El-Gohary

‘Just how broken a bureaucracy is,’ someone told me once, ‘can be gauged from how quickly can they take a trivial problem and turn it into an intractable one.’ Walk up to an agency with a cure for cancer and they will throw every obstacle in your path because they don’t have enough bureaucrats trained [...]

The Essay Read Round the World

Caroline Glick’s article on the foreign policy implications of Angelo Codevilla’s essay on America’s Ruling Class comes as Niall Ferguson is touring Australia warning that the end of American dominance may be imminent and sudden. Somehow the ideas in Codevilla’s essay are popping up everywhere, whether people have read it or not. Ferguson describes how [...]

Murphy Rides Again

CBS News reports that Times of London reporters “scanning the [Wikileaks] reports for just a couple hours found hundreds of Afghan names mentioned as aiding the U.S.-led war effort.” One specific example cited by the paper is a report on an interview conducted by military officers of a potential Taliban defector. The militant is named, along [...]

Blind Men and Elephants

The New Republic has a special section on Afghanistan in which “Nine Eminent Intellectuals, Analysts, and War Reporters—From Steve Coll to Leon Wieseltier—Debate the Way Forward”. The good news is the nine POVs are well written; the bad news is that there are nine of them, all in disagreement to some respect. The articles are [...]

Dancing In the Dark

The Christian Science Monitor explores the issue of whether something produced entirely by aggregation should become secret and whether the Washington Post, by bringing together disparate pieces in a story detailing the top secret world of America, may have produced in its survey a review that is more than the sum of the parts. The [...]

But She’s Not There

Ross Douthat argues that Angelo de Codevilla’s argument about the existence of an American ruling class trying to impose its will on the people is overdrawn.  The ‘overclass’, he argues, is on closer inspection not there. And if even it were, it is by no means monolithic in its views.  So how can a group [...]

Jurassic Farce

What Reuters called a “division and tension between black and white Americans” is shown by Steve Sailer’s analysis of the President’s approval ratings to primarily be a falling away of white and hispanic support. Sailer notes: Black support for the black President remains almost rock solid, standing at 89 percent through the week ending July 11, [...]

The Politics of the Night

The public policy arena can be compared to a grand opera house, whose foundations were laid in turmoil, and which despite the magnificence of the Grand Staircase and Grand Foyer is reputed to contain numerous secret passages and dank cellars.  Two of the chambers marked “do not enter” are the Hall of Race and the [...]

The Dead Hand Again

You can read it as tragedy or as farce but read the New York Times blogger John Harwood’s post on “Mystery for White House: Where Did the Jobs Go?” Harwood writes, “the whodunit has flummoxed economists in both parties for a year.” And the captains of the ship of state are no nearer to a [...]

The Best of Times

Seeing Michael Totten on the Pajamas Media Express blog line-up makes me feel like I’m in good company.  Yet it also carries with it a realization of how much the weblog scene has changed since it sprang on the scene in the first days of the 21st century.  Back then everything was amorphous; and everybody [...]