The Deputy National Security Adviser to President Obama is John Brennan, who first came to my attention in the aftermath of the Ft. Hood shootings and the almost successful Christmas bombing of an airliner in Detroit. Here is a man who is on the front lines of a war that has been underway in its […]
Archives for 2010
The Gaza Fiasco and Its Backstory
The details on the confrontation between Israeli commandos and a flotilla of Turkish “humanitarian” aid ships bound for Gaza is still being sifted as I write, and there will be other such incidents as the provocations continue. As usual, Israel will bear the large majority of the brunt of the public outrage from all the […]
Honoring Those Who Served
Recently we have heard the reports of a Connecticut candidate for the Senate who has consistently lied about his Vietnam War service and I was struck during one TV discussion of the issue by comments from Katrina van den Heuvel, Editor of the leftist magazine, The Nation, who wonders why we so revere our veterans […]
The Limits of Competence and Its Frustration
The political class and all of its groupies in the punditry industry just can’t stand it. They cannot abide a major disaster of the nature of the Gulf oil well blowout that doesn’t have a political solution. This frustration is manifest in every media update on the well and every White House press briefing–the 21st […]
Could Greece Be a Turn to Sanity?
Well, that remains to be seen, but maybe. Just maybe the European Union has realized that this crisis has brought them very close to failure and that it ain’t over yet. Maybe they are sufficiently shocked into strictly enforcing the sanctions that are the conditions for the Greek bailout, which look pretty comprehensive. And maybe […]
A Few More Thoughts on Financial Regulation
As the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill nears a vote in the U. S. Senate, it is difficult to fully understand its mission. Supposedly, we are responding to the “big culprit” in the recent meltdown, which has been identified as the deregulation of the financial markets over the past 30 years or so, in spite of […]
And Then There is Arizona
Apropos Peggy Noonan’s “The Big Alienation”, the recently adopted immigration law in Arizona is a monument to the dysfunction of Washington and a perfect illustration of the “systematic misunderstanding” that exists between our government and the people it purportedly serves. Remember the definition of systematic misunderstanding? This is a condition wherein the frame of reference […]
The Politics of the Tribe
Various pundits have been at work over the past year or so analyzing the Tea Party movement, and I don’t pretend to have any better handle on it than others. In fact, I think the movement defies comprehensive characterization and is certainly not monolithic in any sense, which is why there isn’t and in my […]
Speaking of the New Start With Russia
This is more dreamworld. We won the Cold War by being willing to think the unthinkable. The Soviets were not stupid and they understood cost/benefit analysis. They also knew that U. S. nuclear retaliation in response to something dumb on their part was a very real probability under every American President since Truman. Was this […]
Fantasy World
It’s difficult to imagine what rational processes, if any, are being pursued by the Obama administration in developing its strategy for dealing with the nuclear weapons threat posed by Iran, not to mention the growing list of acts of war that have already been perpetrated against the United States by that regime over the past […]