The media makes inevitability narratives, and the media can just as unilaterally break them. Pundits and political observers fabricate them out of little more than their own hack impressions of “What It Takes” and “The Way to Win,” to cite but two headache-inducing, faux-authoritative surveys of the postmodern campaign.
The fallout from last week’s Read More
Since there is no rule requiring the United States to finish one war before starting the next, with each passing day the bookies are shortening the odds that Iran will be next. No war will have less justification in light of the number of chances the U.S. has been offered to settle its differences with Read More
One can hardly blame the Bush administration for wanting to change the subject when it comes to foreign policy.
Iraq remains bloody and chaotic, the security situation in Afghanistan is rocky and efforts to stabilize Pakistan by pushing Pervez Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto into a pact are at risk of unraveling.
Casting Read More
“Now,” Alan Greenspan told The Wall Street Journal the other day, “it turns out politics is less important, domestically, than it was, because globalization is taking over an ever increasing part of the decision making process with the exception of national security.”
This is a fancy-dancy way of saying, “You foolish little persons can Read More
It was like watching a mechanical rabbit spring onto the rail of a greyhound track: Over the weekend, the Des Moines Register reported the results of an October poll showing Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton pulling away from her two main competitors for the Hawkeye State’s January caucus vote. And the nation’s pundit corps rallied to Read More
Now he tells us. Alan Greenspan has come out from behind the cloud of gas where he had hidden himself for the past couple of decades to say in public what he should have said years ago when it might have mattered.
In his book, Mr. Greenspan complains that the Bush administration paid little Read More
It’s certainly no news to New Yorkers that former Mayor Rudy Giuliani has a taste for the theatrical. Long before the World Trade Center towers fell, the mayor had a penchant for making morbid cameos at accidents and crime scenes, usually just as 11 p.m. news crews arrived, as though Mr. Giuliani were both Commissioner Read More
The tiresome boast put forth by secretaries of the treasury, stock exchange executives, Wall Street C.E.O.s, their economists, their consultants, their think-tankers, their B-school professors and suck-up business journalists is that Wall Street is the “world’s most efficient capital market.”
Exactly what we are to take that to mean is rarely explained. We are Read More
In virtually all the ways it was intended to, the Iraq surge has worked. That is to say, it’s shifted the focus in American politics away from the gaping flaws in the messianic American reflex to remake the Arab Muslim world into its own image and onto crisply technocratic matters of timing and modulation.
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It took forever, but the government has announced that Medicare will no longer pay for hospital-caused diseases. The policy will cover hospital-caused injuries, preventable errors and infections.
The Center for Disease Control estimates that hospital-caused infections alone result in 270 deaths a day, or nearly 100,000 deaths per year. In addition more than a Read More
