The vacuum left by former clown-in-chief George W. Bush, ably lead by sinister foil Dick Cheney, has spawned an entire army of wanna-be Bushes: the nicknames, the physical comedy, the blunders, the dumb look, seemingly every Republican is trying to replicate the act, and many are having quite some success.

When recent Democratic re-convert Senator Arlen Specter defended himself with outrage against the charge of being a "loyal Democrat" this week, we knew exactly what he meant: no core beliefs, idealistic yearnings or basic ideology will ever come between him and power. In that sense, he joins a...

The obtuseness of the government and the financial industry on the subject of executive compensation is best summed up by one of the bonus defenders, who complains: "It's suddenly a crime to make money, it seems." Leaving aside the telling stupidity of assuming that the mere act of "making...

The political death-watch for RNC Chairman Michael Steele is wildly entertaining: who knew the party that gave us George W. Bush and Sarah Palin was holding back its best buffoon yet? The bigger question, though, is not so much whether Steele will survive, but whether it his party that...

Sean Hannity's meltdown about Sean Penn's fictional same-sex Oscar night kiss is absurd if only because, as GLAAD points out, there were many more heterosexual kisses just in that one show. More perniciously, though, it is absurd because Hollywood remains one of the country's most conservative institutions for gay...

When Republicans suffered a disastrous beating in November's election, it would have been fair to assume that things could not get worse for them: the-most-liberal-Senator was to be president, Nancy-Pelosi-from-San-Francisco was going to lead a massive Democratic majority in the House, and assorted socialists were going to run things....

Attorney General Eric Holder's assessment that the United States is a "nation of cowards" on issues of race was perhaps off-puttingly blunt but results from the recent Presidential election support his call for Americans to talk more about race. And while Holder was presumably not singling out a particular...

There is John McCain, the Republicans' failed presidential candidate, as incapable since the election as he was before. There is John Boehner, the party's leader in the House and Ohio's own George Hamilton (the tan, not the affair with his stepmother when he was 12). We now also...

Barack Obama, just a couple of weeks into his presidency, has already squeezed one person too many into his big tent, Judd Gregg, his new Commerce Secretary, a right-wing Republican who once wanted to dismantle the department he is about to run. Now if Obama's intention was in fact...

Barack Obama has finally realized that, yes, bankers' behavior is "shameful," "outrageous" and the "height of irresponsibility." The solution: he and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will have direct conversations with corporate leaders to make the point. That's nice, but it's obviously not going to cut it. Now that US...

While Barack Obama has spent the last couple of months figuring out how to save the country and its economy from GOP-inflicted disasters, the candidates to head the Republican National Committee have been debating abortion. Splitting hairs does not begin to describe the exquisite dissection of each candidate's stance...

"We knew what we were doing." It would be easy to describe Dick Cheney's recent assessment of his time in office as the epitaphic bluster of a deeply failed man. But even as we rejoice at the thought of his departure and the arrival of a man in whom...

The photographs of the current, future and former living presidents at the White House earlier this week were remarkable for the fact that such a meeting has not occurred since 1981. And because, for the first time, an African-American president-elect is present. And because, once again, there isn't a...

Speculation about Hillary Clinton's successor in the Senate will soon be moot, but the debate about America's political dynasties is hopefully just starting. This year's newly open Senate seats were particularly revealing, with the leading contenders in New York, Delaware, Colorado and Illinois all including the kin of prominent politicians.

When a 19 year-old white supremacist recently gained a seat on the Palm Beach County Republican Executive Committee, the election created such an outcry that embarrassed local politicians used a technicality to block his seating. The entire process was buffoonish, although the views of the spawn of a grand...

You can disagree about the propriety of the auto industry bailout. You can disagree about free trade. You can disagree about a lot of things. But when you say gay people are pedophiles and rapists, that is not a simple disagreement: it is a stupid, hateful position that, say,...

The battle over the bailout of some segments of the US auto industry has become increasingly defined in terms of class, with the head of the United Steelworkers union accusing Washington of bailing out "those who shower before work but not those who shower afterwards," a sound bite eagerly...

For the past couple of decades, the consensus in the mainstream media was that the Democratic Party was in dire trouble: politically close to irrelevance and on the wrong foot demographically. Even Bill Clinton's eight years in power were considered a fluke: brought on by a third-party candidate, Ross Perot,...

During the recent presidential campaign, accusations of socialism flew from the Republican camp, with Sarah Palin the chief warrior against an evil she had likely not heard of until, say, early September (and this would include her many years in college studying, yes, journalism). Democrats reacted as if...

For many of us, 2008 will mark the last time we vote for a candidate who does not favor same-sex marriage. Hopefully, this will be because at least one candidate from a major party will support those rights, but we should also be prepared that, as in this year's presidential...