Yesterday I had to eat a little crow after, well, after I crowed over the fact that Donny’s Little Hideaway, aka the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, was going to be abandoned now that all U.S. troops are being pulled out of Iraq, when, in fact, it’s being expanded, at least in terms of staff. I…
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Donald Rumsfeld’s head: It’s Alive!
Last week I ended a post on the imminent (well, end of the year) withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq with a melodramatic flourish, comparing the U.S embassy in Iraq to an empty skull staring out across the desert sands with sightless eyes—the idea being that the embassy, built by the Bush Administration at the…
Disaster, Death, and Destruction—the Bush Legacy
In its more than 1200 years of existence, Baghdad has accumulated many monuments to human greed, stupidity, and folly. The city got off to a very good start in 762 when the caliph Al Mansur founded it as the capital city for the Abbasid Empire and for centuries it was one of the greatest cities…
Daniel Larison, working way too hard
Over at the American Conservative, Daniel Larison is working overtime trying to keep Mitt Romney honest on foreign policy, searching his speeches for errors: “Greg Scoblete finds another untrue statement in Romney’s foreign policy speech from last week,” Dan announces excitedly, in his latest post. Dan, let me save you some trouble. In each Mitt…
Ya gotta have friends, or at least one friend
Add New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to the list of Republican candidates and non-candidates who assert that we must not “turn our back on the world.” Republicans insist that the U.S. must be engaged continuously in some manner of good works all around the globe—which mostly but not entirely means either killing people or selling…
9/11, not so bad as 8/14, one can hope
Yes, one can hope that Osama Bin Laden was not as “lucky” as Gavrilo Princip, the Serbian nationalist/terrorist who assassinated Arch Duke Ferdinand of Austria in the summer of 1914 and unleashed the dogs of war as they had never been unleashed before. The arch duke’s murder was seized upon by the military aristocrats at…
Obama: Not that innocent
I’ve been expressing some sympathy for President Obama these last several days. He does, after all, have to put up with the Republicans, for whom I have no sympathy at all. But, as Dahlia Lithwick has recently reminded us, the guy does have his faults. In a recent article in Slate, Dahlia brings us up…
The Debt Crisis—Oy the Hypocrisy
Was there ever a crisis so tedious and unnecessary as the current debt crisis—a monument to the hypocrisy of the American people, who want the world, but don’t want to have to pay for it? I’ve written before of the “tear it down, tear it all down” fervor of the Tea Party crew, but what…
President declares victory, decides to stay
Good news! The tide of war is receding, as the President has announced. Just not very fast. Things are going so well in Afghanistan, according to the President, that a year from now we will only have twice as many troops stationed there as we did when he came into office two years ago. Quelle…
Do we want to elect this man President?
Mitt Romney tells a joke: “I saw a young man over there with the eggs benedict,” says Romney. “He had the eggs benedict with a hollandaise sauce and the eggs, there. And I was going to suggest to you that you serve your eggs with hollandaise sauce and hubcaps. Because there’s no place like chrome…