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Even a creative Hollywood producer couldn't have conjured up a film in which Bill and Hillary Clinton would pursue the tactics of personal destruction against a Democrat in full-throated alliance with the vast right-wing conspiracy!
Wonder why Clinton confidant Terry McAuliffe sings the praises of Fox News with the hilarious compliment that they are the most fair of the cable networks?
I once asked a reporter back from Vietnam: “Who’s telling the truth over there?”
“Everyone,” he said. “Everyone sees what’s happening through the lens of their own experience.”
Enmeshed in two military occupations that have turned into well-publicized quagmires, the Army and Marines are understandably having trouble enlisting new recruits. Their answer: vastly increase the number of convicted felons and other societal miscreants accepted into their ranks.
According to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, from 2006 to 2007 the Army more than doubled its felonious recruits and the Marine Corps increased its share by more than two-thirds.
One of the advantages that the American Right has achieved from investing tens of billions of dollars in media – from talk radio and cable TV, to print and the Internet – is the ability to define what is and what isn’t a “scandal,” a powerful factor in determining who wins national elections.
By comparison, American progressives have short-changed their own investments in media. The disparity leads to the spectacle of Democratic presidential candidates submitting to questioning on Fox News while no one would expect a Republican leader to undergo interrogation from, say, the DailyKos.
What’s left out of a movie about history often interests only a few experts in the field. However, the recent release of one that chronicles the successful sub rosa American effort to bleed the Soviet Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s may prove to be an exception.
“Charlie Wilson’s War,” which stars Tom Hanks, tells the story of a hard-drinking, womanizing Texas congressman who nudged Congress and the Reagan administration to give more arms, especially high-tech Stinger missiles, to shoot down Soviet helicopters in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
Representatives for film director Errol Morris told me during pre-production that “Standard Operating Procedure” would be the very best documentary on the abuses of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib – the one that would tell the whole truth.
I had pinned great hope on that. It didn’t turn out that way.
Dick Cheney’s tenure at Halliburton ended eight years ago, but a federal investigation of alleged bribes from a company subsidiary to Nigerian officials lingers from the Cheney era, raising questions about what the Vice President knew or should have known.
In its quarterly filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 25, Halliburton said the Justice Department was widening its probe to determine whether Kellogg Brown & Root paid $180 million in bribes to Nigerian officials to win a $5 billion construction contract for the Bonny Island natural gas liquefaction plant.
An obscure academic dispute – over whether Israeli archeology sought to obscure the land’s last two millennia of history and promote a continual Jewish claim of ownership – has shown again how tensions in the Middle East can reverberate in unlikely ways in the United States.
The dispute centered on whether Barnard College should grant tenure to Nadia Abu El-Haj, an American-born scholar of anthropology who, in the 1990s, challenged the scientific integrity of what she saw as the Israeli use of archeology in a politically motivated way to justify Jewish settlements on territory that had belonged to Palestinians.
According to General David H. Petraeus’s progress report to Congress on Iraq, the latest worst threat to the shaky U.S. position is Iranian-backed “special groups.”
This label refers to parts of Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, which Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and his security forces ham-handedly sought to confront and undermine in Basra before the fall local elections.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq is so passé.
Read on.Newly released U.S. government documents, detailing how Bush administration officials punched legalistic holes in the Geneva Convention’s protections of war captives, stand in stark contrast to the outrage some of the same officials expressed in the first week of the Iraq War when Iraqi TV interviewed several captured American soldiers.
Then, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, President George W. Bush and other administration officials orchestrated a chorus of outrage, citing those TV scenes as proof of the Iraq’s government contempt for international law in general and the Geneva Convention in particular.
Nearly seven years after Sept. 11, 2001, what accounts for the vast discrepancy between the terrorist threat facing America and the scale of our response?
Why, absent any evidence of a serious domestic terror threat, is the War on Terror so enormous, so all-encompassing, and still expanding?
Hillary Clinton’s 10-point victory in the Pennsylvania primary should put to rest the wishful thinking of Barack Obama’s campaign that the United States has slid painlessly into some “new politics” that can transcend character smears and McCarthyistic tactics, the sort of ugliness that has defined U.S. elections for the past two decades.
Some political observers had hoped that the painful results for the nation from two decades of this style of politics – including the disastrous two-term presidency of George W. Bush – would have convinced the public that a change was needed; that the old tactics wouldn't work anymore.
At the passing of the 25th anniversary of the 1983 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, Lebanon—the first large suicide bombing to target Americans—the time is right to ask the perennial question: has the Bush administration’s “war on terror” since 9/11 made Americans safer?
Although the Bush administration regularly boasts that its war on terror has been effective because no large terrorists attacks on U.S. soil have occurred since 9/11, such terrorism in North America has historically been a rare event.
Senior officials at the Veterans Administration debated internally how to downplay evidence of a stunning number of suicides and suicide attempts among veterans who were treated or had sought help at VA hospitals around the country, according to newly disclosed internal VA e-mails.
On Feb. 13, 2008, Ira Katz, the VA’s mental health director, and Ev Chasen, the agency’s chief communications director, exchanged e-mails discussing P.R. strategy for handling this troubling news, according to evidence made public Monday in a federal court case in Northern California.
Pope Benedict XVI arrived in the United States last week against a macabre backdrop featuring reports of torture, execution and war. He chose not to notice.
Torture: Fresh reporting by ABC from inside sources depicted George W. Bush’s most senior aides (Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Rice and Tenet) meeting dozens of times in the White House during 2002/03 to sort out the most efficient mix of torture techniques for captured “terrorists.”
After prying loose 8,000 pages of Pentagon documents, the New York Times has proven what should have been obvious years ago: the Bush administration manipulated public opinion on the Iraq War, in part, by funneling propaganda through former senior military officers who served as expert analysts on TV news shows.
In 2002-03, these military analysts were ubiquitous on TV justifying the Iraq invasion, and most have remained supportive of the war in the five years since. The Times investigation showed that the analysts were being briefed by the Pentagon on what to say and had undisclosed conflicts of interest via military contracts.
John Yoo and some other Bush administration lawyers who built the legal framework for torture are now out of the U.S. government, but one still holds a Cabinet-level rank – Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.
In the summer of 2002, Chertoff, then head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, offered assurances to the CIA that its interrogators would not face prosecution under anti-torture laws if they followed guidelines on aggressive techniques approved by the Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, where Yoo worked.
Seated amid the clatter and chatter of a mall food court in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I was reminded of the late House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s famous saying, “All politics is local.”
O’Neill’s observation came to mind as I was having lunch with Penny, my 39-year-old niece, a mom with a child in “Christian” day-care, a Presbyterian, a manager of an upscale jewelry store, a wife of a department store manager – and, oh yes, a Republican.
