Politics
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Lieberman’s Loss
Lamont’s victory isn’t just a win for the antiwar wing of the party. It’s a victory for Americans who fear the recklessness of the Bush administration, who feel the wheels are falling off the truck, and who want Democrats to fix it. Mainstream Democrats who can’t see that political reality are a threat to the
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Amnesia Americana
Judith Coburn on "Iraqification": However it feels to anyone else, it’s distinctly been flashback city for me ever since. One of the great, failed, unspeakably cynical, blood-drenched policies of the Vietnam era, whose carnage I witnessed as a reporter in Cambodia and Vietnam, was being dusted off for our latest disaster of an imperial war.
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Fierce Love
Polarization is a symptom of spiritual failure. It might be said to be a failure of biblical proportions if the biblical ideal here is to love one’s enemies. For most this has always seemed an idiotically unrealistic ideal reserved for saints and flakes who don’t know how the real world works. But I think
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War Obsolete?
Certainly the style practiced by our military-industrial complex is. That was the point made by Jonathan Schell in the Impotent Omnipotence piece I wrote about the other day. If there is one silver lining to this dark cloud in the Middle East, it’s the dawning recognition in the corridors of power that after almost a
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The Adolescent Beltway Mind
In my last post, I spoke to the foolishness that follows from the adolescent militarist assumptions of our current leadership, and how it has come to define the conventional wisdom. Paul Waldman speaks to it here: A few days ago William Kristol, who is as responsible as anyone outside the Bush administration for the neocon
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Impotent Omnipotence
Today’s must read is Jonathan’s Schell’s piece appearing at TomDispatch. It’s as good a summary as I’ve come across outlining the way a particular brand of power-corrupted thinking leads to tragedy: Of far greater importance was what happened to two kinds of war that had historically been the most important — wars of imperial conquest
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More on Libertarianism & Tyranny
The modern Reagan Republican Party, the modern conservative movement, if you want to know what it’s going to do … imagine a table and around it are all different groups. And on the issue that brings them to politics, not on everything, but the issue that moves their vote, what they want from the government
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Conservatives on Their Heels
The TypePad service crashed for most of the day, and I lost a good chunk of a post I was preparing this morning. In that piece I want to address the reasons that contemporary GOP-conservatism, which is not real conservatism (see here and here), is an ideology that leads to inevitable social and political disaster.
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Discernment
I spent some time this weekend reading some thoughtful conservative justifications for the war. See for instance this interview given by First Things editor Father Richard John Neuhaus before the war and his reflections on events since then in a piece he wrote in October of 2005. This is about as reasonable a Christian justification
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Remember the Mayaguez
A U.S. cargo ship, the SS Mayaguez, was raided by a Cambodian naval force in May 1975. Another of the Kissinger legacies in the region had been the fall of Cambodia, a month before, to the Khmer Rouge, and the new communist regime was flexing its muscles. The ships thirty-eight American crew members were taken