Roundup: Media's Take

Adam Holland: What Obama's Uncle Charlie Saw

[Mr. Holland runs an investigative blog.] Comments made on Memorial Day by Barack Obama concerning his uncle's role as a liberator of a concentration camp in World War II have attracted considerable attention. Obama told the story of his great-uncle being among the liberators of a death camp he erroneously identified as Auschwitz (read here). Republican blogs (

Leon Wieseltier: The False Prophesy Of Jeremiah Wright

I was tired of hearing Jeremiah Wright, so I started reading him. This did not improve matters. In his books I found mainly (in the words of one of his admirers) "Africentric Christian manhood," a panic about the situation of the African American male raised into a truculent paranoid theology. There are many expressions of love in Wright's preaching, but only for his own, which is not love's strongest test. In 1991, he inaugurated a series of sermons honoring Martin Luther King Jr., wi

John B. Judis: Obama and the psychology of the color barrier

... Now, with Barack Obama inching closer to the Democratic nomination, race looms yet again as a central factor in American politics. Already, race has played a key part in the Democratic primary, almost certainly hurting Obama among swaths of voters in states like New Jersey, Ohio, and, most recently, Pennsylvania. If he manages to win the nomination anyway--and it appears he will--race seems likely to play an even larger role in the general election. What role, exactly, will that

Michael Crowley: How impeachment explains the Clinton campaign

The Clintons find themselves victimized and under siege. The presidency is being stolen from them. The press is out to get them. They deride elites and champion the masses. They live in a constant state of emergency. But they will endure any humiliation, ride out any crisis, fight on even when fighting seems hopeless. That might sound like a fair summary of how Bill and Hillary Clinton have viewed the past five months. But it also happens to describe what, until now, was the greates

Walter Shapiro: The end of both Clintonism and its opposite -- Kennedy-style liberalism -- draws closer

The sun-dappled image from August 1997 shimmers in memory. The two great Democratic political dynasties had set sail on carefree waters. Aboard the Mya as the schooner maneuvered its way out of Menemsha Harbor on Martha's Vineyard were the reigning Clintons and the radiant Kennedys. The news photographs, which mesh with my memory, show the president and the ruddy white-haired Massachusetts senator, along with a waving Hillary Clinton and the extended Kennedy clan, including Rep. Patrick Kennedy

Douglas Feith: How Bush Sold the War

[Mr. Feith was under secretary of defense for policy from July 2001 until August 2005. This article is adapted from his new memoir, "War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism" (HarperCollins).] In the fall of 2003, a few months after Saddam Hussein's overthrow, U.S. officials began to despair of finding stockpiles of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The resulting embarrassment caused a radical shift in administration rhetoric about the war

Gregory Rodrigue: It's hard to reach a national consensus when so many people are hard partisans

[Gregory Rodriguez is a columnist and author who specializes in a variety of contemporary social issues.] As we cloister ourselves in like-minded enclaves, we're less likely to reach national consensus. May 26, 2008 Voter turnout this primary season has been setting records. With interest so high, some analysts are predicting another blockbuster general election in November. But can American democracy survive all this heightened interest in the political process?

Donald Boudreaux: Is misogyny to blame for Clinton's misfortunes?

[Mr. Boudreaux is chairman of the economics department at George Mason University.] Hillary Clinton is now complaining that her candidacy has been harmed by sexism. Interviewed earlier this week by the Washington Post, Sen. Clinton said the polls show that "more people would be reluctant to vote for a woman [than] to vote for an African American." This gender bias, she grumbled, "rarely gets reported on." So a woman who holds degrees from Wellesley a

Robert McHenry: Who Can Account for the Rev. Hagee? (Hitler, Jews & the Middle East)

[Robert McHenry is a former editor-in-chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica and author of How to Know.] I wonder what sort of man the Rev. John Hagee must be (see video overview, produced prior to the news that McCain and Hagee were parting ways). That “Rev.” tells us that he is, as they say, a man of God. On the evidence, he’s a man who thinks in large, even cosmic terms – he explains great historical events in terms of vast plans, and he finds, if not specific prophesies, then at le

Robert J. Samuelson: The End of Entitlement

We middle-class Americans are in a funk. "The overarching economic narrative of the 2008 campaign is the idea that life for the middle class has gotten more difficult," writes Paul Taylor of the Pew Research Center, which has just published a massive report on middle-class anxieties. By its survey, more than half of Americans believe they either have not moved ahead in the past five years (25 percent) or have fallen behind (31 percent). Pew pronounces this "the most d

George Packer: The fall of conservatism

The era of American politics that has been dying before our eyes was born in 1966. That January, a twenty-seven-year-old editorial writer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat named Patrick Buchanan went to work for Richard Nixon, who was just beginning the most improbable political comeback in American history. Having served as Vice-President in the Eisenhower Administration, Nixon had lost the Presidency by a whisker to John F. Kennedy, in 1960, and had been humiliated in a 1962 bid for the C

Mort Kondracke: Can GOP Reform to Avoid 'Kennedy Scenario' for 2008?

Everyone in and around American politics is pulling for Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) on a personal level. But Republicans have to work very hard to avoid the fulfillment of his political dream. In an interview in March, Kennedy talked about the difference that the 1964 Democratic landslide meant for the passage of liberal legislation, specifically Medicare. He clearly was hoping for a similar triumph this year. Kennedy recalled to me how, two years after his arrival in

Andrew Stephen: Hating Hillary

[Andrew Stephen was appointed US Editor of the New Statesman in 2001, having been its Washington correspondent and weekly columnist since 1998.] History, I suspect, will look back on the past six months as an example of America going through one of its collectively deranged episodes - rather like Prohibition from 1920-33, or McCarthyism some 30 years later. This time it is gloating, unshackled sexism of the ugliest kind. It has been shamelessly peddled by the US media, which - soone

David Horowitz & Ben Johnson: Party of Defeat

What nation can prevail in a war if half its population thinks the war is unnecessary and unjust, and its commander-in-chief is a liar, and its own government the aggressor? What president can mobilize his nation if his word is

Harvey Wasserman: Can a civil rights/feminist presidential union put John Edwards on the Supreme Court?

As the end game for the Democratic nomination takes shape, the historic union of the feminist and civil rights movements has never been more in evidence. Nor has the next upcoming appointment to the US Supreme Court ever been more pivotal. It's no accident that for the first time in history, we have both an African-American and a female contender. No matter what one may think of the two individuals -- their stands on the issues, their personalities, their "baggage" -- the

Michael Schwartz: The Loss of an Imperial Dream

[Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook University has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency. His analyses of America's Iraq have appeared regularly at Tomdispatch.com, as well as Asia Times, Mother Jones, and Contexts. His forthcoming Tomdispatch book, War Without End: The Iraq Debacle in Context (Haymarket, June 2008) explores how the militarized geopolitics of oil led the U.S

Kelpie Wilson: Why Dems and Republicans Are Afraid of Two Words ... Peak Oil

[Kelpie Wilson is Truthout's environment editor. Trained as a mechanical engineer, she embarked on a career as a forest protection activist, then returned to engineering as a technical writer for the solar power industry.] The pro-growth faction has reacted quickly and scathingly to the idea that there could be limits to growth. In 1956, M. King Hubbert, a petroleum geologist with Shell Oil, presented a paper to the American Petroleum Institute that predicted US oil pro

Jeff Biggers: Appalachia's role in the national culture shouldn't be a laughing matter

[Jeff Biggers is author of The United States of Appalachia: How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence, Culture, and Enlightenment to America (Shoemaker and Hoard, 2006).] When I saw the clip of the Daily Show's Jon Stewart apeing a misinformed West Virginia voter last week, I had a flashback to a Saturday Night Live"Appalachian ER" skit, which featured rocker Neil Young embroiled in a mess of incest and depravity.How the media loves its hillbillies. Ma

David Talbot: Obama/Kennedy vs. McCain/Goldwater

[David Talbot is the founder of Salon. He is the author of the New York Times Bestseller, "Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years," which will be released next week in paperback by Free Press.] May 21, 2008 | If John McCain is running for George W. Bush's third presidential term, as Democrats have suggested, Barack Obama is campaigning for John F. Kennedy's second term. That was driven home again this week when the Obama and McCain campaigns squared

Robert Parry: The Bushes and Hitler's Appeasement

[Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His new book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com.] The irony of George W. Bush going before the Knesset and mocking the late Sen. William Borah for expressing surprise at Adolf Hitler's 1939 invasion of Poland is that Bush's own family played a much bigger role assisting the Nazis. If Borah,