Roundup: Media's Take

Daniel Sack: The Perils of publicity for churches suddenly in the news

[Daniel Sack is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ and administrator of the Border Crossing Project at the University of Chicago Divinity School.] They say in this age of celebrity that there's no such thing as bad publicity. Thanks to the current presidential campaign, two American religious groups will find out if that's true. The now-suspended campaign of Mitt Romney thrust his religious tradition, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, in

Gabriel Lafitte: Tibet ... revolt with memories

[Gabriel Lafitte is a development policy consultant to the environment & development desk of the Tibetan government-in-exile, based in IndiaThis article was first published in the online journal NewMatilda.] The Tibetan revolt of March 2008, like those of 1959 and 1987, will be crushed by the overwhelming might of the Chinese military. No match could be more unequal: maroon-clad nuns and monks versus the machinery of oppression of the global rising power. In recent months, fast-

John Spiri: Tokyo Teachers Fight an Uphill Battle Against Nationalism and Coercion

[John Spiri is an Associate Professor and writer at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology.] In Japan at War: An Oral History, Hideo Sato recalls being forced to hoist the hinomaru, the Japanese flag, in tandem with the playing of Kimigayo — “His Majesty’s Reign,” the Japanese national anthem — as a schoolchild in the 1940s. If the flag reached the top of the pole too early the teachers would beat him. More

Stephen B. Cohen: Democratic Party's split may lead down a path similar to 1968's

[Stephen B. Cohen is a Georgetown University law professor who worked in the 1968 presidential campaign of Sen. Eugene McCarthy.] Consider the stunning parallels between the contest for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2008 and the same contest 40 years earlier in 1968, which ended in a party divided. Both contests feature insurgent political campaigns, and the catalyst for the insurgency in both cases is opposition to an unpopular and misconceived war: in 2008 in Ira

Roger Cohen: Obama’s Brother in China

So there I was, a couple of weeks back, sitting under a mango tree in western Kenya, when Senator Barack Obama’s half-sister Auma says to me: “My daughter’s father is British. My mom’s brother is married to a Russian. I have a brother in China engaged to a Chinese woman.” My understanding is that this half brother living in China is Mark. He’s the son of Obama’s father and an American woman named Ruth, whom Obama Sr. met while at Harvard in the 1960s and brought back to

Barack Obama: A More Perfect Union (Speech in Philadelphia)

"Spengler": The peculiar theology of black liberation

Senator Barack Obama is not a Muslim, contrary to invidious rumors. But he belongs to a Christian church whose doctrine casts Jesus Christ as a"black messiah" and blacks as"the chosen people". At best, this is a radically different kind of Christianity than most Americans acknowledge; at worst it is an ethnocentric heresy. What played out last week on Ame

Jeff Jacoby: Patton and the 2008 vote

[Mr. Jacoby is a Boston Globe columnist.] ON THE eve of the Normandy invasion in 1944, General George S. Patton, addressing the men of the US Third Army, delivered a speech that would become legendary long before George C. Scott reenacted it on a Hollywood soundstage. "Americans love a winner," Patton growled, "and will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise cowards. Americans play to win - all the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost

Mark Steyn: Obama's pastor disaster

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright thinks that, given their treatment by white America, black Americans have no reason to sing "God Bless America." "The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America," he told his congregation. "God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human." I'm not a believer in guilt by association, or the campaign vau

David Sirota: Remembering What Nixon Learned

[David Sirota is a nationally syndicated weekly newspaper columnist for Creators Syndicate. He is the author of Hostile Takeover: How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government and How We Take It Back (Crown 2006). His second book, The Uprising, is due in the Spring of 2008.] A half century ago, Richard Nixon spearheaded his party's national congressional campaign in the face of a recession like we face today. Then Dwight Eisenhower's vice president, he decided the GOP would

Paul Beatty: How Obama is like Jackie Robinson, (early) Al Pacino, and the Fonz, or: Why Geraldine Ferraro is so wrong.

[Paul Beatty is a novelist and poet. His books include The White Boy Shuffle and Tuff.] ... Obama's star power is partly a testament to the miasma of incompetency rising from the nation's capitol. In some respects Obama is to Bush and post-9/11 America as Adenauer was to Hitler and post-war Germany, and Tony Dungy was to Sam Wyche and the hapless '95 Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He's change. He's new. He's completely unidentifiable with the blunders, war crimes, and bad play-calling of the

Scott Horton: Armenia and the Unfinished Business of Ethnonationalism

Catholic University historian Jerry Z. Muller writes in the current issue of Foreign Affairs that Americans have a tendency to under-assess the importance of nationalism as a political force around the world. Indeed, he takes a particular focus on ethnic nationalism—the tendency to define the nation-state in terms of a particular ethnic group. Americans also find ethnonationalism discomfiting both intellectually and morally. Social scientists go to great lengths to demonstrate that

George F. Will: Running-Mate Math

Were it not for the 12th Amendment, ratified on June 15, 1804, presidential nominees could, and probably would prefer to, run alone, without being saddled with pesky vice presidential running mates, who can be embarrassments. Unfortunately, the presidential election of 1800 happened. It was "a magnificent catastrophe" (that is the title of a splendid new book on it, by Edward J. Larson of Pepperdine University). As the two-party system, unanticipated by the Constitution's

Sherry F. Colb: Client 9 and President 42 ... Drawing Parallels Between Spitzer and Clinton

[Sherry F. Colb is a Professor at Rutgers Law School in Newark. Colb has taught courses in Criminal Procedure, Evidence, Mental Health Law, and Feminist Legal Studies.] On March 11, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's fall from grace topped the news. Federal investigators had caught Spitzer -known to them as "Client 9" -- arranging for a prostitute named "Kristen" to meet him for an assignation at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. Ten years ago, in 19

John Judis: Obama and the cult of the new

[John B. Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.] ... Obama is the candidate of the new--a "new generation," a "new leadership," a "new kind of politics," to borrow phrases he has used. But, in emphasizing newness, Obama is actually voicing a very old theme. When he speaks of change, hope, and choosing the future over the past, when he pledges to end racial divisions or attac

David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'

... I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind. As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart. These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know

Richard Cohen: Dems are working hard to give McCain a fighting chance

In a 2007 column, I compared this current presidential campaign to that of 1972, when George McGovern lost 49 states to Richard Nixon. The parallels are in some ways obvious - the Vietnam War and the war in Iraq, above all. What I could not have foreseen a year ago was how much more obvious the parallels would become. Back in '72, the Democratic Party was split between doves and hawks, reformers and stogie smokers - even men and women. The result was a national convention that was boisterous, un

Andrew Leonard: So long, John -- gas is $4 a gallon

On March 7, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States reached $3.17. Four dollars a gallon by summertime is well within the realm of possibility -- even if that comes as a surprise to the current occupant of the White House. Record gas prices? During an election year? What could it mean? Let's review the historical record. When Jimmy Carter was sworn in as president in January 1977, the average price of a gallon of regular leaded gasoline was 60 cen

Bret Stephens: A President, Not a Symbol

Sometime before Barack Obama's middle name slipped into the realm of the unmentionable, it was supposed to be a selling point of his candidacy. "Well, I think if you've got a guy named Barack Hussein Obama, that's a pretty good contrast to George W. Bush," Mr. Obama told PBS's Tavis Smiley on October 18, 2007. "If you believe that we've got to heal America and we've got to repair our standing in the world, then I think my supporters believe that I am the messenger who can deliver

Noel Malcolm: Is America the new Rome?

[Review of The New Rome: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America by Cullen Murphy.] The American edition of this book, which came out a few months ago, bore the title Are We Rome? Apparently that was the sort of question for which ancient Romans would have used the word 'nonne', expecting the answer 'yes'; for the British edition is baldly entitled The New Rome. Sidney and Beatrice Webb did something similar when they dropped the question mark from their Soviet Co