So it's come to this. After five and a half years of setting records for filibusters, blocking judicial nominees, stonewalling executive branch appointees and holding the debt ceiling hostage, Republicans are planning a lawsuit "to compel President Obama to follow his oath of office and faithfully execute the laws of our country." The culmination (or […]

The ugly picture in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories is rapidly getting uglier still. After the collapse of U.S. sponsored peace talks, the Netanyahu government quickly retaliated against the President Mahmoud Abbas' unity government with Hamas by announcing 1,500 new settlement units in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. This week, the slaughter of […]

To hear the best and the brightest of the conservative movement tell it, Americans' freedom of religion is in dire peril. At Liberty University in April, Texas Senator Ted Cruz cautioned, "Religious liberty has never been more under attack." Ben Sasse, the Nebraska GOP Senate candidate, went even further in declaring that "the free exercise […]

For Republicans, it is the love that dare not speak its name. Tax cuts don't pay for themselves by generating economic growth so explosive that government revenues exceed the levels they would have otherwise reached. Ever since the Laffer Curve was first sketched on a napkin for the likes of Jack Kemp and Ronald Reagan, […]

Back in the summer of 2008, National Review contributor Kathryn Jean Lopez had a "totally crazy thought" about President Bush's life after the White House. "Wouldn't George W. Bush make an awesome high-school government teacher?" she asked, adding "Wouldn't it be something if his post-presidential life would up being that kind of post-service service?" Alas, […]

On December 14, 2008, President George W. Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki signed the status of forces agreement (SOFA) under which American military forces would leave Iraq by the end of 2011. But at their press conference announcing the SOFA, an Iraqi journalist hurled his shoes at Bush's head, shouting "This is a […]

Republicans have their queen of the 1 percent. In the wake of her flip comments about having been "dead broke" and not "truly well off," the GOP and its conservative echo chamber are portraying Hillary Clinton as the reincarnation of Leona Helmsley. Hoping to provide additional fodder for the right, Bloomberg News suggested estate tax […]

The revelation that the Internal Revenue Service lost two years of Lois Lerner's emails has Republicans and their right-wing echo chamber dredging up Watergate comparisons. Peggy Noonan, James Poulos and Paul Mirengoff are just some of the conservatives "paging Rosemary Woods" and gleefully making comparisons to Richard Nixon's 18 minutes of erased tape. But the […]

This weekend, the architects of President Bush's disastrous Iraq war fanned out in what might deemed Operation Blame Shift. But of all the Republican efforts to make Barack Obama's the face of Bush's failure, perhaps none is more pathetic than that of L. Paul Bremer. On television and in the op-ed pages of the Wall […]

"Obama lost Iraq." With the fall of Mosul and Tikrit to the forces of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), that will be the rallying cry for Republicans for the foreseeable future. Already, there is a chorus of voices from John McCain and the Wall Street Journal to right-wing radio and the […]