The news that General David Petraeus will replace Stanley McChrystal as the commanding general in Afghanistan is a brilliant stroke by President Obama. He gets all of the benefit of relieving General McChrystal — a patriot and a hero who had a terrible lapse in judgment — and none of the drawbacks. Obama is replacing

Politico reports that Rep. Darrell Issa, the conservative firebrand whose specialty is lobbing corruption allegations at the Obama White House, is making plans to hire dozens of subpoena-wielding investigators if Republicans win the House this fall. … Issa has told Republican leadership that if he becomes chairman, he wants to roughly double his staff from

The oil spill is an environmental catastrophe for the Gulf Coast and a political disaster for Barack Obama. It is doing significant, and possibly irreparable, damage to his presidency. That may not be fully clear now, since Obama's approval ratings have certainly not collapsed during the span of this crisis. The deeper concern for the

“When one begins with an initial error,” Aristotle wrote in Book V of “The Politics,” “it is inevitable that one should end badly.” Almost 17 months into his presidency, things are going badly for President Obama on multiple fronts. That is in part because he entered office with, and has governed based on, several initial

It's all coming together now. On Wednesday, we learned, in the words of The Denver Post, that: U.S. Senate candidate Andrew Romanoff acknowledged tonight that he discussed three possible jobs with the deputy chief of staff of the Obama administration — all contingent upon a decision by Romanoff not to challenge U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet.

Like a rock emerging in a sea of lies, we know important facts about the confrontation that took place on Monday between Israel and a flotilla of ships making its way to the Gaza strip. The blockade was justified by international law. (Egypt, by the way, had also imposed a blockade on Gaza because of

In their book “The Battle for America 2008,” Haynes Johnson and Dan Balz wrote this: [Chief political aide David] Axelrod also warned that Obama's confessions of youthful drug use, described in his memoir, Dreams From My Father, would be used against him. “This is more than an unpleasant inconvenience,” he wrote. “It goes to your

The best news Democrats received from Tuesday's election was not the victory of Mark Critz over Tim Burns in Pennsylvania's 12th District. It was the Senate primary victory in Kentucky of Republican Rand Paul, son of Rep. Ron Paul. The reason is that Democrats are going to take the views of the younger Paul, also

Elena Kagan may be a brilliant constitutional scholar and first-rate legal mind — but if she is, she has done a mighty fine job of hiding her intellectual light under a bushel. She has left almost no paper trail and has made no significant, or even particularly notable, contributions to our understanding of law, legal

Those were the words of Pete Schoomaker, then chief of staff of the Army, to General David Petraeus, who at the time (2005) was commander of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The context of Schoomaker's remarks was that the war in Iraq, which had been going on for more than two years,