O.J. Simpson had himself one helluva Thursday. Earlier yesterday, Fred Goldman kicked off a coast-to-coast tour to pitch “If I Did It” on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Goldman’s son Ron is widely believed to have been murdered by Simpson along with his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson. Dad was awarded the right publish the Juice’s ghostwritten non-confession confession in bankruptcy court as a consequence of his decade-long battle to force Simpson to help satisfy a 1997 $33.5...

The much-hyped Anbar Awakening has ended with a bang for Sheik Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha, President Bush’s new best friend in Iraq. Bush had met with the sheik, a key figure in the U.S.-funded revolt of Sunni leaders against Al Qaeda, in a fly-by visit to an airbase in Anbar on September 3. Pentagon officials say that the assassination of Abu Risha, who along with two bodyguards died in a bomb blast, is a huge blow to U.S. efforts because it sends a message that other Sunnis who help Americans...

As legal eagles go, they don’t come much smarter, nicer or fairer than Erwin Chemerinsky. I know this because Chemerinsky was one of my go-to guys when I was covering the O.J. Simpson murder case and criminal trial in the mid-1990s and I needed an astute comment on deadline regarding one of the hydra-headed legal aspects of this drama. Chemerinsky has become a favorite talking head on cable news shows because of his constitutional law expertise. His politics, somewhat left of center, are...

You have to go all the way back to Richard Nixon’s infamous 1973 “I am not a crook” speech to find a presidential address that is being made under circumstances so incredible as those when George Bush addresses the nation tonight. Bill Clinton’s 1998 “I did not have sex with that woman” speech was ignominious, but hardly comparable. Nixon turned a third-rate burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters into a constitutional crisis that would lead...

The Democratic Party needs MoveOn.Org like a bad case of diarrhea. Yet there was the left-wing public policy group giving it the sh*ts this week because of its latest outburst of trash talk – a full-page ad disparaging General David Petraeus in the New York Times on Monday that carried the the big, bold headline “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” While there was merit to what the body of the ad said, because of the headline it accomplished nothing positive and plenty negative...

Two of the seven GIs in Iraq who wrote a controversial New York Times op-ed piece questioning the war have been killed. Sergeants Omar Mora and Yance Gray died Monday when a cargo truck overturned in western Baghdad, two of seven U.S. troops killed and 11 injured just as General David Petraeus was about to report to Congress on progress of the surge. Their names were released today. A third co-contributor, Staff Sergeant Jeremy Murphy, was shot in the head while the article was being written and...

Petraeus and Crocker: That’s a Wrap Now that we’ve gotten another 9/11 anniversary out of the way, there’s an opportunity to let the testimony of General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker really sink in. And unless you’re one of those delusional souls for whom the corner in Iraq has been just about to be turned for years, the upshot of their dog-and-pony show is deeply depressing. But not surprising. As I noted in my sum-up of Petraeus’ first day of testimony...

I would be remiss if it didn’t put my oar in the water on the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks if only long enough to remember the men and women who died on that horrible day and the families and other loved ones they left behind. As well as note in passing that I was in New York City the other day and the Twin Towers still were gone — something I don’t think I’ll ever be able to reconcile for as long as I live. Judging from the relative paucity of 9/11-related...

ANNIVERSARY By Suzanne Vega Fall and all attendant memories Crowd the day with unrelated histories Each year leaves it’s unresolving fantasies To hang around each corner Hang around each street. Thick with ghosts, the wind whips round in circuitries Carrying words as strangers exchange pleasantries Do they intrude upon your private reveries As they meet you on each corner Meet you on each street. Watch for daily braveries Notice newfound courtesies Finger sudden legacies As they clean up every...

In an exercise in lowering already low expectations, General David Petraeus told lawmakers today that U.S. troops levels in Iraq may be able to return to their pre-surge strength by next summer without jeopardizing what he characterized as hard-won progress. Then, lowering expectations further still, the top American commander in the bitterly divisive war tried to close the door on any decision on wholesale withdrawals until next spring when he said he would give another progress report. The long-await...

Once upon a time, I was a newspaper reporter and editor. Over nearly four decades in the business, I saw the world, covered the O.J. Simpson trials and a few wars, did investigative work that got laws passed than nobody paid any attention to, mentored a bunch of rising stars, won some awards, made my mother proud and eventually got so burned out that I quit the business. Barely two months before the 9/11 attacks. Whew! Once upon a time, I bled printer’s ink and feared newspapers had become...

Allow me to offer a modest prediction: Kyla Ebbert will rue the day that she made a big deal out of being taken aside by a Southwest Airlines employee at a San Diego airport when she tried to board a flight to Tucson because she had the temerity to wear a tank top and short skirt in 100-degree weather. If you’re not hip to the tabloid sensation of the moment, the employee told the 23-year-old bottle blonde, who is waitressing at Hooters so she can attend college to become a marine biologist...

When Chuck Hagel announces his retirement from politics tomorrow, Congress will lose that rarest of men — a principled maverick who was not afraid to stand up to his party and his president. In an era when politics in America has slouched inextricably to the right, the 60-year-old Nebraskan was difficult to pigeonhole. No mistake about it, Hagel was a conservative and usually reliable Republican vote over two terms, but charted his own course on Social Security and foreign policy — and...

With General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker set to testify before Congress next week and President Bush planning to deliver his own progress report on the Iraq war, here are five things you should know about these hugely anticipated events: (1.) THE BIG COVER-UP This dog-and-pony show is a cover-up for a White House-manufactured catastrophe of epic proportions and an exercise in finding excuses for staying the course without further alienating voters. As former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright...

Can You Spot Reed and Pelosi? The retreat of the Democratic congressional majority from trying to force the White House to delineate an Iraq war exit strategy, as well as agreeing to a timetable for wholesale troop withdrawals, is yet another shameful chapter in the Age of Bush. Using the modest and temporary successes of the surge strategy as a fig leaf, the very Democratic leaders who insisted in the wake of the party’s mid-term election victory that nothing less than bringing the troops...

Sgt. Joseph Mosner, veteran of Bush’s Forever War As we slouch toward to the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, the real story of that awful day and its aftermath is now well known. While the attacks were the darkest day for the world’s remaining superpower since Pearl Harbor, astoundingly they were leveraged by President George W. Bush into the greatest foreign policy disaster in American history — the Iraq war. This American flag-draped act of hubris and deceit is...

As far as the war in Iraq is concerned, the trouble with September for the Bush administration is that August has to come first. This means the good news in the run-up to the anxiously awaited Petraeus-Crocker progress report gets upstaged by the bad news: Negligible decreases in U.S. and Iraqi casualties despite all of the spinning about how much better things are. Please click here for the monthly war wrap-up at Kiko’s House.

It seems right out of a shoot-’em-up Hollywood thriller: A shadowy private American security company led by a messianic right winger by the name of Erik Prince who has close connections to the White House and Pentagon hires out his own air force to put down civil unrest at home and insurgencies abroad. Well, it’s not a movie, but all too real. There is an Erik Prince and he heads Blackwater USA, which touts itself as “The most comprehensive professional military, law enforcement,...

Conservatives, as absent minded as their president when it comes to the lessons of history, are forgetting a significant cyclical aspect of the history of the Iraq war in their hearty hosannas over the “success” of the surge. In each of the first four years of the war, there has been a spike in violence as temperatures cool down, summer wanes and Ramadan approaches. I pray that this year is different. But in a scary confluence of events, Ramadan begins on September 13 this year, two...

Please click here for some musings on the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and here to read about an especially noteworthy disaster-related charitable organization.

The Joke Was On The American People Alberto Gonzales, a legal lightweight and dull-witted apparatchik whose name was once floated as a possible Supreme Court justice, leaves in shambles a Justice Department that he willingly helped the White House to transform into a branch of the Republican Party. President Bush repeatedly stood by Gonzales even as he faced increasing scrutiny for his abysmal leadership of the department and bipartisan calls for his resignation, his role in the dismissals of nine...

Scholars feasting on the carcass of George Bush’s tenure will have a field day recalling his serial distortions of history, in reality efforts to justify failed policies and reckless actions. Presidents and other leaders have cited historical events since time in memoriam to state their cases, but usually with a bit more care than the fecklessly reckless Mr. Bush. I find especially execrable Bush’s frequent comparisons of the Iraq war to World War II and himself to Harry Truman. Then...

I’m a sucker for maps and just the other day was pouring through a (real) copy of Mercator’s historic 1638 Atlas Novus, but there’s big fun in this map, too. The so-called Republican “L” predominates and begs the question as to whether the Democrats will be able to make inroads into the L next year. Rhodes Cook takes a crack at answering that question at Real Clear Politics.

Some active-duty commanders and a fair number of retired ones have been warning for some time that a protracted Iraq war is slowly but inextricably bringing the Army to its knees because of the physical and emotional demands that it is putting on its soldiers as well as the Pentagon’s inability to quickly replace damaged and destroyed vehicles and materiel. These soldiers typically are serving 15 months in Iraq with less than a year at home between tours. Some units have been deployed to the...

Like a bad penny that keeps turning up, partitioning Iraq into three ethnic mini-states in order to save it is back in the news. The latest slugfest over this truly lousy idea has been aired out this week at TMV, and I review that in a lengthy post at Kiko’s House. But I also add some pertinent background – as in the fact Iraq’s borders today are a result of an insidious secret deal between the British and French – and review a fascinating flight of fancy by Ralph Peters...