Roundup: Media's Take

Alexander Golts: Military Historians Will Applaud Medvedev

Alexander Golts is deputy editor of the online newspaper Yezhednevny Zhurnal.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: The Peter Cruddas Affair is Nothing New

Geoffrey Wheatcroft is a British journalist and writer.Just over a hundred years ago, the Conservative leader was a rich, languid, superficially intelligent Etonian – those were the days – whose party claimed to represent the Empire and the Union, British greatness or even, in the guise of "Tory democracy", the welfare of the patriotic working class. In truth, if it represented anything at all, it was money, property and the interests of trade – or, more precisely, "the trade". From the 1870s until after the great war, the Tory party was a partly owned subsidiary of the liquor business. If anyone knew this it was the Tory leader AJ Balfour. For 20 years he sat in the Commons as the member for Manchester East, where the chairman of his constituency committee was the local leader of the trade, and the seat itself was effectively in the gift of Manchester brewers. Although the side-splitting grossness of ex-fundraiser Peter Cruddas (where does the modern Tory party find them?), with his "hundred grand isn't premier-league", and his offers of dinner at Downing Street, may have highlighted the problem, the conjunction of politics and money has been around a long time...

David Brooks: The March to Centralization

David Brooks is a columnist for the NYT....American history can be seen as a series of centralizing events — the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Progressive Era, the New Deal and the Great Society.Many liberals have tended to look at this centralizing process as synonymous with modernization — as inevitable and proper. As problems like inequality get bigger, government has to become more centralized to deal with them. As corporations grow, government has to grow to counterbalance them.Many conservatives have looked at these inexorable steps toward centralization with growing alarm. Complicated problems, many have argued, are best addressed by local people on the ground. Centralized government inevitably leads to oligarchic government. The virtue of the citizenry depends on local control, personal initiative and intimate connections. These things are being bleached away.The Obama health care law represents another crucial moment in the move toward centralization. With its state insurance exchanges, Obamacare is not as centralized as a single-payer system. Still, it centralizes authority in at least four ways....

Mark Bauerlein: Authority Figures

Mark Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University, a blogger for Brainstorm, and author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30) (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2008).

Mehdi Hasan: Bomb Iran and it Will Surely Decide to Pursue Nuclear Arms

Mehdi Hasan is senior editor (politics) at the New Statesman and a former news and current affairs editor at Channel 4. 

Michael Barone: Evening in America? Obama’s Campaign Video is Carteresque

Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner. 

Larry Kudlow: The Reagan in Romney ... Mitt’s Tough Conservative Positions

Larry Kudlow, NRO’s economics editor, is host of CNBC’s The Kudlow Report and author of the daily web log, "Kudlow’s Money Politic$."

Adam Davidson: Why Some Countries Go Bust

Adam Davidson is the co-founder of NPR's Planet Money, a podcast, blog, and radio series heard on “Morning Edition,” “All Things Considered” and “This American Life.”By his own admission, Daron Acemoglu is a slightly pudgy and fairly nerdy guy with an unpronounceable last name. But when I mentioned that I was interviewing him to two econ buffs, they each gasped and said, “I love Daron Acemoglu,” as if I were talking about Keith Richards. The Turkish M.I.T. professor — who, right now, is about as hot as economists get — acquired his renown for serious advances in answering the single most important question in his profession, the same one that compelled Adam Smith to write “The Wealth of Nations”: why are some countries rich while others are poor?

David Maraniss: Clinton and Obama: Presidential Parallels

David Maraniss, an associate editor of The Post, is the author of “First in His Class: A Biography of Bill Clinton” and the forthcoming “Barack Obama: The Story.” This is the second column in an occasional series on the 2012 presidential candidates’ political lives.

Paul Krugman: Paranoia Strikes Deeper

Paul Krugman is an economist and a columnist for the NYT....As Richard Hofstadter pointed out in his classic 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” crazy conspiracy theories have been an American tradition ever since clergymen began warning that Thomas Jefferson was an agent of the Bavarian Illuminati. But it’s one thing to have a paranoid fringe playing a marginal role in a nation’s political life; it’s something quite different when that fringe takes over a whole party, to the point where candidates must share, or pretend to share, that fringe’s paranoia to receive the party’s presidential nod.And it’s not just gas prices, of course. In fact, the conspiracy theories are proliferating so fast it’s hard to keep up. Thus, large numbers of Republicans — and we’re talking about important political figures, not random supporters — firmly believe that global warming is a gigantic hoax perpetrated by a global conspiracy involving thousands of scientists, not one of whom has broken the code of omertà. Meanwhile, others are attributing the recent improvement in economic news to a dastardly plot to withhold stimulus funds, releasing them just before the 2012 election. And let’s not even get into health reform....

Nicolaus Mills: Grits and Bear It

Nicolaus Mills is professor of American studies at Sarah Lawrence College and co-editor with Michael Walzer of Getting Out: Historical Perspectives on Leaving Iraq.In the wake of the primaries in Mississippi and Alabama, Mitt Romney’s effort to ingratiate himself with Southern voters by proclaiming, “I’m learning to say ‘y’all’ and I like grits,” has gotten almost as much attention as his third-place showing. Critics have made fun of Romney’s efforts to win Southern voters, but they have also been forgiving. Their assumption has been that changing his way of speaking, like tailoring the issues he addresses, is all part of the political game Romney, like every modern politician, must play.But we shouldn’t automatically make that assumption. The best counterexample comes from the speech Robert Kennedy, another Massachusetts politician (then a new attorney general), gave in the South at the University of Georgia Law School in May 1961.

Danny Heitman: Advice for Congress This First Day of Spring: To Improve Leadership, Go Outside

Danny Heitman, a columnist for The Baton Rouge Advocate, is the author of “A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.”On this first day of spring, as another cherry blossom season arrives in Washington, I find myself thinking of Henry David Thoreau, who once wryly observed that “much more is adoing” in the world than Congress knows about.Thoreau’s comment, first published in 1842, is a useful reminder that low opinions of Congress are really nothing new. But Thoreau’s dim view of lawmakers had nothing to do with tax law, foreign policy, or the federal budget. His real concern was that Congress wasn’t connected enough with nature.

DD Guttenplan: How Rick Santorum's 1860 Comparison Might Be Right

DD Guttenplan is London correspondent for the Nation, and the author of the newly-published American Radical: The Life and Times of I.F. Stone. For Republicans, the Apocalypse is always just around the corner. So when Rick Santorum told his supporters that this was "the most important election since the election of 1860", it was easy to scoff.

Aaron David Miller: Six Big Lies about How Jerusalem Runs Washington

Aaron David Miller is a distinguished scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. His new book, Can America Have Another Great President?, will be published this year. "Reality Check," his column for Foreign Policy.com, runs weekly. Several years after leaving government, I wrote a piece in the Washington Post titled "Israel's Lawyer." The article was an honest effort to explain how several senior officials in U.S. President Bill Clinton's administration (myself included) had a strong inclination to see the Arab-Israeli negotiations through a pro-Israel lens.

Sergey Radchenko: Gorbachev, Not O'Neill, Deserves BRIC Credit

Sergey Radchenko is lecturer in the history of Asian-American relations at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. He is the author of Two Suns in the Heavens: the Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962-67. Thirty years ago, on March 24, 1982, Leonid Brezhnev made a speech in Tashkent that would set in motion the process of rapprochement between Moscow and Beijing. The general secretary, who had only a few months to live, had by then succumbed to senility and did not fully understand the implications of his Tashkent gesture. He would sign his name on any paper placed before him by his advisers, who in turn vied for influence over policy with ranking party, government and military officials, some of whom wanted to reach out to China. In this case, the China-optimists won the day. We know why now: The breakdown of detente, U.S. sanctions and U.S. President Ronald Reagan's militant rhetoric shook the Kremlin leadership into trying to break out of international isolation by mending fences with China after a bitter 20-year feud. In the 1960s, former Communist allies the Soviet Union and China quarreled over ideology, and in the 1970s they built up forces at their border. Chinese leader Mao Zedong sought safety from the Soviet "social imperialists" in closer alignment with the United States.

Radwan Ziadeh: Have We Learned Nothing From the Nineties? Syria is the Balkans All Over Again

Radwan Ziadeh is a spokesperson for the Syrian National Council and executive director of the Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Washington. As the international community continues to debate high-minded principles of national sovereignty, Syria continues its downward spiral into unmitigated chaos. The bitter truth is that the longer this situation continues, the deeper the scars will be once the nation has been freed of Bashar Al-Assad. Increasingly, crimes against humanity are being committed by both sides, as the Free Syria Army struggles to incorporate and maintain control over its armed rebel brigades. But as harrowing as the details of the current situation are, the basic principles at stake are very clear. Indeed, the United States, and other countries in the West, ought to reflect on the Syrian conflict’s strong resemblance to the situation in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. That would clarify, if the events on the ground have not already, that the international community has a responsibility to intervene. More than that, it would underscore that the main source of regret, years from now, will be that it delayed so long in doing so. The most obvious, and sobering, comparison that presents itself is between Bashar Al Assad and former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.

William D. Hartung: Throwing Money at the Pentagon

William D. Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, a TomDispatch regular, and the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.If you’ve been fretting about faltering math education and falling test scores here in the United States, you should be worried based on this campaign season of Republican math.  When it comes to the American military, the leading Republican presidential candidates evidently only learned to add and multiply, never subtract or divide.

Lee Ruddin: Cameron and Obama Continuing the Anti-Autocratic Action Tradition

Lee Ruddin is a roundup editor at the History News Network. He lives in the UK. ‘It is as easy to be distracted by the outward glamour of a prime ministerial visit to Washington as it is to fail to discern its occasional real inner substance,’ Martin Kettle wrote in last week’s Guardian. In a piece about withdrawing from Afghanistan entitled, ‘Cameron and Obama ended the neocon era,’ though, the newspaper’s associate editor is as guilty (by using the word “neoconservative”) as any of putting style before substance. ‘New friends’ may be ‘rac[ing] to end an old war,’ as another associate editor writes (the Financial Times’ Philip Stephens), but to say, as Kettle does, that last week’s two-day meeting ‘marked the end of a chapter in modern history’ misinterprets two centuries of Britain’s past.

Paul Begala: Why We Need More Negative Political Ads

Paul Begala is a Newsweek/Daily Beast columnist, a CNN contributor, an affiliated professor of public policy at Georgetown, and a senior adviser to Priorities USA Action, a progressive PAC. In the basement of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington there is a framed picture of Harry Truman. Behind that picture there is one loose brick. Push the brick and a secret panel opens to a staircase. Descend three flights, guided only by the faint smell of gunpowder, and you will enter what is called nefastus nefastum—the unholy of unholies. In this dank and pitiless place, men and women who have not seen the sun in months hunch over computers, fueled by speed and cheap swing-state bourbon. Their mission: to master the dark art of negative advertising. Or not. Truth is, negative advertising is not some evil or nefarious practice. In fact, when I contributed to the Obama campaign in 2008, I wrote on the check: "For Negative Ads Only." I love negative ads.

Amitai Etzioni: The World America Didn't Make

Amitai Etzioni served as a senior advisor to the Carter White House; taught at Columbia University, Harvard, and The University of California at Berkeley; and is a university professor and professor of international relations at The George Washington University. Robert Kagan’s book, The World America Made, is refocusing the debate on whether the United States is declining as a global power—and speculation about whether other powers will step in to assume the responsibility for sustaining a liberal, rule-based international order. Kagan is known as a brilliant conservative observer, and even President Obama is reported to be reading this tour de force of U.S. foreign policy. Most of the debate about the book is centered on the question of whether the United States is indeed declining and if China is ready to buy into the liberal order.