Tag Archives: Richard Cohen

It’s the Sun Flares, Stupid

BY WILLIAM F. GAVIN

I awoke this morning to learn from the TV news that there are gigantic sun flares on the sun, among the largest ever recorded.

Then I turned to the Washington Post editorial page.  The lead editorial was a scathing condemnation of the IRS for its treatment of conservative political groups. But it was the op-ed page that really surprised me.

The left-hand column, written by Charles Lane, criticized an energy scheme by Rep. Ed Markey, Massachusetts arch-liberal (or do I repeat myself?). In the middle of the page were two columns, one by George Will, the other by Michael Gerson. Each, in its own way, condemned the administration for the IRS scandal and President Obama for his recent (and all too typical) speech at Ohio State University  in which he  sneered at conservatives who “warn that [government] tyranny is just around the corner”. Continue reading →

Wikileaks Crime Should Shock America

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

I wonder if there is a family somewhere in America whose son’s or daughter’s life was put at risk because of the Wikileaks.org release last month of 76,000 classified documents?

            I wonder if there is an Afghan family whose son’s or daughter’s life was put at risk because of those leaks that we are told contain the names of Afghani citizens who have tried to help U.S. soldiers in their war against the Taliban.

            I’m the father of five and I wonder about those things because war must get very personal and very heart wrenching for parents with children—age doesn’t matter and adulthood doesn’t exist for parents—involved on the violent fronts of the conflict.

            So it was especially alarming to read the reactions of those detached observers suffering from chronic arrogance and elitism who thought the release of the documents was boring, telling us little we didn’t know already.  “Overall, though, the most shocking thing about the ‘War Diary” may be that it fails to shock, wrote columnist Eugene Robinson.  His colleague Richard Cohen went further: “The news in that massive data dump…is that there is no news at all.”

  Continue reading →