After the harsh winter weather that helped bring U.S. economic growth to standstill, the strong May jobs report came as very good news. The U.S. added 280,000 new jobs and saw signs that wage growth is picking up steam. Even the uptick in the unemployment rate to 5.5 percent represents a positive development, as more […]

Absence makes the heart grow fonder. That's especially true with former American presidents, whose approval numbers invariably rise as their time away from the Oval Office increases. That's one reason why Politico and the right-wing commentariat trumpeting a new CNN/ORC poll showing that George W. Bush now enjoys a higher approval rating than President Obama […]

Jeb Bush, the 2016 GOP White House hopeful tells us, loves his brother. But judging by his recent statements, he apparently loves the idea of being president even more. Confronted by Dubya's dismal record at home and abroad, Jeb ultimately denied the Iraq war was a mistake and comically claimed "ISIS didn't exist when my […]

With the loss of Ramadi to ISIS forces, the Republican Party has launched one of its most ambitious myth-making operations in recent memory: Barack Obama lost Iraq. "We had the conflict won," John McCain declared this week, "thanks to the surge." Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard and the Project for a New American Century […]

There's an old Monty Python sketch in which a "Face the Press" interviewer grills the Minister for Home Affairs: "You claimed that you would build 88,000 million, billion houses a year in the Greater London area alone. In fact, you've built only three in the last fifteen years. Are you a bit disappointed with this […]

Just one week after a 19 year-old college student rightly informed Jeb Bush that "your brother created ISIS," the 2016 GOP White House hopeful apparently decided one historical beat down wasn't enough. At a gathering in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on Wednesday, Dubya's brother doubled down and declared: "ISIS didn't exist when my brother was president. […]

In the wake of Jeb Bush's whiplash-producing reversal last week, the U.S. media is engaged in a feeding frenzy over who would have supported the Iraq war "knowing what we know now." For his part, former Colorado Senator and might-have-been President of the United States Gary Hart is disgusted both with the current circle-jerk and […]

"Knowing what we know now." With those five words, virtually the entire 2016 Republican presidential field erased over 12 years of GOP talking points steadfastly supporting President Bush's 2003 invasion of Iraq. But that phrase is much less important in what it says about the past (after all, as many have noted, we had plenty […]

It must be tough being the brother of the man who is responsible for the world-historical disaster that was the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It's tougher still to try to replace him as the next Republican president of the United States. This week, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush found that out the hard way. Mocked […]

Knowing what he knows now about the reaction to his statement that knowing what he knows now he would still have gone into Iraq, Jeb Bush on Friday comically reversed course on his brother's 2003 invasion of Iraq. Even more side-splitting have been the responses of Jeb's rivals for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. Casually […]