In his 2007 book The Assault on Reason, former Vice President Al Gore warned about what he saw as a dire threat to American democracy. "The 'well-informed citizenry,'" Gore fretted, "is in danger of becoming the 'well-amused audience.'" In a presentation on Super Tuesday 2008 ("That's Entertainment: Politics as Theater in Campaign '08"), I elaborated […]

When it comes to defending their party against scandals, no one gets in line like Republicans. That's why it's no surprise that GOP leaders in Congress are doing their best to head off any independent probe into President Trump's rapidly propagating Putin problems. Last week, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus called allegation of Team Trump […]

Looking back on it now, the result of the election is even more unfathomable than when media outlets first called the race. Thanks to a strong economy, the two-term Democratic president enjoyed an approval rating well over 50 percent--with good reason. Despite near-total Republican opposition to his health care and stimulus plans and dire GOP […]

"Reagan," Vice President Dick Cheney said in 2002, "proved deficits don't matter." Unless, Cheney felt no need to mention, the occupant of the Oval Office is a Democrat. After all, Ronald Reagan had tripled the national debt in 8 short years and George W. Bush had nearly doubled it again by the time he ambled […]

It is an article of conservative faith that federal spending under President Obama is "out of control." As the 2016 GOP Platform states in an amazing revision of recent history: The Administration's policies systematically crippled economic growth and job creation, driving up government costs and driving down revenues. When Congressional Republicans tried to reverse course, […]

On July 28, 2008, the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility jointly published the results of a year-long investigation into the hiring practices at the Bush DOJ. As the AP reported, "A new Justice Department report concludes that politics illegally influenced the hiring of career prosecutors and immigration judges, […]

The Democratic and Republican conventions just completed broke new ground in modern American politics in two ways. Casting a dark shadow over the first presidential nomination of a woman by a major party was the reaction to it by the other. Republicans don't merely want to defeat their opponent at the polls in 2016. They […]

They say the best defense is a good offense. As the GOP prepares for its convention in Cleveland, Republicans have little other choice. After all, the Party of Lincoln is about to officially crown the pathological liar, race-baiting bigot and parasite posing as a populist Donald Trump as its nominee for President of the United […]

From the beginning of his unlikely quest for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump has enjoyed the strong backing of those GOP voters who say they want a successful businessman in the White House. After only his outsider status, Gallup polling showed earlier this year, backers of the real estate mogul turned reality TV […]

In an understandably rare interview with Fox News on Sunday, Barack Obama spoke bluntly about the "worst mistake" of his presidency. That error, as he had also recently explained to the BBC and The Atlantic, was the unraveling of Libya following the fall of Muammar Qaddafi: "Probably failing to plan for the day after what […]