Ross M. Levine

I for one wish I could vote for George Bush on November 4 and give him a third term. (And why can't I, given the myriad "revisions" to constitutional law that have already occurred under his presidency?) But before you have me committed, the reason I'd like to re-elect him...

Yes, there is something "novel" about this war in Iraq. The extensive cast of characters, the exotic locales, the numerous chapters, and the sense of progression, as, in this case, the United States goes from neocon idealist ready to reinvent the Middle East to dissembling bungler attempting to portray every...

Of course, we won't be hearing the President make the above claim anytime soon -- he's still quite confident that he's the decider. But I'm sitting here wondering if this is still the United States of America, since I never realized it was possible here -- short of a military...

When it comes to the nuclear option, my dear mother is always prepared to reach into her well-stocked arsenal for her most lethal weapon - denial. No matter what she has said or done, all she has to do is go into denial mode and the battle is over. Her...

We all know that the Bush administration has flirted with torture. Well, more than flirted -- they've consummated the relationship in Guantanamo and arguably helped consummate it at Abu Ghraib, Haditha and who knows where else we've yet to learn about. And it all makes sense now.

The only...

(with all due apologies to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops)

If you're a sinful homosexual, you'll sleep with your same-sex partner and yell "Holy Mary Mother of God!" at the moment of climax. If you're a disordered homosexual, you'll yell "Forgive me, Jesus!"

If...

Forgive me, Lord, for I have sinned. As a fundamentalist, pro-life, Bush-loving, gay-hating, patriotic, afraid-of-the-caliphate, SUV-driving Christian Republican, I was taken in by my party's optimism. They said they were going to win on Tuesday, and so, because I believe in lending aid to the downtrodden, I voted for the...

Scandal is to politics what turning points are to a movie script: the action is proceeding in a linear fashion when all of a sudden, something causes the plot to shift directions. And just as turning points keep the audience engaged in a film, so scandals keep us engaged in...

If Erasmus will forgive me, I would like to give former Congressman Mark Foley some credit, and not just for making a few of the Washington pages feel appreciated. Foley has single-handedly (no pun intended) exposed how risky it is for a political party to become too entwined with what...

Donald Rumsfeld was in Salt Lake City the other day to tell the American Legion - and the rest of us -- that if we aren't willing to tow the administration's line in Iraq, then we are appeasing the "Islamic fascists" the way the French and British appeased...

There seems to be some disagreement out there on just how much the United States spends on its military in comparison with the rest of the world. According to James Surowiecki, the New Yorker's business columnist, it's more than the rest of the world combined. Others are not quite so...

...ruled on other hot button issues besides gay marriage?.

After all, when it came to same-sex nuptials, they decided that the New York "legislature could find that unstable relationships between people of the opposite sex present a greater danger that children will be born into or grow up...

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, depending on your income, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, depending on your gullibility...

With apologies to Chuck Dickens...

Yes, it's bad enough that young Americans are being exploded in Iraq...

Kenneth Lay, dead? Did we hear right?

Felled by heart stoppage in the night?

There's been a flurry of proposed Constitutional amendments of late, and I would like to voice my support for one in particular - the ban on fag burning.

The liberals say that we don't need a Constitutional amendment against fag burning, that it's already prohibited by law...

We'd heard the rumors, of course, but dismissed them as idle gossip. Sure they say the tabloids don't lie on their front covers, but when they were blaring the news that President Bush was thinking of leaving his wife for his true love, Condoleezza Rice, we were pretty...