As far as I can tell, President Bush first pronounced it as American policy on August 12, 2005, when he replied to an Israeli television interviewer who asked what the president would do if diplomacy didn’t turn Iran away from its nuclear ambitions. “Well, all options are on the table,” Bush said. “Including the use [...]

“The goal of the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons has been essentially forgotten,” Mikhail Gorbachev wrote recently. “We must put the goal…back on the agenda, not in a distant future but as soon as possible.” But over the past 15 years, he pointed out in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece on Jan. 31, the [...]

Where are those critics now, the right-wing know-nothings and the bloviating Bill Bennett who wanted to arrest the Washington Post’s Dana Priest for treason when she outed the CIA in November 2005 for hiding captives in “black sites”? She was a shill for the Democrats, one wingnut cried. Why are they not congratulating Priest and [...]

I grew up in South Africa and saw how the apartheid government consolidated power in the executive. When I became an American, impressed with the skill of the Founding Fathers in devising a system that would resist dictatorship, I came to admire the division of powers as one of our Constitution’s most brilliant insights. But [...]

The news that North Korea has agreed to a grand bargain of dismantling its nuclear weapons program in exchange for new international relationships and fuel can be seen in stark contrast to the U.S. handling of the prospect of diplomatic engagement with Iran. So, too, does the news coverage offer a similar contrast. The press [...]

Here is one reason reporters too often don’t ask the right provocative questions of the president or his briefers: They bog themselves down in details and make it easy for the briefer to slip away, as Tony Snow did the other day when he was asked about proposed budget cuts for Medicare and Medicaid, on [...]

Was it surprising to see a headline like this one in the Washington Post recently?: “Bush Addresses Income Inequality on Wall Street Executive Pay / Economic Speech Touches on Executive Pay as Senators Move to Rein It In”? Yes. Was it surprising that Bush did not address the subject in response to a reporter’s question? [...]

I came across this lead from a recent online issue of the English version of Al Jazeera, the Arab-based news service. And I wondered whether there was a lesson there for the U.S. press, which pussyfoots around such juxtaposition, for fear that it’s unfair or too pointed. The lead went as follows: “George Bush, the [...]

As a long, long time political reporter, I think it’s not too late to get in my few cents on the feeding frenzy over whether and when Sen. Barack Obama attended a Muslim school as a boy, and whether the Hillary Clinton campaign leaked the story. It was all nonsense, but it won’t be the [...]

With the 2008 campaigns under way for the GOP and Democratic Party presidential nominations, two key questions have to be asked. One focuses on the news media in general and the other on the Iowa caucuses in particular. With regard to the news media, the question is: “Hey, why can’t you get the question right?” [...]