Roundup: Media's Take

Jean Chrétien, Joe Clark, Ed Broadbent and Lloyd Axworthy: Toward a World Without Nuclear Weapons

At the end of the Second World War, Canada was one of the few countries that possessed the technology and raw materials needed to produce nuclear weapons. In the wake of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Canadian leaders of the day, shocked at the terrifying power of the bomb, renounced that option and turned their attention to achieving an international agreement to control the spread of nuclear weapons and to free humanity from the risk of annihilation. Lester Pearson

Brian Thevenot: The Textbook Myth

[Brian Thevenot spent a dozen years at The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, most recently as special projects editor.] As the furor over the State Board of Education’s ideological rewriting of social studies standards has exploded nationally in recent weeks, a primary narrative has emerged: that whatever 15 politicians in Texas (or at least the rightest-leaning half of them) decide will be published in textbooks nationwide for years to come. That fear has already stoked a

Philip Johnson: Could Ireland Really Rejoin the Commonwealth?

[Philip Johnson is the Daily Telegraph's Assistant Editor for Home News.] Easter holds a special place in the history of Ireland. In 1916, the insurrection known as the Easter Rising paved the way for the country's partition and a bloody civil conflict. In 1998, the Good Friday Agreement marked the end of the Provisional IRA's war with the British state and the beginnings of a process that has resulted in the two extremes in Ulster politics coming together to share power....

David Brooks: Return of History in Economics

[David Brooks is a columnist for the New York Times.] Some brilliant scholar has to write a comprehensive history of modern economics because the evolution of this field is clearly one of the most consequential things happening in the world today. Act I in this history would be set in the era of economic scientism: the period when economists based their work on a crude vision of human nature (the perfectly rational, utility-maximizing autonomous individual) and then bu

Ranj Alaaldin: Iraq's Democracy is Messy but Genuine

[Ranj Alaaldin is a Middle East political and security risk analyst based at the London School of Economics and Political Science.] As post-election events unfold in Iraq, the usual prejudicial arguments will also make their way back into the wider debate on Iraq's democratic process: it is a failure, sectarianism dominates and Iraq will self-destruct (see Fawaz Gerges's article on Cif, Iraq's delayed democracy ). But this is the template argument that has plagued Iraq as much as vi

Benjamin Wittes: Obama's Lawyers were Smeared--But Guess What, So were Bush’s

[Benjamin Wittes is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and a member of the Hoover Institution's Task Force on National Security and Law.] The attacks on the Justice Department lawyers who had represented Guantanamo detainees angered me for several distinct reasons. They typified a growing culture of incivility in the politics of national security and law that I have always loathed and have spoken against repeatedly. They sought to delegitimize the legal defense of politica

E.J. Dionne: Back to the 1830s ... Health Care and the New Nullifiers

[E.J. Dionne is a twice-weekly columnist for The Post, writing on national policy and politics.] Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli seems determined to use an attack on health-care reform to bring us back to the 1830s. Cuccinelli, to cheers from the "tea party" crowd, went to court this week to overturn the new law, which he says conflicts with a Virginia statute "protecting its citizens from a government-imposed mandate to buy health insurance.&qu

Ben Macintyre: Barack Obama Must Justify Covert Killing Or Halt It

[Ben Macintyre is Writer at Large for The Times and contributes a regular column.] David Miliband was diplomatically livid. “Such misuse of British passports is intolerable”. Israel had broken every rule, he said, by cloning British documents that were used by some of the hit-team sent to kill the Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel room. In retaliation for forging Her Britannic Majesty’s signature, the senior Mossad officer in London is heading home — presumably on his

Bernard Weiner: "Shallow Throat": Obama, the GOP and "Potomac Fever"

[Bernard Weiner, a poet/playwright and Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at universities in California and Washington, worked as a writer/editor with the San Francisco Chronicle for two decades, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org). To comment: crisispapers@hotmail.com.] With the Democrats running the show, the Republican mol

Mark Steyn: Health Care Reform Could Lead to Global Collapse

[Mark Steyn is a contributor to the National Review.] Sometimes you do live to see it. In my book America Alone, I point out that, to a five-year-old boy waving his flag as Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee procession marched down the Mall in 1897, it would have been inconceivable that by the time of his 80th birthday the greatest empire the world had ever known would have shriveled to an economically moribund strike-bound socialist slough of despond, one in which (stop me if this so

Henry A. Giroux: On Pop Clarity: Public Intellectuals and the Crisis of Language

[Henry A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department. He has taught at Boston University, Miami University of Ohio, and Penn State University.] The presupposition that academics no longer function as critical public intellectuals willing to connect their knowledge and expertise to larger public issues is now pervasive. Many factors have contributed to this alleged withdrawal from speaking to public iss

Justin Miller: Health Care Reform Isn't Very Historic

[Justin Miller is a staff editor at TheAtlantic.com. Previously he was an assistant editor at RealClearPolitics, a political reporter in Ohio, and a freelance journalist. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan and lives in Washington, D.C.] Just how historic is the new health care law? You can't look at the news without seeing the adjective used or listen to people talk for an hour without hearing the president's name mentioned with FDR or LBJ. No matter what someone's polit

James Taranto: The New York Times Relaxes Taboos about Nazi Germany

[James Taranto is editor of OpinionJournal.com and author of its popular Best of the Web Today column. In August 2007 he was named a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.]The other day David Leonhardt, who writes the "Economic Scene" column for the New York Times business section, offered an analogy that some are likely to find shocking:In the s

Ben Heineman Jr.: No Presidential Greatness Without Spending Political Capital

[Ben Heineman Jr. has held top positions in government, law and business. He is the author of High Performance with High Integrity (Harvard Business Press, 2008).] Only in recent months, when he was willing to make it his personal issue and to spend significantly from his store of political capital, was President Obama able to achieve victory in the bitter congressional battle over health care reform. There have been two great Democrat presidents since FDR--Harry Truman

E.J. Dionne Jr.: What Real Conservatism is All About

[E.J. Dionne Jr. writes for the Washington Post and is a professor at Georgetown University.] Every nation needs an intelligent and constructive form of conservatism. The debate over the health care bill, which mercifully came to a close on Sunday night, was not American conservatism's finest hour. In its current incarnation, conservatism has taken on an angry crankiness. It is caught up in a pseudo-populism that true conservatism should mistrust -- what on Earth would

Jonathan Cohn: Truman, LBJ, Obama

[Cohn is a senior editor for the New Republic.] Care for the sick. Serenity for the fearful. Those are the simple, elegant terms Lyndon Johnson used to describe Medicare on July 30, 1965, the day he signed it into law. He said it at the side of Harry Truman, who was nearly 80 then. They were at the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, where Johnson had come to pay homage. It was Truman who had waged the first serious campaign for national health insura

Alan M. Dershowitz: Obama's Legacy and the Iranian Bomb

[Mr. Dershowitz is a law professor at Harvard. His latest book is "The Case for Moral Clarity" (Camera, 2009).] The gravest threat faced by the world today is a nuclear-armed Iran. Of all the nations capable of producing nuclear weapons, Iran is the only one that might use them to attack an enemy. There are several ways in which Iran could use nuclear weapons. The first is by dropping an atomic bomb on Israel, as its leaders have repeatedly threatened to do. H

Richard Cohen: The Health-Care Vote: One More Step on a Long, Slow Journey

[Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post.] ...Do not underestimate the importance of Sunday's House vote. It was momentous, and it will not be repealed by the results of the November elections. Against the hopes and insistence of the GOP, America did not reverse Social Security (as late as the Eisenhower administration, that was the fervent wish of the party's right wing) or Medicaid. The worth of these programs became evident, and thus they became politically sacrosanct....

Jamie M. Fly: Obama Is Making Bush's Big Mistake on Russia

[Jamie M. Fly is executive director of the Foreign Policy Initiative. Gary Schmitt is director of the Program on Advanced Strategic Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.] Still in the midst of a diplomatic fracas with Israel, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also found herself in a mini-crisis with Russia during last week's Moscow trip. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin publicly snubbed Clinton during a meeting Friday, hectoring her in front of reporters after announcing Thurs

Gerald F. Seib: Vast Ambition, Colossal Risk at Work in Health Care Reform

[Gerald F. Seib writes for the Wall Street Journal.] As a piece of social policy, the health bill passed Sunday night by the House of Representatives ranks up there with the Great Society programs of Lyndon B. Johnson in ambition and scope. But here's one big difference: The Great Society programs were enacted in an era when Americans still tended to trust the government to get things done. By contrast, a principal reason the health bill was so hard to get to this point