The Sundries Shack

From Jeff Goldstein’s piece on Colin Powell and Barack Obama that is worth your consideration:

Colin Powell is — and always has been — a “realist,” and as such was of course at one time despised by the left precisely for his Nixonian realism. Interestingly, though, he was, at a later point, despised by the left [...]

While we’re up here bickering over the election, the tyrants around the world are still perfecting their repugnant craft.
Hugo Chavez, Hollywood’s second-favorite tyrant, has expelled Human Rights Watch from Venezuela. He claims they’re in cahoots with President Bush to overthrow him. Strangely enough, he’s half right. Though HRW and the President aren’t working together, they’d [...]

When it comes to stories about Russia’s invasion of Georgia (such as this one which tells how Russia is trying to make formal what it’s been doing for a long time), reporters make one fundamental mistake that colors their coverage wrongly. I’ve made the same mistake in some conversations I’ve had about Georgia. The mistake [...]

Michael Totten, reporting from Tblisi, Georgia, spoke to some survivors of the Russian attack on Gori. I thought this bit especially interesting:

Her husband had remained behind and arrived in Tbilisi shortly before I did. “He was trying to keep the house and the fields,” she explained. “Afterward, he wanted to leave, but he was circled [...]

The Russian government has sent forth two mouthpieces to try to sway American public opinion this week. Mikhail Gorbachev has an op-ed in the New York Times wherein he said that Russia was just minding its own business in South Ossetia when the wicked Georgians shelled the city and forced them to act to save [...]

Even after signing a cease-fire agreement that says they have to leave Georgia, the Russians, like the Chorus of Policemen in the Pirates of Penzance, don’t seem to be in a very big hurry to go.

In Gori, a strategic town on Georgia’s main east-west highway, six Russian armored personnel carriers, three tanks and two [...]

I’ve been really disappointed with the Bush administration over the past year or so. I had thought, with the twin invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the robust and vocal support of the downtrodden in Iran, and the huge push to establish ourselves as something much less than the Devil in Southeast Asia, that the President [...]

I wonder how, or if, the UN will respond to this explicit threat.

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Sudan has warned the United Nations of “serious consequences” for its staff and facilities if the International Criminal Court issues an arrest warrant for President Omar Hassan al-Bashir over Darfur, a U.N. envoy said on Monday.

We should watch carefully [...]