When it comes to the war on drugs, here are two awfully good reasons not to be a supply-sider:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The CIA obstructed inquiries into its role in the shooting down of an aircraft carrying a family of U.S. missionaries in Peru in 2001, the agency’s inspector general has concluded.
The inspector-general’s report said a CIA-backed [...]

Polansky the Younger has a nice one up on the front page today. Here’s a taste:
Of course, suggesting that the neocons will somehow manage to pervert our descendants’ understanding of the present is pointless, insofar as the consensus of our children’s children is unlikely to be right in the first place. Most people are poorly [...]

While perusing Sonny’s fine post and the links therein to the Kmiec-Douthat dustup, I also chanced upon Kmiec’s counter-response to Douthat’s biting takedown. It’s worth a quick read, if only to see exactly what pseudo-magnanimity sounds like. There are plenty of examples, but here’s a taste:
Genuine love and affection do not reside on the Internet, [...]

My colleague Amr Hamzawy has a partial post-mortem on Bush administration Middle East policy in Al-Ahram:
After two Bush administrations, which sought to redraw the map of the Middle East in order to eliminate or marginalise forces antagonistic to its policies in the region, Washington is incapable of controlling conflicts in Lebanon, in Palestine between the [...]

There are times when the good folks at the American Conservative act as useful reminders to heed the wisdom contained in Washington’s farewell address:
The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of [...]

Jacob makes some fair points again in the comments below. The Right has always had and, godwilling, always will have the advantage over the Left in the freedom to dissent department (or at least that’s what my cognitive bias asserts). Ramesh Ponnuru, for example, recently called Fukuyama the “most honorable and serious” of the Obamacons—pace [...]

I think Dan and pmm have fair points about Palin’s role in contributing to McCain’s unpopularity at this point, but in the end, I think Palin is mostly a distraction. If this election were a referendum on experience, Obama himself would be in trouble. What’s really at issue is judgment. Looking at polls on Iraq, [...]

Down in the comments of my own splenetic expression of annoyance with the conservative movement, pmm gives us some good things to think about, but I’ll probably be addressing some of his points in a post later on down the line. For the moment, I want to say something about Jacob’s comment about the spectacle [...]

Ta-nehisi Coates has figured it out:
No one has conspired to deprive us of power over the past few decades. The American people aren’t stupid. We’ve sucked at articulating our message. If you have any interest in a more progressive country, we need to be honest. At the presidential level, at least, conservatives have hammered us. [...]

So once again, in Sonny’s view, there’s no difference between imperfect cooperation and no cooperation at all. Some might say we should think a few steps ahead before shaving our heads and going straight for our guns every time we run into a problem. As Stephen Van Evera wrote in the inaugural issue of the MIT [...]

Yes, there are reasons not to do things like this:
DAMASCUS, Syria – Syria threatened Wednesday to cut off security cooperation along the Iraqi border if there are more American raids on Syrian territory, and the U.S. Embassy announced it would close Thursday because of a mass rally called to protest a deadly weekend commando attack.
Assuming [...]

There’s a difference between bad and worse. To me, Sonny’s historical perspective reads like: Gaza was a hellhole, anyway, so why not bring Hamas to power? The Iranians have been trying to build nukes for 30 years, so why not invade Iraq and provide them an object lesson in why they need one sooner rather [...]

I’d like to belabor this, at least a little, because the difference in our conceptions of how to protect our people is the difference between a foreign policy that works and a foreign policy in which we continue creating more problems than we can solve.
In the past few years, the idea that we can take [...]

Sonny’s right about the applications of plausible deniability in the war on terrorism. The trouble is that “plausible” part.  It’s one thing when a senior Syrian security official gets stabbed in a freak mugging in the capital. Another when a helicopter air assault comes from inside Iraq. At that point, it’s pretty useless for the U.S. [...]

I like Daniel Larison’s comparison of the present-day Republican party to the Tories since Tony Blair’s first victory, because they seem similarly out of touch with what’s going on in their country. However, I would say that Republican congressmen, whatever their foibles, are less likely to end up like this guy (link not for the [...]

Jacob Weisberg has an amusingly nasty hatchet job in Slate heralding the latest financial crisis and ensuing federal bailout as the death of libertarianism. His last lines are particularly funny and biting:
The best thing you can say about libertarians is that because their views derive from abstract theory, they tend to be highly principled and [...]

Where was this Colin Powell in February 2003? First things first: on foreign policy, and the message an Obama presidency would send about what an extraordinary and resilient country the United States is, I agree with the endorsement Powell delivered this morning on Meet the Press.
That said, I’ve lost some respect for him. [...]

Paul Volcker says the U.S. economy is in a recession, that this financial crisis is unlike any of the many others he’s witnessed, and that large-scale government intervention is in order.

Barney Frank and fellow Congressional Democrats think the federal government should spend more money in the interest of economic recovery, and it looks like Republicans do, too.

Oh, and there’s also the fact that for the first time in a decade, the President is talking about the G7 instead of the G8.  Any financial bailout would no doubt be largely a U.S.-U.K. endeavor, with only symbolic involvement from the other industrial powers, but this is a gratuitous kick in the groin to [...]