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No sooner do I call it out than both the Weekly Standard and National Review abruptly abandon their democratic revolutionism and go far beyond the old dictatorships-and-double-standards standby, sounding an awful lot like Edmund Burke, if not Joseph de Maistre, in warning ominously about the dangers of the mob. But the news comes today that [...]
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As of 11 AM Eastern Standard Time, the only item on the Commentary blog since 7 PM last night is about Amy Chua. The preceding item is a lament for Lebanon by the odd gentile Eustonite Michael Totten. The Weekly Standard only showed last night’s Brett Baier panel discussion on the events in the Middle [...]
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Events in Egypt and elsewhere continue to proceed too rapidly to keep pace. I continue to highly recommend Mondoweiss, which whatever my criticisms of its editorial line has always been second to none in breaking coverage of major stories. There is yet more breaking news here, here, and here. Even so establishment an outfit as [...]
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Long time readers should be familiar with my view that Obama never seriously believed he could dismantle settlements, that it was only a smoke screen to buy time for the inevitable. That inevitable is of course now fast approaching, not just with Israel but across the whole region. And to be sure, the Administration flails [...]
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I’ve been saying it for quite a while now, but in just the last few days events have been happening faster than they can be reported across the Arab world. The first sign came that Tunisia would not be an isolated case over the weekend with large protests taking place in Algeria, where twenty years [...]
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The official line now appears to be that “engagement” has failed, for probably the third or fourth time at that. Over at Lobelog they see the glass half full, and they may be right. If we analogize to Nixon and China, it is worth remembering that the first two years of Nixon’s presidency were no [...]
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I am very late in coming to any comment on the TAC symposium on the 50th anniversary of Eisenhower’s Farewell Address, and as tends to most often be the case, my heart is with Bill Kauffman and my head is with Michael Desch. I come to the subject now because of a swipe made at [...]
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Today, of course, is Martin Luther King Day. Even as a kid I can remember finding something very disturbing about the fact that in America we observed something called “King’s Birthday” (that I first heard it referred to as such by a teacher with a very thick southern accent surely didn’t help). Chris Rock undoubtedly [...]
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Steve Walt has a typically intelligent blog about why he’s skeptical that Tunisia is the beginning of a revolutionary wave in the Arab world, primarily in response to a blog by Juan Cole. Walt correctly notes that 1989 was the exception, that in 1919 and, even earlier, the 1790s, the Russian and French Revolutions respectively [...]
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Though it may well be too soon to assume any real significance to the withdrawal of Hezbollah from the Lebanese government, it is nevertheless suggestive of what I have argued for a while – that we are on the brink of an uprising across the Arab world to cast off the yoke of the American [...]
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