Suzanne Fields

Her roguish success

The good news for George W. Bush is that the haters have just about worn out the object of their contempt. The Bush years have been remaindered to the old-news bin. The good news for Sarah Palin is that she's the designated heir.

December 10, 2009

Getting down to business

This has been a bad year for both rich and poor, and particularly annoying for celebrities. The masters of the universe demonstrated how they can't even master Wall Street, leaving the rest of us to pay for the cleanup; and their big houses and luxury cars no longer invite the unquestioning respect of the shallow and the superficial.

December 3, 2009

Over the groaning board

This is not the happiest Thanksgiving. So many out of work, so many others afraid they're next, and the recession is not receding as swiftly as we were told it would.

November 26, 2009

Polishing her mettle

Sarah Palin arouses venom from the left like Hillary Rodham Clinton from the right. On the day after her "Oprah" interview, Richard Cohen in The Washington Post said it was time for "Palintology," punning ungallantly on the study of fossils. In the New York Times, the television critic, writing about her appearance on "Oprah," said "she still had the hunted look and defensive crouch" she demonstrated in the campaign. This is pretty much politics as usual. The dominant liberal media can't see beyond their stereotypes.

November 19, 2009

Reluctant White House welcome

If a photograph is worth a thousand words, a sharp newspaper cartoon is often worth the book. One Israeli cartoonist depicts Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the missus arriving at the White House to meet with President Obama. Mrs. Netanyahu knocks at the front door with the explanation: "We just happened to be in the neighborhood." Another cartoon depicts the prime minister pulling up at the White House, and telling the driver to wait: "I'm not sure they're at home."

November 12, 2009

The fall of the wall

Twenty years ago the Berlin Wall came tumbling down. If Humpty Dumpty had been sitting on top of it, not Soviet soldiers nor Stasi spies could put Humpty together again. It wasn't the end of history, as some liked to call it, but rather like history on a pause button that showed the world in one powerful moment that some of the evil that men do can be undone.

November 5, 2009

Home economics reduced

Maria Shriver is no "wife of," even though she's married to the governor of California. She's no "niece of," although her uncle was president of the United States. She credits her late mother Eunice Kennedy Shriver for encouraging her "to believe we had the ability to change the world," and as the inspiration behind "The Shriver Report: A Woman's Nation Changes Everything."

October 29, 2009

An inconvenient rebuttal

Ann McElhinney's low-budget documentary refuting the global-warming hype and hysteria arrives in Washington just in time to break Al Gore's crystal ball. "Not Evil Just Wrong," the feature-length film she made with her husband Phelim McAleer, coolly reveals how Mr. Gore's disguise of hot fanaticism as cold fact arrives as the Senate begins to gear up for debate on "climate change" legislation.

October 22, 2009

Noble achievements - and deserved

Enough already. Barack Obama got the Nobel Prize for Hope and Hype, and now the rest is up to him. But there are more important Nobels, and this year, women won three of those for scientific research. They won not for what they might do, sometime, maybe, could be, or hope so, but for what they already have done. Just eight women have won Nobels in physiology or medicine, and the recognition of these women strikes down pernicious myths about women and science. These were not affirmative-action awards.

October 15, 2009

Sense and sexuality

Not so long ago, rape was a capital offense, right up there with murder. When death was not decreed, convicted rapists could count on a long prison sentence. No one took rape lightly. The crime was an absolute evil, the moral equivalent of neither shoplifting nor stealing a kiss.

October 8, 2009

A revolution too far

Austin, age 13, is touching and familiar. With his helmet of short brown hair, biggish ears and sensitive eyes, he's typical of a tender age almost on the cusp of manhood.

October 1, 2009

When defenses go down

Autumn in Washington is often cruel. The heat and the humidity have lifted and Congress returns more or less refreshed from summer vacation, but the pressure cooker continues to cook politics. Conversations about health-care legislation and the economy continue to get top billing on the Hill and elsewhere, but Barack Obama is playing football with foreign policy. It's the season of the gridiron, after all.

September 24, 2009

It’s multicultural, stupid

The attack on America on Sept. 11, 2001, set off alarms everywhere. We were shocked to discover that few Foreign Service officers were fluent in Arabic or Farsi, the dominant languages of the Middle East. We didn't know much about Islam. Children grew up on the engrossing and romantic "Tales of the Arabian Nights," but few parents thought much about the implications of women portrayed in veils and harems, as the property of men.

September 17, 2009

Learning is no picnic, Buster

Conservatives and other parents won their point. President Obama dropped his lesson plan for the schoolchildren of America. He didn't ask what they can do for him, as he first intended to do, but what they can do for themselves and country.

September 10, 2009

No requiem for a twitching corpse

All but hidden in the fulsome eulogies for Edward M. Kennedy lurk a few serious ideas worthy of more than romancing history or waxing sentimental over a death in a famous family. These ideas are about the very nature of liberalism and conservatism, the connections between personal virtue and public morality, and how emotion shapes ideology.

September 3, 2009

His bummer of a summer

This is everybody's bummer of a season, particularly these rough weeks for Barack Obama. You could call this a summer of discontent, but there's nothing poetic about it. The president warns that the economy will only get considerably worse before it gets better.

August 27, 2009

Cheating the least among us

Colonial Williamsburg is proud of its tradesmen. You can see the carpenters walking out of the history books and down the cobblestone streets, ready to talk to visitors about how they hammered Williamsburg together, log by log, shingle by shingle, as if still in the 18th century.

August 20, 2009

Reverie beyond Beltway bustle

The shorter days of late summer usher in the melancholy prospect of autumn, the thoughts of returning to school, work and reality. Such anticipation makes the last moments at the beach, lake or camp site especially precious. The children can stay up late because they can sleep 'til noon. They come and go on whim, tracking sand or mud, but dirty footprints are easily washed away with seawater.

August 13, 2009

But for the grace of God …

What a fortnight this has been for observing the human animal in his natural habitat. We're reminded daily of the clay feet, the wounded psyches, the angst of the exploiters and the anger of the exploitees. Their behavior runs the table, from naive foibles to deep tragic flaws, linking the venal with the vulnerable. All is writ large in headlines about money, sex and power.

July 2, 2009

FIELDS: No slouching toward approval

Nothing so polarizes the nation as a nomination to the Supreme Court. Advise and consent is often more like divide and confront, rarely eliciting our best debates. "Borking" a candidate has entered the lexicon of tactics for savaging a nominee by exaggerating positions with simplistic slurs, uttered with an attitude and tone of self-righteousness.

June 4, 2009