Not.
George W. Bush bristles at any attempt to assess his presidency while he’s still alive, never mind in office. By the time history has judged him, he says, we’ll all be dead. But everyone who judged his presidency a disaster before it began — for me the clincher was his disappearance and ashen-faced return […]

Despite running the worst GOP campaign since Bob Dole’s in 1996 — most people don’t remember that Dole even ran — John McCain managed to confound my expectations and crack 46%, by quite a bit, in the popular vote. This should be instructive for anyone who genuinely believes a new day is dawning in America, […]

I can’t believe anyone believes the CIA when it says that Iran was working toward nuclear weapons for a while but now they’re not. This sounds like they got snookered on the front end and now they’re covering for it. “Oh, shit. They weren’t working on a bomb. What do we do now?” I wonder […]

I write something pretty good on Monday, drew quite a bit of traffic albeit none generous enough to comment on it, but I remember very little of the piece or the process. Since then my condition has lost more luster and I’m starting to look, rhetorically speaking, like liver left on the counter so long […]

Someone somewhere asked if the wrecked economy would be George W. Bush’s last gasp as president. The answer is, naturally, no: the one rule that best describes the Bush administration, one that we’ve articulated often, is that no matter how bad what we know they’ve done may be, there’s worse to come. Bush and Dick […]

Despite running the worst GOP campaign since Bob Dole’s single-shoulder-shrug of an effort in 1996, McCain remains in contention for next month’s election. By which I mean he is still alive and not too embarrassed to show himself in public, the latter of which shouldn’t be any surprise because Republicans, and indeed most Democrats as […]

There are, to be sure, stark differences between Barack Obama and George Bush. Obama has a pretty good jump shot, for one. And he’s never formally been a cheerleader. It turns out they they have more in common than one might think, and in the unlikely territory of social philosophy.
Back in February of 2005, Bush […]

The only fair way to score the debates is to watch them without audio. That way one doesn’t get distracted by what the candidates say, which anyway has only a minor relationship with reality. The important thing is how they looked. Did McCain smirk? Did Obama get that pinched, schoolmarm-ish look? Did either man dip […]

Continuing from where we left off, which was with the explanation that however poorly you may think of politicians, you are, unless burdened with a constant and absolutely crushing sense of impending doom, nowhere near the awful truth. The reason politicians get away with what they do is that recognizing what they do is the […]

Despite my constant exhortation to readers, it’s very likely, to the point of a lock, that voters will not choose to bring on the revolution by electing John McCain and precipitating the simultaneous onsets of facism and the worst depression since the best one. Almost as certain is that among president Obama’s first orders of […]