28 Tuesday Sep 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
The head of Iraq’s nuclear research program has spoken. Mahdi Obeidi, writing on the op-ed page of the New York Times Sunday, offers an insider account of what was going on in Iraq in the years before the U.S.-led invasion. In the absence of any compelling reason to doubt his credibility, what he says seems to offer the best answer so far to a truly vexing question: What was Saddam Hussein thinking?
21 Tuesday Sep 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
My frequent NPR sparring partner E.J. Dionne had a very interesting column in The Washington Post on Friday, one that took up the case of his neoconservative friends, among whom I count myself.
14 Tuesday Sep 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
The presidential election is a mess. Granted, it is a mess in favor of the incumbent, and George W. Bush’s contribution to the mess pales in comparison to that of the John Kerry campaign. But it is a mess just the same, one likely to yield an outcome well short of optimal, even if my guy wins (or for that matter, if yours does).
07 Tuesday Sep 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
There was a time when Democrats were better at the craft of politics than Republicans. Given the dominance of congressional Democrats for the 40-year period from 1954 forward and the overall policy impact of FDR’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, Democrats certainly knew what they were doing. But those days are gone, and against all expectations, it is the Republican Party that is better at politics nowadays.
31 Tuesday Aug 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
I had a conversation a couple months ago with a colleague, a political scientist, in which we were comparing notes on the presidential election. These were not George W. Bush’s best days. Nevertheless, he noted, every model that political scientists use to predict the outcome of presidential elections pointed to a Bush victory, based on the strength of the economy. There was one potential anomaly, and that was the wartime character of the Bush re-election bid.
24 Tuesday Aug 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
There are two possibilities: Either the Kerry campaign actually believes that the Bush campaign is behind Swift Boat Veterans for Truth; or the Kerry campaign just thinks it’s good politics to blame President Bush personally for the Vietnam veterans who served in proximity to Mr. Kerry and have decided he is “unfit” to be commander in chief. The question, then, is which of these two views is the dumber?
17 Tuesday Aug 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
Last week, the Commission on Presidential Debates announced the moderators for the 2004 election face-offs, and once again, I have been passed over in favor of the likes of Jim Lehrer and Bob Schieffer. In the brilliant Paddy Chayefsky-Sidney Lumet satire “Network,” Peter Finch plays Howard Beale, a network anchorman who has gone around the bend and become the “mad prophet of the airwaves,” mad as hell and not going to take it any more, vowing to speak the truth that no one else dares to.
27 Tuesday Jul 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
The left is back. I don’t say this in relation to the Democratic convention in Boston, where, of course, in their heart of hearts, many of the delegates do indeed wish that their party could be more explicitly progressive in its appeal to American voters. The point of the Democratic convention will be to inject as much progressivism into the debate as the party’s wise men and women think is prudent in relation to appealing to an electorate that is not especially left-wing in outlook.
20 Tuesday Jul 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
Where is the John Edwards surge in the polls for John Kerry? Democrats want to know. What happened? With a choice for veep as brilliant as Mr. Edwards, shouldn’t Mr. Kerry have gotten a bigger bump than the small-to-nil effect the announcement actually produced?
13 Tuesday Jul 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
John Edwards may be the best politician of his generation. Never mind what he brings to John Kerry’s campaign for president in 2004. In an astonishingly small number of extraordinarily acute political moves, Mr. Edwards has established himself as the single most likely American to occupy the Oval Office one day [and here I include Mr. Kerry].
Tod Lindberg 