On Friday I wrote a response to Joe Klein's most recent Time column — and apparently Joe didn't like it very much. On Sunday he wrote not one but two responses to my posting. They are worth unpacking.   1. Klein refers to me as the “former chief White House propagandist for the Iraq war”

I still remember the call. My White House colleague Dan Bartlett called me on a Friday morning five years ago today to inform me that Michael Kelly, whom I had come to know over the years and who was embedded with the 3rd Infantry Division in Iraq, had died. I reacted with disbelief. I muttered

When it comes to being labeled “a liberal,” Barack Obama is dismissive. “Oh, he's liberal. He's liberal,” he said recently in describing a characterization of him by Republicans. “Let me tell you something. There's nothing liberal about wanting to reduce money in politics. It's common sense. . . . There's nothing liberal about wanting to

Throughout his dramatic campaign to win his party's nomination for the presidency, Senator Barack Obama has tended to ignore the specifics of policy in favor of the generalities of emotion, centering his appeal to voters on vague promises of “change” and “unity.” But on one issue, above all others, Obama has remained fixated from the

Here are a set of 22 questions political reporters and other journalists might want to press Barack Obama to answer about his relationship with the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., the former senior pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago: 1. In early March you said your church was not “particularly controversial.” Later

George Packer of The New Yorker, himself a fine writer, was deeply impressed (to say the least) with Barack Obama's speech on race. According to Packer, what we witnessed in Philadelphia a week ago was an “intimate lecture,” the “greatest speech on race by an American politician in many decades,” one that seemed to have

Several years ago my wife and children attended a Presbyterian church in Washington, D.C. We liked and respected the senior pastor, we had close friends in the congregation, and we felt spiritually nourished by the congregants and the worship. Two of our children were baptized there. Not long after the attacks of September 11, my

A few thoughts on the widely played excerpts from the sermons of Barack Obama's pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago: 1. This is the worst crisis the Obama campaign has faced. It has done deep and perhaps long-term damage by calling into question the judgment and credibility of

The US “surge” in Iraq has been so manifestly successful that no serious person can deny that gains have been made. Even Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have (grudgingly) conceded progress. Yet both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama are quick to add that progress has been purely on the military side and that those gains

There will be many people who knew Bill Buckley far better than I who will attest to his personal kindness and grace over the years. And many people will pour forth with testimonies about Mr. Buckley’s monumental role in the history of modern conservatism. I simply want to recount his role in my own pilgrimage