George Bush, Dick Cheney, and John McCain are sending a razor-sharp message to the fighting men and women of America.

It's underlined again in bright, fresh, blood-red every time a tank in Bahgdad is blown up by an IED and shrapnel rips into another soldier's flesh.

It's written in script-letters...

After all the pontificating on TV, in the end it didn't come down to sideshow jive like the Reverend Wright Imbroglio or the Great Sniper Fire Lie. It didn't come down to micro-demographics, or gas prices, or the war in Iraq. Incredibly enough, it didn't even come down to the...

"Liberty is connected with prose, and bureaucrats who want to destroy liberty tend to write and speak badly." -George Orwell

George Orwell: meet Tim Russert.

And all his blowhard kin.

Tuesday's biggest winner was not Barack Obama -- though it's impossible to overstate just how stunning his victory was, scoring...

Reeling from Tuesday evening's results, a desperate Hillary Clinton today promised voters an extraordinary new platform that, while making no mention of pressing political issues, includes "zero-calorie" Hershey Bars, a month's-worth of free Marlboro Reds, and--somewhat controversially, in certain quarters--a mysterious new kind of crystal methedrine, which while having all...

As we stagger out into the middle of the ring for Round 1,293 of this heavyweight title-fight between two battered contenders for the Democratic Party crown, the cumulative effect of all the punches, head-butts and knockdowns has been to make us all feel soul-weary and half-concussed. As one who's become...

Whoopee, kids! George Bush III and Hillary Clinton have called for a Gas-Tax Holiday! Let's celebrate in style! Whaddaya say we all kick our Magic Tax Rebates into one big kitty, put on our flag lapel-pins, car-pool out to the desert, and throw an End-of-the-World Celebration--a Woodstock of the Apocalypse!

Obliterate.

All week this word's been haunting me.

Ever since Hillary Clinton channelled her inner Doctor Strangelove on ABC-TV, vowing to "totally obliterate" Iran for some imagined attack on Israel in the future, that word's hung in the air like a tiny mushroom cloud. Of course, to the corporate...

It's zany hi-jinks a-plenty when a desperate, ambition-crazed politician (Hillary Clinton, playing herself) suddenly finds her power-base crumbling. Forced to team up with her doddering Republican opponent , John McCain (played by the corpse of Ted Knight), to plot against an upstart black candidate named Barack Obama (Blair Underwood), Hillary...

I grew up in the decaying mill town of Utica, New York, among gas-station attendants, nuns, glass-workers, alcoholics, conveyor-belt workers, and factory-hands. They were mostly devout Catholics--Italian, Polish, and Irish--and, when offered the chance, equally devout in their devotion to their labor unions. Utica boomed during World War II, churning...

As Iraq-war-fatigue infects our Wolfs and Katies and Brians and Tims and Times and Newsweeks and all our daily papers, too -- with the percentage of news-time devoted to the war now shaved to a pitiful 3% -- the same flu-like torpor is filtering down to viewers and readers: when...

When an outhouse-supply rag like The National Enquirer trumpets a headline like "The Most Shocking Story You Will Ever Read!", as it does in its current issue, its 7-11 readers have every right to expect something truly juicy -- hard-core proof that Elvis' ghost impregnated Katie Couric during a...

As campaign politics in America lurches, zombie-like, deeper and deeper into the muck, with Hillary Clinton desperately flogging the Reverend Wright "scandal" in all its idiotic glory, it's time to study the true masters of smear-ology -- the supermarket tabloids. Here, in the sick, teeming id of America, tales of...

No one in American political history has squandered his reputation so wantonly, so publicly, and so quickly -- and in the pursuit of so little -- as Bill Clinton. As he desperately chases the impossible dream of a thousand more nights in a White House bed, he has laid bare...

Where did it begin? Pick a time. How much can you stand to remember without getting nauseous? Back to Bob Kerrey, an early proponent of the slimy and absurd Muslim slurs? Back to the porcine Mark Penn, and his portrait of Obama as a shiftess cocaine fiend? Back to...

Good evening, Senator Clinton, Senator Obama. Guys, I got blind, screaming drunk with Brian Williams last night because the two of us just couldn't take it any more. (You'd be amazed, but even when he's pounded down six Jack-and-Cokes, ol' Brian still has a voice that can induce instant coma...

At 17, on the Lower East Side of New York, I became Abbie Hoffman's protege in rebellion: he liked to call me "The Littlest Yippie." And one of the core-truths that Abbie embodied -- whether it was fist-fighting pro-war thugs in the streets of New York or marching through clouds...