An inexperienced leader, facing a serious global threat, grows increasingly arrogant, spurns lawmakers, grabs unprecedented power, bullies skeptics, stifles the press, and decides to spurn the advice of seasoned hands and go it alone. Sound familiar? Lynne Olson, author of a new book about the British Parliament replacing Neville Chamberlain with Winston Churchill in 1940, […]
Hmm, what was the most disturbing part of Joe Lieberman’s appearance on ABC’s “This Week” this morning? It’s a surprisingly tough call. Was it Lieberman’s reality-be-damned insistence that “the surge is working”? That was certainly disconcerting. Was it Lieberman’s assertion that leading Democrats are weak because they reject a neocon vision of foreign policy? That […]
The dramatic events in Britain over the last couple of days are a stark reminder of a terrorist threat that is likely getting worse for the West, not better. Fortunately, no innocent people suffered any serious injuries as a result of these attacks in Britain. What’s more, the attackers do not appear to have been […]
As of yesterday, three years to the week after the president triumphantly proclaimed, “Let freedom reign,” we are now seeing the end of the deadliest quarter for U.S. forces in Iraq since the war began. Those deaths brought to 99 the number of U.S. troops killed this month, according to an Associated Press count. The […]
Ken Silverstein wrote a fascinating expose for the July issue of Harper’s about DC’s lobbying industry. Silverstein wanted to understand how, exactly, these firms operate when approached by an ethically-dubious client, and what lobbyists would/could do for a price. Of course, if the Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine calls up one of these firms, he’ll […]
The New York Times report on the defused bombs in London included this disconcerting graf: [T]he idea of a multiple attack using car bombs — a departure from the backpack suicide attacks of the London bombings of July 2005 — raised concerns among security experts that jihadist groups linked to Al Qaeda may have imported […]
During his recent visit to TV preacher Pat Robertson’s Regent University, Rudy Giuliani also sat down with Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network to discuss some of the issues on the minds of Christian conservatives. CBN: How do you feel about some of these previous Supreme Court rulings, way back in the day, about school prayer in […]
For years, one of the principal concerns on the left was creating a political and intellectual infrastructure that the right developed over decades. Conservatives had the think tanks, the massive membership organizations, the media outlets, the conferences, the deep-pocketed benefactors, etc. The left started scrambling to catch up in the late ’90s, but the right […]
For an “overblown personnel matter,” the U.S. Attorney scandal sure has produced a lot of Justice Department resignations. A Justice Department official who was considered as a possible replacement for one of several fired United States attorneys has resigned. The official, Rachel L. Brand, the assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Policy, will […]
The God Machine had to work overtime this week to manage all the fascinating faith-related news items coming its way, so let’s dig in. First, Alabama is in the midst of an awful drought, so Gov. Bob Riley (R) has decided to, well, just take a look. With the state’s weather forecasters not delivering much-needed […]