Roundup: Media's Take

Ben Adler: Haley Barbour’s Historical Amnesia

[Ben Adler is a writer for Newsweek.] As we mentioned in our guide to Republican presidential contenders, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour is prone to making racially insensitive comments. This year alone, he dismissed complaints that Virginia’s Confederate History Month made no mention of slavery as “not amounting to diddly,” and he claimed, falsely that he attended integrated schools and that he befriended Verna Bailey, the first black woman to attend the University of Mississippi.

Stephen M. Walt: Michael Gerson's Moral Myopia

[Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.] There was a brief flap last week when the Nixon Library released a tape of a conversation between Henry Kissinger and the former president. At one point, Kissinger says "the emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitaria

William J. Watkins, Jr.: Obamacare, the Constitution, and the Original Meaning of the Commerce Clause

[William J. Watkins, Jr. is a research fellow at The Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. and author of “Reclaiming the American Revolution.”] Does Congress’s power to regulate commerce permit it to mandate that all Americans purchase a health insurance policy? So far two federal district courts have answered “yes” and one has answered “no.” The courts’ opinions exhaustively discuss and interpret modern Supreme Court case law, but barely touch upon the history of the commerce po

Rich Lowry: Obama's Mitterrand Moment

[Rich Lowry is editor of National Review.] In 1981, Francois Mitterrand swept to power in France in a watershed election. He united the Left and fired the imagination of the country’s youth, who danced in the streets on election night in a frenzy of revolutionary anticipation. Mitterrand embarked on a stimulus program that would have satisfied Paul Krugman. He increased the wages of government workers and hired more of them. He boosted the minimum wage and reduced worki

Nir Rosen: Iraq Is No Blueprint for Afghanistan

[Nir Rosen is a fellow at the New York University Center on Law and Security and author of Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World.] General David Petraeus will soon be back in Washington D.C. to report on progress in a war many consider lost, this time in Afghanistan. The narrative that Petraeus and his surge in troops along with the new way of war he is credited in perfecting led to "success" in Iraq is hard to challenge these days. It i

Patrick Cockburn: Nixon adopted this tactic in Vietnam. It won't work any better now than it did then

[Patrick Cockburn is a foreign correspondent at The Independent.] Could US Special Forces make a lunge across the Pakistan border in pursuit of the Taliban just as American and South Vietnamese troops briefly invaded Cambodia in pursuit of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese forces in 1970? The precedent is not good. What US officers have in mind for the Pakistan border regions is much smaller in scale than President Nixon's venture, but is unlikely to be any more success

Robert D. Blackwill: Plan B in Afghanistan

[Robert D. Blackwill is a senior fellow at the US Council on Foreign Relations and former US ambassador to India.] US policy toward Afghanistan involves spending scores of billions of dollars and suffering several hundred allied deaths annually largely to prevent the Afghan Taliban from controlling the Afghan Pashtun homeland. But the United States and its allies will not defeat the Taliban militarily. President Hamid Karzai's corrupt government will not significantly

Bret Stephens: China and the Next American Century

[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.] Not least among the better surprises of 2010 was that Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize and Mark Zuckerberg was Time's Person of the Year—two rare good picks, and two that tell us something about our time. "Our time" is supposed to be one of China's unstoppable rise and America's inevitable decline. Don't believe it. History is littered with the wreckage of regimes that t

Edward Schumacher-Matos: The Dream Act Joins a Shameful Tradition

[Edward Schumacher-Matos writes for the WaPo.] In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act. It forced most Native Americans in the Deep South to move to Oklahoma in what became known as the "trail of tears and death." Then in 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law. It required federal law enforcement officials to arrest any black person in the North that a Southern slaveholder declared as his. Blacks were forcibly shipped south under the law.... A

Michael Gerson: When Foreign Policy Realism Isn't Realistic

[Michael Gerson was a speechwriter for George W. Bush and is a columnist for the WaPo.] Early in his service as President Nixon's national security adviser, Henry Kissinger paid a visit to his homeland. The West German government suggested to the press that Kissinger intended to visit some relatives. "What the hell are they putting out?" Kissinger vented to his aides. "My relatives are soap." Blunt, and true. Kissinger had left Germany in August 1938

Steve Kornacki: Why Haley Barbour Whitewashes History

[Steve Kornacki is Salon's news editor.] Who'd have figured that the first major blow to Haley Barbour's 2012 White House hopes would be delivered by ... the Weekly Standard? Bill Kristol's magazine is out today with a profile of the Mississippi governor, written by Andrew Ferguson, in which Barbour downplays the upheaval of the civil rights movement and characterizes the notorious White Citizens Councils of the 1950s and 1960s as a force for good. Asked about coming of

Tim Rutten: And the Rich Get Richer

[Tim Rutten is a columnist with the LA Times.] ...Abolishing the estate tax has been a goal of some conservative Republicans since the 1940s, so it's easy to forget that its modern champion was a president the GOP used to regard as among the greatest the party has produced — Theodore Roosevelt. Like many thoughtful Americans of his era, he believed the disproportionate accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few would make a mockery of our meritocracy and, ultimately, of our democr

Stephen M. Walt: Obama's Nixonian Afghanistan Strategy

[Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.] Perhaps you noticed the following two headlines from today's New York Times (print edition; the online headline is different): "U.S. Will Widen War on Militants Inside Pakistan" and "Germany Will Begin Afghan Exit Next Year." Those two stories tell you a lot about the situation in Central Asia, especially when read in the contex

Larry Kudlow: Reaganomics 2.0 in the Driver's Seat

[Larry Kudlow, NRO’s Economics Editor, is host of CNBC’s The Kudlow Report and author of the daily web blog, Kudlow’s Money Politic$.] On a historic night this past Thursday, a new Tea Party Republican Congress completely transformed U.S. economic policy. Elections matter, and so do their ideas. Smaller government, low taxes, and less spending were key election themes in the Republican landslide. And those themes triumphed this week as a large tax-cut bill finally passed the House a

Bill McKibben: Everything Is Negotiable, Except with Nature

[Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and founder of 350.org. His latest book is Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. He recently was awarded the prestigious Puffin Prize.]The UN’s big climate conference ended Saturday in Cancún, with claims of modest victory."The UN climate talks are off the life-support machine," said Tim Gore of Oxfam. “Not as rancorous as last year’s train wreck in Copenhagen,” wrote the Guardian. Patricia Espin

Deroy Murdock: WikiLeaks What-Ifs

[New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a nationally syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.] On Christmas night 1776, George Washington and his troops silently set out east from Pennsylvania and crossed the Delaware River into New Jersey. There they pounced on snoring Hessian mercenaries at their barracks in Trenton. Washington’s surprise attack vanquished the pro-B

Jason Mazzone: Can Congress Force You to Be Healthy?

[Jason Mazzone is a professor at Brooklyn Law School.] HENRY E. HUDSON, the federal judge in Virginia who ruled this week that the individual mandate provision of the new health care law is unconstitutional, has become the object of widespread derision. Judge Hudson explained that whatever else Congress might be able to do, it cannot force people to engage in a commercial activity, in this case buying an insurance policy. For the last century the Supreme Court h

Roger Cohen: The Unquiet American

[Roger Cohen is a columnist for the NYT.] It was the worst summer. The war seemed as unending as the excuses of Western leaders for their inaction. In a besieged Sarajevo, people raised hands to their necks in a gesture of self-strangulation as the flat fracturing boom of another shell reverberated in the valley. Then Richard Holbrooke appeared in the snake pit. Nobody could end the Bosnian war — nobody. Europe’s worst conflict since World War II had gone t

Michael Barone: Holbrooke Thought Highly of Himself — for Good Reason

[Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner.] Reading Masters and Commanders, Andrew Roberts’s magnificent account of British and American leaders in World War II, I was struck by how many of them, working very long hours and under great strain, were struck down by heart attacks while in their 60s. This doesn’t happen anymore, I thought, with the blood-pressure and anti-cholesterol medicines many of us routinely take. But it doe

Wendy Kaminer: The Espionage Act's Shameful and Forgotten History

[Wendy Kaminer is an author, lawyer and civil libertarian. She is the author of I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993.] Demanding the indictment of Julian Assange under the 1917 Espionage Act in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Senator Diane Feinstein (or her resident ghost writer) quoted everyone's favorite rationale for restricting speech: "the First Amendment is not a license to yell 'Fire!' in a crowded theater." Actually,