Roundup: Media's Take

Christian Science Monitor Editorial: The history behind opposition to Obama's speech to students

Why the uproar over President Obama’s plan to deliver a televised back-to-school speech to US students? Part of the opposition surely is due to political opposition to Obama himself. But there is another, deeper factor that also may be at work: the historic conservative antipathy in the US to a federal role in education. Look at it this way: Many people in Texas and Florida (and other conservative states and areas) might well object to anybody from Washington addressing their kids a

Ruben Navarrette Jr.: Get real about Afghanistan

[Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a nationally syndicated columnist and a regular contributor to CNN.com.] As someone who often takes a conservative stance on issues, I once again find myself in the curious position of defending President Obama to disillusioned critics within his own liberal base. And once again, I'm glad to do it. This time, it's Afghanistan. In one of the most complicated corners of the world, Obama -- and his military commanders -- are pursuing a troop build-

Telegraph Editorial: We still need peace, but the world has changed

This is a season of anniversaries. This week we commemorated the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War. This autumn, we are marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of Communism, symbolised above all by the tearing down of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. Both historic moments have much to teach us about the political landscape of the 21st century: about why the developed world is peaceful, about how we go about keeping it peaceful – but, also, about the frightening instab

Anatol Lieven: A Cool-Headed Look at 1939

[Anatol Lieven is a professor in the War Studies Department of King’s College London and a senior fellow of the New America Foundation. He is currently working on a book about Pakistan.] In the Polish-Russian dispute over what happened in 1939, rival myth-making is being driven by domestic political calculations on both sides. Polish right-wing politicians including the present president have used the memory of 1939 and the alleged continuity of Soviet and Russian policy to whip up

Robert Scheer: Obama's Meaningless War

True, he doesn’t seem a bit like Lyndon Johnson, but the way he’s headed on Afghanistan, Barack Obama is threatened with a quagmire that could bog down his presidency. LBJ also had a progressive agenda in mind, beginning with his war on poverty, but it was soon overwhelmed by the cost and divisiveness engendered by a meaningless, and seemingly endless, war in Vietnam. Meaningless is the right term for the Afghanistan war, too, because our bloody attempt to conquer this foreign land

Noam Chomsky: Response to Williams

Ian Williams angrily denied that "NATO air raids on Serbia [beginning March 24 1999] actually precipitated the worst atrocities in Kosovo" and charged that it is deeply immoral for me to say so, "like claiming that the British air raids on Germany precipitated the Nazi gas chambers." In response, I asked the obvious question: Why does he issue this quite serious charge against NATO Commander General Wesley Clark and the White House, comparing them to Nazi

Andrew Klavan: Romanticon: Wordsworth's corpus reflects the growth of a conservative's mind.

[Andrew Klavan is a City Journal contributing editor and the author of such best-selling novels as Don’t Say a Word and Empire of Lies. His latest book is The Last Thing I Remember.] It’s something of a parlor game among the commentariat to compare one era with another. Every time America’s power ebbs, the pundits conjure the fall of the Roman Empire—and every time America’s power increases, they fear it’s the collapse of the Roman Republic. Each new war must be either Vietnam again

Alex Koppelman: Glenn Beck exposes Obama's Communist art scheme

Dear liberal CommunoFascist President Obama: I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, but the jig is up. Your plans for revolution in the U.S. have been exposed. Glenn Beck found the secret codes you managed to hide in artwork in Rockefeller Center that was created 30 years before you were born a world away, and on his Fox News show Wednesday night, he told the world about them. He even managed to connect you to every New World Order conspiracy theorist's favorite villains, the

WSJ Editorial: The Michigan Example, How government investment in business failed to create jobs

A central belief in Washington and most state capitals nowadays is that government should "invest" in certain businesses—"clean tech," say, or manufacturing—to drive job creation. We hope it all turns out better than it has in Michigan. For the past 14 years, Lansing politicians have offered $3.3 billion in tax credits through the Michigan Economic Development Corporation and spent another $1.6 billion in outlays to create and retain jobs. The subsidies have rang

Economist Editorial: Mr Putin regrets

It is hard to imagine modern Germany haggling with Poland about opening wartime archives, let alone over who started the war. With Russia, it is different. Vladimir Putin’s visit to Gdansk, where a ceremony this week marked the first shots of the second world war in September 1939, was both a step forward and a depressing sign of continuing difficulties. Polish officials struggled to stay polite before the Russian prime minister’s arrival. In June the Russian defence ministry websit

Dan Senor and Peter Wehner: Afghanistan Is Not 'Obama's War'

[Mr. Senor is an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Mr. Wehner is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. They both served as officials in the administration of George W. Bush.] In his column for the Washington Post on Tuesday, the influential conservative George Will provided intellectual fodder for the campaign among some Republicans to hang the Afghanistan war around the Obama administration’s neck. Washington, he wrote, should “keep faith

Anna Borshchevskaya: Putin The Historian

[Anna Borshchevskaya is a research assistant at the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics.] On Aug. 31, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin published an open letter in which, for the first time, he condemned as immoral the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that divided much of Eastern Europe into Soviet and Nazi spheres of influence. But despite this significant and surprising departure from Russia's old policies, rather than signal a new era of conciliation seven decades

Is Fed chairman Ben Bernanke a follower of John Maynard Keynes or Milton Friedman?

[Penn Bullock is a freelance writer for Village Voice Media.] Ben Bernanke just had a fine month. For allegedly saving the world from a second Great Depression, President Barack Obama awarded the Federal Reserve chairman a second four-year term. "As an expert on the causes of the Great Depression, I'm sure Ben never imagined that he would be part of a team responsible for preventing another," the president said. "But because of his background, his temperament, his cou

Jean Edward Smith: Roosevelt: The Great Divider

[Jean Edward Smith, a professor at Marshall University, is the author of “F.D.R.”] PRESIDENT OBAMA’S apparent readiness to backtrack on the public insurance option in his health care package is not just a concession to his political opponents — this fixation on securing bipartisan support for health care reform suggests that the Democratic Party has forgotten how to govern and the White House has forgotten how to lead. This was not true of Franklin Roosevelt and the Dem

Ali Aujali : Why Libya Welcomed Megrahi

[Mr. Aujali is the Libyan ambassador to Washington.] When Abdel Baset al-Megrahi landed in Tripoli following his release from Scotland last week, the world saw a single event in two very different ways. Through the prism of the Western media, Americans saw a terrorist being given a hero's welcome by a country eager to celebrate mass murder. Libyans saw a dying man—believed to be innocent by his countrymen and many others world-wide—being embraced by his family. The mis

Dan Senor & Peter Wehner: Afghanistan Is Not 'Obama's War'

[Mr. Senor is an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Mr. Wehner is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. They both served as officials in the administration of George W. Bush.] In his column for the Washington Post on Tuesday, the influential conservative George Will provided intellectual fodder for the campaign among some Republicans to hang the Afghanistan war around the Obama administration's neck. Washington, he wrote, should "keep f

Francis A. Boyle: The Illegalities of the Bush Jr. War Against Afghanistan

[The author served as Legal Advisor: to the Palestine Liberation Organization on Creation of the State of Palestine (1987-1989), to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East Peace Negotiations (1991-1993) and sometime to the Provisional Government of the State of Palestine. He is a Professor in International Law.]The"Blowhard Zone" On September 13, I got a call from FOX News asking me to go on the O'Reilly Factor program that night, two days after the tragic e

John Pilger: Power, Illusion, and America's Last Taboo

[John Pilger is an Australian journalist and documentary maker. The following article is the text from John Pilger’s address to Socialism 2009 in San Francisco, California on 4 July.] Two years ago, at Socialism 2007 in Chicago, I spoke about an “invisible government,” a term used by Edward Bernays, one of the founders of modern propaganda. It was Bernays who, in the 1920s, invented “public relations” as a euphemism for propaganda. Deploying the ideas of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, B

Tom Schaller: Actually, the Senate Is Far Less Nepotistic Today

The hiring of Jenna Bush Hager by NBC's"Today" show to be an education correspondent smacks of non-meritocratic promotion, and has Salon's Glenn Greenwald suitably fired up. Tongue planted firmly in cheek, Greenwald imagines this scenario:They should convene a panel for the next Meet the Press with Jenna Bush Hager, Luke Russert, Liz Cheney, Megan McCain

Richard Viguerie: Ted Kennedy Canonized By Media

[Viguerie's op-eds have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsday, USA Today, the Scripps-Howard newspapers, and literally hundreds of other publications. The Washington Post called him “the Conservatives’ Voice of America.”] Who was that saintly senator who dominated the weekend news? I hardly recognized him. Did you? When Senator Ted Kennedy died, I decided I was going to follow the counsel we’ve received all of our lives: Don’