Michael Steele edition. By Steele’s logic, Republicans who want to privatize Medicare and Social Security actually want to infect senior citizens with deadly plagues before slaughtering the elderly in their beds. This is what we have to put up with.

I give the Washington Post credit for intellectual honesty. Here’s a piece floating the idea that flag officers suck at their Obama administration senior civilian positions that goes on to contain at least 15 paragraphs worth of refutation. That’s even more refutation than thesis/exposition! And I’m sure that sort of bold experiment in intellectual honesty [...]

At the risk of predictions and all that. See my latest at the Washington Independent. The Pentagon’s statement not ruling anything out, coming after Secretary Gates wanted to wait until December for the Carter/Ham working group to report on implementing the repeal, is a way for both Congress, anti-DADT activists and Gates to claim a [...]

IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 427-10 May 24, 2010 DOD Identifies Marine Casualty The Department of Defense announced today the death of a Marine who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. Lance Cpl. Philip P. Clark, 19, of Gainesville, Fla., died May 18 while supporting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan. He was assigned to 1st Battalion, 6th [...]

More Galrahn fun! This is a dumb thing for someone who reports on these issues to write, but for some reason people on blogs and Twitter are causing speculation about a post-Gates Pentagon, and I feel like having some fun. The last time I made a big personnel prediction it was to predict David Petraeus [...]

The 23rd Commandant of the Coast Guard will be retiring tomorrow. I don’t know the first thing about the Coast Guard — my Coast Guard familiarity starts and ends with knowing to get out of the Coasties way on line at the galley at Guantanamo Bay — but Galrahn makes a plausible case that Adm. [...]

The House Armed Services Committee wants to fund a second, unnecessary engine for the Joint Strike Fighter and an Air Force transport plane the secretary of defense opposes. This might better illustrate Gates’ lessons on political will and the defense budget than anything I can write.

All my first impressions of Marine Gen. James “Mad Dog” Mattis were negative. One of the most decent human beings I have ever been lucky enough to know — and I really only barely knew her — was a human-rights activist named Marla Ruzicka. In 2005, Marla chastised Mattis, who had recently served in Anbar [...]

The New York Times has an editorial today about Omar Khadr that has quite the fizzle as a payoff. Leaving aside the very worthy call for the Office of the Secretary of Defense to reverse its inexplicable decision to ban four of my colleagues from Guantanamo Bay, the editorial urges the Obama administration to “press [...]

Sean Lee has a thoughtful and lengthy response to my defense of a liberal Zionist tradition (which, alas, was never the lengthy or robust post I promised). You should read the whole thing, especially because I’m not going to go point-by-point in reply. ”A liberal democracy is a democracy for all of its citizens equally,” he [...]