I should have sent President Obama a present for his fiftieth birthday last week, but I didn’t. A lot of things should be but aren’t. Obama should have been an ideal chief of state to reverse the previous twenty years’ self-destructive ...
Try to see it from the other guy’s point of view. He may be wrong. He may be, at least partly, right. Today, I am trying hard to see life from the point of view of an Israeli settler in the occupied West Bank. I have known a few, including one ...
The first email came on May 31 from London’s Pluto Press, saying that one of their authors was missing and believed to be imprisoned. The author was forty-year-old journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad, whose reporting on Pakistan and Afghanistan was ...
They say no money was paid and no prisoners were exchanged. I’m not talking about Dominique Strauss-Kahn, but about the two French hostages released in Afghanistan while Strauss-Kahn’s alleged rape victim’s credibility was disintegrating. The ...
Obama is pulling American troops out of Afghanistan. Or at least he says he is. He also said that American forces in Iraq are no longer there. Officially, the Iraq war is over, at least if you ignore the fighting. So where are the 45,000 soldiers ...
What’s going on with Barack “Open Government” Obama? His Justice Department has prosecuted more people for exposing government secrets than all the presidents from George “I cannot tell a lie” Washington to George “I cannot tell the ...
The Briterati, as I call Britain’s media pontificators on matters spiritual and temporal, are in a spin over reports that parents no longer read to their children and that the state is failing to protect the wee ’uns from pornography. It is good ...
Mitt Romney declared his intention last week to seek the Republican Party’s nomination for president in 2012. Between now and next summer’s convention, he’ll trip along the Yellow Brick Road that he must imagine will lead him to the White ...
The other night at the Hotel George V, the American Library in Paris held a fundraising dinner of the city’s American grandees. Dotted among the plutocrats were various publishers, journalists, and writers such as Lily Tuck, Diane Johnson, Alan ...
You have to love Likud, Israel's governing party. Its politicians may not be as smooth as Labor's grandees, but they are usually more honest. An Israeli saying that dates back to the early 1970s asserts: "The Labor Party announces one settlement ...
Most versions of the Saint George legend tell us that when the great Christian slew the dragon, he went home. Task accomplished, deed done, dragon's blood dry on his lance, and king's daughter rescued, George rushed to the family hearth in Lydda, ...
There were two huge stories last week in American mythmaking: The United States has slain Public Enemy Number One, and Superman is renouncing his American citizenship. Barack Obama may exult in the first, but he should beware the second. The Man of ...
