Roundup: Media's Take

Eben Harrell: Will a Fresh Look at the Lockerbie Case Find New Evidence?

[Eben Harrell is London correspondent for TIME magazine.] It was a moment of revulsion for some of the family members of those who died in the 1988 bombing of Pan-Am flight 103: the only person convicted in the attack, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, being set free and receiving a hero's welcome on the tarmac in his native Libya. Now, two months after al-Megrahi's controversial release, Scottish police are diving back into the two-decade-old investigation in hopes of identifying the fo

John B. Judis: End State, Is California finished?

[John B. Judis is a senior editor for The New Republic.] California is a mess, but I love it all the same--especially the Bay Area, where I lived for 15 years. I went to Berkeley in 1962--a refugee from Amherst College, which at that time was dominated by frat boys with high SAT scores. I didn't go to Berkeley to go to school, but to be a bus ride away from North Beach and the Jazz Workshop. In a broader sense, I went to California for the same reason that other émigrés had been goi

William McGurn: The Post-Gracious President

[William McGurn is a Vice President at News Corporation who writes speeches for CEO Rupert Murdoch. Previously he served as Chief Speechwriter for President George W. Bush.] Nine months after Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, his most adamant critics must concede he's delivered on "change." And we see it in our first post-gracious presidency. The most visible manifestations of the new ungraciousness are the repeated digs the president and his senior staffe

Paul Cooper: Smearing Lincoln to Support Obama

[Paul Cooper is a featured blogger for NewsReal. Paul Cooper is a pastor, writer, and business owner.] If you can make up recent history with attributing false quotes to Rush, what is there stopping you from completely distorting how two of the most popular US Presidents of all time handled the press? Obviously nothing. CNN’s Rick Sanchez has proven once again that truth and research is not needed on CNN’s mid-day programming. This week Sanchez decided the best way to

Amy Chua: Where Is U.S. Foreign Policy Headed?

[Amy Chua, a professor at Yale Law School, is the author of “World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability” and “Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance — and Why They Fall.”] Neoliberalism, which dominated the decade before 9/11, had an exuberantly simple vision. Communism and authoritarianism had failed; therefore markets and free elections were the answer. Free-market democracy, conveniently spread by globalization,

Jonathan Macey: Washington's Plans May Result in Even Higher Executive Pay

[Mr. Macey is a law professor at Yale and a member of the Task Force on Property Rights at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.] Executive pay has emerged, once again, as a major issue in Washington. This week Treasury and the Federal Reserve announced new regulations designed to oversee and limit executive pay at thousands of financial institutions. This is deeply ironic, because today's pay woes are the direct result of prior government intervention. In 1992, Con

Joshua Kurlantzick: Afghanistan could turn into Vietnam. Let's hope so.

[Joshua Kurlantzick is a fellow for southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of "Charm Offensive: How China's Soft Power Is Transforming the World." ] In a ceremony last week honoring a unit of Vietnam veterans for their heroism in a long-forgotten battle, President Obama offered a glimpse of how heavily the lessons of Vietnam weigh on him as he considers the way forward in Afghanistan. "If that day in the jungle, if that war lon

Jim Sleeper: What 'Liberal' Academy?

[Jim Sleeper, a writer and teacher on American civic culture and politics and a lecturer in political science at Yale, is the author of The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York (W.W. Norton, 1990) and Liberal Racism (Viking, 1997, Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).] A couple of years ago The Nation's Eric Alterman published What Liberal Media?, shredding the familiar conservative charges. It may be too soon to ask, What liberal academy? -- although I'v

Thomas Friedman: Obama Must Not Forget Iraq

[Thomas Friedman is foreign-affairs columnist at the New York Times.] Baghdad, Aug. 25, 2012 — President Obama flew into Baghdad today on his end-of-term tour to highlight successes in U.S. foreign policy. At a time when the Arab-Israel negotiations remain mired in deadlock and Afghanistan remains mired in quagmire, Mr. Obama hailed the peaceful end of America’s combat presence in Iraq as his only Middle East achievement. Speaking to a gathering of Iraqi and U.S. officials under the

David Ignatius: History's Road to Waziristan

[David Ignatius is columnist and associate editor at the Washington Post] Talking with a Pakistani intelligence officer here last week about the army's invasion of South Waziristan, a visitor noted that troops have been marching down these same rough roads, toward the same tribal strongholds, for more than 150 years -- never with much success. "Yes," replied the Pakistani official, "it's all been done before." The difference, he explained, was that

Nat Hentoff: Obama Every Bit as Bad as Bush/Cheney on Patriot Act

[Nat Hentoff is one of the foremost authorities on the First Amendment. Hentoff was a columnist and staff writer with The Village Voice for 51 years, from 1957 until 2008.] While battling the FBI's expanded surveillance guidelines, Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., also revealed (Daily Kos, Oct. 8) that in the Senate Judiciary Committee review of the Patriot Act (also Oct. 8), Republicans protecting the Act were joined, in a closed-door classified session, by Obama officials with amendmen

Jamison Foser: Remembering Nixon

[Jamison Foser: Executive Vice President at Media Matters for America, a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.] The first year of Barack Obama's presidency has seen some absurd media memes, from nonexistent "death panels" to crazy birtherism. But for overall ahistorical (not to mention hysterical) audacity, it's tough

Dayo Olopade: How the (Dr. Cornel) West Was Won [part 1]

[Dayo Olopade is Washington reporter for The Root.] Cornel West, distinguished professor in the Princeton Center for African American Studies, and author of bestsellers such as Race Matters (Vintage, 1994) Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism (Penguin, 2004) and Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Faith in America (Routledge, 1994),has a new memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud (Smiley Books) in stores now. In it, West describes his journey from “Mama’s chi

Dayo Olopade: Words From the Other Mr. (Cornel) West [part 2]

[Dayo Olopade is Washington reporter for The Root.] Cornel West, distinguished professor in the Princeton Center for African American Studies, and author of best sellers such as Race Matters (Vintage, 1994) Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism (Penguin, 2004) and Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Faith in America (Routledge, 1994),has a new memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud (Smiley Books) in stores now. In it, West describes his journey from “Mama’s ch

Gerald F. Seib: Memories of Vietnam Haunt War, but Scarcely Apply

[Gerald F. Seib is the executive Washington editor of The Wall Street Journal] The comparisons roll off tongues easily in Washington these days: Vietnam and Afghanistan, both home to far-away, maddeningly intractable struggles. The former became a quagmire that devoured a presidency; might the latter as well? Every significant foreign conflict since the mid-1970s has, almost inevitably, been compared to Vietnam. In Ronald Reagan's first term, for example, Washington buz

Harvey Wasserman: Beware a Times/Pentagon "virtual coup" on Afghanistan

[Free Press Senior Editor and "Superpower of Peace" columnist Harvey Wasserman is also senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service.] Some military coups are still done the old-fashioned way. Tanks surround the capital, generals grab the radio station, the slaughter begins. Here our the Declaration of Independence scorned King George III for elevating his army over the colonial legislatures. The Founders opposed a standin

Robert Nedelkoff: The New Realpolititik?

[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.] Ever since President Obama’s took the oath of office twice last January, he’s been compared by pund

Patrick J. Buchanan: Nixon and Obama—Soul Brothers?

[Patrick J. Buchanan has been a senior adviser to three presidents, twice a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and the presidential nominee of the Reform Party in 2000. Buchanan has written eight books, including four New York Times best-sellers. He is married to the former Shelley Ann Scarney, a member of the White House staff from 1969 to 1975.] Four decades ago, Lamar Alexander worked in Richard Nixon’s White House. Sen. Alexander today says Barack Obama’s White

Patrick J. Buchanan: Traditional Americans are losing their nation

[Patrick J. Buchanan has been a senior adviser to three presidents, twice a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and the presidential nominee of the Reform Party in 2000. Buchanan has written eight books, including four New York Times best-sellers. He is married to the former Shelley Ann Scarney, a member of the White House staff from 1969 to 1975.] In the brief age of Obama, we have had "truthers," "birthers," tea party activists and town-hall di

Thomas E. Ricks: The Generals Aren't Necessarily Right (he should remember FDR's lessons)

[Thomas E. Ricks, the author of Fiasco and The Gamble, is a fellow at the Center for a New American Security and author of Foreign Policy magazine’s Best Defense blog. He was a reporter at the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post for a total of 26 years.] I am in the midst of researching a book on modern American generalship, and so tend to view the current agonizing over the way forward in Afghanistan in that light. I find myself thinking that President Obama, for all