I’m only sorry I can’t make that headline a little tougher. Big Don bemoans the fact that President Obama failed to obtain a “status of forces” agreement with Afghanistan. “We have status of forces agreements probably with 100, 125 countries in the world. This administration, the White House and the State Department, have failed to…
Search Results for: iraq
Robert Samuelson, idiot
I have been in the past quite complimentary of Wash Post columnist Robert Samuelson. Well, I can’t take it all back because Bob often gets it right. But in this wretched post, “Defunding defense,” Bob gets it grossly and gratuitously wrong. It’s the “gratuitously” part that I can’t forgive, although the “grossly” part is, in…
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…
President Obama’s horrible, terrible, callous, cowardly, shamelessly opportunistic, and reasonably effective foreign policy
Over the past five years, President Obama has ended two wars and brokered a deal with the most intransigent of the many oil-rich Muslim nations who regard the U.S. as largely if not entirely a damn infidel pain in the ass. Of course, he’s killed a couple thousand innocent civilians and wasted several hundred billion…
George Will, pissy, prissy, and probably prescient
George Will—or “George F. Will,” as they like to call him at the Gabbing Geezer—when he isn’t sniffing and harrumphing over the “unraveling” of the Obama administration, sometimes gets it right. A case in point is a recent column on the administration’s recent agreement with Iran regarding its nuclear program. After directing a variety of…
Obama Bubble? Nuh-uh
What’s Obama’s problem? The Wash Post’s Dana Milbank “explains”: In one account of what even administration officials acknowledge is a debacle, the Wall Street Journal reported that Obama’s policy advisers were aware long ago that the president’s promise that “if you like your insurance plan, you will keep it” wouldn’t hold up. “White House policy…
Barack Obama: Not without guile, not without stupidity
What a difference a day, or at least a couple, make. I just finished patting Obama on the shoulder for pulling a fast one on the Republicans. Now it seems he’s doing his level best to live up to the caricature the right wing has drawn of him—an empty suit in search of a teleprompter….
The President’s policy on Syria is useless and a disappointment to everyone. Maybe that’s the idea!
Hey, it’s August! Things are slow, and it helps to have something—anything, really—to talk about. So administration officials utter proclamations, explanations, and recriminations, while the chattering class chatters in chattering class heaven. How entertaining it is to see our war leaders, General William “Wild Bill” Kristol and Admiral Leon “Bull” Wieseitier in particular, strappin’ on…