Roundup: Media's Take

Bob Dole: Bosnia and American Exceptionalism

[Mr. Dole is a former majority leader of the U.S. Senate and in 1996 was the Republican Party nominee for president.] When it announced that it was giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama last month, the Nobel Committee praised the president for his efforts on climate change. It also said in its citation that, with Mr. Obama now in office, a "multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position" and "dialogue and negotiations" are the preferred instruments

Tom Bevan: Obama vs. The President He Said He'd Be

[Tom Bevan is the co-founder and Executive Editor of RealClearPolitics.] During the campaign Barack Obama vowed he would be a different kind of leader who would move America beyond the "smallness of our politics." That inspired promise was not an insignificant part of why he was elected last November. In his inaugural address Obama told us that "the time has come to set aside childish things." He promised to bring "an end to the petty grievances

Bob Dole: Bosnia and American Exceptionalism

[Mr. Dole is a former majority leader of the U.S. Senate and in 1996 was the Republican Party nominee for president.] When it announced that it was giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama last month, the Nobel Committee praised the president for his efforts on climate change. It also said in its citation that, with Mr. Obama now in office, a "multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position" and "dialogue and negotiations" are the preferred instruments

Nathan Glazer: Up from the Alcove with Irving Kristol.

[Nathan Glazer is a contributing editor of The New Republic.] When Irving Kristol joined the new magazine Commentary, he distinguished himself from the other editors--Clement Greenberg, part-time then, Robert Warshow, and me. First, he had an interest in politics, real politics, electoral politics, and not just the politics of left-wing anti-Stalinists, mulling over what was living and what was dead in Marxism, the fate of socialism, the future of capitalism, communist influence in

Michael Schaffer: Musharraf lets loose in Baltimore

[Michael Schaffer is the author of One Nation Under Dog.] Some simple rules of thumb for the foreign ex-dictator out to make a mint on the U.S. lecture circuit: Get yourself included in a speakers’ series that features non-controversial names like Laura Bush and Jean-Michel Cousteau. Promise your “august audience” a “frank exchange.” Maybe drop the names of one or two revered American leaders who are your close friends. And perhaps it is best not to admit that you wish you still had

Jonathan Martin: Nelson embodied journalism's golden age

[Jonathan Martin is a senior political writer.] Journalist Jack Nelson, who died Tuesday of pancreatic cancer at age 80, earned his fame as one of Washington’s best-connected and best-known reporters. He also outlived the position that made him so influential. Nelson spent 20 years — from 1975 to 1995— as a dominant player in the nation’s capital as the bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times. But the years since have radically devalued the title

John Fund: From Mao to Obama

Anita Dunn, the White House's communications director who has declared war on Fox News, came under scrutiny herself last week when it was discovered she had told an audience that Mao Tse Tung was one of her favorite political philosophers and quoted Mao on how to "fight your war." In her speech last June, after she joined the Obama White House, Ms. Dunn said the "two people I turn to most" were Mother Teresa and Mao Tse-Tung. She barely discussed the late nun, but waxed at le

Ethan Bronner: Painful Mideast Truth: Force Trumps Diplomacy

[Ethan Samuel Bronner has been Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York Times since March 2008 following four years as deputy foreign editor.] JERUSALEM — As the Obama administration tries to broker a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there is a dark truth lurking: force has produced clearer results in this dispute than talk. The results of the violence may prove short-lived — and possibly counterproductive; condemnation of Israel and Hamas is likely to gr

Judith Miller and David Samuels: No way home: The tragedy of the Palestinian diaspora

[Judith Miller is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. David Samuels is a contributing editor at Harper's and a contributor to The Atlantic and The New Yorker.] It is a cynical but time-honoured practice in Middle Eastern politics: the statesmen who decry the political and humanitarian crisis of the approximately 3.9 million Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in Gaza ignore the plight of an estimated 4.6 million Palestinians who live in Arab countries. For d

Victoria Khromova: Russia has changed. It is now open about the Stalin era

[Victoria Khromova is a Moscow-born Russian currently in the UK training to be a psychiatrist.] Your report on the detention of a Russian historian contained a comment from Orlando Figes attributing the arrest to the "Putinite campaign against freedom of historical research and expression" (Historian arrested over research into Stalin era, 16 October). This made me revisit a previous Figes article expressing his belief that the Kremlin wishes to rehabilitate Stalin and hen

Andrew Leonard: China prepares for Oba Mao

[Andrew Leonard is a senior staff writer for Salon.] Oba Mao! Oba Mao! Oba Mao! Where tea-partiers and Chinese Communist capitalist commodification intersect! Socialist realism was never so real. Who needs to dig up old videos of Obama staffers praising the Chairman when you can go directly to the source? If the pictures displayed at this overseas Chinese Web portal are any indication, President Obama's upcoming visit to China is stirring up some excitement on the mainl

H. D. S. Greenway: Cyprus and 'Chosen Trauma'

[HDS Greenway leads the Opinion and Analysis section for GlobalPost. He has been a journalist for 50 years and recently retired from the Boston Globe after a distinguished career] “Chosen trauma,” were the words the political psychiatrist Vamik Volkan used to described the way nations, as well as individuals, can seize upon a wrong done to them to the exclusion of any wrongs committed by themselves. I was reminded of that the other day when the International Crisis Grou

Norman Solomon: Uncle Sam in Afghanistan: Good Help Is Hard to Find

[Norman Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, is the author of “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” His appearance on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” last month, warning against escalation of the Afghanistan war, is now on YouTube.] Almost eight years after choosing Hamid Karzai to head the Afghan government, Uncle Sam would like to give him a pink slip

Peter Bergen: The Taliban-Al Qaeda merger

[Peter Bergen is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of The Osama bin Laden I Know.] On July 25, Najibullah Zazi, a lanky man in his mid-twenties, walked into the Beauty Supply Warehouse in Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver. The visit was captured on a store video camera. Wearing a baseball cap and pushing a shopping cart, Zazi appeared to be just another suburban guy. Of course, not many suburban guys buy six bottles of Clairoxide hair bleac

Peter Ferrara: President Obama Chooses Decline for America

[Peter Ferrara is director of entitlement and budget policy at the Institute for Policy Innovation, and general counsel of the American Civil Rights Union. He served in the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, and as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under the first President Bush.] "Decline Is a Choice: The New Liberalism and the End of American Ascendancy." That was the title of the devastating critique of Obama Administra

Glenn Greenwald: A Rumsfeld-era reminder about what causes Terrorism

[Glenn Greenwald is a lawyer, columnist, blogger, and author.] The debate over Afghanistan -- or, more accurately, the multi-pronged effort to pressure Obama into escalating -- is looking increasingly familiar, i.e., like the "debate" over Iraq. The New York Times is publishing articles filled with quotes from anonymous war advocates. Permanent war-justifier Michael O'Hanlon is regularly featured in "news accounts" as he all but blames Obama for increasing comb

Bret Stephens: Does Obama Believe In Human Rights?

[Bret Stephens is the foreign-affairs columnist of the Wall Street Journal.] Nobody should get too hung up over President Obama's decision, reported by Der Spiegel over the weekend, to cancel plans to attend next month's 20th anniversary celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Germany's reunited capital has already served his purposes; why should he serve its? To this day, the fall of the Berlin Wall on the night of Nov. 9, 1989, remains a high-water mark in the mar

Melvin A. Goodman: The Urgent Need to Demilitarize the National Security State

[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 national security policy inherited by President Barack Obama has been increasing

Michael Sexton: No Vietnam echoes in Afghan action

[Michael Sexton is NSW Solicitor-General and the author of War for the Asking: How Australia invited itself to Vietnam.] The most important difference between the two conflicts is that the so-called war in Afghanistan is not a war in any conventional sense. This might, no doubt, strike the troops under fire there as a matter of semantics, but they are really engaged in a police action against the Taliban, a group of insurgents whose support is confined to some regions

WSJ Editorial: Health Costs and History

Washington has just run a $1.4 trillion budget deficit for fiscal 2009, even as we are told a new health-care entitlement will reduce red ink by $81 billion over 10 years. To believe that fantastic claim, you have to ignore everything we know about Washington and the history of government health-care programs. For the record, we decided to take a look at how previous federal forecasts matched what later happened. It isn't pretty. Let's start with the claim that a more pervasive fede