The Misanthrope’s Corner

IN my February 19 column, I wrote, “I can’t shake my sense that the Bush presidency is star-crossed,” but I never thought female intuition would be this accurate.

As soon as it happened, so many commentators called it “our second Pearl Harbor” that my mind drifted back to our first one. I was not quite six in 1941, so my memory of specific events is sketchy, but the general emotional flavor is engraved on my mind as a classic example of my family’s bent dynamic.