Your parents spill a few secrets as they get older. One night at dinner with my mom, I ventured that the rhythm method had worked well for her, given that there were six years between my sister Peggy and my brother Kevin, and six more between Kevin and me. She arched an eyebrow. “Well, sometimes your father used something,” she said. My parents were the most devout Catholics I’ve ever known. But my dad came from a family of 16 in County Clare in Ireland, and my mom’s mother came from a family of 13 in County Mayo. So they balanced their faith with a dose of practicality. After their first three kids, they sagely decided family planning was not soul-staining. So I wasn’t surprised ... Continue reading →
I ALWAYS liked that the name of my religion was also an adjective meaning all-embracing. I was a Catholic and I wanted to be catholic, someone engaged in a wide variety of things. As James Joyce wrote in “Finnegans Wake:” “Catholic means ‘Here comes everybody.’ ” So it makes me sad to see the Catholic Church grow so uncatholic, intent on loyalty testing, mind control and heresy hunting. Rather than all-embracing, the church hierarchy has become all-constricting. It was tough to top the bizarre inquisition of self-sacrificing American nuns pushed by the disgraced Cardinal Bernard Law. Law, the former head of the Boston archdiocese, fled to a plush refuge in Rome in 2002 after it came out that he protected priests who molested thousands of ... Continue reading →
Jamie Dimon calls it “a doozy.” And it was. A $2 billion credit derivatives trading bungle that could mushroom to a $4 billion loss. The shining industry agitator against some of the tougher regulations on banks has suddenly become the shining example of why still tougher regulations may be needed. After the economy nearly atomized in a cloud of cupidity, Dimon became known as America’s least-hated banker. But now the blunt 56-year-old Queens native who snowed Democrats in Washington with all his talk about not lumping in “good banks” with “bad banks” has fallen off his pedestal. If “Jamie the Great” and his “good” bank can make such a gigantic blunder, sending déjà vu shivers down America’s back, what hope is there for lesser bankers? ... Continue reading →
In 1983, Genevieve Cook brought a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream to a Christmas party in the East Village. She left with 22-year-old Barack Obama’s phone number. The lithe Australian assistant teacher at a Brooklyn grade school was soon in a romance with the lithe future president. In the diary entries she shared with David Maraniss, whose new biography, “Barack Obama: The Story,” is excerpted in the June Vanity Fair, Cook presages Obama’s relationship with bedazzled American voters: passion cooling as he engages in a cerebral seminar and a delight in doubt. Sunday, Jan. 22, 1984: “A sadness, in a way, that we are both so questioning that original bliss is dissipated.” Thursday, Jan. 26: “Distance, distance, distance, and wariness.” Saturday, Feb. 25: “His warmth ... Continue reading →
It’s the most chilling warning you can hear in France: Dominique Strauss-Kahn is out on the town, looking for a good time. When Julien Dray, a prominent Socialist Party deputy, had a birthday party for himself Sunday night at a cocktail lounge, he didn’t bother to tell his V.I.P. guests that he had invited the most notorious man in France. The randy economist — once considered the leading prospect to beat Nicolas Sarkozy before a swan dive from grace — could not resist popping up as a Socialist Party pooper on the eve of the election. Strauss-Kahn has felt isolated for months, a political pariah fighting an “aggravated pimping” charge involving a global prostitution ring here and a civil suit by a Manhattan hotel maid ... Continue reading →
Maybe we gave up on John Edwards too soon. His hair still looks great, even though he now gets cuts for $12.95, not $400. And the man clearly has a gift for multitasking under pressure. In the winter of 2007, as Edwards campaigned for the presidency in Iowa, he still found time to check up on his pregnant girlfriend, Rielle Hunter, who was on the lam with fall guy Andrew Young and his family, zooming around in private jets to luxe resorts and haciendas in Aspen, Santa Barbara and Florida. Even as the candidate schemed to lie to his cancer-stricken wife about a looming National Enquirer scoop on the “love-child bombshell” and finger Young as the baby’s father, Edwards made sure to call the fugitives ... Continue reading →
Ann Romney is a good mom. She’s also a good pol. And though her people skills are far superior to Mitt’s, it turns out that Ann is just as capable as her husband of turning an advantage into a disadvantage. After the liberal strategist Hilary Rosen clumsily mocked Mitt Romney for relying on Ann to tell him what issues women care about when “his wife has actually never worked a day in her life,” Ann smashed that lob back. Blasting out her first tweet, she said: “I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys. Believe me, it was hard work.” Shaken Democrats dived for cover and threw Rosen under the campaign bus. The media, worried about being perceived as favoring President Obama, ... Continue reading →
“SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE” writers have devastatingly lampooned Mitt Romney as a corny, coreless candidate who evokes an “Eh, I guess” response in voters. Now they’re worried that we’re heading, comedy-wise, toward an “Eh, I guess” election. “I don’t think it’s going to be as much fun as 2000 and 2008,” Jim Downey, the show’s inimitable satirist, told me. “When you have an incumbent president, it’s not wholly new. And because of the long Republican primary debate stretch, I’m already tired of Romney. I wish there could be a crazy brokered convention with someone we’ve never heard of to keep it fresh. But you don’t get a gift like Sarah Palin very often, and I’m sure it’ll never happen again.” You’re telling me. “Comedy writers are ... Continue reading →
