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Archive of posts published in the tag: Bret Stephens

The Cult of Personality

From Bret Stephens at The Wall Street Journal, The Donald and Demagogues: If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling. And so forth and so on—a parade of semi-sophisticated theories that act as bathroom deodorizer to mask the stench

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Austerity and Reality in Greece

from The Wall Street Journal, Greece and the Flight From Reality by Bret Stephens excerpt: But maybe rules isn’t quite the right word. The larger issue is reality—and Greece’s flight from it. Greece’s debt-to-GDP ratio is 177%, which sounds like

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Illusions of Grandeur

from The Wall Street Journal, Greece and the Flight From Reality by Bret Stephens excerpt: What’s more remarkable is how Greece’s flight from reality persists. Since Athens defaulted on its IMF loan last week, the Greeks have gotten a taste of what

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Wealth Without Work

from The Wall Street Journal, Greece and the Flight From Reality by Bret Stephens excerpt: These and other details give the lie to the claim that Athens’s woes are somehow the product of powerful and indifferent economic forces beyond its control: the

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Appeasing Obama on Israel

from the Wall Street Journal, The President Against the Historian by Bret Stephens: excerpt: But no Israeli concession could ever appease Mr. Obama, who had the habit of demanding heroic political risks from Mr. Netanyahu while expecting heroic deference in

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A Special Innocence

Bret Stephens writes in The Wall Street Journal, Everything Is Awesome, Mideast Edition Excerpt: I recount these events not just to illustrate the distance between Ben Rhodes’s concept of reality and reality itself. It’s also a question of speed. The

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The Cynics in the Mirror

Bret Stephens writes in The Wall Street Journal, Hillary’s Cynical Song of Self excerpts: Cynicism is the great temptation of modern life. We become cynics because we desperately don’t want to be moralists, and because earnestness is boring, and because

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Mutual Reinforcement of Foreign and Domestic Policy

from Bret Stephens at The Wall Street Journal, Israel Alone Excerpts: In other words, Mr. Obama is bequeathing not just a more dangerous Middle East but also one the next president will want to touch only with a barge pole.

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Finding the Truth in Ferguson

Bret Stephens writes in The Wall Street Journal, Ferguson, Lies and Statistics “Witness 109 claimed to have witnessed the shooting, stated that it was justified, and repeatedly refused to give formal statements to law enforcement for fear of reprisal should

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Lessons Unwanted

Bret Stephens writes in The Wall Street Journal, Obama Needs to Call Bush Excerpts: Maybe President Obama also calls Mr. Bush every now and then, just to talk, and one day we’ll find out about it. But I suspect not.

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Inexperienced Foreign Policy Advisors

Bret Stephens writes The Meltdown in the September Commentary. Excerpts: None of these fiascos— for brevity’s sake, I’m deliberately setting to one side the illusory pivot to Asia, the misbegotten Russian Reset, the mishandled Palestinian–Israeli talks, the stillborn Geneva conferences on Syria,

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Safe, Benign, and Confident hands.

Bret Stephens writes The Meltdown in the September Commentary. Excerpts: Should any of this have come as a surprise? Probably not: With Obama, there was always more than a whiff of the overconfident dilettante, so sure of his powers that he could

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Inherited Dilemmas

Bret Stephens writes The Meltdown in the September Commentary. Excerpts: Then again, every president confronts his share of apparently intractable dilemmas. The test of a successful presidency is whether it can avoid being trapped and defined by them. Did Obama

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Supremely Comfortable With His Own Ignorance

Hillary’s Foreign Policy Failures a comprehensive look, also scan the 80+ commments at AT. A similar look, though more focused on Obama,  from Bret Stephens in Commentary: The Meltdown excerpts: Even the ordinarily sympathetic Washington press corps has cottoned to

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The Questions of 9/12

From The Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens writes The Neo-Neocons: So now liberals want the U.S. to bomb Iraq, and maybe Syria as well, to stop and defeat ISIS, the vilest terror group of all time. Where, one might ask,

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Subordinated Convictions

From Bret Stephens in The Wall Street Journal, The Hillary Metamorphosis There are a few possible answers to that one. One is that the views she expressed in the interview are sincere and long-held and she was always a closet

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The Case for Barbarism

From The Wall Street Journal, Palestine Makes You Dumb, by Bret Stephens Excerpts: Consider the media obsession with the body count. According to a daily tally in theNew York Times,  as of July 27 the war in Gaza had claimed 1,023

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Capitalism and Envy

Bret Stephens writes in the Wall Street Journal Obama’s Envy Problem. Excerpts: The moral greatness of capitalism rests in the fact that it is the only economic system where one person’s gain can be another’s also—where Steve Jobs‘s billions are his shareholders’

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The Paradox of Equality

Bret Stephens writes in the Wall Street Journal Obama’s Envy Problem. Excerpts: Now about inequality. In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville noticed what might be called the paradox of equality: As social conditions become more equal, the more people resent the

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Incompetent Conservatives

The January 2013  issue of Commentary asked 53 writers and conservative leaders What is the Future of Conservatism? This is part of the response from Bret Stephens, I know it’s a small thing in the scheme of the universe that Ashcroft should have been

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