Sen. John McCain, who demonstrated questionable political acumen by picking Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate in 2008, has joined other Republicans in blaming Vladimir Putin’s seizure of Crimea on what McCain sees as President Obama’s limp-wristed approach to foreign policy.

The implication is that a different, stronger, more resolute American leader would have so intimidated the Russian tough guy that he would not have dared to snatch off a piece of Ukraine. This assertion is dubious in at least three ways.

The first is that Obama’s predecessor, a man who swaggered around the world starting wars and acting “resolute,” was also the guy who said he looked into Putin’s eyes, saw his “soul” and came away rather smitten. Who was bamboozled there?

The second is that when Soviet leaders barged into neighboring countries – Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Afghanistan in 1979 – other American presidents also...

If current demographic trends hold true, the Democratic Party has a healthy future, but, in the near term -- meaning the 2014 congressional campaign -- Republicans still have the key to success: voters who actually show up on Election Day.

A week ago, in the first political showdown of the year, Republican David Jolly beat Democrat Alex Sink in a special election to fill the vacant seat in Florida’s 13^th Congressional District. Jolly’s campaign relentlessly attacked Obamacare and many pundits immediately interpreted the Republican victory as a sign the healthcare issue could prove toxic for many other Democrats come November.

Certainly, the rocky rollout of the new healthcare scheme does not help the D’s, but Jolly’s success had much more to do with simple math. In a district President Obama carried in the 2012 election, Democratic voters simply failed to turn out in enough numbers to prevent Jolly from squeaking out a win. His margin of victory was 3,400 votes...

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s accusation that the CIA has illegally spied on Congress has caused everyone from South Carolina’s hawkish Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham to on-the-run whistle-blower Edward Snowden to weigh in.

Feinstein, a Democrat, chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee. She claims there is evidence that the CIA conducted surveillance on committee staffers who were looking through classified documents related to the spy agency’s interrogation and detention practices during the administration of President George W. Bush. CIA chief John Brennan claims his people were just trying to find out how Feinstein’s crew got hold of an internal review document they were not supposed to have. Feinstein thinks it is more serious than that.

"I have grave concerns that the CIA search may well have violated the separation of powers principles," Feinstein said in a speech on the Senate floor. "I am not taking it lightly." 

In comments to reporters, Graham...

A weekend of binge-watching fictional Vice President Frank Underwood scheme for power on the Netflix political drama “House of Cards” has put me in a frame of mind to think Mitch McConnell is probably right about something. The leader of the Senate Republicans has accused a political action committee that claims to speak for the tea party of being in the game only for the money.

The PAC in question is the Senate Conservatives Fund, a right-wing campaign group founded by Jim DeMint, the ex-senator from South Carolina who now runs the hyper-conservative Heritage Foundation. The SCF is backing a tea party challenger against McConnell in Kentucky’s Republican Senate primary.

McConnell’s campaign is hitting back with an ad that claims the SCF “solicits money under the guise of advocating for conservative principles but then spends it on a $1.4-million luxury townhouse with a wine cellar and hot tub in Washington, D.C.”

McConnell could probably say the...

It is rather curious, given the American conservative movement’s long and dramatic history of anti-Communism and anti-Russian saber-rattling, that many leading voices on the right are speaking about Russian President Vladimir Putin with varying degrees of admiration. 

For some, it is just a matter of comparing Putin’s toughness with President Obama’s alleged weakness. Without suggesting any love for Putin, Republicans in Congress have asserted that Russia’s incursion into Ukraine would not have happened had Obama not been such a wimp in his dealings with Moscow.

This line has been pushed especially hard by the foreign policy Tweedledee and Tweedledum of the Senate GOP caucus, John McCain and Lindsey Graham. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio echoed that sentiment at the CPAC conference in Washington on Thursday. 

“We cannot ignore that the flawed foreign policy of the last few years has brought us to this stage, because we have a president who believed but by the...

Russia seems to have learned little in the 160 years since the Crimean War. Launching ships and sending armies to grab land may work in the short term, but there are always negative consequences that bring big regrets later.

In 1853, Russia's man in charge was Czar Nicholas I, who hoped to take advantage of the weakening Ottoman Empire and expand Russian power and influence around the Black Sea and beyond. In 1853, using the pretext of protecting Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman-controlled Holy Land, Russia went to war and quickly destroyed the Ottoman fleet. Not a bad start.

However, by the time the war ended three years later, things had not worked out so well. France and Britain had won the conflict, and the weakness of Russia’s serf-dominated armies was exposed. Nicholas was dead and the czarist system began a decline that would lead to the monarchy’s 1917 demise. War debts were so high that the new czar, Alexander II, decided to sell Alaska to the United States...

Sunday night, a happy cohort of entertainment folks will have their careers sprinkled with fairy dust at the 86thAcademy Awards. And, as happens every year, too many of them will clutch their Oscars and bore an audience of many millions with totally lame acceptance speeches.

You would think that such a distinguished group of creative people could do better, but many of them will spend their precious moment in the spotlight simply checking off a baffling list of names. If it were merely a matter of thanking their parents and their high school drama teachers, that might be OK, especially if they share some poignant bit of personal history in the process. But few will stop with that.

They will thank the studio and their publicist and their agent and their personal assistant and the caterer and the key grip and, as the music from the pit orchestra kicks in, they will rush to name a dozen more. Why is this the default speech at awards ceremonies? Where would we be if politicians did the...

Watching the dramatic events in Ukraine unfold, I have harbored the hope that one or two of the thousands of people protesting in Kiev's Independence Square might have been encouraged to act on their dreams of liberty by words I spoke during a week in the city in September 2012. 

I was in Ukraine as a guest of the U.S. State Department. Like hundreds of artists, authors, actors and journalists the United States has sent abroad over many decades, my job was simply to talk about the why and how of my job. I had jumped at the chance to go someplace I had never been and figured whatever message I had to deliver would come to me once I got there.

The staff at the U.S. Embassy set up a fairly exhausting series of engagements for me. Two or three times each day, I would speak to journalists, librarians, the general public and many students of various ages. A gallery display of my cartoons was also mounted alongside an exhibit detailing the history of political cartooning in the United States....

This week marks five years since passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act -- President Obama’s economic stimulus plan -- and it has been either a great success or an abject failure, depending on who is doing the assessment.

Folks at the White House, not surprisingly, are speaking in the affirmative. In a freshly issued report, Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors insists that the stimulus scheme kept the nation from dropping into a second Great Depression and laid the groundwork for recovery from the economic mess left behind by the George W. Bush administration.

Though the road back has been steep and progress slow, Obama’s team notes that the United States is in much better shape than France, Britain and other economic leaders, with only Germany matching the U.S.' progress.

Among the tangible benefits of the stimulus, the White House lists 2,700 bridges upgraded, 40,000 miles of roads repaired, 700 drinking water systems brought up to federal clean-...

Especially when it comes to economic policy, too many politicians are motivated by myths more than by facts. A prime example: the myth of the job creators.

Republicans, such as Speaker of the House John Boehner, talk of job creators in reverent, worshipful terms. In their vision of how the world works, it is these brave titans of capitalism who, with no help from anyone else, build the companies that create jobs for American workers. To Boehner and his party, anything that inhibits job creators in their endeavors — taxes, environmental laws, financial regulations — is a job killer.

This is economic theory at its most simplistic and has been proven erroneous, over and over again. A dramatic example: The financial debacle of 2008 that killed millions of jobs was, in large part, the result of bankers and financiers being liberated from federal regulations that had once served as a check on free-market excesses. Nevertheless, conservative members of Congress cling to the myth...