Sam Rosenfeld

PEE-WEE ARGUMENTS. Jonah Goldberg loooves hypocrisy arguments. It’s his very favorite thing. Get into an argument with Goldberg on a given substantive issue, and nine times out of ten he will turn it promptly into a discussion of how different liberal X made the same argument he was making on different topic Y � so […]

PRIZE WINNER? If ever anyone deserved to win something as a form of redemption, this man deserves this prize, for which he was nominated today. –Tom Schaller

OBAMA’S CHICAGO YEARS. It went live a bit late, so if you missed Mark‘s post from yesterday on Barack Obama‘s history as a community organizer, give it a read. This is a part of the guy’s career and life that I’ve never thought has gotten sufficient attention. –Sam Rosenfeld

ECONOMIC INEQUALITY BEGETS POLITICAL INEQUALITY. Brad Plumer has a good, straightforward piece on the subject over at TNR today. –Sam Rosenfeld

FINAL SACRIFICE. For all the talk in the ’90s about how Bill Clinton epitomized the self-absorption of the Baby Boomers, the current White House occupant has magnified Clinton’s failures by several orders of magnitude. All must be sacrificed to George W. Bush‘s whim, his need to be right, his desire to find now the affirmation […]

ARI FLEISCHER. Ari Fleischer was certainly the most damaging prosecution witness against Scooter Libby so far in Libby’s trial. Fleischer testified that on July 7, 2003 Libby told him that Valerie Plame worked at the CIA and that the information was “hush-hush.” Libby’s story under oath is that, having completely forgotten that he had been […]

THE SPECTER OF JOE AND EILEEN. It wasn’t until I saw Chuck Schumer repeat, at the end of a Meet the Press appearance yesterday, his bizarre assertion that Iraq won’t be a central issue in the 2008 election that I realized a possible motive for saying such a thing (beyond the generic and still-pervasive wishful […]

FUN WITH STATISTICS. Sometimes the approving links one finds in John Podhoretz posts on the Corner shouldn’t go unacknoweldged. Historian (and Open University contributor) David Bell wrote an op-ed in The Los Angeles Times yesterday pointing out that, by most standards, both the destructiveness of the 9/11 attack and the general threat posed by Islamist […]

WHY 4K? You may remember that we reached one of what Donald Rumsfeld once called “arbitrary” milestones in Iraq — the 3,000th American fatality — on the last day of 2006. Another month later, and for just a slightly different milestone figure, we’re now over 4,000. How’s the math on that work when more than […]

KAPUSCINSKI ADDENDUM. To briefly add to Tara‘s note: the only Kapuscinski book I’ve read is Another Day of Life, about the Angolan civil war, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Riveting, funny, very sad. –Sam Rosenfeld