Michael Lind has a nice piece over at Salon, pointing out that the Tea Party nation has a distinctly southern tinge. Yet it was the Tea Party in Massachusetts—Scott Brown’s election to the Senate to replace massively flawed liberal icon Teddy Kennedy—not the Tea Party in Texas, that has the Obama Administration dazed and confused….
Search Results for: WAR IN AFGHANISTAN
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…
Thoughts on the current discontents
(Editor’s note: The following was intended to be a reasoned, coherent essay on the current state of affairs. Unfortunately, I’m better at ranting.) What’s happening in the Middle East? Damfino. Robert Darnton thinks it’s 1789. Ann Applebaum thinks it’s 1848. If Ann’s right, things ought to be pretty tight all around the Mediterranean around the…
Thoughts on the current discontents
What’s happening in the Middle East? Damfino. Robert Darnton thinks it’s 1789. Ann Applebaum thinks it’s 1848. If Ann’s right, things ought to be pretty tight all around the Mediterranean around the year 2150 or so. Take that, Caesar Augustus!1 But what about the home front? Well, I had hoped to comment on Obama’s State…
The Errors of Obama: One long and two shorts
When I survey the past two years, when I think of the ridiculous “we’ll get it right once we’ve killed enough people” war in Afghanistan, when I think of the long-distance murders via “killer drones,” of the continuing practice of denying the most basic human rights to our political prisoners lest they do anything that…
The Ample Ass-Covering of Anne Applebaum
Anne Applebaum is back from Afghanistan, and she has a tale to tell. According to Anne, the job is tough but doable. “Though Americans like to talk about “winning” and “losing” the war in Afghanistan, on the ground it’s clear that those categories aren’t relevant. Of course we can “win”: The real question is whether…
Israel versus Palestine: When Dreams Collide
“What a dreary compromise is life!” exclaimed the hero of Norman Mailer’s abortive magnum opus, The Man Who Studied Yoga.1 And so life is a dreary compromise for most of us, which is why we go to films to see people who do all the things we don’t do in real life, like punch out…
Ross Douthat, devout Catholic or lying sack of sh*t? I report, you decide.
Writes Ross in his recent column re 9/11 versus present times, regarding our disastrously unnecessary and grotesquely mismanaged invasions of both Iraq and Afghanistan, In each of these case [the two invasions], the achievement of something relatively basic — preventing terrorist groups from existing in the kind of comfort required to pull off another Sept….
Stop the world. I want to get off. Immediately.
If you think the news from the Middle East couldn’t get any worse, well, wait ten minutes. This once inconceivable sequence of horrifying events seems destined to rumble on until, well, until it stops. I am generally a fan of finger pointing, but this constant barrage of disasters is, naturally, spawning an orgy of outrage…
OMG! I’m turning into Larry Summers! But not all the time!
The truth can be ugly, can’t it? Here are, courtesy of frequent good guy yet employed by the American Enterprise Institute James Pethokoukis, a number of cogent (I think) charts to illustrate a recent cogent (I think) talk by Larry at the Peterson Institute for International Economics titled “What Should the 2023 Washington Consensus Be?”,…