A story by Eric Schmitt in the New York Times on February 1 reported the testimony of January 31 by James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence: Iran's leaders "are now more willing" to consider attacks inside the United States. The foggy grammar may be traceable to...

The piety attached to a collective memory can be used to assist forgetting; and this is especially so when the facts are stark and engraved on every mind. Nineteen terrorists, acting on the design of a political-religious fanatic, murdered 3,000 Americans. All of the killers are now dead. The danger...

The Saved and the Sacked

Cross-posted from TomDispatch.

Is it too soon to speak of the Bush-Obama presidency?

The record shows impressive continuities between the two administrations, and nowhere more than in the policy of “force projection” in the Arab world. With one war half-ended in...

President Obama's surrender to the Tea Party in the debt-ceiling negotiations brought back an old question about his ability to lead. What is the Tea Party? A right-wing populist movement, rooted in local discussion groups and instructed by Fox TV and Fox Radio, that has dominated the Republican Party since...

July 4, 1861 -- exactly a hundred and fifty years ago -- witnessed the reading aloud, on the floor of Congress, of Abraham Lincoln's Message to Congress in Special Session.

The circumstantial appeal of Lincoln's message turned on his defense of the Union against the threat posed by...

Has it been adequately noticed that bipartisanship, the goal so cherished by Barack Obama, has now at last emerged? President Obama himself has been the means of its appearance -- though not in the way that he envisaged. The stimulus to the bipartisan rally on behalf of everything that "unites...

This post originally appeared at the London Review of Books blog.

Minutes before midnight on May 26, President Obama, in France, by a species of teleportable pen signed into law a four-year extension of the Patriot Act: the central domestic support of the security apparatus...

One of Barack Obama's first acts as president was to say that Guantanamo must go. It did not go. Soon after, he said that the Israeli settlements must go. They expanded. Obama made his peace in the end with Guantanamo and the Israeli settlements. He restarted the military tribunals at...

Crossposted with TomDispatch.com

From Egypt to Pakistan, February 2011 will be remembered as a month unusually full of the embarrassments of empire. Americans were enthralled by a spectacle of liberty in which we felt we should somehow be playing a part. Here were popular movements toward self-government, which...

Barack Obama's 2011 State of the Union address was an organized sprawl of good intentions -- a mostly fact-free summons to a new era of striving and achievement, and a solemn cheer to raise our spirits as we try to get there. And it did not fail to...

President Obama's memorial speech in Tucson on January 12 delivered a message of consolation and hope about the terrible killings four days earlier. Don't we realize, the president asked, that we Americans are all neighbors, that we are something like the members of a family? And once we...

How wrong is the criticism that says President Obama prefers to explain his policies from a great height or to answer requests for assurance from humble citizens and TV hosts? A middle layer of explanation has certainly been lacking from the start: the effort of persuasion that is neither inspirational...

Barack Obama gave many speeches in the 2008 campaign which were -- with a single large exception -- versions of one speech. In office, he has addressed Americans chiefly in two formats: the grand policy exordium, as in the Cairo speech on the Middle East in June 2009 or the...

When Nancy Pelosi said the power and money backing the anti-Muslim protests in New York and elsewhere should be investigated, she had in mind the simplest of political questions. Who benefits? In this case, who benefits from a spectacle of words and images that suggest that right-wing populism in...

Will the summer of 2010 be remembered as the time when we turned into a nation of sleepwalkers? We have heard reports of the intrusion of the state into everyday life, and of miscarriages of American power abroad. The reports made a stir, but as suddenly as they came they...

"Things are in the saddle,/ And ride mankind." The words were written by Emerson in a poem about the Mexican war--the first crisis that took America out of itself. The second such crisis was the Spanish-American war, and we are now in the middle of the third. The extent of...

One more chance will be hard to credit. And "I am going to take a few days to decide" -- that, too, will be incredible. This was General Stanley McChrystal's third outburst of insubordination. Last September, there was the leak of his high-end preferred figure of 45,000 troops for Afghanistan....

He held his last in the White House, with all topics open, on July 22, 2009. It aimed to launch that summer's push for the enactment of health care, but got derailed at the end by an extended improvised answer about the arrest of the Harvard professor Henry Louis...

"To wipe the spit off his face, Biden had to say it was only rain." The Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar was tapping a vein of bitter Jewish wit when he wrote those words about the humiliation of the vice president on his recent state-visit to Israel. Trust...