The folk at PowerLine (and elsewhere) are incensed by a recent Time interview with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The premise behind the complaints would appear to be that if you’re going to print the thoughts of a world leader who also happens to be a reprehensible thug, you must fulminate like an A.M. radio host throughout […]

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Great post by Jim Henley on how folks warning we can’t risk withdrawing from Iraq keep “defining catastrophe up.”

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Could we get this story picked up and circulated in the Muslim world? The United States elects its first Muslim congressman, and when a pundit suggests he ought not to be able to swear an oath of office on the Quran, there’s a near-unanimous condemnation of the idea, including calls by many prominent Jews to […]

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That seems to be the popular question for the less creative among the hawks this week, and I can see why adherents of the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics might harbor doubts on this front. Let me put it this way. I would really like to be a seven-foot-tall black point guard for the Pacers. […]

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Over in the L.A. Times, Jonah Goldberg gets around to conceding that the Iraq war was a mistake, and goes on to make a sound point, with an illustration that underscores his point nicely—but not in the way he intended: In the dumbed-down debate we’re having, there are only two sides: Pro-war and antiwar. This […]

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For once, I agree with Jonah Goldberg: The revelation that large numbers of government officials tasked with making decisions about this sort of thing appear to be totally innocent of the fundamental theological divide in Islam and how various contemporary groups fall along that divide. Granted, I probably couldn’t go into phenomenal detail either, but […]

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At a first pass, it might seem like unvarnished good news that George Bush has ordered 14 high-level detainees, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, to be transfered to Guantanamo Bay from shady CIA “black sites” abroad, where the oversight is minimal and the interrogations are packed with torturey goodness. But over at TNR, Spencer Ackerman considers […]

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Jim Henley pegs it: This story is so intrinsically bizarre that any further commentary is redundant.

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Via Tbogg, I feel compelled to link this faux “tough-minded” post on the hard necessities of killing kids in war not primarily because it’s creepy, or as a case study in glib rationalization, or even for the entertainment value of watching some Socrates manqué fantasize about dominating an imaginary female interlocutor. No, those are all […]

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I’m not sure who I’m more embarassed for after reading this TownHall column: Thomas Sowell for writing it, or PowerLine for linking and quoting such a self-evidently ludicrous argument so uncritically. At 76, Sowell can at least plead creeping senility if he’s slipping; the PoweLine boys lack that excuse, but my expectations for them are […]

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