Spencer Ackerman

THE KILLING CLOWNS, THE BLOOD MONEY MEN, ARE SHOOTING THOSE WASHINGTON BULLETS AGAIN. The Clash vote has determined at least one race tonight: Daniel Ortega has won in Nicaragua. This is going to be one awesome U.N. Security Council session. –Spencer Ackerman

RUMORS, RUMORS. Just got off the phone with a friend of mine who’s running a Democratic campaign in heavily Republican Colorado Springs. He passes along this delicious tale about disgraced Reverend Ted Haggard, he of the methamphetamine-and-gay-hookers infamy. Apparently, the Sunday before the story broke, Haggard held a gigantic candidate forum. The good pastor was […]

NUCLEAR WINTER. Now that’s the Republican Party I know and love! Hill GOPers and The Weekly Standard have long been on a crusade to declassify captured Iraqi documents in the hope that somewhere, there’s a pony — some sort of evidence of WMD programs — amidst the manure. So now the Republicans in Congress, fresh […]

FAILURE OF THE WILL. Via The Corner, conservative mil-pundit Ralph Peters has thrown in the towel on Iraq. What’s revealing about the piece is that it’s impossible to see why he bought into the Bush line in the first place. In a typical passage, Peters writes that “I believed that Arabs deserved a chance to […]

WATERBOARDING: AS NEW ENGLAND AS YACHTING AND LOBSTER ROLLS! Jonah should be ashamed himself for posting this “without comment”: I was recently reading Richard Norton Smith’s biography of Col. Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune. It seems that when McCormick was a student at Groton he was subjected to the school tradition of “pumping.” In […]

RIGHT UP TO YOUR FACE AND DIS YOU. National security adviser Steve Hadley is in Iraq today to deliver a message to the disobedient administration of PM Nouri al-Maliki: He wishes “to reinforce some of the things you have heard from our president.” That being, in general, “Can’t you just do as we say? You […]

INCOHERENT LIKE A FOX. OK, do your best with what in the world this means. This is Bush during his roundtable with conservative columnists: This stuff about “stay the course” — stay the course means, we’re going to win. Stay the course does not mean that we’re not going to constantly change. So he is […]

AFGHAN WIGS. Rob, I liked your piece defending the worthy invasion of Afghanistan. If I can make one criticism: early in the piece you ask, “If we�ve come to the conclusion now that the Iraq invasion was a mistake, then how do we evaluate the disaster on the other side of Iran?” I don’t see […]

YOU CAN’T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT. Ezra, I really, really don’t like disagreeing with Peter Bergen on al-Qaeda. You generally should be extremely wary of telling a guy who interviewed bin Laden that he’s off-base. But, dude, you asked. Thanks, Ez, you’re a good friend. Let me start by saying that Peter is 100 […]

KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE PRIZE, HOLD ON. My buddy Lawrence Kaplan tries to salvage the Bush Doctrine from the Iraq war. His argument is that critics of the war risk learning too much from the failure in Iraq: the antidote to tyranny is democracy, even if it didn’t turn out so well in Baghdad, […]