Does one American in a thousand know that the Federal government is buying 23 VIP helicopters, each one of which will cost more than the extravagantly expensive F-22 fighter aircraft? A half-billion dollar helicopter—a half billion dollars each! — to ferry political hacks to their campaign events?   If the reader was unaware of that fact, we welcome him to Washington. … [Read More]

The government’s assaults on our common sense, our wallets, and our dignity are becoming so numerous that one is hard pressed to keep up. The media pivot like a herd of wildebeests from one scandal to the other—from illegal wiretapping, to torture, to mercenaries, to saber rattling in the Persian Gulf, to $4 billion lost at Homeland Security, to $9 billion … [Read More]

As the Bush administration comes corkscrewing back to earth, like one of the early V-2 test shots that nearly obliterated its own launch team, the trickle of self-justifying memoirs from the perpetrators is widening into a flood. For sheer three-hanky mawkishness, nothing will probably be able to match the forthcoming cri de coeur of that noble martyr, Colin Powell. And Douglas … [Read More]

In a previous article, we analyzed the function of supposedly nonpartisan think tanks as propaganda mills for government policies, particularly those that aggrandize the warmaking state. It is worth elaborating with a fresh example.   In the Aug. 16, 2007, edition of the New York Times, Anthony Cordesman of Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) tells us why it … [Read More]

Of late, many of the nation’s literati have preoccupied themselves with a mendacious New York Times op-ed column by a couple of think tank hacks named Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, the burden of which is that, by golly, the glorious Surge really is working. Of course, the whole thing was a put-up job, sold on the man-bites-dog pretence that the … [Read More]