(This article first appeared on the site of The Washington Monthly on May 26, 2013.) I liked what President Obama said in his national security speech the other day. I thought it was amazingly courageous for him to talk in terms of ending the war on terror, if for no other reason than that it …
This piece was originally written for The Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog on April 20, 2013: Good morning, ardent Washington Monthly fans. I am pleased to be among you. A bit daunted, too; compared to the news-gorging, policy-devouring flamethrowers who usually occupy this spot, I’m a old spitballer trying to get by on craft and …
In The New York Times last Sunday, John F. Burns wrote a lamentation for the state of his native Britain, and the recognition of the overall depressing complexity of the hacking scandal, the corruption of the three major institutions of the media, the police, and Parliament, really left one with the sinking, sickening feeling that …
Paul Krugman is unhappy. “After the Democratic “shellacking” in the midterm elections,” he writes in today’s Times, “everyone wondered how President Obama would respond. Would he show what he was made of? Would he stand firm for the values he believes in, even in the face of political adversity? On Monday, we got the answer: …
Sunday on The Chris Matthews Show, during the “Tell Me Something I Don’t Know” segment, Reihan Salam of National Review said “Conservative backlash against the TSA is just part of a huge revival of civl liberties talk on the right. We’re going to see more of it in the next couple of years.” First, all …
There is no shortage of self-analysis about America’s position, insightful and otherwise, especially this week. Sometimes the views of other can offer an altogether helathful shock. The German news magazine Der Spiegel this week offers a lengthy cover story called “A Superpower in Decline: Is the American Dream Over?” Some of their observations: “The fall …
In a comment on the declining state of magazine journalism, conservative firebug Dinesh D’Souza has published an article in Forbes that is one of the goofiest, sloppiest, most nonsensical pieces of punditry I have had the misfortune to read. D’Souza, once a rising star among right-wing polemicists, proves himself one of its dimmer bulbs in …
Call it bad luck. President Obama gets passed a stimulus bill aimed to revive the economy, and Karl Rove says that what he’s really done is revive the GOP. Arguing in The Wall Street Journal that “sometime late this year or early next the economy’’ would have rebounded “on its own,’’ Rove contends that the …
I put this item on The Huffington Post this morning, and already I got 24 comments–passionate, argumentative comments, pro and con. Amazing. Maybe I missed it, but where was the Fireside Chat? Eight days after his swearing-in, Franklin Roosevelt went on the radio for the first of the so-called fireside chats. He had declared a …
“Indeed,” says Joe Klein of Time magazine, “as the weeks have passed since the election, I’ve felt — as an urban creature myself — less restricted, less defensive. Empowered, almost. Is it possible that, as a nation, we’re shedding our childlike, rural innocence and becoming more mature, urban, urbane . . . dare I say …