End of week edition.
Eugene Robinson:
The good news? Nobody has to pretend anymore that Gen. Stanley McChrystal knew how to fix Afghanistan within a year. The bad news? Now we're supposed to pretend that Gen. David Petraeus does.
David Yepsen:
Yes, Obama looks strong in firing his "runaway general." It was all very Trumanesque. What gets overlooked in the parallel is that despite firing Douglas MacArthur, President Truman remained unpopular over the Korean War and opted not to even run in 1952. Like Korea, the Afghanistan war is growing increasingly unpopular as Americans realize it can’t be won and that will threaten Obama’s reelection in 2012 just as Korea clouded Truman’s prospects.
Vietnam clouded Lyndon Johnson’s chances. Abraham Lincoln was in trouble in 1864. Americans simply don’t like presidents stuck in wartime quagmires.
Of course, the old adage that "you can’t beat someone with no one" is important to remember too. There aren’t any Dwight Eisenhowers on the Republican field just yet.
Robert Shrum:
A week ago, the president was on the ropes, and critics of all political stripes were questioning his ability to rise to the occasion. Today, no one should be.
But everyone will, nonetheless.
Paul Krugman:
The effect of this currency undervaluation is twofold: it makes Chinese goods artificially cheap to foreigners, while making foreign goods artificially expensive to the Chinese. That is, it’s as if China were simultaneously subsidizing its exports and placing a protective tariff on its imports.
This policy is very damaging at a time when much of the world economy remains deeply depressed. In normal times, you could argue that Chinese purchases of U.S. bonds, while distorting trade, were at least supplying us with cheap credit — and you could argue that it wasn’t China’s fault that we used that credit to inflate a vast, destructive housing bubble. But right now we’re awash in cheap credit; what’s lacking is sufficient demand for goods and services to generate the jobs we need. And China, by running an artificial trade surplus, is aggravating that problem.
John Nichols/The Nation:
The Unexpected Winning Issue for Democrats: Healthcare
There are still plenty of Republican candidates who imagine that they will sweep to victory this fall on a promise to repeal the healthcare reform legislation enacted earlier this year by the Democrats who currently control the House and Senate.
The Democrats can only hope that the repealers will raise their voice and be heard.
Joe Klein:
It was the nature of McChrystal's blunder that made the reascension of Petraeus inevitable. It was the insular, locker-room puerility of McChrystal's team, spewing in a recent Rolling Stone article — the stone-cold belief that they had all the answers; that the civilians in charge, especially those who were members of the Democratic Party, were just a bunch of feckless chin pullers — that made the incident so dangerous; it cut far too close to the bone. It raised timeless questions about civilian authority over the military in wartime and a nagging one that has shadowed American politics since Vietnam: whether Democrats are too soft, too removed from the realities of military life, to pursue an effective national-security policy.
Nagging question for whom? The Villagers?