Your one stop pundit shop.
Bob Herbert points out that:
The idea that fewer than 1 percent of Americans are being called on to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq and that we’re sending them into combat again and again and again — for three tours, four tours, five tours, six tours — is obscene. All decent people should object. [...]
The air is filled with obsessive self-satisfied rhetoric about supporting the troops, giving them everything they need and not letting them down. But that rhetoric is as hollow as a jazzman’s drum because the overwhelming majority of Americans have no desire at all to share in the sacrifices that the service members and their families are making. Most Americans do no want to serve in the wars, do not want to give up their precious time to do volunteer work that would aid the nation’s warriors and their families, do not even want to fork over the taxes that are needed to pay for the wars.
To say that this is a national disgrace is to wallow in the shallowest understatement. The nation will always give lip-service to support for the troops, but for the most part Americans do not really care about the men and women we so blithely ship off to war, and the families they leave behind.
And that lip-service isn't limited to one political party.
Eugene Robinson thinks we should leave Tiger Woods alone and get back to discussing health care, climate change or Afghanistan. He then spends the next 9 or so paragraphs talking about Tiger Woods and his taste in women.
Anne Applebaum on banning the construction of minarets in Switzerland:
As grotesquely unfair as a referendum to ban minarets may have been to hundreds of thousands of ordinary, well-integrated Muslims, I have no doubt that the Swiss voted in favor primarily because they don't have much Islamic extremism -- and they don't want any.
Well, sure. That'll stop a terrorist.
Mike Huckabee takes to the pages of the Washington Post to defend his decision to commute the sentence of a man who later shot and killed four police officers in Washington state, repeating something he's said several times over the past week:
If I could have possibly known what Clemmons would do nine years later, I obviously would have made a different decision.
Way to go out on a limb, Mike. Now, any comment on Wayne Dumond?
Roger Cohen, on President Obama's Afghanistan speech:
The most important line in President Obama’s Afghan speech was not about Afpak policy (so named by the White House) but about the U.S. domestic situation: “Our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended — because the nation that I am most interested in building is our own.”
As military strategy for winning a war the speech made little sense. You don’t need to be von Clausewitz to know that the commitment of 30,000 troops combined with the establishment of proximate date for the start of their withdrawal is not going to break the will of an enemy or destroy its center of gravity.
But as a political statement and as an acknowledgment of the limits of American power after the first decade of the 21st century, the speech was adroit. [...]
In acknowledging these trade-offs, and putting the world on notice about America’s future capacity as global security underwriter, Obama turned an Afghan speech into perhaps the most important domestic pronouncement of his presidency.
Derrick Z. Jackson applauds the Obama administration's declaration that carbon dioxide a dangerous pollutant:
In a critical demonstration of backbone on global warming, the Obama administration yesterday declared carbon dioxide a dangerous pollutant. Saying the country “will not ignore science and the law any longer,’’ Lisa Jackson, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said her findings and declaration “cement 2009’s place in history as the year when the United States government began addressing the challenge of greenhouse gas pollution.’’
Bret Stephens doesn't want to say that people who believe in global warming are "closet Stalinists," and then explains how they are just that, comrades.
A.G. Gancarski reviews John Gibson's (yes, that John Gibson) new book, "How the Left Swiftboated America: The Liberal Media Conspiracy to Make You Think George Bush Was the Worst." I made it this far into the review:
Fox News commentator John Gibson, in his most recent book, ably dispels the fabrications and fallacies the left put forth to successfully torpedo the Bush legacy.
Frank Gaffney continues his jihad against the President.