Roundup: Media's Take

Jeffrey Lord: Is Sarah Palin Too Dumb to Be President?

[Jeffrey Lord is a former Reagan White House political director and author. He writes from Pennsylvania at jlpa1@aol.com.] ...Barry Goldwater, the first modern conservative to win a GOP presidential nomination in 1964, would have been lucky to be tagged as being merely too dumb to be president. He was also said to be, according to Time magazine, "psychologically unfit to be president," "emotionally unstable," "immature,&qu

Fred Kaplan: Diplomacy in Action

[Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation.] ...So let's pretend for a moment that WikiLeaks' founder, Julian Assange, was motivated not by a messianic, anti-American, cyberanarchistic glee ("I enjoy crushing bastards," he once told an interviewer) but by a desire to show us how the world really works. ...[W]hat do these documents reveal about U.S. foreign policy and the nature of diplom

Heather Hurlburt: Why Wikileaks Is Bad for Progressive Foreign Policy

[Heather Hurlburt is the executive director of the National Security Network.] ...In the last few years, there has been some progress toward classifying fewer documents and using the more rarefied classifications less frequently. This series of leaks will almost surely reverse that progress. A top-secret classification would have kept any of these documents off the shared network from which they were allegedly downloaded by a very junior soldier. You can bet that the in

WSJ Editorial: Attack by WikiLeaks

Regarding the latest WikiLeaks dump of U.S. secrets, our friends at the New York Sun (at nysun.com) have taken to asking, What would Lincoln do? Their implication is that the President who suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War would not be wringing his hands about Julian Assange the way the Obama Administration has for so many months. This week's cable cache does less immediate harm than the previous leaks did to the lives of Afghans and Iraqis who have cooperated with us on the battlefie

Andrew Leonard: The WikiLeaks China-Google Connection

[Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon.] ...According to the New York Times, one as-yet-unreleased-to-the-public cable from the American embassy in Beijing cites "a Chinese contact" as the source of an assertion that "China's Politburo directed the intrusion into Google's computer systems in that country" -- an incident that the search engine giant blamed for its decision to withdraw from China.... The sourcing is thin, but after my own recent vi

John Paul Stevens: On the Death Sentence

[John Paul Stevens served as an Associate Supreme Court Justice from 1975 to 2010.] David Garland is a well-respected sociologist and legal scholar who taught courses on crime and punishment at the University of Edinburgh before relocating to the United States over a decade ago. His recent Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition is the product of his attempt to learn “why the United States is such an outlier in the severity of its criminal sentencing.” T

Doug Bandow: It's time for South Korea to defend itself

[Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is the author and editor of several books, including The Politics of Plunder: Misgovernment in Washington.] In recent years South Korea has begun to develop regional ambitions. Seoul is creating a blue-water navy and deploying international peacekeeping troops. The Republic of Korea increasingly sees itself sitting alongside the world's most powerful nations.

Joshua E. Keating: Why Do Diplomats Still Send Cables?

[Joshua E. Keating is an associate editor at Foreign Policy.] WikiLeaks' release of nearly 250,000 U.S. State Department cables has given the public a rare look into the inner workings of American diplomacy. The files document everything from the U.S. take on Turkish foreign policy to accounts of meetings between U.S. and Chinese diplomats on North Korea's nuclear program, to instructions for intelligence gathering at the United Nations. The cables provide the media, scholars, and f

Rich Lowry: Assange the Anti-American

[Rich Lowry is editor of National Review.] If electing a black president with the middle name Hussein was supposed to assuage anti-Americanism around the world, Julian Assange didn’t get the message. The first batch of WikiLeaks documents undermined the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, violent conflicts started by the hated, warmongering Bush administration. The latest batch undermines American diplomacy, the soft art of international bargaining and persuasion as practiced

Richard Cohen: WikiLeaks provides the truth Bush obscured

[Richard Cohen is a weekly columnist for The Post.] Say what you want about WikiLeaks - and I don't much like what it has done - it nevertheless would be useful for its founder, Julian Assange, to follow George W. Bush as he lopes around the country, promoting his new book, "Decision Points." When, for instance, Bush attempts to justify the Iraq war by saying the world is a better place without Saddam Hussein, Assange could reach into his bag of leaked U.S. government cabl

Philip Stephens: A history of the present in 250,000 cables

[Philip Stephens is associate editor of the Financial Times and a senior commentator.] To trawl the vast cache of hitherto secret US state department cables dumped on to the web by WikiLeaks is to dip into the history of the present. Tales of diplomatic duplicity and unvarnished portraits of foreign leaders have grabbed the headlines. The big picture is one of the most powerful nations on the planet battling to hold on to its primacy. America’s diplomats have a sharp bu

Steve Kornacki: About that Palin-Reagan Comparison...

[Steve Kornacki is Salon's news editor.] ...McCain isn’t the only Republican peddling Palin-Reagan comparisons. It is, in fact, the example of Reagan that fuels the hopes of many of Palin’s staunchest supporters, who see encouraging parallels between her political standing heading into the 2012 election cycle and Reagan’s in the run-up to 1980. After all, because of his perceived extremism and divisiveness, Reagan was the Republican candidate the Carter White House most wanted to fa

Gregg Easterbrook: The Pentagon's Wasteful Defense Spending

[Gregg Easterbrook is a contributing editor at The New Republic.] This year, the United States will spend at least $700 billion on defense and security. Adjusting for inflation, that’s more than America has spent on defense in any year since World War II—more than during the Korean war, the Vietnam war, or the Reagan military buildup. Much of that enormous sum results from spending increases under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Since 2001, military and security expendit

Richard Wolffe: Obama Could Learn from Bush

[Richard Wolffe's latest book, "Revival: The Struggle for Survival Inside the Obama White House," came out last week.] ...If Obama is serious about reclaiming his own narrative, he might want to look to the example of a man whose record he trashed at every turn in the presidential election: George W. Bush. Six years ago, Bush's reelection campaign faced a daunting set of circumstances. Iraq had spiraled into a brutal civil war, while the rationale for the inva

Matt Welch: McCain's Straight-Line Thinking

[Matt Welch (matt.welch@reason.com) is editor in chief of Reason and the author of "McCain: The Myth of a Maverick" (Palgrave-MacMillan).] On Sept. 22, 2001, as a wounded nation ached for emotional leadership, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) delivered one of the most beautiful speeches you'll ever hear from a politician. It was a eulogy in San Francisco for Mark Bingham, one of the passengers who helped bring down United Airlines Fligh

William Voegeli: Why Populism Isn't Popular

[William Voegeli, a senior editor of the Claremont Review of Books, is the author of "Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State." This article is adapted from an essay in the December issue of Commentary.] ...In his 1972 presidential campaign, Sen. George McGovern's proposal to impose a 100% tax on any inheritance over $500,000 (about $2.6 million today) got a hostile reception from voters, most of whom were unlikely to ever be affected by it. According to the less-t

Abigail Carroll: The Remains of the Day

[Abigail Carroll is writing a book on the history of the American meal.] ...During the hearth-cooking era, preparing food was time-consuming and labor-intensive, and early Americans cooked with leftovers in mind. In most households, at least one meal a day was based on the remains of a previous meal. If “hasty” cornmeal pudding was on the menu for supper, breakfast might feature the same pudding sliced, fried and served with milk or molasses. If the midday dinner was stew, supper wa

Jack Hedin: An Almanac of Extreme Weather

[Jack Hedin is a farmer.] THE news from this Midwestern farm is not good. The past four years of heavy rains and flash flooding here in southern Minnesota have left me worried about the future of agriculture in America’s grain belt. For some time computer models of climate change have been predicting just these kinds of weather patterns, but seeing them unfold on our farm has been harrowing nonetheless. My family and I produce vegetables, hay and grain on 250 acres in o

Jeffrey Rosen: Radical Constitutionalism

[Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University, is a frequent contributor to the NYT magazine.] Of the newly elected Tea Party senators, Mike Lee, a 39-year-old Republican from Utah, has the most impeccable establishment legal credentials: the son of Rex Lee, a solicitor general under President Reagan, he attended law school at Brigham Young and later clerked for Samuel Alito on the U.S. Court of Appeals and then the Supreme Court. But on the campaign trail, especia

John Bemelmans Marciano: On the Origin of the Species

[John Bemelmans Marciano is the author of, most recently, "Toponymity: An Atlas of Words."] At this time of year, do you ever find yourself wondering if turkey the bird has anything to do with Turkey the country? Is it really a coincidence that the main course of our national meal shares its name with a large Muslim country that stretches from Europe to the Caucasus? After all, besides being the star attraction at Thanksgiving dinner, the turkey is a bird so American that