One of the world’s great enduring mysteries is why some otherwise clearheaded analysts continue to portray Newton Leroy “Newt” Gingrich as some sort of intellectual policy wonk and not simply a blowhard and a liar. The truth is, the former speaker of the House from Georgia is right up there with the Pauls, father and…

That high-pitched clacking you hear is the wailing and gnashing of teeth on the radical right, whose efforts to paint President Barack Obama as a weak-spirited and feckless protector of America’s national security have been buried as deep as the seaborne corpse of Osama bin Laden. Now that the world’s most wanted terrorist has been…

Given all that yakkety-yak about the emergence of a new era of postracial politics, you might have hoped that by now, even the looniest of ultraconservatives might have figured out a way to criticize Barack Obama without sounding like howling race-baiters. Keep hoping. Conservative dependency on racial resentments is so deeply ingrained that even phony…

If there’s one thing you’ve got to give right-wingers credit for, it’s coming up with new ways to scare the pants off of white people. When it comes to playing the race card, their creativity is unsurpassed. A recent example of this unique talent could be found the other day on, of all unlikely places,…

Thanks to Donald Trump and his fellow Birthers, who continue to claim that Barack Obama is a foreign-born Islamist enemy of America, we know what it takes to create a villain for the conservative lunatic fringe. The process involves deadening the brain. Now, through the example of Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan, auteur of a new…

During the Cold War, J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation is said to have subsidized the Communist Party so that agents could keep track of its activities. Without a centralized organization luring Marxist sympathizers like moths to a flame, they might have scattered in all directions, making it more difficult for G-men to monitor…

Leave it to the inimitable Sarah Palin to have an incoherent — make that asinine — reaction to President Barack Obama’s strongly argued case for America’s intervention in the Libyan civil war. On one hand, the Republican presidential wannabe protested, “We’re not hearing from our president what is the endgame here. And with Qaddafi still…

It’s one thing to give a pass to Beyoncé, Usher and Mariah Carey for shaking their booties in exchange for big bucks from the thuggish sons of Libyan dictator Col. Muammar Qaddafi. As my colleague Jenée Desmond-Harris points out on The Root, they aren’t foreign policy experts, and some never made it through college. They…

Like most African Americans old enough to shudder with revulsion when they remember Ronald Reagan’s presidency, I won’t be joining the hagiographical celebration of the late conservative saint’s 100th birthday that is scheduled to take place this weekend. There will simply be too many lies. The celebrations won’t be talking about it, but neither the…