Author: Richard Cohen

Bill Clinton recently convened a telephone conference of his ex-aides to
deal, among other things, with what he sees as unfair blame for failing to
deal with Osama bin Laden and his terrorist organization.

It’s not as if the administration did nothing at all. On August 20, 1998,
Clinton authorized a missile attack on an installation in Afghanistan where
bin Laden was supposed to be. Bin Laden narrowly escaped — a matter of hours,
we are told.

After that, however, nothing much was done. U.S. intelligence continued
to track bin Laden for the purpose of killing him — a presidential directive
to that effect had already been signed — but it seems fair to say that the
Clinton administration at the highest level was not singularly focused on this
aim.

On the other hand, bin Laden’s focus, as we now know, was both singular
and effective.

In this respect, the Clinton administration can be — and has been —
blamed for the September 11th attacks. Simply put, it did not do what it had
to do. At the same time, though, blame has to be assigned to the Reagan
administration, which backed down in Lebanon after the 1983 terrorist attack
on the Marine compound in Beirut, and the first Bush administration, which
prematurely ended the Gulf War, leaving Saddam Hussein still in power and in
possession of his attack helicopters.

Not surprisingly, terrorists, including bin Laden, concluded that the
United States was simply unwilling to take casualties. This perception was
only reinforced by the Clinton administration’s abrupt retreat from Somalia in
1993 after 18 U.S. soldiers were killed there — and its stuttering approach
to Haiti and, of course, Bosnia. For too long it hurled nothing but speeches
at the practitioners of genocide.

But when it comes to bin Laden, a little context is in order. The missile
attack took place in the middle of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Clinton had
just testified to the grand jury. Before that, a sample of blood had been
taken from him to prove that it was he who had stained Lewinsky’s dress. He
was facing impeachment, and, by way of understatement, his marriage was under
stress.

You may say that this was all his own fault. To a degree, true enough.
But it is also true that he was sustaining an unprecedented attack on his
presidency, an effort to oust him for reasons that had nothing to do with
abuse of power. What’s more, the entire impeachment process had been propelled
by an effort to “get” Clinton — the “vast right-wing conspiracy” of Hillary
Clinton’s telling and accurate phrase.

If blame is to be apportioned for what happened or didn’t happen around
that time — the lagging, distracted effort to eliminate bin Laden, for
instance — then the uber partisans of Washington have to take some
responsibility. It was they, with the connivance of the Supreme Court, who
manufactured a sexual harassment lawsuit out of Paula Jones’ uncorroborated
charge of boorish behavior and converted it into an assault on the presidency
itself.

If you believe that Clinton could compartmentalize in the manner of your
computer, then no ill effects came of this scuzzy effort to oust the
president. If you believe that Lewinsky and Jones were in Clinton’s “C” drive
and bin Laden and everything else — the Israeli-Palestinian situation, for
instance — in his “D” drive, then there is no reason the president could not
have functioned smoothly.

But common sense screams otherwise. And if that is not persuasive, you
can — as I have — ask Clinton’s aides or his visitors about his mental state
at the time. Consumed with his own plight, they will tell you — and
understandably so.

That long, arduous, and contemptible effort to shame the president from
office did real damage. It lowered the bar to impeachment and it weakened the
country at a moment when, as we now know, it was in peril.

No doubt Clinton’s legacy suffered, and no number of conference calls can
change that. But if history faults him for not focusing more on bin Laden,
then it will also take into account the reasons. Say what you will about
history, it does not compartmentalize.

Richard Cohen is a member of the Washington Post Writers Group.
His work frequently appears in the Flyer.

It has been a bit more than a month since terrorists took out the World Trade Center and yet it seems that time has stood still. Instead of the city recovering, it still ails both physically and emotionally. Reminders of September 11th are everywhere — the heavy police presence, a walk past a funereal firehouse. So much has changed, and the change, both surprisingly and frighteningly, seems permanent.

This month Barry Bonds broke the home-run record with 73. Before that, Mark McGwire had done it in 1998 with 70, and before that it had been Roger Maris’ record for 37 years. Until Maris, Babe Ruth had held the record. It stood, seemingly untouchable, for 34 years. What once seemed so permanent has, in the modern era, become transient. We mark history and then we consume it.

The impeachment of Bill Clinton and the whole Monica Lewinsky scandal have come and gone and barely left a footprint. Think of O.J. Think of Gary Condit and even — in the sense that it had so little effect on us at the time — the Gulf War. One day history, the next day trivia.

This is not the case anymore. Just as the collapsing towers of the World Trade Center took other buildings with them, it seems the power of the explosions still cannot be contained. Some buildings are gone, but the entire city is imperiled.

New York is not so much a city as it is an idea. Once it was a port and a manufacturing center. But, in a way, New York lost World War II. Defense jobs went elsewhere — to the West, to the South. Manufacturing followed, and at the same time the port, with about 100,000 jobs, atrophied. The city reinvented itself as a corporate center. But a corporation is not a port or a factory. It’s footloose. It can go anywhere.

That’s not the case with some other major cities. London was bombed by the Germans, but while the children could be moved to the country, Parliament and Buckingham Palace could not. The king and the royal family famously stayed, sharing the risk. It’s the same with Washington. Congress must meet there. The president lives and works in the White House. Washington is more than just a place. It is a function.

But not New York. What it has offered in recent times is the shared idea that an urban environment is attractive. The more people, the better. A kind of abrasive closeness produced a sort of heat — and then creativity. Immigrant Jews from Europe coming into contact with African Americans up from the South produced American popular music. Irving Berlin’s first hits were based on black ragtime music and so, a bit later, were George Gershwin’s. Paris had Picasso vying with Braque to produce cubism. This is what cities can do.

But this proximity is precisely what now scares people about New York. It makes it and its signature buildings a potential target for terrorists. The urge is to disperse, to go where it is presumed to be safer. And why not? Location hardly matters anymore. Many people can work anywhere they want. And, already, somewhat sheepishly, some are moving out — to the suburbs, to the country. Some corporations have largely relocated. They say they are coming back, but they will do — as they always do — what’s best for their bottom line. It is the ultimate repository of the corporate conscience.

So I fear for New York. The abiding, unrelenting staying power of that one day, September 11th, cannot be denied. The heavy police presence, the sad shrines before the firehouses, the subway that used to go one way and now goes another — all these are wounds on a city that is weakened and bleeding still.

New York lost more than 5,000 lives September 11th. It lost revenues beyond reckoning. But the idea of the city, as lovely and ephemeral as a Sinatra song, may be the final, uncounted casualty.

Richard Cohen is a member of the Washington Post Writers Group; his columns frequently appear in the Flyer.

Until his televised speech to a joint session of Congress, George W. Bush had been occasionally wobbly, somewhat tentative, and — especially in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attack — diminished in stature. He seemed unsure of himself, somehow shrunken in his clothes, and — understandably — scared by the responsibilities that he suddenly faced and for which he was, by background and intellectual habit, almost totally unprepared.

Little by little, though, he gained confidence. He seemed emboldened by the heroism of others — those New York City firefighters, for instance. They did what they had to do because it was their job to do it. So it would be with Bush and so, at least in that speech to the nation, did he rise to the occasion.

The words were perfect, occasionally eloquent, as when he said that the terrorists would follow other extremist groups “to history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies.”

The speech was also utilitarian, outlining what needs to be done and why the United States has to do it. Details were lacking, but one suspects it is not just because they were withheld. It is because the plans are not yet anywhere near complete.

But a speech is more than words. It is theater. Winston Churchill understood that. His words set an unsurpassed standard for eloquence — he was downright Shakespearean during the Blitz and he coined, of course, the phrase “Iron Curtain.” But it was his effect that also mattered — his delivery, his pauses, and his determination to venture out into still-smoking London. He would become the face of Britain.

This — or something like it — was what Bush displayed last Thursday evening. He seemed steadfast. He seemed determined. He seemed confident. He was the master of the moment, as much the leader of that room as a conductor is of his orchestra. He seemed — this is our American word for it — “presidential.”

Walter Lippmann, the great columnist and public intellectual, scathingly dismissed Franklin Roosevelt when he first ran for the White House. Eleanor Roosevelt, who knew the great men of her times, similarly dismissed John F. Kennedy. Others, too, considered JFK a dilettante whose father had bought him a political career.

It is too soon and too silly to liken Bush to Kennedy or Roosevelt and to say that he, like them, has grown to match his responsibilities. Bush has a long way to go and his task is imprecisely defined. It is called a war, but it is both something less and something more.

The world has turned upside down on Bush. He came to Washington to shrink it, to diminish the role of the federal government in almost all areas, if only by depriving it of money. He made missile defense the centerpiece of his foreign and defense policies. He pushed through an ideologically conceived tax package that was unfortunate in its inception and would be just plain catastrophic in its implementation.

Now he has created a whole new Cabinet-level post, the oddly named Office of Homeland Security. Now he is recalling retired federal workers. He is asking Congress for more and more money. He is intervening to save the airline industry, and missile defense, which is not such a crazy notion in its place, will just be part of a larger package.

As for the economy, he will need to turn his tax package on its head. It is now back-loaded and it benefits the wrong people, mostly the affluent. He needs to front-load it so the money gets into the economy as fast as possible. And he needs to give that money to the people who are most likely to spend it –the middle class.

All that in time. Meanwhile, the man who was a middling student, a boozer and towel-snapper, an incurious and intellectually inert businessman and governor who back-slapped his way into the presidency, emerged Thursday night as something we terribly needed. He was always the president. Now he is the commander in chief.

Richard Cohen is a member of the Washington Post Writers Group. His columns frequently appear in the Flyer.

It was a noise unlike one I’ve ever heard. It was a roar wrapped in thunder followed quickly by the feel of sound on your face. The woman next to me said something about fighter jets being scrambled and so I looked into the sky, but there was nothing there. Suddenly, a blizzard hit, and the quaint streets of lower Manhattan were turned white with powdered building material. Here and there paper floated to the ground. The World Trade Center had collapsed.

I could not see and I could hardly breathe. Emergency workers and others ran toward me, shouting “Get back, get back!” but we — another reporter and I — moved forward, covering our mouths with a handkerchief and then wet paper towels supplied by a grocery store and then — thank you, thank you — face masks supplied by a medical worker in an ambulance.

Until that moment, it seemed that the horror could be contained. Two planes had hit the buildings, that much I knew, and maybe other acts of terrorism were about to occur, and up ahead, maybe six to eight blocks, the World Trade Center was engulfed in smoke. On the street, though, there was no sense of panic — the occasional crying woman, the occasional agonized look — but there, in a doorway with his hand outstretched, a reassuringly normal beggar.

I pick up a piece of paper. Mr. and Mrs. Abraham Friedman have a bill. It’s for a camp fee, a membership tea, yet another membership tea, spring festival, and tuition. The bill is from a Jewish parochial school. It was blown out of the World Trade Center, I guess. I guess, too, that’s where the billing was done, although maybe it was in someone’s pocket.

The streets are shoe-high in white stuff. Currier & Ives — out of season, out of sync, out of someone’s mind. This is the little stuff by which you make big stuff by which you make very big buildings. Up ahead is a dense cloud of dust and building particles and sweaty emergency workers who emerge from this false night with fear written on their faces. Up ahead is death in numbers I cannot fathom.

A woman glides by on a bike. She is crying. Two men come toward me, ghostly white from the dust. Up ahead is that awful cloud, the smoke, the flames, the huge empty space where once beat the heart of a very great city. A fireman kneels, exhausted. Another is carried by his colleagues. A cop sits on the curb, staring into space. Someone goes by on a stretcher.

Smaller explosions go off periodically. Is it one of the World Trade Center buildings? We know nothing. Someone yells “Gas!” and everyone starts running. But which way? Where is the gas leak? Where is it safe? Nowhere. Nowhere, anymore. Where were you on Tuesday, September 11, 2001?

I was in downtown Manhattan, walking south toward the World Trade Center towers after the planes had hit them. The subway had stalled and so I walked down from 23rd, past 14th, where, suddenly, the low 19th-century buildings yielded a brilliant blue sky marred by a black eye of dark smoke. I could not see the World Trade Center, just the smoke.

“The commission, as a matter of policy, did not bring enforcement proceedings against anyone.” So begins page four of a legal brief I have picked off the ground. Certain words are underlined, the work of someone who was doing this for tomorrow. We all work for tomorrow. Now, for so many, there are no tomorrows. We are at war, all right, but with whom?

Up ahead is the smoke. To the west, a car or two is ablaze. All around me, firemen and cops and U.S. marshals wait for something to do. Little by little, our perimeter is pushed back for fear of yet more explosions and more building collapses. Our army of rescue workers suddenly have no one to rescue. The victims are in the advancing cloud.

Richard Cohen is a member of the Washington Post Writers Group. His columns frequently appear in the Flyer.

Pardon my sarcasm, but no one who has followed the recent debate in
Congress regarding human cloning and stem cell research — they are
intertwined — could help being impressed by the sheer stupidity of the
rhetoric, as well as the outcome.

By a lopsided vote of 265 to 162, the House banned all human
cloning, having decided the matter after less than a day of debate. Propelled
largely by religious conviction — now, there’s a reason to ban cloning — the
leadership was ecstatic.

“This House should not be giving the green light to mad
scientists to tinker with the gift of life,” said Rep. J.C. Watts, fourth
in the GOP House leadership.

Congress then went on its summer recess, enabling us all to
entertain the (probably vain) hope that, as the members sit on their
respective front porches, they will reflect on their impetuousness and be
overcome with shame. As they sip their iced teas, they may also come to wonder
why they moved with such alacrity to forbid something that — along with time-
travel and hair restoration — does not yet exist.

For all the talk, human cloning is not quite around the corner.
Cloning has famously been accomplished in sheep (hello, Dolly) but not yet in
dogs or higher mammals. The experts I’ve consulted say we’re talking 30 years
down the road and overcoming daunting difficulties. Fusing new DNA with old
DNA is not as easy as banning the process.

And even then what are we talking about? Why do legislators like
Watts employ the language of grade-B science fiction flicks to talk about
what, someday, may just be another reproductive choice? But he is not alone.
In a recent essay in The New Republic, the ethicists Leon R. Kass and
Daniel Callahan — both of whom were consulted by President Bush — call human
cloning “unethical.” Maybe so, but they never say why.

I grant you the prospect is scary, and no doubt it ought to be
regulated. But at the moment, babies are being produced by in vitro
fertilization. I know of a child produced by once-frozen sperm and carried in
the womb of a surrogate mother. This, to say the least, is not traditional. I
am not at all sure what God thinks of it. Nor does the so-called miracle of
conception always involve something warm and wonderful.

Think of two drunks in the backroom of some frat house. If God
approves of that, then who’s to say He frowns upon a childless couple
producing a clone of one of them? I don’t see the ethical problem here. Taste?
Propriety? Difficulties? Yes to them all. Among other things, the clone would
know its genetic destiny, and it would be saddled, as are identical twins,
with a lifetime of stupid remarks — “How do you know who you are?”
— but these are inconveniences, not momentous moral issues.

Had the House opted for a moratorium on human cloning, it would
have been praised for its sagacity. Instead, it leaped into the debate on stem
cell research. After all, if stem cells have the capacity to reverse or cure
diseases such as Parkinson’s, think of what could be done with cells produced
not by a stranger but by the recipient himself.

Back in 1969, Kevin Phillips published The Emerging Republican
Majority. Now he might want to write The Emerging Republican
Theocracy. It is led in the House by Tom DeLay, Dick Armey, and the
aforementioned Watts. They substitute faith for thought. For a minister,
that’s okay. For a legislator, it’s a sin.

This is a complicated subject — a peek into a frightening and
unknowable future. Congress should move slowly and not be spooked by silly
language about “mad scientists.” If moral questions are what concern
our politicians, then they ought to consider this: If they continue on their
present course, people will die — that’s all there is to it. Tell me the
morality of that.

Richard Cohen is a member of the Washington Post Writers
Group. His work frequently appears in the Flyer.

The polls are in and the usual suspects are being rounded up. Who is responsible for George W. Bush’s low numbers? Could it be Karl Rove, the president’s chief political adviser, or Nicholas E. Calio, the liaison to Congress, or maybe Mary Matalin, who gave up a lucrative television career to devote herself to George Bush and Dick Cheney and all they stand for? Her sanity, if not her competence, has to be questioned.

The answer to the question is, “None of the Above.” The person most responsible for the current plight of George W. Bush is — drumroll, please — George W. Bush.

He has not been acting presidential. By that I just don’t mean that he’s been less visible than a president should be or that he has not been adroit in his use of the so-called bully pulpit. Those things can be fixed — and soon will be.

I am thinking instead of something else, a certain quality Bush has of lampooning himself so that, after all these many months in office, his self-deprecating act seems absolutely convincing. Even those of us, like me, who know Bush is no dummy are beginning to wonder.

I refer you now to the interview Bush recently granted Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal. With the possible exception of his wife, Bush could not have found a more sympathetic, adoring, interviewer. Noonan revealed Bush as virtually Olympian, a regular Churchill, who had lost the “tentativeness” of the campaigner and, instead, has an “even-keeled confidence, even a robust faith, in his own perceptions and judgments” — in other words, in himself. This confidence, the interview makes clear, is shockingly misplaced.

Bush had just returned from his first European trip as president — maybe even as a human being. He had met, you will recall, with Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader — a so-called summit where no treaties were signed, no accords initialed, no grand plans discussed. This was a get-acquainted meeting — not much more — with the leader of the mess called Russia, not the dictator of the formidable Soviet Union.

And yet, Bush spoke about it as if he had just come back from Yalta or one of the Cold War summits where so much hung in the balance. “It was a big moment,” Bush allowed. Noonan, no fool, picked up on the vast, but unstated, importance of what had transpired: “What you’re telling me is this meeting with Putin was a kind of breakthrough, it was something special.”

“I think it was,” said Bush. “I went to Europe a humble leader of a great country, and stood my ground. I wasn’t going to yield. I listened, but I made my point.” It was for those reasons, Bush said earlier, that Ronald Reagan himself “would have been proud of how I conducted myself.”

Reagan nothing. I myself was overwhelmed. Yet it was only by using the utmost intellectual discipline that I was able to remember that the countries Bush had not yielded to, the nations he had confronted and, yes, bested, were not our enemies but our friends — our allies, for crying out loud. It was as if he was doing a parody of a president returning from an overseas trip. This was the Oval Office as comedy club.

Neither Bush nor his crack staff sensed it, however. When Noonan asked if she could use his remarks for her Journal column, she was given permission. They all thought that Bush had not merely acquitted himself, he had done so splendidly.

I grant you that not all the interview was as inadvertently self-mocking as the parts I chose. But the overall effect was the same as one of Bush’s enough-already self-deprecating television appearances or one in which he seems on the thinnest of intellectual ice. He seemed unable to distinguish the exceptional from the mundane, the historic from the pedestrian.

What we’re seeing — both in print and on television — are essential Bush traits that are probably not amenable to change. In a way that TV emphasizes, he seems smaller than the office he occupies, less the master of his (or our) fate even than he was when he first took office. More and more he reminds me of that old commercial where the actor says, “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on television.”

It is the same with Bush. I, for one, don’t think Bush is a dope. But he sure plays one on television.

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group and is a frequent contributor to this space.

Shakespeare said something about the seven ages of man.

In Strom Thurmond’s first several ages, he was someone I downright loathed. My first recollection of him was as South Carolina’s governor, the segregationist who bolted the Democratic Party. In 1948, he ran for president as a third-party candidate and did so badly he failed, fortunately, to cost Harry Truman the election. The nation has been grateful ever since.

After that — and in due course — Ol’ Strom (he was always old) became the Democratic senator from South Carolina and then the Republican senator from South Carolina. You could say he changed with the times, but what really changed was his constituency. It went from all white and all Democratic to much less white and much less Democratic. Maybe that’s why Ol’ Strom (he was 42 when he crash-landed his Army glider at Normandy) went from filibustering against civil rights legislation to embracing civil rights legislation. You gotta change with the times, son.

There’s not much to admire here–just political pragmatism of the sort that makes it hard to say what Ol’ Strom really believes in. But there is something he truly and genuinely believes in and for which, we can now discern, he is willing to risk his very life: work. The man has to work — or, if you will, have a job. He refuses to retire. This is the Strom I admire. This is the man who, at 98, has finally got me on his side. He will not be moved. He will not go. He will stay in the Senate because the Senate, I sense, is his life. Retirement and death are the same to Strom — Ol’ but not so Ol’ that he is willing to cash in his chips. Deal around once again, fellas.

My view of Strom is not the universal view of Strom, I’ll grant you that. An argument can be made that he has stayed too long, that his state deserves better, more vigorous representation, and, for that matter, so do we all. (It’s our Senate, after all.) What’s more — and duty compels me to add this — it would be great if the Democrats took control of the Senate. The world and all its green things would be better off.

Still, it is a far, far better thing to win a seat than to get one by default. You would not know that from some of the recent articles on Ol’ Strom I have read. There is an undertone of impatience to them, an unstated “be gone with you” message that can be discerned between the lines or, if you are of a certain age, by the odor of ageism wafting from the page.

Make way for another generation, Strom is being told. You are old, aged, ancient, frail, sick, senile, beyond senior, and beyond repair. Go, sir, go!

No, I shout back at the page. Stay, stay! Stay for us all — all of us whose youth has, well, ripened, who see retirement as death’s cozy waiting room (Dr. Reaper will be right with you), who have no hobby except work and whose respite from work is still more work.

We are too old, not worth the cost of a subscription — demographic detritus. We buy nothing. We are worthless. Be gone, be gone, and make way for some jerk kid who thinks it’s cool to say “cool” a lot.

But we do have those Senate seats — not just Strom’s, but all the others over the age of 60. And we have Ol’ Strom himself — undefeated, indefatigable, obstinate, and in all matters political, always, always wrong. But his politics no longer matter to me, only his endurance. It has taken him awhile, but he is my hero.

Stay, Strom, stay.

Richard Cohen is a member of the Washington Post Writers Group. His columns frequently appear in the Flyer.

The new administration’s intention to mine for arsenic in Yellowstone National Park, first reported here last week (what, you didn’t notice?), may well be reversed before it makes it to the president’s desk, should he be there and not in the gym, working out. I have this on the best of all possible sources, an irrepressible imagination.

The fact that you might have accepted just a bit of the first sentence tells you something about the George W. Bush administration and how it is not as smart as it, for one, thinks it is. Nothing could illustrate this better than the new standard for arsenic in drinking water.

The Cheney administration, as it is sometimes called, finds itself on the wrong side of the arsenic issue. That takes some work, since nothing makes the average American shudder more quickly than the word “arsenic.” It is, after all, the poison used in the movie Arsenic and Old Lace by those kindly spinsters, the Brewster sisters, who dispatched lonely old men to a better place. They offered their guests homemade elderberry wine with only a teaspoon of arsenic. It does the trick.

I have no idea, really, whether a teaspoon is sufficient. And I do not know whether the arsenic standards the Cheney administration rescinded are too stringent, as it maintains, or simply prudent. But I do know that an administration about to embark on the wholesale rape and pillage of the land (and the skies) should have waited a bit before becoming pro-arsenic.

It would have been one thing if the administration had rescinded the arsenic standard and done nothing else. Then we all could have debated the standard and listened to one expert call another expert a fool. But the new standard was really part of a package — an environmental approach that would make Smokey the Bear weep.

The administration wants to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. It is considering opening vast areas of the Rocky Mountain West for oil and gas drilling. It has dropped the Kyoto treaty on global warming into the wastebasket and will not, as George W. Bush himself once promised, reduce the amount of CO2 in the air. Much of this is to solve an energy crisis that many experts say simply does not exist.

It is EPA director Christie Whitman’s task to explain this or that bright idea from the brain of some conservative ideologue. Even though she argued for the United States not to renounce the Kyoto treaty, she later tried to explain why doing so was just a dandy idea. The other day, she said the administration was working hard to develop more balanced arsenic and CO2 standards than the ones scuttled. The new standard for arsenic may even be tougher than the old one, she said.

We are now beginning to understand the meaning of the phrase “compassionate conservative.” It refers to the attempt to lull most Americans into believing that George W. Bush is, at most, a millimeter right of center. In this sense only is the administration compassionate. By all means, the people should be comforted.

But now, by dint of some knuckleheaded thinking, the administration stands revealed as deeply, passionately, and insanely conservative. It talks about an energy crisis without mentioning conservation. It argues for the repeal of the estate tax for farmers who have lost their land to the IRS — only these don’t exist. It has a reason du jour to justify a huge tax cut, but, really, it just wants to starve the government. As always, it’s your money but not, for some reason, your government or your national debt.

I sincerely doubt the administration will mine for arsenic in Yellowstone. This feeling, I have to tell you, is hardly based on the Bush administration’s reverence for the environment but rather on my guess that there’s no money in it. If, however, there is a buck to be made in arsenic, Old Faithful will have to go. Poor Christie Whitman will explain why.

Richard Cohen is a member of the Washington Post Writers Group. His columns frequently appear in the Flyer.

I recently turned 60. I didn’t hit the lottery again last month. I tend to miss the sun this time of year. I thought these were the reasons I was down in the dumps. Then the true explanation hit me: I am suffering from George Bush Syndrome.

GBS, as it shall henceforth be known, is rooted in the fact that Bush may be the dullest president since Calvin Coolidge. In the month or so he’s been in office, Bush has pledged to do better by education, raise the pay of our brave servicemen and women, and give us all the tax cut we so unarguably deserve. I know all this stuff is important, but I can hardly write these words without falling into a stupor.

Is it any wonder that Bill Clinton — wonderful, newsworthy, controversial, hated, loved, polarizing Bill Clinton — still dominates the news? We journalists cannot let go. It’s true, of course, that Clinton continues to provide material — the pardons, the gifts, the office rent, the move to Harlem. My heart leaped when the always creative Senator Arlen Specter said that Clinton could still be impeached. Oh, yes: news! Bring back Henry Hyde and the boys.

But Bush? He’s an abstraction, the genial face of an issueless time. He wants to get along, go along, and, of course, get his own way. Sooner or later, he may get into a real fight with the Democrats in Congress, but at this moment it’s hard to see what the issue will be — and whether anyone will care. Bush cannot make news.

Last month Bush went to war against Iraq — for a day. A bomb here, a bomb there, and then it was over. Purely routine, he said — and a day later there was nothing more to write. In contrast, when Clinton did something similar — bombed an Osama bin Laden camp in Afghanistan and a suspected chemical weapons facility in the Sudan — he broke off his Martha’s Vineyard vacation and winged it back to the White House. Bush undoubtedly would have stayed where he was. He’s not going to let something “routine” break his routine.

Bush is for faith and against crime. He wants every kid to read. Math would be a good idea, too. He’s for chastity, charity, and, probably, chocolate. This is not the stuff of table-thumping columns.

I have been through this before — and survived. I lived through the Ronald Reagan era. He was frustratingly agreeable, too. Once, when I was writing a column of such blistering criticism the words fairly smoked on the page, I got a message from Air Force One. It was a birthday greeting from the president. I walked around the newsroom trying to get my dander up. It was hard. Reagan was such a nice guy.

I survived Reagan, I’ll survive Bush. But I was younger then, more confident in my judgment, wisdom, and, yes, brilliance.

I just knew Reagan was wrong about everything. Looking back, I can see that here and there — such as the way he handled the Cold War — he was just possibly right, but what’s more important is that he made news. He fired the air traffic controllers right off. Maybe Bush will fire the forest rangers. I call this “faith-based optimism.”

I despair. It’s been a couple of days since Bill Clinton last made news. Maybe something will break soon — an armed robbery or something his aides talked him into at the time. I know I can’t count on Bush. Mr. Nice Guy! Mr. Routine. I’m counting the days. Less than three years until the presidential campaign starts up again. Only one person can lift my depression.

C’mon, Hillary.

Richard Cohen is a member of the Washington Post Writers Group. His columns frequently appear in the Flyer.