Neo-conservative founding father Irving Kristol once famously said, a neoconservative is "a liberal who's been mugged by reality." Now the once-preening adherents of the Bush Doctrine are being beaten and battered by events on the ground. First came the Sharia-influenced constitution and sectarian violence in Iraq and the Hamas government in Palestine. With the possible […]

These may be dark times for President Bush and the GOP, but Republicans are happy. Or at least happier than Democrats. That's the unsurprising conclusion of the annual survey of American happiness ("Are We Happy Yet?") by the Pew Research Center. Just as predictably, conservatives like George Will are happier still about what they see […]

This weekend's third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq brought another shake-up in the Top 10 GOP Sound Bites List. Catapulting to #4 is the new White House medley, "We're Makin' Progress", performed by George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and General George Casey. Still topping the charts is the hard rocking smash hit, George […]

On this the third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, I'm adding to the endless list of retrospectives. The Perrspectives Iraq Archive includes all of this site's articles, features and pieces on the planning, politics and policies surrounding the American conflict in Iraq. Among the featured pieces:

In case you missed it, this past week completed the transformation of John McCain from GOP maverick to Republican prostitute. In his no-holds barred pursuit of the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, the Arizona Senator has exchanged his seething hatred of George W. Bush for a fawning courtship and high-profile bootlicking of the Bush political machine. […]

With its sympathetic portrait of a polygamous family, the new HBO series "Big Love," is helping to heat up the culture war. The show has been the fodder of a Newsweek feature on the polygamy rights movement, complete with headlines such as "Polygamists Unite!" For conservative stalwarts like Charles Krauthammer and Rick Santorum, "Big Love" […]

The much-deserved indignities continue for President Bush. Just a day after a host of new opinion polls put the President's approval rating as low as 33%, Bush suffered a devastating blow from one of his core constituencies. George W. Bush is losing the cracker vote. On Thursday, pop star Jessica Simpson snubbed the President, choosing […]

The latest wave of public opinion polls shows that President Bush's downward spiral continues unabated. The Wall Street Journal reports that Bush's approval rating has plummeted to 37%, with CNN coming in at 36%, a precipitous 10% drop from January. And while a comparatively upbeat Washington Post survey from March 6th put the President at […]

Refusing to bow to the inevitable, Republican Congresswoman and 2000 GOP recount heroine Katherine Harris is staying in the 2006 Florida Senate race. Sidestepping a major address planned for this evening, Harris instead used the friendly confines of the Fox Hannity and Colmes program to declare her intent to continue her quixotic campaign the Democratic […]

A sense of humor has always been an invaluable tool for presidents. Self-deprecating humor helped endear John F. Kennedy to the press and allowed Ronald Reagan to disarm his critics. But for George W. Bush, humor provides only a occasional glimpse of the truth and a rare window into the dark soul of a man […]