Nearly a decade of investigations, a lurid final report and a concerted campaign for impeachment left Bill Clinton among the more popular American presidents, with the majority of Americans unconvinced of any need to impeach or remove him from office. Nearly a decade of no investigations, with no coherent summary of misdeeds and no institutional [...]

Voters under the age of 35 or so may not recall the most memorable cultural artifact of Hillary Clinton’s doomed 1993 health care reform package. Evidently someone in Barack Obama’s campaign does, and thought it would be clever to resurrect Harry and Louise, an earnest couple concocted by the health insurance lobby to do some [...]

The Great Democracies, by Winston Churchill
Our Kind, by Marvin Harris
Here, as the title suggests, are two very different takes on historical non-fiction. It’s a stretch to pair them, but I suppose they can be united thematically as something other than the usual American style of political mythology or narrative, and both books aim for [...]

When last we noted the Bush administration’s appalling record on national security, a few items fell through the cracks. The story was on the economic resurgence of opium in Afghanistan following the US invasion that drove the Taliban out of power and ended the group’s short-lived but astonishingly effective ban on opium poppy cultivation. Since [...]

Many months ago when I was writing something about health care I ran across a blog that had a number of entries on the subject, one of which I used in my piece. That web page and 70-some others are still open in my browser, which in retaliation is now consuming most of my computer’s [...]

When onlookers asked Ben Franklin what sort of government the constitutional convention had produced, he told them “A republic, if you can keep it.” Well, we haven’t. We no longer live in a constitutional republic. The republic is dead, deceased, demised, passed on, no more, ceased to be, expired, late, bereft of life; it is [...]

Continuing on my quest to close enough browser tabs for my computer to regain some self-respect and nimbleness, here’s the second installment of stuff I either meant to write but never quite did, or did write but for some reason couldn’t bring myself to part with the web page I used for material. See here [...]

Serge Kovaleski’s New York Times story on Barack Obama’s youthful flirtation with recreational drugs has been in the works for a while. Obama wrote about his drug use in his autobiographical “Dreams of My Father”, and his mention of the subject prompted a brief flurry of stupidity in December culminating in the resignation of a [...]

Colin Powell dropped some hints yesterday in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that he’s looking outside the GOP for a candidate to endorse.
Powell, who served as the closer for the Bush administration’s sale of an Iraq invasion with an astonishingly dishonest speech to the United Nations, the world and, most importantly, credulous Washington pundits, [...]

A recent Barack Obama campaign email carried the tag line “We are the change we’ve been waiting for”, drawn from a speech he made after the February 5th primary extravaganza. The line leaves me cold because my resistance to Obama arises in large part from his inflationary rhetoric, but it nagged at me for several [...]

Documents unsealed in a British court allege that Prince Bandar, Saudi Arabia’s long time US ambassador and a close family friend of president George W. Bush, threatened to withhold terrorism intelligence from the UK if former prime minister Tony Blair failed to subvert a bribery inquiry into payments to the prince from mammoth British defense [...]

Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates, by Tom Robbins
The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka
Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card
The unifying theme of these three novels is the embodiment of contradictions. It’s not exactly a rare theme in literature, and I’m no doubt committing certain literary sins by sitting Franz Kafka down at the same table [...]

John McCain’s campaign bus, the Straight Talk Express, has officially become a rolling punch line to the joke of the GOP presidential primaries.
There has simply never been a primary for either major party as ridiculous as the 2008 GOP effort. Mitt Romney, who would easily have won the Phil Gramm award for financial futility [...]