The Bell Curve:

The political cartoonists are having a field day with President Obama’s beer bust last week. The reaction was predictable. When I saw the picture of this little grouping of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., Boston police Sgt. James Crowley and the president and vice president of the Unites States on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, surrounded at a respectful distance by an army of photographers, my first thought was what politically yummy targets they made. For cartoonists, not guns. There must have been more Secret Service than journalists in that pack.

The Times’ editors chose a cartoon by “Rogers” of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for their op-ed page. In case you missed it, there are four fat and jovial beer drinkers standing at a bar, three in raucous “beer talk” and the fourth on the phone telling his wife that “the boys and I are solving racism, and if that goes well, we’re moving on to health care and the environment.”

That’s good for a laugh. It’s also a cheap shot. Has cynicism in this country taken over in our thinking to the point that any effort at civility in the settling of disputes is regarded somewhere between contempt and hilarity? If that is true — and I think it is — then we need to find some other process that won’t be overpowered by the health-care lobbyists and the National Rifle Assn.

So why not follow the cartoonist’s advice and the leadership of our president by creating a series of national and international beer busts where problems can be put on the table? What do we have to lose?

What we’re doing now, especially with health care, sure as hell isn’t working.

I wrote the above paragraphs Tuesday. The following morning, former President Bill Clinton arrived from North Korea with two American journalists who had wandered across the border, been arrested by North Korean troops, convicted as spies and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Today, they are back home with their families. And the Korean News Agency is reporting that Clinton “expressed thanks for their pardon and delivered an oral message from Barack Obama on improving relations between the two countries.”