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Debate Preview: More Ahmadinejad's Missiles Than Cain's

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Esquire - By Charles P. Pierce - Nov. 09 (Opinion) - Tonight, in the 3245th of 9876 scheduled debates between the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, the topic is very likely to be OMG, SCARY IRANIAN NUKES! FECKLESS! NAIVE! HIDE UNDER THE BED!!! Of course, nobody in the field except Jon Huntsman, the Incredible Vanishing Mormon, has any serious experience at dealing with foreigners. Michele Bachmann has negotiated with nobody except the voices in her head for 10 years, and Rick Perry believes there are only two countries in the world — America-Fk-Yeah! and Meskinland. Newt Gingrich's most memorable overseas experience was bitching about his seat on Air Force One, and all Ron Paul knows about people in other lands is that we shouldn't give them any money. (He feels much the same about other Americans, too, so that's a wash, I suppose.) Mitt Romney's experience in foreign affairs is limited to bobsledders, and Herman Cain's experience in foreign affairs is — please, god in Heaven, let this be so — merely limited.

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If Opinion Polls Decided Everything...

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Esquire - Aug. 10 - Conservatives are furious that a judge overturned California's Prop 8 election results. But would anyone really want to live in a society where polls decided everything?

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The Monks of War

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Esquire - By Thomas P.M. Barnett - Jun. 23 (News Analysis) - If anyone is going to take the top Afghan job, it will probably be James Mattis or one of his contemporaries — the generals fighting the wars, the men with the most lessons to teach

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The Fastest Way to Real Reform

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Esquire - By John H. Richardson - Mar. 30 (Opinion) - Sure, the Tea Partiers could just shut up, but our national delusion is the result of screaming on all sides. Top economists are right: it's time to follow the money.

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Dear Tea Party: This Is What America Stands For

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Esquire - Mar. 16 (Opinion) - A message to the new believers in our country's "can't-do" spirit, and a history lesson for the eve of health care reform

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Can Obama Save the Global Economy (and Globalization) at the G-20?

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Esquire - By Thomas P.M. Barnett - Sep. 25 (Opinion) - What does this "rebalancing" play from Washington amount to? In a nutshell, a near-term future in which America consumes less and China consumes a helluva lot more. But Obama's "framework" also promises diplomatic cover for all sides in this rebalancing process by empowering the International Monetary Fund to monitor G-20 member pledges and flag them for consultations if voluntary targets aren't being met. Since sanctions never work (even if Dmitri Medvedev and the West Wing think they're inevitable), this transparent approach is considered ideal — in effect, a multilateral version of the shaming technique historically employed by the IMF (and by the U.S. against mercantilist Japan in years past).

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The Future of the Republican Party

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Esquire - By Tucker Carlson - Jul. 08 (Interview) - The scene: Lunchtime at Jeb Bush's modest office just outside Miami. Just Tucker and Jeb, no one else in sight. Sandwiches. Jeb, only fifty-six, the smarter Bush boy, a good governor, with a great many people expecting that he's not yet finished, but after passing on the chance to run for Mel Martinez's Senate seat earlier this year, there's not an obvious path back to power for him. And his party is a shambles. Obama strides the globe like a colossus, Specter is days away from jumping, and Congressman Eric Cantor's sad rebranding effort is about to launch to no fanfare at a pizza parlor somewhere in Virginia. What will become of the once (and recently) great Republican party? And what role will one of its brightest stars — one of its only stars — play in its future?

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The Cynic and Senator Obama

Sat, 10 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Esquire - May. 10 (Opinion) - The cynic knows he'll never make Oshkosh. He took the wrong exit and went too far north, and now he has to double back. He gives up, finally, and turns down County Road S in central Wisconsin, looking for a place where he can park and listen to the speech on the radio. It has warmed up well into the double digits, and the snow is sliding slowly off the roofs of the barns along the way. The speech is not going to be anything the cynic hasn't heard over the past week, in four or five different places all over the state, on the last really good week Barack Obama will have in his campaign to be president of the United States. He's running up the score in Wisconsin, the campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton having virtually abandoned its efforts when the polls went sour. The country is not yet familiar with the words of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Tony Rezko isn't on trial in Chicago yet. Obama has not yet collided with the bitter small-town gunmen of Pennsylvania. There's a brief, silly dustup about whether Obama has lifted one of his applause lines -- "Don't tell me words don't matter!" -- from the campaign of Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, who happens to be one of his best friends and most enthusiastic supporters. But it dies aborning, and he rolls through Wisconsin on golden wheels, talking about hope and an America free from rancor and bitterness and partisan strife. The cynic drives deeper into the farm-quilted countryside and thinks to himself, Yeah, sure, absolutely. In a place like this, the cynic knows, you can see trouble coming from miles off. The cynic likes the stump speech, even the fourth time around, and even though it's oddly impervious to the immediate events of the day. The previous day, a gunman had shot up the campus of Northern Illinois University, not far from the Wisconsin border. At the very least, he thought, this was a divisive act that would be of great rhetorical utility, given the theme of the Obama campaign. Flog your cause with the dead, the cynic thought. But it was barely mentioned in the candidate's speeches that day, and the day after that, and the cynic was disappointed. There is one point in the stump speech, however, that catches the cynic up short every time. It comes near to the end, when Obama talks about cynics. Obama says that cynics believe they are smarter than everyone else. The cynic thinks he's wrong. The cynic doesn't think he's wiser or more clever or more politically attuned than anyone else. It's just that he fears that, every morning, he'll discover that his country has done something to deface itself further, that something else he thought solid will tremble and quake and fall to ruin, that his fellow citizens will sell more of their birthright for some silver that they can forge into shackles. He has come to believe that the worst thing a citizen of the United States of America can believe is that his country will not do something simply because it's wrong. It would be a mistake for anyone -- but especially for a presidential candidate -- to believe that the cynic thinks himself wise or safe or liberated. In 2008, the cynic is more modest. He considers himself merely adequate to the times.

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Four Ways to Solve the Energy Crisis

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 14:29:33 -0800

Esquire - By Tim Heffernan - Nov. 20 (Opinion) - Energy-independence advocate Gal Luft looks for winners. The former lieutenant colonel in the Israel Defense Forces and counterterrorism expert fervently believes that the only way to make America safe is to make it energy independent. And so as executive director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security and cofounder of the Set America Free Coalition, he has set out to do just that.

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The Beauty Contest

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 11:49:21 -0700

Esquire - By Charles P. Pierce - Aug. 06 (Special Report) - It is an odd campaign. By most accounts, Edwards is running third, behind a woman and a black man. Hillary Clinton has a bigger name and a higher profile. Barack Obama is what Edwards once was -- the out-of-the-blue rookie senator with the intriguing biography, an apparent purchase on the future, and the crowd in his pocket. For the moment, at least, young John Edwards is a throwback -- the white man out, talking about issues that hearken back to the days when a woman president or a black president were gauzy, aspirational fantasies.

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