Now that a Guatemalan court has convicted General Erfrain Rios Montt of “genocide” maybe we can better come to terms with the history of the early 1980s when the Reagan Administration was determined to vanquish communism in Central America. We should recall that General Montt was an ally in what President Reagan characterized as...
So we’ve reached the 10th anniversary of President George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” spectacle, the nadir of any U.S. presidency since the time Richard Nixon made his getaway in a helicopter from the White House lawn. The aircraft carrier stunt was a Karl Rove P.R. production designed to provide images for Bush’s 2004 re-election...
Whenever David Brooks and Thomas Friedman begin singing from the same hymnal you can bet the next public policy catastrophe is knocking at the door. This time around they’ve become boosters for online college courses as a panacea to cure the ills afflicting public colleges and universities. Brooks and Friedman’s new interest in higher...
Apologists for the war of aggression against Iraq that President George W. Bush launched ten years ago claim the United Nations and various European nations’ intelligence services “believed” Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction.” We constantly hear from former Bush officials that “everybody got it wrong” on Iraq when it came to whether or...
As sure as the sun rises in the East we can count on seeing a host of North America’s most prominent “conservatives” and right-wingers hyperventilate in the days ahead about what a horrible “friend of Castro” Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was. There will be obituaries that refer to Chavez as a “communist” or a...
It’s a welcome step to see President Obama appoint two Vietnam veterans to serve as Secretaries of State and Defense. John Kerry and Chuck Hagel are two people who have experienced war directly and have voiced publicly their deep ambivalence about war. Too bad in 2002 neither of them were willing to risk their...