Category: General

Dad, what did you do during the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism? I was a war-blogger, son.

The nation’s security must wait…at least until September, or so moved Senator Frist on the Senate floor on Tuesday morning. Frist pulled the all-important Defense Authorization bill from the Senate floor in order to pass the NRA’s Gun Liability legislation.

It turns out John Bolton is not the first UN Ambassador nominee to consider a recess appointment: in 1999, President Clinton floated the idea of a recess appointment for Richard Holbrooke, one of his UN Ambassador nominees, but Holbrooke refused.

I’m on the road right now, and I’m grateful to the line-up of fascinating personalities who have agreed to help step in and provide their own thinking on a wide variety of public policy questions, as well as risotto recipes.

In a recent column in the Singapore Business Times (reprinted in antiwar.com), “The Unbearable Lightness of Being ‘Condi,’” I suggested that our secretary of state Condoleeza Rice is kind of a, well, lightweight, especially when you compare her to predecessors like, say, George Marshall, John Foster Dulles, Dean Acheson, and of course, Henry Kissinger.

Good morning, everyone. Joining our cast of bloggers today is Leon Hadar, a research fellow in foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, a journalist, a professor, and a gentleman. Leon is the author of the just published Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

Since the White House has made noises about wanting a UN Ambassador before the United Nations’ session opens in September, they’ve created a phony pretext for the recess appointment — the time demand — when in actuality they’ve spent the whole summer running out the clock.

We all know that John Bolton has never seen a clearance process he didn’t want to subvert or destroy. But as Mr.

Greetings from the centrist Republican corner of the blogosphere! I’m Jeremy Dibbell, and I’ve been blogging over at Charging RINO since late March. One of the major stories I’ve been focused on since the beginning is the Bolton nomination, and I’ve been a very regular reader of Steve’s excellent commentary.

Greetings to the readers of the Washington Note, and thanks to Steve for the opportunity to guest post. To introduce myself, I am the editor of The National Interest (nationalinterest.org) and of its online supplement In the National Interest.