Drawing on some hidden inner reserves of strength I never knew I had, I just watched the Des Moines Register Republican debate on MSNBC, moderated by the Register’s Carolyn Washburn. As always with these events, the program was not a debate. A debate, as those of us who took speech in high school know, is an organized back-and-forth between two sides, within set rules including time constraints that the contestants are penalized for violating, and most importantly on a single topic. Resolved: that . . .

MSNBC billed this presentation, in one of its crawls, “Today marks Huckabee’s first ...   more »

 

March – April 2002.     Wiser heads prevail temporarily, as the general public displays little sign of being eager for war with Iraq. But the top ranks of policy-makers in the administration keep trying, notably with a major fanning-out of top administration figures on the six-month anniversary of 9/11, all hitting the ground running to talk publicly about Iraq, thus linking ‘Iraq’ to ‘9/11.’ Over the longer haul the focus is not explicitly on war; rather than saying, ‘We want to go to war against Iraq,’ they talk about ‘WMD’ and ‘inspections’ and ‘United Nations.’ But in ...   more »