It was one of the defining moments of the 2012 presidential campaign. "Our Navy is smaller now than at any time since 1917," Republican Mitt Romney charged during the third and final debate, adding, "Air Force is older and smaller than at any time since it was founded in 1947." President Obama responded with overwhelming […]

For the second straight week, Republican nominee Donald Trump has continued his much-hyped "outreach" effort to black voters. But as the recent polling suggests, Trump is failing to convince African-Americans that he will "build the future" of the Party of Lincoln "on his legacy." That's in large part because in words and in deeds, Donald […]

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has tied into a pretzel over immigration; on Wednesday night in Arizona he will try to extricate himself. But for all of the talk about a new, "humane" approach with its "baby steps" towards the ejection of the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States, nothing about […]

When it comes to its electoral strategy, it's not often that a presidential campaign gives the game away so easily. This week, new Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway did it twice. Last Sunday, she personally confirmed that Donald Trump's laughable outreach to black voters wasn't intended for African-Americans at all. "I live in a white […]

And now some helpful advice for Republicans pretending to diagnose Hillary Clinton by video: it won't go well for you. Back in the spring of 2005, Senate Majority Leader and physician Bill Frist (R-TN) told his assembled colleagues that he disagreed with Terri Schiavo's doctors that she had suffered massive, irreversible and permanent brain damage. […]

Over the past few days, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump received the equivalent of a Little League participation trophy. Some in the press lavished praise on the "new Trump" for offering an ersatz apology to no one in particular for nothing specific. Then the man who has the lowest approval ratings from African-American voters in […]

In his first major address since turning over the reins of his campaign to Stephen Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump provided two notable--if not laudable--moments. For starters, the Republican offered a blanket apology, or more accurately, an "unpology." That is, his expression of conditional regret applied only in unspecified circumstances in which "you don't […]

The grief and suffering of the families of the four Americans killed in Benghazi, Libya in 2012 must be unbearable and interminable. Only someone with the most hardened heart would fail to understand their pain and anguish. But that doesn't mean the latest efforts of some of the relatives, enthusiastically supported by Republican hardliners, to […]

And now for some friendly advice for my Republican friends. If you want to criticize President Obama on anything having to do with Iran, don't waste your energy seething about "Iran" and "ransom" and "hostages" and what Ronald Reagan would do. It won't end well for you. After all, it wasn't Reagan's inauguration that secured […]

The Democratic and Republican conventions just completed broke new ground in modern American politics in two ways. Casting a dark shadow over the first presidential nomination of a woman by a major party was the reaction to it by the other. Republicans don't merely want to defeat their opponent at the polls in 2016. They […]