George W. Bush is suffering from another severe case of premature Iraq elation. That's the inescapable diagnosis after a week which featured sunny statements from the President even as Baghdad and Basra descended into chaos. On last week's fifth anniversary of his invasion of Iraq, President Bush was blissfully unaware of the tumultuous three-way Shiite […]

News that Mitt Romney has joined John McCain on the campaign trail is fueling speculation that the Arizona Senator may tap his defeated rival for the Republican VP slot. Which would make perfect sense. Back by the Bush braintrust and conservative chattering classes, Romney claims to know something about the economy, a topic on which […]

As much as anything else, presidential campaigns are won and lost by the media narratives that rightly or wrongly come to define a candidate. In the case of Repubican nominee John McCain, the seemingly unshakable narrative of the political "maverick" could not be further off the mark. At almost every turn, McCain in his eternal […]

A new study released last week revealed a Republican Party ever more out of touch with the mushrooming crisis of the American health care system. Predictably, 68% of Republicans believe the U.S. has the best health system in the world, compared to only three in 10 Democrats. Ironically, those findings come just as new studies […]

Just in time for Easter, the Houston Chronicle has a report on the resurrection on Tom Delay. While the disgraced, indicted former House Minority Leader is still awaiting trial on charges of money laundering and conspiracy to launder money, the Hammer is once ramping up his right-wing rage machine in an effort to propel himself […]

If the contest for the White House followed the rules of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," John McCain would be going home empty-handed. At last four times in the past month, George W. Bush's would-be Republican successor sounded the alarm over a non-existent Al Qaeda-Iran alliance in Iraq. But for a lifeline from Joe […]

After Barack Obama himself, no politician in America may have had a greater stake in Obama's critical speech on race yesterday than former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. The former Baptist minister, after all, hasn't been shy about his interest in being John McCain's choice for vice president. Like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Huckabee's closet of […]

As I documented just two day ago, John McCain has been wrong from the start about virtually every aspect of the Iraq war. From Ahmed Chalabi and Saddam's WMD to the prospects of Americans troops being greeting as liberators and the certainty of a "rapid" U.S. victory in "three weeks," John McCain had it wrong […]

Timing, as they say, is everything. By that measure, John McCain is having a very bad day. First, just one day after his own visit to Baghdad, Vice President Dick Cheney showed up in Iraq to remind Americans that McCain is inextricably linked to President Bush. Then just as the Federal Reserve rushed into to […]

Just one day after John McCain's drive-by photo op in Baghdad, Vice President Cheney too made a surprise visit to Iraq. Announcing "it's good to be back," Cheney no doubt reminded Americans that John McCain represents the third term Bush agenda on Iraq. And to be sure, Dick Cheney's latest pronouncements reminded Iraqis on one […]