Going to the Dump

I got me a new laptop this weekend while in San Antonio and so need to do some serious housecleaning in the office. Thus it's time to do a links dump of all of the tabs that have accumulated on my perpetually-stretched-to-capacity Firefox window:

You would never know it from the madding crowds of tea partiers and talking heads, but this Congress has been a whole lot more productive than you think.

For all of the insults going Obama's (and Eric Holder's) way for allegedly radically changing how we deal with accused terrorists, it turns out that this administration has pretty clearly followed many of the precedents of its predecessor. So, yeah -- Obama's critics are largely uninformed. Shocking, I know. If anyone has a right to be angry it would be Obama's critics from the left, but they tend to wallow in their own blissful ignorance. All of this simply serves as a reminder that today's conservatives would reject much of what Ronald Reagan represented in reality (as opposed to in their purist caricature of him) but then you knew that already.

At TNR William Galston takes on some of the more sophisticated conservative critiques of Obama (they are out there, believe it or not). In so doing he mounts a nice defense of liberalism, something that should have never needed a defense.

Finally, at TNR's The Book, dcat friend and former mentor Jeffrey Herf reviews Robert Wistrich's A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad.