Jackson Diehl: [After months of deliberation in 2006], no one accused George W. Bush of dithering. So why does Barack Obama keep hearing the taunt as he deliberates about Afghanistan — and why do even some who sympathize with his dilemma find it hard to shake the feeling that this commander in chief lacks resolve? One part of the answer is easy: Bush was renowned for summoning plenty of resolve, and not enough critical thinking. No one questioned that Bush’s heart was in his bid for...

Andrew Sullivan informs his readers that he is taking a brief pause to pore over Sarah Palin’s new book: Since the Dish has tried to be rigorous and careful in analyzing Palin’s unhinged grip on reality from the very beginning – specifically her fantastic story of her fifth pregnancy – we feel it’s vital that we grapple with this new data as fairly and as rigorously as possible. That takes time to get right. And it is so complicated we simply cannot focus on anything...

On Monday, Think Progress trashed liberal pundit Mark Shields for allegedly saying, with regard to Obama’s patience on Afghanistan, [It] makes me nostalgic for those days when we had a manly man in the White House who could say, “Let’s kick some tail and ask questions afterwards” you know? That’s what we really need instead of any reflection. Kevin Drum read TP’s post and seconded the motion, albeit with more circumspection and less vitriol. But to his credit, Kevin read the...

From the Weekly Standard: Republicans need to point out that Obama’s economic policies aren’t working. But they need to resist appearing to relish bad news for the country on Obama’s watch. When rising unemployment numbers come out, there is occasionally an unseemly sense of celebration in the emails that come from various GOP offices. More in sorrow than in joy, more in confirmation than in vindication–that should be the Republican mood as the news of Obama’s failures,...

A “dog warning card” arrived with my mail today. Thanks to a New Jersey branch of the National Association of Letter Carriers, you can see the form online. The form provides invaluable advice, such as “Do not deliver mail if you feel endangered by an animal.” For a better understanding of the threats faced by America’s letter carriers, I recommend the following passage from The Postal Employee’s Guide to Safety (August 2006 edition), Section IX D: Animals and...

Monday NY Times, Page 1: Every time Mr. Obama declares that the United States will not have an “open-ended” military commitment in Afghanistan, he fuels a second concern of the powerful Pakistani military and intelligence establishment, which believes the United States commitment is fleeting. It is a concern that some of them say justifies Pakistan’s continuing ties to the militants who fight American troops in Afghanistan. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton appeared to fuel this concern...

“Having a ham sandwich on the afternoon of Yom Kippur doesn’t make you less Jewish,” Rabbi Yitzchak Schochet, chairman of the Rabbinical Council of the United Synagogue, said recently. I feel like this may be a license for mis-behavior. (If you’re interested in the context of Rabbi Schochet’s remark, click here.) Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

No, that’s not a serious prediction. My real point is about Republicans getting too excited about thrashing the Democrats in 2010. Sure, that’s what I’d like to see. But remember what happened during Reagan’s first term? That precedent has been on my mind, so I was glad to see that Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts were thinking along the same lines. Here’s their exchange from Sunday morning: SAM DONALDSON: …[Reagan's] popularity went down to 37 percent, at...

Kevin Drum praises Jonah Goldberg for resisting the impulse to call Nidal Malik Hasan a terrorist. A traitor? A murderer? Sure. But not a terrorist. The strange thing is that liberals assume they should be against labeling Hasan a terrorist and conservatives assume they should be for it. That makes a certain amount of sense. Liberals fear exaggerated threats. Conservatives fear threats that are ignored. But wouldn’t the Afghanistan doves want Hasan to be a terrorist? Then they can say...

If you wait 15 years, people will say anything. Sunday morning on ABC, Donna Brazile explained why 2010 won’t be another 1994: Well, first of all, I don’t think it’s ‘94, because in ‘94, we also had some potential disastrous that happened that caused Democrats to lose so many seats. First of all, we had a great deal of retirements in the Congress, we had the bank scandal, the post office scandal… We also had a Republican Party that had ideas. We had a Republican...

Natalie Portman is giving up eggs and milk. She writes on HuffPo: Jonathan Safran Foer’s book Eating Animals changed me from a twenty-year vegetarian to a vegan activist. I’ve always been shy about being critical of others’ choices because I hate when people do that to me. I’m often interrogated about being vegetarian (e.g., “What if you find out that carrots feel pain, too? Then what’ll you eat?”). With that kind of radical anti-pain attitude, the next...

I’m not an aggressive consumer of financial journalism, so it has to be something of a coincidence that I’ve come across three separate items that chronicle the dark predictions of three separate men who warned of an impending financial crisis. The first two are discussed below. The third is Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. The Black Swan was published in 2007 and written in the preceding years. Here are a few quotes that jumped...

In the mid-1990’s, Yale economist Robert Shiller predicted the dot-com bubble would burst. In 2005, Shiller predicted the housing bubble would burst. Why? In the wake of the dot-com crash, which helped make Shiller a public figure, Americans turned their financial attention from stocks to real estate. House prices were rising rapidly, and people had begun to see real estate as a can’t-miss investment. Shiller wanted to know what history might say about that, but he realized that data...

The weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal profiled John Paulson, whose firm made $15 billion by systematically betting against the value of American homes. Paulson himself took home $4 billion. How’d he do it? Research. Grasping for new ideas, [Paulson researcher Paolo] Pellegrini added a “trend line” that clearly illustrated how much prices had surged lately. He then performed a “regression analysis” to smooth the ups and downs. The answer was in front of him:...

The vote is in. Tom Friedman says no more troops for Afghanistan. Why? When I think back on all the moments of progress in that part of the world — all the times when a key player in the Middle East actually did something that put a smile on my face — all of them have one thing in common: America had nothing to do with it. America helped build out what they started, but the breakthrough didn’t start with us. We can fan the flames, but the parties themselves have to light the fires of moderation....

Tom Friedman says don’t send more troops to Afghanistan, because there are no positive trends to build on, like the Anbar Awakening before the surge in Iraq. Yet back in 2007, Friedman condemned the surge precisely because there was no progress to build on: January 3, 2007 Now President Bush wants a “surge” of more U.S. troops to Baghdad, in one last attempt to bring order. Whenever I hear this surge idea, I think of a couple who recently got married but the marriage was never very solid....

David Adams commanded a US advisory team in the Afghan province of Khost. Ann Marlowe reported from Afghanistan. They write, From the beginning of 2007 to March 2008, the 82nd Airborne Division’s strategy in Khost proved that 250 paratroopers could secure a province of a million people in the Pashtun belt. The key to success in Khost—which shares a 184 kilometer-long border with Pakistan’s lawless Federally Administered Tribal Areas—was working within the Afghan system. By partnering...

There’s plenty of material out there, but Steve Biddle’s article in TNR [subscription only] stands head and shouders above the rest. Even if you’re against more troops, you should test your logic against Biddle. For example, NYT columnist Nick Kristof wrote: The United States was born of our ancestors’ nationalistic resentment of a foreign power whose troops we saw as occupiers, not protectors. The British never fathomed our basic grievance — this was our land, not theirs!...

Yesterday, I was flipping through the Brooks Brothers fall catalogue. The catalog tells a story, in which all the models are part of one multi-generational (super-rich, super-WASPy) family. Except for the two black models. These two — one man and woman — seem to be married to each another (see page 112, for example). Perhaps they fell in love because of their shared passion for dressing up like WASPs (which I completely approve of, as a Brooks-loving semite myself.) But seriously,...

Michael Goldfarb is not interested in constructive criticism of J Street. What Mike wants is to expose J Street as a fringe, left-wing activist group that only pretends to be pro-Israel to advance it’s relativist agenda. So call Mike partisan, but don’t forget that partisan critics often make substantive points, regardless of their intentions. And Mike is both very sharp and very entertaining, so it’s worth reading his posts, including his three on-site reports from J Street’s...

This evening (Wed) at 6:30pm, I’ll be part of a panel discussion on the topic of “Afghanistan: Should We Stay Or Should We Go?” Details here. I assure you, if you live in Washington, there is nothing more intellectually enriching you can do tomorrow night other than listen to me. (Assuming you have a DVR and don’t have to miss a brand new episode of So You Think You Can Dance.) So, I have ten minutes to say something useful tomorrow night. My plan is to identify five critical...

Yes, you heard me right. Here’s what Kerry had to say on CBS about relying on counterterrorism instead of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan: SENATOR JOHN KERRY: That’s correct. I– I– I do not believe that a counterterrorism strategy all by itself without a sufficient level of counterinsurgency will work because if you don’t have a presence on the ground that’s effective, it– it’s almost impossible to collect the kind of intelligence that you need to...

Steve Benen has a very different opinion from my own. So what if some racist statements were falsely attributed to Rush? He’s said plenty of real racist things, too. Steve provides this list, via TAPPED, Limbaugh’s record of racist commentary…includes not only a habit of comparing black athletes to gang members but a general hostility toward black people. Limbaugh only recently suggested that having a black president encouraged black children to beat up white children —...

My old friend Dara Horn has a great column in the WSJ. She writes, Americans crave authenticity, culinary and otherwise. But most of what we consider authentic is just an earlier generation’s novelty. The Jewish delicatessen is a case in point. While cured meats are a European specialty, Mr. Sax points out that most Jews in Eastern Europe were too poor to afford red meat; pastrami got its start as a way of curing fatty poultry. Sandwiches on rye, equally alien, were an accommodation for the...

As I’ve said before, I don’t listen to Rush Limbaugh or any other conservative talk-show hosts. Nothing I know about Rush & Co. has inspired any particular respect or fondness on my part. Yet I remain deeply suspicious of those who rely on criticism of Rush & Co. to advertise their own alleged commitment to civility, facts and the reality-based community. This brings us, of course, to the recent admissions by CNN, the HuffPo and ThinkProgress that all of them falsely attributed...