American - Journalist | November 21, 1973 -
My office-hour reading is fairly ad hoc: I generally read whatever seems relevant to what I'm editing, writing, or thinking about writing.
Bret Stephens
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I don't read 'Vanity Fair,' whose millionaire-fashionista-liberal shtick I find repellent.
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I am not sorry the CIA went to the edge of the law in the aftermath of 9/11 to prevent further mass-casualty attacks on the U.S.
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I am sorry that Mr. Cheney, and every other supporter of enhanced interrogation techniques, has to defend the practices as if they were torture. They are not.
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Censoriously asserting one's moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.
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Demanding abrupt and expensive changes in public policy raises fair questions about ideological intentions.
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Perhaps if there were less certitude about our climate future, more Americans would be interested in having a reasoned conversation about it.
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The United States can only lead a world that's prepared to follow.
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Did you loathe and detest the Bush administration? If so, you'd probably say its ideas were horrible and their execution worse. Did you not loathe and detest the Bush administration? In that case, you might say its ideas were pretty good - only the execution often left something to be desired.
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Ms. Rice was a bad national security adviser and a bad secretary of state. She was on the wrong side of some of the administration's biggest internal policy fights. She had a tendency to flip-flop when it came to the president's core priorities, and her political misjudgment more than once cost Mr. Bush dearly.
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'Character Doesn't Count' has become a de facto G.O.P. motto. 'Virtue Doesn't Matter' might be another. But character does count, and virtue does matter, and Trump's shortcomings prove it daily.
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In place of presidential addresses, stump speeches, or town halls, we have Trump's demagogic mass rallies. In place of the usual jousting between the administration and the press, we have a president who fantasizes on Twitter about physically assaulting CNN.
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