Roundup: Media's Take

Robert Fisk: WikiLeaks Exposé ... The Shaming of America

[Robert Fisk is The Independent's award-winning Middle East correspondent.] As usual, the Arabs knew. They knew all about the mass torture, the promiscuous shooting of civilians, the outrageous use of air power against family homes, the vicious American and British mercenaries, the cemeteries of the innocent dead. All of Iraq knew. Because they were the victims. Only we could pretend we did not know. Only we in the West could counter every claim, every allegation again

Menzies Campbell: The Iraq War ... Nasty, Brutish and Refusing To Go Away

[Sir Menzies Campbell is former leader of the Liberal Democrats.] It simply will not go away. Every time it seems that Iraq, Britain's worst foreign policy judgement since Suez in 1956 might at last slip down the political agenda, it bounces back. If it is not David Miliband's public spat with Harriet Harman at the Labour Party conference, it is the chilling but not surprising news that Iran is brokering the deal to resolve the political impasse in Iraq and install a government mont

Alyssa Battistoni: The "Culture of Poverty" Myth Returns

[Alyssa Battistoni is a writer and graduate student in geography and environment at Oxford University.] The New York Times caused a stir earlier this week with its assertion that the "culture of poverty" theory of urban decline is back in vogue. But the real news isn't that it’s coming back -- it's that it ever went away in the first place. The theory may have been formally rejected by academic sociologists for a time, but the culture of poverty has remained a

Michael Gerson: Christine O'Donnell's Misconceptions of the Constitution

[Michael Gerson is a columnist for the WaPo.] The controversy surrounding Christine O'Donnell's constitutional views -- Does she deny the existence of the establishment clause? Dispute its location in the First Amendment? Reject that it mandates the "separation of church and state"? -- is mainly the result of the candidate's imprecision. On the evidence of her recent debate, O'Donnell's real problem is that this "constitutional conservative" seems unmotivated by

Hendrik Hertzberg: The Prose and Politics of Daniel Patrick Moynihan

[Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker, where he frequently writes the Comment, in The Talk of the Town.] This week, after years of false starts and bureaucratic tangles, a modest groundbreaking ceremony will be held for a project that will go some distance to righting this great wrong. The reincarnation of Penn Station will occupy and transform the body of the monumental Farley Post Office, across Eighth Avenue from the original station and, like t

Peter Galuszka: The Dodgy World of Southern History

[Peter Galuszka, a writer for Bacon's Rebellion, has been writing about Virginia politics and business since 1975. Now a freelance journalist living in the Richmond area, he has been executive editor of Virginia Business magazine and a reporter at the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk and the Richmond Times-Dispatch. He also spent 18 years at the McGraw-Hill Companies, including 15 years writing for BusinessWeek.] Popular histories about the Confederate States of America can be dodgy, as a

Nicholas Eberstadt: The Global Poverty Paradox

[Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute.] For a brief, glorious, and unforgettable moment 20 years ago, it seemed as if a great and terrible question that had been perennially stalking humanity had finally been answered. That profound question was as old as human hope itself: could ordinary men and women, regardless of their location on this earth or their station in this life, hope that deliberate social arrangements

Dana Milbank: Is the NAACP Trying to Pick a Fight with the Tea Party?

[Dana Milbank is an op-ed columnist for the WaPo.] ...This latest provocation came in a Wednesday conference call arranged by the NAACP and other civil rights groups to release a new report, "Tea Party Nationalism." The report itself, put together by the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, appears to be relatively tame. But the timing -- 13 days before the midterm elections -- is suspicious, and the unveiling was at times incendiary. The Rev.

Walter Dellinger: How to Really End ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’

[Walter Dellinger, a lawyer, was the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel from 1993 to 1996.] Many people seem to believe that [Don't Ask Don't Tell] would disappear if the Justice Department refused to appeal the court order. But there are...reasons that’s not the case. ...[T]he government has an obligation to comply with the nation’s laws, regardless of whether the president agrees with a particular statute. Doing otherwise would also set a precede

Guy Sorman: France's Perpetual Revolution

[Mr. Sorman, a contributing editor at City Journal, is the author, most recently, of "Economics Does Not Lie: A Defense of the Free Market in a Time of Crisis".] The French have a long tradition of taking to the streets as an irrational answer to economic reforms. In 1848, when a democratically elected government tried to contain monetary inflation, the nascent Socialist Party raised barricades in Paris. Alexis de Tocqueville, then a member of the parliament, wrote in his

Seumas Milne: The Bullingdon boys want to finish what Thatcher began

[Seumas Milne is a Guardian columnist and associate editor.] The savagery unveiled today by George Osborne doesn't only amount to the deepest programme of public spending cuts since the 1920s. As the chancellor's fog of spin started to clear, the scale of the political ambition behind them also became apparent. The Tory-led coalition is using the economic crisis not only to rein in the state, but to reorder society. This is to be Britain's shock therapy. It is the culmi

Lucy Wadham: Sarkozy risks breaking the spirit of 1968

[Lucy Wadham is a British novelist who lives in France.] I'm not sure that Pierre Haski is right in suggesting that President Nicolas Sarkozy is unruffled by the scale of the current crisis unfolding on the streets of France. Although there is nothing new about this kind of mass protest, it does not mean that Sarkozy is not terrified. He will not have forgotten that it was May 1968 that brought down the colossus, Charles de Gaulle, or that in his lifetime not a single government has

Bernard Weiner: WTF?: A Letter to Appalled and Puzzled European Friends

[Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, worked as a writer/editor with the San Francisco Chronicle for nearly two decades, has taught at universities in California and Washington, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org).] Dear Wolfgang and Jacqueline: Your recent email, wondering"what the f--- is going on" these days, questioning whether we Americans have taken"more tha

Steven Aftergood: Telling Secrets

[Steven Aftergood directs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists and writes the Secrecy News blog.] Washington is bracing for another Wikileaks document dump later this week and the Pentagon is urging reporters not to publish the secret files from the Iraq war -- once again, the conversation has turned to whether or not there's a danger in releasing this information. But in a city full of fractious disagreements, there is one issue that nearly eve

Li Datong: Wen Jiabao: The Verdict of History

[Li Datong is a Chinese journalist and former editor of Bingdian (Freezing Point), a weekly supplement of the China Youth Daily newspaper. In 2006 he was the recipient of a Lettre Ulysses award for reportage on his experience at Bingdian.] Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, is a different kind of Chinese politician. Most of his peers in the current generation of communist leaders share an administrative style so lacking in individuality and flair as to make them appear almost clone

Timothy Noah: The Case Against the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.

[Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.] ...You can argue, as my friend and mentor Charles Peters does, that the ridicule in Stewart's and Colbert's satire, like the ridicule in much contemporary popular comedy, carries a screw-those-uneducated-yokels message that you never found in, say, the humor of Will Rogers. Rogers once quipped: "An ignorant person is one who doesn't know what you have just found out." At the risk of spoiling a joke by explaining it, Rogers meant:

Maureen Dowd: Making Ignorance Chic

[Maureen Dowd is a columnist for the NYT.] Casanova’s rule for seduction was to tell a beautiful woman she was intelligent and an intelligent woman she was beautiful. The false choice between intellectualism and sexuality in women has persisted through the ages. There was no more poignant victim of it than Marilyn Monroe.... At least, unlike Paris Hilton and her ilk, the Dumb Blonde of ’50s cinema had a firm grasp on one thing: It was cool to be smart. She

John Bolton: Obama and the Coming Palestinian State

[Mr. Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of "Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad".] Direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, for 21 months the centerpiece of Obama administration Middle East policy, are moving inevitably toward collapse. The talks may limp past our Nov. 2 election, but they are doomed to fail. The Palestinian Authority (PA) fully understands that the talks—and t

Nile Gardiner: The end of the Obama Empire? The outlook is grim for the imperial presidency

[Nile Gardiner is a British-born, Washington-based foreign affairs analyst and political commentator.] With just a fortnight to go until the November 2nd midterms, the political outlook for the Obama presidency looks increasingly grim. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs may claim the midterms are about “local issues,” but the American public clearly disagrees. As the latest Wall Street Journal/ NBC News poll shows, “69% of voters are saying their vote is a signal

M.J. Rosenberg: The Bogus Demand to Recognize Israel "As a Jewish State"

[M.J. Rosenberg is Senior Foreign Policy Fellow at Media Matters Action Network. Previously, he worked on Capitol Hill for various Democratic members of the House and Senate for 15 years. He was also a Clinton political appointee at USAID. In the early 1980s, he was editor of AIPACs weekly newsletter Near East Report. From 1998-2009, he was director of policy at Israel Policy Forum.]Israel's ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, is an old-fashioned right-wing Zionist, which is