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TPMCafe has a discussion going on Will Bunch’s new book Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future. Bunch is no fan of the 40th president, obviously, but one of the myths he attacks is that of Reagan the foreign-policy neocon. Reagan was very far from being [...]
Filed under: Foreign policy
President Obama’s deployment of an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan has neocons in a bind. On one hand, they’re programmed to applaud madly and scream for more anytime they hear “surge.” (The latest Weekly Standard cover: “The Case for a Domestic Surge.” Not a parody.) On the other hand, they’re worried that Obama will get [...]
Filed under: War
In the Arts & Letters section of the latest TAC, we have three first-rate reviews, which should appeal to readers of widely differing tastes. First, historian Patrick Allitt reviews John Lukacs’s new memoir, Last Rites. Allitt, author of Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America, 1950-1985 and a leading authority on Lukacs, delivers an appreciative, [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized
In Monday’s Independent Patrick Cockburn reported on the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) report suggesting that as much as $125 billion might have been stolen from both Iraqi and American funds allocated for reconstruction. The thefts were carried out with the collusion of senior US military personnel. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/a-fraud-bigger-than-madoff-1622987.html. Readers of TAC might recall [...]
Filed under: War
My Georgetown colleague Michael Kazin wrote recently of the re-ascendancy of Left-wing patriotism and its revival as a “liberal faith.” Long moribund in the aftermath of the Vietnam War – when the New Left especially came to abhor American participation in foreign interventionism, militarism, colonialism and its embrace a crass consumerist free-market ideology – it [...]
Filed under: Conservatism, Culture, Politics
Newly up on the front page — TAC literary editor Freddy Gray takes a cold-eyed looked at Conservative Party leader David Cameron, a man touted by some on the American Right as a model for bringing conservatism back into the mainstream. Not so fast, says Freddy… Also on-line — “Counter Intelligence,” Philip Giraldi’s essay on [...]
For a taste of what happens when hyper-privatization of government services meets the hyper-criminalization of our modern American society — a perfect storm of corruption, greed, runaway authority and shattered lives in its wake — look no further than what’s happening in Pennsylvania today: Two lawsuits have been filed against two Pennsylvania judges accused of [...]
Filed under: Law
“Bush Boom Continues” trilled the headline over the Lawrence Kudlow column, as George W. Bush closed out his seventh year in office. “You can call it Goldilocks 2.0,” purred Kudlow. Yes, you could. But what a difference 12 months can make. Final returns are now in on the eight years of George Bush. Charles McMillion [...]
Filed under: Economics
Via this guy, proof positive that the neocons are out of power: A bust of the former prime minister once voted the greatest Briton in history, which was loaned to George W Bush from the Government’s art collection after the September 11 attacks, has now been formally handed back. The bronze by Sir Jacob Epstein, [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized
Apparently for no reason at all, or at least no reason that has anything to do with what used to be euphemistically referred to as a national interest. One of the most astonishing articles to appear recently was featured in The WashPost’s outlook section today, Thomas E. Ricks’ “The War in Iraq isn’t over. The [...]
Filed under: War