Yeah, Blobists! Or Establishmentarians, or whatever you like to call yourselves these days! What is the deal with this hardnosiosity, or perhaps rhinosaurusism, that is coming to the fore with regard to Saudi Arabia? I first noticed, and bewailed, this unfortunate “trend” last March, when I faulted Atlantic editor Jeff Goldberg for pushing the line…
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Joe Biden, last seen sinking deeper into the Blobby bog
Daniel Larison has an excellent—“excellent” as in “deeply depressing”—take on President Biden’s stumbling—“stumbling” as in “clearly and severely wrong-headed”—Iranian “policy”, which is, in fact, so bad that I’ve exhausted a whole week’s supply of quotation marks in one goddamn sentence, which means I’ll have to take out a loan, something I can scarcely afford to…
Biden’s foreign policy is sliding into a Blobby bog
Sad, but unsurprising, not to mention scary as shit: Uncle Joe is letting the military intellectual complex put both hands on the wheel when it comes to the U.S. and the outside world. Consider the following: – In a recent meeting with Chinese foreign minister Yang Jiechi in Alaska, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony…
The “Blob” lives! At the New York Times!
As I understand it, all the cool kids at the White House (whose number, according to Ben Rhodes, is limited to President Obama and, well, Ben Rhodes) like to call the blinkered, myopic terminally self-righteous American foreign policy establishment “the Blob.” That said, if you’re up for some seriously blinkered self-righteous myopia, you ought to…
Cry sorrow, sorrow, but let the truth prevail
On November 8, 2016, in the wake of Donald Trump’s first triumph, I wrote “It is, appropriately enough, gray and wet in Washington, DC this morning. Brilliant sunshine would be almost more irony than one could bear.” Today, we are not so lucky. What I had to say in my earlier post, which bore the…
Samantha Power, powerless in Gaza
One would have to be cynical indeed—and I am not such—to enjoy the dilemma of Samantha Power, who once advocated U.S. intervention to avert whatever even looked like genocide at the drop of a hat, and who is now, as head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, presiding over what looks an awful lot…
My Henry Kissinger Story
Whenever someone seriously important dies, there is a rush by everyone with even the slightest connection to the deceased to file a “My [Insert VIP Name Here] story”. I usually get a hearty snicker, or even a sneer, out of these, because the hapless hanger-on/spiritual remora involved almost invariably inflates an utterly trivial encounter into…
F*ck yeah I’m a Wikipedia-surfin’ Kissinger wannabe! Ugottaproblemwitdat?
My old buddy/bête noir Dan Drezner brings me this message, Are "Wikipedia-Surfing Kissinger Wannabes" Killing the Political Risk Field?, jumping off a fulminatin’ post by one Tina Fordham, a serious, totally non-amateur political risk chick who now runs her own company, Fordham Global Foresight. Writing in the Financial Times, Tina ripped a new one for…
Yo, New York Times! Want to know who started the War in Iraq? Look in the goddamn mirror!
20 Years On, a Question Lingers About Iraq: Why Did the U.S. Invade?, rumbles “Interpreter” (that’s what they call him) Max Fisher, subjecting us to a shitload of obscurantist chin-stroking before reaching an all too convenient non-answer/confession of ignorance, topping off this banal exercise in disingenuosity with this laughable quote as a closer: “I will…
The Republicans: WTF Happened to this Party? Part II Part 2: Matthew Continetti and The Right
A few years ago, I wrote an extended piece bearing the title The Republicans: WTF Happened to this Party?. Recently, in response to a couple of engaging (relatively) meas culpas—Matthew Continetti’s The Right The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism and Tim Miller’s Why We Did It—I began preparing an update. I originally planned to…