Roundup: Media's Take

Robert D. Kaplan: Be Like Bush

[Robert D. Kaplan is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, in Washington, D.C.] The word that best describes President Barack Obama is “finesse,” implying delicate skill, subtlety, and grace—all attributes that former President George W. Bush seemingly lacked. Obama is truly the great finesser: he has finessed his way through life. To exude this quality is to be the opposite of an ideologue – something that comes cl

Teresa Ghilarducci: The Difference Between Eunice and Teddy on Abortion Is Irrelevant

[Teresa Ghilarducci is the Irene and Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of Economic Policy Analysis at the New School for Social Research.] My economist’s eye caught a familiar (false) debate over Catholic social teaching while reading New York Times columunist Ross Douthat, who compared Eunice Shriver favorably to Teddy Kennedy because she was a pro-life Catholic and Teddy was a Catholic for Choice. Unfortunately, Douthat advances a distorted version of Catholic social teaching: making

Steve Benen: The Familiar Tale of William A. Wirt

[Steve Benen is a political journalist who writes a blog for the Washington Monthly.] The LA Times' Michael Hiltzik had a terrific item yesterday on a footnote of history named William A. Wirt, who garnered some notoriety in 1934. His claim to fame? Wirt claimed he had"discovered" evidence of a plot within FDR's administration to launch a Bolshevik takeover of the United States. As silly as this was, this was an era when Roosevelt's New Deal was blasted by the Teaba

Robert D. Kaplan: Be Like Bush ... Obama Needs Less 'Finesse'

[Robert D. Kaplan is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, in Washington, D.C.] The word that best describes President Barack Obama is “finesse,” implying delicate skill, subtlety, and grace—all attributes that former President George W. Bush seemingly lacked. Obama is truly the great finesser: he has finessed his way through life. To exude this quality is to be the opposite of an ideologue – something that comes clo

Jonathan Steele: The Afghan 8os are back

[Jonathan Steele is a Guardian columnist, roving foreign correspondent and author.] It is deja vu on a huge and bloody scale. General Stanley McChrystal, the US commander in Afghanistan, is about to advise his president that "the Afghan people are undergoing a crisis of confidence because the war against the Taliban has not made their lives better", according to leaked reports. Change the word "Taliban" to "mujahideen", and you have an exact repetition

Cathy Young: Kennedy's Big Government Paternalism

[Cathy Young is a contributing editor at Reason magazine. Her columns also appear regularly in the Boston Globe.] Ted Kennedy's death of brain cancer at 77 could not have occurred at a more symbolic moment. By the end of his life, the late Senator became the lion in winter of old-style American liberalism - and one of his final political acts, at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, was to pass on the mantle to Barack Obama, the prime champion of liberalism's new incarnation.

Uri Avnery: comparing the boycott of South Africa to a possible boycott of Israel

[Uri Avnery is a peace activist, journalist, and writer. He is a founding member of Gush Shalom independent peace movement, former publisher and editor-in-chief, Haolam Hazeh news magazine, and former member of the Knesset (three terms: 1965-1969, 1969-1973, 1979-1981). He is also a founding member, Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace.] How much did the boycott of South Africa actually contribute to the fall of the racist regime? This week I talked with Desmond Tutu about

Earl Ofari Hutchinson: Afghanistan is Obama's Vietnam

[Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His weekly radio show, “The Hutchinson Report” can be heard on weekly in Los Angeles at 9:30 AM Fridays on KTYM Radio 1460 AM and live streamed nationally on ktym.com] In August 2007 Senator Barack Obama fresh on the presidential campaign trail made an impassioned promise at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars to wage what he dubbed the war that has to be won. The war is the war in Afghanistan. He promised t

Paul Krugman : Missing Richard Nixon

Many of the retrospectives on Ted Kennedy’s life mention his regret that he didn’t accept Richard Nixon’s offer of a bipartisan health care deal. The moral some commentators take from that regret is that today’s health care reformers should do what Mr. Kennedy balked at doing back then, and reach out to the other side. But it’s a bad analogy, because today’s political scene is nothing like that of the early 1970s. In fact, surveying current politics, I find myself missing Richard Ni

Robert Nedelkoff: Memories Of 1969

[Robert Nedelkoff, a resident of Silver Spring, MD, received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Louisville and his Juris Doctor degree from Monterey College of Law in 1996. From 1997 until March 2009, he worked on behalf of the Richard Nixon Foundation at the National Archives in College Park, MD. He has published articles in several magazines, including GQ and McSweeney’s.] The fortieth anniversary of “three days of peace, love and music” on Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, N

Michael Winship: Even Camelot Needed Health Care

[Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday nights on PBS.] Toward the end of George McGovern's failed presidential bid in 1972, I was helping advance a bus trip for vice presidential candidate Sargent Shriver. The final weekend of the campaign, his caravan would start in New Hampshire and work its way down the Eastern seaboard, holding rallies along the way and winding up in Washington, DC, just before Election Day.

David Forsmark: Reviewing Obama's Reading List

Dick Morris once rather famously admitted that at a time when Bill Clinton needed help with his image as a real guy, he conducted a poll to find out where the Clintons should spend their summer vacation. This led to a miserable wilderness vacation complete with mosquitoes, and whitewater rafting (how did they miss the obvious pun there?) and the next year, the First Family was back to hob-nobbing with the elites where they belonged.Whether the stratagem worked, or not, is hard to j

Theodoric Meyer: In Health Care Debate, Republicans Should Look to Disraeli

[Mr. Meyer is a student at McGill] Ask Congressional Republicans to name their political heroes and you’ll most likely get the same few responses. Ronald Reagan. Abraham Lincoln. Perhaps Teddy Roosevelt. But definitely not Benjamin Disraeli. It is to this 19th century British prime minister, however, that Republicans might look to resuscitate their battered party.In Disraeli’s Britain, the goal of expanding the electoral franchise occupied much the same domestic political

60 Minutes: The Bet That Blew Up Wall Street

Anyone with more than a casual interest in why their 401(k) has tanked over the past year knows that it's because of the global credit crisis. It was triggered by the collapse of the housing market in the United States and magnified worldwide by the sale of complicated investments that Warren Buffett once labeled financial weapons of mass destruction. They are called credit derivatives or credit default swaps. As correspondent Steve Kroft first reported last f

Sherwood Ross: Prosecuting Bush and Cheney Could Spare Future Generations

[Sherwood Ross is a media consultant to the Massachusetts School of Law] Allowing today's leaders to get away with war crimes will send a dangerous signal to future leaders that they can do the same. “The battle to impose criminal responsibility upon them (Bush, Cheney, etc.) is not for today alone but to safeguard a vast future,” points out Lawrence Velvel, dean of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover. “Otherwise the future will be threatened by Exec

Ben Smith: Conservatives warn of 'Wellstone effect'

[Ben Smith writes a blog about the national politics for POLITICO. Before joining POLITICO, he was a political columnist for the New York Daily News and in 2005 and 2006 started three of New York City's leading political blogs, The Politicker, The Daily Politics and Room Eight.] Key conservative voices have begun to charge in the day after Sen. Ted Kennedy’s death that Democrats are inappropriately politicizing the senator’s death, his memorial and his legacy. Ke

Hale "Bonddad" Stewart: The Myth of the Black Swan

[Hale "Bonddad" Stewart is a former bond broker with several regional firms. He has been involved with the financial markets since 1995. He is a graduate of the Thomas Jefferson School of Law's LLM program with a dual concentration in international and domestic taxation.] The most common argument made against people who see a recovery emerging is that we are in the middle of uncharted waters where the traditional rules of economic analysis don't apply. As I will demonstrat

Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin: Ted Kennedy's legacy shapes Obama's path

[Ben Smith writes a blog about the national politics for POLITICO. During the 2008 presidential campaign, he covered the Democratic primary.Before joining POLITICO, he was a political columnist for the New York Daily News. Jonathan Martin is a senior political writer.] Through two years of wearying campaigning, defeats and victories, the cool, disciplined Sen. Barack Obama rarely was overcome by emotion. Once was on the eve of the election, when his grandmother died.

WSJ Editorial: The Real CIA News

Whoever advised people to be skeptical of what they read in the papers must have had in mind this week's coverage of the documents about CIA interrogations. Now that we've had a chance to read the reports, it's clear the real story isn't the few cases of abuse played up by the media. The news is that the program was thoughtfully developed, carefully circumscribed, briefed to Congress, and yielded information crucial to disrupting al Qaeda. In other words, it worked—at least until po

Eric Alterman: Novak Without Tears

[Eric Alterman is a Distinguished Professor of English, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and Professor of Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.] Journalist and television personality Robert Novak died August 18. I think it's time to do him the honor of taking his life's work seriously. I got to know Novak a bit in the late 1980s while writing a magazine profile of him, and another of his then-colleague John McLaughlin while researching a b