Politics

POST-WAR IRAQ….OxBlog has a good post up about post-war Iraq and support for democracy. As David says, the conservatives are in charge right now, so there’s no chance for democratic reform unless it’s supported by the right. I hope conservative commentators and bloggers will keep up the pressure for genuine reform in Iraq instead of […]

TONY BLAIR ON TERRORISM, POVERTY, AND GLOBAL WARMING….Carla Passino of The International Sentinal links today to a speech by Tony Blair that’s mostly about global warming. But not entirely: On the one hand there are the very clear and dangerous threats of unstable states developing or proliferating weapons of mass destruction and the evil of […]

A DEFENSE OF UNILATERALISM….Steven den Beste says: The only way someone can say “No” is if we bother asking them in the first place. That’s an admirably straighforward endorsement of unilateralism, I guess. Of course, it’s also the reason that virtually no one in the rest of the world trusts us these days ? and […]

NAME CALLING….I was curious about, um, pro-war memes, so I just checked and found that in the past four weeks InstaPundit has posted 14 times about “Old Europe” and 15 times about the “Axis of Weasels” ? eight of the posts specifically about how cool it is that the phrase is spreading. Sheesh. When these […]

AN AIR FORCE GENERAL TALKS ABOUT THE WAR….Zizka points us to this interview in The Oregonian with Tony McPeak, chief of staff of the Air Force during the Gulf War: And yet McPeak will tell you, before the next coffee refill, that President Bush has botched the crucial process of building a coalition, of enlisting […]

1970 WASN’T REALLY THAT LONG AGO, EITHER….This Just In, the Bob Schieffer memoir I’m reading, is pretty good. Nothing spectacular, but it’s fun and readable and an interesting personal reminder of some of the events of the recent past. One of the things he mentions that is indeed hard to believe for someone my age […]

DRIVING ON THE LEFT….It’s Monday evening in London, so how are things going with the congestion charging experiment now that the school holidays are over and traffic is back up to its usual levels? Quite nicely, it turns out: Opponents of the scheme were waiting to see if it would struggle to cope after a […]

HAWKS VS. HAWKS….I agree with Tapped: this column by Ronald Brownstein is a pretty good primer on the ideological battle between the neocons and the “tough doves”: The neo-cons want to frighten the bad guys in rogue states by demonstrating U.S. power and resolve. The tough doves want to unify the civilized world against emerging […]

THE WORST ARGUMENT EVER….So I’m noodling around over at Atrios’ site and come across this: “The Worst Argument Ever.” Sounds juicy, so I click the link and am whisked to the estimable Charles Dodgson’s site where he quotes someone saying: As much as I’m unhappy about how the Bush administration has mishandled everything, backing out […]

ALAN GREENSPAN’S SLOW DEATH….According to a story in the Chicago Tribune, George Bush is peeved that Alan Greenspan actually testified truthfully to Congress a couple of weeks ago: When he publicly undercut President Bush’s proposals to stimulate the economy, Alan Greenspan opened the door to widespread speculation that his career as chairman of the Federal […]