American exceptionalism

Torture and American Exceptionalism

May 12, 2011

Since la crème de la GOP decided to use the death of Osama bin Laden as the basis for a renewed defense of torture (and other virtues that form the basis of their overweening national pride), I’m offering this week from the none-too-dusty sad red archives the best this blog has had to offer on [...]

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Libya and the End of the American Imperium

March 31, 2011

Watching the array of opinion on Libya play out over the screen of public pronouncement and positioning has been a marvel, a kind of international and inter-ideological performance art – the Western political mind CAT-scanned, back lit, and thrown onto a blotter. It looks a lot like a Pollack. We’ve got the neocon “freedom agenda,” [...]

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The Arab Revolution: a Case for Realism

March 14, 2011

If the oldest profession is prostitution, the second oldest pastime (the very oldest being left to the imagination) is heckling. There is, too, no more timeless heckle of the cautious leader than “Why don’t you do something!” Obama Seeks a Course of Pragmatism in the Middle East In the Middle East crisis, as on other [...]

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Nation, Culture, and Identity

October 19, 2010

The truth is that none of the ideas against which Adam Levick argued last week in response to my “The Churchill Doctrine” and “Incoherence on Race and Culture“ are positions that I hold. How can that be? Adam is the estimable managing editor of CiF Watch, a blog finely dedicated to exposing the rampant, ugly [...]

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