I believe in the usefulness and validity of the telling anecdote — the seemingly small story that reveals a broader truth about a politician or other subject. But sometimes anecdotes are misused — usually to sling mud. Such is the case with this piece about John Edwards by the editorial page editor of The State, South Carolina’s …
I’ve read the comments and some postings elsewhere about my appearance on that YearlyKos panel and an interview I did later for TPMtv. A couple of points. First, one commenter reads too much into a statement I made on the panel to the effect that “Time will always have conservative columnists”. I was asked about columnists like Bill …
I dialed into the conference call yesterday held by “senior administration officials” to brief reporters on the “FISA modernization bill.” There were lots of long pauses and repeated phrases, but very little light shed on what the new law actually does and why it was necessary to grant the executive branch sweeping new power to eavesdrop …
Yesterday I was on a panel at the YearlyKos Convention in Chicago entitled “Blogs and the MSM: From Clash to Civilization”. Also on the panel were Glen Greenwald of Unclaimed Territory/Salon.com, Mike Allen of Politico and Jill Filipovic of Feministe. Ari Melber of The Nation and Huffington Post moderated the panel. I thought it was a …
Remember all that gauzy talk about bringing democracy to the Middle East? Remember how President Bush was going to abandon the policy, pursued by previous U.S. administrations for decades, of propping up authoritarian regimes in the Middle East with military aid because doing so served our paramount interest in regional stability?
There …
Karl Rove and his like-believers have analyzed the 2006 elections and told just about anyone who will listen that the reason Republicans were wiped out had mostly to do with corruption and very little to do with Iraq (and therefore, conveniently, little to do with President Bush). Now, I strongly believe that grim sentiment about Iraq, …
The good news is that all of Iraq could and did celebrate the victory of its truly national football/soccer team in the Asian Cup. As picked up by Drudge, the sobering news comes from the team’s captain, who says he won’t return to Iraq to celebrate because he’s afraid he’ll be killed — and that he wants the U.S. to withdraw from his …
News of Thompson’s relatively anemic fundraising in June could put a damper on his big event in Washington tonight. It also calls into question the wisdom of Thompson’s decision to wait until the fall to enter the race officially rather than announcing in the spring or summer. Most of the Thompson supporters I interviewed for my story in …
Not that long ago, it was a widely held opinion among conservatives in the professional political class that Hillary Clinton would be a dream Democratic presidential nominee — for the Republicans. Her high negatives, divisive personality, weak political skills, excess baggage and reputation as a big government lefty would all combine to …
That, in essence, is what Romney said this morning to some Iowans. I guess he’s not reading those right track/wrong direction numbers too closely. I’m not sure that his observation about Americans’ anger over Iraq amounted to a “stinging assessment of the Bush administration’s handling of the conflict from a Republican candidate,” which …
I have a piece in the coming print issue of Time on the hard-to-meet expectations being heaped by fretful Republicans on Fred Thompson’s I’ll-get-in-someday campaign for the GOP nomination. The piece is already posted here. It says volumes about the state of the party, and about the level of discontent among GOP voters with the current …
The arguments made in the New York Times today by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, former Clinton NSC officials, about the Pentagon’s bureaucratic incapacity to plan and execute small-scale anti-terrorist operations is persuasive enough. As the two of them note, despite the fact that the Special Operations Command budget has ballooned …
Eric Edelman’s background is confusing. In addition to having served Cheney, both in this administration and when Cheney was SecDef under Bush 41, Edelman for a long time worked for — get this — Bill Clinton’s old friend and former Oxford roommate Strobe Talbott, when Talbott was deputy secretary of state. (Currently the president of …
