Follow me
A Republican Win for 2012
Republicans are fast becoming America’s lost tribe. As the nation embarked on a new century, Republicans fell behind on the journey. Why? The party has had to tend to its laggards. Some stubbornly struck out in a different direction; others inadvertently wandered. But now, gathering for the presidential election of 2012, Republicans are hovering on the far side of a great open field that everybody else has already crossed.
Not A Bash But A Bit: White House Correspondents’ Dinner
Several years ago, as a neophyte reporter for OfftheBus at The Huffington Post, I shared a table with an NPR reporter and her husband at the Obama Campaign Victory Party after the California primary. One of the Orwellian quirks of American campaign politics (and there are many) is that election-night gatherings are called “victory parties” even when the candidate loses—as indeed Obama did that night, to Hillary Clinton, by almost ten points.
What We Forget About Osama
Osama Bin Laden was a religious man. This is an uncomfortable truth that is being lost in the deluge of commentary and speculation about his violent death.
The Most Gutsiest Act: Obama Gets Osama
“One of the most gutsiest acts of any president in recent memory,” John Brennan, the White House counterterrorism advisor, said today of President Obama’s decision to send a team of Navy Seals into a Pakistani residential compound that circumstantial evidence suggested might be the hiding place of Osama Bin Laden. Since late last night, the world has known how that decision played out. Despite first a weather delay and then death-by-mechanical-failure of one of the two Black Hawk helicopters used in the operation, the Seal team took less than forty minutes to find, identify and kill Bin Laden, to secure another helicopter and to remove themselves and Bin Laden’s body from the country just as the Pakistani air force was scrambling aloft to deal with the violation of air space.
4 for Obama 2012
What are the four things that President Obama should keep in mind for 2012?
The consequences of making promises that cannot be kept.
OBAMA 2012: LAUNCH FAIL
Americans who follow the news know two things so far about Barack Obama’s reelection campaign. Somehow—although we’re not quite sure where or why—it has already begun. And Obama is prepared to put a lot of money toward a second term.
A Tick on the Bill Keller Hide
Editor of the New York Times Bill Keller writes “All the Aggregation That’s Fit to Aggregate” for today’s Sunday magazine. In his screed, Keller picks a fight with Arianna Huffington, whom he calls “the queen of aggregation.” Both Bill Keller’s piece and Arianna Huffington’s eviscerating riposte have already been much commented upon. Here is my take, in which I presume to edit Editor Keller (his piece in much need of it).
Hey Bill Keller, the New York Times is feeling the pinch—aren’t we all?—but surely your very own Check’n Go Carlos Slim pays for editors? Still? (more…)
Donilon Explains Obama: 6 Quick Points
President Obama’s press conference on Libya today demonstrates the aptness of this editorial comment in the Wall Street Journal yesterday: ”America’s response to the Libyan crisis is stuck in repeat mode.”
Two months into the Arab Spring, any of us who have by now heard it many times can smoothly spin from our mouths the Obama administration spiel on our foreign policy in the Middle East and North Africa. (more…)
Hillary Clinton & Al Jazeera: Context
Why does American media react to events just as reductively as the general public? I don’t understand this. Shouldn’t it be our job to provide context and nuance in the face of knee-jerk reaction?
Last week, however, pundits from Daily Kos to Taylor Marsh to Jay Rosen reported that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised Al Jazeera and criticized American news outlets like CNN. (more…)
Al Jazeera Spring in America
In Amman for an International Women’s Forum conference, I discovered Arab TV. This was the spring of 2007, and the Iraq War was going strong fifty miles away. The tiny Hashemite kingdom of Jordan had taken in more than half a million Iraqi refugees, many of them Arab Christians. The Amman Hyatt, where I was staying, had been badly damaged (and several people killed) by a suicide bomber two years before; by the time of my visit, the hotel bristled with security guards carrying automatic and semi-automatic weapons.
The large flat screen TV on the Hyatt club floor, as in such concierge lounges everywhere, played 24/7. The Amman Hyatt had chosen CNN International. Every breakfast and cocktail hour for a week we travelers—Japanese and Arab businessmen and women leaders from Mexico and Argentina and Russia and Ireland and the UAE—were treated to the latest update on the rehab of Britney Spears, over and over and over again. (more…)