Sol W. Sanders President Barrack Obama’s sudden volte-face on a strike against the Syrian regime of President Bashar Assad has only put on hold the enormous stakes in the crisis’ ultimate outcome. In one of those curious turns of history, an ugly, bloody, little conflict in an always fragile, volatile, artificial nation-state created in […]
Sol W. Sanders When a young, flibbertigibbet reporter asked the old Edwardian Harold Macmillan what might derail implementing the prime minister’s promised political agenda, he rejoined, “Events, dear boy, events!” For pseudo-aristocrat that he might have been – his grandfather was a Scottish crofter, his mother quintessentially Midwestern American – Macmillan knew well and […]
Sol W. Sanders It’s impossible to tell whether it is infection from the hysterical Mideast Arabic and English commentaries on radio and TV. Or does the twaddle result from misunderstanding the complexity of the issues? Whatever, our talking heads are befuddled more than usually about events in Egypt. And they are lending further confusion […]
Sol W. Sanders “In the good, old days” a reader’s world was filled with newspapers. Several coexisted competitively in a single urban area and even in the rural hinterlands. The choice for a subscriber for dawn home delivery by a boy on a bicycle or picked up at the local newsstand en route to […]
Sol W. Sanders The U.S. economy is sick. And it’s not getting any better despite the inherent vitality and innate resources which do spring to life intermittently from the world’s largest and most important economic enterprise. In fact, it may be growing worse in terms of basic issues. Vested interests – the Obama administration, […]
Sol W. Sanders The Obama administration’s Middle East policies – it would be foolhardy to call them “strategy” – would be ludicrous were they not so threatening to American interests, regional and world stability. The latest permutation is Washington’s position against the Egyptian military and its satellite, hopefully provisional, civilian government. Washington’s insistence that […]
Sol W. Sanders Fleeting memory – and perhaps proof that if there are lessons of history, they are never learned – is that there is almost no mention of “Nasserism” or “Pan-Arabism” in the current reporting on Egyptian chaos. Yet for two decades a young army officer out of nowhere, Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussein, […]
Sol W. Sanders Although he did not originate the phrase, President Harry Truman had a sign on his desk through most of his presidency indicating he understood he was the ultimate arbiter of The Republic’s executive decision-making. It said: “The buck stops here”. Perhaps as important, the back side said, “I‘m from Missouri” — […]
Sol W. Sanders For those of us who lived through it, current negotiations for the American exit from Afghanistan smells much too much like the end of the U.S. commitment in Vietnam. Washington, after a decade of enormous sacrifice of life and treasure, has chosen to negotiate with the enemy following diplomatic “modalities” pretty […]
Sol W. Sanders One of the more bizarre aspects of the current deluge of Washington scandals is that their very numbers permit President Barack Obama to finesse and continue to play a role as No. 1 observer and chief political fundraiser. The almost weekly additions to news of the administration’s dereliction of duty and […]
