I heard a report that Sen. Barack Obama’s position on Israel/Palestine is no different from the Democratic mainstream, that in fact he abandoned a more progressive view—which you might expect given his multicultural/international backstory—to get there. I asked someone who…
M.J. Rosenberg has a terrific piece on TPM about his alma mater Brandeis saying that Jimmy Carter can only speak there if he’s balanced by Alan Dershowitz. It is with real pain that I note that Brandeis is yielding to…
Following Tony Judt’s lecture two weeks back, NYU had a wine-and-cheese where I ran into a leftish Jewish journalist who felt guilty over Judt’s criticisms of the Jewish state. I ought to write about what is going on in Palestine,…
Till he died on Mt. Hood, Kelly James led a rich, daring life. He did “high-end modernist” landscape design and loved climbing mountains. He proposed to his now-widow at 14,000 feet, on Mt. Rainier. The two men he climbed the…
A few minutes ago in a speech before the New America Foundation, Flynt Leverett, a former CIA and NSC official, attacked Kenneth Pollack, the “thinker” at Saban/Brookings who served up the Iraq war on a silver platter for liberals. Leverett…
The Times mentioned Jimmy Carter twice in yesterday’s paper. On the sports age, he was described as “soft-spoken, cautious, reserved, conformist, reliable” (a piece on blood types). But the other article was in Arts, and labelled him a raving lunatic….
A few months back, the brilliant and flawed David Brooks said that blue/red was giving way to a new divide in American society that would play out in ideology and partisan politics: globalist interventionist elites on one side, populist isolationist…
Tom Ricks of the Washington Post is ticked that I said he is on “the left” (in my last item re Obama). He wrote me a note, here’s the exchange: TR: Describing Iraq as a Hobbesian state worse than a…
The Iraq Study Group report has freed the left to describe Iraq in a new way, as worse than a civil war. On Meet the Press, Tom Ricks of the Washington Post said: Right now it’s…the pure Hobbesian state, the…