A dreary rain pelted New York City as tabloid headlines shouted from beneath tarpaulin-covered newsstands. "Evil Returns," proclaimed the giant New York Daily News headline plastered across the face of avowed mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

The New York Post featured a sunny postcard depicting a Manhattan skyline featuring the twin towers adorned by the words, "Welcome to New York."

"NOW DIE!" is plastered below. "9/11 fiends coming here for trial. Next stop is hell."

But even as the most sensational of the city's newspapers played the story for...]]> Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600 Now this is change I can believe in.

Remember the stories written one year ago today, the morning after the Barack Obama win? It wasn't just about him, said the prevailing analysis. This was a giant reset button, a realignment of American politics, which had skewed mostly Republican since Reagan.

We were told the Obama election was a pivotal event signaling a repudiation of all of those nasty things Republicans had been selling and an embrace of the Democratic brand that could leave the GOP reeling for years.

But the people of Virginia and New Jersey have now suggested otherwise, electing Republican governors in one state that Obama won comfortably and another that...]]> Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Indignation is a curious thing in the era of Barack Obama. Having seen the mockery this White House can heap on voters who dare to show it anger, this week has provided a window to what in turn sparks the Obama team to outrage.

The current scorecard:

•Release of one of the world's most notorious terrorists by Scottish authorities - not much indignation.

•Techniques used by the previous administration to get answers from terrorists to keep Americans safe - massive indignation. The evidence mounts that an administration that cannot even bring itself to use the word "terrorist" has shown itself thoroughly unfit to fight them. From the wildly foolish notion of...]]> Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 With all the talk of "teaching moments" comes the supposition that we all should learn something from the Cambridge, Mass., arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.

I've learned something, all right, but not what the self-appointed "teachers" had in mind.

Cambridge city officials are giddy about all the learning likely to spew from a review panel about to embark on a witch hunt clearly designed to paint this as what it was not.

The language of the city manager and mayor - platitudes about "getting through this stronger and more united" and "not letting Cambridge be judged by this" - suggest they are willing to throw a good cop under the bus to avoid the...]]> Wed, 08 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Talk about nerve. The very notion of leaving an elected office occupied for barely two years. Even if it is to run for president, that makes it even more peculiar in view of the candidate's lightweight résumé of political experience.

I refer, of course, to Barack Obama.

Cheap stunt, but it makes my point. Sarah Palin's electoral track record, of course, is far longer than that of Obama, who overcame his meager credentials, and longer even than that of George W. Bush when he ran for president.

Granted, the departing Alaska governor's early political career is defined within the walls of a small-town city hall, but is that somehow less valid than years...]]> Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Loved and despised, revered and reviled, Michael Jackson took the world on a journey like no entertainer ever has or ever will.

He charmed us with his amazing musical gifts during a childhood that never really ended. The abusive father who prodded him and his brothers to great fame in the Jackson 5 era may well have laid the groundwork for an adulthood that saw him steeped in a perpetual freeze-frame of behavior that ranged from the bizarre to the perverse.

For a blink of an eye, it looked like his tense and pressure-filled childhood would give way to an adulthood of relative normalcy, if not outright obscurity.

As he and his brothers released their last memorable...]]> Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 One generation never knows exactly what world it will pass to the next. But there is an alarming term making the rounds these days that seems a likely adjective for the era we are being guided toward:

"Post-American."

This is to be distinguished, I suppose, from "un-American," indicative of actual loathing of the substance and behaviors of our nation. "Post-American" is pitched as the attitude that accepts and may even embrace the passing of America's era of global leadership.

I would hope it is impossible to be ambivalent about such a monumental global moment. Surely there are only those people who cheer this development as refreshing and timely and those who dread...]]> Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 Nor does it involve letting our suffering economy recover the way it always has, by relying on the engine of free markets.

Obama, known for his unflappable cool on the campaign trail, now comes to us with doom saying that makes Jimmy Carter look like Richard Simmons.

Carter merely saddled us with the stigma of "malaise," acknowledging the wrecked economy beneath him by giving voice, not solutions, to a nation's discomfort. Even this worst of presidents during my lifetime (so far) did not try to pull off this kind of economic hijacking.

When Ronald Reagan inherited an economy far worse than today's, his first instinct was to prop up the American spirit by reminding us...]]> Wed, 14 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0600 Whether in the media or the general public, the aptly titled Bush Derangement Syndrome may stem from his enemies' inability to stomach his 2000 win, decided, as the rules require, not by the popular vote won by Al Gore or by their wish to steal a state Gore did not win, but by the facts and the law.

But it is more likely the war that enrages them, as it has toppled their comfortable notions of innocuous, persuadable terrorists and the high-mindedness of pacifism.

I wanted to make sure any moments I had with the president and first lady that night contained one thing. With my wife standing with me and our two kids secure at home in Texas, I wanted above all else to thank him...]]> Wed, 19 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0600 Wed, 15 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Just to settle this: The cries you have heard from the faithful to get tougher on Mr. Obama have been a call for heavier artillery against his poor judgment and thin record, not for playground taunts you probably cannot live up to.

I have no idea whether you should try to rhetorically wrap unreformed terrorist Bill Ayers around Mr. Obama's neck tonight. Frankly, I don't know if you can do it skillfully enough to defuse criticisms that you are bringing this sudden concern to the campaign too late.

Some were surprised when you sought to stifle supporters who actually had the misgivings about Mr. Obama that your ads sought to create. It was probably a good idea to tap the brakes...]]> Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Instead, the American people intervened, and the nation is far better for it.

No matter how much hand wringing and fear mongering you may have heard since the 228-205 vote, what we saw was real bipartisanship based on genuine public sentiment, rather than the usual kowtowing to moneyed special interests.

Wall Street's cliff dive was all the evidence anyone needed that the vote was exactly the right thing to do.

The stock market is a cauldron of business sentiment, geared to the short-term feelings of Wall Street luminaries. They are properly shell-shocked. Horrible business decisions, often prodded by horrible government decisions, got us into this. Real voters would...]]> Sun, 28 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Campaign spending is free speech. Candidates have to spend millions because they have to start running a full year before the Iowa caucuses. (Surely you know fundraising meetings are already underway for 2012.) But why lament this? Candidates ask for money, we give it to them, they run ads, and we either pay attention or not. Campaigns start absurdly early because we pay attention that early. The system works.

As for the tone of ads, every candidate's pledge to campaign less negatively lasts until his chops are busted in an opponent's negative ad. Then comes the "you have to fight back" logic, which may or may not be true because virtually no one has ever failed to fight...]]> Wed, 03 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Sarah Palin will not be the first woman to accept a major party's vice presidential nod, but she's the first with a chance to win. As such, some questions and answers about where she goes from here:

Has she been derailed by the pregnant daughter story?

Barely. The measure of a campaign brushfire is how many voters it stands to cost. So far, the socially conservative base remains grateful to have a John McCain running mate they actually like more than him. To them, the measure of Sarah Palin is not unwise behavior by her almost-adult daughter; it is the loving and poised manner in which she and her family have faced the issue.

But isn't it a...]]> Wed, 13 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0500 What she and her handlers should have cared about was the wisdom of his advice, laid bare in an upcoming issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

It details numerous e-mails that reveal the depth of the internal squabbling that stalled the Clinton campaign. But a larger question looms: What if she had followed Mr. Penn's inclination to focus strongly on voter unease with Barack Obama's far-flung upbringing and resulting lack of mainstream American values?

"His roots to basic American culture and values are at best limited," Mr. Penn wrote in March 2007. "I cannot imagine America electing a president at a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and...]]> Wed, 23 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500 They showed him the respect and deference any U.S. senator or presidential candidate should receive. But one has to wonder how his words hit their ears.

Mr. Obama's expressed goals in Afghanistan and Iraq were to hear commanders' "biggest concerns" and "to thank our troops for the heroic work they've been doing."

I could gag.

The commanders did not dare inform him that their biggest concern is a commander-in-chief who would yank them out before their mission is complete.

And as for "thanking" the troops, it appears District Attorney Harvey Dent of the new Batman film is not the only two-faced character on wide display this week.

Democrats have done shameful...]]> Sun, 13 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500 So on Friday morning I asked rhetorically: "I wonder how Tony Snow is doing?" His was truly the only name of sufficient caliber that occurred to me.

Now I know the answer to that question, and another titan of modern American media has fallen. Like Tim Russert before him, Tony Snow brought an infectious passion and likability to his craft. He brought those skills not only to his media jobs in print, radio and television, but to the White House, where he was a speechwriter for the first President Bush and press secretary for the second. His 17 months at the White House press room podium made predecessor Scott McClellan look like the useless shlub history now reveals him to...]]> Wed, 02 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0500 You certainly will hear it from the Middle East, where terrorists and their millions of fans will discharge enough celebratory gunfire to pepper an entire desert with spent shells. The devil George W. Bush will no longer be there to impede their goals.

You will hear it from the portions of Latin America smitten with the thuggery of Venezuela President Hugo Chavez. Mr. Bush will no longer be there to oppose his poisonous socialism and reckless saber rattling.

There should be a particularly loud sigh from North Korea, recently chastened by Bush administration diplomacy, a seeming oxymoron to the finger-wagging critics who have lied for years that this president seeks to wage...]]> Mon, 23 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0500 Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500