The anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor gives us an opportunity to remember our tragic loss that day, and reflect on the almost unimaginable sacrifices that generation of Americans made to protect the liberty of all who followed. But as I first suggested in 2005, our observance now includes a new ritual. With each […]

President Bush's amen corner in the conservative commentariat is apoplectic over the new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran. After all, the report's conclusion that Tehran suspended its nuclear weapons program inn 2003 knocked the legs out from their "World War III" rhetoric. And as you'd expect, the same people who helped bring you the […]

More and more, President Bush's strategy in Iraq resembles an M.C. Escher illustration. Like the hands drawing each other or the elegant depiction of stairways that cannot possibly meet, the military progress of the U.S. surge is producing an image of a future Iraq that, while glorious to behold, can never be built. The very […]

The visit of Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore to the Bush White House Monday constituted one of the more surreal moments in recent Washington memory. While Gore was quick to praise his campaign 2000 opponent ("He was very gracious in setting up the meeting and it was a very good and substantive conversation"), Bush […]

As Condoleezza Rice prepares to host the Middle East summit in Annapolis this week, her State Department has issued an updated historical timeline of American efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The timeline is a fascinating document both for what it reveals and what it leaves out. The rise of Hamas and its election victories […]

This week, Republican White House hopeful John McCain denounced George W. Bush's unprecedented use of presidential signing statements. As well he should. After all, it was President Bush's December 30, 2005 signing statement on McCain's amendment to the Detainee Treatment Act that made waterboarding and other acts of torture the continuing policy of the United […]

A Washington Post report that the Bush administration is facing a massive backlog of hundreds of thousands of applications for U.S. citizenship is sadly unsurprising. After all, as the Katrina disaster and new passport fiasco demonstrated, incompetence is the hallmark of President Bush's Department of Homeland Security. But with the news that hundreds of thousands […]

Just one day after excerpts from the upcoming Scott McClellan tell all book suggested President Bush lied about the roles of Karl Rove and Scooter Libby in the Plamegate affair, the publisher is now back-tracking on the explosive claim. But despite a spokesman's assertion that McClellan "did not intend to suggest Bush lied to him," […]

The New York Times' recent report that the United States has been secretly helping Pakistan secure its nuclear arsenal contained another revelation. As with its 2005 expose of the Bush administration's illegal NSA domestic surveillance program, the Times sat on the Pakistan story at the request of the White House. Contrary to the repeated claims […]

On October 7th, 2003, President Bush famously declared of the outing of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame, "I don't know if we're going to find out the senior administration official." Now we have more insight as to Bush's misplaced confidence that the truth would remain hidden. In his new tell-all book, former White House press […]