Roundup: Media's Take

Rep. Joe Baca: Cinco de Mayo's celebrated in the US

Every year, as we approach the 5th of May, stores and companies begin to promote Cinco de Mayo in their storefronts and through their advertisements. There are office parties, full of festive decorations, and children at school might have the opportunity to take a swing at a piñata. This splendor is to celebrate a date of significance to Mexicans and Mexican-Americans alike. While this is not Mexican Independence Day (that is on September 16th), it is a date pivotal to the history o

George Will: Conservatives should beware of presidential power

... A 1948 photograph here shows Truman at a lectern delivering a campaign speech in Los Angeles. Seated near the lectern is the man who had introduced Truman, 37-year-old Ronald Reagan. Between Truman's and Reagan's presidencies, between the dawn and dusk of what John Kennedy called the Cold War's "long twilight struggle," Americans accepted extravagant -- or so the Founders would have thought -- assertions of presidential powers. These assertions have been made by presidents of both

Steve Chapman: McCain finds his own radical friend

[Steve Chapman is a member of the Tribune's editorial board. E-mail: schapman@tribune.com] Can a presidential candidate justify a long and friendly relationship with someone who, back in the 1970s, extolled violence and committed crimes in the name of a radical ideology—and who has never shown remorse or admitted error? When the candidate in question is Barack Obama, John McCain says no. But when the candidate in question is John McCain, he'

Delbert Spurlock: Matthew Ridgway warned against relying on an all-volunteer military, and now we can see why

[Delbert Spurlock is a former general counsel and assistant secretary of the Army (dubert@live.com). He lives in Reston, Va.] America's model for an all-volunteer military has now become a casualty of our war of choice in Iraq. The consequences for our military, our young people and their families, and our diplomatic flexibility to sustain our current commitments and to meet future challenges will be significant. None of this is being discussed i

Evan R. Goldstein: What happened to the pragmatism that marked early Israeli leaders?

[Evan Goldstein is a staff editor at The Chronicle Review, the magazine of ideas published by The Chronicle of Higher Education. ] Immediately following the Six-Day War, in June 1967, a contingent of Mossad agents fanned out across the West Bank to meet with members of the Palestinian elite. A few days earlier, the Israeli army had entered the area and occupied villages and towns. The agents were charged with taking the temperature of the Palestinian body politic and recommending wh

E.J.Dionne: Not to absolve Reverend Wright of his behavior, but ...

[E.J. Dionne, Jr. is the author of the recently published Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right. He is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Georgetown University.] Do white right-wing preachers have it easier than black left-wing preachers? Is there a double standard? The political explosion around the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was inevitable, given Wright's personal closeness to Barack Ob

Elizabeth Wurzel: Obama's Other Radical Friends

[Miss Wurtzel, a recent graduate of Yale Law School, is the author of "Prozac Nation" (Houghton Mifflin, 1994).] ... Apparently, back when he was running for state senate, Barack Obama had fund-raising events at the home of Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, and there's been some press about the senator's friendship with this controversial Weathercouple. Many reporters are well aware, even though Mr. Obama has described his connection to Ayers and Dohrn as "flimsy,"

Robert Kagan: U.S. foreign policy in expansive, idealistic, and militarist mode has done well: defeats of Nazism, Japanese imperialism, and Soviet communism, for instance

[Robert Kagan is senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Transatlantic Fellow at The German Marshall Fund. He is the author of The Return of History and the End of Dreams (Knopf).] “The Iraq War will always be linked with the term ‘neoconservative,’” George Packer wrote in his book on the war, and he is probably right. The conventional wisdom today, likely to be the approved version in the history books, is that a small group of neoconservatives seized

Malcolm A. Kline: Cold War on Campus

The latest survey on academic bias has sent academics into their usual state of denial despite evidence of same that frequently stares them right in the face. “Taken together, 40 percent of the Americans in the survey said professors often use their classrooms as political platforms,” Robin Wilson of the Chronicle of Higher Education reported on April 4th of a Gallup poll. “When that many Americans think this happens often, higher ed has a problem,” says S. Robert Lichter, director o

Jeff Greenfield: Obama and Orwell and elitism

[Mr. Greenfield is a commentator on CBS News.] Elitism has bedeviled American liberalism for the better part of four decades. It undermined the presidential campaigns of Al Gore and John Kerry, and now it's making mischief in the Obama campaign every bit as much as the omnipresence of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The charge that liberal candidates don't connect with or understand the values and beliefs of regular Americans is embedded in old epithets like "limousine l

Pepe Escobar: The Iranian Chessboard ... Five Ways to Think about Iran under the Gun

[Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is the roving correspondent for Asia Times and an analyst for The Real News. He's been a foreign correspondent since 1985, based in London, Milan, Los Angeles, Paris, Singapore, and Bangkok. Since the late 1990s, he has specialized in covering the arc from the Middle East to Central Asia, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has made frequent visits to Iran and is the

Steve Plaut: How 'Nakba' Proves There's No Palestinian Nation

[Steven Plaut, a frequent contributor to The Jewish Press, is a professor at Haifa University. His book “The Scout” is available at Amazon.com. He can be contacted at steveneplaut@yahoo.com.] Over the past few years, the term nakba (also spelled naqba) has become the favorite nonsense word of the Anti-Israel Lobby. Meaning “catastrophe” in Arabic, it has been embraced by anti-Semites all over the planet to refer to Israel’s creation

Humberto Fontova: Jeremiah Wright's Cuban Friends

[Humberto Fontova is the author of four books including Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who idolize Him and Fidel; Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant.] Was it remotely conceivable that someone with Jeremiah's Wright's worldview and connections had somehow avoided a pilgrimage to the world capitol of Yankee-hatred, to worship and commiserate with its high priests? Not a chance. Reverend Wright was part of Revered Jesse Jackson's 300 person entourage to Havan

Clarence Jones: MLK and the Jews

[Mr. Jones was Martin Luther King's personal attorney and close adviser. He is the co-author, with Joel Engel, of "What Would Martin Say" (Harper, 2008), from which this was adapted.] Earlier this month, at a Los Angeles event for the national African-American fraternity Kappa Alpha Psi, the keynote speaker launched into an anti-Semitic tirade – directed at the fraternity's guest of honor. The shocking episode shows just how far we've strayed from the original vision of th

Barbara Crossette: The Clintonian Legacy

[Barbara Crossette, South Asia bureau chief for the New York Times from 1988 to 1991, reported on the first election of Benazir Bhutto and the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, which won her a George Polk Award.] That Hillary Clinton has apparently found success in talking tough about foreigners and sinking to Bush-like "politics of fear" only illuminates how little American foreign policy has been seriously debated in the Democratic presidential nominee race, and how little

Noam Scheiber: Why'd Obama Join Trinity in the First Place?

The question is worth revisiting now that his ex-pastor is threatening his entire campaign. I've heard two basic theories since the Wright tapes first surfaced in March. The first is cynical: Obama was a black politician in Chicago with an exotic background and intimidating credentials. He needed a home in a black church to gain credibility with his less educated, less affluent, more parochial-minded constituents. Trinity offered him the requisite cred. The second, no

Michele Willens: Before there was Hillary, there was Helen Gahagan Douglas

If only. In 1950, Richard Nixon, then a 38-year-old first-term Congressman from California, high on Hiss-bashing, ran for the United State Senate. His opponent was a 50-year-old ("but still young looking," according to the New York Times) three-term Congresswoman, Helen Gahagan Douglas. Their race broke all previous records for spending (on his side) and vitriol (almost all on his too). This, after all, was where Nixon first earned his moniker "Tricky Dic

Patrice de Beer: May ‘68 ... France's politics of memory

[Patrice de Beer is former London and Washington correspondent for Le Monde.] France is approaching a potent anniversary in a strange mood. The student riots of May 1968 radically shook an arch-conservative society and came near to toppling then-president Charles de Gaulle - as well as inspiring students in Europe, the United States and Japan to emulate Paris's "example". It is natural, then, that the fortieth anniversary is being vigorously commemorated; more than 100 boo

John Lundberg: Civilization's First Attack Ads

If you've missed Rudy Giuliani's 9-11 exploitation ads or waited anxiously for Swiftboaters to start running some shadowy Bin Laden video, this 2008 Democratic primary is for you! At the rate it's devolving, voters in South Dakota and Montana can look forward to Deal or No Deal getting interrupted by footage of Hitler at the Reichstag--with Obama. All the ridiculous sniping got me wondering how politicians went after one another befo

Roger Pulvers: Hail and farewell to the world's greatest 'Good Gringo' U.S. president

On April 1, the widely read History News Network (HNN) Web site announced the results of a survey it conducted among historians. In what was, alas, not an April Fool's joke, they asked the historians whether they considered the presidency of George W. Bush a success or a failure. Out of 109 historians surveyed, 107 said they viewed the Bush presidency as a failure, although only 67 of them classified him as "the worst president in the nation's history" —