One of the most enduring moments of the 9/11 Commission hearings came when Condoleezza Rice casually recalled the now infamous August 6, 2001 presidential daily brief (PDB). "I believe," she said, "the title was, 'Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.'" Now almost exactly seven years later, Secretary of State Rice seems to […]
Category: Foreign Policy
In ways large and small, CBS News continues to offer John McCain's presidential campaign a helping hand. Less than a month after Katie Couric edited out McCain's shocking confusion over the timeline of the surge in Iraq, CBS News on Monday featured Robert Kagan, not identified as McCain foreign policy adviser, as its lone analyst […]
The announcement this morning that Russia will halt its military operations in Georgia will almost certainly be followed by another. No doubt, the McCain campaign and its conservative amen corner will claim that John McCain's tough talk is responsible for it. As with the July release of Colombian hostages and the recent dip in oil […]
As the conflict over the breakaway region of South Ossetia threatens to explode into all-out war between Georgia and Russia, Republican presidential nominee John McCain weighed in. "What's most critical now," McCain said, "is to avoid further confrontation between Russian and Georgian military forces." But given his confused and contradictory statements about expelling Russia from […]
Continuing to play the victim at the hands of the American media that love him, on Friday John McCain bashed both Barack Obama and the press. Appropriating Lance Armstrong's cancer awareness event in Columbus, McCain slammed the "throng of adoring fans" who greeted Obama in Paris. Sadly for McCain, French President Nicolas Sarkozy's glowing reception […]
That the Republican water carrier and New York Times columnist David Brooks would blast Barack Obama's Berlin speech was utterly predictable. (Kevin Drum even predicted the title of the piece, "Playing Innocent Abroad.") To be sure, by slandering Obama's call to "remake the world" with epithets including "saccharine," "treacle," and "Disney," Brooks did not disappoint. […]
On Tuesday, Time columnist Joe Klein labeled as "shockingly unpresidential" John McCain's accusation that Barack Obama "would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign." But in announcing "I can't remember a more scurrilous statement by a major party candidate," Klein spoke a day too soon. As it turns out, McCain would […]
It's been a very busy week for war crimes and war criminals. In some good news for the cause of justice and the upholding of international law, Bosnian Serb mass murder Radavan Karadzic was finally captured in Belgrade, just days after the International Criminal Court charged Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir with crimes against humanity in […]
Back in the 1980's and 1990's, millions of American children learned the basics of global geography with the software and later TV show, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? As his latest geographic blunder suggests - this time regarding the "Iraq/Pakistan border" - John McCain would have done well to tune in to the […]
On Thursday, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama will cap his European tour with an address in Berlin to an audience whose numbers may approach one million. But while the media will focus on Obama's call to strengthen America's trans-Atlantic alliance with France and Germany, lost no doubt will be John McCain's essential role in undermining […]