Roundup: Media's Take

Michael Fumento: The Gulf War Syndrome ‘Mystery’

[Michael Fumento (U.S. Army Airborne, 1978–82) is director of the National Journalism Project, where he specializes in health and science issues. He was also embedded three times in Iraq and once in Afghanistan. His website is www.fumento.com] Gulf War Syndrome (GWS) is back in the news, thanks to a new study released by the Institute of Medicine (IOM), and so is the persistent effort to label it a “mystery.” See, for example, the story by a Heal

Marc Ambinder: Gingrich Further Enables the Right's Flight From Reality

[Marc Ambinder is the politics editor of The Atlantic. He has covered Washington for ABC News and the Hotline, and he is chief political consultant to CBS News. Follow him on Twitter @marcambinder] My Friday column weighing in on the issue of epistemic closure on the right, and the flight of conservatives from empirical reality, has provoked fast, angry, and often personal rebukes. So far, the misreadings are legion. Of course there are Republicans with good ideas and conservative l

John B. Judis: Why Hysteria Has Won Out in Arizona

[John B. Judis is a senior editor of The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.] Severe recessions can make people crazy and mean. During the Great Depression, immigration to the United States from Mexico virtually ceased, but states began arresting and deporting Mexicans, many of whom were in the country legally. The Mexican population of the United States fell by 41 percent during the 1930s. And the same kind of thing is happening ag

Todd Crowell: Is Thailand Going the Way of 1936 Spain?

[Todd Crowell worked for Thailand-based Asia Times from 2006-07. He is the author of "Far From Worries: a Year in the King's Town." He currently writes from Tokyo.] Bangkok circa 2010 is looking more and more like Madrid circa 1936 every day. That was the year that the bloody Spanish Civil War began, which lasted until 1939 and killed hundreds of thousands. Could such a bloody event engulf the Land of Smiles? The government headed by Prime Minister Abhisit Vej

Jonah Goldberg: What Kind of Socialist Is Barack Obama?

[Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.] The assertion that Barack Obama is a socialist became a hallmark of the 2008 presidential campaign. His opponent, John McCain, used Obama’s own extemporaneous words to an Ohio plumber as Exhibit A: “When you spread the wealth around,” Obama had said, “it’s good for everybody.” That, McCain insisted, sounded “a lot like socialism,” as did Obama’s proposals to rais

Doyle McManus: Obama and Wall St. — it’s not 1936

[Doyle McManus is Washington columnist for the Los Angeles Times.] The Barack Obama who went to Wall Street last week to ask investment bankers to support new financial regulations had little in common with the fire-breathing Franklin D. Roosevelt of 1936 who denounced "financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking," and added pungently, "I welcome their hatred." This wasn't even the Barack Obama of a few months ago who denounced "fat-cat ba

Bari Weiss: Miss Me Yet? The Freedom Agenda After George W. Bush

[Ms. Weiss is an assistant editorial features editor at the Journal.] No one seems to know precisely who is behind the "Miss Me Yet?" billboard—the cheeky one featuring a grinning George W. Bush that looks out over I-35 near Wyoming, Minn. But Syrian dissident Ahed Al-Hendi sympathizes with the thought. In 2006, Mr. Hendi was browsing pro-democracy Web sites in a Damascus Internet café when plainclothes cops carrying automatic guns swooped in, cuffed him, and

E.J. Dionne Jr.: Is Gordon Brown Great Britain's Harry Truman?

Could Prime Minister Gordon Brown become the Harry Truman of British politics? For many long months, Brown and his Labor Party were written off as sure losers in this year's election, likely to be set for May 6. David Cameron, the young, energetic and empathetic Conservative Party leader, was all but handed Brown's job by the chattering classes, so consistent and formidable had been his lead in the polls. But suddenly, Cameron doesn't seem quite so inevitable. One recen

Anatole Kaletsky: The Old Politics is Dead in the UK, but Where is the New?

[Anatole Kaletsky writes for the Times (UK).] So what is it about? All the political parties have now launched or previewed their manifestos. Their leaders have given dozens of interviews and speeches. The beancounters have done their assessments, confirming what everybody knew in the first place — that none of the policies and promises come close to adding up. After a week of campaigning, the polls are exactly where they started, undecided voters remain undecided and b

Steven Fielding: Meet the Nick Clegg of 1942

[Steven Fielding is director of the Centre for British Politics and professor of Political History in the School of Politics and IR, University of Nottingham.] The Sunday Times quotes a YouGov poll that says Nick Clegg is nearly as popular as Winston Churchill.... Actually the best historical figure with whom to compare Clegg is not Churchill but Sir Stafford Cripps. Stafford Who, you may ask? Those with some history behind them might know that he was Clement Attlee's c

Andrew Blick: Proposal for UK Constitution Should Worry Historians

[Dr Andrew Blick is Senior Research Fellow, Democratic Audit, and co-author, with Stuart Wilks-Heeg, of Governing without majorities: Coming to terms with balanced Parliaments in UK politics.]The Cabinet Office is currently engaged in a process of defining the UK constitution. But its approach gives grounds for concern. First, there is a democratic deficiency in the closed nature of the process being followed. No public consultation has been held, with the Cabinet Office drawing in

Ron Rosenbaum: The Tea Party's Toxic Take on History

[Ron Rosenbaum is the author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler.] I am a great believer in used-bookstore serendipity. Sometimes when you're thinking about how to express something, you find a perfect exemplification of it just by chance in the musty stacks of such an emporium. Here's a remarkable example. I'd been trying to find a way to write about Tea Party ideology, and in particular about the fraudulent history and distorted language it indulges in. Listen to Tea Par

Charles Fried: Why Elena Kagan has Earned the Respect of Conservatives Like Me

[Charles Fried teaches constitutional law and contracts at Harvard Law School, where he has been on the faculty since 1961. He was solicitor general of the United States during the second Reagan administration and from 1995 to 1999 he was an associate justice on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.] Some years ago, I told my colleague Jack Goldsmith, when his role in revoking the notorious Yoo-Bybee torture memos became public, that the only thing worse than being demonized by

Glenn Greenwald: Diane Wood Would Make an Excellent Justice

[Glenn Greenwald is an attorney and a contributor to Salon.com.] If one were to analogize the search for Justice Stevens' replacement to the recently concluded health care debate, Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Diane Wood would be the public option. Just as the truly left-wing health care approach (a single-payer system) was eliminated from consideration before the process even began, so, too, have the truly left-wing candidates to replace Justice Stevens (Pam Karlan, Harol

Thomas Sowell: Why Was It Necessary to Pay Certain Slaves?

[Thomas Sowell is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.] When I first began to study the history of slavery around the world, many years ago, one of the oddities that puzzled me was the practice of paying certain slaves, which existed in ancient Rome and in America’s antebellum South, among other places. In both places, slave owners or their overseers whipped slaves to force them to work, and in neither place was whipping a slave literally to death likely to bring an

Pete du Pont: The VAT Would be Horrible for America

[Pete du Pont is the former governor of Delaware.] A cultural battle is under way in America, a battle between, in columnist Michael Barone's, words, "the culture of dependence and the culture of independence." The culture of dependence is the belief by American liberalism that government can make better decisions for people than people can make for themselves. The U.S. has now created the largest government spending increases, takeovers, and regulation expans

Zachary Karabell: Obama Needs a Reset Button on His Own Foreign-Policy Machine

[Zachary Karabell is an author and money manager. His most recent book is Superfusion; How China and America Became One Economy and Why the World's Prosperity Depends On It. He blogs at www.rivertwice.com.] For the past 18 months, foreign policy has been a distinctly secondary concern for U.S. President Barack Obama, in spite of still-hot wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, nuclear diplomacy with Russia, and simmering crises in Iran and North Korea.

Jonathan Steele: Afghan Ghosts ... American Myths

[Jonathan Steele, an international affairs columnist, has been Moscow bureau chief and chief foreign correspondent for the Guardian.] “Explosion? What explosion?” Afghanistan’s foreign minister, Shah Mohammed Dost, inquired with an elegant raising of his eyebrows when I interrupted our interview to ask about the sudden noise I had just heard. “Ah yes, the dynamiting,” Dost said with relief as another boom sounded in the distance and he realized what had misled me. “They

Victor Erofeyev: The Past, the Present and the Future of Katyn

[Victor Erofeyev is a Russian writer and television host. Translated from the Russian by the International Herald Tribune.] What will relations between Russians and Poles be like after this disaster? In their response to the tragic air crash that killed dozens of members of Poland’s military and political elite, it was as if the two nations regained their sight and saw each other, for once, as people capable of suffering and compassion. There was a sea of flowers and candles in fron

Christopher L. Eisgruber: Justice Stevens Will Not Be Easily Replaced

[Christopher L. Eisgruber is provost of Princeton University and the author of "The Next Justice: Repairing the Supreme Court Appointments Process." He clerked for Justice John Paul Stevens in 1989 and 1990.] President Obama has said that he will seek to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens with someone who has "similar qualities." If the president is looking for another brilliant lawyer to join the court's liberal wing, he might