Specifically, our freedom to do whatever it is we want to do to them and their part of the world without consequence.
Disclaimer: I don’t support terrorism as an expression of political or ideological frustration, or in any event, but I understand the impulse and one has to admit that as a negotiating technique, it [...]

I didn’t actually watch or read Obama’s Afghanistan speech but I gather it was similar to but less coherent than his campaign speeches about Afghanistan, which I did read, so I feel comfortable commenting on his announced alleged policy.
But you know, screw it. Who cares? This is not my beautiful house. I will mention [...]

The news is all around that George W. Bush will be writing a memoir focused on 12 difficult personal and policy decisions in his life. It cannot be an accident that the format so closely apes that of John F. Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Profiles in Courage,” which featured the stories of eight U.S. senators who [...]

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 actually believe someone is talking about Peggy Noonan winning a Pulitzer, but apparently my capacity for belief falls short of reality, because they are. They being a former colleague of Noonan’s at the Wall Street Journal, and Brian Williams, the managing editor of NBC Nightly News who is paid more than $10 million [...]

I have a hat that I call my Gilligan hat, which I often wear in tandem with some dark sunglasses. The past week or so people have been staring at me. No, really: it has gotten to the point where I’m checking to see if my fly is open or I’m drooling or bleeding or [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The administration has a habit of paying lip service to the poor and then cutting or gutting programs aimed directly at helping them. Before last November’s election, there was a joke making the rounds to the effect that if the President asked to speak alongside and praised someone involved in providing services to the poor, that person’s program was doomed. And as the mounting deficit and the increase in military spending stresses the budget, discretionary spending programs designed to help low income citizens make ever more tempting targets.

I miss Richard Nixon. He was an evil motherfucker and everyone knew it, even his friends and family and die-hard supporters, with the possible exception of Bill Safire, the exception who proves the rule. Nixon was responsible for one of the great advances in political culture, the removal of the concept of “shame” from the [...]