Today’s installment of campaign-related news items that wouldn’t generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers: * Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) continues to say he won’t run for president in 2008, but now he’s dropping hints about a possible campaign in the future. In an interview with a […]
When Bush used Veterans Day to lash out at Democrats, it was unseemly. When he took a few cheap shots at John Kerry, it was embarrassing. (Was Clinton going after Bob Dole a full year after the ’96 election?) But to truly appreciate the dismal point Bush’s presidency has reached, consider the president’s new-found interest […]
When it comes to classified leaks, most of the attention has focused lately on the Plame scandal and the CIA’s “black sites” prisons. But let’s not forget that a sitting U.S. senator has been under investigation for about two years for his role a controversial leak of his own. Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), who was […]
After all the times that infamous passive voice phrase has been used, you’d think Republicans would avoid it. Alas, it lives on. Former President Ronald Reagan, on the Iran-Contra scandal, in 1986: “Mistakes were made.” George W. Bush, on the Abu Ghraib scandal, in 2004: ” It’s also important for the people of Iraq to […]
During the presidential campaign, John Kerry had a pretty decent response when it came to describing his vote on the Iraq resolution that ultimately led to war. I gave the president the authority to deal with Saddam Hussein, Kerry said, but I didn’t know Bush was going to screw it up so badly. It wasn’t […]
To hear the White House tell it, last week’s Dem election victories had absolutely nothing to do with the president. As Scott McClellan told reporters, “I don’t think any thorough analysis of the election results will show that the elections were decided on anything other than local and state issues and the candidates and their […]
The president’s Veterans’ Day speech, apparently part of a new White House offensive against, well, everyone who doesn’t agree entirely with everything Bush believes, generated plenty of media attention, but probably not the kind the Bush gang had hoped for. The Washington Post made it clear — on the front page — that the president […]
Guest Post by Morbo I take it as a given that George W. Bush will be remembered as the worst president of the modern era, which I’m defining here as post-World War II. But lately I’ve been wondering if a case can be made that he’s the worst president ever in American history. I do […]
Guest Post by Morbo Another week, another appalling story about government-sanctioned torture in “The New Yorker.” This one comes courtesy of writer Jane Mayer. She writes about Iraqi insurgent Manadel al-Jamadi, who died in Abu Ghraib prison at the hands of the CIA in November of 2003. The subtitle of Mayer’s article is “Can the […]
Guest Post by Morbo Back in July, I criticized a Roman Catholic cardinal, Christoph Schonborn, for writing an opinion piece defending “intelligent design.” I asserted that Schonborn was dragging the church back to its anti-intellectual past. In an effort to be “fair and balanced,” I must note that not all church cardinals are behaving like […]