Roundup: Media's Take

Humberto Fontova: When Fidel Castro Dictated to the Old U.S. Media

[Humberto Fontova is the author of Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him. Visit www.hfontova.com.] We cannot for a second abandon propaganda. Propaganda is vital -- propaganda is the heart of all struggles. (Fidel Castro in a letter to a revolutionary colleague in 1954)A foreign reporter -- preferably American -- was much more valuable to us at that time (1957) than any military victo

Joseph I. Lieberman: Islamist Extremism and the Murder of Daniel Pearl

These are the remarks Sen. Joseph Lieberman delivered at the fourth annual Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture at Stanford University on October 18: It has been nearly eight years since Ruth and Judea Pearl were confronted by the most unspeakable horror that any parent can contemplate. But rather than retreat into grief and anger, they have instead ensured that the flame of their son’s memory, and everything he stood for, has continued to burn with undiminished urgency and relevance. Beca

Robert Nedelkoff: In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning…

[Robert Nedelkoff, a resident of Silver Spring, MD, received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Louisville and his Juris Doctor degree from Monterey College of Law in 1996. From 1997 until March 2009, he worked on behalf of the Richard Nixon Foundation at the National Archives in College Park, MD. He has published articles in several magazines, including GQ and McSweeney’s.] There has been quite a lot of coverage this week of President Obama’s early-morning journey on Thur

Robert Nedelkoff: He Came, He Saw, He Muddled The Facts

[Robert Nedelkoff, a resident of Silver Spring, MD, received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Louisville and his Juris Doctor degree from Monterey College of Law in 1996. From 1997 until March 2009, he worked on behalf of the Richard Nixon Foundation at the National Archives in College Park, MD. He has published articles in several magazines, including GQ and McSweeney’s.] Rocco Landesman, who was appointed chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts by President Oba

Jim Gallen: Echo of 1970? (re: New York Twenty-third Congressional)

[Jim Gallen is an attorney practicing in St. Louis, Missouri. He is also an amateur historian who teaches continuing education classes through St. Louis Community College at Meramec.] The upcoming special election in the New York Twenty-third Congressional brings to mind an earlier three way election in the Empire State. The 2009 special election features Democrat Bill Owens, Republican Dierdre Scozzafava and Conservative Doug Hoffman. Identifying the players in New Yor

Ray McGovern: Kipling Haunts Obama's Afghan War

[Ray McGovern was an Army infantry/intelligence officer and then a CIA analyst for almost thirty years, during which his duties included chairing National Intelligence Estimates. He is cofounder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, and now works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington.] The White Man's Burden, a phrase immortalized by English poet Rudyard Kipling as an excuse for European-American imperiali

Robert Parry: Al-Qaeda Outwitted Bush, Neocons

[Parry is an investigative journalist who has worked for the AP and Newsweek. He most recently founded Consortium News, an investigative news e-zine.] As security worsens in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it is clear that al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies outwitted President George W. Bush and his neoconservative advisers by tying down U.S. forces in Iraq for five years while the Islamic militants rebuilt their forces for the war on their “central front.” The growing U.S. casu

Ben Piven: Communist North Korea clings to ‘Juche’ ideology

[Ben Piven is a multimedia producer at Worldfocus who went to North Korea in August. He writes about the isolated Communist nation’s Juche state religion.] North Korea is a Cold War relic, but its communist roots alone do not explain the widespread adoption of the ideology knows as Juche — essentially a hybrid of East Asian Confucianism and East European Stalinism. Despite the fact that state literature decrees “man is the master of all things,” Juche (”self-reliance” i

William A. Darity and Darrick Hamilton: Bernanke ignores history of black and white wealth rift

[William A. Darity is the Arts & Sciences Professor of public policy studies and professor of African and African American Studies and economics at Duke University. Darrick Hamilton is an assistant professor of management and urban policy at Milano – The New School, and an affiliated faculty member in the department of economics at The New School for Social Research, and an affiliate scholar at the Center for American Progress.] Last spring when Federal Reserve chair Ben

Ronald Brownstein: A Reaganite Or Jacksonian Wave?

[Ronald Brownstein writes a weekly column for National Journal.] Fittingly for a politician who represents Las Vegas, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., this week doubled down on his party's defining political bet. From the White House to Capitol Hill, Democrats are wagering that they can sell Americans on a sweeping and in some ways unprecedented expansion of government's reach to confront both the immediate economic downturn and such long-term challenges as he

Stephen Rohde: Habeas Corpus: Vessel to Safe Harbor

[Stephen Rohde is a constitutional lawyer and partner in the Los Angeles firm of Rohde & Victoroff. He is a past president of the Beverly Hills Bar Association and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.] Setting the stage for the next major challenge to the power of the President, this time Barack Obama rather than George W. Bush, the Supreme Court has agreed to consider whether a federal judge can order the release of Guantanamo Bay detainees into the United

Ted Sorensen: America's Next Unwinnable War

[Ted Sorensen, former special counsel and adviser to President John F. Kennedy, is the author most recently of Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History.] America’s unwise, unwarranted, and sadly unwinnable war in Afghanistan—hastily initiated and then abandoned for Iraq by President Barack Obama’s ideologically blinded predecessor and dumped into Obama’s lap in the worst possible way—is beginning increasingly to smell like the 1964-68 war in South Vietnam that swallowed up the presi

George H. Wittman: Russia Redux

[George H. Wittman is a member of the Committee on the Present Danger and the founding chairman of the National Institute for Public Policy.] What exactly did Western leaders and pundits think would happen as Russia regained economic stability and again gained leverage in the world of international politics? What did they think would be the outcome of a weakened United States undercut by lack of support by some Western European allies? What they didn't contemplate was

Charles Krauthammer: Obama's Bush Blame Game

[Charles Krauthammer writes about politics and policy for The Washington Post's op-ed page.] Old Soviet joke: Moscow, 1953. Stalin calls in Khrushchev. "Niki, I'm dying. Don't have much to leave you. Just three envelopes. Open them, one at a time, when you get into big trouble." A few years later, first crisis. Khrushchev opens envelope 1: "Blame everything on me. Uncle Joe." A few years later, a really big

Vairous: Reflections On The 80-Year Anniversary Of The Stock Market Crash Of 1929

"A New Agenda for America"- On the 80th Anniversary of Great Crash, What Have We Learned and What Lies Ahead? 80 years ago today, on October 29th, 1929, Wall Street saw the worst day in its history. The shock of"Black Tuesday" came to an end, but the misery of the Great Depression was just beginning. Lynn Parramore, Editor of New Deal 2.0 , the Roosevelt Institute's economy blog, asks some provocative thinkers - lawyers, economists, historian, civil rights leaders, auth

Glenn Greenwald: The universality of war propaganda

[Glenn Greenwald is a lawyer, columnist, blogger, and author.] I'm traveling still today, but I wanted to note an amazing Op-Ed that was referenced in a book I'm reading: the Op-Ed is by Nikolai Lanine, published in The Toronto Globe and Mail in November, 2006. Lanine was drafted into the Russian Army at the age of 18 and spent several years as part of the Russian occupying force in Afghanistan. Thereafter, he moved to Canada, and in 2006, his wife's first cousin, a medic in the

John Meroney: A Conversation With Gore Vidal

[John Meroney is completing a book, Rehearsals for a Lead Role: Ronald Reagan in The Hollywood Wars.] At age 83, Gore Vidal remains a sharp provocateur, as irascible and irreverent as ever. Snapshots in History’s Glare, a new memoir by Vidal released this month, renews interest in this American literary and cultural icon—offering readers a pictorial look at his singular life, from his youth in the political and social circles of Washington, to his service in World War I

Andrew J. Bacevich: We’ve got to figure out what our aims are in Afghanistan before we talk strategy

[Andrew J. Bacevich, a professor at Boston University, is the author of The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.] The "strategic" debate over Afghanistan is a diversion that serves chiefly to distract attention from the condition of strategic bankruptcy that President Obama inherited. The issues in Afghanistan do not qualify as strategic. They barely rise to the level of operational. To the extent that the war in Afghanistan can claim to have any purpose, t

Mitchell Bard: Have Russia and Iran Checkmated Obama?

[Mitchell Bard is the Executive Director of the nonprofit American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (AICE) and the director of the Jewish Virtual Library.] President Obama’s decision to abandon the plan to deploy a missile defense system in Europe shocked many analysts in the United States as well as our eastern European allies who were counting on the shield to protect them from the threat of Russian missiles. Perhaps the only one who was not surprised was the political chess grandma

Dilip Hiro: Why Obama's Iran Policy Will Fail

[Dilip Hiro is the author of Blood of the Earth: The Battle for the World's Vanishing Oil Resources (Nation Books), among other works. His forthcoming book, After Empire: The Birth of a Multipolar World, will be published in January 2010, also by Nation Books.] While the tone of the Obama administration is different from that of its predecessor, and some of its foreign policies diverge from those of George W. Bush, at their core both administrations subscribe to the same doctrine: W