A couple days ago I did my most successful item, counting by serious comments: about the vanishing progressive Jewish presence in public life, from my viewpoint as an assimilating Jew. Later that day I opened my email to discover a…
Is Condi Rice’s warm-and-fuzzy opening to Iran, after President Ahmedinejad’s man-to-man letter to President Bush, a signal of a sharply soft turn in an Administration desperate to shore up public trust, not just in Europe but in the U.S.A.? I…
The Times has a fine piece today on Hillary Clinton that mentions that Jonathan Tasini is going to primary her over her dismal Iraq policy. This touches on the LA Times articleI mentioned a couple days back that says that…
A month after he did so, I learn that Vice President Cheney gave a long toast to the neoconservative scholar Bernard Lewis at a lunch in Philadelphia. As usual, Cheney’s speech is significant for what it doesn’t tell us: anything…
Today’s LA Times has a good piece by Jacob Heilbrunn about Democratic neocons. They want, in essence, to return to the beliefs that originally brought the neocons to prominence, the beliefs that motivated old-fashioned Cold War liberals such as Democratic…
Let’s talk about the neoconservative network, and make a few connections, then a theoretical leap. Start at the top. Lately Vanity Fair has reported that Vice President Dick Cheney travels everywhere with a biological and chemical suit. No more specifics…
The American Prospect—Greg Sargent—has a good item on the bogusness of those horrifying reports that Jews and other religious minorities in Iran would have to wear colored badges identifying them as infidels. One of the original reports on this canard,…
Under this heading, from time to time I’m going to dig up some of the sage advice the neocons and their fellow travelers offered us as they pushed the country toward war in Iraq. First at bat is David Wurmser,…
I just got a copy of Ken Pollack’s latest book on Iran, The Persian Puzzle, and was shocked on flipping to page 429, the Author’s Note at the end of the book, to read that Pollack has never been to…