Category: Media Beat column

The man in the Oval Office is fond of condemning “killers.” But his administration continues to kill with impunity. “They can go into Iraq and do this and do that,” Martha Madden, former secretary of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, said Thursday, “but they can’t drop some food on Canal Street in New Orleans,…

The men and women of the National Guard shouldn’t be killing in Iraq. They should be helping in New Orleans and Biloxi. The catastrophic hurricane was an act of God. But the U.S. war effort in Iraq is a continuing act of the president. And now, that effort is hampering the capacity of the National…

Over the weekend, a spectrum of liberal responses to Cindy Sheehan came into sharper focus. The message is often anti-Bush… but not necessarily anti-war. Frank Rich spun out his particular style of triangulation in the New York Times. While deriding President Bush’s stay-the-course stance, Rich also felt a need to disparage the most visible advocate…

For a long time, the last refuge of scoundrels was “patriotism.” Now it’s “the war on terror.” President Bush and many of his vocal supporters aren’t content to wrap themselves in the flag. It’s not sufficient to posture as more patriotic than opponents of the Iraq war. The ultimate demagogic weapon is to exploit the…

The Bush administration may ratchet up the Iraq war. That might seem unlikely, even farfetched. After all, the president is facing an upsurge of domestic opposition to the war. Under such circumstances, why would he escalate it? A big ongoing factor is that George W. Bush and his top aides seem to believe in red-white-and-blue…