Doug Ireland

Remember those historical movies Hollywood cranked out in the ’30s and ’40s about the American colonies’ war to throw off the English yoke that created the United States? Inevitably, those flicks had a scene in which some luxuriously uniformed but dimwitted Brit officer complained of the guerrilla tactics employed by......

AS THE UNITED STATES SLOUCHES toward a unilaterally declared war, the polls show that most rank-and-file Democratic voters yearn for a presidential candidate who will speak unambiguously against it and fight Bush on the issue. Yet nearly all of the major Democratic contenders — Joseph Lieberman, John Kerry, Richard Gephardt......

I'VE NEVER BEEN ABLE TO STOMACH our secretary of state. I think of him as Colon because he is so indigestible: For example, we’ve known for more than a decade that Colin Powell played a key role in covering up the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War (thanks to......

George Bush gave the first speech of his re-election campaign Tuesday night -- and his speechwriters crafted a discourse mostly of shortish sentences and short words, which the president is less likely to mangle than long ones. It was Christmas in the first half of the State of the Union......

The national press corps didn‘t bother to tell you why Tom Daschle, the Democrats’ Senate leader, decided at the 11th hour not to run for president: In the end, he calculated that he couldn‘t survive scrutiny of his persistent service to the clients of his wife. Linda Daschle has been......

While TV gushed last week over the Republicans’ new Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, intervening in a traffic accident, portraying the former heart surgeon as a “Good Samaritan,” in truth the GOP has simply replaced a racist with a corporate crook. Frist was born rich, and got richer -- thanks......

In Africa, I am told, a marvelously simple device was used to trap monkeys: a wooden box with a banana inside. A monkey would stick his hand through a small hole, grab the banana, and be trapped by his own greedy fist. It was easy for the monkey to escape......

The United Nations‘ latest report on AIDS, issued last week, underscores how the Bush administration’s war on the condom has blocked HIV-prevention efforts around the world. A key finding: Nearly half of all new cases of HIV infection are women. But in May, at the U.N.‘s Special Session on Children,......

The Bush administration‘s plan to privatize half of the federal work force is an attack on the very essence of the federal government: It replaces the notion of public service for the common good with the profit motive. By turning over 850,000 civil-service jobs to private contractors, the Bush initiative......

Is Nancy Pelosi the answer to the Democrats‘ problems? Forgive me for having a few doubts. Certainly, it’s long past the time when one of the two major parties should have placed a woman in a position of real political power -- and by choosing Pelosi as their new leader,......