27 Tuesday Apr 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
From the people who brought you “Howard Dean will be the nominee,” “George W. Bush is vulnerable,” “Ralph Nader doesn’t matter” and “the news conference bombed,” we now have, more or less, “John Kerry can’t win.” Good grief.
20 Tuesday Apr 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
The second-guessing of the Bush administration over Iraq has been a part of the background noise since, really, the start of major combat operations, if not indeed before. Shouldn’t the United States have done more to try to secure a northern invasion route into Iraq out of Turkey? Did U.S. forces move too quickly into Iraq, leaving their supply lines dangerously exposed as they became bogged down in a sandstorm?
13 Tuesday Apr 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
Trying times in Iraq make it worthwhile to explain the basics once again: Saddam Hussein was a security problem, a legal problem and a moral problem. That’s why we took him out. But that’s not why we are in Iraq today.
06 Tuesday Apr 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
Thanks to the spike in insurgent violence in Iraq, beginning with the grisly scene of mutilated American bodies in Fallujah and continuing through a violent weekend, the question of whether the June 30 transfer of sovereignty to an interim Iraqi authority should go forward is now on the table. Is it, perhaps, too soon? Doesn’t handing over sovereignty in a deteriorating security environment pose additional risks, including, perhaps, an emerging full-scale civil war?
23 Tuesday Mar 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
BRATISLAVA, Slovakia. — This “New Europe” capital on the banks of the Danube is rapidly emerging as a crossroads of Central and Eastern Europe. I first started to get the point as I was getting on a plane a week ago bound for Frankfurt, Germany, en route to a conference in Bratislava of prime ministers and NGOs, mainly from countries about to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union, on the subject of “Towards a Wider Europe.”
24 Tuesday Feb 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
President Bush has been through a bad patch. This fact has been evident in his declining poll numbers, the disaffection of his conservative base, the administration’s defensiveness about weapons of mass destruction and a manifest hesitancy that Mr. Bush seemed to have banished from his major public appearances post-September 11.
10 Tuesday Feb 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
Undeniably, the project of building liberal democracy in Central and Eastern Europe since the end of the Cold War has been a resounding success. But the purpose of this international gathering in Latvia’s capital last week, which drew a high-powered congressional delegation led by Sen. John McCain, was not to celebrate success but to draw attention to one conspicuous failure: Europe’s last dictator, Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus.
03 Tuesday Feb 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
It wasn’t clear to me exactly how long the Bush administration here and Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government in Britain were going to have to contend with the charge they somehow cooked up a phony intelligence case that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction [WMD]. But with former chief WMD-hunter David Kay’s congressional testimony this week and the release of the exculpatory report of an independent inquiry into 10 Downing’s handling of Iraq intelligence, the scurrilous season seems to have come to an end.
27 Tuesday Jan 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
It might be a little premature to declare its demise, but among serious candidates, the use of federal matching funds in presidential primaries is dying. Far from a resource for a presidential primary campaign, matching funds have begun to look like an obstacle to raising what’s necessary to be competitive.
20 Tuesday Jan 2004
Posted in Washington Times
The Washington Times
I guess we should consider Sen. Edward Kennedy’s op-ed in The Washington Post Sunday the state-of-the-art in sober, Democratic anti-war criticism of President Bush. The piece is noteworthy not for the shrillness of its tone or the harshness of its judgment – the senator left that to the wrecking crew on the Democratic campaign trail and their overheated comrades at MoveOn.org, et. al. – but for its elegiac, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone. The problem is that his own relatively sober description of events simply doesn’t support the charge of dishonesty that is the essence of Mr. Kennedy’s case against Mr. Bush.
Tod Lindberg 