A "team of rivals" is how the Obama administration is being portrayed by the head-over-heels media, which started out by likening the new president to Lincoln and may end up comparing him – favorably – to God. A more appropriate phrase would be...
In the age of Obama, we're going to have to get used to the new zeitgeist in Washington, and in the media: the perpetual high moral dudgeon of contemporary liberalism. While the Bush administration had its own style of moralizing – the rhetoric of "liberation,"...
As a new administration takes power in Washington and the promise of "change" is in the air, we have to ask ourselves: when-oh-when is it coming? When will the dam break on the sclerotic foreign policy thinking of the past eight – heck, the past 50...
When Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated, he sought to dismantle the evolving Federalist tradition of pomp and circumstance. In a ceremonial sense, royalism seemed to have been restored, or so it appeared to him. As this blogger put it, "Dressed in simple attire,...
The role played by Israel as the catalyst for war in the Middle East was dramatically underscored the other day, when David Sanger of the New York Times reported Israel had requested access to "bunker-buster" bombs developed by the US, and also clearance for flying...
Now that the greatest strategic disaster in American military history is an accomplished fact, its architects are distancing themselves from their handiwork. For the past year or two, we have been treated to the spectacle of what might be called neoconservative panic...
Why is Israel pounding Gaza? Well, we know the official explanation, which goes something like this: if you Americans were being targeted by crude, albeit potentially lethal, rockets from, say, Mexico, on a daily basis, how would you respond? Israel, we are told, had...
The news that Dennis Ross will be appointed the special envoy to Iran – and, more, that he will function as a Middle East "czar" – is "staggeringly bad news," as Philip Weiss so trenchantly put it. The appointment, Weiss avers, is "illustrative of the fact...
A new year, and a new president – plenty of grist for my prediction mill, or, at least, for the obligatory January "predictions" column. Not that there's anything special, really, about it: all punditry is prediction, in an important sense. Every time a writer...
We all know the rationalization for Israel's brutal invasion of the Gaza Strip. After all, it's been reiterated endlessly over the airwaves by official and unofficial spokesmen for the Israeli government, on all channels, and with no rebuttal or skeptical perspective...
