Andrew Ferguson, Bloomberg News: President George W. Bush released his second National Security Strategy last week, and almost immediately the capital’s foreign policy experts began pecking at it like barnyard hens. It’s a funny thing about these foreign policy experts. Washington is often caricatured as a transient town, a rootless place where ambitious people come to make their mark and then vamoose. We should be so lucky. The real problem

Jawa Report (among others on the right, including the Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes and Say Anything’s Rob Port) think so. Me, I think it a bad idea.  I understand the whole political impetus for “shakeup,” but I agree with one of Rusty’s commenters that early CPA—as well as some early missteps in learning the grammar of middle eastern nation (re)building—were more responsible for the imperfections in the campaign than was

Interesting bit from NRO’s Stanley Kurtz (who describes himself as being “on the neo-realist end of the neo-con spectrum”) about the necessity of the Iraq strategy as a nuclear deterrent, not as a program to push democratization: The problem in Iraq was never that it already possessed WMD’s, but that it might someday manufacture or purchase nukes. The failure to find WMD’s, and the resulting shift in the administration’s rhetorical

Though its name (Red America) sounds vaguely like some Tony Kushner one-acter that imagines a forbidden tryst between Joseph McCarthy and Lillian Hellman (“He Loved His Country, But He Loved Her Communist Dewpatch Even More!”), in actuality it is the moniker of the Washington Post‘s spanking new political blog.  Run by RedState co-founder Ben Domenech, former Capitol Hill political journalist, contributing editor to National Review Online, and—after 9/11, the youngest

Publius pundit has several posts and links; Yahoo has ongoing photo updates here. From Publius: In just a couple of hours, we will see if democratic opposition candidate Alexander Milinkevich’s call to the people for street protests against an obviously fraudulent election will pan out. People are to meet at October Square in the middle of Minsk at 6:30 p.m. wearing smiles first and foremost. They will call for a

brave progressive:  “Yes, but how can you prove it’s Monday?  And don’t go citing western calendars, either—because those are “evidence” of nothing more than how widespread the western hegemonic meme of dividing the week into 7 days has become.  And besides, calendars don’t prove that, from the very first, some proto-fascist didn’t put ‘Monday’ on, say, Wednesday, just to cement his authority and control over the PEOPLE!”

Christopher Hitchens wastes no ammo going after the feckless, cufflink and Kir Royale UN / anti-war crowd—the transantional progressivists’ last great hope for a world ruled by tailored bureaucrats who, on their way to cocktail parties, pause to initial documents everyone knows, deep down, will be ignored or finessed or massaged or excused by the really bad actors of the world—but that can be used to henpeck and worry and

“Bin Laden Sought ‘Joint Operations’ With Saddam”.  Yes, it’s Newsmax.  But hell, if Jane Hamsher or Arianna Huffington can quote, say, the Nation or Alec Baldwin with a straight face, I reserve the right to cite Newsmax on occasion.  And besides, Newsmax is referencing the Weekly Standard, whose credibility is not in dispute (except among those who dismiss anything “conservative” as ipso facto unreliable).  Just, y’know, trust but verify: An

From “Spreading Genocide to Chad”: “Is this really what we have come to? The United Nations has described the carnage in Darfur as the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis but continues to prove itself completely useless at doing anything to stop it. In the Security Council, China protects Sudan. Europe, for its part, has been inert.” Of course, as Allah pointedly notes in an email, “One could say exactly the same

From The Sunday Times: The movement to impeach President George W Bush over the war on terror began with a few tatty bumper stickers on the back of battered old Volvos and slogans such as “Bush lied, people died” on far-left websites. But as Democrat hopes rise of gaining control of Congress this autumn, dreams of impeaching Bush are no longer confined to the political fringe. A poll last week