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In recent weeks, John Kerry has been conducting a public quasi-postmortem, granting media interviews in which he largely defends his performance on the presidential campaign trail. Of course--and I don't mean to be snide; I've always had a liking for this cerebral fellow who took on the CIA over the contra war--he has not identified any major mistakes committed by himself or the campaign. But to come across as credible, he has had to concede there were some errors. For instance, he acknowledges communications within the campaign sometimes were problematic. This led, according to Kerry, to the infamous episode in...

Oh, sure, David Corn -- odious, carping leftist that he is -- engages in desultory sniping, but there isn't much he can say but that Bush's SOTU speech was a huge success, and the Democrat response painful. I'm only posting a few short quotes to give the flavor. If you don't want to give The Nation the pings, you can read Corn's review ("Capital Games") at CBS here. Or don't give CBS the pings either and trust me that I'm giving you pretty much all of the (relatively) non-dreary and/or schadenfreud worthy quotes. Oh, yeah, there is one funny bit...

"You've just witnessed the beginning of the end of the Bush administration!" So shouted a Kerry aide as I stumbled out of the spin alley set up in the University of Miami's Wellness Center after the end of the first face-off between George W. Bush and John Kerry. Such exuberance was perhaps overstated but understandable. Kerry had more at stake this evening. A poor showing would have placed him in a position from which a come-from-behind victory would have been a hard-to-conceive possibility. But with a viable performance--in which he demonstrated he knows the facts and he knows his own...

Please shut up, Terry McAuliffe--that is, about George W. Bush and his missing-time in the Texas Air National Guard. I keep receiving press releases from flacks at the Democratic Party about Bush's Guard service (or lack thereof). For instance, moments before John Kerry delivered a major speech on September 20 that refocused his campaign with a blast against Bush's war in Iraq, the Democratic National Committee press office emailed me and other reporters an invitation to participate in a conference call with McAuliffe on Bush and the Guard. The call was scheduled to occur in the middle of Kerry's speech....

Chairman McAuliffe, Please Shut Up Sept. 24, 2004 This column from The Nation was written by David Corn. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Please shut up, Terry McAuliffe -- that is, about George W. Bush and his missing-time in the Texas Air National Guard. I keep receiving press releases from flacks at the Democratic Party about Bush's Guard service (or lack thereof). For instance, moments before John Kerry delivered a major speech on September 20 that refocused his campaign with a blast against Bush's war in Iraq, the Democratic National Committee press office emailed me and other reporters an invitation to participate in a...

Please shut up, Terry McAuliffe--that is, about George W. Bush and his missing-time in the Texas Air National Guard. I keep receiving press releases from flacks at the Democratic Party about Bush's Guard service (or lack thereof). For instance, moments before John Kerry delivered a major speech on September 20 that refocused his campaign with a blast against Bush's war in Iraq, the Democratic National Committee press office emailed me and other reporters an invitation to participate in a conference call with McAuliffe on Bush and the Guard. The call was scheduled to occur in the middle of Kerry's speech....

Can't Rich Lowry debate? David Corn is creaming him. Get with it Rich!!!!

"I can't believe they're doing it again, and getting away with it." So said a Republican strategist not keen on George W. Bush, referring to the attack being waged against John Kerry. "The Bush gang did it to John McCain four years ago. They're doing it now to Kerry. They're like the mob." Moments earlier, as delegates filed into Madison Square Garden for Night Three of the GOP convention, I encountered several Republicans who had worked on the McCain campaign in 2000 during the South Carolina primary. It was there that pro-Bush forces mounted the foulest political battle of recent...

New York ON A THURSDAY they had the book party. It was a simple affair: just family, friends, coworkers, and journalists. They came to Ambassador Joseph Wilson's house, nestled in the ritzy Palisades neighborhood of Northwest Washington, to celebrate the release of his first book, The Politics of Truth. One thing Joe Wilson keeps track of is his "Notoriety Quotient," or the amount of attention he receives from the media. And that Thursday it seemed to be on the rise. For the past week The Politics of Truth was mentioned in the same breath as Ron Suskind's The Price of...

Debating the President's WarBy Jamie GlazovFrontPageMagazine.com | February 17, 2004 Frontpage Debate has the pleasure of welcoming, from the Left, David Corn, the Washington editor of The Nation magazine and the author of The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception; from the Right, we are joined by Joel Mowbray, a syndicated columnist and the author of Dangerous Diplomacy: How the State Department Threatens America's Security. Frontpage Magazine: Mr. Corn and Mr. Mowbray, welcome to Frontpage Debate. I think a good way to begin would be discussing the recent developments in Iraq. How do you see...

Trust Buster By Godfrey Hodgson, THE LIES OF GEORGE W. BUSH Mastering the Politics of Deception By David Corn Crown. 337 pp. $24 George Washington, at least according to Parson Weems, never told a lie. Subsequent presidents, as David Corn admits, have not always lived up to his standard. In a rich gallery of examples, we remember Lyndon Johnson (the Gulf of Tonkin), Richard Nixon ("I am not a crook"), Ronald Reagan ("I did not trade arms for hostages"), George H.W. Bush ("Read my lips: no new taxes") and, of course, Bill Clinton ("I did not have sexual relations with...

Is the President a Pathological Liar? Bush’s unhealthy relationship with reality by David Corn It was a set-up question. Conservative radio talk-show host Michael Medved was trying to bait me, to push me into saying something so out of whack about the commander in chief that I would destroy my own credibility before the audience of his nationally syndicated show. It was a ruse I’ve become quite familiar with in recent weeks, since I published a book demurely titled The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception. In scores of media interviews, right-wing hosts have pressed me...

Husking Corn November 21, 2003 "George W. Bush is a liar. He has lied large and small. He has lied directly and by omission. He has misstated facts, knowingly or not. He has misled. He has broken promises, been unfaithful to political vows. Through his campaign for the presidency and his first years in the White House, he has mugged the truth—not merely in honest error, but deliberately, consistently, and repeatedly to advance his career and his agenda." This is the introduction to David Corn’s new book: The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception. A book...

I Am No Novak 10/15/2003 @ 12:12am I'm no Bob Novak. The conservative columnist, it seems, receives different treatment from the CIA than yours truly. After senior administration officials told him in July that former ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife was a CIA officer working in the field of counterproliferation--this was the leak that launched the current scandal--he called the CIA for confirmation. According to Novak, a CIA official was "designated to talk" to him. This official, in Novak's telling, denied that Valerie Wilson (nee Plame) had "inspired" Joseph Wilson's selection for a mission to Niger to check out allegations that...

Note to Readers This article uses excerpts from mainstream news sources to establish how former Amb. Joseph C. Wilson IV morphed over months from the anonymous source of a forgotten CIA-requested report, to theself-described outraged husband at the center of Washington's latest political firestorm. The sources these excerpts are drawn from are extensive and easily could make a fair-sized booklet. Therefore, the excerpts are necessarily tightly focused, and the reader is encouraged to: Pay close attention to details of how Wilson's statements and behavior morph over time—literally from no mention in an interview conducted by Bill Moyers one month after...

<p>August 29, 2003 -- THE rise of an ardent, pas sionate, angry and en gaged left is the most im portant political story of 2003.</p> <p>The hottest book of the new publishing season is Al Franken's "Lies (and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them)." Joe Conason of the New York Observer has a fast-selling tome called "Big Lies." At the end of September comes "The Lies of George Bush" by David Corn of the Nation magazine, which will likely hit the bestseller list as well.</p>

Regime Change Now...For the Democrats Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, was barely into his post-Election Day press conference when he smiled and said, "I know I cost the Bush family a little money." Spoken like a true fundraiser. He meant that the Democrats, by mounting what seemed to be a competitive campaign in Florida against Governor Jeb Bush, had forced the Republicans to spend more money and time than they had planned to defend the President's brother. On a bad-news morning, McAuliffe cited this as an accomplishment. What a straw to grasp! Fellow Democrats, feel good today,...

This coming election has no meaning. That seems to be the reasonable consensus of the political cognoscenti. USA Today columnist Walter Shapiro, for one, has dubbed it the "Seinfeld election: a campaign about nothing." No grand issues. No large themes. Not even a damn narrative. This is unlike non-presidential elections of the recent past. Four years ago, the contest was widely considered a referendum on the Republican’s scorched-earth impeachment crusade. Bill Clinton and the Dems came out on top, picking up five seats in the House. The 1994 campaign was viewed, as is usually the case in the off-year election...