Andy Rooney award nominee

Growing up, I noticed that about 10% of what Andy Rooney said was interesting, 80% was pedantic, and the last 10% was so uninformed, incendiary and wrong that you immediately forgot his overall point. In honor of that style of commentary, I nominate John McEnroe, writing in the Daily Telegraph, for the first Rooney award. ...

By , a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast.

Growing up, I noticed that about 10% of what Andy Rooney said was interesting, 80% was pedantic, and the last 10% was so uninformed, incendiary and wrong that you immediately forgot his overall point. In honor of that style of commentary, I nominate John McEnroe, writing in the Daily Telegraph, for the first Rooney award. Most of it's harmless, but then he says on 9/11:

Growing up, I noticed that about 10% of what Andy Rooney said was interesting, 80% was pedantic, and the last 10% was so uninformed, incendiary and wrong that you immediately forgot his overall point. In honor of that style of commentary, I nominate John McEnroe, writing in the Daily Telegraph, for the first Rooney award. Most of it’s harmless, but then he says on 9/11:

Apportioning blame was not as cut and dried as people liked to think. I mean, didn’t we arm Iraq in their war against Iran? And didn’t we back that same Osama bin Laden, who wreaked such havoc and misery upon our country, in his fight against the Russians?

The natural extension of this logic is that because the U.S. is so powerful, anything that happens anywhere must be caused by something the U.S. government did (or did not do).

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner

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