Romney Goes From Victim to Vicious
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on July 19th, 2012 11:08 pm by HL
Romney Goes From Victim to Vicious
Charles Blow, New York Times
Presidential campaigns are protracted affairs that require candidates to deftly manage the seesaws of hopes and fears, enthusiasm and foreboding, aggression and equanimity, momentum and wanderings.Not only has the Romney campaign not been on top of this lately, it has been crushed beneath the boards.
Romney Can’t Wait Out His Tax Storm
Frank Rich, New York Magazine
Mitt Romney's taxes, tax avoidance, and tax returns have become one of the central issues of this campaign. A growing chorus of Republicans, among them Ron Paul, Rick Perry, and the editors of National Review, have called on Mitt to release more returns. Would that be smart politics? Or can he wait out this storm?Is there any major Republican, from George Will to Bill Kristol to Haley Barbour, who has not called for Romney to release more returns? Surely Romney himself is asking for more than two years of returns from the veep prospects he’s vetting. What Mitt doesn’t…
Looking for a Syrian Endgame
David Ignatius, Washington Post
WASHINGTON — As Syria veers toward a violent political transition, U.S. officials are hoping to avoid a dangerous vacuum like the one that followed the 2003 toppling of Saddam Hussein in neighboring Iraq that triggered a sectarian civil war.President Obama is seeking a “managed transition” in Syria with the twin goals of removing President Bashar al-Assad as soon as possible, and doing so without the evaporation of the authority of the Syrian state.
The Assad Regime Is Finished
Steve Coll, The New Yorker
On Wednesday, an apparent suicide bomber in Damascus attacked a meeting of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s war cabinet, killing Daoud Rajha, Syria’s defense minister, and Asef Shawkat, who was the President’s brother-in-law. The attack was the most striking in a series of signs that Syria’s uprising has tipped into a full-blown civil war, as the Red Cross has now labelled it, with the war’s momentum now favoring the rebels. (The intelligence and access required for an attack to succeed against a crisis-cabinet meeting suggests that the…