[Program Note: Two years ago today, President Barack Hussein Obama was sworn into office. Today, I was busy running errands and didn't have a chance to write anything, but two years ago I was on the National Mall trying not to freeze my extremities off, to witness this historic moment. So I thought I'd run the column I managed to write after the event as well as all the photographs I took while attending Inauguration Day. If you'd like, you can search my January, 2009 archives page to read all the columns I wrote about the highs and lows of Inauguration Week two years ago. I realize I could have marked the fiftieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy's inaugural speech today, but I've already printed two speech transcripts in the past week, so I thought I'd take this route instead, to mark the halfway point of Barack Obama's first term in office.]

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The House of Representatives, as expected, just voted to repeal the landmark healthcare law which President Obama signed less than a year ago. This vote was a symbolic victory for Republicans, but not any sort of substantial change. To truly repeal the law, the Senate would have to also pass the bill the House just passed, and then both houses would have to muster a two-thirds majority vote to overcome Obama's veto. None of which is going to happen. Democrats still control the Senate, and Harry Reid has all but pronounced the bill "dead on arrival" in his chamber, meaning that today's House vote is the only victory (and a symbolic one, at that) Republicans should expect in their mad dash to repeal healthcare reform.

Which is probably fine with them. House Republicans know full well that their vote today is nothing more than empty symbolism -- but it is important empty symbolism, as far as they're concerned. The Tea Party Republicans who campaigned on the issue of "Repeal!" have proven their bona fides to their fervent supporters, and now they can throw up their hands and blame the expected inaction on Senate Democrats -- thus paying no real political price for spending time on such a Pyrrhic victory. In other words, Republicans in the House have won a single "news cycle" -- even though the more honest among them fully admit that the effort is ultimately going nowhere.

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Senator Joe Lieberman will announce tomorrow (from all reports) that he will not be seeking another term in the Senate. Democrats across the land are collectively heaving a large sigh of relief at the news. "So long, Joe," seems to be the prevailing sentiment, although if you listen closely you can hear the muttered "... don't let the door hit you on the way out," or other less-than-endearing sentiments.

Joe Lieberman's legacy will be one of a decidedly mixed nature. One might almost say "quixotic," especially in the past few years. From the heights of the Democratic Party to being little more than a pariah, Joe has charted his own course in the past decade. In 2000, Lieberman was named as Al Gore's running mate. Being a candidate for vice president launched his own presidential run four years later. But from there it was mostly downhill, in terms of how he was viewed within the party. Lieberman so annoyed his own state's Democratic voters by his staunch support of Bush's wars that he was defeated in the 2006 Democratic Senate primary, in his last bid for re-election. Joe then formed his own party and won as a third-party candidate (helped by an extremely weak Republican in the race). But even all of these were minor transgressions which could have been overlooked by Democrats. What happened next was not.

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[Note: Last week, a Defense Department official made a rather startling statement, to the effect that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would have supported America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Jeh Johnson reportedly said: "I believe that if Dr. King were alive today, he would recognize that we live in a complicated world, and that our nation's military should not and cannot lay down its arms and leave the American people vulnerable to terrorist attack." Salon has the full story, as well as a video of the speech which is transcribed below. Dr. King gave this speech in April of 1967 at Manhattan's Riverside Church. Today is a fitting day to read or view this speech, and then to make up your own mind about what Dr. King would have had to say about our current wars.]

Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence
Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask. And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.

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To honor the fallen this week, we're going to refrain from our usual heated political rhetoric here for a change. It's only fitting, really, after such an emotional week for America. So, just to warn everyone up front, we're not going to be heaping our usual amounts of scorn on Republicans this week. Instead, we're going to (briefly) heap some scorn on the mainstream media, and then after a foreshortened awards section, we are going to reprint the text of President Obama's moving speech in Tucson this Wednesday, for those of you who haven't had the chance to view it or read it.

But before we get to that, one thing must be addressed first. In all the media I've been exposed to in the past week, I've noticed something. While there has been a frenzy of finger-pointing and blame assigned by the mainstream media, in an attempt to attach some sort of meaning to the murderous rampage Saturday, there has been precious little said about the role of the media itself.

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For those of you who still feel it is "too soon" after the Tucson tragedy to discuss such a crass subject as politics, I would strongly advise just skipping the rest of this column, because it's only going to annoy you. I have not yet discussed any of the political ramifications from last Saturday's shooting rampage, which (as it turned out) was probably a wise choice, because we've all had a bit too much of that sort of thing already by this point. Giant logical leaps to the Land of Conclusion have been happening pretty steadily since the news first broke, and many of these did not have soft landings (to put it mildly). It's always risky to attempt to draw any conclusions by extrapolating from a very tiny set of data (or a single data point, at times), because predicting trends is an almost impossible task from such shaky ground. And when there simply is no data available, pontificating about "what it all means" becomes downright dangerous, since it is no more than wild speculation (which usually leads to what the psychiatrists call "projection" -- ascribing your own thoughts and views upon the subject at hand). Which, as we've seen all week, can lead to some spectacular backfires. But having said all of that, I am about to engage in exactly what I've just warned everyone else not to do -- identify a trend from mere shreds of data. So, up front (and with apologies to Emile Zola, of course), I'd just like to pre-emptively say: "Je m'accuse!"

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Roughly once a year or so, I turn this column space over to a guest author. This usually happens when a point of view is presented to me either in public comments or private emails which has impressed me. I haven't always completely agreed with these points of view, but have thought that they deserved a wider audience because the writing was so thoughtful and the reasoning so impressive. Other times, I do heartily agree with the guest author. But sometimes the author writes on subjects which I don't feel qualified myself to tackle. Today, I am once again turning my column over to a group of three authors who have a point to make -- a point that lies mostly outside my experience, which is why I don't comment on it very often: the state of education in America, and how politics relates to it.

The first of the authors of the following piece is well-known to us here, as he was one of the first guest authors to ever appear in this column. Joshua Eisenstein, Ph.D., took me to task during the 2008 Democratic primary season for writing an article suggesting "How Obama Could Wrap It Up". Eisenstein challenged me to write a companion article about Hillary Clinton, but his comments and suggestions as to how to write such an article impressed me so much that I invited him to write his own column, "How Hillary Could Win Fair (And Lock Up The General Election Too!)" -- which is still worth reading for his excellent point of view.

Campaign season aside, though, Eisenstein recently challenged me once again to write about President Obama and his "Race To The Top" education policy, after the release of the movie Waiting For Superman. Eisenstein is not only a doctor of educational psychology but also a civics teacher in a large public school district, so he had a much more experienced take on the subject than I could have managed. He is joined in writing this article by educational expert Miriam Ebsworth, Ph.D., and research librarian Vedana Vaidhyanathan, M.S.L.S.

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The search for meaning in the recent tragic shooting spree in Arizona continues apace. The suspect isn't saying anything, and the police aren't saying anything -- which is wholly unacceptable to the American media (and to a large part of the American public). We have a deep-seated need to attach meaning -- any meaning -- when faced with what sometimes turns out to be nothing more than aberrational and irrational behavior. We all want what Polonius was looking for, it seems:

Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.
-- Hamlet

Now, I realize this quote isn't all that relevant, because of what was really going on in the play (Hamlet was indeed just pretending "madness" -- the modern term would be "insanity" -- and he did have an ulterior motive for his "mad" rambling dialogue; in other words, Polonius was right). But it's worth remembering now because of the frenzy of people both in the public sphere and in private conversations who are desperately grasping for some sort of "reason why" the tragedy happened. Closely related is the yearning for comfort going forward; or, to put it another way, the need many have to declare that "this should have been prevented before it happened."

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When a national tragedy happens -- especially one with political relevance -- the country explodes in a paroxysm of commentary about the incident, in what psychologists would probably label a desperate attempt to attach some sort of meaning. Looking around the media universe today, I see that this is now happening from all sides. Snap judgments are made, spin is spun, and everyone tries to fit what happened into their own view of the world, whatever that happens to be. But since everyone else is covering the bases on this front, I thought I'd focus on heroism.

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Sometimes it is hard to come up with a metaphor to describe the week that was. This was not one of those weeks.

Of course, the easy way out would be to get all self-referential and talk about our sesquicentennial column (or, perhaps more accurately, sesquivolumenical, in a literary sense... or even sesquihebdomadal, in the strict calendrical sense... but then I don't speak Latin, so what do I know?). But that would be a cheap shortcut indeed, so we'll get to that sort of thing in a bit, but we have to shy away from actually leading off with such blatant patting-ourselves-on-the-back-ism.

Instead, we must present the dominant metaphor of the past week: Republicans take control of the House of Representatives, and masses of dead birds begin dropping from the sky.

Boy, that just leaves all sorts of openings, doesn't it?

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