This is a hell of a good season for audacity. If you haven't tuned in to Joe Klein's fight with the smarmy bullies of the Jewish Right, here's what you've been missing. Last month, Joe Klein posted in his Time blog as follows: The fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives--people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary--plumped for this war, and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the ...

Rummaging through American history, I just stumbled on this, from Franklin Roosevelt's 9th State of the Union Address, January 6, 1942: If any of our enemies, from Europe or from Asia, attempt long-range raids by "suicide" squadrons of bombing planes, they will do so only in the hope of terrorizing our people and disrupting our morale. Our people are not afraid of that. We know that we may have to pay a heavy price for ...

As of 9 pm Saturday night, the nation's major newspapers are weirdly reticent about Prime Minister al-Maliki's striking (make that extremely striking and indeed extraordinary) statement to Germany's Der Spiegel that a timetable for US withdrawal from Iraq makes sense: "U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right time frame for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes." According to this major magazine, "In his conversation ...