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…
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Liberals and the war in Iraq: still not getting it
Frank Rich has an article in New York that pivots off the publication of The Last Magazine, the posthumous novel of deceased journalist Michael Hastings that, as Rich tells it, chastises those liberals who supported the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq in 2003: It’s the default position of liberals to lay the blame for this…
Fred Kaplan: Getting Gates right
I’ve taken out some, though only some, of my many frustrations over our bloody and pointless war in Afghanistan by frequently ridiculing the columns of Fred Kaplan on the war. Writing for Slate, Kaplan, who has a lot of experience with foreign affairs, slowly metamorphosed from Afghan cheer leader to cautious skeptic to outright disbeliever…
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…
Anne Applebaum, oddly ubiquitous
Anne Applebaum is a distinguished journalist and scholar who has written about the horrors of the Soviet Gulag and the oppressive Communist rule in Eastern Europe following World War II. She is married to Radosław Sikorski, currently Poland’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. So why is she writing about Iran? My guess is, synergy. In a…
Robert Gates and Leon Panetta: They’ll none of them be missed
Last week, that music hall pair, Robert M. Gates and Leon E. Panetta, aka Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside, brought their good cop/bad cop routine to Dallas, Texas to answer questions about President Obama’s proposed incredibly small bombing of Syria. Gates, aka “The Thoughtful One,” said it was a bad idea while Panetta, aka “The…
Who’s worse, Leon Panetta or the New York Times?
Okay, not the whole New York Times. I mean, their food criticism is pretty bitchin’, and their coverage of the fashion scene is consistently awesome, but when it comes to world events, they’re not so hot. A case in point is a recent “article” attributed to Thom Shanker and David E. Sanger bearing the head…
David Frum, Master of the Muslim Mind
David Frum has surely not said the stupidest thing about the current crisis in the Middle East, and Egypt in particular. Still. The Obama administration has staked its foreign policy on the assumption that the best way to deal with radical Islam is by engaging with radical Islam, thus splitting the men of violence from…
Is it “I Hate Condoleezza Rice Week” already?
How time flies! But the calendar doesn’t lie, does it? And neither do Daniel “Rice Is a Uniquely Poor Choice for VP” Larison or Jennifer “The silliest VP suggestion of them all” Rubin, not to mention Bret “Anyone But Condi” Stephens. One can almost feel sorry for Condi, but not really. She spent the first…
Leon Panetta: Less than inch from being a douchebag
U.S. troops film themselves urinating on corpses in Afghanistan. U.S. and allied troops burn copies of the Koran. A U.S. soldier goes berserk and murders 16 innocent Afghans. U.S. troops pose for photographs holding severed hands and legs. U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, we learn, has been flying home every weekend, to visit his…