Only Muslim Extremists Get Upset About Cartoons
Good line, purportedly from Jon Stewart: Obama is not upset about the cartoon that calls him a Muslim extremist. Who gets upset about cartoons? Muslim extremists. via Steve Garfield. See "New Yorker Obama Terrorist Cover" for background and commentary on the story. UPDATE: Amusingly, I see via Memeorandum, the hubbub goes on. Obama is continuing to beat this dead horse: Democrat Barack Obama said ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 16, 2008 06:37
Jesse Helms’ Foreign Policy Legacy
Christopher Hitchens joins the legions dancing on Jesse Helms' grave. Rather than piling on about the racism of a Southern politician whose career began sixty-odd years ago, he instead focuses on Helms' foreign policy: His chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was a period of national embarrassment and, sometimes, disgrace. The Helms-Burton Act of 1996, imposing additional economic sanctions on ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 7, 2008 12:57
Conservative Bloggers Silent On Torture?
Shaun Mullen wonders "Why Are Right-of-Center Bloggers So Silent On Torture?" He searched high and low and could find no right-of-center bloggers who made any mention at all, for example, of yesterday's NYT story "China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo." I'd note that Andrew Sullivan wrote roughly 600 posts on the subject yesterday, including this one, which pretty well covered our bases. ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 3, 2008 11:28
Question Time for the USA
Christopher Hitchens draws attention to a proposal by John McCain that received scant attention when announced last week: "I will ask Congress," said the presumptive Republican nominee, "to grant me the privilege of coming before both houses to take questions, and address criticism, much the same as the prime minister of Great Britain appears regularly before the House of Commons." Hitchens is ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on May 19, 2008 12:58
Hitchens Calls Sully ‘Lesbian’
A Media Matters report of remarks made by Christopher Hitchens in a weekend television debate with Andrew Sullivan is getting some blogospheric attention. On the April 5 edition of MSNBC's Tim Russert, Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens debated the significance for Sen. Barack Obama of comments made by his former pastor Jeremiah Wright about a trip Wright took with Louis Farrakhan ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on April 8, 2008 07:45
Hillary Clinton Hysteria
James Poulos contemplates Hillary Clinton's hysteria and Hillary Clinton Hysteria. Christopher Hitchens and then Stanley Crouch summing up M(r)s. Clinton. There is no way around the uncomfortable fact that both men use the world 'hysterical' to pin the tail on a complex of emotional pathologies that's inseparable from Hillary Clinton's womanhood. As mannish as she sometimes tries so hard ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on April 1, 2008 16:45
Wright, Hagee, and the KKK?
It will come of little surprise that Christopher Hitchens uses the Obama-Wright controversy to take another whack at organized religion. Look at the accepted choice of words for the ravings of Jeremiah Wright: controversial, incendiary, inflammatory. These are adjectives that might have been—and were—applied to many eloquent speakers of the early civil rights movement. . . . But is ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on March 25, 2008 08:47
Press Bias and Campaign 2008
Kevin Drum cites several instances of John McCain acting in ways inconsistent with his maverick image and yet surviving with the image more-or-less intact, a situation he ascribes to a fawning press corps. He asks, "And what window do Democrats go to to get the same treatment the press gives McCain?" In reality, all of the remaining major candidates have ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on March 25, 2008 08:06
Getting it Right on Iraq
Taking a page from Christopher Hitchens' book, Jim Henley admits that he was right on the Iraq War. Predicting ahead of time that a given war is a bad idea isn't particularly hard, frankly. It's a bimodal choice (War/No War) and wars are almost always "bad" in some sense that would be defensible down the road even if ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on March 22, 2008 12:17
Hitchens on 5th Anniversary of Iraq War
As part of a retrospective commemorating the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War, Christopher Hitchens admits to having been right all along. He does, however, reject the premise of the question. Anyone with even a glancing acquaintance with Iraq would have to know that a heavy U.S. involvement in the affairs of that country began no later than 1968, ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on March 18, 2008 08:06
