George W. Bush’s ability to create chaos and violence has consistently trumped his capacity for diplomacy. Bush’s unique cocktail of petulance, arrogance and incompetence have produced a foreign policy characterized by the use blunt force (and borrowed money) on the one hand and a dismissive attitude toward diplomatic relations on the other. Two of the [...]

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George W. Bush has said that Jesus Christ saved his soul. He is mistaken. On March 8, 2008, Bush used his veto power to kill a bill that was intended to make it illegal for the CIA to use torture to obtain information from detainees. Let’s put this clearly: Bush used his executive power to [...]

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As the graph below shows, “Afghanistan” is back, “taxes” is big, “terrorism” is bigger, “Iraq” looms biggest, and “Earth” makes a brief appearance, says hi to a couple of people, then takes off. Another popular word in Bush’s final State of the Union Address on January 28 was the word “trust”. Early in his speech [...]

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Iowa, as Iowans know well, is something of a joke in the national imagination. The muted tone of condescension familiar in national media coverage of Iowa’s role in the presidential campaign is made explicit in a story in Rolling Stone, which begins, “Iowa is not like other states. There’s fuck-all to do here, and unless [...]

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In the October/November issue of the Ames Progressive we published “A Conversation with Christopher Hitchens,” by Gavin Aronsen and Ryan Gerdes. During the conversation, Hitchens, discussing the possibility of pre-emptive military action against a potentially nuclear Iran, asserted that “the evidence against the Iranian government [demonstrating the existence of a nuclear weapons program] has been [...]

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