American hostages have been brutally murdered by terrorists in the Middle East. Other Western captives may suffer the same fate at the hands of the Islamic State. In response, President Obama's opponents are doing what they always do when the going gets tough for the United States. In "What Would Reagan Do," CNN Crossfire host […]

The disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq wasn't just an American war of choice. As much as anything else, it was a war of talking points. Designed, as President Bush once explained, to "catapult the propaganda," the tried and untrue sound bites about "the smoking gun that could come in the form of mushroom cloud," about […]

"Israel has no better friend than the U.S.," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proclaimed to a joint session of Congress in 2011, "and the U.S. has no better friend than Israel." As recent events have once again confirmed, Bibi is only half-right. As the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, Netanyahu's government not only worked around the […]

Politico practices journalism in much the same way that bricks float.* For years, its mission to "win the morning" has often come at the expense of the truth. But with Katie Glueck's piece on Iraq titled "Neocons to Obama: No Half-Measures," the publication Charles Pierce rightly mocks as "Tiger Beat on the Potomac" has reached […]

Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador to the United States, is a fixture on American television screens and op-ed pages. His defense of the Netanyahu government and its military campaign in Gaza is full throated. Just 8 days after proclaiming in the Washington Post that "to guarantee peace, this war must be given a chance," […]

In their controversial 2007 book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, authors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt proposed a dramatic change in American financial aid for Israel currently amounting to $3 billion annually. "It is time to treat Israel like a normal country," they argued, "and make U.S. aid conditional on an end to […]

Last week, the Pew Research Center released the largely predictable findings of a survey measuring how Americans feel about the nation's various religious faiths. While adherents unsurprisingly gave their co-religionists high marks, one factoid stood out. White evangelical Protestants love the Jews, giving them an impressive 69 on Pew's 100 degree thermometer. Alas, that love […]

With the body count growing daily in Gaza, the conservative commentariat has predictably circled the wagons around Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud government. "Rarely does international politics present a moment of such moral clarity," Charles Krauthammer declared this week and repeating Bibi's mantra about his Hamas enemies. "We're using missile defense to […]

The ugly picture in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories is rapidly getting uglier still. After the collapse of U.S. sponsored peace talks, the Netanyahu government quickly retaliated against the President Mahmoud Abbas' unity government with Hamas by announcing 1,500 new settlement units in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. This week, the slaughter of […]

On December 14, 2008, President George W. Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki signed the status of forces agreement (SOFA) under which American military forces would leave Iraq by the end of 2011. But at their press conference announcing the SOFA, an Iraqi journalist hurled his shoes at Bush's head, shouting "This is a […]