Christmas/New Year’s is the time for lists. You can’t blame journalists for wanting to have a life, can you? So they make lists, aka “phoning it in”. There are only two list-makers I like, so my list will not be long: Dan Drezner: “Your nonfiction book picks for the end of 2018 Actually, Dan makes…
Tag: Fred Kaplan
Fred Kaplan: So sadly so right
I blow hot and cold on old Fred Kaplan, who hangs his hat at Slate, most recently, cold, when Fred waxed hot, announcing that “America’s retreat from the world under Trump has shown why we’re still the indispensable nation”1, vaguely claiming that all the world is crying out for American “leadership” to solve all their…
Reply to Fred
Fred Kaplan, who writes for Slate and whom I sometimes praise and sometimes ridicule, has a new post, with the disappointing subhead “America’s retreat from the world under Trump has shown why we’re still the indispensable nation”, causing me to post a long comment, which was so eloquent, and so unlikely to read by anyone,…
Oh, and there was also the whole Jew Joke thing
Okay, this one is a bit stale, but I guess I like putting “Jew Joke” in a headline. I was reading Dan Drezner’s 97% merciless takedown of Secretary of State Rex “Wife made me take the job” Tillerson,1 which included a sneer directed at major foreign policy advisors who, like Tillerson, had never met the…
Fred Kaplan, still not getting it—UPDATED
Several dog lifetimes ago, Bob Newhart was on the Tonight show, and he told Johnnie Carson “You know, Johnnie, truth is stranger than fiction. And even if it isn’t we’re going to pretend that it is, because if you buy the frame, you buy the bit.” The accuracy of Bob’s words of wisdom were perfectly…
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…
The Education of Fred Kaplan
You’ve got to hand it to Fred: he’s not turning his back on Afghanistan, no matter how crappy it gets. Long ago, I used to ridicule Fred for his Pollyanna reports on our cool weaponry, including a 15-ton “Guided Multiple-Launch Rocket System” that, Fred insisted, people called the “70-kilometer sniper round,” which, coupled with our…
Suppose you gave a war and everybody got so bored they wanted to go home?
That seems to be the way things are shaking down in Afghanistan. As Slateman Fred Kaplan notes, when Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta stated, rather offhandedly, on February 1 that “hopefully” the U.S. would be “transitioning” [that is, getting the hell out of Kabul] in 2013, rather than the previously announced/anointed victory year of 2014,…
Fred Kaplan, getting scared again
Unlike the rest of us, Fred Kaplan—Cap’n Fred, as we like to call him—is always on the alert for new dangers. Fred’s latest worry? North Korea! As Fred accurately (for once) notes, we know practically nothing about the new leader, Kim Jong-un, although “meet the new boss, just like the old boss,” wouldn’t be a…
U.S. bad guy identification technology no longer lighting Fred Kaplan’s fire in Afghanistan
Well, that was quick. It seems like it was only two months ago—on Oct. 21, to be precise—that Slate’s Fred Kaplan was raving about our abfab, state of the art Guided Multiple-Launch Rocket System (aka “the 70-kilometer sniper round”), our High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (a “a 15-ton wheeled vehicle carrying a computerized fire-control system…