The question Mr. Obama should have asked right after the inaugural parade was: What will happen after we capture the next Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or Abu Zubaydah? Instead, he took action without a meeting of his full national security staff, and without a legal review of all the policy options available to meet the threats facing our country.
What such a review would have made clear is that the civilian law-enforcement system cannot prevent terrorist attacks. What is needed are the tools to gain vital intelligence, which is why, under President George W. Bush, the CIA could hold and interrogate high-value al Qaeda leaders. On the advice of his intelligence advisers, the president could have authorized coercive interrogation methods like those used by Israel and Great Britain in their antiterrorism campaigns. (He could even authorize waterboarding, which he did three times in the years after 9/11.)
Who am I? Why am I? Where am I going?
So very, very much for the Republicans to ponder in this Winter of the Democrats' Contentment. So many questions. Even the reliable color scheme has gone blurry. Isn't that big-shot GOP strategist Alex Castellanos swirling Republican red with Democrat blue, and coming up with a Washington consulting shop called -- heavens! -- "Purple?" Why, yes.
"Sit tight," the new firm's Web site says. "We are still mixing the colors."
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"We're in this rebuilding time," Monica Notzon, a Washington-based Republican fundraiser, helpfully explained this month. "Trying to figure out who we are."
It is into this new world order, this Washington version of an existential whorl, that a steadfastly loyal group of Republicans descend this week, skidding into an iced-over landscape and holing up at the Capital Hilton beginning yesterday for a four-day winter meeting of the Republican National Committee. (Not to be missed on the restorative agenda: a "Reboot the RNC" open house.) They've themed the whole get-together "Republican for a Reason," and left it at that.
"Republican for a reason?" says Stephen Scheffler, a committeeman from Iowa, pausing before a banner carrying the slogan. "I don't know what that means."
The more conservative, partisan, and strident their message becomes, the more they alienate non-base Republicans. But the more they alienate non-base Republicans, the fewer of them are left to worry about appeasing. Thus, their message becomes continually more appealing to the base -- but more conservative, partisan, and strident to the rest of us. And the process loops back upon itself.
Endowed with an art student’s pictorial imagination, a journalist’s sociological eye and a poet’s gift for metaphor, John Updike — who died on Tuesday at 76 — was arguably this country’s one true all-around man of letters. He moved fluently from fiction to criticism, from light verse to short stories to the long-distance form of the novel: a literary decathlete in our age of electronic distraction and willful specialization, Victorian in his industriousness and almost blogger-like in his determination to turn every scrap of knowledge and experience into words.
It is as a novelist who opened a big picture window on the American middle class in the second half of the 20th century, however, that he will be best remembered. In his most resonant work, Mr. Updike gave “the mundane its beautiful due,” as he once put it, memorializing the everyday mysteries of love and faith and domesticity with extraordinary nuance and precision. In Kodachrome-sharp snapshots, he gave us the 50’s and early 60’s of suburban adultery, big cars and wide lawns, radios and hi-fi sets, and he charted the changing landscape of America in the 70’s and 80’s, as malls and subdivisions swallowed up small towns and sexual and social mores underwent a bewildering metamorphosis.
Mr. Updike’s four keenly observed Rabbit novels (“Rabbit, Run,” 1960; “Rabbit Redux,” 1971; “Rabbit Is Rich,” 1981; and “Rabbit at Rest,” 1990) chronicled the adventures of one Harry Rabbit Angstrom — high school basketball star turned car salesman, householder and errant husband — and his efforts to cope with the seismic public changes (from feminism to the counterculture to antiwar protests) that rattled his cozy nest. Harry, who self-importantly compared his own fall from grace to this country’s waning power on the global stage, his business woes to the national deficit, was both a representative American of his generation and a kind of scientific specimen — an index to the human species and its propensity for doubt and narcissism and self immolation.
“I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles, if I had to,” he told The Paris Review in 1967. “The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.”
His essays and criticism alone filled more than a dozen volumes, and ranged from “Golf Dreams: Writings on Art” (1996) to “Just Looking: Essays on Art” (1989) and “Still Looking: Essays on American Art” (2005) to “Self-Consciousness: Memoirs” (1989) to his famous piece on the baseball star Ted Williams’s last game, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” (1977), which first appeared in The New Yorker on Oct. 22, 1960.
While his vast output of poetry tended toward light verse, in “Midpoint and Other Poems” (1969), the title work undertakes a self-examination at age 35, comically combining a homage to past great poets, autobiography and experimental typography in what the author called “a joke on the antique genre of the long poem.”
The poem concludes:
Born laughing, I’ve believed in the absurd,
Which brought me this far; henceforth, if I can,
I must impersonate a serious man.
As his fiction matured, Mr. Updike’s prose grew leaner and more muscular, and his novels waxed more exotic in form, locale and subject matter, especially in “The Coup” (1978), set in an imaginary African country; “Brazil” (1994), a venture in magic realism; “Toward the End of Time” (1997), whose story occurs in 2020, following a war between the United States and China; “Gertrude and Claudius” (2000), about Hamlet’s mother and uncle, and “The Terrorist” (2006), a fictional study of a convert to Islam who tries to blow up the Lincoln Tunnel.
Smarting over their party's losses in the November election in Harris County, some local Republican precinct chairmen are poised to try to restructure party leadership, effectively deposing party chairman Jared Woodfill -- tonight.Precinct leaders meet at 7 p.m. at the Houston Community College campus on the West Loop, and the show is free and open to the public.
Restive GOPers will try to get the assemblage to create a seven-member steering committee to set a new course for the party and then yield to whomever is elected party chairman in the county's March 2010 primary.
They allege that under Woodfill, the party failed to coordinate effectively with like-minded folks in adjacent counties, to raise enough money to run party operations, to recruit enough candidates for public office and to expand the party's voter base, among other things.
Woodfill has been preaching some of the same goals: expand the party's appeal to new voters; use new technologies to spread the word. But he's the one who was in charge when the party lost two-dozen judgeships and other local seats in November in the face of a Democratic vote wave that was generated by President Obama's candidacy, scandals involving local GOP officials (as depicted here by Democrats) and other factors.
The Rev. Gene Pack prayed at the start of tonight's 7 o'clock Harris County Republican leadership meeting for blessings upon party chairman Jared Woodfill "in these times of rebellion."When the meeting was adjourned after 9:30, Woodfill's critics hadn't even tried to introduce a resolution that .. would have essentially taken away much of his authority.
With President Barack Obama a strong supporter (of SCHIP) and bipartisan Senate support precluding the possibility of a filibuster, many GOP members of Congress who had previously opposed the program joined the majority. ... No such rethinking of previous partisan positions was evident in the Texas delegation, where 20 Republicans voted against the SCHIP bill. The state leads the nation in percentage of uninsured children, with Harris County having the largest rate of unprotected youngsters.That’s why the continuing opposition of Houston-region GOP representatives John Culberson, Pete Olson, Kevin Brady, Michael McCaul, Ted Poe and Ron Paul is so unfathomable. The Southeast Texas medical safety net is already stretched to breaking by the burden of treating uninsured patients in overcrowded hospital emergency rooms and absorbing the costs of their care.
In opposing SCHIP on the grounds it is socialized medicine, too costly and subsidizes illegal alien health care, the lawmakers are ignoring this fact: Taxpayers already bear the cost of treatment for the uninsured. Every child covered by the state-supplied private policies is one less expense for area health care providers, who otherwise pass the cost of indigent care on to insured patients.
“I think he has decided that the only chance Republicans have is to be very aggressive,” political scientist Larry Sabato said of the Texan, who
came to Washington six years ago as a defender of President George W. Bush.
New York Gov. David Paterson, who appointed Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand as Clinton’s successor, called Cornyn’s maneuvering “grandstanding and self-promotion.”
And some Republican Senate colleagues want less partisanship and more collaboration. As Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., put it: “The message that the American people are sending us now is that they want us to work together and get to work.”
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And Cornyn pointedly challenged Reid about alleged ties to lobbyists. A Reid spokesman dismissed the criticism by Cornyn as having “everything to do with raising money.”
