America's soul-searching to mark the tenth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq went pretty much according to script. While many of its liberal supporters offered their mea culpas for having been so catastrophically mistaken, the Bush administration's architects of the war doubled-down on their epic failure. (Meanwhile, some of their biggest cheerleaders lamented only […]

This week's tenth anniversary of the catastrophic U.S. invasion of Iraq produced perhaps the most bizarre post-mortem in in recent history. While liberal supporters of the war like Ezra Klein and Jonathan Chait lined up to apologize for their error, right-wing cheerleaders like Peggy Noonan and Ross Douthat lamented only that President Bush's calamitous conflict […]

Ten years later, there is little question that the Iraq war was a disaster for the United States and its people. Over 4,400 Americans died and another 30,000 were wounded in the conflict. While U.S. forces were left to "muddle through" in Afghanistan, America's Mesopotamia misadventure significantly strengthened Iran's influence in the region. All told, […]

Ever since the tragic attack on the U.S. consulate in Libya that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, "Benghazi" has been the Republican response to almost every question. Despite receiving the report of the State Department's Accountability Review Board (whose recommendations were immediately endorsed by the Obama administration), hearing the testimony of the […]

During a heated exchange on the Senate floor back in June 2004, Vice President Dick Cheney famously told Vermont Democrat Pat Leahy, "f**k yourself." Looking back on the episode six years later, Cheney told Fox News that he had no "qualms, second thoughts, or embarrassment" about his Leahy outburst, because "I thought he merited it […]

With the year-end expiration of the Bush tax cuts and the looming "sequestration" of $1.2 trillion they agreed to during their debt ceiling hostage-taking last summer, the message from Republican leaders is the same as it ever was. Taxes (especially for the rich) must not go up, defense spending must not go down, and the […]

Memorial Day should not be a day for politics. It should be a time for all Americans to remember and honor the men and women in uniform who sacrificed - and still sacrifice - all to make our freedom possible. And yet John McCain, a man whose own service in Vietnam deserves the respect and […]

Desperate to deny President Obama any credit for the daring Bin Laden operation in Pakistan that George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney were on record as having opposed, veterans of Dubya's administration and their right-wing water carriers are trying a new and similarly despicable tactic. Obama, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Romney […]

Echoing Teddy Roosevelt's famous line, Vice President Joe Biden used a major address on foreign policy Thursday to "promise you the President has a big stick." That provides a sharp contrast to the big shovel Republican nominee Mitt Romney will need to bury the embarrassing flip-flops in his foreign policy past. After all, the same […]

Last summer, Congress ended the debt ceiling hostage-taking drama by agreeing to $1.2 trillion in automatic budgets cuts, half of them from the Pentagon, if a so-called "super committee" failed to come up with a plan to do so. Of course, now that the Republican refusal to raise even a dime in new tax revenue […]