Category Archives: Current Events

Frank Rich thinks Dick Cheney is just trying to position the national debate so that if there is any sort of future attack on America, his side can get maximum impact from blaming the current administration. I think that's so but I also still think Cheney is trying to rally his followers around him should he be indicted.

Matt Taibbi is losing his patience, waiting for Barack Obama to become the kind of president a lot of us thought we were electing. I have a little more patience than that but we all have our limits. At some point, "A lot better than Bush" won't be enough.

There are folks who are horrified at the prospect of taking terrorists (or alleged terrorists, and I wish that distinction mattered to more people) and moving them to prisons in this country. As Fred Kaplan notes, our prisons are already full of dangerous terrorist-types.

Merrill Markoe knows what to do about Kim Jong Il. We should listen to this woman.

Here's one man's analysis of today's California Supreme Court decision on Proposition 8. If he's right, it isn't quite the disaster that some are making it out to be. Yes, it's a denial of the word "marriage" to an arrangement that should be called by the same name as when heterosexuals have it. But the fact that the court let all existing same-sex marriages stand may be of greater value in the long run to the campaign for marriage equality.

Fred Kaplan on what Obama should do about the North Korean nuclear bomb test. Answer: Not a lot.

I'm becoming a bigger and bigger fan of Matt Taibbi's writing. Here's a blog post about who's to blame for the financial crisis. Here's a blog post about the moral dysfunctionality of the Sarah Palin family. I still think that if a Democratic candidate had an unwed mother as a daughter, all the Palin boosters would be out there arguing that that, in and of itself, disqualified the parent from elected office. (I don't think it should, by the way. I just think most of those who'd vote for Palin would so argue.)

David Brooks, who's one of the New York Times Conservative commentators, has an interesting view on the current arguments being made by people named Cheney. It's that the Bush administration went through two phases in its so-called "War on Terror." The first phase was reckless, confused, destructive to us and full of immoral acts. The second phase, he says, was more intelligent and moral and effective. And what Dick Cheney and his minions are doing now, sez Brooks, is attacking Obama for continuing and refining Bush's second phase.

The McClatchy newspaper folks do a fact check on Dick Cheney's noxious speech yesterday. And Joe Conason compares it with the Obama approach to democracy.

You can find an awful lot of people on the web ripping apart Dick Cheney and the dishonest speech he gave this afternoon. Fred Kaplan is one of many.

I've been watching the right-wing reaction to that article by Robert Draper — the one that itemizes an appalling number of screw-ups by the Bush administration and lays them all at the feet of Donald Rumsfeld. So far, I see no one arguing that Draper got anything wrong. Here and there, someone tries to spin things as if Draper is exonerating Bush and Cheney of any blame since it was Rumsfeld who erred so much, not them. Need I point out that if Rumsfeld's management style had succeeded, those same folks would be giving George and Dick all the credit?

If you come across a spirited debunking of Draper, let me know. In the meantime, I note this blog post by Conservative strategist David Frum, who seems to accept that it's all so and that Republicans need to learn from it, not ignore it.

Last time I looked, Robert Draper was one of the Bush administration's favorite journalists. So I'm trying to decide if his new article on Donald Rumsfeld will please them (because it finds Rumsfeld to blame for so much of what went wrong) or enrage them (because it lists how many things went wrong). And while you're over there, don't miss the slideshow.

Michael Kinsley thinks change is coming and we're not ready for it. Or something like that.

Joe Conason summarizes the growing case that what all this torture business is about is Cheney and his crew telling the interrogators, "Waterboard those prisoners until they give us something that will make our invasion of Iraq look like it was necessary." If that's the case, it will be further proof that torture doesn't work.

Fred Kaplan on what's up with our military budget. Years ago, I had a long, nasty debate with a right-wing friend who insisted we had to spend as much money as possible on every possible weapons system…and it didn't seem to matter a lot if the systems worked or if they worked as well as other systems we might buy. You were "soft on defense" (his term) and perhaps praying for America to be conquered (his insinuation) if you, say, wanted to stop funding System A and instead put all that money into System B.

I've never understood that. I seem to remember a time when John McCain said something about how he could slice many billions from the defense budget by trimming fat and eliminating ineffective programs. He hadn't even said what he'd cut but he was attacked by his fellow party members as if he'd said, "Let's replace all our guns with big sticks!" It struck me as an odd line of attack from people who think every other aspect of the government is filled with pork, inefficiency and waste.

Anyway, go read Fred.