By MARTIN SCHRAM, Scripps Howard News Service

As we lament the fact that our newspapers are either on the skids or on the blocks, America's two most famous -- The New York Times and Washington Post -- just showed us again that they are often great but not always good.

From Day One, President Obama has been making commander-in-chief decisions on the multiple, overlapping and overwhelming national security crises he found in his inbox.
Yet through the first 100 Days of national security crises, you almost never read or heard these three words in the mainstream news:
"General James Jones."

Perhaps you haven't heard, but we have just completed the first 100 Days of the Obama Presidency. So today we will do a job performance evaluation -- of our anniversary, not his.
How have we done in our first 100 Days as American citizens during the Obama Presidency?

Not since the financially endowed Howard Hughes designed for the otherwise endowed Jane Russell the world's first cantilevered, under-wired strapless bra -- lifting her to prominence in his film, "The Outlaw" -- has a "New Foundation" debuted with such global prominence.

Once again, a president of the United States strode across a flattop and approached the microphones with unmistakable confidence. But this time the president was not walking across an aircraft carrier at sea, just a campus lecture hall stage in Washington.

It has been almost four decades since Spiro Agnew warned us to beware of "nattering nabobs of negativism" (an oratorical gem that proved to be a genuine Safire). Yet we are just wising up to the greater peril we face now that the nabobs are aiming their nonstop natter at us via 24/7 cable news and an unfiltered world-wide web.

Looking back, those chilling news stories of the ease with which a handful of Pakistani militants rampaged through hundreds of police cadets in Punjab on the morning of March 30, 2009, seems like the good old days.

Decades before the advent of the little blue pill, a mid-sized, somewhat pudgy doctor once confided the essential secret of Washington's upwardly aspiring men. "Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac," said Dr. Henry Kissinger.

We Americans have always found comfort by wrapping ourselves in a one-size-fits-all security blanket.

We are a nation in need of new animals. Because the old ones -- the symbols of our two major political parties -- no longer reflect reality.
The elephant must go as the Republican Party symbol. We all know that elephants never forget -- and the problem today's Republicans have is they can no longer remember.