Roundup: Media's Take
This is where we excerpt articles from the media that take a historical approach to events in the news.
SOURCE: Daily Beast (1-1-13)
Newsweek/Daily Beast special correspondent Michael Tomasky is also editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.
While most liberals were stewing at Barack Obama yesterday for his "capitulation" on tax rates, I confess that I was feeling philosophical about it, and even mildly defensive of him. He is negotiating with madmen, and you can’t negotiate with madmen, because they’re, well, mad. I also spent part of yesterday morning re-reading a little history and reminding myself that rascality like this fiscal-cliff business has been going on since the beginning of the republic. So now I’d like to remind you. It’s always the reactionaries holding up the progressives—and usually, needless to say, it’s been the South holding up the North—and always with the same demagogic and dishonest arguments about a tyrannical central government. We’ll never be rid of these paranoid bloviators, and if no other president could stop them I don’t really see why Obama ought to be able to.
This history of legislative hostage-taking begins with the odious three-fifths compromise, which counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for census purposes. That much I trust you know. What you may not know is that the Southern states, backers of the three-fifths rule in this case in order to get greater representation in the House of Representatives, had opposed a different three-fifths rule earlier, back in the Articles of Confederation days. Then, three-fifths of all slaves were going to be counted for purposes of deciding how much federal tax each state owed.
In other words, the South had said, count slaves as part human for the purposes of taxation? Nevah! Count them as part-human for the purposes of representation, however—well, Yankee, now you’re talking. The South is still doing exactly the same thing today, never paying its freight, its cornpone pols inveighing against the evil government while the Southern states are collectively the most dependent on Washington largesse of all states and regions. The hypocrisy has a long pedigree...
SOURCE: Time (12-28-12)
Bruce Crumley Time's Paris bureau chief, and has covered French and European news since 1989.
The recent visit of French President François Hollande to Algeria received praise for addressing the painful historical wounds that continue plaguing relations between the two countries. In doing so, Hollande acknowledged the "brutal and unjust" manner in which France treated its former Algerian colony — a sober recognition that pointedly stopped short of the full apology officials in Algiers have long demanded. Still, coming a full 50 years after Algeria won its independence with a long and gruesome war, Hollande’s words drew a thundering ovation from the Algerian parliament during his Dec. 20 address.
"Over 132 years, Algeria was subjected to a profoundly unjust and brutal system," Hollande said during his two-day visit. "This system has a name: it is colonialism, and I recognize the suffering that colonialism inflicted on the Algerian people."
But despite the praise — and protest — Hollande’s comments generated on both sides of the Mediterranean, he failed to touch on two terrible, living consequences of France’s legacy in Algeria. First among those is the historical background in which the continuing discrimination and ghettoization of millions of French Arabs are rooted — much like the increasingly open expression of Islamophobia within French society. Second is his failure to acknowledge the deeply corrupt, brutal and military-supported Algerian power structure that has dominated the country since independence — one that Paris has preferred to placate and patronize, even as it presses for democracy elsewhere...
SOURCE: National Interest (12-26-12)
Paul R. Pillar is director of graduate studies at Georgetown University's Security Studies Program and a former national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia. He is a contributing editor to The National Interest.
I was born just early enough to have some faint but direct memories of the stain on American history that became known as McCarthyism. One recollection is of my parents watching on television in 1954 substantial portions of the Army-McCarthy hearings, which was the first Congressional inquiry to be nationally televised. Although I was too young to understand it at the time, those hearings marked the beginning of the end of Joseph McCarthy's red-baiting campaign of slander. Before the end of the year he would be formally censured by the U.S. Senate.
One important factor in stopping McCarthy's reputation-ruining rampage was the working of media in those early days of the television era. Media coverage of the 1954 hearings, which lasted several weeks and in which accusations and counter-accusations were made and confronted in concentrated form within a single hearing room, made it impossible to turn a blind eye to what McCarthyism was about. The gavel-to-gavel television coverage, bringing such a dramatic event into living rooms across the country for the first time, was especially influential.
Another important factor was the willingness of visible figures to call McCarthy to account and to shame him, clearly and directly. A key figure was Joseph Welch, the prominent lawyer who served as chief counsel for the U.S. Army at the hearings. When McCarthy attempted to apply his usual method of innuendo and guilt-by-association to a junior lawyer at Welch's firm, Welch labeled McCarthy's tactics as "reckless cruelty" and spoke the most eloquent and memorable line of the hearings:
You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?...
SOURCE: National Review (12-27-12)
Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner.
In combing through the results of the 2012 election — apparently finally complete, nearly two months after the fact — I continue to find many similarities between 2012 and 2004, and one enormous difference.
Both of the elections involved incumbent presidents with approval ratings hovering around or just under 50 percent facing challengers who were rich men from Massachusetts (though one made his money and the other married it).
In both cases, the challenger and his campaign seemed confident he was going to win — and had reasonable grounds to believe so.
In both elections, the incumbent started running a barrage of negative ads defining the challenger in the spring. And in both elections, the incumbent had at least one spotty debate performance.
In both elections, each candidate concentrated on a more or less fixed list of target states, and in both elections the challenger depended heavily on outside groups’ spending that failed to achieve optimal results.
The popular-vote margins were similar — 51 to 48 percent for George W. Bush in 2004, 51 to 47 percent for Barack Obama in 2012.
The one enormous difference was turnout...
SOURCE: LA Times (12-26-12)
Sam Pizzigati edits Too Much, the Institute for Policy Studies' weekly on excess and inequality. This piece is adapted from his new book, The Rich Don't Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970.
Close your eyes in Washington these days and you can almost hear the echoes of 1932. Eighty years ago, just like today, a fiscal crisis almost totally dominated the nation's capital.
Then, as now, fiscal conservatives demanded immediate action to fix a federal budget awash in red ink. And then, as now, average Americans wondered why all the fuss about deficits. The Depression was in its third year, and millions had no jobs. Why were politicians haggling about balancing the budget?
Is history simply repeating? If so, bring that repeat on, with the same final result. That 1932 fiscal crisis produced an unexpected, and stunning, watershed in U.S. history, the moment when America's rich and powerful began to lose their lock-grip on the nation's political pulse...
SOURCE: Foreign Policy (12-24-12)
John Arquilla is professor of defense analysis at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and author of Worst Enemy: The Reluctant Transformation of the American Military.
SOURCE: WSJ (12-23-12)
Mr. Kaplan is chief geopolitical analyst for Stratfor, a private global intelligence firm, and author of The Revenge of Geography (Random House, 2012).
SOURCE: Daily News (12-23-12)
Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
SOURCE: Huffington Post (12-22-12)
SOURCE: Defining Ideas (Hoover) (12-19-12)
Toshio Nishi is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Japan has been apologizing since the summer of 1945; apologizing to its neighbors in the Asia-Pacific and to the United States. Have we, the Japanese, been kowtowing to the point that no nation believes our sincerity? Or do the Asia-Pacific nations demand more of our prostration? The scene is perhaps like an addict needing a more potent drug every passing day: the drug being Japan’s apology, and the addict you could easily guess.
Don’t the Japanese get sick and tired of our same miserable behavior? Yes, we do. Indeed, a proverbial swing has moved a little toward the center, and Japan has become assertive and recently proclaimed ownership for some little rocks sticking out of the water in the Sea of Japan.
China and South Korea are shocked to see Japan’s unexpected nationalistic, neo-militaristic resurgence. The United States wisely stays out of this potentially volatile shouting match. There is a very good reason for unfriendly bickering. Below the rocks, under the seabed, huge oil and natural gas deposits have been discovered.
MacArthur’s Legacy
Something is going on under the surface of a polite Japanese society that previously enjoyed unprecedented wealth and now is suffering from two decades of recession (but is still without much crime). Granted, the largest earthquake and tsunami in our memory and the four nuclear meltdowns never before experienced in our history have wrecked our daily lives. Yet, on its surface, Japan remains calm and collected. The people’s indignation, however, is heating up within...
SOURCE: National Review (12-19-12)
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
The political slogan "Forward" served Barack Obama well during this year’s election campaign. It said that he was for going forward, while Republicans were for "going back to the failed policies that got us into this mess in the first place."
It was great political rhetoric and great political theater. Moreover, the Republicans did virtually nothing to challenge its shaky assumptions, though a few hard facts could have made those assumptions collapse like a house of cards.
More is involved than this year’s political battles. The word "forward" has been a political battle cry on the left for more than a century. It has been almost as widely used as the Left’s other favorite word, "equality," which goes back more than two centuries.
The seductive notion of economic equality has appealed to many people. The pilgrims started out with the idea of equal sharing. The colony of Georgia began with very similar ideas. In the Midwest, Britain’s Robert Owen — who coined the term "socialism" — set up colonies based on communal living and economic equality.
What these idealistic experiments all had in common was that they failed...
SOURCE: The Hill (12-19-12)
Budowsky was an aide to former Sen. Lloyd Bentsen and Bill Alexander, then chief deputy majority whip of the House. He holds an LL.M. degree in international financial law from the London School of Economics. He can be read on The Hill’s Pundits Blog and reached at brentbbi@webtv.net.
Let’s do this for the beautiful girls and boys of Newtown, whose happy smiles, wide eyes, caring hearts, and loving souls will never again warmly hug the families that love them or joyously open the presents that await them, as the nation that mourns them and loves them begins heartfelt thought and prayerful reflection during this holiday season.
Regarding the role of the National Rifle Association in a nation that has witnessed far too many killings of far too many innocents in a nation with far too many of the kind of weapons that are best left to Navy SEALs killing enemy terrorists, I write today to reach out.
A great political battle might be necessary, but a national consensus for unity and action would be far preferable. Not one child will be saved by renewing ancient political wars that inevitably lead to inaction that history will condemn as another appalling prelude to the next mass murder....
SOURCE: Guardian (UK) (12-19-12)
Nabila Ramdani is a Paris-born freelance journalist and academic of Algerian descent. She specialises in Anglo-French issues, Islamic affairs, and the Arab World.
It is now half a century since Algeria, the jewel in the crown of Gallic imperialism, was finally granted independence, so ending 132 years of often barbarous rule from Paris that culminated in a war in which more than a million Algerians died. This week the French president, François Hollande, is on a two-day state visit to the country. His main task is effectively to offer a qualified apology for what happened, and thus "turn a page" in arguably the darkest chapter in France's recent history. Moreover, Hollande will use the platitudinous jargon of modern global government to make the case for increased economic integration between the two countries, highlighting France's continuing friendship with her oil- and gas-rich North African partner.
Apologies and clean slates are to be welcomed in any language. Bitterness over a uniquely savage history achieves nothing in terms of economic policy. France is now Algeria's main trade partner, and it has to compete with countries including Britain, China and the US for highly lucrative markets. Algeria's president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, will use the two-day visit to show off positive business developments in the relationship between the two countries, including the building of a new Renault factory in Oran and the signing of at least 15 new contracts for the construction of trams, water-treatment plants, telecommunications and other infrastructure projects.
There is irony in Hollande, a socialist with an avowed dislike of the go-getting rich, seeking to expunge a dark colonial legacy with the promise of corporate profit. But he has displayed a genuine commitment to change. His presidential entourage in Algeria is one of the biggest ever, and he will become the first French head of state to address both houses of parliament in Algiers since the country's independence in 1962. Earlier this year Hollande broke the official state silence over the murders of as many as 200 Algerians (estimates of the exact number vary) during a pro-independence demonstration in Paris in October 1961, recognising the "bloody repression" of thousands of Algerians living in mainland France.
What Hollande's trip to Algeria fails to acknowledge, however, is just how oppressed so many French-Algerians still feel today...
SOURCE: Financial Times (UK) (12-17-12)
The writer is director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.
For more than 30 years, from the mid-1970s to 2008, Keynesian demand management was in intellectual eclipse. Yet it returned with the financial crisis to dominate the thinking of the Obama administration and much of the UK Labour party. It is time to reconsider the revival.
The rebound of Keynesianism, led in the US by Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury secretary, Paul Krugman, the economist-columnist, and the US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, came with the belief that short-term fiscal and monetary expansion was needed to offset the collapse of the housing market.
The US policy choice has been four years of structural (cyclically adjusted) budget deficits of general government of 7 per cent of gross domestic product or more; interest rates near zero; another call by the White House for stimulus in 2013; and the Fed’s new policy to keep rates near zero until unemployment returns to 6.5 per cent. Since 2010, no European country has followed the US’s fiscal lead. However, the European Central Bank and Bank of England are not far behind the Fed on the monetary front.
We can’t know how successful (or otherwise) these policies have been because of the lack of convincing counterfactuals. But we should have serious doubts...
SOURCE: New Republic (12-19-12)
Adam Winkler is a professor at UCLA School of Law and the author of Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America.
Gun control is one of the great pieces of unfinished business for the Democratic Party. Although the party has never been unified in its support of restrictive gun laws – indeed, gun control historically transcends the usual party lines – for the past century Democrats have pushed for a more vigorous role for government in regulating guns. They’ve been largely unsuccessful, however, and lately Democrats have made Avoid Gun Control an informal plank in the party’s platform.
The Newtown massacre however may have changed all that.
Like health care, social security, and so many other issues central to the Democratic agenda, the party’s support for gun control stems from Franklin D. Roosevelt. For most of American history, regulation of guns was a matter of state law. State-level regulation, however, came under tremendous pressure during the 1920s and 30s, when Prohibition-era gangsters like Al Capone overwhelmed local police resources and traveling desperadoes like Bonnie and Clyde easily escaped capture by racing across state lines. FDR promoted a "New Deal for Crime," which, like his other New Deal policies, involved expanding the role of the federal government in serving the people.
Roosevelt’s original proposal for what would become the National Firearms Act of 1934, the first federal gun control law, sought to tax all firearms and establish a national registry of guns. When gun owners objected, Congress scaled down FDR’s proposal to allow only for a restrictive tax on machine guns and sawed-off shotguns, which were thought to be gangster weapons with no usefulness for self-defense.
Congress watered down FDR’s bill because of concerns about maintaining the right of people in rural communities, where there was little police presence, to have handguns for protection—not because of the Second Amendment. In congressional hearings into the NFA, Karl Frederick, the leader of the NRA, was called to testify. When asked if the Second Amendment imposed any limitations on what Congress could do in regulating guns, the NRA president’s reply was surprising: "I have not given it any study from that point of view."..
SOURCE: National Interest (12-17-12)
Paul R. Pillar is director of graduate studies at Georgetown University's Security Studies Program and a former national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia.
Several factors contributed to the demise of apartheid in the land where that term originated, South Africa. Inspired and timely leadership within South Africa was an important ingredient. But international agitation and pressure, based on a widespread sense of moral outrage, undoubtedly were also critical. The international response included unofficial boycotts and official sanctions, with great and lesser powers alike contributing.
International opposition to the most conspicuous current example of apartheid—Israeli subjugation of Palestinian Arabs—is not nearly as ubiquitous as opposition to the South African variety had become near its end in the early 1990s. But there are signs that it is growing. Organized efforts are aimed at boycotting products from settlements Israel has built in occupied territory in the West Bank. A recent noteworthy departure in the policy of a major power was Germany's refusal to toe the Israeli line in a vote in the United Nations General Assembly.
To the extent that international opposition to Israel's conduct toward the Palestinians may indeed be growing, there are good reasons. One is a realization that the Israeli version of apartheid is very similar in important respects to the South African version, and that moral equivalence ought to follow from empirical equivalence. Both versions have included grand apartheid, meaning the denial of basic political rights, and petty apartheid, which is the maintaining of separate and very unequal facilities and opportunities in countless aspects of daily life. Some respects in which Israelis may contend their situation is different, such as facing a terrorist threat, do not really involve a difference. The African National Congress, which has been the ruling party in South Africa since the end of apartheid there, had significant involvement in terrorism when it was confronting the white National Party government. That government also saw the ANC as posing a communist threat.
A fitting accompaniment to the similarities between the two apartheid systems is the historical fact that when the South African system still existed, Israel was one of South Africa's very few international friends or partners...
SOURCE: Daily Beast (12-18-12)
Peter Beinart, editor of OpenZion.com at the Daily Beast, is author of The Crisis of Zionism.
In signaling that he’s likely to select Chuck Hagel as his secretary of defense, Barack Obama is sending a message about his second term. In the decade since 9/11, the spirit of Harry Truman has dominated American foreign policy. Now it may be giving way to the spirit of Dwight Eisenhower. And that could make all the difference in the world.
Truman’s foreign policy was grand. In March 1947, in his speech to Congress requesting aid to Greece and Turkey, and then, more comprehensively, in a secret 1950 strategy paper entitled NSC 68, Truman committed the United States to containing communism everywhere on earth. It was a stirring cause, and hubristic beyond words. The United States lacked the money and manpower, not to mention the wisdom, to ensure that no new nation embraced communism (itself an ill-defined term). And by making global containment the centerpiece of American foreign policy, Truman set America on the path to Vietnam.
George W. Bush, who had avoided his own rendezvous with Vietnam, loved the bigness of Truman’s vision, and set out to emulate it. Thus was born the "war on terror": a vow to use force, or the threat of force, to prevent any new adversary from acquiring nuclear weapons and, ultimately, to transform dictatorships into democracies and foes into clients. That limitless quest has led the United States into unwinnable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and threatens to bring us into a third, in Iran. And like Vietnam, it has helped bring us to the brink of insolvency as well.
Barack Obama knows this. But fearful of the Bush-era right, he has failed to break decisively with the hubris he inherited...
SOURCE: WaPo (12-16-12)
Joseph A. Califano Jr. was President Lyndon B. Johnson’s top assistant for domestic policy. He was secretary of health, education, and welfare in the Carter administration and is Founder and Chair Emeritus of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University.
Ifever there were a moment for President Obama to learn from history, it is now, in the wake of Friday’s shootings at the elementary school at Newtown, Conn. The timely lesson for Obama, drawn from the experience of Lyndon B. Johnson — the last president to aggressively fight for comprehensive gun control — is this: Demand action on comprehensive gun control immediately from this Congress or lose the opportunity during your presidency.
In the aftermath of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (just weeks after the fatal shooting of Martin Luther King Jr. and only a few years after President John F. Kennedy was shot), President Johnson pressed Congress to enact gun control legislation he had sent to Capitol Hill years earlier. LBJ ordered all of us on his staff — and urged allies in Congress — to act swiftly. “We have only two weeks, maybe only 10 days,” he said, “before the gun lobby gets organized.” He told Larry O’Brien and me, “We’ve got to beat the NRA [National Rifle Association] into the offices of members of Congress.”...
