At a John McCain Presidential campaign stop on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina, a woman is the audience publicly uttered the words that many Republicans have used in private to describe the party’s concerns with Democratic front runner Hillary Rodham Clinton.
“How,” the woman wanted to know, “do we beat the bitch?”
The US House of Representatives defied President George W. Bush on Thursday, passing a bill tightening legal oversight of the power of intelligence agents to use wiretaps to eavesdrop on terror suspects.
The bill, approved in the Democratic-led House by 227 votes to 189 did not however meet the president’s demands for retroactive legal immunity to telecommunications firms which may have handed over data to the government.
The White House immediately warned the legislation would “dangerously weaken our ability to protect the nation from foreign threats.”
Does Congress have the guts to stand up to President George W. Bush and withhold funding for his illegal and immoral war in Iraq?
Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill claim they do. Of course, they have claimed that before and then caved when Bush played the “support our troops” card.
Now Congressional leaders say they will withhold funding until after the first of the year and the propagandists at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue are cranking out talking points saying the party of the donkey is making an ass of itself by abandoning our troops in the field.
Poor Hillary Clinton. She’s says her fellow Democrats are picking on her. She calls it mudslinging but the complaint during Thursday night’s debate in Las Vegas has all the elements of a classic whine: Everyone is being mean to her.
Looks like the lady can dish it out but she can’t take it.
Throughout her political career and her partnership with Bill Clinton, Hillary has been a master of the politics of personal destruction. She and her husband sought to destroy anyone who dared defy them.
As attorney general and designated lightning rod for the Bush administration, John Ashcroft wore his Bible-thumping nature as a suit of Christian armor and a flag of pride.
This regligious zealot from Missouri was so uptight he expressed displasure at a nude statue in the Department of Justice and aides scrambled to cover it up so the AG wouldn’t have his picture taken with a bare breast behind him.
Perhaps President Bush is looking ahead to January 2009, when he must give up his personal jetliner, Air Force One, and his personal chopper, Marine One, and begin flying commercial. He, of course, will receive VIP treatment, but even so, if his plane is delayed, so will he.
And the odds of that happening are unhappily good and getting better. A year of record air travel has also been a year of record low punctuality, with about one-fourth of all flights arriving late.
Is another former governor of Arkansas in our future? Could we possibly have a President Mike? A Vice President Mike?
As scandal swirls around Rudolph Giuliani and his friendship with his indicted former police commissioner, Bernard Kerik, and as support for Mitt Romney seems to be stagnating, the compassionate conservative from Arkansas is moving up the track on the inside.
Although it has sometimes looked like Mitt Romney might have much going against him and little going for him in the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, it turns out he does have one very, very serious, perhaps ultimately decisive advantage. His brains.
The yellow-billed oxpecker stands atop the mighty rhinoceros, gobbling ticks and chirping loudly when danger looms. This tiny bird would make a perfect mascot for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential bid. Akin to that creature, the New York Democrat leaves tiny footprints and has spent more than three decades riding aboard her outsized, accomplished husband, William Jefferson Clinton.
Americans shouldn’t expect much relief from the nation’s problems for the next 14 months. That would mean solving immigration, health care, Social Security, Medicare and a dozen other domestic- and foreign-policy dilemmas that cry out for attention and reform.
Neither end of the historic thoroughfare called Pennsylvania Avenue, the one connecting Congress and the president, will be much open to the other until a year from January, when there are some new occupants in the U.S. Capitol and one in the White House.