Obama's Dubious Praise for Reagan

By Robert Parry
January 19, 2008

Sen. Barack Obama prides himself in transcending the old ideological chasms that have divided the American electorate for decades, so much so that he recently cited Republican icon Ronald Reagan as a leader who “changed the trajectory of America.”

Though Obama’s chief point was that Reagan in 1980 “put us on a fundamentally different path” – which may be historically undeniable – the Democratic presidential candidate went further, justifying Reagan's course correction because of “all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s, and government had grown and grown, but there wasn’t much sense of accountability.”

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Saving Hillary, at Least for Now

By Robert Parry
January 18, 2008

In December and early January – as Hillary Clinton’s lead in the Democratic presidential race evaporated and especially after she lost the Iowa caucuses – her panicked supporters played nearly every card in their political deck to salvage the dream of putting a second Clinton in the White House.

Sen. Clinton and her feminist backers appealed to women to get behind one of their own; Clinton operatives insinuated that Barack Obama’s youthful drug use would make him unelectable; and former President Bill Clinton pulled a page from Karl Rove’s playbook in attacking Obama on a perceived strength, his early opposition to the Iraq War.

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Iraq War: 1,760 Days and Counting

By Robert Higgs
January 17, 2008

On Oct. 19, 2001, in speaking about the new government controls and heightened surveillance already being clamped on the American people in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney said that the new war “may never end. At least not in our lifetime. . . . The way I think of it is, it’s a new normalcy.”

We should have taken his grim forecast more seriously.

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A Surge of More Lies

By Congressman Robert Wexler
January 16, 2008

A new troubling myth has taken hold in Washington and it is critical that the record is set straight.

According to the mainstream media, Republicans, and unfortunately even some Democrats, the President's surge in Iraq has been a resounding success. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

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Will Anyone Pay for the Iraq War?

By Robert Parry
January 15, 2008

If the latest polls are to be believed, the Republican frontrunner is John McCain, who favors continuing the Iraq War for decades if not centuries, and the leading Democrat is Hillary Clinton, who voted to give George W. Bush the power to start the misadventure in 2002 and remained a staunch war supporter until the eve of Campaign 2008.

In Congress, the Democrats appear so spooked about being accused of “partisanship” that they have replaced their periodic little white flags of surrender to President Bush on Iraq with a permanent large one. For his part, Bush is on his own personal victory lap of the Middle East, hailing the success of his “surge.”

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