Punting the Pundits

“Punting the Pundits“ is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Joan Walsh: Fox News’ 50-state Southern strategy

CNN’s “Reliable Sources” from Sunday is worth watching. American University’s Jane Hall has the best quote, in my opinion: The former Fox contributor said Shirley Sherrod was the victim of “virtual world McCarthyism.” I wasn’t that disciplined or clever in my comments. I was angry at the attempt to make this story about the Obama administration (I’ve already stated my objections to how Obama handled the mess), to whitewash the role of Fox in the scandal, and to try to turn the tables on Shirley Sherrod and insist she’s wrong to call either Fox or Breitbart “racist.”

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The most important point is this: Fox News has, sadly, become the purveyor of a 50-state “Southern strategy,” the plan perfected by Richard Nixon to use race to scare Southern Democrats into becoming Republicans by insisting the other party wasn’t merely trying to fight racism, but give blacks advantages over whites (Fox News boss Roger Ailes, of course, famously worked for Nixon). Now Fox is using the election of our first black president to scare (mainly older) white people in all 50 states that, again, the Democratic Party is run by corrupt black people trying to give blacks advantages over whites (MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow laid out this history last week).

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Watch the video for yourself, and see what I said. First of all, the idea that any journalist is wasting his or her time policing Shirley Sherrod’s rhetoric on race, after what she’s been through, is absurd. But what I said was, I think her charges of racism by Fox and Breitbart are justified. Both are peddling a false story of all the nonexistent ways white people are hurt and/or oppressed by blacks; in particular, our black president. In my book, that’s racist; others may disagree. I didn’t give Sherrod carte blanche to peddle hatred of white people (not that she would if I gave it to her).

It’s not my job, either way. Fox and Breitbart are far more powerful, and dangerous, than Shirley Sherrod. They should be ashamed of themselves, but they’re shameless.

Bob Herbert: Long-Term Economic Pain

The pain coursing through American families is all too real and no one seems to know what to do about it. A rigorous new analysis for the Rockefeller Foundation shows that Americans are more economically insecure now than they have been in a quarter of a century, and the trend lines suggest that things will only get worse.

Rampant joblessness and skyrocketing medical costs are among the biggest factors tearing at the very fabric of American economic life so painstakingly put together in the early post-World War II decades.

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More than 14 million people are out of work and many more are either underemployed or so discouraged they’ve just stopped looking. Big corporations, sitting on fat profits even as the economy continues to struggle, have made it clear that they are not interested in putting a lot more people back to work any time soon.

Policy makers have dropped the ball completely in terms of dealing with this devastating long-term trend of ever-increasing economic insecurity for American families. Long-term solutions that have to do with extensive job creation and a strengthening of the safety net are required. But that doesn’t seem to be on anyone’s agenda.

David Brooks: The Long Strategy

I was a liberal Democrat when I was young. I used to wear a green Army jacket with political buttons on it – for Hubert Humphrey, Birch Bayh, John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt. I even wore that jacket in my high school yearbook photo.

It’s a magic green jacket. I can put it on today and, suddenly, my mind shifts back to the left. I start thinking like a Democrat, feeling a strange accompanying hunger for brown rice.

When I put on that magic jacket today, I feel beleaguered but kind of satisfied. I feel beleaguered because the political winds are blowing so ferociously against “my” party. But I feel satisfied because the Democrats have overseen a bunch of programs that, while unappreciated now, are probably going to do a lot of good in the long run.

Eugene Robinson: Wikileaks reveal the obvious dangers of Afghanistan

The tens of thousands of classified military documents posted on the Internet Sunday confirm what critics of the war in Afghanistan  already knew or suspected: We are wading deeper into a long-running, morally ambiguous conflict that has virtually no chance of ending well.

The Obama administration, our NATO allies and the Afghan government responded to the documents — made public by a gadfly organization known as Wikileaks — by saying they tell us nothing new. Which is the problem.

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Overall, though, the most shocking thing about the “War Diary” may be that it fails to shock. The documents illustrate how futile — and tragically wasteful — it is to send more young men and women to fight and die in Afghanistan.

But we knew this, didn’t we?  

Michael Gerson: Best course for dealing with the Taliban: Win, then negotiate

The Wikileaks document download — illustrating Afghan corruption, Pakistani duplicity and Taliban toughness — revealed little that is new. But it will intensify a popular kind of desperation.

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The prospect of serious negotiations with the Taliban does not seem particularly realistic. If America were to insist on protections for the rights of women, ethnic minorities and civil society as preconditions for power-sharing discussions with the Taliban, it would probably be a deal-breaker. As it stands, the Taliban has every reason to think that it wins by enduring. A panting desire for a hasty deal only encourages this belief. Coming to the table at this point, the Taliban would have little motivation to make concessions on the most fundamental aspects of its

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This is the realistic alternative: Win first, then negotiate.

Richard Cohen: Wikileaks, telling us the obvious in Afghanistan

The news in that massive data dump provided by the dauntingly mysterious Wikileaks (who? what?) to one American and two European publications is that there is no news at all. We already knew that the war in Afghanistan was not going well. We already knew — or, in the words of the New York Times, “harbored strong suspicions” — that Pakistan’s military spy service was aiding the Taliban (with friends like this . . .) and we already knew that Afghanistan’s army and police would be reformed and able to stand up to the Taliban some time around when pigs fly or Washington balances the budget. No need to wait by the phone.

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The Obama administration will go through the motions of hunting down the leaker and denouncing the leaks, as it should. (Government is entitled to some secrets; it needs them to protect us.) But after taking a deep breath, it may conclude that Wikileaks has done it a favor — speaking the unspeakable, and not in the allegedly forked tongue of the mainstream media but in the actual words of combat soldiers. This will make the inevitable decision easier. Barack Obama, an unemotional man, will wind down the war in Afghanistan — not just because he wants to but because he has to. This, like the news from Wikileaks, is not news at all.

Nushin Arbabzadah, @ The Guardian: War logs are no surprise to Afghans

The real question Afghans want answering is the extent its allies knew of Pakistan’s involvement in undermining Nato

Julian Assange’s remarkable service to truth, transparency and democracy are appreciated on the ground in Afghanistan. Yet there was little in the WikiLeaks revelations  that came as a surprise to Afghans and the local media mostly refrained from commenting, limiting their effort to reporting news of the publication of secret files.

Only a few papers tried to take a clear stance in reaction to the story. This silence could be interpreted in different ways. Given that the WikiLeaks revelations primarily compromise Afghanistan’s key ally in Washington by showing that the US army has little regard for civilian casualties, the papers might have feared backlash by the Kabul administration and hence refrained from comment to avoid confrontation. Alternatively, the silence might have a mundane explanation: nothing in the published secret files was news to Afghans.

Peter Galbraith @ The Guardian:  Wikileaks and the ISI-Taliban nexus

Pakistan’s intelligence leaders should ask whether their support of the Taliban is worth the price the country may have to pay

The Wikileaks documents, splashed in the Guardian and several other papers, provide useful confirmation of what is readily discerned from public sources: the Afghanistan War is going badly, the Taliban are exceptionally brutal, US forces have not always attacked the right targets and elements in Pakistan continue to support the Taliban.

The most striking feature of the documents – an unprecedented 90,000 pages of mostly raw intelligence that could only be leaked thanks to 21st-century technology that enables large volumes of data to be compressed into a tiny thumb drive – is the inconsistent quality of the intelligence. Americans should be asking why they are paying upwards of $50bn for this kind of information and why military officers and diplomats so rely on it.

Of all this information, the most troubling concerns the duplicitous double dealing by Pakistan’s powerful spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI. While some of the intelligence seems wildly implausible (surely the ISI did not plot to poison Kabul-bound beer, an enormously complex operation with limited pay off since US troops are not allowed to drink alcohol in Afghanistan), the Wikileaks documents show a continued relationship between the ISI and the Taliban. This is not surprising. In the 1990s, the ISI helped create the Taliban and Pakistani support was decisive to the Taliban’s capture of Kabul in 1996. The US has known since 2001 that Pakistan did not break its ties with the Taliban as President Pervez Musharraf had promised President Bush. After all, Mullah Omar and his close associates have been in Pakistan since 2001 and it is not plausible that Pakistan did not know where any of them were.