Recently (well, yesterday), I commented on a long article in the New Yorker by Evan Osnos on Samantha Power, our ambassador to the UN, whom I described unkindly as “President Obama’s whom-shall-we-invade-next gal about town”, making further fun of her (as who would not?) for not knowing that plants “breathe” carbon dioxide rather than oxygen….
Search Results for: WAR IN AFGHANISTAN
Henry Kissinger’s World Order—the silk stocking full of shit at 90
Henry’s actually 91 rather than 90, but I doubt if he’ll miss the extra birthday. And, in any event, I always choose euphony over accuracy when given the choice. Since we’re talking accuracy, Napoleon was in fact talking about, and to, Talleyrand when he delivered the memorable insult given above, while Henry’s fave rave was…
Nicholas Burns, fortunately no longer with the State Department
“It was one of the most unfortunate weeks of his [Obama’s] presidency,” moaned Nicholas Burns, former State Department official (under George Bush), now at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, to intrepid Politico reporters Josh Gerstein and David Nather, referring to that shocking occasion when President Obama actually consulted with Congress before launching an assault on…
Meet the new liberators, same as the old liberators
In the past, I’ve raved, or at least praised, Pankaj Mishra and his book, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia. In his book, Mishra quotes a testy Egyptian on the original liberators of the benighted East, the army of Napoleon Bonaparte: “It is their custom not to bury their dead but…
Why is Obama so unpopular?
It’s official: President Obama is the people’s choice for the worst president since WWII. And his popularity is dropping faster than runoff in the Dead Sea.1 The first part is easy to explain. Any Democratic president is going to be picked as the “worst” president because Republicans hate Democratic presidents so much. Some fringe Republicans…
Ukraine—It’s like catnip for neocons!
I’m not going to bother linking to any of the multitudinous stories ruminating about the meaning of Putin’s latest folly. I’m sure that William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, et al. are fulminating at length over the Crimean Invasion. Putin is laughing at us! He’s eating our lunch! He is playing chess with tanks and we are…
The surge that wasn’t, the surge that didn’t
Max Boot’s rather un-Bootish* review of Robert Gates’ memoir, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, gives me an opportunity to take another whack at Bob, who in some ways was not that bad a SecDef. I mean, he didn’t bomb Syria or Iran. Nice guy! Still, there are things from Bob’s memoir that rub…
What Robert Gates said that no one said he said
Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War, former Secretary of State Robert Gates’ memoirs of his years as SecDef, have been excerpted and/or discussed by the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. If you follow this sort of thing, you know that Bob loved Hillary, definitely a feather in her…
David Ignatius: Yes, I’m an asshole! An asshole who wants to keep his job!
America’s allies are growing restless, David Ignatius warns. “Is President Obama an American version of Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader whose well-intentioned reforms led to the demise of his country’s global power? That’s the anxiety a traveler hears these days from worried U.S. allies, and it’s mirrored in a provocative new article.” Which American allies are…
Yes, Marc Ambinder is an idiot
The sad thing is Marc Ambinder is not an idiot, which is why his snappy little item, “5 truths about the drone war,” is so disappointing. First of all, and largely tangential to my major point, the “5 myths/5 truths” gambit is, 95 percent of the time, a lazy piece of punitory padding and jiggery-pokey,…