The Nairobi mall attack has conjured up memories of the first terrorist attack I ever remember: the Lod airport massacre. You may never have heard of it—or of Lod airport, for that matter, which is in Tel Aviv and was … Continue reading →
…on the part of the American public. We keep reading polls such as this one about how few Americans know the basic facts of American history. So we shouldn’t be surprised to read another. But oh, how very depressing it … Continue reading →
It’s a tried and true tactic, and Dana Milbank gets into the act here. The topic this time? The Benghazi killings and coverup. The method? Emphasize the fringe arguments that are more easily mocked and/or repudiated, and ignore or gloss … Continue reading →
…because it’s much more fun to, you know, make stuff up. Facts are not stubborn things, they’re slippery things.
Continue reading →…but sometimes we forget how nit-picky crazy they were [the following excerpt is from The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War]: To enjoy full civil rights under the new regime [in Austria after Germany’s takeover] each person required a … Continue reading →
I’ve just spent a fruitless hour trying to find the source from which I’d copied the following Allan Bloom quote some time ago. Somehow I’d lost the link, and now I can’t find it again. But I thought I’d present … Continue reading →
Will Mubarak actually be released now? Maybe, just maybe, could people be entertaining the thought that Mubarak’s repressiveness was a reaction to the situation in Egypt at the time he came to power? And that said situation has not changed … Continue reading →
Literally. The article says it’s the largest city in the US to ever file for bankruptcy, but New York came mighty close in 1975. I know, because I owned a very small NYC bond at the time, and I remember … Continue reading →
America has been so fortunate, and in many ways so outside of history’s darker corridors, that we have forgotten what we should have known, and neglected to teach it to our children. It’s like a population (think Native Americans before … Continue reading →
…Not. And so, Chris Hayes of MSNBC was right to apologize after referring to Wallace as a Republican. He said his statement had been “a “stupid, inexcusable, historically illiterate mistake.” But it was a lot more. This was no random … Continue reading →
Richard Fernandez always has something interesting to say, and this post of his is no exception: For much of history our ability to harm ourselves was fortunately limited by the crude nature of our means. But by the dawn of … Continue reading →
Scandalgate (a name that, for want of a better term, has been given to the current spate of brouhahas simultaneously hitting the Obama administration) is raising the specter of Watergate, which celebrated its 40th anniversary about a year ago. I’m … Continue reading →