These things occur by stealth, but not by chance. Plenty of reports of the Afghanistan war, the jihadists in Pakistan, U.S. bombing and efforts at rebuilding and the uncertain morale of our troops have appeared on the front page and elsewhere in recent weeks in the New York Times; yet...

"There were no thrills while he reigned, but neither were there any headaches. He had no ideas, and he was not a nuisance." What Mencken said of Coolidge can be reversed in the case of Safire. There were plenty of thrills, and after the thrills, the field was littered with...

Probably the speeches President Obama has scheduled next week will come off as planned. On Tuesday, he is set to address schoolchildren on TV in the nation's classrooms. Some parents, dreading a subliminal message, will refuse to send their children to school. On Wednesday he will address Congress. Some lawmakers,...

There are times when President Obama seems to imagine himself as the moderator of a national discussion encompassing all the major issues. A similar fantasy must have been harbored by many gifted speakers, at one time or another. The odd thing about finding it in a president is that the...

Crossposted with TomDispatch.com

On July 16, in a speech to the Economic Club of Chicago, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that the "central question" for the defense of the United States was how the military should be "organized, equipped -- and funded -- in the...

If you want to kill with a clean conscience, the faces of the enemy had better be blank. Start to see them as human beings and it becomes harder to blockade and bomb them, to mine, and pollute, and "destabilize." President Clinton had no imagining of the disease he would...

Between May 15, when President Obama announced that he would keep the Bush-era Military Commissions to try enemy combatants, and May 21 when he replied to the opponents of his decision to close Guantanamo, we had an opportunity to judge the temper of this administration on issues of national security...

The New York Times story today on the dropping of the government case against the AIPAC lobbyists Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman comes in separate parts, not entirely signaled by paragraph breaks or outward format. The report by Neil A. Lewis and David Johnston sets out to answer three...

Barack Obama's initial statement on the torture memos and his remarks at CIA headquarters suggested that the release of the facts of the case would be accompanied by a policy of refraining from prosecutions. That preference was repeated by Rahm Emanuel last weekend in a televised interview on This Week....

President Obama's statement on releasing the Bush-era torture memos is a curious and depressing document, but it bears the marks of having been revised with care by the president himself. He takes the occasion to assure the country that a dark age has passed. At the same time he assures...

The lately published list of the honorariums received by Lawrence Summers for
lectures delivered in 2008--at firms like J.P. Morgan, McKinsey and Company,
Goldman Sachs (twice), Citigroup (twice), Lehman Brothers (twice), American
Express, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Skagen Funds (twice)--shows the practical
meaning of an aristocratic class....

Today is the sixth anniversary of the death of Rachel Corrie. On March 16, 2003, in Rafah, in the Gaza Strip, she was run over by an armor-plated Caterpillar bulldozer, a machine sold by the U.S. to Israel, the armor put in place for the purpose of knocking down homes...

The high doctrine of Economic Correctness of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush years is as bankrupt as Soviet Communism. It is all but officially dead. Why then are the president's economic advisers paid to prop it up and apply a sickly rouge and embalm it and set it in motion with galvanic shocks...

What prompts the fantasy that you can "kill all the terrorists" without sowing the seeds of new terrorism? Partly, the fantasy comes from the idea that any civilian deaths you cause will be forgiven; but, much more, it derives from the secondary fantasy that civilian deaths will go mainly unwitnessed....

In the days before Israel's overwhelming retaliation, Hamas -- the anti-Israel terrorist sect and democratically elected majority party in Gaza -- harassed the towns bordering Gaza with missile attacks that made ordinary life impossible. It was a matter of chance that not one Israeli was killed by the missiles....

Implausible as it sounds,...

The days since the last presidential debate have been preoccupied with efforts to give satisfaction to "Joe the plumber." As everyone who follows the election knows, Joe Wurzelbacher presented himself to Barack Obama on the campaign trail in Ohio as an average American with reasonable doubts about Obama's tax program....

A watchword is the familiar code used by a sentinel to tell the approach of a friend. After three debates and a protracted exposure to campaigns that show consistency on both sides, we can say what the watchwords of the parties have become. The Democrats are speaking of fairness, the...