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….
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Chuck Hagel—“Pour encourager les autres”*
One of the comparatively few attractive things about President Obama is his dislike of the “ritual dismissal”—the Washington practice of figuratively beheading a pre-eminent DC playa, not really because his departure will make a difference as much as the sheer pleasure involved in seeing an important somebody get his butt publicly kicked. Well, a foolish…
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…
Michiko Kakutani does the (almost) impossible; she makes me feel sorry for President Obama
After Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency, almost everyone who ever knew him lined up to say what a shit he was. Moaned Richard Cohen, “I hate Richard Nixon’s friends. They make me feel sorry for Richard Nixon.”1 Well, Barack Obama is no Richard Nixon, and I don’t hate him, but still. I don’t like…
It’s all Obama’s fault!
Well, it isn’t, of course, but we have to blame someone. And, sadly, the Democrats have taken a pasting of historic proportions. For the past six years, the Republicans have been arguing about whether they need to undergo an agonizing reappraisal1 of what the Republican Party stands for. Now it’s the Democrats’ turn. It’s easy…
What Hath Obama Wrought?
In 2012 President Obama became the first president to win two terms by a majority of votes cast since Ronald Reagan, back in 1984, and the first Democrat to do so since Franklin Roosevelt, back in 1936, and, yeah, you read that right. Yet now his administration drifts towards the 2014 mid-terms like a rudderless…
Leon Panetta, backstabbing asshole
If the U.S. spends the next 30 years wallowing aimlessly, and profitlessly, in an endless succession of Middle Eastern wars, one of the people you can blame is former CIA Director former SecDef Leon “The Sky is falling and it’s all Obama’s fault” Panetta. I bitched about Leon in the past for a long time…
President Obama: Bush Lite or Bush Heavy?
What has Harvard done to us? I know it’s not surprising that a graduate of Harvard Law School would think like a grad of Harvard Business School, but do they have to be an exact match? That’s what “everyone’ has to be thinking after President Obama’s UN address last week. If George W. Bush didn’t…
The War Lovers
From 1929 to 1989, Americans lived in a state of almost perpetual crisis—the Great Depression, World War II, and then forty-four long years of contention with international communism. When the U.S.S.R. finally fell apart, the resulting silence was, it seems, more than America could bear. George H.W. Bush and his gang of “realists” conducted wars…
Nothing to see here, folks. Move along. Move along
Say, what was all that fuss down in Ferguson about, anyway? According to This Town author Mark Leibovich, it’s just a lot of hot air from, you know, the media. “In a less media-saturated time, we might have gone on to consider this serious news event on its own terms, with journalists providing facts and…