Rumors and leaks continue to swirl around the case of outed CIA agent Valerie Plame and the various journalists and Bush "senior administration officials" believed to be involved in some fashion in her outing. Whole forests have undoubtedly been pulped for...
Presidential Aggressor
Mitchell B. Lerner, editor, Looking Back at LBJ: White House Politics in a New Light (University Press of Kansas, 2005). In Mitchell Lerner's informative and worthwhile collection of essays by a group of historians scrutinizing LBJ's domestic and foreign policies...
Rage Against the Killing of the Light
Mid-August 2005 may be remembered as a moment in U.S. history when the president could no longer get away with the media trick of solemnly patting death on its head. Unreality is a hallmark of media coverage for war. Yet most of all war is about death...
Tyranny’s Gate
For my radio show on August 6th I interviewed Jacob Hornberger, the founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation. [stream] [download] The man was upset. Why? Because, he says, the Bush regime, which has already acted contrary to every one of the first ten...
Cheney’s Man Slated to Replace Feith
A career diplomat and foreign policy operative, Eric S. Edelman has just replaced the controversial Douglas Feith at the Pentagon as the new undersecretary of defense for policy, having been appointed by President Bush during a congressional recess. Many observers had...
Nuclear China Good, Nuclear Iran Bad?
What I have noticed about conservatives and Republicans is that they are no longer conservative and Republican. They believe in the efficacy of force. If we are losing in Iraq, it is because we are not using enough force. All we have to do to win in Iraq, they...
Angry Mothers and Trembling Grizzlies: The Sheehan Effect
"Sheehan has been involved in protests against Bush since last year. She founded Gold Star Families for Peace...She said she decided to seek another audience with Bush when she heard his comments about the war last week, after a spike in American deaths. The...
No Sympathy for the Neocons
The news that the Rolling Stones are coming out with a song called "Sweet Neocon" that takes the administration to task for its Iraq war policy is music to my ears: "You call yourself a Christian, I call you a hypocrite/ You call yourself a patriot. Well, I...
Iranian Ironies
We have now reached another of those recurring tinderbox moments relating to Iran. Yesterday, the Iranians officially relaunched their nuclear program, beginning a suspended process of uranium conversion at a facility near Isfahan. In this, Iran's emboldened clerical...
Backtalk, August 9, 2005
Who's Behind the Coming War With Iran? An otherwise informative article was badly damaged by your repeated reference as a Trotskyite someone in the State Department. I fail to see the necessity to dredge up this red-baiting with references to a Bolshevik who has been...


