On Friday, Senator John McCain became the highest ranking American political figure to meet with the Libyan rebels. But while his declaration that "they are my heroes" doubtless was well received in by the anti-Qaddafi fighters in Benghazi, McCain's track record should give Americans good reason for concern. After all, this is the same John […]

As was proven once again this weekend, for Republicans nothing succeeds like failure. Across the Sunday talk shows and op-ed pages, a legion of GOP luminaries spoke authoritatively on subjects they had frequently - and often catastrophically - bungled in the past. Apparently, no transgression is too serious, no series of mistakes too disastrous and […]

Three trillion dollars. Once all the costs of the actual fighting, veterans care, expanded baseline defense spending and extra interest on the national debt are factored in, that's the price tag for the still-unfunded American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But there's one more reason to institute a post-recession war tax to pay for the […]

George W. Bush was the first modern president to cut taxes during wartime. Now, the unpaid $2 trillion bill for the wars he fought - and chose to fight - is long overdue. While President Obama and the Republican leadership in Congress jockey to position their budget cutting plans, it's time for both parties - […]

Pushing his new memoir in an interview with NBC's Matt Lauer which aired Monday, George W. Bush addressed one of the defining episodes of his presidency. Finding no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Bush claimed, left him feeling "sickened." But in 2004, as you may recall, President Bush found his Iraqi WMD fiasco side-splittingly […]

Even more than the 2007 surge of U.S. troops, it was the earlier Sunni Awakening which helped dramatically seduce the sectarian carnage in Iraq. While Colonel John Tien called it "the tipping point in Anbar province," the BBC cited U.S. soldiers insisting it was the Awakening, not the Surge, which was "the game changer." But […]

On Thursday, the Washington Post literally offered a blast from the past with its profile of vice presidential buckshot recipient Harry Whittington. As the Post reports, "Nearly five years on, he's still waiting for Dick Cheney to say he's sorry" for accidentally shooting him the face during a 2005 hunting trip. Whittington shouldn't hold his […]

In the wake of President Obama's speech last, the neoconservative architects of the Iraq War predictably reemerged to claim credit for the national disaster they portray as success. But one of them, Bill Kristol, allowed that the address was, "on the whole, not a bad speech by the president," adding that it was "unrealistic for […]

In her predictable Facebook pre-buttal to the President's primetime speech on Iraq, Sarah Palin demanded that Barack Obama "admit you were wrong about the surge." But in insisting that "the more honest you are about the past, the more likely it is you will gain the support of the American people," Palin exempted President Bush […]

"At that price," the shopper says, "even if you don't need it, it's a bargain." And so it is with the Iraq War, at least according to Fox News. Citing numbers from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), "the total cost of the eight-year war was less than the stimulus bill passed by the Democratic-led Congress […]