Visual source: Newseum
Doyle McManus says even the hawks aren't ready to fly yet on Syria, but they're headed in that direction:
The interventionist liberals of the Obama administration were a doleful bunch last week. It was the 20th anniversary of the siege of Sarajevo, when a Bosnian Serb army battered a city full of civilians with artillery while the United States issued ineffective cries of alarm. The comparison with this year's massacres in Syria was painfully apt.
Now, as then, the United Nations Security Council has asked both sides to stop shooting, to no great effect. Now, as then, the United States and its allies are rejecting the idea of military intervention as too difficult, too risky, too likely to add to the violence instead of ending it.
In Bosnia, it took the United States more than three years and many massacres to decide that diplomatic measures and sanctions weren't enough.
Eyal Press:
In the two decades since [the shooting started in Sarajevo], attention has understandably focused on the deeds of the architects and perpetrators of the Balkan wars. Confronting the truth about how the violence was planned and orchestrated, many have argued, is an essential step in getting formerly warring factions to reckon honestly with their responsibility for what transpired.
But this point should apply no less to the conduct of those who behaved honorably during the war, daring to cross the lines of ethnic division that too many of their fellow citizens chose not to traverse.
The New York Times:
As Friday’s jobless numbers showed, the economic recovery has been listless and fragile, but its upward trajectory has been clear enough that Republicans have been forced to acknowledge it. To avoid giving President Obama the slightest bit of credit for the improvement, however, they have come up with increasingly convoluted explanations that have little relationship to reality.
Paul Krugman gives a huzzah to President Obama and a bullseye smackdown of alleged "centrists" who can't bring themselves to admit that Paul Ryan is a dangerous extremist, albeit a polite one.
Harold Meyerson believes the reasons erstwhile hedge-fund managers have abandoned Obama is because they don't think he understands how extraordinarily special they and their 15 percent tax rate is.
But there’s more to this anti-Obama animus than mere hedge-hoggery. What leaps out from the bankers’ indictments of the president, even more than their affronted amour propre, is their insularity, their complete cluelessness about how their fellow Americans see them and their effect on the U.S. economy. Who besides Wall Street’s more benighted denizens is affronted by legal action against what looks to be securities fraud? Who besides the very rich and Republican political candidates thinks the very rich don’t have enough political clout? Who believes that making Warren Buffett pay taxes at rates as high as his secretary’s constitutes defecating on the rich? (Buffett certainly doesn’t.)
As for class warfare—no one has waged it with the skill and relentlessness of Wall Street.
E.J. Dionne Jr:
Perhaps conservative pundits couldn’t stand the fact that Obama called them out explicitly. “I’d just remind conservative commentators,” he said, “that for years what we’ve heard is, the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint — that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law. Well, this is a good example.” Yes, it is.
Ed Quillen:
Of relevance here is the Deep South. There, little has changed in four centuries, even if its oligarchs are now Republicans instead of Democrats. They want "a compliant, poorly educated, low-wage workforce with as few labor, workplace safety, health care, and environmental regulations as possible."
One thing has changed, though. For 250 years they lived in mortal fear of a slave revolt. These days, they don't need armed patrols. If high unemployment doesn't keep Americans from getting uppity, the oligarchs can always hire some lackey to go on TV and prattle about "values."
Criminitly,
Peggy Noonan's soft-nosed diatribe puts her in the running for at least the silver medallion in the contest for world's worst case of upsidedownism.