Roundup: Media's Take

Jim Sleeper: What Blinded Murdoch's Enablers and Apologists?

Jim Sleeper is a lecturer at Yale.As Rupert Murdoch was closing in with his bid for Dow Jones & Company and The Wall Street Journal five years ago, what Harper's magazine former editor Lewis Lapham calls "the orchestra of high-minded opinion" could be heard tuning up to play "This Is The Best of All Possible Worlds," its familiar medley of hosannas and half-truths.

Caroline Glick: The path to the next Lebanon War

Caroline Glick is an American-Israeli journalist and is the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. She is also the Senior Fellow for Middle East Affairs of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Security Policy. Five years ago this week, Iran’s Lebanese proxy opened war with Israel. The war lasted 34 days, during which Hezbollah launched more than 4,000 missiles against Israel. Now five years later, under US President Barack Obama, America is pushing a policy that drastically escalates the chance that a new war between Israel and Iran’s Lebanese army will break out again in the near future.Back in 2006, Israel’s response to Hezbollah’s aggression was swift but incompetent. While Israel scored some blows against the Iranian proxy force, the war ended with Hezbollah still shooting. Israel failed to defeat the terror army. And because Hezbollah survived, it won the war. This truth is exposed in all its ugliness by the political and military realities five years on. Today, Hezbollah is not simply in charge of Israel’s former security zone in South Lebanon.It is in charge of all of Lebanon.

David Pryce-Jones: Peace in Sudan ... The legacy of enlightened colonialism

David Pryce-Jones is senior editor at National Review magazine. A Sudanese novelist by the name of Tayyib Salih has retired to London. I practiced my Arabic by translating his novel Season of Migration to the North. Here is a tragic story of a Sudanese who tries to live up to the standards of the British, fails to do so, and kills his English girlfriend and then himself. And this is also pretty close to the story of Sudan. True, at the battle of Omdurman at the close of the nineteenth century, the British sealed their occupation by killing ten thousand Sudanese, the bravest of the brave, in the face of machine-guns. The young Winston Churchill rode in the decisive cavalry charge and remained proud of it for the rest of his life. But it didn’t take long for Sudan to become the outstanding example of enlightened colonialism.

George Alexander: Assessing the Space Shuttle Program

George Alexander was the Los Angeles Times' science writer from 1972 to 1985.

Anne Applebaum: Just Another British Tabloid Scandal

Anne Applebaum is an op-ed columnist for the Washington Post.“It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World. . . . In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about? Naturally, about a murder.”

Ephraim Sneh: Bad Borders, Good Neighbors

Ephraim Sneh, a retired general in the Israel Defense Forces, was Israel’s deputy minister of defense from 1999 to 2001 and from 2006 to 2007.TODAY, as American, European, Russian and United Nations officials meet in Washington to discuss the future of the Middle East peace process, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, remains adamant that a peace deal premised on returning to Israel’s pre-1967 borders poses an unacceptable risk to its security.He is right: the country’s 1967 borders are not militarily defensible. But his use of this argument to reject the only viable formula for Israeli-Palestinian peace — a negotiated two-state solution based on mutually agreed upon land swaps — is wrong, and it does not serve Israel’s security interests. 

Neil Reynolds: Costing ‘success’ in Afghanistan and Iraq

Neil Reynolds is an Ottawa writer whose columns on national economic issues appear Wednesday and Friday. He is the former editor-in-chief of The Vancouver Sun and the Ottawa Citizen. You might think that the cost of America’s foreign wars has driven the country into bankruptcy. You’d be wrong. It didn’t in the Second World War (when U.S. military spending peaked in 1944 at 37.8 per cent of GDP). It didn’t in the Vietnam War (when military spending peaked in 1968 at 9.4 per cent of GDP). It didn’t in the Cold War (when military spending peaked in 1988 at 6.1 per cent of GDP). And it hasn’t in Iraq and Afghanistan (when military spending peaked last year at 4.7 per cent of GDP). It’s not so much that the U.S. has spent too much on war. It’s that it has spent too much on peace – most of it with borrowed money. War expenses aside, the country has increased its debt in the past two years by more than $4-trillion (from $10-trillion to $14-trillion). But the issue isn’t the financial cost of the Iraq and Afghan wars. It’s the human cost – which, however appalling, can be properly assessed only with the passage of time.

Steve Kornacki: How a One-Term President is Made

Steve Kornacki is Salon's news editor. Reach him by email at SKornacki@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @SteveKornacki Republicans hope to unseat President Obama next year with a message that goes something like this: He inherited a bad economy and made it worse, squandered hundreds of billions of dollars on a stimulus program that didn't create jobs, and blew a massive hole in the deficit that sapped the private sector's confidence.You can make yourself crazy pointing out how flimsy these arguments are, but the swing voters who will decide the 2012 election won't be relying on a measured analysis of the logic of each party's case to make up their minds. It's the state of the economy that will dictate their verdict. If they perceive it to be improving, they will reject the GOP's claims about Obama's "failed" economic stewardship. But if they believe it is stagnant or getting worse, the GOP line will be music to their ears.

Chuck Spinney: Why the War Machine Keeps on Running

Franklin "Chuck" Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon. He currently lives on a sailboat in the Mediterranean and can be reached at chuck_spinney@mac.comThe United States has always meddled in other people's affairs. For those readers who think this statement is an exaggeration, I urge them to peruse the chronology of interventions compiled by the Congressional Research Service. This historical predilection for meddling, however, grew enormously in depth and breadth during the Cold War, and to make matters worse, it is now clear that it exploded after the end of the Cold War.

Gene Lyons: The GOP Turns Its Back on Reagan

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com....Here's how President Reagan reacted to crazy talk about not raising the national debt limit in 1983: "The full consequences of a default -- or even the serious prospect of default -- by the United States are impossible to predict and awesome to contemplate. Denigration of the full faith and credit of the United States would have substantial effects on the domestic financial markets and the value of the dollar."Congress gave Reagan the tax increases he wanted and lifted the debt ceiling. Anti-tax zealots predicted economic disaster. Events proved them wrong, precisely as they did after 1993 when President Bill Clinton won an increase in marginal income-tax rates that put the nation's balance sheet in order.

Chase Madar: Bradley Manning, American Hero

Chase Madar is a lawyer in New York and a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, the American Conservative magazine, CounterPunch.org, and Le Monde Diplomatique.  His next book, The Passion of Bradley Manning, will be published by O/R Books this fall.  He is covering the Bradley Manning case and trial for TomDispatch.com.

Jamil Anderlini: It is Time to Act on Mao's Call for Democracy

Jamil Anderlini is deputy Beijing bureau chief for the Financial Times and has been a correspondent covering China since 2003. Last Friday, the Communist party of Chinacelebrated its 90th birthday with an enormous propaganda campaign and a wave of revolutionary nostalgia. “Without the Communist party, there would be no new China,” proclaimed billboards across the country as the party hammered home the message that only it was capable of enriching and strengthening the nation. But at 90, the party is at a crossroads.

Jeffrey Lord: The Blanding of Ronald Reagan

Jeffrey Lord is a former Reagan White House political director and author. He writes from Pennsylvania at jlpa1@aol.com.What a lovely, lovely man.Never a pointed word. Always soothing. Just one big kumbaya lug of a president.Can’t we all be as civil and wonderful and eternally non-radically sweet in our political dialogue as Ronald Reagan?Um….excuse me.Snap out of it!For reasons that appear unfathomable other than the clamor from GOP consultants selling their how-to-attract-Independents-Minorities-and-The Women’s Vote sure-fire soap suds  -- and that would be for a pretty penny not to mention in vain -- a strange fate has befallen the former president.Ronald Reagan has been bland-ed. By the Right....

Robert Fisk: Syria Has Seen Similar Bloodshed Before

Robert Fisk is an award-winning Middle East correspondent for the Independent. A journalist with decades of experience in foreign reporting, Fisk has interviewed Osama bin Laden multiple times and has been repeatedly recognized and awarded for his work.History comes full circle in Syria. In February 1982, President Hafez al-Assad’s army stormed into the ancient cities to end an Islamist uprising. They killed at least 10,000 men, women and children, possibly 20,000. Some of the men were members of the armed Muslim Brotherhood.Almost all the dead were Sunni Muslims, although even senior members of the Baath party were executed if they had the fatal word Hamwi—a citizen from Hama – on their identity cards. “Death a thousand times to the hired Muslim Brothers, who linked themselves to the enemies of the homeland,” Assad said after the slaughter.

Bruce Fleming: Does the U.S. Military Have a Clear Purpose?

Bruce Fleming, a professor of English at the US Naval Academy, is the author of "Bridging the Military-Civilian Divide."Soon, openly gay servicemen and women will be able to serve without reprisal. Harvard has re-instated its Reserve Officers Training Corps. This seems to many like progress. But who would recommend in these days of the all-volunteer force that anyone, straight or gay, Ivy or enlisted, go into the military at all?The class of 2011 at the US Naval Academy, where I have served 24 years as a professor, has just graduated and its members have become officers. As have the classes of the other service academies. They should know what they are about to embark upon: A futile effort? A noble endeavor? A job with guaranteed benefits that may have them coming back in a box or spending years in rehab?...

John McWhorter: What the Harlem Renaissance Teaches About Gay Rights

John McWhorter is a regular contributor to The Root.One more thought on the idea of homosexuality as wrong, in light of New York state's legalization of gay marriage last week. The historical perspective is useful in two ways. One is to show how things used to be. The other is to get a sense of how today is going to look when it has become history. We need both ways of looking at things in evaluating how we look at gay tolerance, gay marriage and anti-gay language today.Let's start with the past: New York in 1929. Harlem, to be specific. It was actually a pretty gay place. Like the rest of the city, Harlem was home to countless gay bars. At the annual Hamilton Lodge drag ball, hundreds of drag queens competed for the top prize while thousands of straight Harlemites and other New Yorkers crowded in to get a look.The "fairy," as he was termed at the time -- even by gays themselves -- was often sought as an emcee even at mainstream nightclub shows. Gay people were part of the scenery at the rent parties so famous now in Harlem folklore.

Tom Switzer: The World Today, Foretold by Nixon

Tom Switzer is a research associate at the United States Studies Center at the University of Sydney, Australia. “When we see the world in which we are about to move, the United States no longer is in the position of complete pre-eminence or predominance [and] that is not a bad thing. As a matter of fact, it can be a constructive thing. ... We now have a situation where four potential economic powers have the capacity [to] challenge [the U.S.] on every front.” So said Richard Nixon, 40 years ago today. Addressing media executives in Kansas City on July 6, 1971, the 37th president predicted “in 5 years, 10 years, perhaps it is 15, but in any event within our time,” America’s global hegemony would be replaced by a multipolar world, in which the United States, the Soviet Union, Western Europe, Japan and China would be leading powers. Not only had the Soviets matched U.S. military might, the old cold warrior conceded, but Japan and Western Europe were competing vigorously with U.S. companies for markets.

Jonah Goldberg: Obama's Reagan Parallels Are Falling Away

Jonah Goldberg is editor at large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors. While that might sound like a controversial series of Olympic curling scores, these numbers in fact add up to a grave problem for Barack Obama. They are the quarterly percentage gains in gross domestic product starting in 1983 through to Election Day 1984. And they aren't the only significant numbers.

Ed Kilgore: The Hidden Meaning Behind Michele Bachmann’s ‘Constitutional Conservatism’

Ed Kilgore is a special correspondent for The New Republic.

Andy Kroll: How the McEconomy Bombed the American Worker

Andy Kroll is a reporter in the D.C. bureau of Mother Jones magazine and an associate editor at TomDispatch. The son of two teachers, he grew up in a firmly -- and happily -- middle-class household. His email is andykroll (at) motherjones (dot) com