I've met Dick Armey before and chatted amiably enough with him in some Washington green room or on the way in or out. Then again, I'm a white male with some gray hair and I wasn't showing the Great Man the extreme discourtesy of daring to argue substantively with him.

It wasn't quite like the night at Camden Yards when Cal Ripken became baseball's Iron Man with his consecutive-games streak, but West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd nonetheless reached a similarly untouchable milestone today when he marked his 50th consecutive year serving in the Senate.

Byrd, now 91, busted out with...

One way to look at the job of president, or at least the kind of president who leads a broad-based national movement for change and promises to be a major transformative figure, is as the sharpest eyed and smartest media critic in the land. He can see through the flimflam...

Berlin--Choosing Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State would be a great move by our president-elect for several reasons, starting with how the selection would go over here in Europe.

The simple fact is, in Europe as in the U.S., Obama cannot afford to overlook the potential problem of not...

We might all think that, come Tuesday, if indeed all goes as expected (nail-gnawing encouraged), Sarah Palin will mercifully retreat from public view and we won't have to wince any more at every one of her awful, ain't-I-cute? winks, or at least not until her love-America-by-preaching-hate supporters try to build...

No Democrat should be overconfident. John McCain, forever bitter about the dirty-tricks campaign the Bushies waged against him in South Carolina in 2000, has obviously cooked up some monstrously hypocritical rationalization for basing his current campaign on filth, filth and more filth. In so doing he has given up...

It's hard to know sometimes if the McCain-Palin campaign is as discombobulated and directionless as it appears from the outside, zigging and zagging and blundering nonstop, or if there is a kind of mad logic at work here.

Ali's brilliant rope-a-dope strategy against George Foreman was necessary because Ali was...

John McCain's scandalous gambit to politicize the nation's economic crisis with still more wild political stunts this week sure looks like a desperate, last-ditch effort to keep Sarah Palin from being further exposed as a lightweight. Why else would the McCain team be pushing to get Friday's debate moved to...

Berlin-John McCain's bizarre response when asked repeatedly about Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero adds to a growing sense here in Europe that if McCain is elected in November, it's time to be afraid, very afraid. Is he out of it or reckless? Both options sound grim.

At...

George W. Bush had to be doing high-fives over the way Sarah Palin's embarrassing cluelessness about the "Bush Doctrine" (go ahead, watch it one more time) has been parsed and explained away by even once self-respecting pundits. Bush is desperately hoping the American people's short attention span will prevent...

I don't claim to know how Staff Sergeant Yance Tell Gray would want us to honor his memory, one year to the day after he was killed in Iraq, but I think a good place to start would be if all of us fiercely insisted on the same respect for...