“Listening to members of Congress, you might think the biggest problem at the Central Intelligence Agency is that one of its officers destroyed videotapes that showed waterboarding of suspected al-Qaeda operatives.” Really? Which ones have been saying such wickedness? And why isn’t destroying evidence of torture, you know, just a bit of a problem? Yes,…
The horror. The goddamn horror.
Over at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall flies into a rage at the thought of Hillary Clinton campaign advisor Mark Penn moonlighting as a lobbyist in support of the proposed bilateral free-trade agreement between the U.S. and Colombia, which Hillary opposes. “There are so many reasons why candidates should be paying Mark Penn to stay…
When smart economists go dumb
Robert Skidelsky is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy at Warwick University in England and author of a three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes, so presumably he knows something about economics. Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize winning economist and former chief economist for the World Bank, so presumably he knows something about economics. But according…
Obama goes wild!
Never let it be said that a Harvard boy can’t talk the talk. In a recent speech, Barack Obama takes dead aim at those crazy free-market folks who’ve been running our economy for the last eight—no, make that sixteen!—years, thus rejecting our sacred New Deal heritage: “Unfortunately, instead of establishing a 21st century regulatory framework,…
Parsin’ W—he’s not so innocent
When President Bush announced the “Surge,” he claimed that it would “hasten the day our troops begin returning home.” Notice that the President didn’t set a date for bringing the troops home. Nor did he say that the Surge would allow us to bring all our troops home. He only promised that the day when…
Il Whopper di tutti Whoppers
Having complimented the Washington Post earlier today on one its editorials, it’s time to go back on the attack, a task made all too easy by today’s effusion, “Good Sense on Iraq: At last, a Bush administration defense secretary listens to his commanders.” Like everyone else defending the War in Iraq, the Post is busily…
Keeping Posted: The Myths Keep Coming
Myth debunking has become a full-time job on the editorial pages of the Washington Post. Last Sunday, Jacob Heilbrunn debunked five myths regarding “those nefarious neocons.” On Monday, Ann Marlowe took on two myths regarding Afghanistan. Myth 1. Hamid Karzai is a good president who looks after American interests. Myth 2. The second is that…
Debunking Myths or Creating Them?
The Washington Post has plenty of editorial space available, and it’s hardly unreasonable for the editors to offer its pages to “competing views.” But when offering space to outside opinion, one might expect, as a courtesy to its subscribers, that the Post would require these contributors to state their case honestly—opinion yes, propaganda no. But…
The Washington Post, centuries behind
Today’s Washington Post editorial page picks an odd hobbyhorse, the high cost of college textbooks. The Post is particularly ticked at publishers who produce new editions “even though there have been no major advances in fields such as calculus and elementary physics in decades or even centuries.” Now, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that…
The New York Times, defining democracy down
The current political season is causing some headache, heartache, and heartburn over at the New York Times. In a heartfelt editorial, the Gray Lady complains bitterly that the American people are just not listening to the American people. Even worse, they aren’t listening to the New York Times. “Americans have made it clear that they…