christopher_hallam

Stuart Taylor, fresh off trashing Sonia Sotomayor, now turns his attention to defending torture: Of course, when all is said and done, there is little doubt that some CIA detainees were tortured. This is a stain on our nation’s honor that should never be repeated. But the responsibility was so widely diffused, across such a […]

One of the things that stuck out to me about the Post story I wrote about earlier was this quote from an anonymous “U.S. Official”: “Once the harsher techniques were used on [detainees], they could be viewed as having done their duty to Islam or their cause, and their religious principles would ask no more […]

A few weeks ago, Obama counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan gave a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies that was basically a liberal counterterrorism manifesto. Brennan thoughtfully articulated the Obama strategy for both fighting Al Qaeda and winning hearts and minds in the Muslim world, declaring an end to the Bush administration’s […]

So a few weeks ago a Washington Post reporter named Ian Shapira who had written an entertaining trend story got mad because Gawker went ahead and excerpted the best pieces of his work leaving little reason to click through to the story itself. It’s understandable why the reporter was upset, he felt like he was […]

Lee Atwater, 1981: You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about […]

I read Bob Somerby every day. I don’t always agree with him, but I think he often has something interesting or important to say. But today I was really struck by this: In short, we liberals have done a miserable job over the past fifteen years. But we remain very good at one thing; we’re […]

I caught a glimpse of Dana Milbank in Mohammed Jawad‘s hearing yesterday over at the D.C. Circuit Court, and I was relieved to see he decided not to make a joke out of a young teenager being imprisoned for seven years on information that was gathered from torturing him. Instead, Milbank chose to write about […]

“I think he’s a racial opportunist…He shouldn’t shoot his mouth off.” — Michelle Malkin on Barack Obama Most of us have made comments we regret. Few of us have made the case for racism as public policy and then gone on to decrying the “racial opportunism” of others. — A. Serwer

Via Matthew Yglesias, Republicans in the House staged a procedural delay on a vote in order to make time for a beach party fundraiser for House GOP leader John Boehner: I bet it wasn’t as exciting as the Britney Spears concert Eric Cantor attended earlier in the year. — A. Serwer

I hope John McWhorter doesn’t mind if I borrow liberally from his post responding to the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr.–which really deserves to be read in its entirety. I do however, want to reproduce the anecdote McWhorter recounts at the end here: I hadn’t realized that the car was a police car, and […]