No more calls. We have a winner. All hail General Stanley McChrystal, who has won his war for 30,000 more troops to be deployed to a country whose government is so rotten and corrupt many of its citizens prefer the Taliban.

Marching triumphantly to Capitol Hill on Tuesday, then giving...

Bravo announced this week that it is expanding its Real Housewives franchise to the nation's capital, with its "influential players, cultural connoisseurs, fashion sophisticates and philanthropic leaders."

Have they been here lately? The best-dressed aide on Capitol Hill would horrify the lowest grip at Universal Studios. There are no cultural...

How fast we journalists move so as not to be left behind or be seen as sentimental.

I expect a story any minute that President-elect Barack Obama is moving too fast, or not fast enough. That his first hire, that of Representative Rahm Emanuel as White House chief of staff...

Let's take an emotional IQ test this morning.

Senator John McCain, the happiest presidential candidate, locked up the Republican nomination and will have few party members other than Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter sniping at him. His challenge is to continue acting "humbled'' and "honored'' to have won and to...

Like millions of New Yorkers, Rudy Giuliani chose to die in Florida.

Rejecting conventional campaign wisdom that advises against skipping the early presidential primaries and relying instead on his residual fame from 9/11, he made his stand in sunny Miami Beach instead of Concord, New Hampshire. He was tanner, readier...

At approximately 6 p.m. on Jan. 15, three hours before a Kumbaya interlude at the Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas, I saw Al Sharpton defending Senator Barack Obama from charges of youthful drug abuse.

As we all know by now, the accusation arises from Obama's own admission in his...

Did choking up a day before the polls opened in New Hampshire help Senator Hillary Clinton to a surprising primary win on Jan. 8, stopping what seemed like a tidal wave of support for Senator Barack Obama?

Or was it the pile-on at the debate on Jan. 5, or Bill...

The Clintons have a steep hill to climb in New Hampshire. Like parents who know better, they have to convince voters that the guy they've fallen in love with isn't good for them.

So far, Bill Clinton is off his game. And Hillary Clinton seems incapable of getting some of...

Mike Huckabee is having his moment, if you haven't heard. The folksy, witty Baptist preacher with the Gomer Pyle face deserves it, if for nothing other than giving the U.S. presidential debates a touch of humanity.

He really is a compassionate conservative, the kind who drives the low-tax, small-government wing...

To all who have shunned previous televised presidential debates, listen up. Tonight, pop a cold one, Tivo Grey's Anatomy or CSI, and catch the supper show live from Vegas: no cover, no minimum and no dancing girls, unless a certain candidate pirouettes around questions she'd rather not answer.

Las Vegas,...

The U.S. presidential debates have been largely a bust, unless you go in for stilted round-robin interviews that reward memorization and neatness over substance.

All those "raise-your-hand-if-you-agree questions'' reduce the candidates to schoolchildren begging the teacher for a hall pass.

Given the setting, Hillary Clinton won every encounter, even though...

Amid the booths pushing abstinence ("Pet Your Pet'' T-shirts), commandment-of-the-month bumper stickers and religious statues the size of aircraft carriers, the attendees at last weekend's Values Voters Summit are more open to heresy than I would have thought.

As they hung out around the Starbucks kiosk outside the Washington Hilton...

Legislation-by-anecdote is a dangerous enterprise. If you want to misunderstand stem cells, consult President George W. Bush's account of "snowflake babies,'' born from unused embryos at in-vitro fertilization clinics.

For every tale of a deadbeat dad with five kids on public assistance, there are thousands of fathers working three jobs...

The sixth Republican presidential debate was pass-fail for former Senator Fred Thompson. To succeed, all he needed to do was stay alert and not nod off in the middle of an answer.

That doesn't mean the audience didn't doze off every so often. There was a build-up to this one,...

Anyone who doesn't get their news through an IV drip from Fox or Rush Limbaugh knows, thanks to The New York Times, that George W. Bush has been secretly obtaining legal opinions that condone torture while publicly abiding by an opinion of former Attorney General John Ashcroft in 2004 that...

U.S. President George W. Bush said last week, "We've got a problem. We understand there's a problem. And we're going to address the problem.''

That sounded promising. It's never too late to pull yourself together, and there's no shortage of problems for Bush to address: health care, which is ruining...

Responding to a question about the growing number of uninsured Americans, President George W. Bush observed: "No one goes without health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room.''

This let-them-eat-cake attitude recalled Barbara Bush's observation when thousands of Hurricane Katrina victims lay sleeping with strangers...

With the nomination of retired federal judge Michael Mukasey, there's fresh hope that the U.S. Justice Department can be cleansed before the end of the Bush administration.

Veteran lawyers without a leader they respect at Justice say it may be sunny and 80 degrees outside, but it feels like a...

In modern warfare, the main theater of battle is television. Someday they'll hand out Emmy Awards in lieu of ribbons and medals.

In a back-and-forth reminiscent of the Verizon man's "Can you hear me now?'' commercial, the technical difficulties ate up a 15-minute recess. Score the general 1, Congress 0.

Fred Thompson has had one of the more inauspicious beginnings to a presidential campaign, all downhill since the swoon he induced among many Republicans when he said in March he was testing the waters.

As spring turned into summer and weeks into months, the swoon turned into foot-tapping impatience.

To...