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Via Ross, I see that it’s become Gerson-bashing week. It’s nice to be a trend-setter. If his latest column is any indication of what his book has to offer, I don’t think “heroic conservatism” is going to take off. For instance, saying things like this naturally open him up to withering criticism from all sides: Traditional [...]
Filed under: politics
Ross writes: However, something like the reverse is also true: Just because the initial invasion was almost certainly a mistake doesn’t necessarily mean that the continued presence of U.S. troops is a mistake as well. And I detect some goalpost-shifting here among the partisans of immediate withdrawal. And: But given that only six weeks ago [...]
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
I have given Chuck Hagel a lot of grief over the past year, but today I’m willing to give him a lot of credit. Via Steve Clemons, I see that Hagel has apparently called on the President to consider “direct, unconditional, and comprehensive talks with the Government of Iran.” Common sense is infiltrating the Washington Iran policy debate! No [...]
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
So Karen Hughes has had enough and is going home. (Mark down another departure, James.) It has been easy to give Karen Hughes a hard time, and it hasn’t really been fair to her. The administration has made an art form out of cronyism, and the President has chosen some of the most inappropriate people for fairly important [...]
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
The notion that somehow changing the tone means simply that we let them say whatever they want to say or that there are no disagreements and that we’re all holding hands and singing ‘Kumbaya’ is obviously not what I had in mind and not how I function. And anybody who thinks I have, hasn’t been [...]
Filed under: politics
And on yet another level, that issue highlights the way the West, including the U.S., has been preoccupied with the killing of 1.5 million Christian Armenians by mostly Muslim Turks and Kurds. ~Leon Hadar Certainly, there has been some attention drawn to the genocide in the West over the last 90 years, though the attention [...]
Filed under: Armenia, foreign policy, history, politics
Ron Paul once again reframes the idea of “isolationism” in his discussion of Cuba policy: Our isolationist policies with regard to Cuba, meanwhile, have hardly won the hearts and minds of Cubans or Cuban-Americans, many of whom are isolated from families because [of] this political animosity. This echoes his statements in his response to the Union-Leader’s [...]
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
But every time you are somewhere that means you are not somewhere else. ~Fred Thompson
Filed under: miscellaneous
David Kirkpatrick’s article on the politics of modern evangelicals has some interesting details, including a general souring of many evangelicals on the war. Then there was this: “The first time I voted was for Carter,” Scarborough recalled. “The second time was for ‘anybody but Carter,’ because he had betrayed everything I hold dear. “Unfortunately,” Scarborough [...]
Filed under: politics
Kagan manages to put together an entire column in which he never once shows that he understands the difference between “liberal autocracy” a la Singapore and illiberal democracy. For the truncated democratist imagination in which there is liberal democracy and everything else lumped under “tyranny,” this oversight is typical. No one, or at least no one of any [...]
Filed under: foreign policy, politics