Category: Campaign 2016

Afghanistan: President Obama’s Vietnam

Exclusive: President Obama is keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan fighting an unwinnable war for fear of the political consequences if he faces reality and admits defeat, an echo of Vietnam, writes Jonathan Marshall.

Hillary-Kaine: Back to the Center

Hillary Clinton’s VP choice, Tim Kaine, is well liked Inside the Beltway, partly because he bends to pressure from Wall Street, DLC-style “centrists” and the austerity-pushing mainstream media, explains ex-bank regulator William K. Black.

Trump’s Midnight in America

Ivanka Trump portrayed her father as a can-do executive with a big heart, but then Donald Trump opened his mouth, spewing forth what sounded like a call for a police state, as Bill Moyers and Michael Winship marveled.

VP Choice Pence Reaffirms Israel Devotion

Donald Trump may alarm Washington’s foreign policy establishment with his “America First” rhetoric but Mike Pence, Trump’s VP choice, reaffirms a commitment to the traditional “Israel First” doctrine, as Sam Husseini shows.

Why Public Needs Go Begging

For decades, Americans have been sold on rugged individualism and told to disdain collectivism and community, a philosophy that has starved many public institutions and fattened up the few at the top, as Lawrence Davidson explains.

GOP Crazy Talk Comes to Cleveland

The Republican National Convention has been an orgy of crazy talk – mixed in with some plagiarism by Donald Trump’s wife and a vast kangaroo court convicting Hillary Clinton – a truly remarkable spectacle, as Michael Winship describes.

America’s Failure to Protect Voting

America may call itself democracy’s gold standard, but it fails to guarantee the right to vote and permits the dominance of political money, a shameful anomaly that requires a constitutional amendment, writes William John Cox.

How the Right Tears Down America

America surely has problems, but the Republican Right tends to ignore its role in causing them and now – under President Obama – exaggerates how bad the situation is, writes former Republican staffer Mike Lofgren.

America’s Unbridged Racial Divide

Last week’s killings of two black men by white police and the killing of five Dallas police officers by a black sniper exacerbated America’s racial tensions which have roots going back generations, recalls Michael Winship.

Still Sabotaging the Iran-Nuke Agreement

Iran has lived up to the terms of the nuclear agreement, now one year old, but that has not stopped its neocon opponents from conjuring up new reasons to bomb-bomb-bomb Iran, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar explains.