Roundup: Media's Take

Gerard Alexander: Conservatism Does Not Equal Racism

[Gerard Alexander is an associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.] From an immigration law in Arizona to a planned mosque near Ground Zero to Glenn Beck emoting at the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, the controversies roiling American politics in recent weeks and months have featured an ugly undertone, suggesting meanness, prejudice and,

Jonah Goldberg: The Next Hoover

[Jonah Goldberg is editor at large for the National Review.] ...I’m beginning to think Barack Obama isn’t the next FDR — as so many promised — but the next Hoover. The creation myth of the modern Democratic party goes something like this: After years of capitalist excess, exemplified by Hoover’s “market fundamentalism,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced reasonable and pragmatic reforms that not only conquered the Great Depression but “saved democracy” itself.

Timothy Noah: The United States of Inequality

[Timothy Noah is senior writer for Slate.] Liberal politicians and activists have long argued that the federal government caused the Great Divergence. And by "federal government," they generally mean Republicans, who have controlled the White House for 20 of the past 30 years, after all. A few outliers even argue that for Republicans, creating income inequality was a conscious and deliberate policy goal. Until recently, the consensus among academics—even most

Andrew F. March: What Shari'a Actually Says

[Andrew F. March teaches Western political philosophy and Islamic law and political thought at Yale University. He is the author of Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus.] Every American now knows something about"shari'a" -- the Islamic religious law. What most know, or think they know, about shari'a comes to be symbolized by a few violent rules -- stoning, cutting off hands or lashing. Other practices many Westerners find disturbing, like

Aaron Goldstein: Where St. Nicholas Once Stood

[Aaron Goldstein writes from Boston, Massachusetts.] With all the talk of building a mosque in the shadow of the World Trade Center, how many of you knew there was a church that once stood in the shadow of the World Trade Center? And how many of you knew this same church was destroyed on September 11, 2001? I must confess that until a few weeks ago I wasn't aware that a church was among the property that was leveled in Lower Manhattan that Tuesday morning. When the Sout

Nick Donovan: The War Criminal Next Door

[Nick Donovan works at the Aegis Trust, which works internationally to build up legal cases against suspected war criminals.] The film Marathon Man is one of the great paranoid thrillers of the 1970s, infamous for the scene in which the Nazi dentist played by Lawrence Olivier drills through Dustin Hoffman's teeth into his live nerve below, repeatedly asking "Is it safe?" This is the stuff of Hollywood horror films, but another scene is more plausible: Olivier -- whose char

Steve Kornacki: Republicans Flunk Government Shutdown History

[Steve Kornacki is Salon's news editor.] In the same way that many of them still -- after all these years and against all available evidence -- would rather chalk up Bill Clinton's 1992 victory to the presence of Ross Perot than to their own deficiencies, there are Republicans who still refuse to accept the reality of what happened when they forced a shutdown of the federal government in 1995. That's probably the best way to understand the eagerness with which so many o

Michael Gerson: Will 2010 Midterms Be 1994 All Over Again?

[Michael Gerson is a columnist for the WaPo and a former speechwriter for the Bush administration.] ...For nearly two years, American politics has been a controlled ideological experiment. A popular president, granted sizable House and Senate majorities, passed the agenda nearly every Democrat wanted -- a large stimulus package and a major expansion of the federal role in health care. The economic outcome has been universally disappointing. A group of highly motivated activists has

Alexei Pushkov: Moving From 'Boris and Bill' to a Real Reset

[Alexei Pushkov is director of the Institute of Contemporary International Studies at the Diplomatic Academy of the Foreign Ministry and anchor of political program “Postscript” on TV Center.] As we enter September, a question naturally arises: What is the future of the much-famed “reset” in U.S.-Russian relations? The previous political season between the two countries ended on a low note because of the spy scandal in the United States, which started — as if by coincidence — three

James Antle: Republicans Partying Like It's 1994

[W. James Antle, III is associate editor of The American Spectator.] The polls keep getting worse for the Democrats. Last week, Gallup showed the Republicans ahead by ten points -- 51 percent to 41 percent -- on the question of who registered voters would prefer to elect to Congress. This is the biggest generic ballot lead for the GOP in sixty years of polling by this venerable organization. On most issues, voters preferred congressional Republicans to their Democratic

Jeffrey Goldberg: Fidel to Ahmadinejad: 'Stop Slandering the Jews'

[Jeffrey Goldberg is a national correspondent for The Atlantic. Author of the book Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror, he has reported from the Middle East and Africa. He also writes the magazine's advice column.] A couple of weeks ago, while I was on vacation, my cell phone rang; it was Jorge Bolanos, the head of the Cuban Interest Section (we of course don't have diplomatic relations with Cuba) in Washington. "I have a message for you from Fidel," he said. This

Evgeny Morozov: The 20th Century Roots of 21st Century Statecraft

[Evgeny Morozov, originally from Belarus, is a Yahoo! Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University.] Hence a question that has been bugging me for months now: What exactly is so 21st century about "21st century statecraft"? Am I being unfair to the State Department in drawing such parallels and asking such questions? Well, here are the facts. Silicon Valley CEOs do join American diplomats to exotic locals like Siberia, Syria and

Jonah Goldberg: Don't Dismiss the Market Economy

[Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large at the National Review and writes a column for the LA Times.] ...In 1958, Leonard Read wrote one of the most famous essays in the history of libertarianism, "I, Pencil." It begins, "I am a lead pencil — the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write." It is one of the most simple objects in human civilization. And yet "not a single person on the face of this Earth knows how to ma

Nir Rosen: What America Left Behind in Iraq

[Nir Rosen is a fellow at the New York University Center on Law and Security and author of the forthcoming book Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World. Research for this article was supported by the Nation Institute.] Hundreds of cars waiting in the heat to slowly pass through one of the dozens of checkpoints and searches they must endure every day. The constant roar of generators. The smell of fuel, of sewage, of kabobs. Automatic weapons pointed a

Jack Hunter: Baghdad Bob Goes to Washington

[Jack Hunter is a conservative commentator on WTMA 1250 AM talk radio and columnist for the Charleston City Paper.] When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Iraqi Information Minister Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf quickly became known as “Baghdad Bob” by declaring on Iraqi television that Saddam Hussein’s military brigades were successfully turning back the invading forces. During the same time the U.S. was handily dominating Iraq militarily, Bob told Iraqis that “We slaughtered them

Bret Stephens: 'Rhymes With Fagin' ... Time's Cover Attempts to Delegitimize Israel

[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.] If you're a reader of a certain age, you might understand the headline. In May 1977, when Menachem Begin was elected Israel's prime minister, Time magazine set out to describe the man, beginning with the correct pronunciation of his last name: "Rhymes with Fagin," the editors explained, invoking the character from Oliver Twist. Modern Israeli leader; archetypal Jewish lowlif

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: China’s Young Officers and the 1930s Syndrome

[Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has covered world politics and economics for 25 years, based in Europe, the US, and Latin America. He joined the Telegraph in 1991, serving as Washington correspondent and later Europe correspondent in Brussels. He is now International Business Editor in London.] I try to remain optimistic that the US and China will work out a more or less amicable way to run the world for the next half century, a “Chimerica” of interwoven superpowers. But it wa

Steve Kornacki: Meet the Newest Reagan Revisionism Hall of Fame Inductee

[Steve Kornacki is Salon's news editor.] Ladies and gentlemen, meet Jim Kessler: the latest pundit to use hindsight to invent nonexistent differences between Ronald Reagan's political standing in 1982 and Barack Obama's today. Kessler, who is identified as vice-president of Third Way, penned an Op-Ed in Sunday's Washington Post under the headline, "To keep the 2010 midterms from repeating 1994, Democrats can learn from Reagan." In Kessler's telling, Reagan fac

Michael Lind: Wall Street's Anti-Obama Strategy: Absurd Analogies

[Michael Lind is policy director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation.] Has the war of metaphors gone too far? Historians, constitutional lawyers and even zoologists have jumped into the fray provoked by Wall Street critics of the Obama administration and Congress. It all began when Stephen A. Schwarzman, a co-founder (with right-wing Republican deficit hawk Pete Peterson) of the Blackstone Group, a major private equity firm, said that the Obama

John B. Judis: You Say Recession, I Say Depression

[John B. Judis is a senior editor of The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.] The terms “recession” and “depression” were once used to suggest that a downturn was not as bad as a “panic” or “crisis.” In fact, for the first years of his presidency, Herbert Hoover chose to refer to the downturn as a “depression” in an effort to convey that what the country was experiencing was just a temporary indentation. Only in 1931 did Hoover begi