Last night James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, interviewed author Lawrence Wright on C-Span about his Al-Qaeda book, The Looming Tower, and alas made a hash of it. The best thing about After Words, the book interview show,…
Yesterday on the Yes Network’s broadcast of the Yankees game, former pitching great Jim Kaat, commenting on Baltimore pitcher Adam Loewen’s long deliberations with catcher Raul Chavez over pitch selection, said that the coaches used to say, “Study Long/Study Wrong.”…
I’ve heard from several journalist-friends who were appalled by Dana Milbank’s smear of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer in Tuesday’s Washington Post, in which he likened the scholars to Nazis. So: the mud has splashed back on to Milbank. That…
Dana Milbank in the Washington Post today attacks Walt and Mearsheimer’s appearance in D.C. yesterday on racialist grounds, saying that they are blue-eyed and have Germanic names, and he wonders about their motivation for saying what they do about the…
Dana Milbank thinks that it important that John Mearsheimer mispronounced a congressman’s name, or two of them. Mearsheimer says we need a “freewheeling” debate about the role of the Israel lobby in our policy. Freewheeling means mispronouncing a politician’s name,…
One big price exacted by the Israel lobby is that it tries to shut down free debate when Israel’s motives are questioned. This is the lesson of the furore over comments on CNN by Tom Ricks, the Washington Post’s Pentagon…
I have a fantasy about Chris Matthews. It’s the 1980s and the height of the violent “Troubles” in Northern Ireland, and Hardball is on. Matthews goes to political turf he knows well, Irish Boston, and gathers a group of American…
I got on a crowded commuter train yesterday and a biggish guy sat down next to me wearing shorts, with a big bag. I was reading the Forward, an article headlined, Bush Riles Muslims With ‘Islamic Fascist’ Remark, when the…
It’s been so long, and gone thru so many bizarre turns, that the JonBenet Ramsey case seems to have lost all reality and become pure entertainment, like a history-channel crime, where no one gets hurt anymore. But I think about…