Free Republic

The Anti-Defamation League is up in arms over two South Carolina Republicans’ revival of an old stereotype. Peter Beinart asks: Is calling Jews thrifty really so offensive? This week, in an act of vicious anti-Semitism, Edwin O. Merwin Jr. and James S. Ulmer, chairmen of the Bamberg County and Orangeburg County, South Carolina, Republican parties, respectively, co-authored an op-ed in which they accused Jews of taking good care of their money. “Jews who are wealthy,” they wrote, “got that way not by watching dollars but instead by taking care of the pennies and the dollars taking care of themselves.” Then...

I wish he was wrong. As personalities, the syntax-mangling Ike and the self-consciously intellectual David Petraeus don’t have much in common. But politically, they’re in a parallel position. Today’s GOP has a right-wing base that can damage Obama, but none of its favorites have a prayer of winning the White House. The reason is that just like the Republican right of the early 1950s, which kept insisting that the New Deal constituted socialism (or fascism), today’s conservative activists have not accommodated themselves to some basic shifts in public mood. Over the past couple of decades, the American people have grown...

President Obama said on Friday morning he was "most surprised and deeply humbled" by being awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. "To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who have been honored by this prize," he added. The Daily Beast's Peter Beinart on why the award only aids the right’s arguments that Obamamania bears no relation to reality.George W. Bush launched a “preemptive” war. Now the Nobel Committee is trying for “preemptive” peace. I had always thought the way these things worked was that you...

It's no longer a close call: President Bush was right about the surge. According to Michael O'Hanlon and Jason Campbell of the Brookings Institution, the number of Iraqi war dead was 500 in November of 2008, compared with 3,475 in November of 2006. That same month, 69 Americans died in Iraq; in November 2008, 12 did.

It's no longer a close call: President Bush was right about the surge. According to Michael O'Hanlon and Jason Campbell of the Brookings Institution, the number of Iraqi war dead was 500 in November of 2008, compared with 3,475 in November of 2006. That same month, 69 Americans died in Iraq; in November 2008, 12 did. Violence in Anbar province is down more than 90 percent over the past two years, the... --snip-- Younger liberals, by contrast, have had no such chastening experiences. Watching the Bush administration flit from disaster to disaster, they have grown increasingly dismissive of conservatives in...

Barack Obama has a problem. He really, really doesn't want this campaign to be about race. He wants it to be about change, President Bush, the economy, gas prices, Iraq, Afghanistan -- almost anything else. But it is going to be about race, at least in part. That's the lesson of recent weeks, when the McCain campaign brought up race (on the pretext that Obama had brought it up first). Once the chum was in the water, the media sharks went wild. Obama should take that as a warning. Race will be central to this campaign because McCain needs it...

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Peter Beinart, editor-at-large at The New Republic. He is the author of the new book The Good Fight: Why Liberals---and Only Liberals---Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again. FP: Peter Beinart welcome to Frontpage Interview. It is a pleasure and privilege to be in your company. Beinart: Nice to be talking with you. FP: David Horowitz will join us for the discussion, but let's first talk to you about your book. Before we even get to that, let me ask you to comment on the recent killing of Zarqawi. What...

Like Kennedy and Truman, Democratic neocons want to beef up the military and won't run from a fight. DON'T LOOK now, but neoconservatism is making a comeback — and not among the Republicans who have made it famous but in the Democratic Party. A host of pundits and young national security experts associated with the party are calling for a return to the Cold War precepts of President Truman to wage a war against terror that New Republic Editor Peter Beinart, in the title of his provocative new book, calls "The Good Fight."

Peter Beinart is an advocate of liberal -- not "progressive" -- nostalgia. He wants to turn the clock back to 1947 at Washington's Willard Hotel. Beinart, who was born in 1971, is editor at large of the liberal New Republic magazine and disdains the label "progressive" as a rejection of liberalism's useable past of anti-totalitarianism. An intellectual archaeologist, he excavates that vanished intellectual tradition and sends it into battle in his new book, "The Good Fight: Why Liberals -- and Only Liberals -- Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again." It expresses Beinart's understanding of liberalism...

Peter Beinart is an advocate of liberal -- not ''progressive'' -- nostalgia. He wants to turn the clock back to 1947 at Washington's Willard Hotel. Beinart, who was born in 1971, is editor at large of the liberal New Republic magazine and disdains the label ''progressive'' as a rejection of liberalism's useable past of anti-totalitarianism. An intellectual archaeologist, he excavates that vanished intellectual tradition and sends it into battle in his new book, The Good Fight: Why Liberals -- and Only Liberals -- Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again. It expresses Beinart's understanding of liberalism...

This fall, for the third time since 9/11, American voters will choose between Democrats and Republicans while knowing what only one party believes about national security. In 2002, Democratic candidates tried to change the subject, focusing on Social Security and health care instead. In 2004, John Kerry substituted biography for ideology, largely ignoring his own extensive foreign-policy record and stressing his service in Vietnam. In this year's Senate and House races, the party looks set to reprise Michael Dukakis's old theme: competence. Rather than tell Americans what their vision is, Democrats will assure them that they can execute it better...

Some of my best friends are professors. Many of my relatives, too. I'd probably be one myself, had I done better in graduate school. But, this week at least, I'm glad I chose another line of work, because the most prestigious professoriate in the world, Harvard's, has just made an ass of itself. It has done so by toppling President Lawrence Summers, who resigned rather than face a second faculty no-confidence vote, which he seemed set to lose. In explaining the coup, conservatives will cite political correctness. They'll say that, by challenging African American Studies Professor Cornel West and musing...

Recently Bill Maher remarked during his HBO show that the military recruits the dregs of society. This infuriated Congressman Spencer Bauchus of Alabama who said Maher's comment borders on treason. This is not the first time Maher has cast aspersions on the military. Nor is he alone in his opinion of military personnel as America's societal residue. Two years ago fellow liberal New York Times reporter Chris Hedges remarked during a commencement speech he made that the military consisted of, "boys from places such as Mississippi and Arkansas who joined the military because there were no job opportunities." About a...

...she opened with a statement referring to Clinton as a "horny hick." Such spiteful and subjective comments brought laughter from the audience but did nothing to strengthen her opposing argument......I went home that night and tore my Bush-Cheney sticker off my door, and took my Bush "Taking America forward" pin off my bulletin board. I no longer consider myself a Republican, or even a conservative Wednesday's (March 9th) intellectual exchange between Ann Coulter and Peter Beinart was both stimulating and disappointing, but above all, it was quite unsettling. Both candidates had significant strengths, and they were surely worthy opponents. And...

Last month, just hours before the Democratic National Committee chose the former Vermont governor to lead it, it did something else: It created an Office of Military and Veterans Outreach. In the coming weeks, Dean will decide what kind of funding and staff this new office receives. But despite widespread talk about military disaffection over Iraq, John Kerry won only 41 percent of Americans with military experience. While active-duty, National Guard and Reserve voters are hard to poll scientifically, a survey last October by the Military Times gave Kerry a mere 18 percent. Democrats have been alienated from the military...

ROUNDTABLE Peter Beinart, the editor of The New Republic; Michael Tomasky, the executive editor of The American Prospect; and Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of The Nation, are three leading voices for liberalism today. Now, following the re-election of George W. Bush, and with the continuing dominance of Republicans in Congress, the politics they stand for is arguably more embattled than at any time since 1933 and Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. Barry Gewen, an editor at the Book Review, asked the three editors to discuss and debate the present state of liberalism in America, and its future. Why has...

(note: abbrev extracts from personal notes) • [Peter Beinart]…1946 was in many ways like mid-term elections 2002 to 2004. Liberals were crushed because they weren’t trusted on national security issue. • 1947 there was a big fight that took 2-3 years where anti-communism became a big feature of American liberalism under Harry Truman and then later under John Kennedy. • Democrats linked anti-totalitarianism abroad with a more “just” United States. • Democrats need to shift from only calling Bush economic policy unjust and unwise (which only appeals to a minority of the population) to calling it unsafe. • In ‘50s...

I think it was John Kenneth Galbraith, speaking in the early 1960s, the high point of post-New Deal liberalism, who pronounced conservatism dead. Conservatism, he said, was "bookless," a characteristic Galbraithian, which is to say Olympian, verdict. Without books, there are no ideas. And it is true: American conservatism was, at the time, a congeries of cranky prejudices, a closed church with an archaic doctrine proclaimed by spoiled swells. William F. Buckley Jr. comes to mind, and a few others whose names will now resonate with almost nobody. Take as just one instance Russell Kirk, an especially prominent conservative intellectual...

A centrist-leaning cadre of Democratic intellectual foot soldiers has declared all-out war on its liberal base, saying it needs to be transformed, if not pulled out by the roots, before the party can win again.     In a bitter soul-searching debate over their party's future, and what needs to be done to halt its decline, no postelection self-analysis has triggered more political buzz among Democrats than a New Republic magazine critique that calls for ending the influence wielded the party's leftist, antiwar wing in its presidential-selection process.  "[John] Kerry was a flawed candidate, but he was not the fundamental problem....

The New Republic continues to run responses to Peter Beinart's "A Fighting Faith." I wonder how representative Anne Kass of Albuquerque, New Mexico is of the Democratic base... In your most recent article, you noted: "Drum said I never proved my key point — that I never explained why totalitarian Islam is so grave a threat that liberals should make it central to their worldview. He urged me to write another article, a 'prequel.'" From my perspective, you also failed to explain why communism was so grave a threat to the United States, and, even more basic than that, why...

I'm very confused. As this is not news to many, let me be more specific. Last week, my friend Peter Beinart wrote a much-discussed cover story for The New Republic arguing that the Democratic party needs to become a "fighting party" that takes Islamic totalitarianism seriously. As I wrote in my syndicated column , I thought it was a wonderful and serious article, even though I thought his prescription was, if not naïve, then certainly overly optimistic. Beinart opens with a flashback. "On January 4, 1947, 130 men and women met at Washington's Willard Hotel to save American liberalism." Their...

The Good Fight - by Peter Beinart Post date: 12.09.04 Last week, I wrote a cover story in The New Republic arguing that the struggle against Islamist totalitarianism should define contemporary liberalism, as the struggle against Soviet totalitarianism defined liberalism during the early cold war ("A Fighting Faith," December 13). This week, I waded through responses--some supportive, some critical, some both. The most surprising came from Kevin Drum, who writes the blog Political Animal at washingtonmonthly.com. Drum said I never proved my key point--that I never explained why totalitarian Islam is so grave a threat that liberals should make it...

For Peter Beinart, it's 1950.Beinart-Skipper: TNR's Peter Beinart argues that, just as liberals needed to purge non-anti-Communists from their ranks in the late 1940s, Democrats need to purge today's "heirs of Henry Wallace"--specifically, Michael Moore and MoveOn--who do "not believe there is a terrorist threat." It's a powerful analogy, and running Moore out of the party might well give any Democratic candidate an essential anti-Souljah credibility. But!1) Beinart says The left's post-September 11 enthusiasm for an aggressive campaign against Al Qaeda--epitomized by students at liberal campuses signing up for jobs with the CIA--was overwhelmed by horror at the bungled Iraq war. There...

The other side may be euphoric, but the intensity of their happiness can't match the intensity of our despair. Honest conservatives, even those who admire President Bush, know he didn't earn a second term. They know he staked his presidency on a catastrophe, and that, by all rights, Iraq should be his political epitaph. Their victory, while sweet, can't be fully enjoyed because it isn't fully deserved. .... But cultural sensitivity is one thing; principle is another. In their attempts to win rural voters, Democrats have already essentially abandoned gun control. That doesn't keep me up at night. But gay...

Previously aired debate on C-Span 2 NOW.

I saw on another blog (linked) that Peter Beinart included in an article a justification for voter fraud as long as more participation results. This article requires membership to the site, and I was wondering if anyone can get and possible post the entire text of the article here. Thanks.

To conservatives, the Bush administration is everything its predecessor was not: decent, ethical, honest. It doesn't abuse government power or the public trust. As Wall Street Journal columnist and presidential hagiographer Peggy Noonan has put it, "Bush brings character to the table."

Peter Beinart, editor of The New Republic is my guest today, and I may be able to link up as well with Ralph Reed to discuss the retirement announcement by Zell Miller. (That announcement puts the GOP in the position of a huge, early advantage when it comes to the Senate races in 2004, which contributors will surely notice.) I will discuss with Peter the North Korean situation, hopefully more productively than I did with Josh Marshall of TalkingPointsMemo.com yesterday. Marshall, heir to Sidney Blumenthal's passion to defend the Clintons in all things at all costs, has taken to blaming...