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Surprisingly this Thanksgiving, the Washington Establishment had a lot to give thanks for. And its chief mouthpiece – the Washington Post’s neoconservative editorial page – was glowing over its good fortune in the three-plus weeks since Barack Obama's election.
With Bob Gates as Secretary of Defense and Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, the incoming Obama administration is shaping up to be a reunion of strong supporters of the Iraq War.
The Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) must be a person whose previous professional performance has been distinguished by unimpeachable integrity and independence. The director must have the courage of his or her own convictions.
Barack Obama’s Pentagon transition team is sitting down with Defense Secretary Robert Gates in a move that some Beltway observers believe signals that the President-elect does plan to keep Gates on despite protests from Iraq War opponents.
After a masterful campaign, Barack Obama seems headed toward some fateful mistakes as he assembles his administration by heeding the advice of Washington’s Democratic insider community, a collective group that represents little “change you can believe in.”
Most of the attention on whether Joe Lieberman should be ousted from his Senate committee chairmanship has focused on his disloyalty to Democrats and his control of homeland security issues, but there’s also the question of how well he has handled his panel’s broad government oversight responsibilities.
After a week lecturing at Kansas State University and then in Kansas City, Missouri, I could not shake the feeling that what Kansas and Missouri need most is the equivalent of Radio Free Europe, which was so effective in spreading truth around inside Eastern Europe during the Cold War.
President-elect Barack Obama, in one of the first policy statements of his transition, demanded that the Bush administration either submit the proposed U.S.-Iraq “status-of-forces agreement” to Congress or leave an opening for him to change it next year.
Around midnight, when the election outcome was clear, thousands of young people walked and skipped and ran to the north gates of the White House, celebrating not just the election of Barack Obama but the repudiation of George W. Bush.
I have been hearing voices in my head for the last four years. No, I have not been driven completely around the bend by eight years of the Bush administration.
When John McCain famously said the press was part of his political “base,” he was right. The press has been in love with John McCain for years, and McCain has benefited from the adoration and friendly bias of the press for almost his entire career.
Gov. Sarah Palin’s claim of energy expertise – and her promise to send Alaskan natural gas through a new pipeline to heat homes in the Lower 48 – may be as dubious as her boast about foreign policy expertise based on Alaska’s proximity to Russia.
In a replay of a tactic used to help secure President George W. Bush’s second term, Republicans – aided by investigative agencies of the federal government – are making a campaign issue out of voter-registration forms with fake names like “Mickey Mouse.”
Read on.One danger of a political campaign is not just losing an election, but losing one’s dignity, becoming a laughingstock or a caricature. After three flailing debate performances – including Wednesday night’s twitchy anger – that is a danger now confronting John McCain.
As some southern legislatures, prodded by African-American representatives, expressed regret over their states' role in slave trading and exploiting slave labor, a kind of “truth and reconciliation” movement has stirred educators.
The neoconservatives and their Republican allies did all they could after Thursday’s vice presidential debate to turn Sarah Palin’s peppy, personable but ultimately goofy performance into a turning point for another four-year lease on the White House.
We thirst for leadership, vision, someone who can speak to us in a way that refuses to avert its eyes from the crisis but shines a light of truth upon the problem, then offers hope and possible solutions.
Chronicling his life as a journalist in the colonial British Raj, a young Winston Churchill wrote that “nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.” Nor, I’d add, is there anything in life quite so discombobulating as to turn a corner and unexpectedly walk into a wall of tear gas.
