Watching Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi do his Caligula thing in the ruins of the Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, and reading about his son’s St. Barts fests with Beyoncé, I confess that disgust yielded to nausea: enough is enough. There are as many versions of current events in Libya...

If President Obama, senior policymakers and members of Congress feel that they were “caught off guard” by the events in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere in the Middle East, maybe they should focus the blame on themselves. Intelligence does not “trickle down” to the president: he is the intelligence...

What’s unfolding in the Arab world today is the mother of all wake-up calls. And what the voice on the other end of the line is telling us is clear as a bell: “America, you have built your house at the foot of a volcano. That volcano is now spewing lava from different cracks and is rumbling like...

LIKE any self-respecting Irish Catholic boy from Boston, I covered the walls of my childhood bedroom with Red Sox paraphernalia, images of Jesus and photos of the Kennedy brothers. Yes — Jack, Bobby and Teddy. Unnaturally handsome for politicians, they had a look in their eyes that said, “Let’s...

Buried deep beneath the stories about executive bonuses, the stock market surge and the economy’s agonizingly slow road to recovery is the all-but-silent suffering of the many millions of Americans who, economically, are going down for the count. A 46-year-old teacher in Charlotte, Vt., who has...

It has been argued that Ronald Reagan was a myth himself, a construct of his own and other people’s imaginings, rather than an extraordinary American about whom some untruths are told. The sentimental colossus his acolytes are trying to erect today, with gilded pecs, red-painted smile and an...

Jonathan Alter wrote a book about Barack Obama’s first year in office called “The Promise.” That’s a great title because it works on so many levels. For example, over the past four years, Obama’s career has been marked by a constant promise: He has continually said he is on the verge of...

Bernard L. Madoff said he never thought the collapse of his Ponzi scheme would cause the sort of destruction that has befallen his family. In his first interview for publication since his arrest in December 2008, Mr. Madoff — looking noticeably thinner and rumpled in khaki prison garb — maintained...

THE stock market has been big news in recent days. Last week’s report that Deutsche Börse, a giant German exchange, intends to buy the New York Stock Exchange, creating a company worth some $24 billion, arrived shortly after the Dow broke the 12,000-point barrier for the first time since before...

Perhaps the most effective antidote to 9/11 will prove to be 2/11, the day Hosni Mubarak conceded the game was up with his 30-year-old dictatorship and left town under military escort for the beach. We’ve tried invasions of Muslim lands. We’ve tried imposing new systems of government on them....