Make sure to read this excellent article by Stanley Fish, Law Professor and New York Times opinion contributor. This gist of his observation is this:
“If the bad act is committed by a member of a group you wish to demonize, attribute it to a community or a religion and not to the individual. But [...]

There is an interesting opinion piece today by Timothy Egan on nytimes.com about mutually assured destruction (MAD). MAD is a Cold War era policy that says essentially “if you nuke our cities, we promise to nuke your cities”.
Egan assumes, like many people do, that MAD kept us safe during the Cold War. But [...]

It is commonly believed that wars are won and lost on the battlefield; that wars have “winners” and “losers” irrespective of their political outcomes. For instance, it is this belief that causes Vietnam vets to claim that “we won the war but were betrayed by the politicians.” This belief is false. Wars [...]

I have no idea why 10 Americans, in Haiti on a humanitarian mission, thought it would be a good idea to take 33 Haitian kids to an orphanage in the Dominican Republic. No one that I have seen has suggested that they were paid or had any insidious motive. My guess is that [...]

The Republican Party is holding their national meeting this winter. This is standard fare for both parties, and these meetings are generally taken up by electing and appointing various people, tweaking the platform in small ways, and generally being an excuse for party leaders to get together and schmooze each other once in awhile.
A [...]

I normally like a lot of the things that Timothy Egan writes, but today he managed to hit one of my pet peeves:
“In Iraq, some Sunnis have always hated some Shiites, and vice-versa, for more years than the United States has been a country, and they will continue to dismember each other and their children [...]

Let’s call it the Wilsonian myth. It’s one of the most pervasive myths in American foreign policy circles today. It is the fundamental assumption upon which both liberals and conservatives base their calls for democracy and human rights. And, unfortunately, it is completely wrong. What is it? I think the [...]

I understand the hullabaloo over the recent controversial Iranian election from the Iranians point of view. After all, the President of Iran does have real power to effect domestic and social policy (within the constraints set by the Supreme Leader and the clerics, of course, but some power nonetheless). What I don’t understand [...]

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates just this past week announced the details of the Obama Administration’s Department of Defense budget. For once, it isn’t the size of the budget that has made a lot of waves, but instead the details of the budget. Gates and Obama want to radically restructure the military. [...]

I remember watching the news, it must have been around the year 2000, and seeing several economist-pundits discussing the “new economy”. The general agreement on the round-table that day, with only one dissenter, was that the United States had entered into a post-cycle economy due to the technological boom of the 1990s and that [...]