Kevin Drum

ATTACK ADS….Atrios isn’t sure whether or not he likes Barack Obama’s newest ad, but I sure am. I think it’s dumb, dumb, dumb. As usual with these things, I don’t know if this is a “real” ad (i.e., one that the campaign is going to spend millions of dollars airing on actual TV) or just […]

THE SURGE….Col. Peter Mansoor, David Petraeus’s former executive officer in Iraq, had a smart op-ed defending the surge in yesterday’s Washington Post: The surge did not create the first of the tribal “awakenings,” but it was the catalyst for their expansion and eventual success. The tribal revolt took off after the arrival of reinforcements and […]

STRATEGIC AMBIGUITY….Do events in the Caucasus demonstrate that we ought to expand NATO to include Georgia (and Ukraine)? The argument against is simple: NATO is reserved not just for friends, but for countries we’re willing to go to war for. If Georgia were in NATO today, we’d be forced to commit troops to a direct […]

GEORGIA AND THE RIGHT….Matt Yglesias, blogging from his ultra-leftist new digs at the Center for American Progress, takes a shot at sensible moderate Bill Kristol over his column about the war in Georgia: If Kristol really thinks we should go to war with Russia, he’s being crazy and irresponsible. If he doesn’t think that, then […]

BOOKS….For reasons I can’t really explain, a couple of days ago I picked up Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind and started reading it. Ugh. What a whiny, petulant little book it turned out to be. Did people really take it seriously when it was first published? Am I not giving it a proper […]

HEADLINE OF THE DAY….From McClatchy’s Washington bureau: 11,000 couples later, gay marriage largely a nonevent in Mass. Good.

I AM AMERICA AND SO AREN’T YOU….Here’s the latest leak from Josh Green’s upcoming tell-all on the Hillary Clinton campaign: Mark Penn, the top campaign strategist for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign, advised her to portray Barack Obama as having a “limited” connection “to basic American values and culture,” according to a forthcoming article in The […]

BLUFFING….When it’s convenient to their own purposes, great powers can always be counted on to “assist” ethnic minorities in their desire to secede from their parent state. The Russians are currently doing this in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and regardless of whether you think Russia or Georgia was primarily responsible for starting the current conflict, […]

A NOTE FROM THE REAL WORLD….Hawaii is an elitist vacation spot? Seriously? Just for the record, folks, Hawaii is about the least elitist vacation spot on the planet. It ranks right in between Disneyland and the Grand Canyon on the elitism meter, and probably a couple of notches below a visit to Yosemite. If you’re […]

GEORGIA….James Traub has a good backgrounder on the source of the hostilities between Russia and Georgia in the New York Times today. Very much worth reading if you want to catch up on the past decade of history in the Caucasus.