Columns

How can the Bush administration be so disciplined and effective at politics and so undisciplined and ineffectual at governing? No White House in living memory has been as successful at squelching leaks and keeping cabinet members on message, reaching down into the bureaucracy to bend analyses in directions that support its goals, imposing its will […]

You have to wonder. Half to three-quarters of the American public doesn’t believe in evolution (depending on how you define it). One out of three Americans thinks the budget deficit can be eliminated (a) by hoping (or praying) that it goes away (8 percent) or (b) by cutting taxes even more (25 percent). Anti-scientific, un-arithmetic […]

George W. Bush’s cynicism and incompetence have come back to haunt him, earlier than might have been predicted. As a result, history has dealt Democrats an opportunity. Whether they will rise to the occasion remains to be seen. Michael Tomasky addresses the politics of the New Orleans catastrophe elsewhere in this issue. Although Hurricane Katrina […]

Back in the late 1970s, when gasoline prices zoomed and oil companies were making money hand over fist, our government enacted a windfall profit tax to return some of those unjustified gains to the public that was paying for them. Today, as gasoline prices have again skyrocketed, the federal government’s reaction is exactly the opposite: […]

The establishment of a pro-Iranian, Islamic government in Iraq was not exactly what the Bush administration told us to expect from the war. But it may well be the result, and I am beginning to think that there is nothing that the United States can or should do about it — except to disengage from […]

This September 11 will mark the fourth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United States. The media will focus on the ceremonies at the former World Trade Center site, the Pentagon, and other cities and towns around the country that will honor the dead. The Bush administration, meanwhile, will do its best to remind […]

In the Iraq War, we failed to commit the troops necessary to secure the country, and now we are in a mess. In the Terrorism War, we are creating more terrorism. In the Afghanistan War, we have yet to capture Osama bin Laden. And in the Trade War, our manufacture is so outsourced that an […]

The battles over George W. Bush’s Supreme Court nominees are about to be waged on the wrong terrain — on the bloody fields of America’s culture wars. Sandra Day O’Connor was the swing vote on many of the nation’s most divisive social issues, and activists on both right and left are mobilized for the fight […]

New projections from the congressional Budget Office suggest that this year’s deficit will be $75 billion or so less than last year’s record level. Similar figures will be reported by the Bush administration just after this column goes to press. The right is already claiming victory. “Our policies continue to boost the economy and tax […]

The American people want out of Iraq, but critics of the Iraq War seem stymied by the mess that the Bush policy has created. Here is an exit strategy that makes sense as geopolitics and domestic politics: The U.S. commits to leave Iraq on a date certain, say August 1, 2006. We use this yearlong […]