Writing some of the most straightforward, readable DC dish available, Josh Rogin gets a lot first and a lot right. Emphasis on the scoop may be dying out, as exclusivity is immediately co-opted by a thousand monkeys typing, but the public still has a vested interest in having the information it receives be correct. Blogging at The Cable for Foreign Policy, Rogin is a sure hand here. He continually maps the landscape of American foreign policy, inherently fraught terrain constantly altered in small ways by imperceptible tremors while susceptible to large-scale radical change in an instant. Rogin is someone to trust when you want to know what’s really happening. He often knows as much as the players themselves.
Rogin has written on Iraq, Afghanistan, China, Japan, North Korea, Syria and more. The Department of Homeland Security is less mysterious to him than to some of its own bureaucrats. His broad bailiwick includes the Pentagon, Foggy Bottom, Langley–the whole military industrial complex. And Rogin doesn’t need to run to the map when things blow up in a particular region of the world. With the globe, he is familiar. Rogin’s work appears daily at the blog and they print his stuff in the Washington Post too, so John McCain can see it. He’s also funny, like that time he thought he’d make a good ambassador to the Bahamas.
