“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…
Search Results for: iraq
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…
How much does foreign policy rhetoric matter? Not enough, and too much
Over at the American Conservative, Daniel Larison riffs on a column by Dan Drezner, who claims that we shouldn’t worry about foreign policy statements like those recently dished out by Hillary Clinton that seem more interested in striking poses than solving problems. Says Drezner, “The most important fact about American foreign policy and public opinion…
Hillary Clinton, Warrior Princess
By now, you may have read that Hillary Clinton’s interview with Jeffrey Goldberg was not quite the unadulterated love-fest that Goldberg described in his intro to the rap session. It was only 99 percent unadulterated. At the Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky wants us to believe that Hillary isn’t really a neocon. She’s just a “muscular…
Thomas Friedman, last seen doing a piss-poor job at self criticism
Over at Politico, Jonathan Topaz reports that Thomas Friedman recently told MSNBC “If there’s anything we should have learned from Iraq … it’s that we don’t know what the hell we’re doing,” Let me unpack that remark just a little, and give you the gist of what Tom is trying to say: “I am a…
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…
Time is Running Out! Again!
Time is running out, Secretary of State John Kerry writes, in the June 30 Washington Post: July 20, the deadline to negotiate a comprehensive agreement on Iran’s nuclear program, is fast approaching. All along, these negotiations have been about a choice for Iran’s leaders. They can agree to the steps necessary to assure the world…
Ross Douthat goes there
Throughout the life of this blog, I have made intermittent yet persistent sport of Timesman Ross Douthat, to the point, on several occasions, of referring to him as “Ross Dumb Fuck.” Well, perhaps I haven’t matured, but Ross has, recently turning in a stunner of a column in which he admitted, as a Republican, that…
George F. Will, finding that elusive middle ground for right-wing hypocrisy
In a column largely, and justly, devoted to pointing out that President Obama’s excellent Libyan adventure, like his predecessor’s Iraqi incursion, was based on false pretences and has resulted more in chaos than democracy, Georgie F then launches as remarkable a series of non sequitur, false assumption, and disingenuous innuendo as I’ve seen since, well,…
Anne Applebaum: Neocons cans luv homos too!
Move over, Buzzfeed, and stand down, Upworthy. There’s a new boy on the block, who’s just lost all his scruples. Yes, Literature R Us is all about the traffic, and today’s headline is the proof. Though I’ve done my share of Anne Applebaum-bashing in the past, I must confess that, when Anne isn’t trying to…