Ezra Klein

This is fairly funny. Mark Leon Goldberg got to talking with the Panamanian Ambassador to the UN, otherwise known as the poor sap who got charged with leading discussions to create a new UN Human Rights council. How are the talks going? Comically badly: The talks were so dead in the water on Friday, rumor […]

Of all the attempts by conservatives to regain some post-Katrina balance, the most pernicious has to be the growing effort to use FEMA’s failure to delegitimize the government’s role in disaster-relief. Man, that’s chutzpah. The car broke because Bush slashed its tires and now his allies are trying to convince us that the real problem […]

Shakes here… In The Calmer in Chief, Ezra pulls a quote from this article that illustrates how truly feckless Bush’s leadership was specifically during the Katrina crisis. As I read the article, I was struck by the repetition of a particular idea—that of Bush as showman, and seemingly little more. (Emphasis mine.) Longtime Bush watchers […]

By Ezra The David Brooks corollary: Because Delta is soon to file for bankruptcy protection, it stands to reason that no airline could possibly be more efficient or profitable and thus all private air carriers should be nationalized. Opponents of this plan must explain how the performance of Delta, a company with multiple highly-detailed plans […]

By Ezra I don’t even know what to say about this one: Bush does not appear to tap sources deep inside his government for information, the way his father or Bill Clinton did, preferring to get reports through channels. A highly screened information chain is fine when everything is going well, but in a crisis […]

By Ezra Matt’s post on asymmetric warfare in Iraq should really be read, maybe not so much by all of you, but by any strong supporters of the war who happen along this site. I’m not entirely sure why this is, but the knowledge that the insurgency fights differently has not quite connected to the […]

So long as we’re talking about race and Katrina, Leonce Gaiter sent me a piece he wrote on the subject that’s well worth a read. Take a look.

By Ezra Nobody’s going to like me for saying this, but Michael Froomkin is 200% correct here: The Bush administration has an admirable record of appointing African-Americans to top posts. And despite the occasional strange incident, I don’t think it is a racist administration. Rather, it’s thoroughly classist. Kleptocratic even. For as far as I […]

Neil the Ethical Werewolf Shakes and Ezra are talking about impeachment, and there are a couple things I’d like liberals thinking in this vein to keep in mind. The first is that Bush has only 3 1/2 years left as an elected official. Certainly, there are benefits to damaging him personally, especially insofar as this […]

By Ezra I would say, in response to Shakes and for those attracted to the impeachment idea, that even if we did get there, we’d be left with President Cheney, which is potentially less palatable than Bush. (As an aside, I always thought the Cheney selection was very good as a survival strategy. Anyone who’d […]