If a rabidly anti-Semitic terrorist attacks a kosher deli, knowing it’s a kosher deli, and starts killing the people inside because he hopes they’re Jews, well, those are random acts of terrorism, according to President Obama, along with Jen Psaki of the State Department, and Josh Earnest of the White House, all of whom apparently want us to believe…
Tag: Obama follies
It’s all Obama’s fault!
Well, it isn’t, of course, but we have to blame someone. And, sadly, the Democrats have taken a pasting of historic proportions. For the past six years, the Republicans have been arguing about whether they need to undergo an agonizing reappraisal1 of what the Republican Party stands for. Now it’s the Democrats’ turn. It’s easy…
What Hath Obama Wrought?
In 2012 President Obama became the first president to win two terms by a majority of votes cast since Ronald Reagan, back in 1984, and the first Democrat to do so since Franklin Roosevelt, back in 1936, and, yeah, you read that right. Yet now his administration drifts towards the 2014 mid-terms like a rudderless…
President Obama: Bush Lite or Bush Heavy?
What has Harvard done to us? I know it’s not surprising that a graduate of Harvard Law School would think like a grad of Harvard Business School, but do they have to be an exact match? That’s what “everyone’ has to be thinking after President Obama’s UN address last week. If George W. Bush didn’t…
Ross Douthat, out on a limb
I have made rather a cottage industry out of ridiculing NYTimes columnist Ross Douthat, descending, to my shame, more than once to the level of referring to him as “Ross Dumb Fuck,” but, well, those times are past. In the past two weeks Ross has turned in columns that place him firmly, even shamelessly, in…
The War Lovers
From 1929 to 1989, Americans lived in a state of almost perpetual crisis—the Great Depression, World War II, and then forty-four long years of contention with international communism. When the U.S.S.R. finally fell apart, the resulting silence was, it seems, more than America could bear. George H.W. Bush and his gang of “realists” conducted wars…
President Obama makes Lynne Cheney look like a [insert opprobrious sexual reference here]
“We need a war!” famously exclaimed Lynne Cheney1 back in the reign of Bill Clinton. President Obama’s motto seems to be “We need another war!” Mainstream Democrats remain terrified of pissing off the Pentagon and the CIA, who will have their toys, and their budgets. This will be a cheap war, of course, but since…
How much does foreign policy rhetoric matter? Not enough, and too much
Over at the American Conservative, Daniel Larison riffs on a column by Dan Drezner, who claims that we shouldn’t worry about foreign policy statements like those recently dished out by Hillary Clinton that seem more interested in striking poses than solving problems. Says Drezner, “The most important fact about American foreign policy and public opinion…
The CIA lies and lies and lies. And the Obama Administration is totally down with that.
What has our CIA been up to recently? Mark Mazzetti and Carl Hulse of the New York Times fill us in: An internal investigation by the C.I.A. has found that its officers penetrated a computer network used by the Senate Intelligence Committee in preparing its damning report on the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program. The…
Is Obama a realist? Well, that depends on what your definition of “reality” is
Over at the American Conservative, Daniel Larison struggles manfully, as is his wont, over the minutiae of American foreign policy, in particular whether President Obama is a “realist.” Quite reasonably, he concludes that he isn’t. Realists don’t start pointless wars, as President Obama did by launching an air assault on a harmless country (Libya) because,…