Why is it that only campaign advisers quit? Shaheen, Power–not to mention the casting off of Rob Malley. These people were merely advising campaigns; it’s fine for them to get cut loose. What about the idiot braintrust that got us…
Going into the basement conference room of a law firm on 6th Avenue in New York yesterday to hear former Cheney adviser David Wurmser speak on “What’s at Stake for the West in Lebanon?” I was afraid that the subject,…
I’ve heard two smart people raving about Larissa MacFarquhar’s profile of novelist Louis Auchincloss in the New Yorker last week–which is not online, only mentioned at the New Yorker site–because it includes scathing judgments by the novelist of his own…
I was in college when the last social order went out, the WASP establishment, labelled “the Episcopacy” by one of my Harvard classmates. The bluebloods had screwed up bigtime with Vietnam, and had a series of scandals, from the assassinations…
A smart reader from Virginia has pointed out that my “shock” yesterday over the statement in a Condi Rice biography that the war was “promoted” to help Israel is callow. Marjorie Wheeler-Barclay writes: I agree that the war was not…
Speaking of Condi Rice, I am reading the superb new biography, The Confidante: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of the Bush Legacy, by Glenn Kessler, a diplomatic correspondent for the Washington Post. On page 242, in describing Rice’s shifting rationales…
C-Span just aired a panel at the Nixon Center about Jacob Heilbrunn’s book on the neocons: They Knew They Were Right. For me it was significant for the raw argument about Jewish identity that arose between Heilbrunn and respondent Dov…
On “60 Minutes” tonight, George Piro, the Arabic-speaking FBI agent who questioned Saddam Hussein for 7 months after his capture, said that Saddam craved Weapons of Mass Destruction because they gave him assurance that Iran would not invade Iraq. Also,…
To his and the paper’s credit, the Public Editor of the Times today attacks the decision to hire Bill Kristol as a columnist. Clark Hoyt says Kristol shouldn’t have gotten the job because he once called for the Times to…