What follows is the letter from a father of a Marine who fell in the opening days of the war in Iraq. During an interview five years ago after his son had died, I asked the father what he wanted to say directly to the president and he wrote this...

If anyone has paid acutely painful attention to the political ministrations of Karl Rove over the past two and a half decades, it's me. And if there is anyone qualified to make comparisons between democracy's Darth Vader and Hillary Clinton, I stand at the head of that line, as well....

Mark McKinnon is once more practicing his dark craft of surfing the political zeitgeist to land on the shores of fame and prosperity. Perhaps the most opportunistic political consultant in the modern era, McKinnon makes Karl Rove appear to be a principled man. He has gone from progressive Democrat to...

The state that gave the planet George W. Bush is poised to play a historic role in the selection of the Democratic presidential candidate. Oh irony of ironies. We always manage to stumble into destiny's crossroads and force detours. March 4th, a date that wasn't supposed to mean...

How difficult is this to see or understand? The yakkers down in blow dry gulch are trying to help us little-brained people in the electorate understand the very thing we have spawned. Thank you, oh wise ones, but we get it; we get it because it is us. Now let...

"What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is to understand others."
- Carlos Fuentes

As another year begins, many of us are involved in contemplating not just the behavior and principles of our country but, indeed, its very fate. We...

Mitt Romney is a tad silly.

I say this as a person who is not a member of a church and lacks the kind of faith that others proclaim. As do many of us who struggle with the notions of god, I often find myself envying those...

"God gives us memory so we can have roses in December."

- J. M. Barrie

There is a place you can go to feel the war in Iraq. You can't experience it living in everyday America. We are shopping and playing golf and watching soap operas and complaining...

Irony is what makes the Bush administration entertaining even as the world catches fire. Of course, it's probably more succinctly called hypocrisy but irony has that shrug of sweetness that makes us want to laugh or cry at the absurdity. In Pakistan, as Pervez Musharraf tears down a...

Okay, I'm tired of talking about this. But it needs clarification one more time.

When I was doing research on George W. Bush's close encounter with the Texas Air National Guard, I kept getting directed to a former guard officer named Bill Burkett. According to numerous people in the Texas...

"We grow small trying to be great."

- Eli Stanley Jones

How they loved his story. It had, after all, the kind of humble origins that tended to be missing from most of their political associates. And because he was an ethnic minority, his educational and economic ascent...

There is nothing easier than making predictions about the behavior of the Bush administration. Look for the eventuality in every scenario that completely lacks logic and it will be the course pursued by this president. Only the zealot can process what he says but the damage done by...

"The wild roller coaster sells the amusement park tickets, not the merry-go-round."
- Chris Newlin, Eclectic Productions, Houston

There is no doubt the news is nuts. And the evidence is in every story and broadcast we hear, see, or read. Without conflict or drama, the news is...

"In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way." -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt

When I first started reporting on Karl Rove in the late 1970s, I was impressed by his singularity of purpose and his willingness to say or do whatever was...

"He's a walkin' contradiction
Partly truth and partly fiction
Takin' every wrong direction
On his lonely way back home."

Kris Kristofferson

In his front page political self-immolation in the New York Times, Bush pollster Matthew Dowd has managed to set a standard for duplicity unmatched...

"Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier
dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war."

Otto Von Bismarck

When the orders came over the radio, both of the young Marines were worried. 1st Lt. Ben Reid, and the...

A few years after the Department of Homeland Security developed its No Fly List and No Fly Watch or "Selectee" List, the Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle reported the screening system was based on an algorithmic software known as Soundex. A crude, antiquated algorithm developed in 1918 to analyze...

Fourteen years ago today, federal agents descended on a clapboard structure outside of Waco to take into custody a man who called himself David Koresh. I was present throughout every day of the subsequent ordeal. And I still don't think the truth of what transpired has ever been told. What...

George W. Bush confronts a long and lonely walk down the hallway of history. There will be loyalists and radical ideologues that will remain his confidantes and treat him deferentially, but he is poised to become a man estranged from the country and the people who endured eight years of...

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

- Margaret Mead

He was, by his own assessment, a hippie. Gary had graduated with an advanced degree from Harvard and got on his motorcycle, which...