Roundup: Media's Take

Lawrence Korb: Free Jonathan Pollard

[Lawrence Korb, a former assistant secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration, is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.] About 25 years ago, Jonathan Jay Pollard, a U.S. naval intelligence analyst, betrayed his country by providing highly classified information to Israel. Even though Israel was and still is a U.S. ally and is routinely supplied with U.S. intelligence, Pollard deserved to be severely punished for his actions. However, the punishment should fit t

WSJ Editorial: There They Went Again

...Far from being a unique historical event, a GOP victory on Tuesday will repeat the pattern we have seen since the 1960s. Four times Democrats have won control of both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, and four times they have attempted to govern from the left. Each time Americans saw that agenda and its results, and they rejected it at an early opportunity. Maybe there's a lesson here. We cite the 1960s as a watershed because it marked the creation of the modern Democratic Party. The

John B. Judis: Four Myths About the Tea Parties

[John B. Judis is a senior editor of The New Republic.]On the eve of the November elections, we are suddenly awash in books, articles, and monographs about the Tea Parties. Some of these—I would single out Sean Wilentz’s historical piece in The New Yorker—deepen our understanding, but most of them don’t get it right. They are too quick either to dismiss or to stigmatize the Tea Parties. And t

Dana Milbank: Obama Isn't Ducking Role in Election Reprise of '94

[Dana Milbank is a columnist for the WaPo.] Get out your Wonderbras and your "Forrest Gump" videocassettes. It's starting to feel like 1994 all over again.... But the strangest similarity may be in President Obama's speeches. As he barnstorms the country in these closing days before the midterms, he has borrowed Bill Clinton's 1994 stump speech -- in some cases, word for word.... Obama has even extended Clinton's automotive metaphor of '94. Clinto

Harold Meyerson: When Tea Party Wants to Go Back, Where Is It To?

[Harold Meyerson is a columnist for the WaPo.] ...Looking at these numbers, it would be reasonable to infer that when the Tea Partyers say that they want to take the country back, they mean back to the period between 1950 and 1980, when the vast majority of Americans encountered more opportunity and security in their economic lives than they had before or since. Reasonable, but wrong. As the right sees it, America's woes are traceable to the New Deal order that Franklin Roosevelt, w

Leon T. Hadar: Post-Midterms Foreign Policy: Will They Make a Difference?

[Leon T. Hadar is a research fellow in foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, specializing in foreign policy, international trade, the Middle East, and South and East Asia.] Assuming that the Republicans gain control of the House of Representatives (and the Senate?) what kind of effect will that have on the Obama Administration's foreign policy? Studying the lessons of another Democratic President who after two years in office and impressive GOP wins in the midterms found his

Michael Lind: Where are the Peasants with Pitchforks?

[Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and is the author of "The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution."] In the aftermath of a global economic collapse brought about in part by the corruption of big government by big finance, many pundits expected a voter backlash in America to take the form of a combination of populist anti-elitism and statist anti-capitalism. But that has not h

Jeffrey Lord: A Society of Beggars? Obama Battles Reagan

[Jeffrey Lord is a former Reagan White House political director and author.] Obama or Reagan. In the end, that's the choice. As the country enters the final week of what may be the most important election in a lifetime, these two presidents and their starkly differing visions of America are at the center of what has become a political earthquake.... An infinitely better understanding of both Ronald Reagan and the conservative principles he cham

Matthew Continetti: The Era of the Eisenhower Democrat has Passed

[Matthew Continetti is an associate editor at the Weekly Standard.] Once upon a time there was a Democratic president who, despite his faults, championed the power of markets, technology, and the global economy. He spoke about building “a bridge to the 21st century.” He ratified major trade agreements like NAFTA and the WTO. He supported balanced budgets and signed into law a tough welfare reform. He cut the capital gains tax. He boasted that government spending as a share of the ec

Christopher Dickey: Americans Grow Apathetic Over Foreign Policy

[Christopher Dickey currently serves as Newsweek's Paris bureau chief and Middle East regional editor.] Americans have forgotten the rest of the world. Nothing could make that clearer than the candidates running for election to the U.S. Congress and the Senate right now. If you watch the campaign ads, listen to the debates or the candidates themselves, Afghanistan barely figures, Iraq is history, the Middle East peace process a yawn. Forget China. Forget Latin America. Russia is an

Ellen Knickmeyer: Blood on Our Hands

[Ellen Knickmeyer was Washington Post bureau chief in Baghdad.] In early March 2006, Donald Rumsfeld called a Pentagon news conference to declare Iraq peaceful -- and to say that U.S. reporters in Baghdad were liars for reporting otherwise. Contrary to the jumble of "exaggerated" reporting from Baghdad, the then-secretary of defense said at the Washington press briefing, Iraq was experiencing no such thing as the explosion of sectarian violence that myself and

Jim Bencivenga: Will U.S. Naval Power Sink?

[Jim Bencivenga is a former teacher and Monitor staffer.] For most Americans, naval power is like gravity. They know it's there, they know it's forceful, but they don't really feel it or understand it. So they won't be thinking about the state of US fleet readiness when they vote in midterm elections.... The three great battles to establish and preserve Western civilization took place at sea: (1) the battle of Salamis (480 BC), where the Athenian defeat of

Christopher Dickey: America Turns Inward ... U.S. Foreign Policy After November

[A distinguished journalist and author, Christopher Dickey currently serves as Newsweek's Paris bureau chief and Middle East regional editor.] Americans have forgotten the rest of the world. Nothing could make that clearer than the candidates running for election to the U.S. Congress and the Senate right now. If you watch the campaign ads, listen to the debates or the candidates themselves, Afghanistan barely figures, Iraq is history, the Middle East peace process a yawn. Forget Chi

Ellen Knickmeyer: We Knew Rumsfeld Lied To Us, Just Not How Much

[Ellen Knickmeyer was Washington Post bureau chief in Baghdad.] In early March 2006, Donald Rumsfeld called a Pentagon news conference to declare Iraq peaceful -- and to say that U.S. reporters in Baghdad were liars for reporting otherwise. Contrary to the jumble of "exaggerated" reporting from Baghdad, the then-secretary of defense said at the Washington press briefing, Iraq was experiencing no such thing as the explosion of sectarian violence that myself an

Daniel Ellsberg: Like my Pentagon papers, these Iraq war logs can't be buried

[Daniel Ellsberg is a former US military analyst who in 1971 leaked the Pentagon Papers, which revealed how the US public had been misled about the Vietnam war.] Nearly 40 years ago I leaked the Pentagon papers – a top secret 7,000-page study of US decision-making during the Vietnam war which revealed repeated lies and cover-ups by the administration. The Iraq war logs, published this weekend by Wikileaks, could be even more significant. As with Vietnam, we have again s

Ramesh Ponnuru and Rich Lowry: The Bender Is Over

[Rich Lowry is editor-in-chief and Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor of National Review.] Whatever happens on Election Day, the heroic phase of Obama’s presidency is over. It is over not simply because he will spend the rest of his term playing defense rather than conquering new ground for liberalism. It is over because the assumptions that underlay that first phase of his presidency have already been discredited. Cast your mind back to December 2008. Democrats had just

Robert D. Kaplan: Eastern Islam and the 'Clash of Civilizations'

[Robert D. Kaplan is the author, most recently, of "Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power." He is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a correspondent for the Atlantic.] Islam has been an American obsession for at least a decade. The 9/11 attacks and the intractable violence in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan — however much we have been the cause of it — have left us bewildered and terrified by this seemingly austere and martial

Diane H. Mazur: The R.O.T.C. Myth

[Diane H. Mazur, a professor of law at the University of Florida and a former Air Force officer, is the legal co-director of the Palm Center at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the author of “A More Perfect Military.”] EVERYONE knows that Ivy League universities banned the Reserve Officer Training Corps from their campuses during the Vietnam War. Forty years later, the bans continue, though the reason has shifted from war protest to the “don’t ask, don’t tell” polic

Gary Younge: Obama was never going to have the room to effect radical change

[Gary Younge is a feature writer and columnist for the Guardian based in the US.] In his book Where Do We Go from Here? Martin Luther King recalls the only time that he was booed at a meeting. His hecklers were young black power supporters. "Unfortunately, when hope diminishes the hate is often turned most bitterly towards those who originally built up the hope … For 12 years I, and others like me, had held out radiant promises of progress … They were now booing because they fe

Michael Barone: Why the US has turned against Obama

[Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the 'Washington Examiner', a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and co-author of 'The Almanac of American Politics'.] Why have American voters gone so sour on Barack Obama's Democratic party? It's a question that must puzzle many in Britain who – Conservative as well as Labour and Lib Dem – welcomed Obama's election two years ago and saw him leading America and the world into broad, sunlit uplands. But now it appears