Roundup: Media's Take

Sherwood Ross: Obama Never Considered Diplomacy in Afghanistan

[Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based publicist who formerly worked at the Miami Herald, the City News Bureau of Chicago, the Chicago Daily News, and as a columnist for major wire services. Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com] After initially injecting 21,000 troops into Afghanistan allegedly to stave off imminent defeat, President Obama Tuesday will tell war-weary Americans why he seeks 35,000 more. If he gets them, the U.S. force there wil

Ross Douthat: A Generation in the Balance

[Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic and a blogger for theatlantic.com.] Do downturns create Democrats? The Great Depression certainly did: The generation that came of age in the 1930s has cleaved to the Democratic Party like no population before or since. And it makes intuitive sense that experiencing a recession at a formative age could inspire lifelong sympathy for the party of the welfare

Sandro Contenta: Shattering Canada's collective myths

[Sandro Contenta writes a weekly column on Canada for GlobalPost. Contenta has been a staff reporter with the Toronto Star, Canada’s biggest circulation daily since 1981.] TORONTO, Canada — There are moments in a country’s history when collective myths become so divorced from reality that almost everyone can hear them burst with a pop. It happened last week in Canada, when stories in the media proclaimed the end of a national identity as peacekeepers, and the birth of o

John B. Judis: The Case for Deficit Spending

[John B. Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic and a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.] If there was one thing that seemed certain about the Obama administration, it was their commitment to Keynesian deficit spending to boost the economy out of its slump. But Keynes beware: With unemployment at a whopping 10.2 percent, and probably rising, the White House has begun trumpeting its commitment to Hoover-style deficit busting. On November 13, the

Bennet Kelley: Patrick Kennedy Takes On The Bishop And The Church's Moral Myopia

[Bennet Kelley is an award winning columnist, a political commentator and the former Co-Founder and National Co-Chair of the Democratic National Committee's Saxophone Club (its young professional fund raising and outreach arm during the Clinton years).] It is fitting that the current battle between the Catholic Church and pro-choice lawmakers involves the nephew of the only Catholic president and takes place in Rhode Island, which not only was the first colony founded on the princip

Ray McGovern: Obama's Profile in Courage, or Cave-In?

[Ray McGovern works for Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He was an analyst at the CIA for 27 years, and is on the Steering Group of VIPS.]“It took a lot of courage on Kennedy’s part to defy the Pentagon, defy the military — and do the right thing,” said Col. Larry Wilkerson, USA (ret.), according to Robert Dreyfuss in his recent Rolling Stone article “The Generals’ Revolt.” Wilkerson, who was chief of sta

Jeff Cohen: Get Ready for the Obama/GOP Alliance

[Jeff Cohen is an associate professor of journalism at Ithaca College, founder of the media watch group FAIR, and former board member of Progressive Democrats of America. ] With Obama pushing a huge troop escalation in Afghanistan, history may well repeat itself with a vengeance. And it's not just the apt comparison to LBJ, who destroyed his presidency on the battlefields of Vietnam with an escalation that delivered power to Nixon and the GOP. There's another frighteni

Earl Ofari Hutchinson: No JFK Moment for Obama on Afghanistan

[Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a nationally acclaimed author and political analyst. He has authored ten books; his articles are published in newspapers and magazines nationally in the United States.] The great hope was that President Obama would have the courage and political sense to do what JFK did forty six years ago. Kennedy told the generals no to their demand for escalation in Vietnam. It wasn't easy. The Pentagon had drawn up plans for the massive military ramp up, had an active l

Glenn Greenwald: A key British official reminds us of the forgotten anthrax attack

Britain is currently engulfed by a probing, controversial investigation into how their Government came to support the invasion of Iraq, replete with evidence that much of what was said at the time by both British and American officials was knowingly false, particularly regarding the unequivocal intention of the Bush administration to attack Iraq for months when they were pretending otherwise. Yesterday, the British Ambassador to the U.S. in 2002 and 2003, Sir Christopher Meyer (who favored the

Jacob Weisberg: Obama is having the best first year of any president since Franklin Roosevelt

[Jacob Weisberg is chairman and editor-in-chief of the Slate Group and author of The Bush Tragedy.] About one thing, left and right seem to agree these days: Obama hasn't done anything yet. Maureen Dowd and Dick Cheney have found common ground in scoffing at the president's "dithering." Newsweek recently ran a sympathetic cover story titled, "Yes He Can (But He Sure Hasn't Yet)." The sarcasm brigade thinks it's finally found an Achilles' heel in his lack of accom

Paul Reynolds: US-UK 'special relationship' not so special anymore

[Paul Reynolds is the BBC's World affairs correspondent.] Some sharp comments by a former British ambassador to Washington during the Iraq inquiry have again cast doubt on the strength of the so-called "special relationship" between Britain and the United States. This raises the possibility that the Iraq war will be seen as a moment after which that relationship took a real downturn. Indeed, it is arguable that the "special relationship&quo

Alan Wachman: China's Lincolnophilia

[Alan Wachman teaches international politics in The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.] In the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Abraham Lincoln’s stance on national unity during the U.S. Civil War and his opposition to the institution of slavery have been summoned up by PRC officials, media, and elites in efforts to explain and legitimate their own response to those they disparage as “separatists” in Taiwan and Tibet. To Beijing, vigorously oppos

David Rothkopf: America's new crisis of confidence

[David Rothkopf is the author of Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They are Making and Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power. He is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and President and CEO of Garten Rothkopf, a Washington, DC-based international advisory firm.] Hope is the life's blood of American politics. This is a country built on the premise of boundless promise.

David R. Stokes: Will Mr. Obama Seize His Big Mac Moment?

[David R. Stokes (www.davidrstokes.com) is a minister, broadcaster, and free-lance writer. He currently serves as Senior Pastor of FAIR OAKS CHURCH in Fairfax, Virginia (www.fairoakschurch.org)] This Tuesday, Barack Obama will travel to the United States Military Academy at West Point to deliver the most important address of his young presidency. He has obviously chosen the site for the speech wi

Stephen Herzenberg: FDR vs. the Great Recession ... We must tackle four big issues to revive our economy

[Stephen Herzenberg is executive director of the Keystone Research Center in Harrisburg.] I keep seeing this image of Franklin Roosevelt rolling over in his grave. What might have our late, great President perturbed? Today's debate about how to get the economy going again. Since the start of the Great Recession, the U.S. economy has shed more than 7 million jobs, 208,000 of them in Pennsylvania. We are living through the deepest economic contraction since t

Thomas Wilner: Obama Made the Right Call on KSM

[—Mr. Wilner was counsel of record to Guantanamo detainees in the Supreme Court's June 2004 and June 2008 rulings in their favor on habeas corpus rights.] The Obama administration's decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 conspirators in federal court marks a fundamental shift in the way we fight terrorism. For eight years we have allowed the terrorists to intimidate us into abandoning our laws and institutions. This decision shows that we're strong enough to face

Nick Danforth: How the West Lost Turkey

[Nick Danforth is a Turkish affairs specialist at Concepts & Strategies, a global strategic communications firm. He also blogs about Turkey for the Project on Middle East Democracy.] Lately, some on the right in Washington have fretted that Turkey's religiously oriented Justice and Development Party, the AKP, will distance the country from its Western allies, eroding secularism as it seeks tighter bonds within the Middle East. After all, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has p

Dallas Darling: From Radical Republicans to Rich Republicans?

[Dallas Darling is the author of "Politics 501: An A-Z Reading on Conscientious Political Thought and Action," "Some Nations Above God: 52 Weekly Reflections On Modern-Day Imperialism, Militarism, And Consumerism in the Context of John's Apocalyptic Vision," and "The Other Side Of Christianity: Reflections on Faith, Politics, Spirituality, History, and Peace." He is a correspondent for www.worldnews.com. You can read more of Da

Arianna Huffington: Will The Unemployment Disaster Be Obama's Katrina?

[Arianna Huffington is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, a nationally syndicated columnist, and author of twelve books. She is also co-host of “Left, Right & Center,” public radio’s popular political roundtable program.] There's a Category 5 storm about to make landfall, and the president and the officials in charge of preparing for the approaching disaster don't seem to be particularly worried. Sound familiar? Just as Katrina exposed critic

Harry Mount: Mark Lowe is right: The Romans said it better

[Amo, Amas, Amat and All That – How to Become a Latin Lover' by Harry Mount is published by Short Books (£7.99)] Next time you curse a flashing speed camera or are undertaken on the inside lane of the M40, here's a little tip: say your rude words in Latin. That's what Mark Lowe, the millionaire hedge-fund boss being sued for wrongful dismissal, did when he sent an email quoting one of the filthiest expressions ever written in Latin – or in any other language, for that matter.