After months and months of delays, the long-awaited National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq was delivered to Congress today. It is altogether fitting that the NIE crawled out from Langley on Groundhog Day. After all, like Bill Murray in the film Groundhog Day we've experienced this unsettling process of murky reports from the intelligence community before. […]

The building bipartisan opposition to the President's proposed troop surge in Iraq and the crickets-chirping reception to Bush's abysmal State of the Union address have led to another dramatic shake-up in the list of Top 10 GOP Sound Bites. The President's hard-charging counterattack has moved two right-wing talking points up the charts. The new #1 […]

In an AP story Wednesday, a Democratic official confirms that Air America headliner Al Franken is in fact entering the 2008 Minnesota senate race against Republican Norm Coleman. Hopefully, the comedian turned Senate candidate can deliver some comeuppance to Coleman, who said of his late predecessor in 2003, "I am a 99 percent improvement over […]

In the war of words between left and right, the conservative chattering classes suffered from a rhetorical quadruple whammy this week. Reality was not kind to the right with Republican rebellion over the Iraq surge, the Libby CIA leak trial, President Bush's abysmal State of the Union and Dick Cheney's media implosion. Here, then, are […]

With Senate debate on competing Iraq resolutions set to begin this week, Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel has emerged as the bete noire of President Bush and his remaining Republican allies in Congress. But while his ferocious opposition to the "Alice in Wonderland" surge in Iraq marks him now as a White House foe, back in […]

Updated January 25, 2007 and April 19, 2005 (originally published November 24, 2004) The “War on Terror” has provided Americans with a helpful introduction to theocracy. The fight against Al Qaeda, the war on the Taliban, and the growing tensions with the regime in Iran has offered a quick primer on the hallmarks of the […]

Lost in the flurry of recent presidential campaign announcements is one of the more intriguing developments of the modern political era. That is, while most candidates seek the White House with real aspirations to govern the nation, a self-chosen few such as Al Sharpton or Gary Bauer aim only to lead a movement or community. […]

The simmering controversy over the display of the Confederate flag by public entities remains a festering sore on the American body politic. And over the past week, voices from the left, right and center weighed in on the ongoing disgrace that is the public romance of the CSA banner in South Carolina, Mississippi and elsewhere […]

For those who had the good fortune to miss his 2007 State of the Union address, President Bush just offered the American people a stunning profile in rhetorical obfuscation and political comeuppance. Domestically, his seeming move to the middle on energy, immigration and health care may have alienated his own base while offering some prospect […]

With the 2007 State of the Union address now one for the history books, you can access the full text of this and all six prior Bush SOTU speeches in the Perrspectives Document Library. Details on new White House policy proposals are available here. The text of Senator Jim Webb's Democratic response is available here.