day gifts, Barack Obama must be basking in a rare moment of unconditional love as his White House is engulfed in a rising spill of criticism and disapproval from all sides.

After what Frank Rich terms a "doomed" speech on the Gulf gush, the President this weekend is being called, on the one hand, "snakebit" by Peggy Noonan, a speechwriter who ruined Bush I's reelection chances by having him mouth "Read my lips, no new taxes" and, on the other, "incompetent and amateur" by Mort Zuckerman, a real-estate tycoon who bought his way into publishing punditry only to end up high on the list of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi victims.

To make the gloom global, Der Spiegel, the post-Nazi German newsweekly with a taste for scandal, pronounces Obama "in danger of turning into an idealistic, one-term president like Jimmy Carter."

Amid all this, the Joe Barton "BP shakedown" flap gave Democrats only a temporary reprieve from bad news (and a hook for election fund-raising) as House Republicans shut down Barton by threatening to take away his privileged position for shaking down all the oil companies for contributions.

Meanwhile, stepping back for a longer view, the Washington Post suggests "narrative creep" in media preoccupation with the man who won the presidency less than two years ago as a quasi-mythic figure and now has to deal with a pileup of crises in the real world:

"The BP oil spill has largely been treated as the latest plot twist in the Obama epic. The plume of crude rising from the seabed is not only the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, darkening the gulf and thousands of lives and pervading the nation with a sense of helplessness, it is a metaphor for Obama's loss of control, a revealing moment to study our protagonist."

But the explanation for Obama's current woes may be as simple as media payback, the process by which journalists elevate politicians and then, when that cycle is over, compensate by tearing them down. It happened to JFK in the last century and John McCain in this one.

When the current round of Obama trashing is over, the only direction he can go is up.

Obama's Moby Dick Moment

In the Oil Spill, the President is sounding like Ishmael but Americans want him to act more like Ahab.

“My power is not limitless," he told Gulf residents before The Speech last night. "I can’t dive down there and plug the hole. I can’t suck it up with a straw.”

That exasperation is reflected in postmortems of his attempt to take political charge of an unmanageable mess that has inspired parallels with Melville's saga of human hubris, a relentless search for oil leading to self-destruction in the ocean's depths.

The President's problem now is that the public expects him to match in his response some of the maniacal passion that led BP to endanger the environment and economy, but such acting out is neither in his nature or the realities of a situation that requires the perpetrator to clean up the scene of an ongoing crime.

As estimates of its output grow, the gush goes on as a continuing image of American impotence no matter how hard the White House pushes BP to stop it and/or put up the money to pay for years of cleanup to come.

Nobody is going to write a happy ending for this 21st century version of "Moby Dick." After his litany of efforts to respond last night, the President was reduced to prayer with "our unyielding faith that something better awaits us if we summon the courage to reach for it."

Meanwhile, some members of Congress have been reaching for "something better" out of the Spill by dumping their shares of BP on the stock market.

Like members of the Pequod crew, they are grabbing for anything that might keep them afloat as the ship goes down.

Update: After meeting with the President, BP's Chairman discovers they share an empathy, “He's frustrated because he cares about the small people and we care about the small people. I hear comments that sometimes large oil companies are greedy companies that don't care. But that is not the case with BP. We care about the small people."

Just about as much as Ahab cared about the small people below his decks.

Gen. Petraeus' Gold Mine

As the war in Afghanistan worsens, its American proprietors have suddenly discovered that, far from being a quagmire, the country is a jackpot of "nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits...far beyond any previously known reserves."

Trumpeted in a front-page New York Times story, quoting Gen. David Petraeus no less, this "revelation" comes at a time when, the Washington Post points out, "Bad news from Afghanistan came in a steady stream last week," including increasing casualties and corruption as the "perception that the clock is ticking on the U.S. mission pushes Karzai toward building and defending his own family network, and favoring aides who can talk to Pakistan--and maybe the Taliban--over those close to the United States."

This juxtaposition of bad news on the ground and pie in the sky leads to a skepticism encapsulated by Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic in a blog post headline, "The Mineral Miracle? Or A Massive Information Operation?"

The Times story tells us, "The vast scale of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists...

"While it could take many years to develop a mining industry, the potential is so great that officials and executives in the industry believe it could attract heavy investment even before mines are profitable, providing the possibility of jobs that could distract from generations of war."

The unpersuaded observer will be pardoned for suspecting that this sudden transformation of America's Afghan mess into a 21st century version of Sutter's Mill may be meant to "distract" us from almost nine years and counting of an endless war that is growing worse by the week.

From this perspective, the "news" that Afghanistan may provide lithium for American laptops and BlackBerrys looks more like another Oil Spill than a Gold Rush.

Update: As skeptical as outside observers might be about their mineral bonanza, Afghanis are excited to the point of figuring out how much they will get--$34,482.76 for each man, woman and child--as President Karzai's spokesman pooh-poohs the idea that the Taliban and local warlords might decide to cut themselves in for a larger share.

In a country where nothing is ever what it seems to be, that may pass for a government promise of socialized mining to surpass proceeds from the drug trade.

Immigrant Offspring: Correspondent and Queen

Helen Thomas and Queen Noor were in the news this week, American women of Middle East descent making career moves.

Thomas, who has annoyed ten presidents with questions at White House press conferences, made the mistake of answering one herself and ended up unemployed shortly before her 90th birthday.

Her Majesty, nee Lisa Halaby of Washington, widow of Jordan's King Hussein, was in Hollywood to promote a movie she helped make with Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" producers warning about nuclear proliferation.

An octogenarian journalist's compassion goes out to Thomas, the daughter of Lebanese immigrants, despite her telling people of my birth to "get the hell out of Palestine" and relocate to "Poland, Germany and America and everywhere else."

Making such a remark to two men with microphones wearing yarmulkes is surely more a sign of senior misjudgment than vicious anti-Semitism, but the demands of political correctness have led to White House denunciation and Thomas' banishment after more than half a century of hard work as a journalist.

Unlike Thomas, Queen Noor was born to American wealth and privilege a generation later, her father a Deputy Defense Secretary for Truman who became head of Pan American Airways and later JFK's head of the Federal Aviation Administration.

Stripped of her role as Queen Mother after her husband's death, the former Ms. Halaby has spent her widowhood working for good causes, including the best of all--avoiding global devastation by the spread of nuclear weapons.

As she goes about promoting the movie, "Countdown to Zero," the former Queen is subjecting herself to previously inexperienced indignities, mostly notably this weekend an interview with smarmy Bill Maher.

But no price is too high to help keep the world from blowing up.

Whatever Happened to "We"?

In retrospect, George W. Bush was right when he described himself as a Uniter, not a Divider. He left office after bringing together Democrats and Independents under the banner of "Yes We Can" while Republicans campaigned as if he had never existed.

A year and a half later, the dams of Bush government-in-denial have burst open to flood the political scene with economic and environmental disasters resulting from a Decider who spent eight years decreeing that regulation of anything was wrong, leaving behind an electorate swamped by social wreckage and furiously divided over what to do about it.

Now, the Oil Spill provides only one metaphor for a helplessness that has overtaken the collective pronoun not only in "Yes We Can" but as deeply in the national psyche as "We the people" in the Preamble of the Constitution.

This election year is unfolding with the theme of "Theys" who are responsible for every misery, among them incumbent lawmakers of both parties, ineffectual bureaucrats, rapacious corporations, greedy Wall Streeters and, of course, the man behind the desk with the sign, "The buck stops here."

As the list lengthens to include the children of illegal immigrants and as Tea Party zealots begin to turn on one another, we are close to the wisdom of Pogo: "We have met the enemy...and he is us."

For guidance, today's vociferous patriots may want to pause in their frantic dumping of everything overboard long enough to recall another "we" tenet of the Founding Fathers: "United we stand, divided we fall."

American Ass-Kicking

Another primary day, another occasion for voter disgust-- today's ballots will be parsed for the degree and direction of anti-incumbent rage as new polls show such passion at an all-time high.

All this recalls the reaction of a social critic half a century ago to excoriation of those who produce mass entertainment as purveyors of junk: "Yes, but what about the people who consume all this swill, who choose the bad over the good, who don't know or don't care about the difference?"

In their current pique, voters are blaming everyone but themselves for public problems while overlooking the inconvenient fact that they chose the incumbents they now hate and are about to transfer their approval to a different set of charlatans and clowns.

Across the primary scene, campaigns are being driven by South Carolina "freak show politics" and inexperienced candidates' "obscene" spending in California, ensuring that new choices will be no better and probably worse than the old.

As President Obama elegantly declares he is looking for "whose ass to kick" over the Gulf oil spill, the American public is engaged in the same search for who to blame for everything.

The enterprise is bipartisan, as reflected in a meeting of "progressive" organizations, where references to government failures provoke the loudest cheers as only one voice urges that organizers “invest in the slow, respectful work of talking to people in our country again.”

When the President is finished satisfying his critics with a manly display of posterior pummeling, he may want to get back to doing that again or come November we will end up being governed by the worst set of horses' asses ever.

Overanalyzing Obama

George W. Bush was lucky. Over eight years, the so-called liberal media decided he was an incurable clod, mocked him as the self-described Decider and left his inner life alone.

Not so with Barack Obama, for whom the Oil Spill has unleashed a new rush of psychobabble from the Left, with globs of comment about his detachment, over-rationality and rage deficit.

As everyone from Maureen Dowd to Spike Lee urges the President to "go off," his Press Secretary is reduced to defending the boss against charges of excessive anger management by citing his clenched jaw and order to "Plug the damn hole" as proof of furious displeasure.

Now along comes Frank Rich to advise "Don't Get Mad, Mr. President. Get Even" and assert that "the debate over how to raise the president’s emotional thermostat...allows Obama to duck the more serious doubts about his leadership that have resurfaced along with BP’s oil."

Rich wants the President to stop his intellectual reliance on so-called experts, "credibly seize the narrative that Americans have craved ever since he was elected during the most punishing economic downturn of our lifetime" and transform himself into a new Teddy Roosevelt to "wield the big stick of reform against BP and the other powerful interests that have ripped us off."

For Obama, such sympathetic but insistent prescriptions for more activism, bracketing Tea Party accusations of too much, must be a constant source of wonderment about how the message of hope and change that took him to the White House has collided with realities that lead to picturing him as an impotent Messiah on the one hand and the Devil incarnate on the other.

In this terrible time for Americans, an alternative view would be gratitude for a president with intelligence, ideals and an unflappable temperament who understands the limits of his power and, making human mistakes along the way, is doing fairly well in meeting an unprecedented pileup of challenges.

Would it be too much to ask Obama's critics on the Left for a moratorium on deconstructing him to match the next ten days of silence from Rush Limbaugh on his honeymoon?

The Gore Divorce

A decade ago, who would have thought Hillary and Bill would still be together as Tipper and Al end their forty-year marriage?

In announcing their breakup, the Gores requested "respect for our privacy," but that hasn't stopped speculation about what happened to the man who might have been president if Bill Clinton had kept his pants zipped.

The Gore news comes right after the premiere of an awful HBO movie titled "Special Relationship" that explores Tony Blair's bond with Clinton as his presidency was being damaged by the Monica Lewinsky scandal and succeeds only in underscoring how messy the interplay between public and private lives can be.

The HBO take on the Clinton marriage, incidental to its portrait of Blair as a devout toady, portrays the 42nd president as a devious glutton, whose "sex with that woman" comes as a surprise to his wife.

Not likely. Nobody has ever accused the deceived First Lady who parlayed her experience into Senator, almost President and then Secretary of State of being clueless. The more plausible explanation is that the Clinton marriage had long ago morphed into an arrangement between two ambitious Baby Boomers with separate agendas in life.

The Gores, on the other hand, his wooden public persona and that theatrical convention kiss notwithstanding, seemed genuinely connected and Tipper Gore, in a way that recalls the forthrightness and public honesty of Betty Ford, spoke openly about the damage politics can do to a marriage and her own bouts with depression.

Serious people, unlike the John Edwardses et al, have a hard time preserving their private lives while living on a public stage.

Whatever gabble there is now about long-marriage breakups, the Gores deserve as much privacy as they can get in this media-drenched age. At least, there is the consolation that HBO won't be making any movies about their life together.

They Must Know What They're Doing

In the 1960s, an editor I knew proposed a snarky picture book to be titled "They Must Know What They're Doing or They Wouldn't Be Where They Are" that would show the captain of the Titanic, the designer of the Edsel, LBJ directing the Vietnam war and other examples of low acumen in high places.

Since then, the list has grown with Nixon at Watergate, Jimmy Carter's bumbling on the Tehran captives, George W's Iraq occupation, Alan Greenspan handling the housing bubble, but now new candidates are arriving at warp speed.

"Everybody," David Brooks observes, "is comparing the oil spill to Hurricane Katrina, but the real parallel could be the Iranian hostage crisis...a symbol of America’s inability to take decisive action in the face of pervasive problems. In the same way, the uncontrolled oil plume could become the objective correlative of the country’s inability to govern itself."

BP's inability to stop the gush and the White House's helplessness in the face of that failure are a perfect pairing of new entries in the annals of unexpected impotence by powerful institutions.

As the Justice Department and Gulf states' Attorney Generals begin looking for ways to apply legal pressure, their dilemma is described in the Washington Post: "The opening of a criminal investigation or civil action against BP, if either were to happen, would create the unusual situation of the federal government weighing charges against a company that it is simultaneously depending on for the most critical elements of the response to the record oil spill."

Tea Party activists will surely blame all this on officeholders but that would be like watching Abbott without Costello or laughing at Laurel and ignoring Hardy as government and corporate leaders pose for their joint portrait to follow the honchos of Wall Street and Congress in the 21st century edition of "They Must Know What They're Doing..."

Update: The incompetence carnival goes on as the Justice Department announces its probe, the stock market savages BP and the "national incident commander" tries to plug the hole with cliches: "We've got to keep our heads in the game; we've got to keep our shoulders to the wheel." And look out for the icebergs.