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"What if the government starts enforcing the espionage statute whenever there's a leak?" Steve Roberts, a former New York Times journalist who teaches at George Washington University, observed to the Baltimore Sun.
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Benjamin Wittes, Ritika Singh
Political parties in the United States, like a spatting couple in a bad marriage, have been fighting over the law of counterterrorism for more than a decade. And like the spatting couple, they have developed an almost rote script for their fight....
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The policy mystery of our time is why politicians in the United States and across much of the democratic world are so obsessed with deficits when their primary mission ought to be bringing down high and debilitating rates of unemployment.
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Good for the NAACP. We need an honest conversation about the role of race and racism in the Tea Party. Thanks to a resolution passed this week at the venerable organization's national convention, we'll get it.
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The October online posting by WikiLeaks of nearly a thousand classified Pentagon documents (the “Iraq War Logs”) shed new light on the vexed issue of Iraqi deaths during and after the 2003 invasion.
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“Justice has been done,” President Barack Obama told the world in announcing that U.S.
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Margaret O'Brien Steinfels
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You don’t have to be a Republican to consider Barack Obama a less-than-ideal president. Indeed, disappointment with the president is rife among progressives.
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The right wing has lost the election of 2012.
The evidence for this is overwhelming, yet it is the year's best-kept secret. Mitt Romney would not be throwing virtually all of his past positions overboard if he thought the nation were ready to...
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It is no secret that President Barack Obama has conducted a very aggressive—and by many measures effective—campaign of targeted killings against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, both in Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan. It is less well known that the...
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Since the beginning of December, military gas (sarin, a nerve agent) has claimed a major place in discussion of the civil war in Syria. The Syrian government has admitted to holding major stocks of (unidentified military) gas in or near the areas of...
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If a president finds himself in the role of a political scientist, he has a problem -- even when his political science lesson is 100 percent accurate.
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On the evening of April 15—the day two bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding more than two hundred eighty—President Barack Obama vowed that those responsible “will feel the full weight of justi
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The European Union doesn’t know where it stands at the moment. NATO thinks it knows and is gambling.
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The increasingly dangerous Afghanistan situation is worth analysis at two levels: that of the war itself—the ultimately doomed attempt by the United States to conquer the Taliban insurrection and impose a pro-American government—and that of the...
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As the American presidential election approaches, the dominant conviction expressed by members of both parties is that the country is gravely in decline. If the wrong man is elected, the nation's spin out of control will accelerate and disasters...
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Politics tends to wring all seriousness out of speech. Sometimes this is a demonstration of unforgivable ignorance. Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan thinks that "now is the time to lock in the success that is within reach" in...
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Last New Year’s Eve, President Obama signed into law the “National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012.” Intended to reinforce the 2001 law that empowered the president to respond to the crimes of 9/11, the new statute grants him powers...
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[This is an updated version of an earlier post.]
Bill Clinton is typically described as the empathetic, feel-your-pain guy. But his greatest political skill may be as a formulator of arguments -- the explainer in chief.
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The interview given the New York Times by the new president of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi, on the eve of his trip to New York for the annual United Nations General Assembly meeting, was notable for its moderation, but more than th
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If we elected the president by popular vote, we would have heard some different spin going into the debates. With the presidential election looking closer in the national polls than it does in the swing states, the pressure on Mitt Romney from his...
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The third American presidential debate was of negligible interest as a test of the qualities of the candidates, whatever it did or did not do to the presidential horserace odds -- probably not much.
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The 2012 campaign began on Aug. 2, 2011, when President Obama signed the deal ending the debt-ceiling fiasco. At that moment, the president relinquished his last illusions that the current, radical version of the Republican Party could be dealt with...
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Over the long run, the most important impact of an election is not on the winning party but on the loser. Winners feel confirmed in staying the course they're on. Losing parties -- or, at least, the ones intent on winning again someday -- are moved...
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To understand how Barack Obama sees himself and his presidency, don't look to Franklin Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln. Obama's role model is Ronald Reagan -- and that is just what Obama told us before he was first elected.
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Gerald J. Russello, Steven P. Millies
Steven P. Millies
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"Lead from behind" may be a sound bite the Obama administration regrets, but debating from behind is clearly something President Obama is very good at. He got the first debate's wakeup call while Mitt Romney let the encounter in Denver mislead him...
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Almost all the shibboleths of Washington conventional wisdom took a hit in Tuesday's elections. Yet advocates of a single national political narrative clung to the difficulties of two incumbent Democratic senators to keep spinning the same old tale...
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Barack Obama's campaign promise of change did not include a pledge to transform American conservatism.
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Who could have imagined that the bailout of the auto industry, one of the single most unpopular moves by the Obama administration, would become one of its best talking points?
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He had just been through the roughest patch of President Obama’s re-election struggle and yet senior adviser David Axelrod seemed, if not quite serene, then at least amiably stoic.
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For campaign operatives and cable-news anchors, it is a job requirement to insist earnestly, if overconfidently, that each upcoming election is historic, realigning, and game-changing. Most, thank God, are not.
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The most incisive reaction to Mitt Romney's disparaging comments about 47 percent of us came from a conservative friend who emailed: "If I were you, I'd wonder why Romney hates America so much."
A bit strong, perhaps. But the more you think about...
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War is war and murder is murder. The law draws the distinction. The American armed drone is a weapons system of war, not of policemen.
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President George W.
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In what is sadly a rare show of national solidarity, former President George W. Bush will join President Barack Obama at “Ground Zero” in lower Manhattan on September 11 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United...
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Margaret O'Brien Steinfels
Polls show that the vast majority of Americans do not want armed drones circling their own neighborhoods. Who could blame us for not wanting to be taken out by a killing machine operated by someone hunkered down thousands of miles away? Then again,...
