Roundup: Media's Take

Robert Draper: Prisoner of War

... JOHN MCCAIN HAS been to Iraq eight times. Those trips, he maintains, have been indispensable in informing his thinking about the war. You cannot appreciate Iraq’s complexity, McCain says, until you see it. Correspondingly, he tends to belittle those war critics—most noticeably presidential rival Barack Obama—whose passports are less well-worn. As his friend and surrogate Senator Lindsey Graham pointedly asserts: “It matters to go.” Of course, simply touching down in-country does

Steve Fraser: The End of a Gilded Age

[Steve Fraser is working on a book about the two gilded ages. A TomDispatch regular and co-director of the American Empire Project series at Metropolitan Books, he is the author of, among other works, the recently published Wall Street: America's Dream Palace.] What is Washington to do as the financial system collapses? Clearly, stark differences in appro

Geoffrey Wansell: So what can we learn from the Crash of 1929 to avoid a 21st Century Great Depression?

[Geoffrey Wansell is an author and journalist.] By the end of September 1929, the American stock market on New York’s Wall Street was riding the wave of a decade of intoxicating growth. The Roaring Twenties — that era of the Jazz Age, bootleggers and gangsters like Al Capone — had seen millions of ordinary Americans caught up in the excitement of owning shares, and making money. The Dow Jones Industrial Average of leading shares had grown five-fold in the

Glen Johnson: McCain leads a dual life as powerbroker

John McCain embraces and expels Washington like an accordion player belting out a song. Squeeze in and he touts his vast knowledge of the capital city. Draw out and he casts himself a reformer bent on changing its ways. It's a remarkable dichotomy echoed throughout the Republican establishment, as a party that's held the White House for the past eight years tries to retain its grip in what has shaped up as a change election. "Reform becomes contagious

Rupert Cornwell: What was Roosevelt's New Deal, and is something like it needed today?

[Rupert Cornwell has written articles published in The Independent.] Why are we asking this now? The current financial and economic turmoil is increasingly likened to the crisis that began with the Wall Street crash of 1929, paving the way to the Great Depression of the 1930s. That slump, the deepest and most prolonged economic downturn of modern times, continued through much of the decade. The response of Franklin Roosevelt, who became President of the United States i

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: Forget about hockey moms and Paris Hilton--the financial collapse is a stark reminder of what actually matters in this election

In democracies, all political factions run against an elite. Since the New Deal, Democrats have cast themselves against the financial and business elite. Since the 1960s, Republicans have thrashed the cultural and intellectual elite. Over the weekend, the moneyed class became much more vulnerable. The foolishness of our financial geniuses now threatens to bring economic sorrow to Main Street. Franklin Roosevelt's 1936 attack on "the privileged princes of these new economic dyna

E.J. Dionne: Whose Elitism Problem Now?

In democracies, all political factions run against an elite. Since the New Deal, Democrats have cast themselves against the financial and business elite. Since the 1960s, Republicans have thrashed the cultural and intellectual elite. Over the weekend, the moneyed class became much more vulnerable. The foolishness of our financial geniuses now threatens to bring economic sorrow to Main Street. Franklin Roosevelt's 1936 attack on "the privileged princes of these new economic dyna

Bret Stephens: Palin and the 'Experience' Canard

If nothing else, the media meltdown over Sarah Palin's candidacy for the vice presidency has exposed the not-unsuspected truth that, when it comes to historical ignorance and political amnesia, our cultural panjandrums are in a class by themselves. ABC's Charlie Gibson is only the latest to offer himself upon the altar of self-parody with his pop-quizzing of the Alaska governor during their interview last week. Gibson: "Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?"

Robert Higgs: Ticking Time Bomb Explodes, Public Is Shocked

The failure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, setting in motion the biggest government bailout/takeover in U.S. history, brings a grim sense of fulfillment to competent economists. After all, what did people expect, that water would flow uphill forever? This financial mega-mess is the same sort of event as the collapse of the USSR’s centrally planned economy, another economically unworkable Rube Goldberg apparatus that was kept going, more or less badly, for decades before it fell apar

Steven Aftergood: Overcoming declassification

The next President could achieve a systematic reduction in government secrecy by directing each agency that classifies information to conduct a detailed public review of its classification policies with the objective of reducing secrecy to the essential minimum and declassifying everything that does not meet the standard for classification.Modeled on the Fundamental Classification Policy Review that was performed by the Department of Energy in 1995, this approach may be the

Daniel Finkelstein: Sarah Palin and the man who wanted Robert Kennedy dead

[Daniel Finkelstein is Chief Leader Writer of The Times and writes a weekly column.] When Sarah Palin used this phrase in her acceptance speech: We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity she attributed it to "a writer". And added: I know just the kind of people that writer had in mind when he praised Harry Truman. I didn't think much more of it. But now the identity of the writer is ca

Daniel Gross: Lehman's failure marks the end of an era

Aside from signaling the end of an era for Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, this weekend's activity definitively drew a line at the end of another historical era: the Age of Glass-Steagall. The Glass-Steagall Act is the Depression-era law that separated commercial and investment banking. It was functionally repealed in 1998, when Travelers (the parent company of Salomon Smith Barney) acquired Citicorp. And it was officially repealed in 1999. But recent events on Wall Street-the fa

Sasha Abramsky: Running after Reagan

[Sasha Abramsky is a senior fellow at the New York-based think tank Demos.] I've been having strange emotions recently. Somehow, I have become nostalgic for Ronald Reagan. It's a somewhat bizarre feeling to have, since I've always thought Reagan's election represented one of the great calamities in modern American history. So let me explain. Reagan was a smiling, genial extremist. He promised a new dawn for a country that suddenly seemed no longer young; a new lease of

Fareed Zakaria: This is not a cold war

[Fareed Zakaria is the editor of Newsweek International and author of "The Post-American World".] I'm sure you've heard the news. The cold war is back. Or history has returned. Or we're now in the 19th century world of great power politics. Russia's attack on Georgia has unleashed a barrage of cliches. Globalisation and integration have been exposed as shams. Our naive idea that we were living in a benign international environment has been shattered. Most of t

Frank Rich: Palin borrowed a quote from an extreme right-winger of forties

... Aligning herself with “a young farmer and a haberdasher from Missouri” who “followed an unlikely path to the vice presidency,” she read a quote from an unidentified writer [in her acceptance address at the Republican National Convention] who, she claimed, had praised Truman: “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity.” Then Palin added a snide observation of her own: Such small-town Americans, she said, “run our factories” and “fight our wars” and are “al

Patrick Hennessy and Melissa Kite: Labour revolt against Gordon Brown: Party like it's 1990

[Patrick Hennessy is Political Editor at the Sunday Telegraph. Melissa Kite is Deputy Political Editor at the Sunday Telegraph.] As her black, chauffeur-driven Jaguar swept through the familiar gates of Chequers yesterday, Margaret Thatcher's thoughts might well have turned to the subject of plots against prime ministers. Eighteen years ago, her own premiership fell victim to an assassination attempt that began among her own backbenchers. It became terminal when a significant number

Andy Beckett: Crisis? What crisis? ... Worrying Parallels for Brown

[Andy Beckett is writing a book for Faber about British politics in the 1970s.] All ailing governments have an atmosphere. In the mid-1990s, John Major's slowly expired amid pinstriped rebellions by Eurosceptics and Tory sleaze stories in the papers. In the early 90s, Margaret Thatcher's sickened more suddenly as poll tax protesters rioted and Michael Heseltine quietly plotted. In the early 70s, Ted Heath's was stalked and then strangled by the National Union of Mineworkers.

Paul Theroux: The bloody rise of the vote hunter

All this talk about moose hunting! It is as though, because of the animal's enormous size and imposing antlers, bringing one down is a heroic feat of marksmanship. Nothing could be further from the truth. As Henry David Thoreau wrote in The Maine Woods, killing these big, gentle, myopic creatures is more "like going out by night to some woodside pasture and shooting your neighbour's horses". Thoreau's descriptions of the moose he saw in Maine are inspired and fanciful: &q

Paul Rogat Loeb: Pit Bull Palin

[Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time. See www.paulloeb.org To receive his articles directly, email sympa@lists.onenw.org with the subject line:

WSJ Editorial: Obama's lost years

Barack Obama makes his first campaign visit today to his alma mater, Columbia University. Just don't ask the prolific self-diarist to talk about his undergraduate days in Morningside Heights. The Columbia years are a hole in the sprawling Obama hagiography. In his two published memoirs, the 47-year-old Democratic nominee barely mentions his experience there. He refuses to answer questions about Columbia and New York -- which, in this media age, serves only to raise more of the