Miscellany

The Iraq Syndrome

Many on the right think President Obama’s Oval Office address last night should have credited “the Surge,” and they would have preferred thanks to his predecessor for taking and implementing a decision that Senator Obama and others fiercely criticized.  The

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Summer Snow

“Restoring Honor” seemed like a strange theme for a mass rally on the National Mall in the year 2010.  In the absence of some very particular, widely perceived grave national dishonor as obvious referent, the title came across to me

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Unsettling Israel

Gadi Taub – In Israel, Settling For Less – NYTimes.com: The religious settlement movement is not just secular Zionism’s ideological adversary, it is a danger to its very existence. Terrorism is a hazard, but it cannot destroy Herzl’s Zionist vision.

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The obsolescence of the obsolescence

Fouad Ajami writes the history of the present moment better than anyone else I know of, but, as with all such writing, the content tends to be obsolete before it’s published.   His current essay on “The Obsolescence of Barack Obama”

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Note on “9/11 Trutherism”

One conservative political goal seems to be to make acknowledgment of any U.S. co-responsibility for 9/11, of any even potential validity in Binladenist justifications for war, as inadmissible as “Trutherism” – which latter, informatively, stands as a classic “repressive de-sublimation,”

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The Horror, The Horror

In a Facebook post entitled “Journey into the Media’s Heart of Darkness,” Sarah Palin writes of a “dark and demented conspiracy,” but no evidence of such a conspiracy appears in the material she references – 15 pages of e-mail exchanges

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Real and Unreal Threats from Iran

Yesterday’s headline topics included unusually “blunt” remarks by U.S. Ambassador Yousef al-Otaiba of the United Arab Emirates on U.S. intervention against Iran’s nuclear program: I think it’s a cost-benefit analysis. I think despite the large amount of trade we do with

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Flamesem & Japesem (All-Contentions Edition)

[T]he leaking of this memo and the notion that it represents the opinions of many in the Pentagon ought to scare Israelis and leave them less willing than ever to make the sorts of concessions Washington believes can strengthen the

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CONTENTION OF THE DAY – since we’re stuck with Obama, it’d be better for McChrystal to go

Who has the sense that President Obama is politically and morally invested in the surge being ramped up in Kandahar? When does he speak of it in public? When does he lend the weight of statesmanlike rhetoric to the military

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The other obvious

From Shelby Steele in the Wall Street Journal – “Israel and the Surrender of the West” – comes a highly articulate rendition of a familiar conservative stance.  Ideological from first word to last, such work can add to pre-existing understandings

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