Kevin Drum

McCAIN’S CAMPAIGN….Was the troop surge in Iraq responsible for the Sunni Awakening? Of course not: the surge wasn’t even a glimmer in George Bush’s mind until several months after the Awakening started in Anbar province and was showing strong signs of success. Yesterday I was complaining about conservatives who try to pretend otherwise, but random […]

BIN LADEN’S SOFT SUPPORT….After the imam leaves and the conversation lingers into the small hours of the morning, what do young Islamic radicals talk about? In “Bin Laden’s Soft Support,” in the current issue of the Monthly, Kenneth Ballen writes that when he started taking part in the all-night conversations that Indonesians call jagongan, he […]

NOT SO LOST IN TRANSLATION….Did Der Spiegel, in its interview with prime minister Nouri al-Maliki published this weekend, correctly translate his endorsement of Barack Obama’s timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq? We now know it did, but CJR reporter Clint Hendler spoke with Spiegel editor Mathias Müller von Blumencron recently and learned just how […]

DISCRETIONARY SPENDING WATCH….Has domestic discretionary spending really skyrocketed on George Bush’s watch? John Cogan and Glenn Hubbard say yes, and they have a chart to prove it — but they measure spending in dollars, not percent of GDP, which is pretty plainly the only proper way to do it. Why? Cogan, a professor in the […]

LEFT AND RIGHT COMING TOGETHER….Just to show that I don’t always disagree with the Cornerites, I think Mark Krikorian gets this exactly right: The Wall Street Journal today describes how the firms owning trademarks for Dora the Explorer and other characters popular with children are working night and day to prevent kids from having the […]

OBAMA ON THE SURGE….Over at the Corner, Andy McCarthy berates Barack Obama’s explanation for the reduction in violence in Iraq (“What you had is a combination of political factors inside of Iraq that then came right at the same time as terrific work by our troops”): Does Obama think the Sunni Awakening and the Shia […]

BAD NEWS….Via Eric Alterman, Pew reports on the changing face of the American newspaper: It has fewer pages than three years ago, the paper stock is thinner, and the stories are shorter. There is less foreign and national news, less space devoted to science, the arts, features and a range of specialized subjects. Business coverage […]

ON KNOWING YOUR BASE….The idiotic kerfuffle of the day revolves around the New York Times’ rejection of an Iraq op-ed by John McCain even though they accepted and printed an op-ed by Barack Obama last week on the same subject. (Obama here, McCain here.) I don’t blame the wingers for trying to gin up some […]

SLEEPER ON BROOKS….If you’d like to read a nice, stemwinding screed against David Brooks, Jim Sleeper has you covered today. Here it is, for your enjoyment. And to prove that it’s the real deal, written in a righteous fury, it’s even got a bunch of typos that occasionally make it hard to figure out what […]

OBAMA IN IRAQ….Alexandra Zavis and Doug Smith report on Barack Obama’s trip to Iraq: After Barack Obama met with Iraqi leaders here on Monday, the Iraqi government outlined a possible schedule for a U.S. troop withdrawal that is similar to the plan the Democratic presidential candidate has pledged to follow if he is elected. Its […]