Roundup: Media's Take

B.R. Myers: North Korea is More Hitler than Stalin

[B.R. Myers, a South Korea-based literary critic, is author of The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters.] America talks the talk; Pyongyang walks the walk. At least according to Kim Jong Il's domestic propaganda machine. In countless posters displayed in city centers, North Korean resolve is contrasted with American spinelessness. "If we say we do something, we do it," a towering Korean People's Army soldier shouts in one poster as he slams hi

Jacob Heilbrunn: Germany is Becoming Introverted

[Jacob Heilbrunn is a senior editor at The National Interest.] Freiburg, A university town nestled in a valley at the foot of the Black Forest in southwest Germany, is where the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who wore a Nazi Party badge for the special occasion, delivered his notorious rector’s address in 1933, exhorting German students to fulfill the Fuhrer’s vision by supporting the “national revolution.” The medieval city was heavily bombed during World War II and occupied by the

Norman Solomon: We Have Become Numb to the True Cost of War

[Norman Solomon is national co-chair of the Healthcare Not Warfare campaign, launched by Progressive Democrats of America. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” For more information, go to: www.normansolomon.com]Playwright Lillian Hellman said: “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.” The statement was in a letter to the House Un-American Activities Committee. The year was 1952. We tell ourselves t

Richard A. Posner: Maybe It Wouldn't Have Been So Bad if Roosevelt Packed the Supreme Court

[Richard A. Posner is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. This is a review of Jeff Shesol's new book, Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court (Norton, 2010)] In 1937 President Roosevelt tried to “pack” the Supreme Court--increase its size so that he could fill the vacancies thus created with liberals, who would shift the balance of power from the conservative majority that had inv

E.J. Dionne Jr.: America's Youth are the New New Dealers

[E.J. Dionne Jr. is a columnist for the Washington Post.] Young Americans are the linchpin of a new progressive era in American politics. So why aren't Democrats paying more attention to them? The relative strength of conservatives in American politics since the 1980s was built on generational change: Voters whose views had been shaped by the New Deal were gradually replaced with the more cautious souls who came of age after FDR. Enter the Millennials -- generally defin

Clif Garboden: The Tea Party is the Woodstock Moment for Conservatives

[Clif Garboden is a Boston-area freelance writer.] ...What the Tea Party actually does represent seems to have a lot of observers baffled. Are its members just a bunch of kooks? Racists? Dittoheads? Survivalists? Libertarian extremists? Gun nuts? Thoughtful conservatives in wolves’ clothing? Can they really be all those things? Yes they can. It’s a familiar pattern. I’ve seen it before, albeit from the opposite political pole. The Tea Party is an organization in no grea

Daniel A. Bell: China’s Confucian Alternative to Communism and Democracy

[Daniel A. Bell is professor of political philosophy at Tsinghua University in Beijing and the author of “China’s New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society.”] Four decades ago, it would have been suicidal to say a good word about Confucius in Beijing. Confucius was the reactionary enemy, and all Chinese were encouraged to struggle against him. Chairman Mao himself was photographed on the cover of a revolutionary newspaper that announced the desecration of Co

Jim Spencer and Curtis Ellis: Most "Tea Partiers" are Aging Boomers Reliving the 60s

[Jim Spencer and Curtis Ellis are Democratic political consultants based in Boston and New York, respectively.] Oceans of ink, terabytes of blog space and an eternity of television time have been devoted to the latest object of media fascination, the "tea party" movement. Now (finally!), a poll conducted by CNN gives us some hard data on the Tea Party Nation. Neither "average Americans," as they like to portray themselves, nor trailer-park "Deli

Valery Kalnysh: Preserving Ukrainian Nationhood

[Valery Kalnysh is deputy editor-in-chief of the “Kommersant Ukraina” newspaper published in Kiev.] ...Relations between Ukraine and Russia run much deeper than any spy story. In the Soviet period Ukraine was considered the “sister” and Russia the “brother” – usually the elder brother - in the USSR family of nations. For the majority of the cultural intelligentsia, success in the capital of Ukraine was only important from the standpoint of how strongly it affected subsequent success in the ca

Melvin A. Goodman: The Secret History of Gen. Alexander Haig

[Melvin A. Goodman is national security and intelligence columnist for Truthout. He is senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. His 42-year government career included service at the CIA, State Department, Defense Department and the US Army. His latest book is "Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA."] The obituaries in the mainstream media failed to capture the full extent of the

Michael Parenti: What Do Empires Do?

[Michael Parenti's recent books include: God and His Demons (Prometheus 2010); Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader (City Lights); The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press), Superpatriotism (City Lights), The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories Press). For further information, visit his website: www.michaelparenti.org.] When I wrote my book Against Empire in 1995, as might be expected, some of my U.S. compatriots thought it was wrong of me to call the United States

Jonathan Alter: Glenn Beck Hates the Progressive Era

[Jonathan Alter is a columnist for Newsweek.] Glenn Beck has now supplanted Rush Limbaugh as the most influential broadcaster in America. He's the one the tea-party movement looks to. Beck wowed the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) crowd Feb 20 with his attack on progressivism, which he said must be "eradicated." "Progressivism is the cancer in America and it's eating our Constitution," Beck told the crowd. Now that Beck has given his m

Jonah Goldberg: The Left Tends to get Schoolgirl Crushes on Foreign Regimes

[Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. © 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.] ‘I have been over into the future, and it works.” Lincoln Steffens, the muckraking journalist, offered that review of the Soviet Union on his return from a fact-finding mission there. For decades, con

Simon Jenkins: From Newry to Helmand, the lessons are the same

[Simon Jenkins is a British journalist and author.] An explosion, then ­silence. Next come the shouts and the sirens. It is another bomb. Oh God, people cry, is ­anyone dead? On this occasion, no. But Northern Ireland sees a terrorist incident, a bombing or a shooting, twice week, double the rate of a year ago. Someone is charged with terrorism every six days. Each time, local leaders are summoned to plead for calm. Each outrage is dismissed as the work of criminal dissidents and de

Eduardo Skzlarz and Martin Barillas: Tensions Rising between Argentina and UK, but War Unlikely

[Eduardo Skzlarz heads the South America desk of The Cutting Edge News. Senior Contributor Martin Barillas edits www.SperoForum.com.] Relations between Argentina and the United Kingdom have entered a period of renewed tension since Buenos Aires on February 16 began to restrict the travel of seagoing vessels between the South American republic and the archipelago known to the British as the Falkland Islands. Known to Argentina—and the rest of L

Anthony Shadid: Old Mistakes in Iraq Cast a Long Shadow

[Anthony Shadid is Baghdad correspondent for the New York Times.] Fittingly, it was Order No. 1. Five days after becoming proconsul in Iraq in May 2003, L. Paul Bremer III issued the decree with the imperial panache of a man partial to the combat boots of an occupier and the business suit of a bureaucrat. With it, he banned the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein and unleashed a process that continues today. In English, his euphemism was de-Baathification. But Mr. Bremer, who

Pete Hegseth: 2010 Reconciliation or 2005 Redux?

[Capt. Pete Hegseth, who served in Iraq with the 101st Airborne Division from 2005 to 2006, is executive director of Vets for Freedom.] Four years ago yesterday, I awoke to a deafening explosion; al-Qaeda-affiliated insurgents had destroyed the golden dome of the Al-Askariya Mosque in Samarra, leaving only smoldering ruins visible from our command post. The bombing sent Iraq spiraling into near-genocidal chaos, with American troops caught undermanned and ill-prepared. T

Alex Alexiev: Afghanistan at the Crossroads

[Alex Alexiev is a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C.] The capture of the Taliban’s second in command in Karachi has been treated in the media as a major U.S. coup and a watershed event in U.S.-Pakistani cooperation in the war against the Taliban. It is, regrettably, nothing of the kind. Even if Mullah Baradar is indeed the Taliban’s de facto military commander, the operational significance of whatever non-Mirandized information can be extracted from him is

Richard Cohen: The Crazy Factor in Iran and in History

[Richard Cohen is a columnist for the Washington Post.] A question relating to Iran's suspected nuclear weapons program: Is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad crazy like Adolf Hitler, or is he crazy like, of all people, Richard Nixon? Nixon had a term for his own sort of craziness: "I call it the Madman Theory, Bob," he said to his aide H.R. "Bob" Haldeman during the 1968 presidential campaign. Nixon was talking about how he would deal with the Vi

Stephen Rohde: Terrorism Law, the New McCarthyism

[Stephen Rohde, a constitutional lawyer, was co-counsel with Arnold & Porter on the amicus brief filed by victims of McCarthyism in Humanitarian Law Project v. Holder.] Tomorrow, the US Supreme Court will hear oral argument in the first encounter with the free speech and association rights of American citizens in the context of terrorism since the 9/11 attacks, and in the first test of the constitutionality of a provision of the USA Patriot Act. The "Material S