Steve Naidamast After surviving tragedy at the World Trade Center on 9-11-2001 (I escaped from building #5, which was engulfed in a fireball 30 to 45 minutes after I evacuated), I became driven to find out the underlying causes of that event. My studies took me toward subjects in sociology and political history as well as…
W.J. Astore Also at Huffington Post. President Obama’s decision to deploy 3,000 troops to Liberia in Africa to assist in efforts to contain Ebola got me to thinking about the military as white blood cells. As a military officer, I took an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. In a…
Michael Murry President Barack Obama’s most recent speech launching yet another self-declared Personal Presidential Crusade against yet another Evil Muslim Acronym (ISIS/ISIL/IS, whatever) reminds me of something that General David Petraeus, Commander of the International Security Assistance Forces in Afghanistan once said regarding his mission objectives and his prospects for achieving them: “I think no…
W.J. Astore Two Afghan stories this week suggest much about U.S. progress in winning hearts and minds there. The first involves Hamid Karzai. Afghanistan’s departing president, the “Mayor of Kabul,” Karzai asserted that “America did not want peace for Afghanistan, because it had its own agendas and goals here.” It’s easy to paint Karzai as…
W.J. Astore In April 2009, I wrote an article for TomDispatch.com recounting Mary McCarthy’s critique of the American experience in Vietnam, and how her lessons applied to President Obama’s “surge” in Afghanistan. A central lesson cited by McCarthy was the American desire never to be labeled a loser. That desire explains, at least in part,…
By KokonutGrove As a student of American history and politics, in my lifetime I’ve witnessed a dangerous erosion of civil and personal liberties. Such an erosion is the hallmark of fascism. Back in the 1970s and ‘80s when my father was stationed in Berlin, he often discussed the totalitarian police state the East Germans created as…
W.J. Astore The more the United States has come to talk about dominance, the less dominant we’ve become. To compensate, we’ve become a steroidal nation, to include the violent side effects associated with steroid use (just look at the latest stories out of the NFL about spousal and child abuse, or our steroidal police forces,…
W.J. Astore A sentiment attributed to Vice President Joe Biden is, Show me what’s in your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value. These words resonate with me whenever I consider the yearly budget for the Department of Defense (DoD), Homeland Security, the Department of Energy (which handles nuclear weapons), and the various intelligence…
Matthew Jacobson Today’s Democrats do not realize the extent to which the Republican Party, and the media machine that it so expertly operates, have transformed politically emotional energy into pure, purposeful political power. They do not realize that issues no longer count for much in the new reality of American politics. Emotions, and the identification…
Michael Murry In 2008 Barack Obama was elected president in a wave of euphoria for “hope” and “change,” but he threw away his mandate during his first year in office when he did not liquidate Deputy Dubya’s dimwit debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan. He became a predictable mediocrity after that, his two terms of office…
The Contrary Perspective 