12 Tuesday Mar 2002
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
It’s impossible to read the transcript of U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick’s March 5 press briefing on the 30 percent tariff the Bush administration decided to slap on imported steel without coming away with the impression of a man who would rather be somewhere else.
05 Tuesday Mar 2002
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
We are only now coming to grips, I think, with the symbolism and the substance of Hamid Karzai, the interim leader of Afghanistan, sitting in the president’s box for Mr. Bush’s State of the Union address. At one level, the easiest to grasp, Mr. Karzai’s appearance was simple triumphalism – a celebration of the prowess of American arms and the tenacity of the anti-Taliban forces. Mr. Karzai was “regime change” in flesh and blood, and wearing that cape, rather a dashing figure he was. Both he and Mr. Bush deserved the ovation they received when the American president introduced him.
04 Monday Mar 2002
Posted in Weekly Standard
Valor and victimhood after September 11.
View this article at The Weekly Standard
THERE ARE no more yellow ribbons. For more than 20 years, in times of travail, the yellow ribbons have come out. The Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80 called forth a nationwide flowering of yellow ribbons. And at one time or another since then–can this really all have been wrought by Tony Orlando and Dawn singing “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree”?–the yellow ribbon has been pressed into service as a symbol of hope amid adversity, an expression of longing for the return of those who are not home. In accordance with past practice, the aftermath of the attack on the twin towers could surely have been an occasion for yellow ribbons: thousands lost and feared dead, the uncertainty of the families of the missing, the conclusion growing inevitable that even the bodies might never be recovered. And in fact, in the first day or two, one did see a few yellow ribbons, usually in a collage with a photograph of someone missing, held desperately by a loved one still in shock. But then, without comment, the yellow ribbons were gone. All the ribbons now are red, white, and blue.
26 Tuesday Feb 2002
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
The Bush administration, and especially the president himself, is offering an interesting illustration of the political phenomenon of success feeding on itself. There is such a thing as pure luck in politics, and even a lucky streak. But there is usually a very different explanation for what is happening when things are going well politically – and it has the virtue of also explaining what is happening when things are going badly.
19 Tuesday Feb 2002
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Post
It’s going to take some time to straighten out exactly what changed in American politics after September 11 and what didn’t change. Obviously, there is unity behind the war effort, and it looks like this unity will extend well beyond the first phase of Afghanistan “regime change.” What is striking in the foreign policy salons of Washington these days is the extent to which Iraq is a subject of debate not over whether to remove Saddam Hussein but only over how.
12 Tuesday Feb 2002
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
Dear Automated Traffic Enforcement: Thank you for your “Notice of Infraction” dated Jan. 16 accusing the driver of the Saturn station wagon we own of going 36 mph in a 25-mph zone in the 3000 block of Cleveland Avenue NW on Jan. 3 at 12:15 p.m. The photograph of the rear end of our vehicle, and especially the enlargement of the license plate clearly showing all six characters in it, is something our family will always treasure.
11 Monday Feb 2002
Posted in Weekly Standard
The administration’s legal reasoning is open to question (but closed to scrutiny).
View this article at The Weekly Standard
TO DATE, THE BUSH administration’s handling of the war has been superb. Its handling of the law of war has not. From the president’s November 13 Military Order — calling for trial by military commission of certain non-citizens accused of terrorist activities — to the current dispute over the legal status of detainees at Guantanamo, the administration has drawn sustained criticism from civil rights and humanitarian organizations for its handling, proposed or actual, of those caught in the terrorist net the U.S. military has so effectively spread.
There is a sense in which humanitarian and civil rights groups exist in order not to be satisfied. And the administration’s supporters, of whom there are many, have risen to denounce the attackers. But while the ACLU and Human Rights Watch are never going to be friends of the Bush team, their animus doesn’t automatically make their legal arguments specious. As it happens, the administration has made a telling moral and political argument that the al Qaeda and Taliban detainees in Cuba are receiving the treatment they deserve. But legally, while it may have a plausible argument, the administration hasn’t bothered to make it.
05 Tuesday Feb 2002
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
Quiz time, folks: Who was it that ran against FDR in 1944? I must confess, I had forgotten. But I was in excellent company, as the couple dozen people to whom I’ve put the question over the past couple weeks, all of them quite knowledgeable about politics and most of them in the business, likewise mainly found themselves scratching their heads.
29 Tuesday Jan 2002
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
It looks like an answer is beginning to emerge to the question of the Bush domestic agenda for the remainder of his term: There isn’t going to be much of one.
22 Tuesday Jan 2002
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
When Bill Clinton convened a meeting of former officials and staff in his Harlem offices a couple weeks ago to talk about promoting the legacy of his administration, Republicans mainly saw it as another “Big He” moment: the latest egregious exercise in self-obsession by the master of modern megalomania. And in fact, the conclusion that some of the participants in the meeting were themselves a little embarrassed by it is hard to resist, given the leaks about it to the press that could only have come from them.
Tod Lindberg 