Never let it be said that people who have grievances against Barack Obama because he won’t talk their talk and walk their walk are white progressives. There’s eminent black scholar Cornel West, who calls the president a “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. And now he has become head of the American killing machine and is proud of it.” Strong stuff, and off target. But if you read between the lines, as Ta-Nehisi...

AMERICA’S MOST FAMOUS PERP WALK As scandals go in France, a nation seemingly lubricated by them, the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn on charges that he tried to rape a New York hotel chambermaid is enormous. The International Monetary Fund chief was widely considered to have a shot at replacing President Nicholas Sarkozy next year. And although he has a reputation for sexual indiscretions, semen-stained dresses are typically taken to the cleaners in France and not presented as evidence...

President Obama’s approval ratings have already started to go down again. We’re so fickle. Basically, we’re saying, who have you shot for us lately? ~ JIMMY KIMMEL We live in times that are grim in so many respects and have to abide politicians who are so awful in so many respects that the irony of Donald Trump’s presidential crash-and-burn is deeply satisfying. In one fell swoop, a man whose only talent is being confrontational is left to piddle on his Salvatore...

Wheeler’s widow is handed flag at Arlington inurnment on April 29 It has been going on five months since the battered corpse of defense consultant John P. Wheeler fell from a trash truck at a northern Delaware landfill, and if anything the mystery surrounding his death has deepened. As dead guys go, Jack Wheeler would not seem to be the kind of person who would end up in a landfill, but a closer look reveals that he had enemies as well as friends. It is possible that he was targeted for...

There has no question more frequently asked about the Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound than the identity of the hound that accompanied the raiders. President Obama met behind closed doors with the raiders — members of SEAL Team Six and the dog — but its identity has remained as secret as the inner workings of Team Six itself. Now the dog has been tentatively identified: He’s a Belgian Malinois who answers to the name of Cairo, who likely came along to sniff...

Does saying that they would have voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act had they had the opportunity make the libertarian father-son tandem of Ron and Rand Paul racists? Before I offer my answer to that provocative question, let’s note that except for more overt examples like denying blacks the right to vote or refusing Latinos service at a pancake house, racism is very much in the eyes of the beholder. That, more than any other reason, is why charges of racism are thrown around with such...

The least that can be said about Erik Prince is that he worships a very unusual God. The son of the co-founder of the ultra-conservative Family Research Council, Prince considers himself a Christian of the highest order who holds strong views on the sanctity of life. How then to square this with Prince’s decidely un-Christian avocation as an entrepreneur specializing in death and destruction? Don’t bother to try. Prince was the founder of Blackwater Worldwide, which in a...

Has there ever been a scenario in modern presidential politics where the only person to have a shot at knocking off an incumbent is considered to be a pariah by much of a party’s base? I speak, of course, of Mitt Romney, who is the only contender in a field of Republican wannabes who range from loons to mediocrities, but despite his furious tacking to the right is far too moderate for today’s Grand Old Party. There are only two comparables in the last five decades, and both are...

Now that we’ve had going on three years to kick Sarah Palin around, it was all but inevitable that there would be a wave of revisionism. At the crest of this wave is “The Tragedy of Sarah Palin,” Josh Green’s takeout (as opposed to takedown) in The Atlantic. Green’s basic argument is summed up in the subhead below the article’s title: From the moment Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech electrified the Republican convention, she was seen as an unbending, hard-charging,...

New York state’s 26th District is a Republican-safe enclave near Rochester and Buffalo where the GOP holds a 30,000 voter registration edge, bucked a statewide trend and voted for John McCain over Barack Obama, and has held the House seat since forever. But now the wheels are coming off the party station wagon. In February, married Republican Congressman Christopher Lee, a scold who had warned against the perils of the Internet, was outted when a website published a sexy photo of him topless...

Suggested campaign slogan:”Gingrich 2012: He will always love America. Unless it gets cancer” ~ ALEX KNAPP The Republican Party’s field of presidential wannabes ranges from outright loons to mediocrities to perhaps two candidates who have the chops to run a smart campaign, although not beat President Obama. They would be Mitt Romney, who is likely to run, and Mitch Daniels, who would best cool his heels until 2016. Then there is the massive ego who goes by the name of Newton...

Nature abhors a vacuum and so does the news media when it comes to big stories and controversy. There was bound to be a controversy of some sort over the brilliantly planned and executed Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin Laden’s palatial pad in Pakistan, and it has centered on whether to release photographs of the slain Al Qaeda leader and the White House’s decision to not do so. As a citizen, I understand the rationale for withholding the photos. They would needlessly inflame passions in...

In some societies, John Yoo would be a disbarred lawyer writing newspaper columns in praise of torture from a prison cell, although speaking engagements and television appearances would be out of the question. But this is the good old US of A, and Yoo, whose pretzel-logic legal opinions as a Justice Department attorney and Bush administration flunky underpinned the use of torture, has of course escaped prosecution, let alone censure. He now has a lucrative second career explaining his perambulations...

Rehoboth Beach, Delaware — 1949

A post published earlier this afternoon in response to Rick Moran’s call for a bipartisan commission to investigate the Osama Bin Laden mission has been removed because The Moderate Voice has a policy that contributors may not rebut other contributors no matter how moderate (pun intended) that rebuttal may be. In other words, had I written a post stating that a bipartisan commission to investigate the Osama bin Laden mission was not called for, Rick would not be permitted to respond to my post...

Not just any penises, mind you, but an effort by the nanny staters of San Francisco to ban male circumcision. These activists call circumcision “male genital mutilation.” They point out that it is extremely painful, although I can’t personally speak to that because it has been over 64 years since I was snipped. They also believe that circumcision is a breach of human rights and violates something called “body integrity.” The activists are collecting signature for a...

While the 9/11 attacks should never been used for political ends, the Republicans have shamelessly done just that. Over and over and over. This took some chutzpah because the attacks might have not happened in the first place if George Bush didn’t have his head where the sun didn’t shine, Dick Cheney, who was the de facto national security adviser, didn’t ignore warnings that Al Qaeda was preparing to launch attacks on the homeland, and Condi Rice, who was the national security...

When does political expedience become cowardice? When you’re Republican congresspersons who vow to gut Medicare, the sick and poor be damned, gets faces full of reality from senior citizens with canes and walkers at town hall meetings back home, and return to Washington with their tails between their legs. That should surprise no one with an intelligence quotient north of Eric Cantor’s. Speaking of the House majority leader, who has sung from the Take From The Poor And Give To The Rich...

I do not believe this is a time to celebrate waterboarding, I believe this is a time to celebrate hard work. ~ Senator LINDSEY GRAHAM Osama bin Laden had been dead for a mere few hours when the conservative priests took to the media altar to crow that torture had led to the death of the Al Qaeda leader. From all available evidence, that is not correct, but an opportunity to try to rehabilitate the worst president in recent U.S. history was not to be squandered. The timeline, please: The administration...

Today marks the 41th anniversary of the murder of four antiwar protesters at the hands of Ohio National Guardsmen at Kent State University, but the full truth of this seminal event still is not known and may never be. The major lingering question is whether the guardsmen, who fired 67 rounds over a period of 13 seconds, were ordered to open fire on the more than 1,000 people, who were protesting the U.S. invasion of Cambodia for the third straight day, or whether they believed that they were being...

BIN LADEN’S ROOMS WITH A VIEW One has to go back go back to fascist Italy under Benito Mussolini to find an example of the kind of blatant hypocrisy that characterizes Pakistan. Pakistan gobbles up billions of dollars in U.S. aid each year but has nothing to show for it, has not just been less than helpful in the dragnet for Osama bin Laden but has allowed him to hide in plain view — giving new meaning to the term terrorist safe haven — in a palatial compound adjacent to the nation’s...

As almost anyone with a comprehensive world view well knows, America’s future lies not in having the mightiest military but in marshaling its extraordinary assets — its people, its infrastructure and its renewable resources — to assure a more secure 21st century. That the wonks at Foreign Policy magazine recognize that reality in publishing a paper titled “A National Security Narrative” is no surprise. Nor is it surprising that the Obama administration has pretty...

The death of the most notorious terrorist the world has ever seen . . . will allow the door to open more widely to the tolerance, modernism, and pragmatism that is so badly needed and so long awaited in a part of the world where despair, corruption, brutality, and fanaticism have laid waste to so many generations. ~ LAWRENCE WRIGHT As defining moments go, it was huge. Barack Obama, the president that his foes still insist is weak on defense and foreign policy, has accomplished in one bold stroke...

Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page gets the award for Best Analogy the Week in describing Donald Trump as being like a loudmouthed carnival clown who sits on a collapsible platform over a barrel of water and shouts insults at the passing crowd. Because that’s all that the guy is good for. Actually, the Republican presidential wannabe has had an issue even near and dearer to his double comb-over heart, and that is to bash China, which he has repeatedly said is “raping this country”...

We do not have time for this kind of silliness. ~ BARACK OBAMA America is slouching toward the end of what has to be the strangest — as well as saddest — week in memory. It was a week in which President Obama, responding to the short-form birthers who have nipped at his heals for three years, was compelled to belabor the obvious by producing his long-firm birth certificate, while the television news media, which has squandered its credibility in such a thoroughgoing fashion, broke into...