At the White House Correspondents' Dinner the other night, Karl Rove was called up on stage and asked to identify himself. "Peter Fitzgerald," he promptly said. Then, he corrected himself, "Patrick Fitzgerald." (That is, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, who had...
Ever since September 2001, the president's central operative image has been "war" – specifically, his "global war on terror" (promptly transformed into the grim acronym GWOT). With it went the fantasy that we had been plunged into the modern equivalent of World...
The carnage in Iraq continues, but what did anyone expect? Roadside bombs (IEDs) take their deadly almost daily toll on U.S. troops in and around Baghdad (and adjoining provinces). Seventy-five Americans have already died in March, at least 50 of them from roadside...
Excuse me if, at 62, and well into my second era of protest against yet another distant, disastrous, and disabling American war, I express a little confusion. Was it actually like this in Rome while the legions were off fighting on the German frontiers? Was this the...
Four years ago, the United States invaded Iraq. It's the anniversary few want to remember; and yet, for all the disillusionment in this country, getting out of Iraq doesn't exactly seem to be on the agenda either. Not really. Here's a little tip, when you want to...
Let me see if I've got this straight. Perhaps two years ago, an "informal" meeting of "veterans" of the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal – holding positions in the Bush administration – was convened by Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams. Discussed were...
When it comes to surging in Iraq, it's "encouraging" out there. So the president tells us ("Yet even at this early hour, there are some encouraging signs…"); so Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, the surge commander in Baghdad, tells us ("[It's] too early to discern...
Once upon a time, our offshore prison at Guantánamo was the sort of place where even an American National Guardsman, only pretending to be a recalcitrant prisoner "extracted" from a cell for training purposes, could be beaten almost senseless. This actually...
Let's start with the obvious waste. We know that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have lost their lives since the Bush administration invaded their country in March 2003, that almost 2 million may have fled to other countries, and that possibly millions more have been...
Nothing reminds us more of how much the American constitutional system has been transformed, of just how extreme the "imperial presidency" has become, than Congress' generally woeful record in the second half of the last century and in the first years of this one to...
