Prior to the start of the war in Iraq in 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made a distinction between "Old Europe" that opposed the American war and "New Europe" that supported that war. Other members of the Bush Administration and neo-conservatives picked...

{My son, Brett, who is 20 and just voted in his first presidential election, wrote the following on Facebook on Election Night. I was so proud and moved by what he wrote, that I decided to post it for others to see.}

This is going to take some getting used to. For me, winning has been neither "everything" nor "the only thing." It has been a very rare thing.

This is the eleventh presidential election in which I have voted since I came of age in 1968. It's only...

If Colonel Robert McCormack, the longtime publisher of the arch-Republican Chicago Tribune is spinning in his grave as a result of that paper's endorsement two weeks ago of Democrat Barack Obama, imagine what sort of posthumous somersaults the brothers Thomas...

"Just a closer walk with thee."

It should be the theme song of the McCain campaign, and the "thee" is George W. Bush.

John McCain has given up Straight Talk for a Straight Walk. He is walking in lockstep...

The latest shift of wind direction in the campaign of John McCain finds him staking his waning hopes for winning the presidency on attacks on Barack Obama for saying, "I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."

"When politicians talk about taking your money and...

". . . that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of
America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had
failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they...

Merry Xmas, everyone!

Oh, I know that Christmas is still almost two months away. But today, October 27th, is Xmas.
Christmas is the day on which Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus. Today is the day on which Xians should celebrate...

What is going on in the Bible Belt in this presidential year may be historic. Much media attention during the presidential primaries was paid to Mike Huckabee's success in the "Christian" states. The Reverend Governor Huckabee, we heard over and over again, was winning the "Christian" vote. "In the Bible...

CLINTON, Miss. There he goes again.

John McCain's instant acceptance of the highly suspicious story that one of his female campaign workers had been attacked at an ATM in Pittsburgh by a black Obama supporter who carved a backwards "B" on...

In 1970, when Richard Nixon nominated Court of Appeals Judge G. Harrold Carswell of Florida to the United States Supreme Court, there was an outcry that Carswell was not a jurist of the caliber required for the nation's highest tribunal.

Nearly...

The time has come for John McCain to be what George W. Bush said he was: "The Decider."

(In fact, of course, Mr. Bush has instead been the Divider.)

It's over. Polls make it clear that Mr. McCain is going to...

The long-awaited McCain Plan for the economy has finally been leaked.

The Republican presidential nominee keeps saying that he will balance the budget by the end of the four-year term he would serve if elected on November 4th.

At the...

There has been a lot of discussion of John McCain's demeanor during the presidential debates. More important, though, has been the demeanor of his campaign as a whole.

Demeanor refers to the way in which someone behaves toward other people. In comparison with Barack...

Here's a question Americans ought to ask themselves as they assess the presidential nominees and decide how to vote on November 4th: Where would we be today if the president during this week in 1962 had been JSM, instead of JFK? Or maybe the question should be: Would we be...

The Gone Old Party has long been the home of two species of fundamentalists: Fundamentalist Economus and Fundamentalist Religulous.

The alliance between the two has been uneasy, but victories have often been sufficient to paper over their differences.

John McCain is an eco-fundie, but...

In an increasingly rare moment of candor, the McCain campaign today released its new campaign song, "Yesterday":

Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away
Now it looks as though they're here to stay
Oh, I believe in yesterday.

Suddenly,...

We already knew that she was stunningly ignorant. Now she has shown herself to be shockingly evil.

John McCain is someone who has totally lost his moral compass (Sarah Palin may never have had one). He and everyone in his campaign have become what Mrs. Palin's prototype, Spiro Agnew,...

What's wrong with most of the commentators in the mainstream media?

Following Sarah Palin's less-than-a-complete-train-wreck performance (which is the operative word) in Thursday's debate, one after another of them said that she had "passed the test"--that she had shown that she is...

Dear Joe and Jane Six-Pack,

In the last two elections many of you chose to vote for the guy who seemed like the sort of person you'd like to have a beer with. John McCain and Sarah Palin are appealing to you to vote on a similar basis this year.