Straight Up | Jan Herman

I’m beginning to feel like Johnny One-Note: Here’s a revealing footnote to the definitive WMD report by the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group. It sketches how technical experts who doubted that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons were silenced by the Bush gang. Although it appeared in August 2003 at WorldNetDaily, it came to a Straight Up […]

Will America stand still for the corruption of its democracy? That’s the real question voters are about to answer — whether they will accept The Big Lie or repudiate it, whether they will go along with The Liar or throw him out of office. On Nov. 2, voters will have their chance to redeem America’s […]

Will voters ever get to see what those guys were scribbling so furiously on their notepads? Our guess is Mr. Sourpuss was doodling his Republican mantra, “significant progress,” and reminding himself not to curl his lip or spit too much venom. Although he was aiming for gravitas (that much overused word), he managed instead to throw […]

Paul Bremer now says, “We never had enough troops on the ground” in Iraq. This confirms Tom Friedman’s description of the Rumsfeld Doctrine, noted in his column on Sunday, as “just enough troops to lose.” Meantime, if you didn’t read Sunday’s immense, detailed report by David Barst and Jeff Gerth on how the White House conjured […]

Like the far more celebrated Nobel Prizes, the Darwin Awards have just been announced. Unlike the Nobels, however, the Darwins honor people who improve the human gene pool “by removing themselves from it. Of necessity, this honor is bestowed posthumously.” This year’s nominees, according to Insight magazine (which describes itself as a sister publication of […]

Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi came halfway clean today. He admitted, in his first speech to the interim national assembly in Baghdad, that the country’s “nascent police force is underequipped and lacks the respect needed from the public to quell the insurgency,” Edward Wong reports. “The tone of the speech was a sharp departure from […]

On the evidence of his first column in two months, the time off revived him. Tom Friedman was back Sunday with a bright thought: “Each time the Bush team had to choose between doing the right thing in the war on terrorism or siding with its political base and ideology, it chose its base and […]

Have a look at the face that launched a thousand slings and arrows. Ain’t it purty? (Scroll to photo.) It’s a reaction shot of the prevaricatin’ prez at the first debate in his real-life role as an Alfred E. Newman lookalike. He appears not to have been separated at birth. John Wayne, talking about his movie career […]

It must be something in the air. Yours truly wrote here (Sept. 29): “If you attack [our prevaricatin’ prez] on everything he’s been wrong about, you appear unfocused and you sound diffuse. But if you narrow your attack to only one or two of his mistakes, you give him a pass on all the others.” Paul […]

Verdict on the first debate: The format didn’t kill the confrontation. Kerry won on points, for substance. If he’d had the wit to shake off his image as a stiff, he might have scored a knockout. He had the prevaricatin’ prez on the ropes, but never finished him off. The prez’s “jes’ folks” style worked […]

Now that “the best debater since Cicero”(1) and the White House dolt who’s “won every debate he’s ever had”(2) have finished their warmups for tonight’s face-off, are we ready for the “naked moments”(3) live from Miami? Will there really be any “naked moments,” instead of stock phrases and mini-stump speeches? Doubtful. But please remember, “We’re […]

American Public Radio’s Marketplace has a great new feature, Power Trips, which gives the lowdown on Congressional travel. Produced by Steve Henn, it tells who has accepted the most trips, and how much they spent. Here’s the top 100. Here’s who picks up the tab. Here are the destinations: “Hideaways tucked up in the mountains. […]

Seven years from now, California will ban foie gras if it comes from force-fed geese. Ahnold found it in his steroid heart yesterday to sign a bill ending “the force feeding of ducks, geese and other birds to produce the gourmet liver product.” The ban is to take effect in 2012. That answers the question: […]

Timothy Noah’s story about the Smithsonian’s new travesty — under the headline “The National Museum of Ben Nighthorse Campbell” — is a devastating account of what’s wrong with the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. He writes: The new museum stubbornly refuses to impose any recognizable standard of scholarship, or even value, […]

The Nincompoop in Chief has been wrong on so much so often — the war in Iraq and the disastrous post-war situation, finding weapons of mass destruction, finding Osama bin Laden, democratizing Afghanistan, retaining European allies, U.S. foreign policy in general, preventing the spread of nuclear weapons via Pakistan, containing North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and now […]

It’s one of those I-told-you-so mornings. Is Sen. Kennedy and/or his staff reading Straight Up? Doubtful. But I couldn’t help noticing Kennedy’s reference to the “rhetorical double-twisting back flips President Bush performs” in a speech he gave yesterday. He also called our Nincompoop in Chief “the world record-holder for flip-flops.” Earlier this month, an item here, ON FLIP-FLOPS […]

James Wolcott has had it up to here with the mummified pundits: Unlike political pundits, sports guys have to know their stuff and be able to back it up on cross exam; whereas William Safire and Andrea Mitchell can spin cobwebs every time they speak without losing oracle status. Meet the Press had a political […]