Roundup: Media's Take

Noemie Emery: Reagan in Opposition ... The lessons of 1977

In 1977, as in 2009, the future seemed dark for the country's conservatives, shut out of all of the conduits to power, with nary a bright spot in sight. "The result of the 1976 election was Democrats in power as far as the eye could see," wrote Michael Barone in Our Country (1992). "It was almost universally expected that the Democrats would hold on to the executive branch for eight years; it was considered unthinkable that they could lose either house of Congress." "Onc

Alexi Giannoulias: Like Stephen Douglas, Cheney on the Wrong Side of History

[Illinois State Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias is exploring a run for the U.S. Senate seat once held by President Obama. You can learn more at www.alexiforillinois.com.] As an Illinoisan, I was struck by how the side-by-side speeches of Barack Obama and Dick Cheney this past Thursday paralleled those of the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates 150 years ago. How we fight to keep Americans safe from terrorism, like that long ago debat

Martin Indyk: Israel Must Take Risks for Peace

[Martin Indyk, Middle East adviser to president Bill Clinton, will speak at the Lowy Institute in Sydney on Wednesday and is the author of the recently published book Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East.] ISRAELI Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's press conference with President Barack Obama at the White House last week conjures memories of a time 16 years ago when a new, young president, committed to achieving Middle East peace, stoo

Walter Berns: Interrogations and Presidential Prerogative

[Mr. Berns is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.] Recently, an Episcopal church in Bethesda, Md., displayed a banner with the following words: "God bless everyone (no exceptions)." I confessed to the rector of my own church that, try as I might, I simply could not obey this injunction. Judging by what he had to say about "enhanced" interrogations, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., N.C.) seems not to share my difficulty. Mr. Graham believ

Oliver Kamm: Liberal over-sensitivity to the beliefs of others is undermining freedom of speech, so giving reactionaries an easy ride

... The degeneration of progressive idealism has many roots. But among the most important is the instinct that the ideas of Western liberty are specific to time and place — that they are Eurocentric. Almost coincident with the revolutions of 1989, which testified to the power of the human instinct for liberty, was a far more atavistic political movement. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of Iran, issued in February 1989 his fatwa calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie, a

Dick Morris: Obama's credit card reform is a fraud

The widely heralded credit card reform legislation making its way through Congress is a sellout to the credit card companies. Obama has proposed and Congress has passed a series of minor reforms that deal with the fringes of the problem - late billings, retroactive interest rate hikes, misapplication of payments and such - but fail to reform the most basic offense of the companies: their usury. Congress explicitly rejected any limitation on the interest rate credit card companies c

Peggy Noonan: A tribute to America's war heroes, past and present.

More than most nations, America has been, from its start, a hero-loving place. Maybe part of the reason is that at our founding we were a Protestant nation and not a Catholic one, and so we made "saints" of civil and political figures. George Washington was our first national hero, known everywhere, famous to children. When he died, we had our first true national mourning, with cities and states re-enacting his funeral. There was the genius cluster that surrounded him, and invented us—

Alain de Botton: The Consolations of Pessimism: In our Age as in Seneca’s the worst is always possible

[Alain de Botton is an essayist living in London. He has written numerous books, including The Architecture of Happiness and the forthcoming The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work.] It’s been clear for a while, at least since the collapse of Lehman Brothers last fall, that what we have to fear above all is hope itself. Attempts to trust that the worst is over and to stop frightening ourselves seem doomed to propel us into yet worse disappointment. We are not only unhappy, but—believing c

David Brooks: Cheney Lost to Bush

President Obama and Dick Cheney conspired on Thursday to propagate a myth. The myth is that we lived through an eight-year period of Bush-Cheney anti-terror policy and now we have entered a very different period called the Obama-Biden anti-terror policy. As both Obama and Cheney understand, this is a completely bogus distortion of history. The reality is that after Sept. 11, we entered a two- or three-year period of what you might call Bush-Cheney policy. The country was blindsided

Charles Krauthammer: Obama's Deeds Vindicate Bush

[Charles Krauthammer is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist and a prominent political commentator. His weekly column appears in the The Washington Post and is syndicated in more than 200 newspapers and media outlets.] If hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue, then the flip-flops on previously denounced anti-terror measures are the homage that Barack Obama pays to George Bush. Within 125 days, Obama has adopted with only minor modifications huge swaths

Michael C. Desch: Apocalypse Not ... Stalin's bomb wasn't the end of the world. Ahmadinejad's won't be either

[Michael C. Desch is a professor of political science and fellow of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Power and Military Effectiveness: The Fallacy of Democratic Triumphalism (2008).] The American Intelligence community has not yet concluded that Iran has even decided to develop a nuclear weapon, but the public debate has moved on to another question: what happens if it does? There is an over

Norman Solomon: The March of Folly, Continued

[Norman Solomon is national co-chair of the Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign, organized by Progressive Democrats of America. He is the author of many books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” For more information, go to: www.normansolomon.com] To understand what’s up with President Obama as he escalates the war in Afghanistan, there may be no better place to look than a book published 25 years ag

Michael D. Lemonick: Ida: Humankind's Earliest Ancestor! (Not Really)

[LEMONICK, is the author of "The Georgian Star" out Nov. 2009, and is a visiting professor at John Hopkins, Princeton, and Columbia.] From the beginning, Ida's unveiling has been a master class in ballyhoo. A week ago, the first breathless press releases began to arrive, portending the presentation of the now famous 47-million-year-old primate fossil from Germany: "MEDIA ALERT," the notice shouted in all caps. "WORLD-RENOWNED SCIENTISTS REVEAL A REVOLUTIONAR

Nader Mousavizadeh: Bringing Iran In From the Cold

[The writer, a special assistant to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan from 1997 to 2003, is a consulting senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.] A fateful consensus is forming around the proposition that war with Iran is inevitable. The failure of the past eight years' non-diplomacy has resulted in a worst-case scenario whereby Iran, most experts agree, has passed the point of no return in terms of technical nuclear weapons capability without violating i

Douglas J. Feith: How to Win the 'Long, Hard Slog'

[Mr. Feith, a former under secretary of defense for policy (2001-05), is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. He is the author of "War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism" (HarperCollins, 2008).] Gen. David Petraeus, chief of Central Command, has said that Taliban extremists are threatening "the very existence of the Pakistani state." And now that Pakistani, U.S. and coalition forces are fighting the Taliban in Pakistan as we

M K Bhadrakumar: A neo-con Yankee in Karzai's court

[Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.] The neo-conservatives have all but been vanquished. But the Barack Obama administration in the United States is making a solitary exception in the case of Zalmay Khalilzad. He is back on the Washington circuit, repeating an amazing trapeze act which has few parallels in the

Christopher Beam: The great American tradition of sending your political rivals overseas.

If all politics is local, one should never pass up a chance to send one's opponents to Asia. That appears to be what President Obama has done by deciding to name Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman as his new ambassador to China.... The most famous example is the most similar. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy picked Henry Cabot Lodge to be his ambassador to South Vietnam. That would be like Barack Obama picking Sarah Palin as his Afghanistan liaison. Lodge had been Richard Nixon's

Noam Chomsky: The Torture Memos and Historical Amnesia

[Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor (retired) at MIT. He is the author of many books and articles on international affairs and social-political issues, and a long-time participant in activist movements.] The torture memos released by the White House elicited shock, indignation, and surprise. The shock and indignation are understandable. The surprise, less so. For one thing, even without inquiry, it was reasonable to suppose that Guantanamo was a torture chamber. Why else sen

John Kearney: Netanyahu's gift of Mark Twain book to Obama is loaded

Did you see the news item noting that Netanyahu is giving Obama a copy of Mark Twain's travelogue to the Levant from Innocents Abroad? This may seem a peripheral news item, but it isn't -- not in terms of the sad history of propaganda marshaled by Zionists against Palestinians. In 1984 Joan Peters'

Hisahiko Okazaki: The Perry Approach to Pyongyang

[Mr. Okazaki is the director of the Okazaki Institute and former Japanese ambassador to Thailand and Saudi Arabia.] With Pyongyang now talking about a possible second nuclear test, starting the repair of its nuclear reactor, and still basking in the glow from its April missile test, it's clear that the Obama administration and its partners need a new approach to the North Korean nuclear problem. The best thing to do is to reflect on the past negotiations and learn lessons from them.