At the warmongering American Enterprise Institute Monday, Frederick Kagan pushed for continuing the war in Iraq by saying that things looked lousy in the Civil War here in 1862 or so, but Lincoln stuck with it notwithstanding widespread grumbling over…
Yesterday’s profile of Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni in the Times was an important expression of mainstream liberal opinion. It was fair and limited. The author, Roger Cohen, is agonized by the moral position of an Israeli society that has…
I just got hold of a copy of Glenn Greenwald’s new book, A Tragic Legacy: How a Good Vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency. Greenwald is a leftlib blogger/lawyer and has a mind like a steel trap: fiercely logical….
This morning I woke up with a fresh understanding of the dual-loyalty issues I have been chewing away at in this blog. It is actually staggering when you think about it, that a leading professor of political philosophy–Michael Walzer–can speak…
A couple weeks ago I watched an Asian-American panel on C-Span talking about responses in their community to the Virginia Tech shootings. The main feeling was, shame; they worried that non-Asian Americans would blame the Asian community for the murders….
Neocon Scooter Libby has lots of friends, and many wrote letters to his judge, alas to little effect. (Pat Buchanan believes the huge sentence to be “punitive.” I agree.) A couple things interest me about the letters. Paul Wolfowitz says…
A little while ago I blogged about Norman Podhoretz’s statement in 1979 that neoconservatism arose in part out of a Jewish concern that the Democratic Party wanted to scale back the military, and this represented a direct threat to Israel’s…
Last night I was reading a biography of Walter Benjamin that described the excitement over Zionism in Berlin intellectual circles 90 years ago. Socialists and dreamers adopted Zionist ideas. In the U.S., too, many eastern European Jews who had lately…
On Meet the Press yesterday, Tim Russert sharply questioned George Tenet over his passivity during the runup to the Iraq War. Disaster was looming, the executive was justifying war with lies; and yet the intelligence chief did not tell the…