On Tuesday, Time columnist Joe Klein labeled as "shockingly unpresidential" John McCain's accusation that Barack Obama "would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign." But in announcing "I can't remember a more scurrilous statement by a major party candidate," Klein spoke a day too soon. As it turns out, McCain would […]

It's been a very busy week for war crimes and war criminals. In some good news for the cause of justice and the upholding of international law, Bosnian Serb mass murder Radavan Karadzic was finally captured in Belgrade, just days after the International Criminal Court charged Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir with crimes against humanity in […]

Back in the 1980's and 1990's, millions of American children learned the basics of global geography with the software and later TV show, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? As his latest geographic blunder suggests - this time regarding the "Iraq/Pakistan border" - John McCain would have done well to tune in to the […]

On Thursday, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama will cap his European tour with an address in Berlin to an audience whose numbers may approach one million. But while the media will focus on Obama's call to strengthen America's trans-Atlantic alliance with France and Germany, lost no doubt will be John McCain's essential role in undermining […]

Earlier this year, Mississippi Republican Senator Thad Cochran said the prospect of his "erratic" and "hotheaded" GOP colleague John McCain becoming President "sends a cold chill down my spine." Now we know why. As the Biloxi Sun Herald reported today, Cochran witnessed an out-of-control McCain disrupt a tense 1987 diplomatic mission in Nicaragua by grabbing […]

When it comes to his foreign policy, John McCain is a revisionist historian and a particularly clumsy one at that. Having asked Americans to ignore his record as the master of disaster on Iraq, John McCain similarly underwent an election-year transformation from rabid France-basher to born-again multilateralist and fawning Francophile. Now, the McCain campaign is […]

On Wednesday, embattled Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and lame duck American President George W. Bush will meet in Washington in a gathering of the walking wounded. Bush's fading hopes to secure a Middle East peace agreement before leaving office have dimmed further as scandal enveloped his Israeli counterpart. Worse still, by moving ahead with […]

In what was billed as a major address today on nuclear non-proliferation, John McCain offered the latest installment in the ongoing saga of strategic incoherence that passes for his foreign policy. Just months after calling for a "League of Democracies" and the expulsion of Russia from the G8, McCain today portrayed Russia as an essential […]

As he heads off to Israel to commemorate that nation's 60th anniversary, George W. Bush is nothing if not optimistic about the prospects for Middle East peace. Even as his negotiating partners are incapacitated by scandal and internal conflict, the lame duck President reiterated his January promise to produce an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement by the […]

A hallmark of the Bush presidency has been the public disavowal of actions already taken in secret. In just the latest episode of Bush White House duplicity, the Washington Post revealed today that President Bush in 2004 secretly approved the expansion of existing Israeli settlements on the West Bank despite his stated policy to the […]