Roundup: Media's Take

Peter Beinart: Obama's Foreign Policy Has Failed

[Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, is associate professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. His new book is The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris.] Just over three years ago, acclaimed author and campaign adviser Samantha Power published a memo outlining the foreign policy Barack Obama would pursue if elected president. It was called “Conventional Washington vers

Jack Hunter: Baghdad Bob Goes to Washington

[Jack Hunter is a conservative commentator on WTMA 1250 AM talk radio and columnist for the Charleston City Paper.] When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Iraqi Information Minister Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf quickly became known as “Baghdad Bob” by declaring on Iraqi television that Saddam Hussein’s military brigades were successfully turning back the invading forces. During the same time the U.S. was handily dominating Iraq militarily, Bob told Iraqis that “We slaughtered them

Bret Stephens: 'Rhymes With Fagin' ... Time's Cover Attempts to Delegitimize Israel

[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.] If you're a reader of a certain age, you might understand the headline. In May 1977, when Menachem Begin was elected Israel's prime minister, Time magazine set out to describe the man, beginning with the correct pronunciation of his last name: "Rhymes with Fagin," the editors explained, invoking the character from Oliver Twist. Modern Israeli leader; archetypal Jewish lowlif

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: China’s Young Officers and the 1930s Syndrome

[Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has covered world politics and economics for 25 years, based in Europe, the US, and Latin America. He joined the Telegraph in 1991, serving as Washington correspondent and later Europe correspondent in Brussels. He is now International Business Editor in London.] I try to remain optimistic that the US and China will work out a more or less amicable way to run the world for the next half century, a “Chimerica” of interwoven superpowers. But it wa

Steve Kornacki: Meet the Newest Reagan Revisionism Hall of Fame Inductee

[Steve Kornacki is Salon's news editor.] Ladies and gentlemen, meet Jim Kessler: the latest pundit to use hindsight to invent nonexistent differences between Ronald Reagan's political standing in 1982 and Barack Obama's today. Kessler, who is identified as vice-president of Third Way, penned an Op-Ed in Sunday's Washington Post under the headline, "To keep the 2010 midterms from repeating 1994, Democrats can learn from Reagan." In Kessler's telling, Reagan fac

Chrystia Freeland: China's Economic Model Isn't the Answer for the U.S.

[Chrystia Freeland is global editor at large for Thomson Reuters. She is writing a book about the global super-elite.] Forget the "Ground Zero mosque," Michelle Obama's Spanish holiday and even the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. When future historians look back to the summer of 2010, the event they are most likely to focus on is China's emergence as the world's second-largest economy.... So far, China's rise has mostly been about industrializing an incredibl

Michael Lind: Wall Street's Anti-Obama Strategy: Absurd Analogies

[Michael Lind is policy director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation.] Has the war of metaphors gone too far? Historians, constitutional lawyers and even zoologists have jumped into the fray provoked by Wall Street critics of the Obama administration and Congress. It all began when Stephen A. Schwarzman, a co-founder (with right-wing Republican deficit hawk Pete Peterson) of the Blackstone Group, a major private equity firm, said that the Obama

John B. Judis: You Say Recession, I Say Depression

[John B. Judis is a senior editor of The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.] The terms “recession” and “depression” were once used to suggest that a downturn was not as bad as a “panic” or “crisis.” In fact, for the first years of his presidency, Herbert Hoover chose to refer to the downturn as a “depression” in an effort to convey that what the country was experiencing was just a temporary indentation. Only in 1931 did Hoover begi

Eugene Robinson: Gov. Barbour's Civil Rights Fairy Tale

[Eugene Robinson is a columnist for the WaPo.] Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who may seek the Republican nomination for president, is trying to sell the biggest load of revisionist nonsense about race, politics and the South that I've ever heard. Ever. He has the gall to try to portray Southern Republicans as having been enlightened supporters of the civil rights movement all along. I can't decide whether this exercise in rewriting history should be described as cynic

Joan Walsh: When Blue-Collar Pride Became Identity Politics

[Joan Walsh is the editor-in-chief of Salon.] The great political failure of the 1960s was the New Left's inability to bring the labor movement into its great liberationist tent. There were lots of reasons for that, one of them being that most big union leaders didn't want to be in that stinky tent with a lot of hippies, feminists, dashiki-wearing black militants and "fags." (That last comes from AFL-CIO leader George Meany's description of the New York delegation to the d

Cathy Young: Reflecting on the Iraq War

[Cathy Young writes a weekly column for RealClearPolitics and is also a contributing editor at Reason magazine. She blogs at cathyyoung.wordpress.com. This article originally appeared at RealClearPolitics.] As the United States' combat mission in Iraq draws to a close, it is fitting to look back on the war and its legacy so far. In most left-of-center commentary, the folly and criminality of the war in Iraq is now an article of faith, and anyone who ever supported it has a black mar

E.J. Dionne Jr.: When Unions Mattered, Prosperity was Shared

[E.J. Dionne Jr. is a columnist for the WaPo.] Watching the great civil rights march on television in August 1963, I couldn't help but notice that hundreds of people carried signs with a strange legend at the top: "UAW Says." UAW was saying "Segregation Disunites the United States," and many other things insisting on equality. This "UAW" was a very odd word to my 11-year-old self, and I asked my dad who or what "U-awe," as I prono

Paul Krugman: 1938 in 2010

[Paul Krugman is a columnist for the NYT and Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.] Here’s the situation: The U.S. economy has been crippled by a financial crisis. The president’s policies have limited the damage, but they were too cautious, and unemployment remains disastrously high. More action is clearly needed. Yet the public has soured on government activism, and seems poised to deal Democrats a severe

Alasdair Palmer: Ahmadinejad ... Genghis Khan with a Bomb?

[Alasdair Palmer is the Public Policy Editor of the Sunday Telegraph.] Joseph Stalin was once described as "Genghis Khan with a telephone". President Ahmadinejad may soon be Genghis Khan with a nuclear bomb. Admittedly, Ahmadinejad hasn't yet committed mass murder on that scale, although when he promised to "wipe Israel off the map", he showed that he would – if only he could. And he may treat his own people slightly better than Genghis Khan treated his. But as D

Alexei Bayer: Pigs and Dogs Rule Again in Russia

[Alexei Bayer, a native Muscovite, is a New York-based economist.] George Orwell’s anti-utopian novel “1984” enjoyed a revival during the presidency of George W. Bush. Even though Orwell’s totalitarian future is now more than a quarter-century out of date, the book read like a collection of newspaper headlines. The current government in Washington also pays homage to “1984.” The recent U.S. withdrawal from Iraq can be described in Orwellian newspeak, “peace is war.” Orw

Charles Krauthammer: Our Distracted Commander-in-Chief

[Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist.] Many have charged that President Obama’s decision to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan ten months from now is hampering our war effort. But now it’s official. In a stunning statement last week, Marine Corps commandant Gen. James Conway admitted that the July 2011 date is “probably giving our enemy sustenance.” A remarkably bold charge for an active military officer. It stops just short of suggesting aiding and

Jonah Goldberg: Obama Could Use Some Clintonesque Salesmanship

[Jonah Goldberg is an editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.] There’s been a lot of talk about Bush nostalgia lately. At Martha’s Vineyard, the Obama-bilia wasn’t moving like it was during the Obamas’ previous visit there. The biggest seller was a T-shirt depicting a smiling George W. Bush with the tagline “Miss Me Yet?” Meanwhile, liberal writers, and even the president in his Oval Office addre

Noah Feldman: How Different Is Obama from Bush on Terrorism?

[Noah Feldman is professor of law at Harvard University and author of the forthcoming book Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices.] After five years of waiting, Omar Khadr was finally slated to go on trial in Guantánamo Bay this summer -- and then suddenly, the gears ground to a halt. The problem was not that Khadr was just 15 years old when, according to the charges, he threw a grenade in a 2002 firefight in Afghanistan and killed a U.S. soldier.

Jay Brookman: Recasting Bush as the hero of Iraq is taking things much too far

[Jay Bookman is a columnist and blogger at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.] ...“Some Americans ask me, if completing the mission is so important, why don’t you send more troops?” Bush said in a typical speech in 2005. “If our commanders on the ground say we need more troops, I will send them. But our commanders tell me they have the number of troops they need to do their job. Sending more Americans would undermine our strategy of encouraging Iraqis to take the lead in this fight.”

Andrew Leonard: The key to economic growth? Stealing

[Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon.] Der Spiegel alerts us to important news:Sigismund Hermbstadt ... a chemistry and pharmacy professor in Berlin, who has long since disappeared into the oblivion of history, earned more royalties for his"Principles of Leather Tanning" published in 1806 than British author Mary Shelley did for her horror novel"Frankenstein," which is still famous today. The explanation for this tidbit may at