Suzanne Fields

FIELDS: Turning against Israel

Iran is just short of becoming a nuclear power, and nearly every nation on earth is worried. Israel worries most of all. Nuclear weapons will afford Iran the means to deliver on its threat to "wipe Israel off the map," as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad so cheerfully puts it. Children throughout the Middle East already study maps with a hole in them where Israel used to be. Some are tempted to dismiss Mr. Ahmadinejad as a blowhard and a clown, but he's a credible and loud voice to the millions of angry Muslims surrounding the only democracy in the Middle East.

May 26, 2010

FIELDS: Tea for the Tambourine Man

The pundits, wonks and wannabes are busy debating what this week's primary elections mean. Newt Gingrich says Barack Obama has only "a 20 percent chance" of re-election two years hence (and he wants to be the reason why). Punditry and wonkery are great fun, and occasionally get things right, but a man named Jonathan Kahn actually represents something new for conservatives to sing about. He's on his way to becoming an authentic hip-pop culture hero.

May 20, 2010

Tea for the Tambourine Man

The pundits, wonks and wannabes are busy debating what this week's primary elections mean. Newt Gingrich says Barack Obama has only "a 20 percent chance" of re-election two years hence (and he wants to be the reason why). Punditry and wonkery are great fun, and occasionally get things right, but a man named Jonathan Kahn actually represents something new for conservatives to sing about. He's on his way to becoming an authentic hip-pop culture hero.

May 19, 2010

Researching good and evil

The idea of good and evil, out of fashion for awhile, is back. In the pop-culture game of what's "in" and what's "out," you could say morality is in, moral relativism is out.

May 13, 2010

FIELDS: Confiscating freedom

We're grateful for plain old cops. What a relief that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who could be mistaken for Inspector Clouseau, was not in charge of the search for the Times Square bomber. The mayor, he told NBC News, was looking for "a homegrown," someone protesting health care reform legislation. Janet Napolitano, the secretary of Homeland Security, was looking into "a man-caused disaster," not terrorism, and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. was on the scout for someone to listen to his Miranda rights.

May 7, 2010

FIELDS: An antidote to foreign policy charade

Pedestrians in Washington have to be a patient lot. The Nuclear Security Summit was a big deal for President Obama and the visiting heads of state, but for everyone else, it was only an opportunity to watch diplomats speeding down the avenues in big black rented limousines, trying to look important. They were in Washington to talk about ways to put nuclear weapons under lock and key, but it's hard to find anyone who thinks it was anything more than big talk.

April 15, 2010

FIELDS: Toward a new capitalism

Among the angels who rebelled against God and followed Lucifer in Milton's "Paradise Lost," Mammon is the most

April 8, 2010

FIELDS: Pass the gefilte fish

You scream, I scream, and even Dolley Madison screamed for ice cream, serving it at the White House for the first time. Vanilla, of course, and she got the attention of voters with a sweet tooth. Rutherford B. Hayes banned liquor at the White House, trying to encourage Republicans to temperance, so his wife, Lucy, served lemonade. She became known as "Lemonade Lucy," and this embarrassed his secretary of state, accustomed to entertaining diplomats. He boasted after one official dinner that "the water flowed like champagne."

April 2, 2010

FIELDS: Profiles in politics

A certain Washington dinner party - most of the guests were conservatives - dissolved in raucous laughter the other night when the host asked me what to make of what's going on in the nation's capital. "Cynicism reigns unchallenged," I said.

March 25, 2010

FIELDS: Deeply negative signals

Joe Biden was late for a very important date in Jerusalem. He had been invited to dinner with the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, but he was delayed by a long telephone call from Washington. He would have to deliver an American rebuke to the announcement that Israel would build 1,600 new houses for Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem. The timing of the announcement was boorish and insensitive. Dinner got cold, and so did the reception for Vice President Biden, who dutifully showed anger.

March 18, 2010

FIELDS: The right stuff of life

On the night gold dust fell on the stars in Hollywood, millions of men and women were putting their lives on the line in Iraq merely by casting a vote. Hollywood nervously measured the size of the television audience for its Academy Awards ceremony while a different statistic was measured in Iraq, where 62 percent of the eligible voters demonstrated courage at the polls.

March 11, 2010

FIELDS: A movie to make us proud

Everyone gets to be a movie critic in the days leading up to the award of the Oscars, betting favorites to win, place or show. Down the home stretch, "Avatar" and "Hurt Locker" battle it out to the finish line. What delicious irony that the "jockeys" were once married to each other. James Cameron, director of "Avatar," and Kathryn Bigelow, director of "Hurt Locker," have untied the marital knot, but their talents remain locked tightly together.

March 5, 2010

FIELDS: Beyond the statistics

Richard Nixon declared a War on Cancer in his 1971 State of the Union address. Pres -ident Obama devoted one sentence to our investment in promising innovative research in cancer. He mentioned the potential solar treatment that can kill cancer cells while leaving healthy cells untouched. Nixon may have employed a met -aphor of "over -kill" in fighting a terrible disease, but Mr. Obama slighted the subject, despite earlier statements about wanting "a cure for cancer in our time."

February 25, 2010

FIELDS: Leaving home and hearth for battle

Some of our women in the military are new American heroines, having served with both sacrifice and distinction. We owe them all a debt we can never fully repay. But some of them are victims of military bureaucrats and high-ranking policymakers who are blind to the values of our culture and deaf to the ancient call of history.

February 17, 2010

FIELDS: David Plouffe needs a friend

David Plouffe is a friend of mine. Not just a Facebook friend, either, but a real friend. He writes to me, personally. "Friend," the president's chief guru wrote to me in a letter that popped into my e-mail on the eve of the president's State of the Union address, "We must regroup, refocus and re-engage on the vital work ahead."

January 27, 2010

FIELDS: The Obama Brown-out

Scott Brown arrives in Washington driving his famous truck and he looks like a million-dollar Jimmy Stewart playing Mr. Smith. President Obama polishes his State of the Union address, and suddenly he's looking discounted to more like a few thousand dollars. The two events are not unrelated.

January 21, 2010

FIELDS: I compute, therefore I am

Health care reform blah, blah, blah. Underwear bomber blah, blah, blah. Immigration reform blah, blah, blah.

January 15, 2010

Beauty in the beast

The Academy Awards have expanded the number of best picture nominations to 10, and the buzz on Planet Earth is all about "Avatar."

December 31, 2009

Tanking of a true believer

The transgression of a celebrity can be worth a thousand sermons. A lot of the gossip on the Internet and in the tabloids is cheap and irresponsible, but accurate dishing on the failures of the rich and famous usually has a bracing effect on society.

December 24, 2009

Sundays aren’t for shopping

The Germans are so strong on their family values they want the state to enforce them. They're debating now whether shops should be shuttered on Sunday by law. It's a burning issue in coffee shops, on the street and in the newspapers, hotter than whether Chancellor Angela Merkel should send more troops to Afghanistan.

December 17, 2009