One day after proclaiming on Meet the Press that he and George W. Bush share a common philosophy, John McCain took to a stage in Cleveland Monday to attack the President's economic policies. As it turns out, of course, when it comes to ideology and policy on the economy, John McCain and George W. Bush […]

On Thursday, candidates John McCain and Barack Obama took a break from the down and dirty battles of the election to poke fun at each other during the annual Al Smith dinner in New York. But if McCain and Obama's night of graciousness and good-natured ribbing was a welcome break from the highly-charged campaign, it […]

After a weekend of rampant speculation that Monday would produce yet another incarnation of John McCain, the only comeback from his campaign appears to be the text of his 2004 speech to the Republican National Convention. McCain's latest transformation - after McCain the Goldwater disciple, the Reagan footsoldier, the Maverick, the neocon, the experienced one, […]

Back in December 2005, Texas Senator John Cornyn pioneered what became the Republican Party's "give me death" defense of President Bush's program of illegal NSA domestic surveillance. "None of your civil liberties matter much," Cornyn announced, "after you're dead." As ABC revealed in its shocking expose of NSA personnel monitoring the private phone calls of […]

From the beginning of the general election race, the central challenge facing John McCain has been to distance himself from the wildly unpopular occupant of the White House. In June, McCain whined that "you will hear every policy of the President described as the Bush-McCain policy." The previous month, McCain water carrier Lindsey Graham threw […]

With each passing day, Sarah Palin's handling of TrooperGate grows more and more reminiscent of George W. Bush's management of the PlameGate affair. President Bush, after all, in October 2003 proclaimed "I want to know the truth" about who outed covert CIA operative Valerie Plame and promised to fire anyone in his administration responsible. Now, […]

No safe havens for terrorists. Preventive war. Democracy expansion. Those are the three central tenets of the Bush Doctrine, the guiding theory of unilateral American foreign and national security policy since 9/11. And today, on the seventh anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the United States, Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin revealed she […]

With the anniversary of the September 11 attacks once again upon us, Bush's Law of Bin Laden is also again on display. That is, in the Bush playbook, the threat posed by Osama Bin Laden is directly proportional to the threat to the President's own political standing. At the White House on Wednesday, press secretary […]

Across the right-wing blogosphere and conservative commentariat, the water carriers of the Republican Party can hardly contain their glee that Hurricane Gustav has washed out an appearance by the wildly unpopular President Bush at their Minnesota conclave. Over at the Weekly Standard, "gets Bush out of St. Paul" tops their list of benefits that the […]

As I've noted previously, what passes for John McCain's health care plan is virtually identical to the stillborn scheme from George W. Bush. Now, the McCain campaign has joined President Bush and indicted former House Majority Leader Tom Delay in offering a novel solution - denial - to the problem of America's 46 million uninsured. […]