Roundup: Media's Take

Boris Dittrich: An Unfair Attack on Gay Troops

[Boris Dittrich is advocacy director in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights program at Human Rights Watch.] Gen. John Sheehan, the former NATO commander, told a Senate committee this month that part of the blame for one of the last half-century's most famous atrocities -- the massacre at Srebrenica during the Bosnian war -- rested on gays in the Dutch military.... As a former member of the Dutch parliament and a spokesman for the parliamentary invest

Sergey Kuznetsov: Moscow Under Attack

[Sergey Kuznetsov is the author of the novel “Butterfly Skin.”] EVERY time some disaster hits the Moscow subway, I remember that Soviet propaganda used to call this the most beautiful subway in the world. Incredibly, in this one case, it wasn’t lying: Moscow subway stations are marble palaces with pillars, mosaics and statues of happy swimmers and oarswomen. Despite all this decoration, I was afraid of the subway as a child. I felt that there was some hidde

Shikha Dalmia: How to Oppose Obama With Lessons from Gandhi

[Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at Reason Foundation and a biweekly columnist at Forbes.] President Barack Obama came into office promising hope and change. But he might get more change than he hoped for. By foisting ObamaCare on a deeply unwilling country he might have set the stage for the largest civil disobedience movement since the civil rights era, which, if it plays its cards right, could undo his legislation and his legacy.... It is hardly surprising then tha

Vin Suprynowicz: Obamacare's Prussian Origins

[Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.] The modern Prussian police state was built by Bismarck and others in the 19th century on a Spartan model, giving the central government vastly greater control over the individual than had ever been considered possible before. Bismarck's program centered squarely on insurance programs designed to increase support for the ever larger and more powerful government. The program included hea

James Kunstler: Is It America's Turn to Go Crazy?

[James Howard Kunstler is the author of "The Long Emergency," the novel "World Made By Hand," and the sequel, "The Witch of Hebron, coming out in September from The Atlantic Monthly Press.] Nations go crazy. It's terrifying when it happens, especially to a major nation with the ability to project its craziness outward. We look back on the psychotic break of Germany in 1933 and still wonder how the then-best-educated population in Europe could fall under the

John R. Guardiano: The Civil War History of Obamacare

[John R. Guardiano is a writer and analyst who focuses on political, military, and public-policy issues. He resides in Arlington, Virginia.] The Democratic Left is fond of invoking history and thus heralds its new "comprehensive national healthcare reform" bill as "historic. That it is. But the historical comparison that may be most apt isn't Social Security or Medicare, both of which were enacted into law with bipartisan majorities. This latest "re

Michael Nelson: Neustadt's 'Presidential Power' at 50

[Michael Nelson, a former editor of The Washington Monthly, is a professor of political science at Rhodes College and a senior fellow at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. He is co-author, with Sidney M. Milkis, of The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1776-2007 (fifth edition, CQ, 2007).] 50: The number of years Richard E. Neustadt's Presidential Power has been in print since it was published, in April 1960. 6: The book's ran

Daniel Gross: Is 2010 Going To Be 1994 or 1934?

[Daniel Gross also writes a twice-weekly "Moneybox" column for Slate, which also appears on Newsweek.com.] Many Republicans expect November to be a repeat of 1994, when popular anger against an overreaching, reform­ist Democratic Party enabled the GOP to pick up 56 seats in the House of Representatives. But Republicans might be well-advised to look back at an earlier midterm election: 1934. When elected in 1932, Franklin D. Roose­velt swept into office along

Jonathan Alter: 1965 All Over Again? The reach of persistent progressivism

[Jonathan Alter is an American columnist and senior editor for Newsweek magazine.] Last week brought a lot of talk about how health-care reform (HCR) was the most sweeping piece of domestic legislation since 1965. That's astonishing when you think about it—nearly half a century with no major bills (welfare reform in 1996 and No Child Left Behind in 2002 weren't nearly as big). Considering that Congress no longer decides if the nation goes to war, this is not much of a record for the

Catherine Mayer: Special Relationship? Why Britain's Affair With the U.S. Is Over

[Catherine Mayer is London Bureau Chief for Time Magazine and former President of the Foreign Press Association in London.] If anyone still doubts that George Bush and Tony Blair were the closest of allies, the text of a July 2002 note from the U.K. premier to the U.S. President, revealed in a new book, should dispel any lingering skepticism. "You know, George, whatever you decide to do [about Iraq], I'm with you," Blair assured his friend. The End of the Par

Ramesh Ponnuru: The Dead End of Liberalism

[Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor for the National Review.] The chief obstacles to new liberal policy victories these days are past liberal policy victories. As a matter of political philosophy, contemporary liberalism may exalt government, but in practice, it enfeebles it. No group of voters has resisted the president’s project of transforming American health care more than senior citizens. Their health care was already transformed, by Medicare. That program is one of

Chris Hedges: Is America ‘Yearning For Fascism?’

[Chris Hedges, whose column is published Mondays on Truthdig, is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City.] The language of violence always presages violence. I watched it in war after war from Latin America to the Balkans. The impoverishment of a working class and the snuffing out of hope and opportunity always produce angry mobs ready to kill and be killed. A bankrupt, liberal elite, which proves ineffectual against the rich and the criminal, always gets swept asid

Neil Reynolds: American Intellectuals and the ‘Fictitious Personality' Gambit

[Neil Reynolds writes for the Globe and Mail.] Stanford University economist Thomas Sowell has spent his remarkable life doing battle with the American intellectual elite, the vanguard of utopians that wrote – or more accurately, perhaps, dictated – the history of the 20th century. In Intellectuals and Society, his 32nd book, published in his 80th year, this indefatigable scholar skillfully documents the tragic consequences of intellectual arrogance. They are all here,

Peter Beinart: Obama Just Fired His Air Traffic Controllers

[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.] Is it just me, or does Barack Obama seem different since health care passed? He’s sticking it to the Senate by appointing 15 nominees while it is on recess; he’s sticking it to Benjamin Netanyahu by not backing down from demands that Israel halt building in East Jerusalem; he’s stick

Frank Rich: The Rage Is Not About Health Care

[Frank Rich is a columnist for the NY Times.] How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht. The weapon of choice for vigilante violence at Congressional offices has been a brick hurled through a window. So far. No less curious is how disproportionate this red-hot anger is to its proximate cause. The historic Obama-Pelosi health care victory is a big

Colbert I. King: In the Faces of Tea Party Shouters, Images of Hate and History

[Colbert I. King writes for the Washington Post.] The angry faces at Tea Party rallies are eerily familiar. They resemble faces of protesters lining the street at the University of Alabama in 1956 as Autherine Lucy, the school's first black student, bravely tried to walk to class. Those same jeering faces could be seen gathered around the Arkansas National Guard troopers who blocked nine black children from entering Little Rock's Central High School in 1957.

David D. Laitin: Laïcité or Discrimination Against Muslims in France?

[David D. Laitin, a professor of political science at Stanford, was a guest professor in the “Equal Opportunity” scholar-in-residence program of the French-American Foundation and Sciences-Po.] In less than two weeks, Eric Besson, the French minister for Immigration, Integration and National Identity, will open a colloquium on “National Identities, European Identities” with leading European ministers and intellectuals in attendance. The event stems from a campaign promi

Stephen Walt: Were the NeoCons a "conspiracy"?

[Stephen Martin Walt is a professor of international affairs at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.] In May 2003, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman told Ha'aretz's Ari Shavitz that the invasion of Iraq was: "[T]he war the neoconservatives wanted ... the war the neoconservatives marketed. .. I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at the moment within a five-block radius of this office [in Washington]) who, if you exiled

Jack Goldsmith and Lawrence Lessig: Anti-Counterfeiting Agreement Raises Constitutional Concerns

[Jack Goldsmith and Lawrence Lessig are professors at Harvard Law School. Goldsmith is co-author of "Who Controls the Internet?" Lessig is the author of "Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy."] The much-criticized cloak of secrecy that has surrounded the Obama administration's negotiation of the multilateral Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement was broken Wednesday. The leaked draft of ACTA belies the U.S. trade representative's assertions t

Sebastian Mallaby: For Rising China, An Identity Crisis

[Sebastian Mallaby writes a column for the Washington Post.] In the early 1990s, when I lived in Japan, its people embarked on a search for their identity. The country had become an economic superpower, but its politics had not caught up; it did not know what to do with its weight in the world.... Of course, Japan's extended slump has muted its ambitions. But the debates of the 1990s came back to me this month, when I spent nine days among Beijing intellectuals. Like th