In his column today, George Will begins by flaying President Obama for being too meek to propose a health care reform that would transition workers out of employer-sponsored health care:

On night one of the Conservative Political Action Conference, as George Will entertained GOP mucketymucks in the Marriott Wardman’s cavernous banquet hall, the next generation of Republicans was downstairs, in the basement, enjoying something more hip. Or, at least, Stephen Baldwin’s idea of hip.
 
“I know you don’t hear the word gnarly too much in conservative circles, but you’re gonna start hearing it in the future!” the 44-year-old ex-actor told a crowd of about 200 assembled youths.

Not long ago, Andrew Sullivan had ultra-hawkish views on Israel and the Middle East. The problem as he saw it, was very simple: The Muslim world was anti-Semitic and wanted to kill all the Jews. Naive Western governments pushed innocent Israelis to make peace, when the only answer was force. Here are some excerpts from an August 2001 column he wrote:

If you've been following the Copenhagen process this week, you may have noticed that the "debate" over climate change and what to do about it has regressed. Whereas, just a few years ago, George W. Bush acknowledged the human role in global warming and John McCain was a leading proponent of climate-change legislation, know-nothingism is now resurgent.

Not many Ph.D. students expect their research to generate outrage among Washington pundits decades later, but, as it turns out, that's exactly what happened to Stephen Schneider. Back in 1971, Schneider was studying plasma physics at Columbia and moonlighting as a research assistant at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. There, he co-authored an article for Science arguing that the warming effect caused by rising amounts of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere would be swamped by the cooling effect caused by aerosol pollution like dust and smoke.

It could have been predicted. In fact, I predicted it here. So, more or less, did Jon Chait and Leon Wieseltier, with subtle differences ... and, from The Washington Post, Jackson Diehl and Jim Hoagland, Charles Krauthammer and George Will, as well. Plus a few more here and there. No one from the New York Times? Huh. What a surprise. The Times never saw the Holocaust. Why should it recognize malign intentions in the charming Middle East?

Oh, so clever, those Obama folk, they would snake-path their way through the old Arab stories--what was now called "the Palestinian narrative"--and present Israel with a solution it couldn't refuse. What a solution.

Barry Rubin does an almost daily commentary on the problem. It's not really the Jewish problem. It's the Arab problem. They will be left with another one of their rhetorical victories, but nothing else. And Israel? It will survive, very well, thank you.

Cursed are the peacemakers.

On an ordinary day, Henry Aaron, senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington, comes across as the quintessential policy wonk: knowledgeable, thoughtful, measured, perhaps even a tad boring. With his rumpled suits, snowy hair, and rosy jowls, the genial septuagenarian brings to mind one's favorite uncle--assuming that uncle had spent the past 40 years exploring tax policy, health care financing, and the intricacies of sprawling entitlement programs.

George Will's column today about Afghanistan might be interesting or worthy of further discussion. But why (why!) does he have to throw in gratuitous swipes that make him seem like a Pat Buchanan-ite. The column is called 'Time To Get Out of Afghanistan'. Here is Will:

To be honest, I've never been terribly interested in the long-running pseudo-debate over whether global warming "stopped" in 1998. If you don't know what I'm talking about, here's the dime version: 1998 was an exceptionally hot El Niño year, we're all agreed.

David A. Bell is the dean of faculty and Mellon Professor in the Humanities at John Hopkins University's Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.

From a distance, it might seem that environmentalists should be crestfallen that the 2008 Climate Security Act--shorthanded as Lieberman-Warner after its lead sponsors in the Senate--went down in flames on the Senate floor on Friday. The bill, which would cap fossil fuel emissions in the United States above a certain level and ask industry to pay more for any excesses, was easily the most aggressive and comprehensive environmental reform ever to hit Congress. But the bipartisan plan to cut U.S.

What does Jerry Falwell have in common with Paul Wolfowitz and Howard Dean? What links columnist George Will with The New Republic? All, according to a recently issued "working paper," a shortened version of which appeared in the London Review of Books, are agents of an amorphous but incalculably powerful "Israel Lobby." That same inscrutable organization, the paper alleges, has dictated the decisions of politicians from George W. Bush to Jimmy Carter and determined the content of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. The goal of the lobby?

It would seem, on the face of it, that the only thing standing between George W. Bush and the presidency is a persistent reservation about his intellect. The doubts have crystallized around a reporter's now-famous pop quiz, in which the Texas governor could not identify various difficult-to-pronounce heads of state. Bush, according to many in the press, needs to wonk himself up, and fast. He needs to cocoon himself with all those Stanford Ph.D.s and reemerge with a deep, studied interest in the stability of Central Asia and the efficacy of scattered-site housing.