Terence Samuel

The war on terror is now the war on failure. If you listen to President Bush, it seems clear that avoiding failure has become his bottom-line consideration for continuing to prosecute the war in Iraq. No more weapons of mass destruction; no more avenging 9/11, or fighting them over there so we don’t have to […]

The president’s State of the Union plea to the Congress and the country to give war just one last chance in Iraq was actually a deft performance for a man faced with so few options for wriggling out of the corner he’s boxed himself into. Despite the tandem military and political disasters that have torpedoed […]

Republicans are in trouble — and it is not the kind of trouble that dissipates with time or the kind that can be overridden by the usual political subterfuge or great 30-second ads in the waning weeks of the campaign. This is the kind of trouble that takes root. It is found not just in […]

I feel for George Allen, and not just because I too once walked around with the bloody head of a fallen deer, bent on having a little fun at someone else’s expense. A couple decades ago, having moved from the Bronx to southwest Virginia — the real Virginia — I was assigned to cover the […]

Politics in our age is an exercise in free-floating disappointment, of varying levels of intensity, punctuated by the occasional surprise, sometimes mild, often unpleasant. The theory holds up no matter where you fall on the ideological spectrum, but the pattern is especially true for liberals and Democrats over the last generation; it’s beginning marked by […]

So having endured the memorials, the tributes and the solemn remembrances at the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, we now brace for the memorials, tributes and solemn remembrances marking the fifth anniversary of 9-11. Remembering well is hard work, especially when you’re forced to do it collectively, on a national or global scale. On September […]

The e-mail was short, to the point and, frankly, a little bit rabid; but that might be only because the writer is a friend and I could feel his outrage oozing from the screen: “Joe Lieberman is going to be the Zell Miller of 2008. I could see him now, at the Republican Convention talking […]

LONDON — I wish I knew the rhythms of this city well enough to measure exactly how jarred Londoners were by the news that, all over town, young men and women had been working away diligently on a diabolical plot to completely disrupt civilization, killing a few thousand people in the process. I know New […]

After Tuesday, after the Battle of Connecticut, expect to hear a lot talk about the need for healing in the Democratic Party if the party wants to win in November. Which raises two questions: First, is healing possible, and, much more counter-intuitively, do Democrats really want to win in November? The answer to the latter […]

What if the Democrats win? Let’s get ahead of ourselves. Let’s presume for a moment that all the nervous excitement coursing through Democratic veins these days is entirely justified and that they actually win in November. Let’s say they win big and take control of the both ends of the Capitol. Let’s assume that this […]