For those of you who believe our mission in Afghanistan is a war of futility as I do then this article in today’s Washington Post reaffirms that notion. As you will learn, Matthew Hoh is no peacenik rabblerouser but a seasoned combat Marine, civil engineer and member of an elite Foreign Service team whose resignation shocked the top civilian foreign policy leaders in the Obama administration. “I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’...

Um, NOT.  The strategy is to “marginalize [the administration's] most powerful critics.”

Although I was born and brought up in Delhi, India’s capital city, I now find it a challenge to live there for more than a fortnight at a stretch. Sam Miller, a former BBC journalist who has made Delhi his home since 2002, quite succinctly describes the city as ‘India’s dreamtown — and its purgatory.’ Sam Miller’s recent book Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity vividly captures the fascinating past, the generally unexplored sites, the smelly underbelly, and the strange magnetic...

In an effort to fan the flames of the healthy comment thread going at this morning’s Michael Phelps post, here, a retread that’s as true now as it was when I first posted it. The director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and one of the U.S.’s leading addiction researchers, Nora Volkow [she's also Leon Trotsky's great-granddaughter], was interviewed on Fresh Air the other day a couple years ago. She says studies show that marijuana is no gateway drug: GROSS: So, you know, a lot...

“Wasilla: The Meth Capital Of Alaska.” That’s the title of a post by Andrew Sullivan, who quotes an article from the Juneau Empire. Now, it this fair game? Is this an issue for the presidential race? Yes, in a way. Let me explain. Obama is from Chicago (if not originally), and Chicago obviously has its problems, but he hasn’t romanticized or mythologized Chicago the way Palin has her hometown. Indeed, Obama has spent much of his life, including as a community organizer, working...

Barack Obama started out running as a race-neutral candidate, but Jeremiah Wright and the “white working class demographic” made the issue inescapable, and the presidential campaign will benefit from having it out in the open. At a fund-raiser this weekend, he previewed the underbelly of the Republican attacks to come: “We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run,” Obama told supporters. “They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid...

The tactic is now well tested: A Hillary Clinton surrogate spouts something over the top and typically race laced about Barack Obama, Clinton looks the other way for a few days while the surrogate’s snark percolates in the media, and then when enough mud has stuck, she belatedly issues a statement of regret, repudiation and rejection. And so it was yet again with L’affaire Ferraro. In a campaign when the news keeps coming 24/7, nearly a week transpired from the time that Geraldine Ferraro...

You can see the headline at Fox News, can’t you? Martial theme music, elaborate graphic, perhaps a mushroom cloud emerging from an about-to-be-carved turkey, an all-American family looking on in horror, white to the core, manifest destiny come undone, exposed at last, the pioneers of American imperialism obliterated by the revisionist blamers. Wait… what? Yes, there is war here, there, and everywhere on the American cultural landscape — and it ain’t just Iraq and Afghanistan....

My post earlier this month on the “vicious underbelly of the blogosphere” rearing its ugly head in the Graeme Frost affair reverberated far and wide, including a reference in a Washington Post op-ed column and in this article in NRC Handelsblad, a Dutch newspaper. (Sorry, no link available.) NRC Reporter Tom Jan Meuss refers to The Moderate Voice as “a weblog that is looking for common ground.” I could not have said it better.

The Frosts Outside & Inside Semi-Palatial Home The vicious underbelly of the blogosphere is in full-howl display over the story of Graeme Frost, the 12-year-old who gave a Democratic Party radio rebuttal to President Bush’s veto of a bill to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program that had passed Congress with broad bipartisan support. Before you could say “Michelle Malkin,” conservative and right-wing bloggers and talk-show blatherers were dumping all...