14 Tuesday Feb 2006
Posted in Washington Times
Cartoon imbroglio not about religion
The Washington Times
In the Danish cartoon imbroglio, does the issue at hand have anything to do with the poor taste of the cartoons themselves? Does free expression always trump taste? My initial inclination was to think that poor taste was an issue. I’ve changed my mind.
13 Monday Feb 2006
Posted in Weekly Standard
What does Hamas’s victory mean?
View this article at The Weekly Standard
WITH HAMAS’S SMASHING VICTORY IN free and fair elections in Palestine, the case for democracy-promotion that George W. Bush outlined a year ago in his second inaugural address has been taking on water. Do we really want a political process that results in victory and legitimacy for terrorists? As Palestine goes, so might a democratic Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc., given the opportunity. All of a sudden, stability–in the form of dictatorial repression keeping a lid on something worse–maybe doesn’t look so bad.
Which makes the Hamas victory an “I told you so” moment for those who have been warning about the dangers of democracy promotion from the beginning–more or less since the end of the Cold War, but especially in relation to the Arab Middle East and in response to the Bush administration’s post-9/11 enthusiasm for democracy promotion there. Given the rise of Islamic radicalism in the late 20th century, the secular dictators of the region and the stability their authoritarian rule provides look like a preferable alternative, runs the critique. Let people vote, and they will vote the radicals in. Such was the sense of danger in Algeria in 1991, when the army intervened to cancel further elections after the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front ran strong in the first round of balloting.
07 Tuesday Feb 2006
Posted in Washington Times
Germany’s Merkel stands firm
The Washington Times
A star is born. Angela Merkel made her debut appearance as German chancellor at this weekend’s Munich Conference on Security Policy, a gathering of NATO defense ministers, ambassadors and current and former policy-makers. The annual meeting is the leading venue for taking the indoor temperature of trans-Atlantic relations, by which I mean the prevailing attitude among those who have responsibility for actually deciding questions like what NATO will or won’t do in Afghanistan, Iraq or Darfur. Mrs. Merkel’s speech, and even more so her unscripted responses to questions from the floor, dazzled the crowd.
31 Tuesday Jan 2006
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
On the day of the state of the union message, we might summarize the state of political play as follows: President Bush has fought his way back – from a catastrophic collapse of job approval all the way up to historic lows of job approval. And at this writing Monday morning, I can’t really tell if Democrats are filibustering the confirmation vote for Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court or not.
24 Tuesday Jan 2006
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
What to do about Iran’s nuclear ambitions is a problem whose complexity we are all busy admiring. It is already clear that no approach to the problem comes without significant costs, and besides which, offers no guarantee of success. And if there are any optimists out there, as there were prior to the Iraq war, I haven’t run into them.
17 Tuesday Jan 2006
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
Why don’t we let Jack Burden, the narrator of Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men,” have the first word this week? It’s the famous passage in which his boss, Willie Stark, the ambitious and corrupt governor of Louisiana modeled on the legendary Huey Long, makes a bid to have the last word on politics and the soul of man: “It all began, as I have said, when the Boss, sitting in the black Cadillac which sped through the night, said to me (to Me who was what Jack Burden, the student of history, had grown up to be) ‘There is always something.’ “And I said, ‘Maybe not on the Judge.’ And he said, ‘Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.’ ”
10 Tuesday Jan 2006
Posted in Washington Times
Where K Street and Capitol Hill meet
The Washington Times
For those who are interested in political ideas and public policy-making, the role of K Street in the process is a source of considerable confusion. So perhaps the downfall of crooked Jack Abramoff will open a window through which the light at last shines on the whole multi-zillion-dollar lobbying industry. Unfortunately, I think it’s just as likely that the Abramoff scandal will obscure more than it reveals.
03 Tuesday Jan 2006
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
Oh dear, it happened again: By late fall, Democrats had talked themselves into the proposition that the Bush administration was, for all practical purposes, over and done with. A few scant weeks later, in fact just in time for Christmas, Mr. Bush was back, with a respectable and rising job-approval rating and momentum in the news cycle.
27 Tuesday Dec 2005
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
Ignoring the law by engaging in domestic spying? Flouting the law? Willfully violating the law? No, on the contrary. The Bush administration’s record is quite clear and consistent: Somewhere inside the locked filing cabinets of this administration’s top lawyers are perfectly clear and cogent legal arguments on behalf of, dare one say, every single official action the administration has ever taken.
20 Tuesday Dec 2005
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
Was that a hallucination we suffered last week at the quagmire? All those millions of, what were they, happy Iraqis, joyous Iraqis, turning out to vote? Well, not just to vote, but to elect a government in accordance with the constitution they approved two months ago, the first truly democratic government in the history of the Arab Middle East? And not just the Shi’ites and Kurds, whose suffering under the regime of Saddam Hussein was especially harsh, but also Sunnis, who dominated the old Ba’athist government and have been trying to figure out where they fit into the new constitutional order.
Tod Lindberg 