As Iran becomes a political football in Campaign 2012 with President Obama and Mitt Romney competing to kick it the hardest and farthest there is talk about Iran’s failure to meet its “international obligations” but little thought about what that means,…
Category: Politics
The Twin Existential Threats
The twin existential threats of nuclear weapons and global warming may work together to end life on Earth because climate dislocations will make desperate national confrontations more likely. But the world’s politicians are doing little about either, writes Robert Dodge.
Punishing Iran, Endlessly
With U.S. politics locked in a competitive “tough-guy-ism” as Republicans and Democrats up the ante on punishing Iran to avoid being deemed “weak” or insufficiently “pro-Israel” no one seems to notice that the tactics are fast becoming an end in themselves,…
The Threat from the Right
The United States finds itself facing an extraordinary political development with the rise of a far-right Tea Party movement that has largely taken over one of the country’s two major political parties, the Republicans. That development makes Election 2012 especially…
Losing a Voice of Wit and Intellect
The death of Gore Vidal on Tuesday at the age of 86 marked an end of an era, a time when men and women of wit and intellect fenced in public debate, now replaced by the loud voices of prideful…
Romney’s Revolutionary War Bungle
Exclusive: Mitt Romney tries to impress the Tea Partiers with his love of the Founders, but the ex-Massachusetts governor writes that the Revolution began in April 1775 with the British capturing Boston by sea, rather than the Minutemen driving the…
More on ‘Vanity of Perfectionism’
Exclusive: Americans are faced with a tough choice this fall: to stick with Barack Obama despite his faults, switch to Mitt Romney who is surrounded by neocons and trickle-down economists, or essentially boycott the process by voting for a third party or…
Iran Rebuffed on Regional Stability
Toeing the neocon line, Mitt Romney denounced Iran as the world’s “most destabilizing nation” despite polls in the Middle East putting Israel and the United States at the top of that list, as Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett note at…
Why Romney Insulted the Palestinians
Exclusive: A favorite neocon theme is that the superiority of Western culture explains the world’s wealth disparities, not the accident of natural resources and the aggressive use of military force. Mitt Romney echoed those neocon sentiments in touting Israel and…
Romney’s Clueless Remark on Palestine
Republican Mitt Romney pandered to a right-wing pro-Israeli audience by claiming Israel’s economic success, relative to the widespread poverty in Palestine, reflected superior cultural values and possibly divine preference, a statement that ignored the impact of the longtime occupation, says…