“Decline is a choice!” bellowed the late Charles Krauthammer back in the day, livid (to say the least) that that pantywaist in the White House hadn’t yet bombed the hell out of whomever Charles felt needed such treatment. And his spiritual children, the Trump-battered nextgen neocons at the Dispatch and the Bulwark are continuing to…
Tag: neocons
Reports of the neocons’ demise have been greatly exaggerated
Weren’t the neocons terrible? Well, they still are, and they’re still running things at both Bloomberg and the New York Times, and they still think it’s “smart” to lie to their readers. Eagle-eyed substacker Daniel Larison brings the sad but unsurprising news on both. First the Bloomberg folks have the “great” idea that President Biden…
Biden’s foreign policy is sliding into a Blobby bog
Sad, but unsurprising, not to mention scary as shit: Uncle Joe is letting the military intellectual complex put both hands on the wheel when it comes to the U.S. and the outside world. Consider the following: – In a recent meeting with Chinese foreign minister Yang Jiechi in Alaska, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony…
When Jennifer Rubin Does the Cuban
Okay, unless you’re familiar with the swing-band classic “When Reuban Swings the Cuban”—and you probably aren’t—you’re probably guessing that I’m accusing Jennifer Reuban of going communist, and I’m not. There was a time when I spent so much time making fun of Jennie for her passionately Likudist psyche—she once denounced Sen. Rand Paul for not…
Donald Trump tries to do something right. DC aghast.
Yes, you read that right: Donald Trump is trying to do something right. Not only is he trying to take a staggering 2,500 troops out of Iraq, he’s trying to take a staggering 2,500 troops out of Afghanistan as well! Effectively ending America’s only official shooting war! Almost as if we weren’t, you know, in…
Twilight of Democracy: Anne Applebaum’s front-row seat to disaster
I have already written with great approval of Anne Applebaum’s recent article for the Atlantic, History Will Judge the Complicit, while snickering at Ramesh Ponnuru’s anguished protest—for surely the dude protested too much—that he was totally not—repeat not—“complicit”. He’s just friends with people who, it so happens, are complicit”.1 Which is like a totally different…
Neocons suffering withdrawal symptoms in Afghanistan
There are about 13,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Now that number is coming down to about 8,600. Yet from the growls n’ howls emitted by unrepentant neocons like Thomas Joscelyn of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, writing in the anti-Trump Dispatch—“No Deal Is Better Than a Bad Deal”—and Iranian-born Shay Khatiri, writing in…
When is a coup not a coup? When the neocons say so.
Neocon Central is battered but not beaten these days. The rise of Trump has split the rock in half, but only when it comes to Trump himself. On other issues, the rock remains firm. A useful example has just presented itself, the claim made by both the Trump-hating Washington Post and the Trump-friendly Eli Lake,…
Ilhan Omar: The strange case of the little girl in the headscarf who noticed that the emperor has no clothes
Oh, Ilhan Omar, what have you done? Yes, speaking the truth in the halls of Congress has always been hazardous to your health, but when little Ilhan, newly elected representative for the fifth district of Minnesota (basically Minneapolis and environs), remarked that “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says…
Shorter New York Review of Books: Some Neocons are Jewish? Go figure!
Yes, I know I should be moralizing about teenage white boys from Kentucky, but I’d rather be writing about New York Jews. Because I gotta be me! My kvetch du jour is a lengthy piece by Columbia University professor Stephen Wertheim appearing a few weeks ago in the New York Review of Books’s NYR Daily,…