Admiral
Clear (Conservative) Thinking On “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”
Max Boot is among the conservative columnists I esteem the most. One reason is that he has to be more than a bit brave because the right is not ordinarily cordial to those who dissent on its keystone issues. Of course, he is not the only conservative to be sensible on gay matters. Still... In his latest blog post on ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” Boot points us to a previous entry that provoked considerable consternation among those who usually claim to want the government out of our private lives.
Adm. Mullen vs Sen. Levin
A friend following Joint Chiefs chairman Mike Mullen's testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee sends over this exchange between Mullen and John McCain, who asked the general about Carl Levin's proposal to prioritize training of Afghan security forces over U.S.
Gates and Mullen vs. George Will
Money quotes from a Pentagon presser this afternoon with the Defense Secretary and Joint Chiefs chairman: “The notion that you can conduct a purely kind of counterterrorist campaign and do it from a distance simply does not accord with reality,” Mr. Gates said, adding that successful methods required cooperation with local law enforcement, the use of internal security and intelligence. Admiral Mullen added: “There’s no way to defeat al Qaeda with just that approach.”
Richard Clarke Assesses Obama's Intel Team
Counterterrorism expert John O. Brennan was reportedly Obama's original choice for director of the CIA, but he withdrew from consideration after complaints about his past involvement in Bush-era interrogation programs. Now, Obama has appointed Brennan as deputy national security adviser for homeland security--a White House position best described as "counter-terrorism czar"--and has selected Leon Panetta to head the CIA, where he will be subordinate to the Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair. To get some perspective on these appointments, I contacted Richard A.
Being and Laziness
Oblomov By Ivan Goncharov Translated by Stephen Pearl (Bunim & Banigan, 443 pp., $45) I. Anyone with a claim to literacy is familiar with the names of Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky, and can cite some of the titles of their most famous works. But Goncharov and his novel Oblomov, of which a new translation, a snappily colloquial and readable one, has just been published—who ever heard of them? Well, Beckett for one, who was told to read Oblomov by his mistress Peggy Guggenheim, and soon signed some of his letters to her with this cognomen.
They All Laughed at Christopher Columbus
I Excuse me for noticing, but haven't we been commemorating Columbus's quincentennial in the wrong year? I know that dates and math aren't America's strong suit right now, but it doesn't take advanced calculus to figure that 1492 plus 500 equals 1992. What is it about Columbus that makes for botched commemoration? The Quatercentennial Columbian Exposition opened a year late, in 1893, delayed by the enormous scale of the show and by the protesting groups (yes, even then) who saw themselves more as victims than as beneficiaries of 1492.
