If you came across someone in your everyday life who repeatedly said fantastically and demonstrably untrue things, what would you think of him? If you showed up at a neighbor’s, say, and your host showed you his newly painted living…
Monthly Archives: February 2017
Andrew Sullivan: The Madness of King Donald – New York
Posted in Noted & Quoted, Operation American Greatness
Josh Barro: Democrats are lost on immigration in age of Trump – Business Insider
You don’t need to be a nationalist to understand that voters will expect policies to be made in their interest. You can even think of this as identity politics, as applied to the whole electorate. How can something be identity…
Vicious microbial warfare helps bacteria evolve cooperation – New Scientist
When Ratcliff and his team mixed two strains of Vibrio cholerae bacteria with different T6SS toxins on petri dishes, one strain or the other always killed off its opponent at any given place. The two strains gradually separated into patches…
Ross Douthat: Who Are We? – The New York Times
…[L]iberalism, under pressure from the left, has become steadily more anxious about its political and cultural progenitors, with Woodrow Wilson joining Jackson and Jefferson in the dock. Meanwhile the right’s narrative has become steadily more exclusionary — religious-conservative outreach to…
Azzam Tamimi: In anticipation of the next cycle of Arab revolutions – Middle East Monitor
Looking farther into the more distant future, had democratic transition been successful, one could envisage the creation of what might have become known as the United States of the Middle East, a formidable power with enormous resources, both human and…
Klaus Brinkbäumer: Europe Must Defend Itself Against A Dangerous President – SPIEGEL ONLINE
Germany must stand up in opposition to the 45th president of the United States and his government. That’s difficult enough already for two reasons: Because it is from the Americans that we obtained our liberal democracy in the first place;…
Posted in International Relations, Neo-Imperialism, Noted & Quoted, Operation American Greatness Tagged with: Germany
John Yoo: Executive Power Run Amok – The New York Times
As an official in the Justice Department, I followed in Hamilton’s footsteps, advising that President George W. Bush could take vigorous, perhaps extreme, measures to protect the nation after the Sept. 11 attacks, including invading Afghanistan, opening the Guantánamo detention…
Posted in Noted & Quoted, Operation American Greatness
Rosa Brooks: And Then the Breitbart Lynch Mob Came for Me – Foreign Policy
I’m not suggesting that Trump’s next move will be drone strikes targeting his journalist critics. But I am suggesting that we are no longer living in a time of normal politics. Trump and Bannon have told us as much. This…
Posted in Noted & Quoted, Operation American Greatness
Brian Beutler: Donald Trump’s Dangerous End Game – New Republic
Perhaps because judges are the greatest impediments to autocratic rule, Trump has singled them out most insidiously. Having inflamed global tensions by antagonizing millions of Muslims in a legally dubious way, Trump not only seeks to attack those who accurately…
Posted in Noted & Quoted, Operation American Greatness
Robert Kagan: Backing Into World War III – Foreign Policy
In the 1930s, economic crisis and rising nationalism led many to doubt whether either democracy or capitalism was preferable to alternatives such as fascism and communism. And it is no coincidence that the crisis of confidence in liberalism accompanied a…