In commuting Scooter Libby's sentence so that the vice president's former chief of staff won't spend a minute in jail, the president is sending a message, one that, while going out to multiple recipients, consists of a sentiment succinctly summed up in two words:...
"Endism" has been a favorite neoconservative theme over the years: every once in a while the neocons announce the death of some commonly assumed idea that the rest of us take for granted– during the 1950s, for example, they wrote the obituary of...
The uncovering of the CIA's "family jewels" – a catalog of the Agency's crimes committed at home and abroad in the 1970s – underscores my principal objection to the trite post-9/11 conventional wisdom, "Everything's changed." Because, of...
While the American people pine for peace, our leaders are intent on war: that's the anomaly of American "democracy," one that speaks ill of the effort to export our system at gunpoint. Adopt "democracy," and you, too, can be ruled by a warmongering...
To look at Fred Thompson, the actor-cum-senator who now appears to be moving to the front of the GOP presidential pack, one would think that what you see is what you get – but, no. Peel back the pretty ordinary red-state Republican opinions – the war is a...
Congress recently passed a resolution calling on the UN to bring charges of "genocide" against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Now, I hold no brief for the Iranian ranter – whose jeremiads against the West are in the category of Borat-like humor – but...
The idea that we invaded and occupied Iraq and launched a bid to "transform" the Middle East because we wanted to install liberal, democratic societies in the region is just not believable on many levels, and certainly recent headlines about the Palestinian...
When the history of the Iraq war is written, the question of who lost it and how it was lost will be paramount, yet the answer is clear enough even today. The seeds of defeat were sown long ago, and not just by the policymakers and authors of our present disastrous...
As he informed Scooter Libby's lawyers that their client would not squirm out of his jail term of two and a half years, Judge Reggie B. Walton revealed that he had been threatened, via letters and phone calls, by some of Libby's more rabid supporters – not really...
I see that Zbigniew Brzezinski is stealing my ideas and not giving me credit, but, what the heck, I'm in a generous mood – and he puts his own gloss on it – so I don't mind (via Matthew Yglesias): "Zbigniew Brzezinski at the conference says the U.S. and...
