Americans have a desperate need to believe. We want to trust our government and our leaders. Our default position is to accept without too much questioning the assertions of our presidents and the institutions of our government. Few of us are easily convinced yet today that America was involved in...

"Home folks think I'm big in Detroit city,
From the letters that I write they think I'm fine,
But by day I make the cars,
by night I make the bars,
If only they could read between the lines."

- Bobby Bare, Detroit City

...

We were on the banks of the Missouri, standing on ground trod by Lewis and Clark and unknown numbers of America's pioneering wayfarers. Horses stomped and snorted in the wet morning air. Families encircled a haggard clergyman atop an upturned tub. The prairie unfolded west toward the great seam made...

At 35,000 feet, northbound up the Mississippi River Valley, the roads below appear as footpaths running beyond the eye's reach. They are paved, of course, but many of them served as migratory trails that carried millions of southerners north of the Mason-Dixon to work in the car factories and steel...

Dear Karl,

Since I'm the guy largely responsible for giving you a reputation as being very smart, then it seems appropriate that I also deliver the news that, as it turns out, you aren't too bright. Actually, I think you may be downright dumb. Yes, I know you can spout...

Don't let them tell you this economic meltdown is a complicated mess. It's not. Our national financial crisis is readily understood by anyone who has seen greed and hypocrisy. But we are now witnessing them on a profound, monumental scale.

Conservative Republicans always want the government to stay out...

As the American Civil Liberties Union was chastising the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) for having a million names on the No Fly Watch (or selectee) List, I was preparing for another business trip. The travel hassles have not changed since I found myself on the list in January of 2005....

"The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges, or churches, or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people."

-Walt Whitman

...

While people and bodies continue to fall out of the train wreck that is the Bush administration, it is probably instructive to look at the dough-faced boy who was smart enough to get off at the previous station. Karl Rove was either asked to leave the Bound for Ignominy Express...

When they invited him to join the campaign, it was almost a matter of necessity. Scott McClellan seemed a perfect choice. He was marginally innocuous, and perceived, as was the future president, to not be much of an extemporaneous thinker or speaker. Scott was perfect for the delivery of messages....

What follows is the letter from a father of a Marine who fell in the opening days of the war in Iraq. During an interview five years ago after his son had died, I asked the father what he wanted to say directly to the president and he wrote this...

If anyone has paid acutely painful attention to the political ministrations of Karl Rove over the past two and a half decades, it's me. And if there is anyone qualified to make comparisons between democracy's Darth Vader and Hillary Clinton, I stand at the head of that line, as well....

Mark McKinnon is once more practicing his dark craft of surfing the political zeitgeist to land on the shores of fame and prosperity. Perhaps the most opportunistic political consultant in the modern era, McKinnon makes Karl Rove appear to be a principled man. He has gone from progressive Democrat to...

The state that gave the planet George W. Bush is poised to play a historic role in the selection of the Democratic presidential candidate. Oh irony of ironies. We always manage to stumble into destiny's crossroads and force detours. March 4th, a date that wasn't supposed to mean...

How difficult is this to see or understand? The yakkers down in blow dry gulch are trying to help us little-brained people in the electorate understand the very thing we have spawned. Thank you, oh wise ones, but we get it; we get it because it is us. Now let...

"What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is to understand others."
- Carlos Fuentes

As another year begins, many of us are involved in contemplating not just the behavior and principles of our country but, indeed, its very fate. We...

Mitt Romney is a tad silly.

I say this as a person who is not a member of a church and lacks the kind of faith that others proclaim. As do many of us who struggle with the notions of god, I often find myself envying those...

"God gives us memory so we can have roses in December."

- J. M. Barrie

There is a place you can go to feel the war in Iraq. You can't experience it living in everyday America. We are shopping and playing golf and watching soap operas and complaining...

Irony is what makes the Bush administration entertaining even as the world catches fire. Of course, it's probably more succinctly called hypocrisy but irony has that shrug of sweetness that makes us want to laugh or cry at the absurdity. In Pakistan, as Pervez Musharraf tears down a...

Okay, I'm tired of talking about this. But it needs clarification one more time.

When I was doing research on George W. Bush's close encounter with the Texas Air National Guard, I kept getting directed to a former guard officer named Bill Burkett. According to numerous people in the Texas...