Exclusive: In his counterterrorism speech, President Obama ruminated about the moral and legal dilemma of balancing the safety of the American people against the use of targeted killings abroad. But Obama’s handwringing did not sit well with some critics including…
Tag: Barack Obama
Source of Anti-Government Extremism
Exclusive: The Right’s hostility to “guv-mint” is not new. It traces back to the South’s fears that any activism by the national government, whether building roads or providing disaster relief, would risk federal intervention against slavery and later against segregation, perhaps…
The Halfway ‘Obama Doctrine’
Exclusive: President Obama’s counterterrorism speech failed to quiet his critics on the Left who want an immediate end to the “war on terror” and those on the Right who demand more Bush-Cheney policies. Obama charted a middle course of gradually…
Charting a New Course on Terrorism
President Obama offered a comprehensive review of U.S. counterterrorism policies since 9/11, while vowing to ratchet down the violence and acknowledging harm done to America’s principles and image. Still, many details of his plans remain fuzzy and follow-through far from…
Obama Distorts ‘Just War’ Principles
In assessing the consequences of the decade-plus “war on terror,” President Obama sought to place his continued — albeit more targeted — use of violence within the context of just-war principles, stressing self-defense and proportionality, a point that religious ethicist Daniel…
Stuck in a Job at the End of the World
Very little sympathy is felt for Air Force personnel assigned to fire nuclear missiles that could end all life on the planet. But their grim, boring and existentially absurd job has eroded staff morale so much that their collapsing competence…
Does Woodward Know Watergate?
Exclusive: Republicans are hyping the flap over Benghazi talking points by calling it “worse than Watergate,” a false narrative that Bob Woodward has helped along by ignoring new evidence connecting Richard Nixon’s sabotage of Vietnam War peace talks in 1968 to…
Racism and the American Right
Exclusive: From the start of the Republic to today’s Republican ranting against Barack Obama, racism has been a central element of the American Right. But this ugly feature of U.S. history has often come concealed behind words praising traditions, liberty…
The Lost ‘Trifecta of Scandals’
From CNN to the Washington Post, the mainstream news media is abuzz about “the trifecta of scandals” besetting the Obama administration, a narrative that fails to assess the actual significance of the three “scandals.” They don’t measure up to the…
Missing the Bigger IRS ‘Scandal’
The Washington press corps is in hot pursuit of “Obama scandals,” stampeding officials into various rushes to judgment while missing the bigger scandals underlying the excitement du jour, such as the systematic abuse of federal tax-exempt status for secret political…