Charley Reese

One question Americans should be asking the Bush administration is why it wishes to do such an expensive favor for the Iraqi people. I cannot think of any instance in which the federal government has been willing to spend $1 billion a week and 1,700 lives just to improve conditions in any one of the … Continue reading “Expensive Favor”

In case you haven’t noticed it, the Bush administration’s standard response to any criticism is to attack the critic. Ad hominem attacks are designed, of course, to avoid the subject of the criticism. Such a tactic greatly appeals to armchair patriots with petrified brains. The fact is, the Bush administration has created a gulag, as … Continue reading “American Gulag”

If you look at the past 100 years or so, you will see plainly that there has always been an “ism” at the gates. The old idea of controlling the people and increasing government power by warning of an “enemy at the gates” dates back to the Roman Empire, and probably well before that. It … Continue reading “The ‘Ism’ at the Gate”

I will give the Bush administration credit: it has more brass and more chutzpah than a pawnbroker in Bombay. It has now proclaimed that America’s miserably bad image in the Muslim world is entirely the fault of one or two lines that appeared in a Newsweek magazine story. The administration has even more or less … Continue reading “Brass and Chutzpah”

If you would like a role model on how a manly person should act in front of politicians and the media, I highly recommend the Honorable George Galloway, a member of the British Parliament. A Senate subcommittee out to discredit the United Nations made the mistake of inviting Galloway to appear before its members. They … Continue reading “More Manly Galloways, Fewer Slimy Colemans”

Humans have the capacity to create and to destroy. It seems to me that if we do not rein in our destructive capacity, bugs will one day inherit an otherwise empty and barren planet. It’s no use assigning blame. The urge to destroy resides in every human heart. Violence is all too often the problem-solving … Continue reading “Boot the Imperialists”

Well, here we are, two years out (as they say in Washington) from “mission accomplished,” the president’s now-famous speech during the photo opportunity on an American carrier. The American death toll in Iraq is now 1,585, and the wounded exceed 10,000. The cost is about $300 billion. Somewhere between 140,000 and 150,000 Americans remain in … Continue reading “Mission Accomplished, Captain Queeg?”

Robert E. Lee advised his children to avoid fiction and read biography and history so that they might know the world "as it really is." Only recently I came upon a new paperback edition of a book originally published in 1956. If you haven’t already read it, I highly recommend it. It’s called Zero," by … Continue reading “The Zero”

It would pay us all to remember that the war in Iraq was both unjust and illegal. We launched a war of aggression against a country that was not attacking us, did not have the means to attack us, and had never expressed any intention of attacking us. Thus, America’s attack against Iraq is the … Continue reading “An Unjust War”

The Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, who was wounded by American soldiers as her car approached the Baghdad Airport, believes she was shot at deliberately. I doubt that is true. Of course, our government would kill an Italian journalist if it had a reason to do so, but I can’t think of one. I don’t use … Continue reading “A Stupid War to Die In”