During one of the more memorable episodes of Seinfeld, George Costanza helps Jerry prepare for a lie detector test by advising, "it's not a lie if you believe it." And so it is with Republican defenders of the Bush administration's regime of detainee torture. As it turns out, Marc Thiessen, David Rivkin, Peggy Noonan, Michael […]

As the latest from the Wall Street Journal and Politico reveal, the apologists for George W. Bush's regime of detainee torture are circling the wagons. While one anonymous Bush official claimed the Obama's release of the torture memos "laid it all out for our enemies," former Attorney General Michael Mukasey in an op-ed written with […]

During his confirmation hearings in January, Attorney General Eric Holder declared "waterboarding is torture." But in language eerily reminiscent of the administration Barack Obama was to replace, Holder assured Republican advocates of torture, "we don't want to criminalize policy differences that might exist" with the outgoing Bush White House. Now with word that the Justice […]

Back in February 2006, Texas Senator John Cornyn led Congressional Republicans with his famous defense of President Bush's regime of illicit NSA domestic surveillance, "None of your civil liberties matter much after you're dead." Now, as the New York Times revealed today, one of those illegal targeted was apparently one of Cornyn's Capitol Hill colleagues. […]

The conservative blogosphere is apoplectic over news that the Department of Homeland Security has issued a warning over the growing threat of right-wing terror in the United States. Coming as it does just after bloody episodes including the politically-motivated slaughter of policemen in Pittsburgh and Unitarian church-goers in Tennessee, the vaguely worded statement seems to […]

The slaughter of three Pittsburgh policemen by an assailant who "didn't like our [gun] rights being infringed upon" has again highlighted the growing danger from incendiary Republican rhetoric spawning right-wing terror. After all, just days ago, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) announced, "I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous." Fox News host Glenn Beck warned […]

The past 48 hours have not been kind to the architects of the Bush administration's regime of detainee torture. In the UK, British police are investigating whether its MI5 intelligence service was complicit in the torture of former Guantanamo prisoner Binyam Mohammed. Meanhile, a Spanish court is poised to launch a criminal probe of Alberto […]

Just days after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pooh-poohed the escalating chaos in the streets of Baghdad, saying with a shrug, "stuff happens." Now six years later, former Vice President Dick Cheney has elevated Rumsfeld's flip response to the level of theory in defending the Bush administration's eight-year record of failure. […]

Within minutes of President Obama's reversal of George W. Bush's strict limits on federal support for embryonic stem cell research, the Republican noise machine was reliably regurgitating its "distracted president" talking point. But while House Minority Whip Eric Cantor's sound bite was faithfully repeated by Time's Mark Halperin, apparently lost in the phony debate which […]

On Tuesday, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor appeared on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart to promote OurCourts.org, her new online civics education project. But while O'Connor's goal is to counter alarming statistics including "only a third of Americans can name the three branches of government," her understandable motivation was the growing right-wing […]