The steady stream of bad news about Afghanistan this week served to highlight two inescapable truths regarding the conflict against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. First, Barack Obama was right that the ongoing commitment of American forces in Iraq is preventing the United States from successfully pursuing Al Qaeda along the Pakistan frontier. Second, the […]

In a disturbing report on Wednesday, CBS News offered Americans a glimpse of their health care future under President Bush, John McCain and their Republican allies. Detailing two cases of patients dying untreated and unnoticed in New York and Los Angeles emergency rooms, the story shows the exceptions that may increasingly become the rule. Call […]

Earlier this year, Mississippi Republican Senator Thad Cochran said the prospect of his "erratic" and "hotheaded" GOP colleague John McCain becoming President "sends a cold chill down my spine." Now we know why. As the Biloxi Sun Herald reported today, Cochran witnessed an out-of-control McCain disrupt a tense 1987 diplomatic mission in Nicaragua by grabbing […]

Every presidential campaign has its pivotal moments as defined or, in some cases, abetted by the media. 2008 is shaping up as no exception. At the very time when Barack Obama is said to be inoculating himself against the far left liberal label with his positions on FISA, gun rights, the death penalty and federal […]

Back in 2000, Democratic strategist and political writer Cliff Schecter contributed $20 to the presidential campaign of Arizona Republican Senator John McCain. An admirer of McCain's independent streak then in opposing Republican orthodoxy on supply-side tax cuts and overturning Roe v Wade, Schecter admitted, "I trusted him." Eight years and seemingly endless McCain flip-flops later, […]

Mike Allen of the Politico reports this morning that former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney now tops John McCain's list of potential running mates. The GOP insiders he spoke to claim that Romney's business background, dazzling teeth, perfect hair, high-profile family roots in swing state Michigan - and his ability to "raise $50 million in 60 […]

On more than one occasion this campaign season, Republican John McCain claimed Americans' economic worries were all in their heads. So it's only natural that a man who described the economic downturn as "psychological" would have his own mental strategy for coping with spiraling gas prices and looming tax bills. Just forget them. That's the […]

Even as poll after poll shows Barack Obama consolidating his sizable leads among women in general and Hillary Clinton supporters in particular, the American media soldiers on in its attempt to manufacture dissent. CNN is no exception. Last night, Larry King featured disgruntled Clinton backer turned McCainiac, Cynthia Ruccia of the group Women for Fair […]

If nothing else, a Republican ticket of John McCain and Mitt Romney would offer Americans the potential for great theater. For openers, the fact that the two men essentially hate each other could make for great drama. And as his comments yesterday suggest, the return of their common ex-adviser Mike Murphy to the stage could […]

When it comes to his foreign policy, John McCain is a revisionist historian and a particularly clumsy one at that. Having asked Americans to ignore his record as the master of disaster on Iraq, John McCain similarly underwent an election-year transformation from rabid France-basher to born-again multilateralist and fawning Francophile. Now, the McCain campaign is […]