George Tenet’s effort to absolve himself from blame for the Iraq fiasco is running into trouble. Critics of the the former CIA director’s role in promoting the war, including those who point to his new book as confirmation that the Bush administration, in particular Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, came into office determined to invade […]

People do stupid things all the time, but most people aren’t the Director of Central Intelligence and the things aren’t stuff like forgetting to write an intelligence assessment on a country you don’t think is much of a threat but that your employers seem intent on invading. So when George Tenet says that’s what he […]

Matt Taibbi’s Boris Yeltsin obit in Rolling Stone is essential reading for anyone harboring romantic notions about the saviour of Russia. The basic theme is that Yeltsin was a drunken, vicious sot who stole Russia rather than saving it, but the treat is in the details. A sample:
[T]he Yeltsin family lived in a workers’ […]

The Iraqi government is waiting out the insurgents, the insurgents are waiting out us and we’re waiting out the Iraqi government. Symmetry is nature’s perfect gift to man.
We’ve been told often enough that US troops will remain in Iraq until Iraqi ones are capable of securing the country; that Iraqi troops will never be capable […]

In a perfect world, the brains of politicians and pundits who say utterly contradictory things from one day to the next would spontaneously combust. This would occur often enough to create yet another serious climate change threat, but America is a great and innovative country that could meet the challenge head on, as it were, […]

Paul Wolfowitz runs not the slightest risk of death by extrajudicial hanging or crucifixion, but I want to call dibs on the search terms “Wolfowitz,” “crucify,” “lynch” and “leftists” now because it’s only a matter of time until defenders of the World Bank president and Iraq war architect start throwing them around.
It may be […]

During his two terms as president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin managed to cut the country’s economy almost in half. He invaded Chechnya, leading to the worst human rights abuses in the brief post-Soviet history; he dissolved the Russian parliament — in fact he attacked it with tanks — and he allowed friends and associates to […]

Michael Chertoff says you should be afraid, very afraid. He’s right. Why? Because he’s our Homeland Security chief and he’s deranged.
A little less than a month ago, former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote a scathing Washington Post op-ed piece taking the Bush administration to task for parlaying the genuine national distress immediately following 911 […]

Slate’s John Dickerson is offering a trenchant analysis of a Move On ad targeting John McCain’s Weird Al Jankovic treatment of the Beach Boys classic tune, “Barbara Ann,” in which McCain substituted “Bomb Iran” for the eponymous intro. Move On’s take is that McCain’s little joke bespeaks a potentially reckless president. Dickerson’s take is that […]

My friend Bill emailed me a few days ago about a piece of legislation pending in the Texas house of Representatives that would require high schools to offer a class on the Bible if 15 or more students requested it. The Los Angeles Times story relied heavily on a Texas watchdog group called the Texas […]