In my September 24 column, “Truth Is Evaporating Before Our Eyes,” I used the destruction of the CBS news team that broke the Abu Ghraib story and the story of President George W. Bush’s non-performance of his Texas Air Force National Guard duties to demonstrate how accusations alone could destroy a Peabody Award winning, 26... Read More

You’ve heard the platitude that hindsight is 20/20. It’s true enough and, though I’ve been a regular skeptic about what policymakers used to call the Global War on Terror, it’s always easier to poke holes in the past than to say what you would have done. My conservative father was the first to ask me... Read More

Who even remembers that, back in September 2002, Lawrence Lindsey, then President George W. Bush’s chief economic adviser, offered an upper limit estimate on the cost of a future war in Iraq at $100 billion to $200 billion? He also suggested that the “successful prosecution” of such a war “would be good for the economy.”... Read More

Born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth, a former businessman who had helped run companies into the ground, he was widely considered ill-prepared for the presidency, out of his depth, a lightweight in a heavyweight world. Still, having won the Republican nomination and then a uniquely contested election, once in the Oval Office... Read More

Recently I learned from a feature article in a print magazine that George W. Bush, as Jimmy Carter and Winston Churchill did, has taken up painting. Among Bush’s subjects are 98 war veterans from Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq who suffered traumatic injuries. Some of the portraits were reproduced in the magazine, and they... Read More

“The evil that men do lives after them,” wrote Shakespeare. A prime example, former US President George W. Bush who appeared last week campaigning in South Carolina for his amiable younger brother, Jeb. George W. continues to haunt the Republican Party and damage its electoral chances. At home, Bush has been staying out of public... Read More

It's a script worthy of Freddie Krueger, the fictional character from the A Nightmare on Elm Street films. Nearly five years after the irruption of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq, here's another chamber of horrors, another glimpse of how The Dark Side really works. But the George W Bush torture memos released by... Read More

WASHINGTON - And now, the end is near; the final curtain drops in a cold, paranoid Fortress DC under maximum red alert. In a contrived Oscar night-style mood, with thanks aplenty, George W Bush delivered his farewell address from the East Room of the White House on January 15. Bottom lines: he turned Afghanistan into... Read More

In the end, President George W Bush ended up finding his weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Munthather al-Zaidi, the 28-year-old Baghdad correspondent for the independent, anti-occupation, anti-sectarian, Cairo-based al-Baghdadiya satellite channel who sent Bush a "goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people" in the form of a flying pair of size 10s and instantly achieved... Read More

Today being John Milton's 400th birthday, I have been reading Paradise Lost in the terrifically well-annotated Cambridge University Press paperback edition. Reading? Well, I've been … looking into it. The infallible Dr. Johnson: Just so. My own browsings are further obstructed by a peculiar transformation the text occasionally seems to undergo right before my eyes.... Read More

Thus George W. Bush, speaking to the Greater Cleveland Partnership in Ohio the other day. I groaned inwardly, reading that. It's not the first time we've heard the Japan-1945 analogy, of course. It was a favorite of Donald Rumsfeld's (remember him?) My inner reaction to it now, as then, is: "Oh, so Japan in 1945... Read More

John Maynard Keynes[1] once observed that: "Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." The master in this master-slave relationship need not actually be an economist. It was only that Keynes was writing about economics[2] when the thought occurred to him. That... Read More

Some readers accuse me of having nothing good to say about President Bush, but I can hardly help that. He swore an oath to uphold the Constitution, and even his defenders don’t seriously say he has done so. I can easily imagine a movie called Mr. Bush Goes to Washington and America Goes to Hell.... Read More

When I was a kid learning to play chess, I couldn’t wait to move my queen. She was the most powerful piece on the board, so I wasted no time using her to attack. Guess what? On his next turn, my opponent captured her. It hurt my little feelings, but those were the rules. I... Read More

At certain moments, you realize with stunning clarity how empty and absurd our political clichés really are. “Democracies don’t start wars,” Condoleezza Rice repeated the other day. What can that possibly mean in the real world? Taken literally, this simple formula implies that any time a democracy is at war with a nondemocracy, the nondemocracy... Read More

American sportswriting has changed a lot since the 1920s. It’s less lyrical, hyperbolical, and moralistic than in the days when Grantland Rice and others set its lessons in rhyming verse. Schoolchildren used to memorize “Casey at the Bat” — the tragic story of Mudville’s great slugger striking out in the clutch. But American optimism demanded... Read More

Back in 2000, candidate George W. Bush described himself as “a uniter, not a divider.” If we didn’t all remember that, you’d think I’d made it up. Now Bush has dubbed himself “the decider.” Well, things change, people change, and our perceptions of them change; but with Bush, everything has changed, and in the most... Read More

I don’t watch television much anymore, but I gather that Stephen Colbert is the hottest comedian on the tube this month. I missed his latest achievement, an act of lese majesty at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, where he ridiculed the chief guest, President Bush, without mercy. Bush and his wife had to take... Read More