Roundup: Media's Take

Andrew Romano: How Tea Partiers Get the Constitution Wrong

[Andrew Romano was named Senior Writer in December 2008.] Since winning the Republican senate primary in Delaware last month, Christine O’Donnell has not had trouble getting noticed. When the Tea Party icon admitted to “dabbl[ing] into witchcraft” as a youngster, the press went wild. When she revealed that she was “not a witch” after all, the response was rabid. O’Donnell has fudged her academic credentials, defaulted on her mortgage, sued a former employer, and campaigned against m

Godfrey Hodgson: America’s mad-hatter politics

[Godfrey Hodgson was director of the Reuters' Foundation Programme at Oxford University, and before that the Observer's correspondent in the United States and foreign editor of the Independent.] "Up above the world you fly / Like a tea-tray in the sky / Twinkle, twinkle"' - Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland The Boston Tea Party describes the moment on 16 December 1773 when the Sons of Liberty, thinly disguised as Native Americans, tipped to

Quin Hillyer: Party Like It's 1995

[Quin Hillyer is a senior editorial writer at the Washington Times and senior editor of The American Spectator.] National Democrats this year are bombarding wavering voters with overblown horror stories about how a Republican Congress will screw up in the same way the previous Republican Congresses did during the G.W. Bush administration. The better comparison would be with what the first Republican Congress in 40 years did in 1995, 1996, and 1997. Set aside some Gingrichian histrio

Mark Helprin: Why Israel Needs the Bomb

[Mr. Helprin, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, is the author of, among other works, "Winter's Tale" (Harcourt), "A Soldier of the Great War" (Harcourt) and, most recently, "Digital Barbarism".] Sixty-five years after Germany's campaign to exterminate the Jews, of the many countries in the world Israel is the only one repeatedly subjected to calls for its extinction. Though Pakistan and India, like Israel and the Arabs, have suffered populatio

Will Hutton: History will see Britain's cuts as one of the great acts of political folly

[Will Hutton has written a weekly column for more than 15 years.] Those who run the International Monetary Fund are supreme financial diplomats. They talk the opaque language of financial final communiques, the honed compromises between the great economic powers. So when Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF managing director, acknowledged that the language of a recent IMF summit communique was "ineffective", that the time for "real action" had come and th

Doyle McManus: Obama's Suddenly Bumpy Road to Reelection

[Doyle McManus, Washington columnist for the Los Angeles Times, has reported on national and international issues from Washington for more than 25 years. His weekly Op-Ed column delivers original reporting and analysis on a wide range of national issues.] One of the oddities of American politics is that midterm congressional elections don't tell us what's likely to happen to a first-term president in the reelection campaign that follows. Bill Clinton's Democrats suffered a catastrop

Tim Rutten: This Brew Just Can't Last

[Tim Rutten’s career as a journalist spans more than 30 years at The Times.] Though the actual voting is still 17 days away, it seems clear that this midterm election cycle will be defined by a surprising presence and a remarkable absence. The presence, of course, is the "tea party," and what's absent are the social issues that so bitterly divided the electorate in recent campaigns.... The problem, as political analyst and George Mason University

Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan: Preserving national treasures

[Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan are award-winning documentary filmmakers who collaborated on the PBS documentary "The National Parks: America's Best Idea."] America's third national park, Yosemite, the home of spectacular waterfalls, silent groves of ancient trees and an unequaled alpine wilderness, celebrated its 120th birthday this month. The place John Muir considered "nature's temple" was arguably where the national park idea was born — a uniquely American idea

Peter Berkowitz: Why Liberals Don't Get the Tea Party Movement

[Mr. Berkowitz is a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution.] Highly educated people say the darndest things, these days particularly about the tea party movement. Vast numbers of other highly educated people read and hear these dubious pronouncements, smile knowingly, and nod their heads in agreement. University educations and advanced degrees notwithstanding, they lack a basic understanding of the contours of American constitutional government.... Washington Po

Federico Campbell: Tijuana Reclaimed

[Federico Campbell is the author of the short story collection “Tijuana: Stories on the Border.”] THERE are two Tijuanas: that of the locals, and that of the rest. The true Tijuana belongs only to the oldest families, the grandparents and great-grandparents of Tijuana. The view from outside, on the other hand, tends to come into focus through fantasy, stereotype and cliché.... In the 19th century, Tijuana resembled the set of an old Western — a few houses, some wooden c

Michael Shifter: Rescued Relations

[Michael Shifter is president of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue.] It would be hard to imagine an odder couple than Sebastián Piñera and Evo Morales. Piñera, after all, is Chile's billionaire president and unabashed free market advocate. Morales, in contrast, is one of the main champions (along with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez) of Latin America's "21st-century socialism." He is the first indigenous president of Bolivia (a country with a majority indigenou

Coleen Rowley and Bogdan Dzakovic: WikiLeaks and 9/11: What If?

[Coleen Rowley, a FBI special agent for more than 20 years, was legal counsel to the FBI field office in Minneapolis from 1990 to 2003. Bogdan Dzakovic was a special agent for the FAA's security division. He filed a formal whistle-blower disclosure against the FAA for ignoring the vulnerabilities documented by the Red Team. For the past nine years he has been relegated to entry-level staff work for the Transportation Security Administration.] If WikiLeaks had been around in 2001, co

Vladimir Shlapentokh: How is Elitist Ayn Rand a Tea Party Hero?

[Vladimir Shlapentokh is one of the founders of contemporary Soviet sociology. After emigrating to the United States from the USSR in 1979, he published several dozen books, as well as many articles on various sociological issues in Russian and American societies. His upcoming book (with Joshua Woods) is "Feudal America: The Elements of Middle Ages in Contemporary Society."] ...At tea party rallies, posters and praise single out the usual suspects: Thomas Jefferson, Sarah

Victor Cha: Without a Loosened Grip, Reform Will Elude North Korea

[The author is a professor at Georgetown University and a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is the author of "North Korea: The Impossible State," which will be published by Ecco in 2011.] The massive Communist Party rallies in North Korea this month provided the world's first real glimpse of that mysterious country's next leader. Kim Jong Eun, youngest son of "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il, seen in pictures for the first time, wa

Bruce L.R. Smith: The Barack Obama Sr. I Knew

[The writer is a retired senior staff member of the Brookings Institution and now a visiting professor at George Mason University's School of Public Policy.] I suspect I am one of the few Americans still alive and modestly in possession of his faculties who knew President Obama's father, and I see nothing of the man I knew in Dinesh D'Souza's Oct. 8 Washington Forum commentary, "The dreams from his father." Barack Obama Sr. was a graduate student in the econom

Earl Ofari Hutchinson: Condi's Moving Civil Rights Story Can't Trump Her Role in Bush's Despicable Iraq Folly

[Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a nationally acclaimed author and political analyst. Hutchinson is the author of ten books on race and politics in America.] An only slightly repentant former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told a well-heeled, prestigious conference crowd on the Future of Asia at the Chinese University of Hong Kong last March that she had doubts and misgivings over the way things ultimately turned out in Iraq. If she had it to do all over again she'd press her bos

Nick Turse: Getting a Read on American War

[Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com. An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and regularly at TomDispatch. His latest book, The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Verso Books), which brings together leading analysts from across the political spectrum, has just been published. Turse is currently a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute]Quick -- name the five most important, influential, and best known

Duncan Campbell: The Death of Linda Norgrove ... Beware the First Rough Draft of History

[Duncan Campbell is a freelance writer who worked for the Guardian for more than 20 years, as crime correspondent and Los Angeles correspondent.] Linda Norgrove was "killed by her captors", "executed by the Taliban" and died after one of her kidnappers "detonated a suicide vest" when her rescuers were "within seconds" of saving her life. That certainly was what the world learned when the news first broke at the weekend of the attempt by US spe

Robert Reich: Reading America's Tea Leaves

[Robert Reich was the nation's 22nd Secretary of Labor and is a professor at the University of California at Berkeley.] November 3, 2020. The newly formed Independence Party pulls enough votes away from both the Republican and Democratic candidates to give its own candidate, Margaret Jones, a plurality of votes, an Electoral College victory and the presidency. A significant number of Independence Party members have also taken seats away from Democrats and Republicans in Congress....

Clifford D. May: Of Niqabs and Neo-Colonialism

[Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism and Islamism.] ...What do you think about the niqab — sometimes also called a burqa — the veil that leaves only the eyes of a woman uncovered? Critics, not least Muslim critics such as Fadéla Amara, France’s secretary of state for urban policy, suggest that when a woman is forced to wear one it not only deprives her of individuality but is, effectively, a portable pri