Politics & War

The cries have begun in earnest. Almost two years into a war that was supposed to last for only a few short months, talk of an exit from Iraq has become commonplace in the arena of public debate. Continue reading “No Exit Strategy”

Yesterday, the second term of President George W. Bush began. There is no doubt that the focus of his administration’s foreign policy in the next four years will continue to be the spread of globalization. Continue reading “Globalization Marches Forward”

I spent a week this holiday season in Ohio. I grew up there. I still have family and friends there. I went back to celebrate Christmas and then the New Year, but since this was my first return to the land of my youth since the summer, I wanted to find out what went wrong in November. Continue reading “A Holiday in the Midwest”

The latest estimates from the pentagon place the number of insurgents in Iraq at around 15,000, a tenth of the 150,000 on the American side. Step back and think about that number for a second. If 15,000 is an accurate assessment of the amount of men our military is fighting, then I would not wish to contemplate what would happen were we facing an enemy equal in number to our own forces. Continue reading “The Invisible Enemy”

Lest we continue to get carried away over the notion of red states and blue states, I have made this map of the results of the election that present the results in less of a simplified manner. Continue reading “No More Red and Blue”

In her book, The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman begins chapter 17, “In 1915 a book about the invasion of his country was published in exile by Emile Verhaeren, Belgium’s leading living poet whose life before 1914 had been a flaming dedication to socialist and humanitarian ideals that were then believed to erase national lines. He prefaced his account with this dedication: ‘He who writes this book in which hate is not hidden was formerly a pacifist…For him no disillusionment was ever greater or more sudden. It struck him with such violence that he thought himself no longer the same man. And yet, as it seems to him that in this state of hatred his conscience becomes diminished, he dedicates these pages, with emotion, to the man he used to be.’ Continue reading “Election Day”

If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual (gay) sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything.

— Republican Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, April 21, 2003

Continue reading “A Worthless Attack”

America has gazed at itself in the mirror, has taken stock of its wealth, power, influence, military might, and is in the process of deciding whether or not to throw it all away. Historians centuries from now will not refer to the United States as an empire in name, but it will be treated as such in fact. They will look back on the 20th century in awe, not just of humankind’s achievements, but for its seeming descent into insanity, for thrusting upon itself a pace of change that the world had never seen, and that has been proved it was not yet ready for. Out of all this, the United States was poised to stand tall for the foreseeable future. No one could seriously challenge the will of its people, or its money. Continue reading “A Country That Has Lost Its Way”

Forget the news analysis and all the previews leading up to tonight’s third evening of the Republican National Convention. Common wisdom would tell you that the heavy hitters of any political convention traditionally come on Wednesday, with the nominee set to wrap things up on Thursday. But all a person would have to have done is watch the past two nights out of Madison Square Garden to realize that the most powerful presenters of the Republican platform weren’t named Bush and Cheney, but were named McCain, Giuliani, and Schwarzenegger. Continue reading “The Guns of August”

As I rounded the corner of Broadway and 17th Street yesterday, finishing up a march that had begun almost two hours before, I was unaware that thousands of people were still gathering and waiting for their chance to march at the staging area miles behind me. I had no idea it would still be over an hour before a small group of black bloc anarchists would set a paper mache dragon ablaze in front of Madison Square Garden (the only serious infraction of the day). I had no idea that on that day, more Americans would take to the streets in opposition of a sitting president’s party’s nominating convention than at any time in American history. Continue reading “This is What Democracy Looks Like”