Just last week, the New York Times ran a lengthy item about how much better Congress, and particularly the House, will function under the new Democratic majority. It all sounded quite pleasant — no more middle-of-the-night votes on key bills, no more restrictions on the minority offering amendments, no more single-party conference committees. Indeed, as […]
Following up on an item from the weekend, the Military Times newspapers published a massive new poll after questioning 6,000 randomly selected active-duty members of the Armed Forces. The results ran counter to much of the conventional wisdom — barely one in three service members approve of the way the president is handling the war; […]
For about a month, Bush administration officials have maintained the fiction that the president had not come to any conclusions about whether to send thousands of additional troops to Iraq, and that while a change in policy was in the works, Bush hasn’t decided what that change would be. The claims always seemed far-fetched — […]
I was just catching up on yesterday’s Meet the Press and was struck by just how far gone William Safire is. Tim Russert asked his journalist roundtable, for example, to name the biggest story of 2006. Safire wasn’t alone in mentioning the war in Iraq, but his response was, shall we say, unique. “The Iraq […]
If you missed the NYT’s Nick Kristof’s year-end piece yesterday, it was a sight to behold. Kristof noted that the president’s legacy “doesn’t look good right now,” and imagined a future obituary that described Bush leaving office “vilified and disgraced.” Kristof proceeded to offer 10 suggestions for the president to pursue in 2007 that might […]
When it comes to Saddam Hussein’s execution, the word of the day, Joshua Holland notes, was “milestone.” As in Bush’s statement marking Saddam’s death: “Bringing Saddam Hussein to justice will not end the violence in Iraq, but it is an important milestone on Iraq’s course to becoming a democracy that can govern, sustain, and defend […]