I should have sent President Obama a present for his fiftieth birthday last week, but I didn’t. A lot of things should be but aren’t. Obama should have been an ideal chief of state to reverse the previous twenty years’ self-destructive policies, but he wasn’t. He should have kept a few ...
Try to see it from the other guy’s point of view. He may be wrong. He may be, at least partly, right. Today, I am trying hard to see life from the point of view of an Israeli settler in the occupied West Bank. I have known a few, including one named Benzion Gruber, whom I liked. Benzi Gruber was ...
The first email came on May 31 from London’s Pluto Press, saying that one of their authors was missing and believed to be imprisoned. The author was forty-year-old journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad, whose reporting on Pakistan and Afghanistan was famously reliable and probing. As editor of Asia ...
They say no money was paid and no prisoners were exchanged. I’m not talking about Dominique Strauss-Kahn, but about the two French hostages released in Afghanistan while Strauss-Kahn’s alleged rape victim’s credibility was disintegrating. The Taliban had captured television correspondent ...
Obama is pulling American troops out of Afghanistan. Or at least he says he is. He also said that American forces in Iraq are no longer there. Officially, the Iraq war is over, at least if you ignore the fighting. So where are the 45,000 soldiers based in Iraq if not in, well, Iraq? According to a ...
What’s going on with Barack “Open Government” Obama? His Justice Department has prosecuted more people for exposing government secrets than all the presidents from George “I cannot tell a lie” Washington to George “I cannot tell the truth” Bush combined. Compared to his ...
The Briterati, as I call Britain’s media pontificators on matters spiritual and temporal, are in a spin over reports that parents no longer read to their children and that the state is failing to protect the wee ’uns from pornography. It is good to drop in on Britain from time to time, if only ...
Mitt Romney declared his intention last week to seek the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 2012. Between now and next summer’s convention, he’ll trip along the Yellow Brick Road that he must imagine will lead him to the White House. That means fifteen months of making promises no ...
The other night at the Hotel George V, the American Library in Paris held a fundraising dinner of the city’s American grandees. Dotted among the plutocrats were various publishers, journalists, and writers such as Lily Tuck, Diane Johnson, Alan Riding, Dinaw Mengestu, Jack Lamar, and Elaine ...
You have to love Likud, Israel's governing party. Its politicians may not be as smooth as Labor's grandees, but they are usually more honest. An Israeli saying that dates back to the early 1970s asserts: "The Labor Party announces one settlement and builds ten. The Likud Party announces ten ...
