Your one-stop pundit shop.
Eugene Robinson:
This is a radical break from journalistic convention, I realize, but today I'd like to give credit where it's due -- specifically, to President Obama. Quiet as it's kept, he's on a genuine winning streak. ... He still hasn't walked on water, though. What's wrong with the man?
Jeffrey T. Kuhner:
A picture is coming into focus now, and it should trouble all Americans. It is widely known that Mr. Obama is a post-national progressive. Yet he is also a cultural Muslim who is promoting an anti-American, pro-Islamic agenda.
So now he's a cultural Muslim? But then Kuhner has been down this road before.
Jonathan Bernstein:
Just last month, Matt Bai "discovered" that the source of Barack Obama's troubles was that the Democrats weren't specific enough in their campaign proposals during the 2006 and 2008 campaigns. He's back again today with yet another explanation for Obama's sagging approval ratings; now, it seems that Americans have soured on Obama because he's too much of a legislator. It was nonsense then, and it's nonsense now. It's not complicated at all: Obama's approval ratings have fallen because the economy stinks. End of story. Anything else is on the margins...and it's certainly possible that everything else is pushing his ratings up, not down.
Robert Fisk:
...the millions of American soldiers who have passed through Iraq have brought the Iraqis a plague. From Afghanistan – in which they showed as much interest after 2001 as they will show when they start "leaving" that country next year – they brought the infection of al-Qa'ida. They brought the disease of civil war. They injected Iraq with corruption on a grand scale. They stamped the seal of torture on Abu Ghraib – a worthy successor to the same prison under Saddam's vile rule – after stamping the seal of torture on Bagram and the black prisons of Afghanistan. They sectarianised a country that, for all its Saddamite brutality and corruption, had hitherto held its Sunnis and Shias together.
As you can see in the column that follows, there are still a few self-described American imperialists who don't think the U.S. shouldn't pack up all its military bags in Iraq.
Max Boot:
There is a pressing need for a new U.S.-Iraq agreement that will allow a considerable force (10,000 to 20,000 troops) to remain in Iraq for years to come. But that accord cannot be negotiated until a new Iraqi government is seated. That, in turn, will require more muscular diplomacy than the Obama administration has hitherto displayed.
Paul Krugman:
As I look at what passes for responsible economic policy these days, there’s an analogy that keeps passing through my mind. I know it’s over the top, but here it is anyway: the policy elite — central bankers, finance ministers, politicians who pose as defenders of fiscal virtue — are acting like the priests of some ancient cult, demanding that we engage in human sacrifices to appease the anger of invisible gods.
Froma Harrop:
Clarence the angel has a tough job in "It's a Wonderful Life." He must show the suicidal George Bailey what terrible things would have happened had he not been born. Two prominent economists are playing Clarence to the multitudes who believe that forceful government intervention during the financial meltdown should never have been.
Haris Tarin:
When my parents decided to leave their war-ravaged homeland of Afghanistan in the 1980s, they had the option of migrating to a number of different countries, but sought one that they could make their "home." You see, my father was a government official in the Afghan Education Ministry, before the Russian invasion and the subsequent takeover by the Taliban. He was tasked with modernizing the Afghan educational system while also ensuring that core, centuries-old Afghan values were preserved. ...
As young children, we would ask him why he chose this country. He would calmly respond: "The acceptance of my faith that I received in my travels through this country, I would not be able to find anywhere else."
He would tell us about the people who respected his religious practice of praying five times a day and created spaces for him to pray in. He would fondly recall how warm and open people were.
Yet today, I am afraid for my children. I am afraid that when they turn the TV on, or listen to the radio (which I now turn off when we are in the car), they will receive a very different message from the one my father shared with us. The message they hear today is of intolerance. Whether it be about an Islamic center in New York blocks from ground zero or a mosque in Temecula, their faith is being openly and viciously maligned, and they themselves are made to feel responsible for the attacks on 9/11.
Marjorie Valbrun:
Now that public pressure has forced her exit, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, the popular conservative radio talk-show host, is reinventing herself as a helpless victim of free speech. Her feelings are hurt; how sad for her. I would venture a guess that she wasn’t worried about hurting the feelings of the woman who called in to her show, or concerned about the tone of the exchange between them that ultimately led to her leaving the show.
She certainly didn’t care about others’ feelings when she demonized gay men as pedophiles—she once said “a huge portion of the male homosexual populace is predatory on young boys”—or spoke out against adoption by gay couples.
The two-faced Dr. Laura's racist meltdown was an outrage, to be sure, but also a blessing, removing from the airwaves a person whose poisonous spew ranked up there with Glen Beck, Michael Savage and Sean Hannity, reaching people they never reached.