My cultural intake the past couple of weeks has provided me with a strong dose of polygamy. Courtesy of Netflix, I am about to finish season two of Big Love, the HBO drama about a forward-thinking polygamist family in Utah. On the literary side of the house, I just finished A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, which recounts the story of two Afghan women who find themselves married to the same brutal man. Hosseini’s novel is relentlessly critical of the violent sexism that passes...

Republicans may not complain much about President Obama’s strategy for Afghanistan, but there is a good amount fire now directed at the administration from the liberal side. Ibn Muqawama provides a solid round-up and critique: A common refrain I hear is that the Taliban has limited appeal, they’re fragmented, the Afghans don’t want them back, they’re not that strong, etc. The humanitarian camp seems to think that IGOs and NGOs can effectively conduct reconstruction without...

The editors of the NYT (of all people) say that Rep. Murtha is becoming a dangerous liability to the Democrats. An ongoing investigation has found that [Confessed bribe-taker Richard] Ianieri’s company hired the lobbying firm of Mr. Murtha’s brother Kit. The company soon was blessed with money from an $8.2 million defense earmark. The Capitol newspaper Roll Call reported last month that Representative Murtha, using a 2005 tsunami relief bill, took the $8.2 million from another contractor that...

The cover story in the current issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine recounts the remarkable progress toward equality and acceptance that gay students have made at Yale over the past thirty years. The same is true at every prominent college or university I’m familiar with. In the homes and workplaces of the American elite — roughly defined by a certain mix of education, wealth and social status — gays and lesbians have achieved something very close to normalcy, that is, a situation...

McNamara eventually apologized for Vietnam. It took him 28 years. How long before we hear from Rumsfeld? That’s the question posed by Bradley Graham, author of a new book about the previous SecDef. It’s actually a pretty one-sided question, which could easily be met with one-sided answers such “Rumsfeld will apologize right after Obama apologizes for opposing the surge” or “Rumsfeld will apologize as soon as the people of Iraq ask for him to put Saddam back in charge.” In...

The Sunday Times ran a front-page story with the headline Obama Delivers A Call For Change To A Rapt Africa. The lengthy article describes how Obama “symbolize[s] a new political era.” But perhaps Africa wants continuity more than it does change? If you read all the way to the end of the NYT story, this is what you’ll learn: [Mr. Obama's] approach follows that of Mr. Bush, who was widely credited with doing more for Africa than any previous president. Like Mr. Obama, Mr. Bush...

Like Dorian and Kathy, I’m fascinated by the story of a secret counterror program hidden from Congress by the CIA. When the NYT first reported the story, a big part of the splash was the suggestion that Dick Cheney gave “direct orders” to hide the program from Congress. Yet the WaPo has clearly chosen to downplay that aspect of the story. The article in the Post doesn’t mention Cheney until its fifth paragraph, which reports, The New York Times, on its Web site, reported...

The experts’ views are diametrically opposed. As far as I can tell, there is no partisan element to this disagreement. In Foreign Affairs [subscription only], Fotini Christia and Michael Semple write: The idea that large groups of armed men bent on killing Americans and other Westerners can be persuaded to change sides may seem fanciful at first. But it is not — at least not in Afghanistan. After continuing uninterrupted for more than 30 years, war in Afghanistan has developed its own...

That’s what Ibn Muqawama has to say about Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban. On a related note, Ibn Muqawama adds, We really need to rethink our entire concept of airpower. I don’t think it lies in F-22s, but in the persistent presence and low-observability offered by the next generation of unmanned and relatively inexpensive drones, operating from longer ranges with a wider variety of weaponry and strike capabilities. That’s the real future, not our efforts to...

If you thought five books was a lot to review, try seven. Princeton historian Sean Wilentz takes on that challenge in a cover story for The New Republic. Wilentz begins by recounting a crude remark about “mulatters” (i.e. mulattos) that Lincoln made while stumping for Gen. Winfield Scott, his party’s presidential candidate in 1952. Wilentz explains, My point in re-telling this story is not to try, yet again, to debunk Lincoln’s reputation for probity and sagacity, and...

John L. O’Sullivan reviews five (count’em, five) new books about Baroness Thatcher. O’Sullivan himself was an adviser to Thatcher and helped with her memoirs. This point jumped out at me: Owen Harries theorized some years ago that Thatcher was seen by many people around the world, foes as well as friends, as being more important than Reagan in spreading the free market revolution, just as Reagan was more important in winning the Cold War. She had successfully transformed a far...

Chris Brose responds to criticism of his question, How good should we feel about a U.S.-Russia relationship where we can make progress on many issues of questionable importance while we disagree over most of the important stuff? The “issues of questionable importance” to which Chris refers are the extension of the START regime for nuclear arms reduction and the opening of a Russian air corridor for supplies to Afghanistan. In his criticism of Chris’ initial post, Patrick Barry...

Dismayed realist Andrew Bacevich starts his column in the LA Times by arguing the British should’ve accepted a compromise with Kaiser Wilhelm instead of fighting to win. Their reward for victory was opening the door to Hitler, Stalin and World War II. Or as Bacevich puts it, “seeds of totalitarianism had been planted, producing in their maturity an even more horrendous war.” With that kind of logic, you can pretty much argue that the British should’ve let the Germans take...

Yesterday, the WSJ ran a column co-authored by Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy. I’m guessing that neither 10 Downing St. nor the Elysee was terribly glad to discover that the Journal buried their column at the bottom of a page, without even including one of those charming pencil portraits of either the French president or the British prime minister. More importantly, the Journal also chose to run the Sarkozy-Brown column under the headline “Oil Prices Need Government Supervision,”...

But I’ll recommend one thing – before digging in to the avalanche of commentary, read all of Palin’s own explanation of why she’s stepping down. Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

(Part one is here.) Michael Goldfarb has an interesting suggestion: Why not allow gay servicemembers to serve openly in roles that wouldn’t threaten unit cohesion? After all, women are allowed to serve in some roles but not in others. Why not extend that logic to gays and lesbians? Michael writes: It’s madness for the service to discharge gay translators and the like. But the military leadership still seems to believe that the core of the policy must be preserved in order to maintain...

Courtesy of The Weekly Standard: The MSM has one standard for covering captured American journalists and another for captured American soliders. The New York Times has one standard for covering the current president’s town-hall meetings and another standard for his predecessor’s “town hall” meetings. But what you really wanted to know is that Gwyneth Paltrow has one standard for loving America and another for loving Europe. Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

With US support, the Organization of American States has threatened to expel Honduras. The Pentagon has cut off military ties. Our Secretary of State wants the actions of the Honduran government to be “condemned by all”. Kathy describes this situation as one of regional democracy at work. Personally, I am more inclined to James Kirchick’s view that it is extremely strange for real democratic governments to be lining up so passionately behind Manuel Zelaya, a disciple of Hugo...

This week, both the editorial columns in both the New Republic and the New Yorker are demanding that Barack Obama demonstrate his commitment to gay rights by revoking “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” so that gay men and women can serve openly in the US military. The editors at both publications seem to have forgotten the conventional wisdom of just a few months ago: Don’t make the same mistake that Clinton did in his first hundred days; Don’t define yourself by taking sides...

Hooman Majd in TNR: One Mousavi campaign manager was asked about the brutality of [the regime], way back, when [Mousavi] was prime minister in the 1980s. The staffer answered, “We were all Ahmadinejads then.” After 6/12, we Iranians are all Mousavis now, even those who voted for Ahmadinejad, whether they know it yet or not. Cross-posted at Conventional Folly

Andrew Stuttaford remembers the good old days when liberals defended the president’s critics from accusations of deficient patriotism, or even treason. Normally, I wouldn’t call out Paul Krugman twice in one day, but this exception is worth it. Krugman writes, As I watched the deniers [who voted against the Waxman-Markey climate change bill] make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet. Surely the good Prof. Krugman...

This post is addressed only to those readers who earn less than $250,000 per year. George Stephanopoulos was doing his best yesterday morning to figure out if President Obama really meant it when he promised not to raise taxes on you. Steph put the question to David Axelrod: STEPHANOPOULOS: I want to show our viewers something the president said during the campaign back in September. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) OBAMA: I can make a firm pledge: Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will...

I’d like to complicate the way that we’re talking about what is democratic and what’s a coup. So far, one side has been saying that if the Honduran military gets rid of the president, it’s bad, it’s undemocratic and it’s a coup. The other says that if the military is doing the right thing, it isn’t a coup. Instead of seeing this as either/or, I’d prefer to think in terms of a spectrum of legitimacy that has a gray center in between the white pole...

On ABC, Paul Krugman effectively summed up what many liberals are saying about Sanford-gate: If a liberal sees somebody who talks about moral values and does something like this, and they call it hypocrisy. A conservative looks at it and says, well, but at least he stands up for moral values. As Krugman’s tone of voice made very clear, his comment about conservatives was meant to be derisive. Back when I was in college, I felt the same way. We all know politicians will sleep around. So in...

HEY IRAQ, HOW’S THAT WITHDRAWAL GOING? Peter Feaver, formerly of the NSC, has some sharp analysis over at Shadow Government, including an improbable comparison of Hillary Clinton to Dick Cheney: These [recent] attacks may simply be what Secretary Clinton has called “a signal that the rejectionists fear Iraq is going in the right direction.” This sounds eerily like the much-derided claim by Vice President Cheney that similar attacks back in 2006 were a sign of “desperation”...