“Are we plain mad? Not really, but in part it is a kind of sickness, the kind that can come with overriding military power. If a superpower does not have to worry about foreign reaction, if its own people pay no attention and if its leader is so insecure that he thinks one way to stay in office is to bomb a people that have never offended or threatened his own, why, he can just go ahead and bomb, if that is to his taste.” That was A.M. Rosenthal in 1995, writing in the New York Times about Bill Clinton … Continue reading The More Things Change…

“Whenever a voice was raised in behalf of deliberation and the recognized maxims of statesmanship, it was howled down in a storm of vituperation and cant. Everything was done to make us throw away sobriety of thought and calmness of judgment and to inflate all expressions with sensational epithets and turgid phrases. It cannot be denied that everything in regard to the war has been treated in an exalted strain of sentiment and rhetoric very unfavorable to the truth. At present the whole periodical press of the country seems to be occupied in tickling the national vanity to the utmost … Continue reading The More Things Change…