Foreign Policy

Friday at the UN (text here), Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas accused Israel of engaging in "ethnic cleansing." Earlier, in a speech to 200 supposed "senior representatives of the Palestinian community in the U.S." (would that include Gaza flotilla organizers and Barack Obama pals Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn? Just askin'), Abbas declared, as relayed by Ynetnews.com, that "…

Reporting on President Obama speaking at the United Nations for Wednesday's NBC Today, chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell sympathetically declared: "Preparing for today's speech, the President was all smiles for the class photo, but while hoping to run a victory lap as the new Libyan government officially joined the United Nations....Everywhere else, trouble loomed."…

CNN's Wolf Blitzer fretted over Rick Perry blasting Obama's foreign policy soon before the President was to deliver his address to the United Nations. CNN analyst David Gergen agreed with him, painting Perry as a grenade-thrower. In a meeting with New York City Jewish leaders GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry slammed what he termed President Obama's policy of "appeasement" in the Middle…

Singer Tony Bennett has sold over 50 million album copies but that success doesn't seem to have required much common sense or decency. In a recent interview, the veteran crooner sounded appallingly similar to controversial left-wing minister Jeremiah Wright, stating, among other things that America "caused" 9/11 to happen. In what was supposed to be an interview about his latest music…

Three years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, what was the fourth-largest investment bank in the US, the Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, Bank of England, and Japanese and Swiss central banks moved last week to avert a liquidity crisis in European banks struggling to deal with the failing Greek economy, leaving American investors with portfolios of Greek bonds worried. Do you think…

NPR's Sylvia Poggioli filed a completely one-sided report on Wednesday's All Things Considered about a radical-left organization, along with a group purporting to represent victims of clergy sexual abuse, lobbying the International Criminal Court to investigate the top leadership of the Catholic Church, including Pope Benedict XVI, for "crimes against humanity." Poggioli played sound bites only…

This was going to be a relatively quick post about the good news, as announced by the Castle Coalition in a Tuesday press release after being teased a few days earlier by "Little Pink House" author Jeff Benedict, that a Lifetime Channel movie is going to be made about the Kelo vs. New London eminent domain drama. Then along came "culture blogger" Alyssa Rosenberg over at the hard-left…

A month before the 9/11 attacks, American missionaries Heather Mercer and Dayna Curry were captured and imprisoned by the Taliban. Their detention and subsequent rescue by American troops in November 2001 received extensive media coverage at the time, including criticism by "Dateline" correspondent John Larson about their proselytizing in a Muslim country. So far, however, it seems no…

A skirmish broke out on Morning Joe today as PBS host Tavis Smiley claimed President George W. Bush "lied" the USA into the war in Iraq. Joe Scarborough and--surprisingly--Jon Meacham forcefully refuted Smiley's slur. Scarborough unwittingly provoked the incident when, commenting on yesterday's 9-11 observances, he called for a Kumbaya moment in which Americans would put aside politics and…

CNN's Fareed Zakaria got more than he bargained for in his Sunday interview with guest Donald Rumsfeld. As he pushed the former Secretary of Defense on America's need to cut military spending, the "GPS" host blushed when Rumsfeld smartly said, "There are people who think we're living in the post-American world, to coin a phrase. There are people who believe that we should step back and lead…

It certainly wasn't a Paul Krugman moment, but is the tenth anniversary of the biggest attack on our mainland a good time to say, "Fifty years from now, we might even look at 9/11 as simply the beginning of the decline of America?" That's what Fareed Zakaria said Sunday on the CNN program bearing his name (video follows with transcript and commentary):

The folks involved in the storming of Israel's embassy in Cairo are probably wondering what they have to do to become the press's pet word for rampaging Muslims (the country is 90% Muslim, and it would be a very safe bet that heavily persecuted Coptic Christians aren't involved): "militants." I guess breaking through the Israeli embassy's security wall, ransacking offices, and dumping…

Having read E.J. Dionne's Wednesday column in the Washington Post (HT Jim Taranto at the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web), I am sooooo comforted -- not. Dionne assures his readers that "Al-Qaeda is a dangerous enemy. But our country and the world were never threatened by the caliphate of its mad fantasies." Thus, the last 10 years of the "war on terrorism" (lowercase letters and quote…

Ten years after the attacks of September 11, it’s worth recalling how the immediate reaction of some on the far Left was to blame the United States foreign policy for instigating the attacks, and how various Hollywood celebrities spent the remainder of the decade trashing the War on Terror and likening the United States to some sort of Nazi regime or police state. Some even promoted wild…