Progressive Opinion

inthesetimes.com — The Bush administration is reportedly using its final months in office to exact retribution on federal employees who have spoken out against agency policies during the past eight years.

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inthesetimes.com — As George W. Bush and Dick Cheney make their case for some positive legacy from the past eight years, two arguments are playing key roles: the notion that torturing terror suspects saved American lives and the belief that Bush's Iraq troop "surge" transformed a disaster into something close to "victory."

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openleft.com — The conventional wisdom is that Bush and Cheney will slip into the night on January 20th, facing no further serious consequence for their actions. After all, it will eat up too much political capital, be too divisive, and piss off too many villagers to do anything else. Well, conventional wisdom is always right, until it's not.

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nytimes.com — We like our failed presidents to be Shakespearean, or at least large enough to inspire Oscar-worthy performances from magnificent tragedians like Frank Langella. So here, too, George W. Bush has let us down. He is not a memorable villain so much as a sometimes affable second banana whom Josh Brolin and Will Ferrell can nail without breaking a sweat. He’s the reckless Yalie Tom Buchanan, not Gatsby. He is smaller than life.

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thenation.com — In the end, the shame of Vice President Dick Cheney was total: unmitigated by any notion of a graceful departure, let alone the slightest obligation of honest accounting. Although nearly a quarter of those polled in a recent CNN poll rated him the worst vice president in US history, and 41 percent as "poor," Cheney exudes the confidence of one fully convinced that he will get away with it all.

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washingtonpost.com — Two things we learned about our politics and our economy in 2008: Lesson One: If it's big and you don't regulate it, you end up nationalizing it. Lesson Two: In matters economic, the Civil War isn't really over.

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time.com — The measure of Bush's failure as President is not his broken promises or unmet goals. All politicians break their promises, and none achieve the goals of their soaring rhetoric. But Bush stands out for abandoning the promises and goals that got him elected, taking up the opposite ones and then failing to keep or meet those.

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newsweek.com — A 'made in the U.S.A.' financial crisis highlights the need for more global — and more robust — oversight.

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consortiumnews.com — As bloody and grotesque as Israel’s pounding of Gaza has been, it marks a bitterly disappointing end for seven-plus years of neoconservative dominion over U.S. foreign policy.

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alternet.org — The collapse of Communism as a political system sounded the death knell for Marxism as an ideology. But while laissez-faire capitalism has been a monumental failure in practice, and soundly defeated at the polls, the ideology is still alive and kicking.

The only place you can find an American Marxist these days is teaching a college linguistic theory class. But you can find all manner of free market fundamentalists still on the Senate floor or in Governor's mansions or showing up on TV trying to peddle the deregulation snake oil.

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