It looks like things in Afghanistan are more dire than we have been led to believe.

It was neglect of Afghanistan that allowed General Petraeus to turn Iraq into a strong ally of Iran in the War on Terror. We may have to be content with that costly achievement. The poppy fields and the Taliban are resurgent, but our own supply lines are threatened.

And when one thinks about it, there are other problems in the region brewing....

Well, no great surprise really that the Times Op-Ed page is full of idiots.

For example, have a look at this piece in which a Times contributor defends pardons in general, and Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich in particular, while including the following historical note:

One of the most astonishing things about the record left by the founders is how passionately they wrestled with the pardon question. Gilbert Livingston, at the New York ratifying convention, demanded a requirement that the Congress approve a pardon for treason. George Mason, one of Virginia's delegates to the constitutional convention, warned that a president could use the pardon to protect his own guilt. Yet, save for cases of impeachment, all calls for restrictions were rejected. It is clear that the founders understood the pardon as one of the most basic checks and balances of the constitutional system.[emphasis added]

It was also Mason who induced Madison to write the Bill of Rights.

Another of Mason's ideas was that it should be possible to impeach a president for incompetence. For this hack to so blithely skate past Mason's prescient objection to the use of the pardon, in the course of a article in which Marc Rich is passionately defended, is rich.