It was a lucky coincidence that Freshmen Parents Weekend at my daughter's college, which was also my college, came right on the heels of the presidential election.

Lucky for me, because the weekend mercifully obliterated my nostalgia for the tumult of my own undergraduate career. Lucky for the country, because...

That's it?

Twelve-hundred-and-eight words, and we're supposed to forget the months of ugly that came before?

Not so fast.

"I urge all Americans who supported me to join me in not just congratulating him, but offering our next president our goodwill and earnest effort to find ways to...

I just hope Peter Feldman isn't Jewish.

In my parents' New Jersey home, when the perpetrator of some awful act in the news was not yet known, I could always count on them to say, "I hope he isn't Jewish."

This worked out well in the case of Lee Harvey...

Listening to Colin Powell endorse Barack Obama, I had the same divided feelings I did last spring, when I heard him speak at my daughter's high school graduation.

He had come because he knew the family of another senior in the class well enough to accept the invitation. An hour...

Man, those relentless close-ups were cruel. And the split screen was killer. If you only heard the debate on the radio, you missed the show of the century.

Ninety minutes of John McCain making faces was more than enough for a lifetime. He smirked. He grimaced. He sneered. He fake-smiled....

What went wrong?

Greed is only part of it. Yes, the people who sold subprime loans to unqualified buyers were concerned about their cut, not about ARMs spiking and home prices falling. Yes, the Wall Street wizards who sliced and diced collateralized debt obligations were greedy for big paydays and...

John McCain and Sarah Palin have been complaining that there's too much "gotcha journalism" going around.

If only.

When they say "gotcha journalism," what they're really trying to do, of course, is to demonize journalism itself -- to de-legitimize asking tough questions, and following up with more tough questions...

Let me hedge my bet.

Maybe, at the vice presidential debate, the talking points Sarah Palin's handlers have been stuffing her head with will come out of her mouth so butchered that even Republican voters will say, like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, "The horror, the horror."

Or...

Both Obama and McCain will make huge efforts on Election Day to turn out their bases -- the revved-up Reds and Blues. But it's still likely that the outcome will depend on the Purples, the swing voters in the middle.

Who are they? Working with Zogby International, the Norman...

Maybe it was because I had just helped my daughter move into her freshman dorm room and I was envious of the deliciously named courses she was thinking of taking. Or maybe it was because I've always been a sucker for pitches like "Conversational Italian in One Day!" Or maybe...

A therapist I know -- OK, since you dragged it out of me, my therapist -- told me that I'd be astonished if I knew how many emergency calls she got the night that Sarah Palin gave her convention speech.

Actually, I wasn't that surprised. Judging from the number of...

Two dots make a straight line. Time to connect them.

Dot one: Bush/Cheney are the biggest liars in American presidential history.

They lied about the connection between September 11 and Saddam. They lied about the President's Daily Briefing warning them about al-Qaeda. They lied about having indisputable WMD evidence....

John McCain's temperament, in three acts:

Act I: The way he chose Sarah Palin -- his first "presidential-level decision," as the media framed the choice for months ahead of time -- speaks volumes about his temperament. The consequences of that style of judgment are now playing out in real...

If John McCain wins this election, it will be because of Hollywood.

It's not that Hollywood is giving him big money (it isn't); or that big celebrities are attracting attention to him (they're not); or that star writers and directors are helping him with stagecraft and wordsmithery (again no).

It's...

Vice President Palin. President Palin.

Like it or not, John McCain, this is your case:

In a dangerous world, who will keep you safe? At a perilous time, who has the experience to face down the Russians, track down the terrorists, back down the Iranians, and bring peace to...

The morning after Obama's acceptance speech, Peggy Noonan told the Morning Joe crowd on MSNBC that everything she'd predicted about the speech and the event in her Wall Street Journal column turned out to be true.

It sucked, Peggy said. In a few months, no one would remember anything...

Or shrink couches, or X-ray glasses?

It's my fault, I know, for watching the convention on a commercial cable channel, rather than on C-SPAN. But it strikes me that today's level of journalistic derangement exceeds anything I've experienced before.

These MSNBC analysts, you see, and these "strategists" whom no one...

It made me think of my own family.

Having coined "O'Bama" for the Irish working-class values that Joe Biden brings to the Democratic ticket, Chris Matthews called his family in Pennsylvania -- where Scranton-born Biden is known as the state's "third senator" in some quarters -- to ask whether now...

Now that Condi has negotiated the very timetable for withdrawal from Iraq that this administration has been calling treasonous for the past three years, will anyone hold them accountable for the pure political motivations for their turnaround? Or will America be as obscenely forgiving of this attempt to deprive Obama...

Not long ago, a guy I know, a good guy who to all outward appearances seems happy and successful, replied to a birthday e-mail I sent him at work -- "go home and blow out some candles" -- with this:

"I'm 40-f*ing-8, give me a break. They tell me...