Typically, when faced with a problem, the first thing Bush administration officials do is reach for their dictionaries to pretzel and torture words into whatever shape best suits them. Then they declare themselves simply to be following precedent (which turns out, of...
What a couple of weeks in Iraq (and at home): Withdrawal was suddenly on everyone's lips, while tragedy and absurdity were piling up like some vast, serial car wreck of event and emotion. Before a massed audience of midshipmen at the Naval Academy, our president...
On the Sept. 27 Charlie Rose Show, interviewing New Yorker editor David Remnick, Rose brought up the question of what the United States should do in Iraq. Should we "get out" – or, as Remnick so delicately put it, should we "bolt"? Here was how Remnick ended...
During his embattled summer vacation in Crawford, Texas, George Bush managed to launch a new promotional ditty for his war in Iraq: "As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down." Since then there has been much commentary from the administration, from military officials,...
Back in mid-October, I noted that informal "walls" and exhibits to honor those Americans (and sometimes Iraqis) who fell – and continue to fall – in the Bush administration's war and occupation of choice in Iraq have been arising on- and off-line for some...
Bertolt Brecht wrote this of empire long ago: "Who built the seven gates of Thebes? The books are filled with names of kings. Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone? And Babylon, so many times destroyed. Who built the city up each time? … In the...
It's finally Wizard of Oz time in America. You know – that moment when the curtains are pulled back, the fearsome-looking wizard wreathed in all that billowing smoke turns out to be some pitiful little guy, and everybody looks around sheepishly, wondering why...
Two presiding deities – and lively ghosts they are – continue to hover over the present administration: Vietnam and Watergate. Though the competition between them is fierce, this week Watergate suddenly surged to the fore as the Washington Post's Bob...
We know one thing about the Bush administration: despite the president's Veterans Day speech on the "irresponsibility" of "rewriting history," he and his top officials – possibly the greatest gamblers in our history – had no hesitation about writing their...
She's just off the plane from Tulsa, Oklahoma, the cheapest route back from a reunion in the little Arkansas town where she grew up in the 1950s. For thirty years, she and her childhood friends have climbed to the top of Penitentiary Mountain, where the local...
