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Comments by Gen. Bantz John Craddock, head of U.S European Command and Supreme Allied Commander Europe for NATO — who wants NATO soldiers to shoot Afghan drug traffickers first, ask questions later — have led to a spirited debate within the NATO community about the legal and moral implications of taking out suspected drug dealers [...]
Filed under: Foreign policy, War
President Barack Obama might turn out to be a foreign policy pragmatist, eschewing the grand strategies and big-label crusades that inspire the minds of Washington’s cognoscenti. After eight years of the Bush administration’s foreign policy fantasies, the notion of an Obama administration muddling through foreign policy choices should be welcomed, even by those who will [...]
Filed under: Foreign policy
The thought-provoking intellectual historian died yesterday, age 73. Diggins’s 2007 book on Reagan is fascinating — the evidence for his thesis, that Reagan was was at heart a disciple of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Tom Paine, is not quite positive, yet rings so true that it’s become my favorite take on the 40th president. I [...]
Filed under: Books
Standing before the Siegessaule, the Victory Column that commemorates Prussia’s triumphs over Denmark, Austria and France in the wars that birthed the Second Reich, Barack Obama declared himself a “citizen of the world” and spoke of “a world that stands as one.” Globalists rejoiced. And the election of this son of a white teenager from [...]
Filed under: World
Upon news their company is being booted out of Baghdad by Iraqi officials who have denied the private security company an operating license there, Blackwater Worldwide executives said the North Carolina-based contractor is well on its way to making $1 billion in annual revenues over the next year or two anyway. And while their guards [...]
Even before the recession/depression began, newspapers had been paring back their books coverage for years. Now comes word that the Washington Post is abolishing its “Book World” as a separate supplement. What’s left of “Book World” will be absorbed into the Sunday Outlook and Style sections. Every institution of the books trade, from retail to [...]
The Harper government survives for another day (or week, or month, half a year, who knows? They like to live on the edge) as opposition Liberals voiced their pleasure at the Tories’ big spending, deficit-ridden budget, which also includes a measure that forces credit card companies to allow their Canadian customers extended grace periods on payments [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized
John Updike died yesterday. There’s no shortage of fawning obits, but as it happens I was reading Florence King’s Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye yesterday, which includes this timely debunking inspired by her attempt to write about Updike for Lear’s magazine: When Samuel Johnson was asked to comment on the plot of Cymbeline, he refused, [...]
The Bill Bennett/David Kuo/Joe Carter website is not long for this world, according to the Washington Independent. Too bad — any site that has John Schwenkler, Helen Rittelmeyer, and Tim Carney contributing regularly is doing several things right.
Filed under: media
The Arabiya interview had some troubling aspects, an undercurrent of hardness running through the feel-good rhetoric, the mailed fist beneath the velvet glove — Justin Raimondo, Antiwar.com, in “The Mailed Fist and the Velvet Glove.” Raimondo’s piece today puts words to those wary (weary?) feelings I experienced watching what is being hailed as Obama’s break-through [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized, War