Doug Ireland

Can Howard Dean be stopped in his bid to become the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee? That’s the question the party’s establishment has been asking since Dean — who’d said he’d run only if he thought he had the votes to win — jumped into the contest with......

President Bush’s appointment of his new chief domestic-policy adviser, Claude Allen — a notorious homophobe, a ferocious enemy of abortion and an opponent of safe-sex education who for years has been one of the AIDS community’s principal enemies — is a huge victory for the social reactionaries of the Christian......

The Bush White House thinks it’s being clever by naming a prosecutor instead of a criminal to head the Department of Homeland Security. But Mike Chertoff’s appointment in the wake of the failed nomination of scandal-plagued Bernie Kerik (now under investigation by multiple law-enforcement agencies) is as political as one......

Photo by Annie Leibovitz I was quite pained to learn just now of the death of Susan Sontag. I first encountered Susan on the page when I was a teenager, through her groundbreaking essays in the Partisan Review — where she helped introduce Americans to European intellectuals of the first......

Coverage of Iraq made this an annus horribilis for America’s major media. If you want to know why public opinion in Western Europe has been so overwhelmingly against the U.S. war in and occupation of Iraq, there’s one obvious answer: the difference in television news between theirs and ours. You......

Democrats, liberals and gays are all in denial about the meaning and extent of the defeat they suffered on Election Day — and about the sea change in the nation’s politics that defeat confirmed. I have argued, since 9/11, that the dastardly terrorist attacks that day cemented a tectonic shift......

The Republicans’ moralizing anti-gay crusade played a crucial role in George W. Bush’s re-election. The Rove-Bush decision to surf on the anti-gay backlash came about in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision, in the spring of 2003, to overturn the so-called sodomy laws. After that decision, there was a......

If the loving heart of the Great Emancipator found its natural amorous passions overwhelmingly directed toward those of his own sex, it would certainly be a stunning rebuke to the Republican Party’s scapegoating of same-sex love for electoral purposes. And a forthcoming book by the late Dr. C.A. Tripp —......

John Forbes Kerry won the televised duel with George Bush — both on demeanor and on points. The question is, will it make much of a difference a month from now when the votes are counted? Jim Lehrer, who has never asked a tough question of anyone in his three......

My L.A. Weekly story last week, “The Outing: David Dreier and His Straight Hypocrisy,” generated a huge reaction — from everyone except the powerful 12-term San Gabriel Valley congressman. The P.R. strategy adopted by Dreier is silence — he’s hoping that, by ignoring the story about the Internet campaign to......