Roundup: Media's Take

Stephen Rademaker: Why Democrats Fail at Arms Control

[Mr. Rademaker, assistant secretary of state from 2002-06 with responsibility for arms control and nonproliferation, is senior counsel at BGR Government Affairs in Washington, D.C.] In his address to the U.N. General Assembly yesterday, President Barack Obama once again stated his goal of "a world without nuclear weapons." Today Mr. Obama will address a special session of the U.N. Security Council on nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament. He will reiterate his intention

Daniel Henninger: From Bismarck to Obama

[Daniel Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.] Delivering ObamaCare unto the world wasn't supposed to be this hard. Just how hard is obvious when the president of the United States does five Sunday talk shows of sequential shilling. The New York Times memorialized this low point for the office of the presidency by arranging on its front page five identical photographs of Mr. Obama with each anchorman sitting across from him like a can of Campbell's

Tim Fernholz: The Vietnamization of Afghanistan

[Tim Fernholz is a writing fellow at the Prospect. His work has been published by The New Republic, The Nation, The Guardian, American Lawyer, and the Washington City Paper. He has been a commenter on MSNBC and C-SPAN.]Obama's choices in Afghanistan will either break the Democrats' association with Vietnam or confirm it. The Nixon administration, elected on a promise to end the Vietnam War via"peace with honor," described its strategy as"Vietnamization": building

Ben Shapiro: Barack Obama: The Black Jimmy Carter

[Ben Shapiro, 24, is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School. He is the author of the recently published "Porn Generation: How Social Liberalism Is Corrupting Our Future," as well as the national bestseller "Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth."] On Sept. 16, ex-president Jimmy Carter excoriated opponents of President Barack Obama as racists. “I think people who [attack] Obama have been influenced to a major degree by a belief that he sho

Robert Parry: Neocon Judge's History of Cover-ups

[Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek.] Laurence Silberman, a U.S. Courts Appeals Court judge and a longtime neoconservative operative – part of what the Iran-Contra special prosecutor called “the strategic reserves” for convicted Reagan administration operatives in the 1980s – is back playing a similar role for the Bush-43 administration. On Sept. 11, the eighth anniversary of the terror attacks on New Yo

Rupert Cornwell: It's not Vietnam, but parallels are growing

[Rupert Cornwell is Washington correspondent for the Independent.] Two conflicts, a generation apart, in some ways so similar, in others so different. But the question gnaws, ever harder to dismiss. Will Afghanistan prove Barack Obama's Vietnam? Despite the growing American casualties, Afghanistan is a far smaller conflict. Some 60,000 US troops are currently deployed there. At the height of the Vietnam War, US forces in the field topped half a million. Afghanistan has

John Yoo: Obama Risks National Security Disasters of '70s

[John Yoo is a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer and a former Bush administration Justice Department official; he teaches law at the University of California, Berkeley.] Ayoung, fresh face campaigns for the presidency by attacking the CIA: ''Our government should justify the character and moral principles of the American people, and our foreign policy should not short-circuit that for temporary advantage,'' he says. He promises to never ''do anything as president that would be

Akiva Eldar: So what if Obama wants to move peace process forward?

[Akiva Eldar is an Israeli journalist and author, currently a chief political columnist and editorial writer for the Israeli national daily Ha'aretz. His columns also appear regularly in the Ha'aretz-International Herald Tribune edition, as well as in the Japanese daily Mainichi Shimbun.] When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sat opposite U.S. President Barack Obama Tuesday, perhaps he was overcome by the sullen recollection from the days when he served as deputy foreign minister u

Scott McLemee: The King of Pompeii (on the history of Neoconservatism)

[Scott McLemee is an essayist and critic. In 2005, he helped start the online news journal Inside Higher Ed, where he serves as Essayist at Large, writing a weekly column called Intellectual Affairs.] The term “neoconservative” is now routinely applied to any right-wing policy wonk inside the Beltway or the mass media. This usage reflects no understanding of the movement's history – or, just as often enough, a largely delusional notion of it, based on third-hand guesses about the i

Michael Crowley: The Limits of Afghanistan Analogies

[Michael Crowley is senior editor at the New Republic.] Last week, Taliban leader Mullah Omar issued a taunting statement warning America about its prospects in Afghanistan. Here's a choice excerpt: The former Soviet Union claimed, the Red Army was invincible but faced defeat at the hands of the Afghans and completely disintegrated. Many other countries got independence thanks to that. Today USA, the Britain and their allies are bent on subjugating Afghanistan. They are

Tim Rutten: A crash course in American coarseness

[Tim Rutten is a columnist at the LA Times.] Incivility is the new secondhand smoke. Everyone feels impelled to disdain it, but nobody is willing to do away with it entirely. Besides, it's profitable. Look at South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson. Two weeks ago, he was just a loudmouth with the bad taste to shout an insult at the president of the United States from the House floor. Since then, he's become a right-wing darling, and $2 million in new campaign contributions have

Editorial in the LA Times: The Bagram difference ... Equating the Afghanistan air base with Guantanamo is a mistake

For those who followed the debate over the legal rights of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, it might seem like a case of deja vu. This time the question is whether about 600 detainees held by the United States at Bagram air base in Afghanistan can challenge their confinement in U.S. courts. Like the Bush administration with Guantanamo, the Obama administration is opposing such access. It is appealing a federal judge’s ruling allowing three Bagram prisoners to seek writs of habeas corpus.

Nile Gardiner: The UN loves Barack Obama because he is weak

[Nile Gardiner is the Director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation.] Barack Obama’s Gallup approval rating of 52 percent may well be lower at this stage of his presidency than any US leader in recent times with the exception of Bill Clinton. But he is still worshipped with messiah-like adoration at the United Nations, and is considerably more popular with many of the 192 members of the UN than he is with the American people. The lates

Eric Margolis: It's shades of Vietnam as U.S. commanders beg for more troops to fight in Afghanistan

[Eric Margolis is a columnist for the Toronto Sun] We should hang a huge neon sign over Afghanistan: "CAUTION: DEJA VU." Afghanistan's much ballyhooed recent election staged by its foreign occupiers turned out to be a fraud wrapped up in a farce -- as this column predicted a month ago. It was as phony and meaningless as U.S.-run elections in Vietnam in the 1970s. Canada played a shameful role in facilitating this obviously rigged vote. ..

Gerald Posner: How Obama Flubbed His Missile Message

[Gerald Posner is The Daily Beast's chief investigative reporter. He's the award-winning author of 10 investigative nonfiction bestsellers, ranging from political assassinations, to Nazi war criminals, to 9/11, to terrorism. His latest book, Miami Babylon: Crime, Wealth and Power—A Dispatch from the Beach, will be published in October.] President Obama’s decision Thursday to scrap the Bush administration’s missile-defense umbrella for Europe is being bemoaned by Republicans at home

Arthur B. Laffer: Taxes, Depression, and Our Current Troubles

[Mr. Laffer is the chairman of Laffer Associates and co-author of "The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy—If We Let It Happen" (Threshold, 2008).] The 1930s has become the sole object lesson for today's monetary policy. Over the past 12 months, the Federal Reserve has increased the monetary base (bank reserves plus currency in circulation) by well over 100%. While currency in circulation has grown slightly, there's been an impressive 17-fold increase

Harvey Wasserman: Tom Friedman's idiocy atomique

[Harvey Wasserman is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and senior editor of freepress.org, where this piece first appeared.] France's atomic power industry is a failed radioactive flame. Its 58 reactors are unpopular, unsafe, uneconomical, dirty, direct agents of global warming, weapons proliferators and major generators of atomic waste for which there is no management solution. But self-proclaimed "green advocate" Thomas Friedman seems to think otherwise. In h

John B. Judis: The only way Obama can pull his presidency back from the brink

[John B. Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic.] Barack Obama looks like he will succeed where three Democratic presidents, Harry Truman, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton, so famously failed--by passing health care reform. That is an achievement for which posterity will likely reward him. But it may not help him and his party avoid setbacks at the polls... ...Are these signs of voter discontent the result of tactical errors by Obama? Would the numbers look differen

Michael Lind: Intellectual conservatism, RIP

[Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., Editor of New American Contract, and a columnist for Salon magazine.] On Sept. 18, Irving Kristol died. On Feb. 27, 2008, William F. Buckley Jr. passed away. Kristol was known as "the godfather of neoconservatism," while Buckley was the founder of the "movement conservatism" of Goldwater and Reagan. The intellectual conservatism that they, in differe

Bret Stephens: Summits of Folly

[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs, which runs every Tuesday in the U.S. and is also published in the European and Asian editions of the paper.] Beggar thy neighbor, bankrupt thy country, appease thy foe. As slogans (or counter-slogans) go, it isn't quite in a class with Amnesty, Acid and Abortion. But it pretty much sums up President Obama's global agenda—and that's just for the month of September. In 1943, Walter Lippm