Stolen Valor and the Origin of the 'Crazy Vet'

Re: The ‘Crazed Veteran’, Contentions, September 13, 2012. "The virtue of Stolen Valor is the way that it methodically and systemically uses documents obtained by Freedom of Information Act requests to reveal fraud after fraud, fake after fake, and lie after lie from supposedly traumatized veterans who in reality rarely even served in the military or saw combat at all."

U.S. Campaign All Tied Up WIth Somewhere To Go

"Even Money and Media Can't Bring This Election to Life," Yorkshire Post, August 31, 2012, not available online. "The U.S. campaign seems to be a race that no one can win. But it isn’t for lack of trying. The British media report obsessively on the U.S. campaign, but they can’t convey its curious lack of momentum. President Obama has a lead of a single point over Mitt Romney in the latest poll of polls, but both candidates are trapped in a narrow range."

A Case Study of Media Error (Or Bias)

Politifact’s Pants on Fire, Contentions, January 20, 2012. "I’ve worked with PolitiFact before, and while I’ve not agreed with previous pieces, they were at least defensible. What it comes down to is that Romney’s claim is factually correct, but assessing the context would require a book-length analysis that would be subject to a wide amount of legitimate dispute over many factors, some of them fundamentally unknowable. Even if applied earnestly and knowledgeably, fact-checking is terrible at assessing this kind of context, precisely because the facts are not known: it’s why Churchill described strategic leadership as an art, not a science. Fact-checkers would have a better sense of their potential contributions and limits if they bore Churchill’s wisdom in mind, and recognized that checking facts is not the same thing as criticizing art."

Bush's Last 100 Days, and Beyond

One final chance for battered Bush to make a lasting name for himself, October 13, 2008, Yorkshire Post.

The State Department on Human Rights in China

Not Good Sports, March 13, 2008, Contentions.

The Media and Iraq

The Media's War, December 9, 2007, Contentions.