Roundup: Media's Take

Jonathan Freedland: Global politics in the decade of radicalism

[Jonathan Freedland is the Guardian's policy editor and has been a columnist for the paper since 1997.] The historian Eric Hobsbawm declared the 20th to be the "short century", an era that ran from the outbreak of the first world war in 1914 to the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. It's possible that the chroniclers of the future will make a similar judgment on the noughties, branding this the "short decade" – one that began on 11 September 2001 and drew to a

Stephen Schlesinger: My Afghan Problem

[Stephen Schlesinger is and author, and Adjunct Fellow at the Century Foundation] My doubts about the US mission in Afghanistan, like those of many other Americans, have grown substantially over the past several years. While I think America was justified in toppling the Taliban government in 2001 for harboring the Al Qaeda criminals who killed 3000 US citizens and foreigners through their suicidal airplane assaults on New York and Washington, at the same time today I am wondering wh

David Neiwert: Limbaugh, conservatives and the 'bloody shirt': The right has a long history of turning perpetrators into victims

Bill O'Reilly held an extended whinefest on The O'Reilly Factor last night about how poor Rush Limbaugh was the victim of a "witch hunt" by racial political-correctness police. For a bunch of people of pooh-pooh the "victimology" of minorities, it would be hard to find a bigger bunch of crybabies than American right-wingers these days. Indeed, that's a key part of what's going on here: In addition to Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity later that evening, O'Reilly -- wi

David Swanson: Presidential Power Grows

[David Swanson served as press secretary for Kucinich for President in 2004, runs the AfterDowningStreet.org website, and is the creator of Impeachbybee.org. His new book is Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union (Seven Stories Press). He is now touring the country for the book. You can find out when the tour will be in your town by clicking here.] Presidential power has been on a pathway of expansion beyond what the Constitution outlined, and wha

Toby Harnden: Biden on the wrong side of history

[Toby Harnden is the Daily Telegraph's US Editor, based in Washington DC.] Want to know how to deal with a momentous issue of war or grand strategy? You could do a lot worse than check out what Vice-President Joe Biden thinks – and plump for the opposite. Mr Biden was chosen as Barack Obama's running mate last August because he was old, white and supposedly knew a lot about foreign policy. I say "supposedly" because really Mr Biden's overseas expertise amounte

Zachary Roth: Behind The GOP.com Re-Launch: Meet The Writer Steele Used To Buff Party's Image

[Zachary Roth is a reporter-blogger at TPMmuckraker. He is a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly, and has also written for The New Republic, Slate, Salon, Columbia Journalism Review, the New York Observer, and Guardian America, among other outlets.] The big GOP.com relaunch has been plagued by technical and other snafus, as we've been documenting. But those mishaps may be the least of it. The new site is at pains to present the party as racially tolerant, and

Robert A. Pape: To Beat the Taliban, Fight From Afar

[Robert A. Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, is the author of “Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.”] AS President Obama and his national security team confer this week to consider strategies for Afghanistan, one point seems clear: our current military forces cannot win the war. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander there, has asked for 40,000 or more additional United States troops, which many are calling an ambiti

Marty Peretz:Not Since Never Have the Palestinians Had a More Sympathetic American President

[Marty Peretz is the editor-in-chief of The New Republic.] No, not Dwight Eisenhower (and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles), who thought of his Arabs as the Egyptians. Frankly, in 1956, nobody thought of Palestinians, including especially the Palestinians. And, no, not even Jimmy Carter, who, while now especially entranced with the Palestinians, including Hamas, was beginning his macabre infatuation with Hafez Assad. Then there was George Herbert

Roger Cohen: An Ordinary Israel

Is Israel just a nation among nations? On one level, it is indeed an ordinary place. People curse the traffic, follow their stocks, Blackberry, go to the beach and pay their mortgages. Stroll around in the prosperous North Tel Aviv suburbs and you find yourself California dreaming. On another, it’s not. More than 60 years after the creation of the modern state, Israel has no established borders, no constitution, no peace. Born from exceptional horror, the Holocaust, it

Michael Hittleman: The New Confederacy of Republicans

[Michael Hittleman is the owner/director of the Michael Hittleman Gallery - Fine Israeli Art, which was opened in 1976. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of UCLA with a B.A. in Philosophy. He is an associate of the Omohundro Institute in Williamsburg, Virginia.] South Carolina Sen. Jim Demint travels to Honduras to endorse the military coup. Illinois Congressman Mark Kirk tells China not to believe our government's figures. Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe will tell the upcoming Copenhagen

Glenn Greenwald: How to avoid the GOP's mistakes during the Bush years?

[Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of two New York Times Bestselling books: "How Would a Patriot Act?" (May, 2006), a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, and "A Tragic Legacy" (June, 2007), which examines the Bush legacy.] The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder makes the following observation: From day one of his administration, the left has held Barack

Barbara Ehrenreich: Are Women Getting Sadder?

[Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of 16 books, including the bestsellers Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch. A frequent contributor to Harper's and the Nation, she has also been a columnist at the New York Times and Time magazine. Her seventeenth book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (Metropolitan Books), has just been published. ] Feminism made women miserable. This, anyway, seems to be the most popular takeaway from "Th

Sam Stein: RNC: Jackie Robinson Was A Republican

[Sam Stein is a Political Reporter at the Huffington Post, based in Washington, D.C.] The Republican National Committee released a new website on Tuesday that goes to great lengths to depict the party as open to minority interests. The most obvious example comes on the "Heroes" page where the RNC pinpoints 16 figures who were "Patriots: American Heroes & Famous Republicans." The list includes seven African-Americans, one Hispanic-American, and fo

Dagobert L. Brito and Michael D. Intriligator: For a Solution in Afghanistan, Look South...and In the Past

[Dagobert L. Brito is Peterkin Professor of Political Economy at Rice University and Michael D. Intriligator is Professor of Economics, Political Science, and Public Policy at UCLA.] It has been reported that President Obama is considering military options for Afghanistan that range from a complete military commitment, such as has been suggested by General McChrystal with 40,000 added troops, to a focus on training the Afghan armed forces and police, as has been suggested by Vice Pr

Jeffrey Lord: The Reagan Prize

[Jeffrey Lord is a former Reagan White House political director and author.] It's time for the Reagan Peace Prize. Actually, it's past time. The Nobel Peace Prize for President Obama -- for which he was nominated after barely two weeks in office -- merely illustrates once again what has been apparent for not just the last few years but at least ninety years. The Nobel, the legacy of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, has become essentially wo

Richard Bennet: Somalia ... How Not to Win in Afghanistan

[Richard Bennet is a research associate in national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He recently returned from a research trip to the Horn of Africa.] As the Afghanistan strategy review dominates conversations in Washington, President Barack Obama's advisors appear split over whether to fully resource a counterinsurgency or scale back the effort to a more limited, counterterrorism approach. Vice President Joe Biden and others, fearing an open-ended engagement, h

Larry Sabato: Why One Vote Matters in the Senate: No Deviations Allowed

[Larry J. Sabato, director of the Center for Politics and University Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia, is the author of “The Year of Obama.”] A bit too much is being made of the “Olympia Snowe factor.” Does her vote for the Baucus health care reform bill ease passage of some kind of bill on the Senate floor? Probably. But my bet is that the Democrats would have found a way to pass health care even if Senator Snowe had voted nay. They remember the G.O.P. landslide

Max Boot: The Incurable Vietnam Syndrome

[Max Boot is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, and author most recently of War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today.] President George H.W. Bush thought that after the victory in the Gulf war we had "kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all." How wrong he was. The syndrome was on full display during the 1990s, when pundits and politico

Leo Rechter: Holocaust Museum Snubs Survivors on Bad Arolsen Files But Luxembourg Gets the Data

[Leo Rechter is the president of the National Association of Jewish Child Holocaust Survivors.] According to a recent press-release by the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen, the ITS has transferred copies of data from its archives to the ‘Documentation and Research Center on the Resistance’ in Luxembourg. Around 80 million images and roughly six terabytes of data have been handed over, including documents on concentration camps, ghettos and prisons (ca. 18 million i

Dick Morris And Eileen McGann: Pessimism: Obama's Political Ally

[Mr. Morris was an adviser to Bill Clinton for 20 years. He is the author of "Condi vs. Hillary." Mrs. McGann, an attorney and consultant, is a CEO of VOTE.com and LegislativeVote.com. She works with Mr. Morris on campaigns and around the world, specializing in using the Internet to win elections.] President Obama has won the peace prize, but nobody thinks he deserves the Nobel in economics. Despite $800 billion of economic stimulus and the accumulation of a $1.4 trillion