Friedman’s latest Op-ed is a sobering column on the increasingly volatile relationship between Hamid Karzai and Barack Obama. Friedman’s column was primarily influenced by this NYT news story on Karzai’s repeated claims that he is the only thing that stands in the way of US hegemony in the region.

And then there’s Hitchens’ essay on Kai Bird’s new memoir. Hitchens concludes with what amounts to a very cold shower.

Everybody has to play a version of the counterfactual game at one point or another, but the more this book rehearses the dropped catches and untaken roads and other metaphorical mixtures, the more it succeeds in showing that the pursuit has hit abruptly diminishing returns. Almost no “concession” made by either side was ever sincere, or would not have been withdrawn or amended if the other party had accepted it. What is authentic and innate in moral individuals like young Kai or young Dani can almost never become true of states or nationalist parties, and is certainly never going to become true of clerical movements, the rise of which among Arabs and Jews is not something that was foreseen in the years under review… There was perhaps a moment when an unambivalent Israeli admission of responsibility for the original expulsion of the Palestinians could have had a healing and even cathartic effect. There may even have been a time when a sincere Arab denunciation of the role of the grand mufti of Jerusalem in the Holocaust might have softened a heart or two. But that time is well in the past, which is where historians like Bird are at their best. The parties of God have the ordering of things now, and we must wait meekly upon their awful pleasure.

After watching this, I was reminded of Einstein’s famous line, “I don’t know what World War III will be fought with by World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

The Tax Foundation has a useful chart to break it down.

(Hat Tip: GOOD’s Andrew Price)

Podhoretz: True, she seems to know very little about international affairs, but expertise in this area is no guarantee of wise leadership. After all, her rival for the vice presidency, who in some sense knows a great deal, was wrong on almost every major issue that arose in the 30 years he spent in the Senate.

Chait: Likewise, why not Ted Kaczynski for president? True, Kaczynski is mentally ill and incarcerated, but being sane and non-incarcerated is no guarantee of wise leadership. George W. Bush is sane and has never spent a day in prison, and look where he got us!

I strongly recommend you to listen to this thing.

I won’t offer too much- or anything right now- in the way of insight. If you care to read what I have to say about health care, chances are you’ve already consumed thousands of words on the matter.

That being said, I strongly urge you to read David Leonhardt’s analysis of health care reform in today’s NYT. Leonhardt takes a broader view of reform to argue that, with one lasting piece of legislation, Obama has officially ended the era of Reagan.

Much about health reform remains unknown. Maybe it will deliver Congress to the Republicans this fall, or maybe it will help the Democrats keep power. Maybe the bill’s attempts to hold down the recent growth of medical costs will prove a big success, or maybe the results will be modest and inadequate. But the ways in which the bill attacks the inequality of the Reagan era — whether you love them or hate them — will probably be around for a long time….

Above all, the central question that both the Reagan and Obama administrations have tried to answer — what is the proper balance between the market and the government? — remains unresolved. But the bill signed on Tuesday certainly shifts our place on that spectrum.

Before he became Mr. Obama’s top economic adviser, Lawrence Summers told me a story about helping his daughter study for her Advanced Placement exam in American history. While doing so, Mr. Summers realized that the federal government had not passed major social legislation in decades. There was the frenzy of the New Deal, followed by the G.I. Bill, the Interstate Highway System, civil rights and Medicare — and then nothing worth its own section in the history books.

Now there is.