There is an unwritten rule in Washington: If you want to last, don’t stand out. Those who do—think Tom DeLay with his cigars, Jack Abramoff with his restaurant—tend to get clipped before too long. Some call it the “tall poppy syndrome,” probably owing to an anecdote, recorded by Aristotle, of Periander’s advice to Thrasybulus: “Always [...]
Not that kind of woman problem. But potentially a more troubling one. Power journalism couple Susan Glasser and Peter Baker sat down with Clinton recently for a Foreign Policy interview and asked him this question: “Who is the smartest, most penetrating thinker you know?” Off the top of his head, Clinton named a handful: Paul [...]
Back in the 1990s, before he became Karl Rove’s Deputy Minister of Propaganda, Pete Wehner had two friends in what might be called the liberal media–E.J. Dionne and me. Pete was William Bennett’s ghost-writer in those days and he liked us because we both liked faith-based social programs, and were critical of some of the [...]
That has been one of the hardest questions to answer, in part because everyone’s situation with regard to health care is so different. Today, the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Taxation Committee issued an analysis that is pretty dense to read, but suggests the Senate version of the bill would, overall, be a good [...]
Fred Kaplan is ambivalent about what to do in Afghanistan…and makes great arguments against all options, which I fully endorse. There is one argument for continuing the fight that I would add, however:
Paul Starr of Princeton, one of the real wise men when it comes to health care reform, put things into the correct perspective in yesterday’s New York Times: the most important challenge is to create a system of robust health care exchanges–that is, super-stores where individuals and small businesses (and, eventually, larger businesses) can select [...]
Iran’s “decision” to build ten new nuclear processing plants is both risible and pathetic. This is a country that has most of the world united against its nuclear defiance–a situation that the regime seems to think it can use to bolster domestic support, as it used to do when it had more credibility–and is flailing [...]
There are those who’ll say that this is purely symbolic, since the resolution doesn’t have teeth–but the Iranians have been censured by the IAEA for non-compliance with the nuclear non-proliferation treaty on a 25-3 votes. The three countries voting against were: Cuba, Venezuela and, for some reason, Malaysia. But the real news here is that [...]
