WASHINGTON -- For the last 60 years of Egyptian dictatorships, several questions have dominated the bedeviling "democracy" debate there. ... More »EGYPT STANDS ON THE BRINK OF UNIQUE DEMOCRACY
The issue will be the bane of our existence until November. Here it is only May – and the back-and-forth over Mitt Romney’s career in private equity at Bain Capital is already as confused as Facebook’s initial stock offering. Buffeted by TV ads, web videos, feigned outraged and zigzagging Democrats, voters undoubtedly are stunned by the sudden outbreak of high-decibel arguments over Romney’s business career. More »Romney's record at Bain Capital: Does it matter?
WASHINGTON -- Until recently, Memorial Day has been a time for men's wartime sacrifices to be commemorated. Men fought the wars, said "I do" to Uncle Sam posters pointing at YOU, while women "kept the home fires burning."But, ahhh, things do change. Slowly at first, over the last two generations, American women began "going to war" in Pentagon offices. Today, they are sharing most jobs except combat with the men. The three prominent women I am going to commemorate in my own little way today were not exactly IN the armed forces. ... More »HOLIDAY INSPIRES POIGNANT REMEMBRANCES
WASHINGTON -- My excellent counselor on stocks, bonds and investments in my hometown of Chicago has long loved Jamie Dimon. My guy, for whom I am close to a charity client, has said to me many times, "That Jamie ... he's the best." Then he would add sadly, "If you newspaper people had any money, we'd put it in JPMorgan Chase."Well, perhaps this week marks the first time "we newspaper people" are damned lucky that we don't have any money to invest in the country's largest bank, with its 260,000 employees and its losses in the first half of the year moving from $2 billion to $3 billion. ... More »LET'S GET REAL ON CAPITALISM
WASHINGTON -- Ah, spring Sundays in Moscow. Poets out basking in the early sunshine, reading their evocative words to the crowds. Writers, once described by Stalin as the "engineers of the human soul," out marching from the statue of poet Aleksandr S. Pushkin into the city. Now it would be better to call them guardians of the human soul. ... More »RUSSIA BEGINS TO SHAKE OFF ITS PATERNALISTIC PAST
WASHINGTON -- President Obama has jumped off the fence where he has been sitting so long and approved same-sex marriage. Telling ABC News that "same-sex couples should be able to get married" because all Americans should be treated equally, Obama's surprising words came only days after Joe Biden's jolting ones, with everybody thinking he was undercutting his president.This change marks perhaps the most difficult and sobering change in American thinking and law in decades. ... More »GAY SECRECY HARMS US ALL, IN WAYS LARGE AND SMALL
WASHINGTON -- Every article out of Afghanistan these days speaks primarily about the U.S. preparing to leave, but not until it can leave behind an Afghan army well-trained enough to police the country.Even President Obama, in his important speech from Bagram Air Base last week, stressed that although our troops would leave in 2014, the world should be assured that the Afghans were ready to take responsibility for their own security, a transition that will start next year. ... More »WASHINGTON'S SHADOW WARS UNDERMINE AMERICAN POWER
WASHINGTON -- Some weeks ago, when the comic/sinister Moammar Gadhafi was still roaming from desert hideout to city basement every night to avoid the Libyan rebels, a lawyer and I had an interesting conversation about that essentially uninteresting man."It would be a shame if he were killed in the battles," he said thoughtfully. "He'll certainly be captured in the next few days and he should be brought to trial by the Libyans.""Oooh NO!" I said, in one of my more intractable vocal tones. "We can thank God if he is just killed by his own people and then they can put that whole period to rest. ... More »A FATE WORSE THAN DEATH
WASHINGTON -- Forget the rules of the Secret Service or the U.S. Marines; it is really what the mothers of those men would have advised that would have saved them from the embarrassment, humiliation and ridicule (not to speak of unemployment) they have encountered after last week in Cartagena, Colombia.Yes, once again, we must stop to consider the kitchen wisdom that "Mother knows best."Take the venue. Mother is told that her Secret Service son is going to Cartagena to protect our president when he arrives there for the Summit of the Americas. ... More »BOYS WILL BEHAVE BADLY WHEN MOM ISN'T AROUND
WASHINGTON -- For those of us who have had even the slightest radiation for cancer, the idea of small cities or whole societies being "infected" by pollution, whether of lead, mercury or any one of a number of poisons left behind in careless industrial waste, does not seem so foreign, but it should be terrifying.My two months of radiation, which I never felt or saw while its rays were being quietly bounced off me by those huge, rumbling machines, at first left me with nothing amiss. After all, the sessions were not even 15 minutes in length. ... More »HEROIC NGO TAKES ON BIG JOB OF GLOBAL TOXIC CLEANUP
WASHINGTON -- My colleagues in the press have been obsessing over Mitt Romney's money. And, yes, I suppose that $250 million is a lot to have for a man who apparently can't afford an extra car to carry his dog. But the predominant criticism -- that "Mittens," as they call him on the press bus, can't "feel our pain" because of his money -- is about as insipid as it gets.We don't need a president to feel our pain. When I'm in pain, I'll go to a friend, to a psychiatrist or to a doctor. When we need some leadership, I'll look for someone who can RELIEVE the nation's pain. ... More »IF YOU LOVED BUSH'S FOREIGN POLICY, YOU'LL LOVE ROMNEY'S
WASHINGTON -- Six years ago in Cairo, I made a point of dropping by the newly opened offices of the Muslim Brotherhood to see what they were really up to. They had been banned for years. Especially, their burning down a third of Cairo in the 1940s had not endeared them to other Egyptians.But now they were suddenly "legal" again. ... More »IGNORANCE, IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS, IS ANYTHING BUT BLISS
WASHINGTON -- Lest you think there are no great and amazing things happening in the world, think again. Consider the beleaguered country of Burma, down on the Bay of Bengal in South Asia, and your faith in mankind will be instantly restored.For it was there, in that magical country of knowing Buddhist statues and valleys filled with pagodas, of British colonial history -- and of the famous Burma Road that carried supplies for the Allies to China in World War II -- that Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and her democrats were elected to the parliament last weekend. ... More »HISTORIC BURMA IS POISED TO RECLAIM ITS GLORY
WASHINGTON -- The headlines tell daily of more deaths in what is becoming a Syrian civil war. Underneath the surface, an increasingly worried "conversation" has been going on in the region's newspapers and among the Arab intelligentsia.To oversimplify, the concern is growing rapidly that, led by Syria, much of the Middle East is essentially forsaking its colonially imposed borders and devolving into its original historical forms.Writing recently in the Daily Star in Beirut, Michael Young, the paper's opinion editor, expressed the idea that this would take the form of "ethnic statelets. ... More »SYRIA'S CIVIL WAR THREATENS ENTIRE REGION
WASHINGTON -- There have been many times when I have felt sorry for Russia -- for example, when it was the hardest-line Soviet state in the '60s, and an attractive middle-aged Russian woman held back her tears when she said to me, "They've killed all the best of us!"I felt sorry on New Year's 2003, 12 long years after the fall of the Soviet Union, when a group of us were riding the train from the beautiful finesse of St. Petersburg to the gray historical monolith of Moscow. As I watched out the window in the dark, I found that there was exactly one light burning in each town we passed. ... More »POOR RUSSIANS, HAVING TO DEAL WITH OUR SILLY POLITICIANS
WASHINGTON -- It was THAT weekend again! We have just finished off one more dinner and show full of hilarity, courtesy of the 127-year-old Gridiron Club and Foundation. Or perhaps IT has finished us off. That's an argument that can go two ways at least. ... More »TRADITION REIGNS AT THE GRIDIRON DINNER
WASHINGTON -- Remember, after the 9/11 attacks, when we went into Afghanistan and then detoured to even greater "glory" in the sandy no-man's land of Iraq?The first foray, into Afghanistan, where the al-Qaida rebels were supposed to be hiding out, started during the fall of 2001, but that apparent win was then halted when American "statesmen" George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld looked out at Baghdad and declared, as one voice, "MINE!" We were to be greeted with flowers and kisses and establish relations with both countries that would serve our stead forever. ... More »INSTEAD OF INVASION, LET'S TRY SOMETHING ELSE FOR A CHANGE
WASHINGTON -- Someday, perhaps some years from now, some unbiased observer will write a book providing a genuine analysis of Willard Mitt Romney and why he was so misrepresented by many of us in the press during this tedious campaign. Readers will be amazed. ... More »WILL THE REAL MITT ROMNEY EVER EMERGE?
WASHINGTON -- How exactly are we to make sense of a world like ours on this first anniversary of many historic events? Most observers expected Egypt and Tunisia, which exploded a year ago this month against their dictators, to have by now reached some level of stability. The military leaderships that tenuously took over, supposedly to lead the nations to genuine elections within six months, should have by now calmed the countries, gotten real constitutions written and laid the basis for new, truly elected, democratic governments. ... More »MIDEAST ANNIVERSARIES MARKED BY UNREST AND HOPE
WASHINGTON -- While the Republican presidential candidates are trying their best to grind the story of the Obama administration into the dust, something largely unnoted has been happening behind the scenes. President Obama and his team have been quietly building a new narrative and structure for America that should outlast his years in office.Until the last few months, it has been possible to wonder if Barack Obama and his stirring admonition of "Yes, we can" were failing. There seemed to be little accomplishment to grasp onto there. ... More »OBAMA'S NEW APPROACHES ARE AT LAST TAKING SHAPE
WASHINGTON -- As the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, enters its 50th year, one can rather easily trace the manner in which "globalization" -- the idea that totally open and unencumbered trade among nations -- was expected to save the world. Endless sessions on the theme entered the economic and political parlance and seemed to the elites and to the free thinkers to be the world's salvation.It used to be that globalization was an idea no person in his or her right mind would think of challenging. It was so good, so right; it was the moral answer to the globe's economic inequities. ... More »GLOBALIZATION IS NOT THE ANSWER
WASHINGTON -- One had a feeling during President Obama's State of the Union address that the Republicans, naturally a major part of his audience in the Congress, were slogging along in the snow and ice of past winters, hanging onto the past, reluctant to embrace future change.At the same time, as President Obama's speech spun along, it seemed less a grocery list of items purchased and checked off than a series of dream sequences through which he stopped every once in a while and stated confidently: "This CAN happen; in fact, I insist, this MUST happen. ... More »OBAMA'S VISIONARY IDEAS PAINT A FUTURE THAT CAN BE REALIZED
WASHINGTON -- One of the first flash mobs appeared in New York City in 2003, when 130 New Yorkers were called together in messages on social media to converge upon the 9th floor rug department of Macy's. There, they bewildered salespeople for a few minutes, dancing around, and then they disbanded.In San Francisco that same year, a flash mob, organized through email and online forums, gathered in Dolores Park, and at exactly 2:07 p.m., leapt to their feet and formed giant standing circles, holding hands as they danced for 10 minutes before running off as unexpectedly as they ran in. ... More »FLASH MOBS ARE NEW PHENOMENON WE STRUGGLE TO UNDERSTAND
WASHINGTON -- Tuesday's New Hampshire primary has to go down in history as one of the silliest days in the Republican Party's history. You could put aside your absurd soap operas and just watch the candidates do their rhetorical circus tricks instead.All the theatrics concerned leading candidate Mitt Romney. The former Massachusetts governor had the nerve to say cheerfully, even jauntily, that "I like to fire people ..."Oh my. Within seconds, one would have thought that the seemingly endless lineup of Republican candidates had exploded. ... More »ELECTION SILLINESS IS FAR FROM OVER
WASHINGTON -- "We are already in the future. And the future is not calm. But there's no need to be afraid."When you ponder those words, originally spoken in Russian, you can feel some of the ancient Russian multi-meaning in them. Spoken with a touch of Tolstoyan poetry, they alternate between hope and desperation.This man of today's Moscow goes on: "Tectonic structures in society are shifting, the social fabric is taking on a new quality. ... Turbulence, even strong, is not a catastrophe but a form of stability. All will be fine."Then, at another point, "The system has already changed. ... More »CHANGE STIRS THE AIR IN RED SQUARE
WASHINGTON -- Ten years ago, I was traveling with a group of international journalists up the Volga River to investigate the long-closed "Old Russia" of great monastery settlements that ruled Russia from the 10th century until communism. And we found ourselves starting out from Yaroslavl, about five hours east of Moscow.It was a lovely city, and I was particularly enchanted by the exquisite cupolas of several Russian Orthodox churches rising above the river. "How beautiful," I thought. Then, before sailing, our guide showed us prints of the "Old Yaroslavl" in a museum. ... More »THE BEAUTY OF CHURCHES MAY LEAD US TO HIGHER THOUGHTS
WASHINGTON -- When the dull power of the Soviet Union collapsed just 20 years ago this month, well-wishers and dreamers in the West were certain that democracy would be the next step for Mother Russia. Western economists from American universities poured into Moscow with all the answers.In particular, economists from Harvard dreamed up ways to issue Russian-style chits to individual Russians presumably showing ownership in mammoth, formerly state-owned enterprises. Thus, it was believed, would capitalism come to Russia.Only it didn't. ... More »TWENTY YEARS AFTER THE FALL, RUSSIANS MAY FINALLY GET FREEDOM
WASHINGTON -- In 1984, when I was a questioner at the presidential debates in Kansas City, I asked a simple question about Ronald Reagan's and Walter Mondale's ideas on immigration. It was, I thought, a "nothing" question, but I was way before my time. There was a kind of hush when I asked it, and quite a number of people turned their backs on me afterward.Mrs. Mondale kindly came up to me afterward and complimented me. I, meanwhile, didn't have much of an idea why I was being so all-but-isolated. ... More »GOP HOPEFULS SHOW NEW SAVVY ON IMMIGRATION, FOREIGN POLICY
WASHINGTON -- All the great markers of American history -- whether the Mayflower Compact, the Constitution, the civil rights and voting acts, the integration of the armed forces or the equality of women -- have been things that have held us together. They marked how, at the heart of our polity, we were standing together, a nation united before the eyes of the world. That is why this past week has been so deeply disappointing and improbable for those of us who believed we knew some truths about the nation we love, but no longer seem to understand. ... More »AMERICA NEEDS TO RECLAIM ITS COMMON CAUSE