As President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised in September, the State Department Accountability Review Board on Wednesday delivered its report on the Benghazi consulate assault which killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. The findings are sharply critical of the State Department, calling security at the Libyan outpost "grossly inadequate," a […]

As the Obama administration and Congress ponder their responses to the slaughter in Newtown, Connecticut, one of the central tensions in the American system of government is once again coming to the fore. That is, the freedoms enshrined in our Constitution's Bill of Rights are neither absolute nor in harmony with each other. For example, […]

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 […]

For years, the Bush torture team and its ardent supporters have depended on what might be called the Seinfeld defense of its regime of detainee interrogation: it's not a lie, if you believe it. But with the release of this week Philip Zelikow's 2006 memo warning the Bush administration about its illegal detainee interrogation techniques, […]

On Monday, GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney blasted President Obama's open mic comment to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he'll have more "flexibility" to deal with issues like missile defense after the November election. Predictably, a "disturbed" Romney denounced Obama's remark as "alarming" and "troubling." But what is surprising is that Governor Romney went on to […]

This week, Karl Rove took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal in the feeble attempt to undermine of one of President Obama's signature achievements, the killing of Osama Bin Laden. "Mr. Obama did," Rove sniffed, "what virtually any commander in chief would have done in the same situation." Well, not quite every commander-in-chief. […]

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 […]

On Monday, goaltender Tim Thomas of the Stanley Cup champion Boston Bruins became just the latest high profile athlete to snub President Obama by refusing to attend a White House ceremony honoring his team. Nevertheless, Thomas' insult to the presidency is unique. After all, Thomas is the first to use the language of the Sovereign […]