If you think of Iraq as an old-fashioned amusement park carousel with the horses and rest of the menagerie rising and falling in organ-music syncopation as it rotates, the events of the last several days would have sent it spinning so fast that it would be a blur. And as for the riders? Only the toughest won’t be thrown off. President Bush worked on earning a new moniker — The Refuser — in drawing a big line in the sand at a time when taking a deep breath, as well as a cue from...

By any objective measure, the so-called War on Drugs has been a failure. The term was first used by President Nixon in 1971, but the war itself didn’t get underway in earnest until the Reagan administration with agreements with drug-supplying countries to curb the import of marijuana, cocaine and heroin into the U.S. A quarter of a century later, the War on Drugs has failed to stem the flow of illegal drugs, the street prices of which are at record lows, while filling American prisons with...

The Oxford English Dictionary definies ad hominem as: “A phrase applied to an argument or appeal founded on the preferences or principles of a particular person rather than on abstract truth or logical cogency.” When I see the words ad hominem attack coming at me, I run for my raincoat because it’s probable that I’m about to get wet. That is because accusing someone of making an ad hominem attack is so easy. Seventeen little key strokes. The universal wrench of the unthinker. So,...

There has been an inordinate amount of flak in the blogosphere today, so let’s be charitable and call the president a slow learner. A slow learner is someone who, among other things, refuses to learn from his mistakes and blames others for them. In this instance his mistake is the Mess in Mesopotamia and the subject of his blame is Al Qaeda, which had zero presence there until the war came a cropper. A slow learner also refuses to acknowledge the admonitions of others to try to learn from...

(Editor’s Note: The following story is absolutely true.) Necessity is the mother of invention, and so when U.S. troops in Iraq found that Silly String was an effective way to spot nearly invisible trip wires they asked their commanders to order up cases of the child’s toy. No can do, they were told. Not content with that answer, Army Specialist Todd Shriver, who is stationed in Ramadi, then asked his parents, Marcelle and Ronald Shriver of Stratford, a South Jersey suburb of Philadelphia,...

The Decider and his environmentally-unfriendly minions have been in denial about global warming from the jump. Now the most powerful presidential administration in modern times — the one that says it has the power to do whatever it wants, Congress and courts be damned — will argue in a Supreme Court showdown with 12 states that it does not have the power to slow global warming by limiting the emission of harmful gases. A reading of the Clean Air Act leaves no room for doubt: The federal...

The Justice Department is at it again, seeking to turn the case of foreign student arrested in the U.S. on terrorism-related charges into another test case of Congress’ power to strip federal courts of the authority to hear habeas challenges. Mischief such as this will have a whole lot more bearing on the future conduct of the War on Terror — and the future of America and its core values such as habeas corpus — than the news du jour. Meanwhile, here’s what’s going on...

It is deeply offensive that The Decider wants to raise $500 million to build a president library and think tank at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Beyond the fact that George Bush is probably the least literate and most poorly read president since God knows when, his administration’s penchant for secrecy extends to papers that routinely are made available to the public after a president leaves office. So what the hell is he going to put in his library? How about “My Pet Goat,”...

It’s not hard to see why golden retrievers are among the most popular breeds in the U.S. year in and year out. They’re cuddly cute as puppies and beautiful as adults. They’re great around kids, energetic, intelligent, intensely loyal and easy to train. In fact, they often train their owners. But many American golden retrievers are also time bombs because an extraordinarily large number of them — perhaps one in four — succumb to cancer before living to their once typical...

(The photo originally posted here has been removed at the request of readers who objected to its content.) I seldom blog on presidential politics (except to give John Kerry well deserved kicks in the slats) because it’s tough to rise above the “horse race” aspect of who is running and what the competition is. But as my TMV colleague Michael van der Galien has noted, Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is making noises about a presidential run in 2008, and he is an exception to...

Nuri al-Maliki had problems aplenty from the moment he became Iraq’s first duly elected prime minister, but his relationship with firebrand anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr was bound to result in a train wreck sooner or later. Observers of the bedlam in Baghdad have seen the trains chugging toward each other for months, and the only question has been when and over what they would collide. The answer may be Al-Maliki’s meeting with The Decider in Jordan next week. Al-Sadr,...

Two of my hottest buttons are hypocritical politicians and the erosion of government-paid veterans’ benefits. With the war in Iraq, the two have come together nicely to make a hot button the size of a volcano. In fairness, the erosion in vets benefits began during the Clinton administration but has accelerated since The Decider took the throne and sent hundreds of thousands of Americans to fight in the Mess in Mesopotamia and in Afghanistan. Many of those veterans have since been discharged,...

Nick was never the same after Vietnam. He would lapse into deep depressions. He let his teeth go, chain smoked cigarettes and pot and drank way too much booze, fought with his wife and would leave home for days at a time after suffering nightmares about the people that he had killed and seen killed. I was one of the few people who knew about Nick’s Vietnam experience. It was horrific — skippering a Navy river boat that patrolled the Mekong River. You know what I’m talking about...

At first blush, it seems a little extreme to compare a leading institution of higher learning to a Mafia family, but that is exactly what the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey has become. While no one was looking, New Jersey wrested the Most Corrupt State title from Louisiana. Its love affair with bribes, kickbacks and influence peddling can be attested to by all of the politicians – from lowly municipal burghers to state senators and political party leaders – who...

While I have long admired Bill Roggio for being one of the very few people reporting on Iraq and Afghanistan to have the cojones to go there and keep going back, he used to piss me off because he took the long view that the U.S. mission in both countries would prevail when I saw evidence to the contrary. Well, Roggio is bowed but not broken, to turn around the familiar phrase. While many war pundits are blogging from a Starbucks (and I from a kitchen table with a commanding view of a bird feeder),...