As the year draws to a close, the only question in Washington appears to be how--and not whether--Republicans will seek payback against President Obama for his executive action deferring the deportations of four million undocumented immigrants. While House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and soon-to-be Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) want to defer retribution until […]

Two weeks ago, the House Intelligence Committee released its report on the 2012 Benghazi tragedy. Like the previous six probes by the State Department, internal watchdogs and other Congressional panels, the GOP-controlled House Intelligence Committee concluded there had been no stand-down order, no CIA intelligence failure and no cover-up in the killings of Ambassador Chris […]

There was plenty not to like in President Obama address on ISIS Wednesday night. His claim to have authority to wage an open-ended military campaign without Congressional action doesn't pass the smell test. To the degree that "success" in restoring regional stability can even be defined, it is contingent on building and sustaining a staggeringly […]

They were for it before they were against it. Current and would-be GOP members of Congress tweeted their praise for the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl before deleting the evidence. Among others, Arizona Senator and failed 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain declared he would be "inclined to support" the very kind of prisoner exchange […]

In December 2004, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld lectured American troops worried about vital equipment shortages plaguing U.S. combat forces in Iraq. "You go to war with the army you have," Rumsfeld pontificated, "not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time." That was a particularly galling statement for Rumsfeld of […]

There are tragedies and then there are scandals. The killings of four Americans in Benghazi, as investigations by the State Department and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence have already confirmed, was a tragedy, and likely a preventable one. But the Bush administration's regime of detainee torture was both a tragedy and a scandal. The […]

This week, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence voted to release a declassified version of its 6,000 page report on the CIA's abuses and deceptions as part President Bush's program so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques." Predictably, its architects immediately circled the wagons. On Fox News, former Bush National Security Adviser and CIA Director Michael Hayden called […]

As Condoleezza Rice reminded Americans this week, nothing succeeds like failure for the members of George W. Bush's national security team. Addressing a $15 million dollar Republican fundraiser, Bush's former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State blasted the Obama administration's handling of the Ukraine crisis, declaring "When America steps back and there is a […]

Politics, it is said, ends at the water's edge. Or at least it did until January 20, 2009. Sensing yet another opportunity to bludgeon President Obama, the usual suspects on the right have fanned out across TV screens and op-ed pages to blame him for Russian aggression in Ukraine. John McCain, who defended President Bush […]

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney must be laughing their asses off. President Obama has a budding constitutional crisis on his hands, with a leading Senate Democrat accusing Obama's CIA director of spying on Intelligence Committee staff. But at the heart of the issue is a still-classified, 6,000 page report said to catalog abuses and […]