The idea is to combine enough potential supporters to make a winning coalition. It's not a surprising development, given that US parties are becoming more ideological-- alliances that cross ideological lines are common in parliamentary democracies, where parties that vehemently disagree on various issues will ally to stop a despised third party from taking power.

Posted at August 14, 2006 8:23 AM in response to The McLieberman Mirage

Blowhard is too kind. I stopped reading Krauthammer when he started making psychological diagnoses of people he disagreed with.

Posted at August 11, 2006 8:06 AM in response to The Krauthammer Charade, Part I

It would be interesting to get more detailed opinions about the meaning of the various fossil anthropoids-- do people think, for example, that they are fake? Or, maybe, that there is some irreducible gap between the fossil anthropoids and humans that can't be bridged by evolution alone?

Posted at August 11, 2006 8:03 AM in response to Evolution

However, there are, as they say, cultural issues. For example, there was an article in the weekend NYT 'News of the week in review' about how Iranians often will say what they think you want to hear. The author struggled a bit with this, carefully noting that he wasn't actually saying that Iranians are liars... but then, what was he saying?

Posted at August 8, 2006 8:15 AM in response to Racists Among Us

It's odd that a prepared statement would be so awful. I mean, this is the 'everything is under control' White House. I have a suspicion that the rats are leaving the ship-- and Bush abandoned is not a pretty sight.

Posted at August 1, 2006 10:31 AM in response to New Column

Cohen simply babbles into his typewriter-- CohenSprach. No connection between consecutive paragraphs, no logic-- he just hears and repeats the rambling drone of his interior voice.

Posted at July 18, 2006 9:40 AM in response to Mistakes Were Made

Hmm, so... if you increase the liberty of the CIA (so that they are free, e.g., to torture suspects), that will decrease security. QED.

Posted at July 12, 2006 10:06 AM in response to Tradeoffs, Real and Imagined

I think what the right-wingers are up to is more subtle and a lot more dangerous. American military power can, pretty much, achieve any plausible military objective. The right-wing goal is to expand the notion of a military objective into what are normally thought of as political arenas. This is both wrong, for the reasons you note, and phenomenally dangerous from both foreign and domestic political standpoints.

Posted at July 10, 2006 10:43 AM in response to The Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics

Missile defense is part of the Reagan heritage. If you're a believer, you may not question the wisdom of The Ron.

Posted at July 8, 2006 2:29 PM in response to Idée Fixe

It wouldn't surprise me if they are reaching physical limitations, particularly vocal. Maybe it's uncool to say so, but I wish Lucinda Williams had taken better care of her voice-- and what SK do is much more stressful.

Posted at June 28, 2006 7:46 AM in response to Bad News