Roundup: Media's Take

Jason Leopold: Holder Ponders Limited Torture Probe

[Jason Leopold is editor of the online investigative news magazine The Public Record and the author of the National Bestseller,"News Junkie."] Last year, in the heat of the presidential campaign, Eric Holder was a featured speaker at the American Constitution Society's annual convention where he told a packed crowd that the"American people are owe[d] a reckoning" as a result of the"abusive" and"unlawful" policies of the Bush administration."Our government authorized the

Jacob Weisberg: New President, Old Mistake

[Jacob Weisberg is chairman and editor-in-chief of the Slate Group and author of The Bush Tragedy.] Politicians, like generals, suffer from a tendency to fight the last war. Having studied meticulously the mistakes of their predecessors, they take care to avoid repeating them—and make the opposite ones. They fortify Maginot lines. They overcompensate for past errors. They swing too far in the other direction. It is difficult to think of a contemporary president who has

Sophia A. Nelson: the Real Affirmative Action Babies

[Sophia A. Nelson is a regular contributor to The Root.] Last Sunday, veteran Washington Post journalist Juan Williams and conservative author Shelby Steele wrote two opposing op-eds on the pending death of affirmative action. Williams opined that Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was too optimistic when she predicted that affirmative action, born with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, had at most 25 more years to live. And Steele argued that persistent racial inequality today between whites

Patrick Mercer: British Empire Knew How to Beat the Taliban

[Patrick Mercer served in the Sherwood Foresters before becoming the defence correspondent for the Today programme. His third novel is set in the Second Afghan War of 1878-80.] The foreign and defence secretaries should take a lesson from history. If they looked into our imperial past they would discover that the first phase of Operation Panther’s Claw was declared complete around the anniversary of the battle of Maiwand — a comprehensive defeat for a British brigade just east of th

Eliot Cohen: What's Different About the Obama Foreign Policy?

[Mr. Cohen teaches at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. He served as counselor of the State Department during the last two years of the George W. Bush administration.] President Barack Obama has put some miles on Air Force One. He and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have made major foreign policy speeches. The national security team is in place. It’s time to make a preliminary judgment about Mr. Obama and the world. Just how different is this ad

Devin Leonard: Government as Wall Street's Enabler

This is very much in the spirit of Mr. Ritholtz’s book, “Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy” (Wiley), in which he argues that the American financial system has been twisted beyond recognition by cynical bankers and their Washington enablers, who champion the free market in good times but cry out for government rescue when times are hard... ... Mr. Ritholtz notes that the government wasn’t always so willing to provide a safety n

Howard French: China Could Use Some Honest Talk About Race

When the city of Detroit erupted in some of the worst rioting in American history over a five-day period in July 1967, the Johnson administration responded by naming a high-level commission to investigate the incident and more generally to weigh in on the troubled issue of race relations in the United States. The panel, known as the Kerner Commission, undertook to plumb three key questions: “What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again?” And

Stanton Peele: LBJ Makes A Comeback

[Stanton Peele is an attorney, psychologist, and addiction expert...His recent work includes 7 Tools to Beat Addiction, and his development of the Life Process Program for addictions.] It began with the February C-Span poll of historians ranking Lyndon Johnson number eleven among American Presidents (although he was still behind his predecessor, John Kennedy, who was #6). Then, in April, a Times opinion piece recommended that Barack Ob

Michael Hirsh: Barack W. Bush

[Michael Hirsh covers international affairs for Newsweek, reporting on a range of topics from Homeland Security to postwar Iraq...Hirsh graduated magna cum laude from Tufts University in 1979 with a B.A. in philosophy. He also holds a graduate degree from Columbia University in international and public affairs.] Obama's approval numbers early in his term are closing in on his predecessor's. Are his policies too? It's the difference between politics and governing—more a

James Taranto: The last word on President Obama’s place of birth

Several readers have written over the past few days taking us to task for dismissing so-called birthers as lunatics without bothering to refute their claims. We reluctantly concede their point. The birthers have managed to sow confusion in the minds of some who are not lunatics, and for the latter group’s benefit it is worth clarifying matters. Compounding the confusion, some rebuttals of the birthers’ claims have been based in part on misinformation. National Review, for example, a

Col. Timothy Reese: ‘It’s Time for the US to Declare Victory and Go Home’

[Text of memo from Col. Timothy R. Reese, Chief, Baghdad Operations Command Advisory Team, MND-B, Baghdad, Iraq.] As the old saying goes, “guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.” Since the signing of the 2009 Security Agreement, we are guests in Iraq, and after six years in Iraq, we now smell bad to the Iraqi nose. Today the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) are good enough to keep the Government of Iraq (GOI) from being overthrown by the actions of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), th

Dick Polman: Why Obama can't pull an LBJ

[Dick Polman is an Inquirer National Political Columnist.] As a political junkie who got hooked in the late '60s, I never thought I'd see the day when people would resurrect Lyndon B. Johnson and cite him as a role model. Back in the day, few thought well of LBJ. He got waist deep in the big muddy of Vietnam, and his sonorous TV demeanor made Ed Sullivan look like Elvis Presley. On the other hand, when it came time to get Medicare passed in '65, he had a great inside ga

David Aaronovitch: The troops leave Afghanistan. And then the horrors begin

[David Aaronovitch is a writer, broadcaster and commentator on international politics and the media.] Almost exactly 30 years ago, in the summer of 1979, an IRA double ambush killed 18 British soldiers near the town of Warrenpoint in Northern Ireland. Among them was the commanding officer of the Queens Own Highlanders, Lieutenant-Colonel David Blair. It was the worst single incident during a campaign that lasted nearly two decades and cost more than 700 military lives.

Patrick Cockburn: Could an 'Entebbe-style' raid have saved British hostages?

[Patrick Cockburn is a foreign correspondent at the Independent.] British officials briefly believed that the Britons kidnapped in Baghdad in 2007 were being held in Iran and considered a commando raid to free them. In the latest act of the tragedy surrounding the fate of the five hostages, officials in London have told the families of two of the guards, Alan McMenemy, from Glasgow, and Alec Maclachlan, from South Wales, that the two men are probably dead. The bodies

Peter Roff: Obama’s Sinking Approval Ratings Are Even Worse Than They Look

Having come into office with an ambitious agenda to remake America, Barack Obama is discovering that time is not his friend. According to the latest USA Today/Gallup poll, Obama's approval rating has dropped by nine points, down to 55 percent from where it was when he first entered the White House six months ago. On its own, a nine-point drop over that period of time does not seem like a cause for much concern, especially when a majority of the country continues to approve of the j

Michael Gerson: Death of Obama's Engagement Doctrine

[Michael Gerson is a Washington Post columnist.] The Obama administration lacks a foreign policy ideology as a matter of ideology. Speaking recently at the Council on Foreign Relations, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asserted, "Rigid ideologies and old formulas don't apply." The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans -- tempered by pragmatism, proud of its ad hockery and willing to consider everything on a case-by-case basis. But even lack

Eliot Spitzer: In Sickness and in Wealth

[Eliot Spitzer is the former governor of the state of New York.] The debate about bank bailouts and health care is missing a critical piece of context: The American economy hasn't been working for the working- and middle class for decades. It is impossible to determine who should pay for what or whether it is"fair" to ask the wealthy to contribute more to the health care of those who are uninsured, without better understanding the winners and losers in the U.S. economy over the past

Michael Lind: Immigrants should be eligible for the presidency

The presidential election of 2009 is the first in American history in which questions about the citizenship of both major party candidates were raised. Article II of the Constitution says that "No person except a natural-born citizen ... shall be eligible to the office of president." During the campaign, some argued that this disqualified John McCain, because he was born in the Panama Canal Zone where his father, a naval officer, was stationed. Also during the campaign, some conservat

Max Boot: Are Millionaires All They’re Cracked Up to Be?

In trying to pay for the Democrats’ grandiose health-care plan, President Obama has endorsed the concept of a “millionaires’ surtax.” Leave aside for a moment the consideration that not even this would raise the revenues necessary to pay for the Democrats’ designs; they will be forced to increase taxes on those earning considerably less than $1 million a year. Still, it’s clear why they’ve focused on milking millionaires as the way to fund their plans. Millionaires are seen as the symbols of

Michael C. Moynihan: A Harvard prof versus a Cambridge cop: Who do you believe?

[Michael C. Moynihan is a senior editor at Reason magazine.] ... When former Harvard president Lawrence Summers suggested that superstar academic Cornel West spend more time on traditional scholarship and less on recording hip-hop CDs, West accused him of racism and decamped to Princeton. It is a testament to the flimsiness of such charges that Summers went on to an important position in the Obama administration. As in the Summers-West spat, it is important to no