Roundup: Media's Take

Steven Rosenfeld: The Surprising Unknown History of the NRA

Steven Rosenfeld covers democracy issues for AlterNet and is the author of "Count My Vote: A Citizen's Guide to Voting" (AlterNet Books, 2008)For nearly a century after, its founding in 1871, the National Rifle Association was among America’s foremost pro-gun control organizations. It was not until 1977 when the NRA that Americans know today emerged, after libertarians who equated owning a gun with the epitome of freedom and fomented widespread distrust against government—if not armed insurrection—emerged after staging a hostile leadership coup.In the years since, an NRA that once encouraged better markmanship and reasonable gun control laws gave way to an advocacy organization and political force that saw more guns as the answer to society’s worst violence, whether arming commercial airline pilots after 9/11 or teachers after the Newtown, while opposing new restrictions on gun usage.It is hard to believe that the NRA was committed to gun-control laws for most of the 20th century—helping to write most of the federal laws restricting gun use until the 1980s.

Alex Seitz-Wald: The Hitler Gun Control Lie

... Unfortunately for [the NRA's Wayne] LaPierre et al., the notion that Hitler confiscated everyone’s guns is mostly bogus. And the ancillary claim that Jews could have stopped the Holocaust with more guns doesn’t make any sense at all if you think about it for more than a minute.

Lawrence D. Bobo: Are We 'Black No More'? Not Quite

Lawrence D. Bobo is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University.(The Root) -- Although 2012 did not produce the Mayan apocalypse, it did produce an unending drumbeat of claims for "postracial America." So much so, I suspect, that if Harlem Renaissance novelist and essay writer George Schuyler had lived through it, he would be inspired to write a whole new version of his classic novel Black No More.In the main, the book is a biting satire of the dilemmas created by race and race prejudice in the United States, with the plot driven by the deeds of Harlemites Max Disher and his friend Bunny Brown. They concoct a way to make black people white. Yet as the book unfolds, the problems associated with race seem to infinitely multiply rather than vanish. There is a lesson for us there.

David Ignatius: What Obama Can Learn from Eisenhower

David Ignatius writes a twice-a-week foreign affairs column and contributes to the PostPartisan blog. It’s telling that one of Chuck Hagel’s favorite gifts to friends recently has been a biography of President Dwight Eisenhower, a war hero whose skepticism toward the military is a model for Hagel’s own. Thinking about Eisenhower’s presidency helps clarify the challenges and dilemmas of Barack Obama’s second term. Like Ike, Obama wants to pull the nation back from the overextension of global wars of the previous decade. Like Ike, he wants to trim defense spending and reduce the national debt. This back-to-the-future theme is visible, too, in Obama’s nomination of John Brennan as the new CIA director. A 25-year CIA veteran, Brennan wants to rebalance the agency back toward its traditional intelligence-gathering function and away from the recent emphasis on paramilitary covert action. More trench coats, less body armor, in other words.

Bill McKibben: Why Climate Change Won’t Wait for the President

Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College, founder of the global climate campaign 350.org, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.Change usually happens very slowly, even once all the serious people have decided there’s a problem. That’s because, in a country as big as the United States, public opinion moves in slow currents.  Since change by definition requires going up against powerful established interests, it can take decades for those currents to erode the foundations of our special-interest fortresses.

Karen J. Greenberg: How "Zero Dark Thirty" Brought Back the Bush Administration

Karen J. Greenberg, a TomDispatch regular, is the Director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School. She is the author of The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days and the co-editor of The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib. On January 11, eleven years to the day after the Bush administration opened its notorious prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s deeply flawed movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, opens nationwide. The filmmakers and distributors are evidently ignorant of the significance of the date -- a perfect indication of the carelessness and thoughtlessness of the film, which will unfortunately substitute for actual history in the minds of many Americans.

Charlyne Berens: Welcome to the Jungle ... How Vietnam Taught Chuck Hagel to Hate War

Charlyne Berens is professor and associate dean at the College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is the author of Chuck Hagel: Moving Forward, from which parts of this article were drawn. Having been there makes a difference. Crawling on your stomach in the pitch dark while you hear the clink, clink of a column of Vietcong troops winding its way through the jungle only a few feet away. Fighting house to house, doorway to doorway in Saigon during the Tet offensive. Being wounded twice and promoted twice and decorated seven times. Chuck Hagel was there -- in Vietnam from 1967-68, during some of the most intense fighting of the war. Now he is President Barack Obama's nominee to be America's next secretary of defense, and if he is confirmed, Hagel would be the first former enlisted man ever to lead the Defense Department. It's a safe bet that what he experienced in the jungles of Vietnam would make a difference in the way Hagel would approach his job at the Pentagon. "War is not an abstraction," Hagel wrote in a piece for the Omaha World-Herald in 2004. "I know.

David Rothkopf: The Disengagers ... Kerry, Hagel, and the End of American Military Adventurism?

David Rothkopf is CEO and editor at large of Foreign Policy. This Wednesday marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Richard Nixon. Conventional wisdom says Nixon was brought down by Watergate. The reality was that he was undone as much by the divisiveness of the Vietnam years as by any of the marked and material flaws in his character. Distrust of the Washington establishment and of the ugly, costly war into which it had mismanaged America created a polarized, volatile atmosphere. Nixon gave his enemies the sword they needed to undo him and produce the kind of wrenching change the era seemed to demand. John Kerry and Chuck Hagel are two products of that era. By extension so, too, is their new patron and soon-to-be boss: Barack Obama (even though Nixon's resignation took place just five days after Obama's 13th birthday). Obama's choices for secretary of state and defense, respectively, Kerry and Hagel are both veterans of the Vietnam war, and although one became a liberal Democrat and the other a conservative Republican, both were defined by their Vietnam experience. Both developed a willingness to challenge conventional military wisdom and a desire to avoid more Vietnams in the future.

Gideon Rachman: The Myth of the Imperial Presidency

Gideon Rachman is a journalist who has been the Financial Times chief foreign affairs commentator since July 2006. If you needed confirmation that American liberals and conservatives inhabit parallel universes, just consider the reaction to last week’s deal on the fiscal cliff. Conservatives saw a ruthless Barack Obama, ramming through his agenda. Liberals lamented a limp surrender by the president. But these two very different lines of attack on Mr Obama have something important in common. Both liberals and conservatives remain addicted to the myth of the imperial president. They expect the occupant of the White House to be a towering figure – a Lincoln, a Roosevelt, a Johnson – who dominates politics and shapes history. In reality Mr Obama is a prisoner of circumstances. He cannot pass laws or get a budget through without the consent of a House of Representatives that is controlled by his bitter ideological and political foes. No president – however brilliant, determined or wise – could create rational and effective policies from such circumstances. Many liberals dreamt that Mr Obama would be set free by re-election.

Benny Avni: In Afghanistan, It's Vietnam Syndrome II

Benny Avni is a New York Post op-ed contributor. The Taliban seem to believe all they need to do now is wait ’til America hightails it out of Afghanistan (coming soon), then take the country back and remake it into the jihadi haven that Allah always intended it to be. "They want to flee from Afghanistan just as they turned tail and ran from Vietnam," a Taliban statement boasted Wednesday. "When America faced utter destruction in Vietnam, they came up with the formula ‘declare victory and run.’ And [now they] want to utilize the formula of ‘transfer security and run’ here in Afghanistan." Vietnam, of course, is where America lost its groove. But then we got it back, didn’t we?.. 

Aaron David Miller: Syria Is Not Obama's Rwanda

Aaron David Miller is vice president for current initiatives at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and has advised Democratic and Republican secretaries of state on the Middle East. His books include the forthcoming Can America Have Another Great President? Who lost Syria? Comments of some U.S.

Michael Tomasky: On the Fiscal Cliff, Obama Does What He Can Against 200 Years of Bad Faith

Newsweek/Daily Beast special correspondent Michael Tomasky is also editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. While most liberals were stewing at Barack Obama yesterday for his "capitulation" on tax rates, I confess that I was feeling philosophical about it, and even mildly defensive of him. He is negotiating with madmen, and you can’t negotiate with madmen, because they’re, well, mad. I also spent part of yesterday morning re-reading a little history and reminding myself that rascality like this fiscal-cliff business has been going on since the beginning of the republic. So now I’d like to remind you. It’s always the reactionaries holding up the progressives—and usually, needless to say, it’s been the South holding up the North—and always with the same demagogic and dishonest arguments about a tyrannical central government.

Bruce Crumley: France’s Colonial Hangover ... Apologizing Abroad, Ignoring Injustice at Home

Bruce Crumley Time's Paris bureau chief, and has covered French and European news since 1989. The recent visit of French President François Hollande to Algeria received praise for addressing the painful historical wounds that continue plaguing relations between the two countries. In doing so, Hollande acknowledged the "brutal and unjust" manner in which France treated its former Algerian colony — a sober recognition that pointedly stopped short of the full apology officials in Algiers have long demanded.

Paul R. Pillar: The Torrent of Vitriol Directed at Chuck Hagel is a Product of a New McCarthyism

Paul R. Pillar is director of graduate studies at Georgetown University's Security Studies Program and a former national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia. He is a contributing editor to The National Interest. I was born just early enough to have some faint but direct memories of the stain on American history that became known as McCarthyism. One recollection is of my parents watching on television in 1954 substantial portions of the Army-McCarthy hearings, which was the first Congressional inquiry to be nationally televised. Although I was too young to understand it at the time, those hearings marked the beginning of the end of Joseph McCarthy's red-baiting campaign of slander. Before the end of the year he would be formally censured by the U.S. Senate. One important factor in stopping McCarthy's reputation-ruining rampage was the working of media in those early days of the television era. Media coverage of the 1954 hearings, which lasted several weeks and in which accusations and counter-accusations were made and confronted in concentrated form within a single hearing room, made it impossible to turn a blind eye to what McCarthyism was about.

Michael Barone: Obama 2012 and Bush 2004

Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner. In combing through the results of the 2012 election — apparently finally complete, nearly two months after the fact — I continue to find many similarities between 2012 and 2004, and one enormous difference. Both of the elections involved incumbent presidents with approval ratings hovering around or just under 50 percent facing challengers who were rich men from Massachusetts (though one made his money and the other married it). In both cases, the challenger and his campaign seemed confident he was going to win — and had reasonable grounds to believe so. In both elections, the incumbent started running a barrage of negative ads defining the challenger in the spring. And in both elections, the incumbent had at least one spotty debate performance. In both elections, each candidate concentrated on a more or less fixed list of target states, and in both elections the challenger depended heavily on outside groups’ spending that failed to achieve optimal results. The popular-vote margins were similar — 51 to 48 percent for George W. Bush in 2004, 51 to 47 percent for Barack Obama in 2012. The one enormous difference was turnout...  

Sam Pizzigati: The Fiscal Cliff ... of '32

Sam Pizzigati edits Too Much, the Institute for Policy Studies' weekly on excess and inequality. This piece is adapted from his new book, The Rich Don't Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970. Close your eyes in Washington these days and you can almost hear the echoes of 1932. Eighty years ago, just like today, a fiscal crisis almost totally dominated the nation's capital. Then, as now, fiscal conservatives demanded immediate action to fix a federal budget awash in red ink. And then, as now, average Americans wondered why all the fuss about deficits. The Depression was in its third year, and millions had no jobs. Why were politicians haggling about balancing the budget? Is history simply repeating? If so, bring that repeat on, with the same final result. That 1932 fiscal crisis produced an unexpected, and stunning, watershed in U.S. history, the moment when America's rich and powerful began to lose their lock-grip on the nation's political pulse... 

John Arquilla: Can There Be War Without Hate?

John Arquilla is professor of defense analysis at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and author of Worst Enemy: The Reluctant Transformation of the American Military.

Robert Kaplan: The Return of Toxic Nationalism

Mr. Kaplan is chief geopolitical analyst for Stratfor, a private global intelligence firm, and author of The Revenge of Geography (Random House, 2012).

Michael Rubin: Bush’s Shadow Hangs Over Obama in Syria

Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.Almost two years after the Syrian uprising began, President Bashar Assad’s reign appears shakier than ever. Rebels are closing in on Damascus. This month, the United States and 100 other countries recognized the opposition as Syria’s legitimate government. For humanitarian and national security reasons, America will be better off with Assad gone. Assad was no bulwark against Islamic radicalism. Though he opposed extremist elements at home, he supported them abroad, helping Al Qaeda terrorists infiltrate Iraq. He also enabled a lifeline to Hezbollah, a group whose targeting of Americans and global reach rivals that of Al Qaeda. While American officials worry that Assad will use chemical weapons, many forget that had the Israelis not destroyed his nuclear facility in 2007, he might now be brandishing a deadlier arsenal. That regime change will likely come without any U.S. military commitment should not be a source of White House pride, however. As an eyewitness and Pentagon participant in both Iraq pre-war planning and postwar reconstructing, I see the Obama team replicating Bush administration mistakes one by one. Start with intelligence...

Jim Sleeper: What We Should Tell the Gun Lobby AND Producers and Editors