Would someone please get the networks out of the presidential debate business?

The networks and the national press love their gotchas, their -gates, their "controversies," their heat. They, alas, are not the grownups in the political process. The grownups are the voters, who -- lamely, in the mind of the...

If George W. Bush had read The Pet Goat to his Economic Club of New York audience on Friday, his speech would have been no less infantile. If the first 9/11 was caused by a massive failure of intelligence about terrorism, the second 9/11 -- the slow-motion collapse of the...

First I was for Edwards, because he told the truth about poverty and power, and he apologized for his vote on the war.

Then I was for Biden, because the Republicans would eat Edwards alive on the haircut and the house, plus Biden had foreign policy street cred, and a...

Playing the expectations game is apparently no work for wimps. When the warriors of the cable news networks got dressed in the dark this Election Day morning, some of them surely did an extra set of forearm-strengthening exercises. After all, it takes one helluva powerful pundit to punch a presidential...

Why won't there be enough votes in the House and Senate to override Bush's veto of the anti-torture bill Congress sent him to sign this week?

The administration's case against the bill -- which merely asks our intelligence services to follow the same interrogation rules already in the US Army...

It's hard to believe, I know, but there is now an entire generation of 20- and 30-something Americans who don't know that Ralph Nader wasn't always a total a**hole. And yet, despite the stupefying narcissism and destructive potential of Nader's 2008 presidential bid, there's one important issue raised by his...

Here's a desirable "learning outcome" for first grade students in the public schools of Georgia: being able to answer the question, "How are Washington, Lincoln, and Bush alike?" In their classrooms, Georgia's 6-year-olds "will compare and contrast information about Washington, Lincoln, and our current president. This information will be...

Friday morning, President Bush came out of a meeting with Republican Congressional leaders and blasted House Democrats for not performing precisely the kind of fellatio on his FISA bill that he had requested. His statement was designed to get Democrats-are-soft-on-terror into the news cycle as he headed off on Air...

Both the Clinton and Obama campaigns have boiler rooms working 24/7 to squeeze public endorsements from as many of the 796 superdelegates as they can before the Party's convention in August. Both campaigns are deploying every gun they have, and they're whispering every blandishment they can muster. But the right...

Cheering members of the Conservative Political Action Committee were shocked today by withdrawing Republican presidential hopeful Willard "Mitt" Romney's surprise announcement that he was going to release 30 million of his dollars to Democratic Presidential aspirant Hillary Clinton.

"I was the only candidate to run a business," said Romney, an...

Q: Will Barack Obama win on Super Duper Tuesday?

A: Yes.

Q: So Hillary Clinton will lose on Tuesday?

A: No. She'll win, too.

Q: How can they both be winners?

A: It depends on whether the winner wins the most votes, the most kind of votes, the most...

Because Barbara Bush taught him to "use your words, George," her son the president, rather than actually mooning some Senate Democrats at the joint session of Congress on Monday night as he would like to do, will instead call them terrorist-lovers for refusing to give retroactive immunity to lawbreaking telecoms...

Imagine you're a high school senior, or the parent of one. Imagine that the principal of your school -- or the headmaster, if it's a prep school, a renowned century-old elite New England boarding school, say, that sends its graduates to all the best colleges -- announces that the...

A story:

Stalin was dead. He lay on a table, face ashen, eyes closed. The Kremlin inner circle was summoned and surrounded his body. At first, there was silence. Then, one after another, his top people began saying things impossible to imagine being expressed during his life. "He was a...

Call me YHWH.

You longtime New York Times readers thought you owned this paper, didn't you? All those years of reading Tony Lewis and Tom Wicker and Anna Quindlen and Frank Rich fooled you into thinking that this op-ed page was some kind of Ivy League newsletter for you and...

When the conversation turns to politics, the question I'm most often asked, by a country mile, is, "What's going to happen?"

Usually, I suppress the two true-but-smart-assed answers I have -- "How the hell would I know?" and "No one knows" -- and draw a verbal diagram worthy of...

The morning after Christmas, Mike Huckabee goes pheasant-hunting in Iowa, presumably to remind Iowa's Republican hunters that he, not Romney, deserves to be the NRA's poster child.

When the Romney people see the Huckabee footage, they contact every political reporter they know: Look how fat Huckabee looks in that get-up!...

If, as we now know, J. Edgar Hoover had a secret "plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty," why not Dick Cheney?

Hoover's just-declassified 1950 plan, laid out in Sunday's New York Times, wasn't about Korean War enemy combatants; it was...

[Below is the text of a flyer that was found on windshields in several church parking lots in Ottumwa, Iowa on Sunday. The Romney, Giuliani, McCain, Tancredo, Hunter, and Paul campaigns have all denied authorship or distribution of it. The Keyes campaign could not be located for a comment. The...

It's the war, stupid.

That's what came to mind as I watched Oprah Winfrey stump for Barack Obama this weekend. It's not about whether a star who can make a book a bestseller can also make a primary candidate the nominee, as the media are framing it. It's about...