The speech, delivered in Philadelphia in March 2008, was compelled by the...]]> Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600 I saw the other day that George W. Bush is raising money for his proposed policy institute at Southern Methodist University. I did some research and found out that there are something like 3,000 policy institutes, most of them hosting convocations about nothing much and issuing papers no one reads. I suggest therefore that Bush use his money to do something truly different and constructive -- establish the Institute for the Study of Sarah Palin. My check is in the mail.

This is Palin Week -- days of interviews relating to the publication of her book, "Going Rogue." She will appear virtually everywhere, making her usual good impression, and there will be more talk about how she...]]> Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600 Between World War I and World War II, Britain fought all across the Islamic world, battling insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, to name just two, and usually losing. This caused a fair amount of worry, introspection, angst and the usual commissions to determine why history was being so unkind. What the British discovered was what Pogo could have told them: They had met the enemy and it was them.

Nowhere is Britain's interwar predicament better stated than in David Fromkin's brilliant and invaluable book about the creation of the modern Middle East, "A Peace to End All Peace." He writes, "What Britain faced in the Middle East was a long and perhaps endless series of individual...]]> Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0600 In his own telling, Bernard Madoff was a version of the serial killer who leaves notes saying, "Stop me before I kill again." In Madoff's case, he was waiting for the Securities and Exchange Commission to ask him how he took in billions of dollars, never invested any of it and was reporting steady investment earnings. The answer, it seems, is that he had accomplices -- the Keystone Kops of the SEC who were always letting Madoff down: "I wish they caught me six years ago, eight years ago." So do others.

Madoff spoke those very words last June when he told H. David Kotz, the SEC's inspector general, how he managed to bilk some of American's savviest investors out of billions of...]]> Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Years ago, I bought an old Time magazine -- the issue with the 1965 Man of the Year on the cover. I stuffed it into an old picture frame and kept it around to remind me both of the fallibility of men, and, even, of Time magazine. It was of Gen. William C. Westmoreland. He was the Vietnam era's Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

Westmoreland was an utter failure and I do not mean to suggest that McChrystal is the same. Yet at the time the square-jawed Westmoreland appeared on the cover of Time, he was seen as something of a savior -- the man who would lead America out of the swamp of Vietnam. When he addressed Congress in 1967, his speech was interrupted 19 times by applause. A bit more than...]]> Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 If, as the saying goes, the perfect is the enemy of the good, then Barack Obama is his own worst enemy. That becomes clear in the upcoming HBO documentary "By the People: The Election of Barack Obama," which is the product of many months of behind-the-scenes access to Obama during the presidential campaign. It reveals -- you will be surprised to learn -- that Barack Obama is pretty close to the most perfect person you will never get to know.

This is what he does not do in the course of the primary and general election campaigns: He does not lose his temper. He does not curse. He does not follow a pretty woman with his eyes or sneak a smoke. He does not dress sloppily. He is always...]]> Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 My love of lo these many years came into the room and asked what I was working on. I detailed some topics, enthralled as usual with my own brilliance, but she scoffed at them all. She said that if she were writing a column, she would have something to say about how the Nobel Peace Prize committee got matters a bit wrong. Instead of citing Barack Obama for things intended, it should have cited the American people for things done. After all, we elected him.

This statement of indisputable but hardly obvious fact struck me as profound and, I think, a bit troubling. In the days after the Norwegian committee made its astounding award, it became common to say the anti-Bush had been...]]> Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Barack Obama's trip to Copenhagen to pitch Chicago for the Olympics would have been a dumb move whatever the outcome. But as it turned out (an airy dismissal would not be an unfair description), it poses some questions about his presidency that are way more important than the proper venue for synchronized swimming. The first, and to my mind most important, is whether Obama knows who he is.

This business of self-knowledge is no minor issue. It bears greatly on the single most crucial issue facing this young and untested president: Afghanistan. Already, we have his choice for Afghanistan commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, taking the measure of his commander in chief and publicly...]]> Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Sooner or later it is going to occur to Barack Obama that he is the president of the United States. As of yet, though, he does not act that way, appearing promiscuously on television and granting interviews like the presidential candidate he no longer is. The election has been held, but the campaign goes on and on. The candidate has yet to become commander in chief.

Take last week's G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh. There, the candidate-in-full commandeered the television networks and the leaders of Britain and France to give the Iranians a dramatic warning. Yet another of their secret nuclear facilities had been revealed and Obama, as anyone could see, was determined to do something...]]> Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The Defenestration of Prague occurred in 1618 when two royal officials were summarily thrown out of some rather high windows and landed, as luck would have it and history recorded it, on a pile of manure. The Defenestration of New York happened just the other day when Barack Obama tossed New York Gov. David Paterson out of a window, landing him not on a pile of manure but on the front page of The New York Times. In its political consequences, this is a distinction without difference.

The Times story, a deft and lethal leak, explicitly said that the White House had asked Paterson to step aside -- not to seek a full term as governor but to content himself with a graceful exit. This,...]]> Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Once upon a time, before I began an interview with Rep. Charles Rangel, I was warned by an aide not to bring up the 1970 race in which the upstart Rangel defeated the virtually legendary Adam Clayton Powell to gain his House seat. In the intervening years, Powell had gone from has-been to icon, with both a state office building and a boulevard named for him in Harlem, and it did Rangel no good in his district to be remembered as the man who brought down Powell -- a little bit of history that desperately needed airbrushing. This, we are now learning, is Rangel's true vocation.

Rangel is now the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and a man of immense importance in...]]> Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 This week it will be eight years since I fled my office and rushed down to Lower Manhattan. Two planes had hit the World Trade Center -- I had seen that on television -- and I jumped on the subway, which, remarkably, was running and then, when I could go no further, went the rest of the way on the run. Suddenly, I heard a crack -- a huge sound that contained the roar of thunder and the snap of lightning -- and the person next to me said, "They're scrambling jets," but the sky was empty and I knew that one of the towers had collapsed. I said to myself, "We'll get you, you bastards," but I was wrong. We haven't.

It has been eight years, two terms of Bush moralism and the beginning...]]> Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Call him Ishmael.

Call him a terrorist or a suicide bomber or anything else you want, but understand that he is willing -- no, anxious -- to give his life for his cause. Call him also a captive, and know that he works with others as part of a team, like the 9/11 hijackers, all of whom died, willingly. Ishmael is someone I invented, but he is not a far-fetched creation. You and I know he exists, has existed and will exist again. He is the enemy.

Now he is in American custody. What will happen? How do we get him to reveal his group's plans and the names of his colleagues? It will be hard. It will, in fact, be harder than it used to be. He can no longer be waterboarded. He...]]> Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 In late November of 1979, I flew to Iowa with Edward Moore Kennedy. He was in first class and I was in coach, but at some point an aide came back and summoned me forward. Kennedy was seated on the aisle; I took the window seat, opened my notebook and asked a string of boilerplate questions: Why are you running for president and why couldn't you give television newsman Roger Mudd the reason when he interviewed you, and what about inflation? Then, for some reason, I asked him if he was having fun and he gave an answer I will never forget.

Fun had always been integral to Camelot, the Kennedy legacy -- sailing and touch football and swimming, the body and the mind, both to their...]]> Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Let's go back to that "teachable moment." It was proclaimed by Barack Obama after he said that police in Cambridge, Mass., had acted "stupidly" in arresting Henry Louis Gates for essentially being black in his own house. It has been a month now, and the one sure thing we have learned in this extended teachable moment is about Obama himself. He can't teach.

This is clear when it comes to two of the major challenges confronting his administration: health care reform and the war in Afghanistan. Both are losing popular support. Increasingly, Americans are becoming convinced that Afghanistan will cost lots of lives and health care reform will cost lots of money -- and both will have...]]> Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Try this on for size: Palinism. What is it? It is an updated version of McCarthyism, which takes it name from the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin liar, demagogue and drunk, and means, according to Wikipedia, "reckless, unsubstantiated accusations, as well as demagogic attacks on the character or patriotism of political adversaries." As far as we know, Sarah Palin is not a drunk.

But she certainly shares McCarthy's other attributes -- and this one as well: the ability to drive the debate. In McCarthy's day, it was anti-communism coupled with national security, and it hardly mattered that he frequently did not have his facts straight. He got huge amounts of attention...]]> Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 With team after team turning him down, the question regarding Michael Vick, thrower of football and killer of dogs, is not whether he will return to the NFL or even whether he should return but whether he would be back already if he were just a wee bit younger and could still thread a needle with the football. The answer, boys and girls, is yes. An excuse would have been found.

Last month, league Commissioner Roger Goodell lifted the ban on Vick, making him eligible to join a team. Vick has done his time in jail, has punched all the remorse and "paid his debt to society" tickets, and even picked up the support of Jesse Jackson, who seems determined to spend his dotage as a parody...]]> Tue, 04 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0500 James von Brunn, who is alleged to have opened fire and killed a guard at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, is apparently a consummate bigot. His former wife said that his hatred of blacks and Jews "ate him alive like a cancer," so it might seem appropriate that in addition to having been indicted last week for murder and gun law violations, he was also charged with hate crimes. At age 89, he proves that you are never too old to hate.

He also proves the stupidity of hate crime laws. A prime justification for such laws is that some crimes really affect a class of people. The hate-crimes bill recently passed by the Senate puts it this way: "A prominent characteristic of a violent crime...]]> Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 When the Pulitzer committee called to say that I had won the Prize for being the only syndicated columnist, or for that matter touch-typist, who had not had an exclusive interview with Barack Obama, I was shocked. I had to check to see if indeed I had not exclusively interviewed the president and, if I had, what he had said and, if I hadn't -- which turned out to be the case -- how it had happened.

I checked my records and diaries and discovered that I had been offered many opportunities to exclusively interview the president but only after he had been exclusively interviewed by all the other columnists, bloggers and of course the anchors of all the networks including cable, basic...]]> Tue, 21 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 A political ad that lucky New Yorkers get to see on television begins with "A million lawyers in America" and goes on to wonder about certain no-bid contracts in nearby New Jersey that will not concern us today. But every time the ad runs, I cannot help thinking about Sonia Sotomayor: A million lawyers in America and Barack Obama chooses her for the Supreme Court.

Don't get me wrong. She is fully qualified. She is smart and learned and experienced and, in case you have not heard, a Hispanic, female nominee, of which there has not been any since the dawn of our fair republic. But she has no cause, unless it is not to make a mistake, and has no passion, unless it is not to show any,...]]> Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 When I was in the Army and known to my friends as "Combat Cohen," I could not get over the fact that the American public supported high Pentagon spending despite firsthand knowledge of astounding waste and theft. I cite, for instance, the well-known and frequently witnessed pillaging of food by mess sergeants. From tasting their stuff, I can say that theft is what they did best.

Now I am similarly perplexed. Many, if not most, Americans have some sort of experience with our nation's mostly private health care system. Yet they still fall prey to the scare tactic that nothing -- but nothing -- could be worse than a government takeover of the system. How things could be worse than...]]> Tue, 07 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 In his novel "The Plot Against America," Philip Roth imagined that Charles Lindbergh, an isolationist and an anti-Semite (but a hell of a flyer), ran for president in 1940 and beat Franklin Roosevelt. In his novel "Fatherland," Robert Harris imagined a Britain that had succumbed to the Nazis. These works are categorized as "alternate history." Here is my contribution to the genre: Sarah Palin becomes president of the United States.

Far-fetched? Not really. After all, Palin really was on the Republican ticket, and the Democratic candidate was both untested nationally and the first African-American to claim the nomination. A significant misstep here or there and the winner could...]]> Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Among the alumni of Far Rockaway High School in Queens, N.Y., are three Nobel Prize winners -- two in physics (Richard Feynman, Burton Richter) and one in medicine (Baruch Blumberg) -- plus a pioneer in women's basketball (Nancy Lieberman), a famous psychologist (Joyce Brothers), a financier (Carl Icahn) and, appallingly and with much regret, Bernard Madoff, class of 1956. Apparently, even back then I didn't like him.

I was in the class of 1958, two years behind Bernie, but in the same class as his wife, Ruth. She was my friend, or so our yearbook strongly suggests, although my memory of our friendship no longer speaks to me. I remember her only as really cute, an object of desire...]]> Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Back during the initial fuss about "don't ask, don't tell," I went over to the Pentagon to see the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. We mostly discussed the situation in the Balkans and the pressure on President Clinton to militarily intervene. Then I asked about gays in the military and the chairman, who was opposed, asked me what I thought the reaction would be if two male soldiers took to the dance floor at some military base. No different, I answered, than if a black man danced with a white woman at the same base about 50 years earlier. Colin Powell seemed taken aback and I thought, naively, that "don't ask don't tell" was doomed.

Now it is 16 years later and "don't ask,...]]> Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The foreign policy sins of the United States fall into two categories: commission and omission. The commission ones include the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, and a one-time Latin American policy tailored to the needs of the United Fruit Co. The sins of omission are less well-known. They include the failure to redeem the hollow promises to various subjugated peoples -- the Hungarians of 1956, the Shiites of 1991 -- that America would come to their aid. In Iran, the Obama administration is intent on not adding to this list.

The current policy, much criticized by prominent Republicans, vindicated Barack Obama's boast in his Cairo speech that he is a "student of history." The student in...]]> Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 To far more people than we would like to admit, the mystery of James W. von Brunn, the alleged shooter at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, is not that he held such weird and depraved views about Jews and the Holocaust, but that those views are considered weird and depraved. In vast parts of the Islamic world, too many people not only deny the Holocaust but embrace the thinking that made it possible.

In his remarkable speech at Cairo University, President Obama only inferentially mentioned this aspect of what has become an ugly part of the Middle East: a tolerance for and advocacy of old-style anti-Semitism. There is, in fact, nothing that von Brunn professed that is not commonly...]]> Tue, 02 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0500 With the nose of a trained columnist, I detect the whiff of elitism-cum-racism emanating from the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. The whiff does not come -- Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich notwithstanding -- from Sotomayor's own statements, nor does it come from her controversial decision upholding race-based affirmative action. It comes, instead, from the general expression of WOW about her background. Imagine, someone from the projects is a success!

"Nobody expects you to be chosen someday for the Supreme Court when your father was a welder with a third-grade education," wrote Richard Lacayo in Time magazine. He is right -- the expectations are all otherwise....]]> Tue, 26 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 "The world is too much with us," the poet William Wordsworth wrote -- and that, of course, was before Elizabeth Edwards published her book and went on television to promote it, ducking questions about a child her husband might have fathered with another woman, but answering other questions about marital infidelity and suffering all the time from cancer. What to do? What to think? What judgments can we make?

I don't want Elizabeth Edwards in my life. Yet I cannot avoid her. She shadows me. Her cherubic visage is on every passing television screen. I have been spending time of late in hospitals visiting a loved one. Elizabeth Edwards is on in every room I pass. She's on in the...]]> Tue, 19 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 In 1947, a British lawyer with no experience in the region arrived in India to draw lines on a map. Within several weeks, Cyril Radcliffe had severed the future Pakistan from India, helping to create the conditions that have since resulted in three wars and the arming of both nations with nuclear weapons. People ask what America would do if Pakistan lost control of its nukes. Wrong question. Ask instead what India might do.

That country has as many as 100 nuclear weapons and the missiles, as well as the airplanes, submarines and surface ships, to launch them. Pakistan also has around 100 nuclear weapons but lacks India's extensive delivery systems. Nonetheless, the two countries...]]> Tue, 12 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Blogger Alert: I have a written a column in defense of Dick Cheney. I know how upsetting this will be to some Cheney critics, and I count myself as one, who think -- in respectful paraphrase of what Mary McCarthy said about Lillian Hellman -- that everything he says is a lie. Yet I have to wonder if what he is saying now is the truth -- i.e., torture works.

In some sense, this is an arcane point since the U.S. insists it will not torture anymore -- not that, the Bush people quickly add, it ever did. Torture is a moral abomination, and President Obama is right to restate American opposition to it. But where I reserve a soupcon of doubt is over the question of whether enhanced...]]> Tue, 05 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500 As the time approaches for President Obama to choose a successor to Justice David Souter, the term "litmus test" will be heard throughout the land. The White House will deny applying any such thing, but the nominee will undoubtedly be chosen according to where she stands on abortion, unions and other issues beloved by liberals. This is fine with me, but what I want to know is where she stands on Frank Ricci. He's a fireman.

He is also the lead plaintiff in a case recently argued before the Supreme Court. It was Ricci's misfortune to take -- and pass -- the New Haven, Conn., fire department's promotion exam for...]]> Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 On April 16, President Obama released the now-infamous torture memos along with a covering statement that said the CIA's old interrogation methods not only failed to "make us safer" but undermined "our moral authority." A week later a woman holding the hand of a child walked into a throng in Baghdad and blew herself up. Apparently she had not heard of our new moral authority.

That term -- "moral authority" -- gets used a lot. There is such a thing, I suppose, although a suicide bomber probably thinks he or she has it in abundance. Whatever it may be, however, it is an awfully thin reed upon which to construct a foreign policy. I, for one, am glad we're no longer torturing anyone,...]]> Tue, 21 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Some residents of Gaza were taken from their homes and shot in the legs or feet. Some were brutally beaten and some were simply murdered, sometimes after hideous torture. If you are expecting -- based on everything that has happened -- that the awful Israelis did this, guess again. It was Hamas, the authentic and genuine government of Gaza. Well, no one's perfect.

The information about the shootings is taken from a report issued Monday by Human Rights Watch and available on its Web site. It says that "Hamas security forces or masked gunmen believed to be with Hamas" executed 18 people, most of whom were accused of collaborating with Israel, sparing the expense and bother of a...]]> Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Former President Bush and some of his White House aides are gathering in Dallas to plan the future George W. Bush Policy Institute. There, I guess, they will ponder grand themes and marble foyers, but I propose they begin by simply renaming the place. I suggest the "George W. Bush Institute of Management Failure" and dedicate it to studying how this presidency went so wrong -- a task as big as Texas itself.

Bush's tenure was truly remarkable. He left office with the lowest poll ratings in 60 years, two wars begun and not ended, and the deepest recession since the Great Depression. If it's true that we learn from our mistakes, Bush's eight years represent a bonanza of...]]> Tue, 07 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Summers is clearly one of these people. D.E. Shaw paid him $5.2 million last year to meet with important clients. In addition, he lent the firm his expertise as a crack economist and it, in turn, provided him with an idea of how a wildly successful hedge fund works. At the same time, Summers made around $2.7 million in speaking fees from other organizations and companies. He was, to use a technical (micro) economic term, on easy street.

Yet he chucked it all for an office on the street of broken dreams, Pennsylvania Avenue. So did national security adviser James L. Jones, who was earning about $2 million a year. David Axelrod, who had been running public affairs firms before...]]> Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The Obama administration has warned both companies that it may let them sink into bankruptcy. In the meantime, though, more money is probably on the way -- along with some cosmetic management changes. Rick Wagoner, GM's chief executive of blessed memory, has already been pushed out and the company's directors are heading in the same direction. Still, somebody -- God only knows who -- is supposed to come up with yet another plan to save GM and do it in 60 days. Maybe they'll outsource it.

It beats me if either company can be saved. Both have proved themselves to be singularly incompetent over the years, but lately some brain waves have been detected. GM, in particular, has...]]> Tue, 24 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The pressure for the legislation was great. In just a day, Charlie Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, went from opposing the idea to introducing the very bill he had earlier denounced. Rangel had all the stock phrases ready -- stuff about shattered dreams and greedy executives, which is all true enough -- but he was right when he first said that the tax code should not be used as a "political weapon.'' With such an about-face, it's a miracle he did not wind up in traction.

As for Obama, around the time this extremely ill-considered piece of legislation was flying through Congress and Pelosi was waxing very hot indeed on television, the cool president...]]> Tue, 17 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500 Or take Richard Fuld. He is the former chairman of Lehman Brothers, which, as we all know, is no more. He lost about $1 billion.

Or take Citigroup's former chairman, Sanford Weill. He lost about $500 million.

Or take all the good people at Bear Stearns, the company Cramer adored almost to the bitter end. They went down with their stock.

If these people kept their money in these companies -- financial and insurance giants they had built and knew from the inside -- then how was even Jim Cramer to know these firms were essentially hollow?

I give you one other name: Richard Cohen. He who writes this column had some of his (extremely)...]]> Tue, 10 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0500 The Obama administration is talking to the Syrians. It is willing to talk to the Iranians. It will parley with the North Koreans. It has kicked the wheels off the "Axis of Evil" and has, in general, shied from the lofty language of the preceding Bush years, especially all that stuff about wars on terrorism and spreading democracy. This is an administration to bring a lump to the throat of Brent Scowcroft, the arch realist, who has never mistaken foreign policy for missionary work, even though they both usually take place abroad.

For the most part, this is good. Even George Bush was starting to realize that he had overreached, over-dreamed, under-thought and...]]> Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0600 Then Zweig experienced a stark loss of control over his life. He went from being at home anywhere in Europe to being on the lam, a Jew fleeing the Nazis. He wound up in Brazil where, in the depth of both despair and hideous reality, he killed himself. His world -- "The World of Yesterday," is what he called his memoir -- had vanished.

Zweig's story is extreme, yet it contains elements of the current economic calamity. The term economic "depression" has now been uttered. This means not that things are suddenly worse, but that we have recognized them for what they are. We give power to words or terms -- which is why it was news in itself when the media chose to label what was...]]> Tue, 24 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 Weizmann's admonition may not be known to Avigdor Lieberman, an immigrant from the former Soviet republic of Moldova and now one of Israel's most important political leaders. Lieberman's Yisrael Beitenu Party placed third in the recent election, meaning he will almost certainly be part of the next government. Lieberman is often called a "nationalist." Maybe so, but he is also an anti-Arab demagogue.

The Arabs of Lieberman's antipathy are not Israel's traditional enemies -- either in Gaza, the West Bank or elsewhere in the Middle East. He is referring instead to the Arabs of Israel proper, about 20 percent of the population. They are his fellow citizens, some of them of...]]> Tue, 17 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 Gregg's turnabout was supposedly an embarrassment for the new Obama administration -- and I suppose it was. But it also was a moment of realism, of clarity, of an antidotal repudiation to all the gauzy talk about partisanship -- about how it is always pernicious and usually silly: games for the sake of games. What Gregg has shown was that ideology matters, ideas count, beliefs divide -- and legitimately so -- and he could only go so far and no further. He decided to be true to himself.

Something of the same has prevailed since the inauguration. Congressional Republicans have made a stand on the stimulus package, just as they did on the original bank bailout when they...]]> Tue, 10 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 Still, he could go to Treblinka, also in Poland, or any of the other Polish camps -- Sobibor, Belzec, Majdanek. In Germany, Austria and elsewhere he could visit Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Flossenburg, Mauthausen, Ravensbruck or the many subsidiary camps -- a trek that could take him across Europe and into the cold reality of historic horror.

Holocaust denial suggests a mind perforated by anti-Semitism, a bigotry so extreme that it blinds the bigot to mounds of shoes and hair and eyeglasses, all of these exhibited at various Holocaust museums. To be a denier, it is necessary to believe that all the survivors -- Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel and all the others -- staggered...]]> Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0600 That message is only compounded by the stimulus package. The need for at least $1 trillion in economic stimulus is beyond argument, and the GOP's obsession with tax cuts -- What if taxpayers don't spend enough? -- is just a version of what Samuel Johnson said about second marriages: "The triumph of hope over experience." (The most recent tax rebate proved to be a relative bust.) But what's lacking in the package is precisely what Barack Obama campaigned on: change. The stimulus is mostly more of the same.

Education should have been the area where Obama put some meat on the bones of change. The administration has earmarked an astounding $100 billion for K-12 education, but...]]> Tue, 27 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0600 Dershowitz, mind you, was not in favor of torture but argued that if torture was going to be done, it was best that it be done legally. In a similar vein, the thoughtful Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter mulled the legality, the morality and the efficacy of torture. In the end, Alter ruled it out -- although not sodium pentothal (truth serum) or off-shoring terrorism suspects "to our less squeamish allies." In fact, the government was already sending suspects to be interrogated abroad.

Alter's essay created quite a stir -- and to his considerable surprise, a lot of whispered support from liberals. Around the same time, historian Jay Winik wrote about the usefulness of...]]>