Tonight’s debate is supposed to be focused mainly on the economy, but the Romney campaign has worked hard to get the Benghazi consulate attack into the conversation. And given the shifting story from the White House and the potential implications, that might be a good idea. House Republicans gave a boost to this argument by [...]

With the June, July, August and September surprises fizzled, the Romney campaign now must turn to an October surprise, and they think they’ve got one, which they’ve inexplicably previewed to a reporter (it’s not a surprise then). According to a highly reliable source, as Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama prepare for the first presidential [...]

It’s fascinating how the economy became something that Mitt Romney’s campaign doesn’t always want to talk about in this election. I’ll leave the reasons for that to the horse-race analysts. But today found one of Romney’s top advisors pivoting to foreign policy, to condemn the Obama Administration for misleading the public on the attack on [...]

If you want to understand how things get done in Washington, perhaps the best lesson of the year comes from the State Department’s decision late Friday to remove the Iranian exile group Mujahideen-e-Khalq from the official list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. The MEK never really lessened the activities that got it listed as a Foreign [...]

When Mother Jones released the secret fundraiser video of Mitt Romney doing his best Thurston Howell III impression (yes that links to a David Brooks op-ed) they promised more to come. Today’s video concerns the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and while Romney will sadly not suffer politically for denigrating the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza, [...]

As we learn more about the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi on September 11, it becomes harder and harder to ignore the probability that the militants involved were retaliating for a drone strike that took out a top al-Qaeda leader who happened to be Libyan. Christopher Chivvis puts this in context. As details [...]

Given the mysteries of the Benghazi attacks on the US consulate (not an embassy, and not an entity that was guarded by Marines, apparently), I’m going to step lightly before attributing any Middle East incident to anything else in a direct through-line. But we do know that riots/protests/attacks are proliferating. Today they have spread to [...]

To pull back from focusing on the Romney campaign, relative to the attacks on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, we’re starting to learn more about the attacks themselves, and their significance inside Libya. More evidence has arisen suggesting these had nothing to do with a poorly produced movie insulting Islam. If anything, the movie [...]

We can discuss why protesters decided to kill four American diplomatic personnel in Benghazi, Libya. The stated impetus concerns a badly produced movie displaying insensitivity toward Mohammed and Islam. In reality, this may have been a last straw for populations angered by anti-Islamism coming from the United States. I would expect that to be a [...]

In addition to the tragic situation in Libya, another international incident simmered last night, on the subject of Israel and Iran. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a speech claiming that the US had “no moral right” to intervene in a potential Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, unless they too set a “red line” [...]

I heard LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the chair of the Democratic National Convention, speak last night in Burbank, and among a fairly mainstream liberal speech that focused heavily on the DREAM Act and the Administration’s granting deferred action status for DREAM-eligible undocumenteds, he accused the Romney-Ryan campaign of “saber-rattling on Syria.” This came one day [...]