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Earthquake Response Shows We Haven't Learned Lessons of 9-11
Tweet Share on Facebook August 25, 2011 Comment (1)A few short weeks before the 10th anniversary of the attacks of 9-11, a magnitude 5.8 earthquake in, around and hundreds of miles north of nation's capital, provided a glimpse into how well the United States has learned to cope with and respond to unanticipated and potentially catastrophic events. The verdict is in: not very well.
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Perry Learned His Lessons While Obama Still Hasn't
Tweet Share on Facebook August 19, 2011 Comment (7)If Maureen Dowd does not win the next Pulitzer Prize for political commentary I will urge people to stop reading newspapers. Months before a single vote has been cast in the election of 2012, Dowd hit the jackpot at least three times in this most tumultuous year.
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For 2012, Obama Is His Own Worst Enemy
Tweet Share on Facebook August 11, 2011 Comment (6)Unable to leave well enough (or "bad enough?") alone, President Obama's hodgepodge of consultants, advisers, and taxpayer-funded staff, appear to be working overtime to make their boss a one term president.
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Joint Chiefs Chair Mike Mullen Plays Partisan Politics
Tweet Share on Facebook August 4, 2011 Comment (6)It is astonishing how the temperature in Washington, D.C. drops the instant Congress leaves town. Having wasted the nation's time for weeks on a divisive partisan issue of its own making, known to readers as "raising the debt ceiling," it has returned to what it does best: it is once again on "break."
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Obama Is Increasingly Irrelevant to the Debt Ceiling Process
Tweet Share on Facebook July 27, 2011 Comment (14) -
After Hacking Scandal, Should Journalists Work for Politicians?
Tweet Share on Facebook July 21, 2011 Comment (2)A new word has entered the political lexicon in the aftermath of the hacking scandal that has resulted in the arrest of several employees of News of the World and in Rupert Murdoch's decision to shut down the paper and withdraw his bid to buy British Sky Channel. It is “schadenfreude,” the word Germans use to convey the pleasure people take in the misfortunes of others.
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Betty Ford: A Woman of Her Own
Tweet Share on Facebook July 14, 2011 Comment (1)This week, America bids farewell to one of its most consequential first ladies, Betty Ford.
Rating first ladies is not an easy matter. Nor is it necessary. Established neither in the Constitution, nor by statute, the position comes with no job description. One gets to fill it by marriage. Still historians and others fascinated by lists keep trying.
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Debt Ceiling, Libya, Taxes Spur New Orwellianism
Tweet Share on Facebook July 7, 2011 Comment (3)This is the summer that George Orwell's “Newspeak” makes its greatest headway in Washington. (Readers of the novel 1984 will recall the term as the process through which bureaucrats re-christened the “Department of War” the “Department of Peace” and administered torture through the “Ministry of Love.”)
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Senate Complicit in Obama's Libya Mistake
Tweet Share on Facebook June 30, 2011 Comment (8)Lovers of fiction, legal and otherwise, will long be feasting on the farce the Obama administration puts on before American people in whose name it pretends to govern. Now in its 14th week in what may be a perpetual run, the saga When is a War Not a War? has broadened its White House cast to include members of Congress. That, of course, is the institution charged by the Constitution with holding the president to account, something it seems unwilling to do.
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Congress Fails to Hold Obama Accountable for Libya Mistakes
Tweet Share on Facebook June 23, 2011 Comment (11)President Barack Obama seems hellbent on reigniting the centuries-old battle between the executive and legislative branches over which has the final say over the authorization of military force and for how long. Obama’s stubbornness and intransigence, like that of Wilson, LBJ, Nixon, and Bush 43 before him, may render his successors less, rather than more able to assert American power in defense of real and readily identifiable national security interests. Such proved the case when Congress re-asserted itself in the aftermath of previous wars the nation waged in pursuit of abstract and ill-defined objectives.
