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 […]

Well really, this is a bit much: Scott Horton at Harper’s Magazine quotes an Iowa preacher begging McCain’s God to stomp the deities of Obama supporters. Well actually not so much begging as threatening: if God doesn’t get McCain elected, then bad things will happen to God. Never mind Joe the Plumber’s concerns about Obama […]

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 […]

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 […]

I’m monitoring Barack Obama not by listening to anything he or Joe Biden says, but by tracking the sputtering heads bobbing in his wake. I’m no longer reading blogs that appear to be taking either man or the Democratic party seriously, so when I run across something like Digby’s lament of Joe Biden’s elegiac portrait […]

You don’t try very hard to please me; with what you know it should be easy … this could be the last time, this could be the last time, may be the last time, I don’t know …
If I had an audience large enough, I’d make “The Last Time”, a pre-punk Rolling Stones anthem of […]

According to John McCain, he was visited by a mysterious Christian North Vietnamese prison guard twice in 1969 and “often” thereafter. The timeline of these visitations is interesting.
Starting in December 1967, McCain was held in a prison camp in northeast Hanoi that the prisoners referred to as “The Plantation.” In May of 1969, McCain […]

The Georgian invasion of South Ossetia, which precipitated a wider conflict between Georgia and Russia, was a move so boneheadedly perverse that it almost certainly has roots in the Bush White House. The Georgians obviously believed that they had sufficient backing from the West, i.e., from the US and its allies in the EU and […]