With Hillary Clinton's lead growing, Barack Obama appears to be overreaching to keep the spotlight and highlight their differences. His suggestion that sex education begin in kindergarten seems a great leap forward even for a liberal Democrat. While Barack...
When, in the South Carolina debate, Barack Obama said he would meet with the leaders of Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, Iran and North Korea in his first year as president, he stepped into a cow pie. Hillary pounced, declaring that in a Clinton White House, there would be no...
Responding to the call of Pope Urban II at Claremont in 1095, the Christian knights of the First Crusade set out for the Holy Land. In 1099, Jerusalem was captured. As their port in Palestine, the Crusaders settled on Acre on the Mediterranean. There they...
Is the United States provoking war with Iran, to begin while the Congress is conveniently on its August recess? One recalls that it was in August 1964, after the Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater, that the Tonkin Gulf incident occurred. Twice it was said, on Aug....
Why did Bush do it? Why did he suddenly barge into the legal process and erase the entire 30-month sentence of Scooter Libby? For, from his own statement, Bush found the act deeply distasteful. In that statement, Bush calls Libby's crimes "serious convictions of...
What was anticipated in September, the retreat of the old bulls of the Republican Party from the Bush war policy, happened in June. The beginning of the end of U.S. involvement in the Iraq war is at hand. "I rise today," said Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana on Monday,...
On April 1 – Palm Sunday – after bullets were fired into the Church of the Holy Spirit in Mosul, Iraq, during mass, the pastor, Father Ragheed Ganni, a Chaldean Catholic, e-mailed friends at the Asia Times: "We empathize with Christ, who entered Jerusalem in...
These are the "birth pangs" of a "new Middle East," said Condi Rice last summer, as Israel pounded Lebanon. Unfortunately, the new Middle East may make us all pray for the return of the old. Hamas is today engaged in savage street-fighting with Fatah for control of...
By 1988, Ronald Reagan, who had famously branded the Soviet Union "an evil empire," was striding through Red Square arm-in-arm with Mikhail Gorbachev. Russians were pounding both men on the back. They had just signed the greatest arms-reduction agreement in history...
Has Congress given George Bush a green light to attack Iran? For he is surely behaving as though it is his call alone. And evidence is mounting that we are on a collision course for war: Iran has detained several Iranian-Americans, seemingly in retaliation for our...
