Well, as long as I’m praising Robert Kaplan, I figure I might spare a few words for a genuine friend of mine. Andrew Sullivan reads an account of the backstory behind Eli Lake’s hit piece on Trita Parsi and the National Iranian-American Council and comes to some unnecessarily harsh conclusions. For the record, as I’ve [...]

I throw a fair amount of criticism and disrespect at Robert Kaplan, so let me rise in defense of him. This post about Ft. Hood is great. The massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, in which 13 soldiers were shot and killed by Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, paradoxically took my memory back to April 2004, when [...]

IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 898-09 November 16, 2009 DoD Identifies Army Casualty The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. Spc. Christopher J. Coffland, 43, of Baltimore, Md., died Nov. 13 in Wardak province, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked his unit with an improvised [...]

IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 896-09 November 16, 2009 DoD Identifies Marine Casualty The Department of Defense announced today the death of a Marine who was supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom. Staff Sgt. Stephen L. Murphy, 36, of Jaffery, N.H., died Nov. 9 as a result of a non-hostile incident in Anbar province, Iraq. He was assigned to [...]

IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 897-09 November 16, 2009 DoD Identifies Marine Casualty The Department of Defense announced today the death of a Marine who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. Lance Cpl. Shawn P. Hefner, 22, of Hico, Texas, died Nov. 13 while supporting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan. He was assigned to 2nd Amphibious Assault [...]

Saturday night was a diplomatic event that changed the internet forever: the Cold Drank Summit, in which an alliance was forged between the Juicebox Mafia and the Grape Drink Mafia that shall endure through the ages. The accord was reached at the apartment of Government Executive‘s Alyssa Rosenberg. Copious amounts of drank was drunk; ethnic [...]

I spend all this time writing this post, and ex-boss Josh Marshall distills it to its essence without any visible effort: Does anyone think that Nuremberg trials or the trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 or the war crimes trials of Slobodan Milosevic and others at the Hague advanced these mens’ causes? Or [...]

I really liked this formulation in Obama’s town-hall address today in Shanghai: We made progress because of our belief in those core principles, which have served as our compass through the darkest of storms. That is why Lincoln could stand up in the midst of civil war and declare it a struggle to see whether [...]

You know what makes me feel confident in the point I made in this post? This history of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed: In 1996, Mr. Mohammed traveled to Afghanistan to sell Mr. bin Laden on an idea: simultaneously hijacking 10 aircraft and flying them into different prominent civilian targets in the United States. He would be [...]

Did you, like me, stop reading Idolator after Maura Johnston left last week? Have you, like me, despaired over the weak-ass music coverage that’s appeared in her wake, bereft of the flair, knowledge and dexterity that she effortlessly displays? Have you, like me, decided that reading Pitchfork is the mark of poor character but you [...]