Visual source: Newseum
As you might expect, this Sunday's pundits deliver a pretty somber mix, even those not directly focused on the events that took place a decade ago.
Julian Zelizer considers a what-if that we don't have to like, but should explore: what if this is Obama's only term.
One-term presidents usually leave office with their parties divided, the economy in crisis, wars unresolved, approval ratings in the tank and a sullen public rejecting them. Becoming a one-term president means joining a gallery of dashed hopes and crushed ambitions. Among those who were elected for just one term were men who, like Mr. Obama, came to the White House with enormous promise.
Nevertheless, accomplishments with lasting significance have resulted from some one-term presidencies.
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IF 2012 is really the end of the road for President Obama, it is possible to see how historians might look favorably on his term. The president has already accomplished a great deal. His health care reform legislation promises to expand health insurance to millions of people and correct a number of flaws in our current system. His economic stimulus helped to stave off a second Depression and preserve the auto industry, while his financial regulations are meant to curb some of the abuses that led to the financial collapse of 2008. He has used executive power to strengthen some environmental regulations, while on foreign policy the killing of Osama bin Laden constituted an important step in the war on terrorism. Most recently, the role of the United States in the collapse of the rule of Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya marks another victory in the struggle against dictatorships.
Which is all not only very nice, but worth protecting from the destructive reversals that would result should someone like Rick Perry slouch into the White House. Best way to do that—see that Obama is
not a one term president. Let's contemplate President Obama's legacy again, after 2016.
Ahmed Rashid delivers the message none of us really wants to hear.
Now, with the United States about to enter the 11th year of the longest war it has ever fought, far more of my neighbors in Pakistan have joined the list of America’s detractors. The wave of anti-Americanism is rising in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, even among many who once admired the United States, and the short reason for that is plain: the common resentment is that American plans to bring peace and development to Afghanistan have failed, the killing is still going on, and to excuse their failures Americans have now expanded the war into Pakistan, evoking what they did in the 1960s when the Vietnam war moved into Laos and Cambodia.
Maureen Dowd was pleased to see President Obama being tough and the GOP being reasonable. Thing is, she doesn't believe it's real.
Congressional Republicans, heeding polls indicating that their all-out assault on President Obama was risky, finally tempered their public comments after the jobs speech on Thursday and stopped acting like big jerks.
Obama, heeding plummeting polls and beseeching voices from his despairing base, finally deigned to get tough.
In the capital of political tactics, it was just another fine day of faking it.
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The reawakened Republicans are no longer the loyal opposition. They’re revolutionary Bolsheviks who want to eat Obama alive.
Thomas Friedman views President Obama's jobs speech as a sign that the president has become Friedman-esque, and warns Republicans that they'll suffer at the ballot box if they continue to be obstructionists. Because, you know, American's hunger for a good compromise.
The New York Times mourns not just the events of that bright September morning, but the moment in time that followed.
At first, there was only shock, grief and fear. But by the next evening there was something surprising in the air. Do you remember? It was an enormous, heartfelt desire to be changed. People wanted to be enlarged, to be called on to do more for country and community than ordinary life usually requires, to make this senseless horror count for something. It was also a public desire, a wish to be absorbed in some greater good, a reimagining of the possibilities in our national life. There was courage and unity on the streets of the city and all across the country, for we were all witnesses of that turning point.
But America has not been enlarged in the years that have passed. Based on false pretexts, we were drawn into a misdirected war that has exacted enormous costs in lives and money. Our civic life is tainted by a rise in xenophobia that betrays our best ideals. As we prepared for a war on terrorism, we gave in to a weakening of the civil liberties that have been the foundation of our culture.
Perhaps if Bush had thought of something more to ask of the American people than to shop, we would be a different people now, but that moment is past. What will we do with
this moment?
Kathleen Parker thinks that there were more victims of 9/11 than those who died in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. She thinks it killed our national sanity.
Something was unleashed 10 years ago that bears our scrutiny. It wasn’t only evil, though the attacks were certainly that. The event was so cataclysmic and horrifying that it caused a sort of emotional breakdown in the American constitution. Simply put, it damaged our collective soul and seems to have released a free-ranging hysteria that has contaminated our interactions ever since.
If that opening makes you think that Parker is about to address Tea Party madness, Glenn Beck's blackboard of insanity, or the spittle-pounding antics of the O'Reilly show where she has so often appeared as a guest, think again. Parker's only lament is that President Obama was "bossy" and "hectoring" in his jobs speech and that rather than telling America's poor to be grateful for what they have, Obama is "banging the drum of class warfare." Then she sighs about missing the country's "better angels." Yes, Kathleen, me too.
George Will... actually has an interesting column for about the first four paragraphs, comparing the attention that this anniversary has garnered to the non-event that was Pearl Harbor a decade after the attack. Will goes off the rails after that, with a bit of John Adams, a dash of Berlin Wall, and lot of why it was Clinton's fault. But it's still 400% better than any George Will column in the last year.
David Ignatius pins the difference between candidate Obama and President Obama on the stream of intelligence that crosses the President's desk.
Intelligence is certainly an area where the president appears confident and bold. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence who has been running spy agencies for more than 20 years, regards Obama as “a phenomenal user and understander of intelligence.” When Clapper briefs the president each morning, he brings along extra material to feed the president’s hunger for information.
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Perhaps Obama’s comfort level with his intelligence role helps explain why he has done other parts of the job less well. He likes making decisions in private, where he has the undiluted authority of the commander in chief. He likes information, as raw and pertinent as possible, and he gets impatient listening to windy political debates. He likes action, especially when he doesn’t leave fingerprints.
What this president dislikes — and does poorly — is political bargaining. He’s as bad a dealmaker as, let’s say, George Smiley would be.
Ignatius stretches things way beyond reasonable to try and fit them into his penny dreadful frame, but for those who don't know who George Smiley is... shame on you.
Go read.
The Washington Post argues that while we have stumbled, and made mistakes, and had overreactions, and started wars in possibly the wrong place, and cut rights, and lots of people are dead, and those that aren't dead hate us... by some sort of calculus, it was all good.
New Scientist details how something as tiny as a virus can hijack the brain of a caterpillar and turn the whole animal into not just a virus making machine, but a germ-dispersal system.
It takes just one gene to rule them all. With that gene, a voodoo virus compels its caterpillar hosts to emerge from their shady hideaways, climb en masse to the tops of trees, deliquesce and fall as a rosy rain of viral particles on their fellow healthy caterpillars. Soon, they too will make the climb of doom.
That's scarier than any movie. If you never thought anything would make you feel bad for gypsy moth caterpillars, read this article.