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…
At last week’s conference on “Freud’s Jewish World” at the Center for Jewish History, two scholars talked about journalism. Freud lived an upper middle class life in Vienna, and until he fled Nazism as a dying man, he read the…
Hillary and Bill Clinton met behind closed doors this past weekend with Minister Avigdor Lieberman, among other Israeli officials, at the behest of Brookings’ Saban Center —so JTA reports. Lieberman is a racist. He has supported the expulsion of Arabs…
The paddling Jimmy Carter is receiving for making criticisms of Israel that are common in Israel demonstrates a law of the Israel conversation: It is one thing for Jews to criticize Israel, but it’s not O.K. for non-Jews to do…
The other night at NYU, Tony Judt said, “Fasten your seatbelts it’s going to be a bumpy night,” and then dropping his scarf and jacket on the stage, gave a barnburner about the intellectual’s responsibility. Here are some of his…
Jimmy Carter’s use of the word “apartheid” in the title of his new book has generated a lot of controversy—the Washington Post reporting that a Middle East scholar has angrily resigned his affiliation with the Carter Center over Carter’s book….