Yesterday (Thursday) at the State Department five officials resigned or retired. Another one today. The media has gone near-insane, claiming State is crumbling in protest under the Trump administration. This is not true. What happened at State is very routine.Leaving...
One of my favorite quotes includes the lines “I awoke this morning to find that it was not judgment day – only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.” I think that sums up a part of my thinking, but certainly not all.A nuclear reckoning, war with China, or...
Chelsea will be free in May! With more than a little irony, while I was in Iraq working for the State Department, Chelsea Manning’s office was across the hall from mine. While I was winning the war by writing emails to the embassy, Manning was across the hall...
Short Answer: It’s been 15+ years of coalition and the Taliban are still there, the Afghan government in Kabul is even more corrupt, and most of Afghanistan is as economically decrepit as ever.A report, “Lessons From the Coalition,” emerged from a conference co-hosted...
Want to know how to evaluate the memo alleging Trump is run by the Russians, and that they have video of him and his golden showers? I can tell you. Read.The use of anonymous sources was once a major line for a journalist to cross. By not naming a source, the...
People talk of the Deep State, a kind of shorthand to refer to the entrenched parts of the government, particularly inside the military, intelligence, and security communities, who don’t come and go with election cycles. The information they hold, and their longevity,...
For those who would like to become a progressive columnist in the world of Trump, here’s a guide for your first and every subsequent article: Everything was pretty freaking close to perfect on November 7. Yeah, tough about Bernie, but Clinton was going to be...
This is a version of last year’s January 1 article, updated to reflect the new fears of the World’s Most Frightened Nation.I survived. America, and the world, and you, survived. We awoke the first day of 2017 to find that once again, using the...
In the through-the-mirror world we now live in, people who once unambiguously supported free speech now are finding plenty of things they want censored.Chief among those opposing ideas they want silenced are Donald Trump’s. His remarks – from the silly, labeled...
History loves little markers, tidy packages of symbolism that wrap up a big, complex thing. You know, the helicopter on the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon standing in for years of failed war, the Berlin Wall being knocked down to visually note the end the Cold...
