In a little reported development a few weeks back, senior McCain adviser Charlie Black relabeled his man, "slightly right of center." After having already adopted virtually the entire Bush agenda and just weeks after running an ad titled "True Conservative" during the Republican primaries, John McCain had started his mad dash back to the political […]

Last week, I highlighted the GOP's effort to manufacture a "character gap" in an election match-up between John McCain and Barack Obama. That is, facing Americans' overwhelming disdain for their party's policies and its president, Republicans will invariably try to repackage the race as a contest of character. Now, two new studies from the Pew […]

If nothing else, John McCain is an irony producing machine. On the very day Scott McClellan described the Bush administration "propaganda" used to sell an "unnecessary war" in Iraq, talking points McCain himself regurgitated, the Arizona Senator challenged Barack Obama to join him on a Baghdad visit. More ironic still, John McCain hasn't merely been […]

As FireDogLake, Huffington Post and others detail, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan revealed that it was President Bush himself who authorized the selective leaking of the 2002 Iraq National Intelligence Estimate. As he disclosed both in his book and during interviews today, McClellan says Bush admitted declassifying portions of the NIE to allow […]

The response from the Bush administration and its amen corner to the blistering charges in former press secretary Scott McClellan's new book has been quick, brutal and predictable. While his predecessor Ari Fleischer proclaimed himself "heartbroken" over McClellan's revelations, his eventual successor Dana Perino branded him "disgruntled." Even as Karl Rove likened the man who […]

Among the more fascinating if less significant revelations in Scott McClellan's new book is his discussion of George W. Bush's past use of cocaine. Bush, McClellan now claims, told him he couldn't remember whether or not he used coke. That, of course, is a far cry from the response of Governor Bush offered Americans during […]

In what was billed as a major address today on nuclear non-proliferation, John McCain offered the latest installment in the ongoing saga of strategic incoherence that passes for his foreign policy. Just months after calling for a "League of Democracies" and the expulsion of Russia from the G8, McCain today portrayed Russia as an essential […]

Senator John McCain used this Memorial Day to ask Americans to remember others' roles in the calamity that unfolded in Iraq. First proclaiming himself "sick at heart by the many mistakes made by civilian and military commanders" in the run up and conduct of the war, McCain then declared of a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, […]

Just days after rejecting the endorsements of his "ministers of war" John Hagee and Rod Parsley, John McCain may be about to confront another faith-based conundrum. Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) is facing withering criticism from prominent conservatives and evangelical leaders over his Senate probe into the finances of Kenneth Copeland and other so-called "prosperity gospel" […]

You put your right hand in. You put your right hand out... Like an overexcited kid at a birthday party, John McCain has been doing the political equivalent of the hokey pokey for the past two years. That is, after first running hard to the right to woo conservative primary voters, McCain then veered sharply […]