Roundup: Media's Take

Peter Osnos: What Presidents Really Think

[Peter Osnos is a journalist turned book editor/publisher. He spent 18 years working at various bureaus for The Washington Post before founding Public Affairs Books.] The modern presidential memoirs—from Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush (co-authored with Brent Scowcroft), and Bill Clinton—tend to be, even if they are bestsellers, on the dull side. Acknowledging the likelihood of generalization, the narrative edges are smoothe

Richard Cohen: Obama's Carter Problem

[Richard Cohen is a columnist for the WaPo.] Almost like an apparition, Jimmy Carter stalks Barack Obama. The former president has published yet another book, his 25th, which has been greeted with some scorn and plenty of ridicule. Garry Wills, in the reliably liberal New York Review of Books, writes that "Carter is a better man than his worst enemy would portray him as. And his worst enemy, it turns out is himself." To which a chorus of critics would quickly add, "No

Anne Applebaum: The Rise of the 'Ordinary' Elite

[Anne Applebaum is a columnist for the WaPo.] In 1958, an English sociologist and Labor Party politician named Michael Young imagined a future in which the British establishment dissolved itself, abolished all forms of hereditary power and created instead a meritocracy (a word Young invented) based on IQ. In Young's fable, the academically talented from the working class happily join the elite. But the less-talented resent them even more than they did the old dukes and duchesses. By

Pepe Escobar: China’s Pipelineistan “War”

[Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times. His latest book is Obama Does Globalistan.]Future historians may well agree that the twenty-first century Silk Road first opened for business on December 14, 2009.  That was the day a crucial stretch of pipeline officially went into operation linking the fabulously energy-rich state of Turkmenistan (via Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan) to Xinjiang Province in China’s far west. Hyperbole did not deter the spectacularly named Gurb

Jonathan S. Tobin: The Mosque and the Mythical Backlash

[Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of Commentary.] On August 25, 2010, a New York City cabdriver was slashed and stabbed by a drunken passenger who allegedly accompanied his assault with anti-Muslim remarks. The driver, Ahmed H. Sharif, a native of Bangladesh, survived the attack, and the accused assailant was quickly arrested and faces a stiff prison sentence. Attacks on New York cabdrivers are not unheard of, but this incident quickly assumed the nature of a symbol of American

Ali H. Soufan: Closing the Case on the Cole

[Ali H. Soufan was an F.B.I. special agent from 1997 to 2005.] Ten years ago, Qaeda terrorists blew a hole in the side of the Navy destroyer Cole in Yemen, killing 17 sailors. Yet the attack’s mastermind still hasn’t been prosecuted, and many of the men tried and imprisoned for the bombing are again free. As Washington debates whether to increase aid to Yemen, it should first remember its duty to seek justice for those sailors — and to heed the broader national-securit

Stanley Kurtz: Obama’s Radical Past

[Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism.] On the afternoon of April 1, 1983, Barack Obama, then a senior at Columbia University, made his way into the Great Hall of Manhattan’s Cooper Union to attend a “Socialist Scholars Conference.” There Obama discovered his vocation as a community organizer, as well as a political program to guide him throughout his life.

Edward Nalbandian: Turkey Has Gone Back on its Word

[Mr. Nalbandian is Minister of Foreign Affairs of Armenia.] Last year on Oct. 10 in Zurich, after intensive negotiations, Armenia and Turkey reached agreement and the foreign ministers of the two countries signed the protocols on the establishment of diplomatic relations, opening of the border and development of bilateral relations. The Armenian-Turkish relations were in a deadlock when President Serzh Sargsyan initiated the normalization process with Turkey. We in Arm

Bret Stephens: From Athens to Beijing

[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.] This could have been the year of Greece. The country where Western civilization was born some 2,500 years ago in a spirit of critical inquiry suddenly offered itself up as a model for where that same civilization may soon end up. Namely, bankrupt, bailed out and deeply marinated in a culture of entitlement, venality and incompetence. Then Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize last Fri

Richard Cohen: Obama's Carter problem

[Richard Cohen is a weekly columnist for The Post, writing on domestic and foreign politics.] Almost like an apparition, Jimmy Carter stalks Barack Obama. The former president has published yet another book, his 25th, which has been greeted with some scorn and plenty of ridicule. Garry Wills, in the reliably liberal New York Review of Books, writes that "Carter is a better man than his worst enemy would portray him as. And his worst enemy, it turns out is himself." To whic

JoAnn Wypijewski: The Media's Odd Hysteria Over Masterbation

[JoAnn Wypijewski is a writer in New York.] Religion was never alone on the ramparts of sexual repression. Science, in the form of the New Orleans Medical & Surgical Journal, contributed the above-cited opinion in 1850. In the same era, American hospitals began circumcising infants as a pre-emptive strike against future self-abuse. The procedure was no more prompted by hygiene than graham crackers or corn flakes were invented to relieve constipated geezers. Such bland high-fiber

Michael S. Doran: The Second Carter Term

[A visiting professor at NYU’s Wagner School, Michael S. Doran is a former senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council and a former deputy assistant secretary of defense. A version of this article originally appeared in the E-Notes series of the Foreign Policy Research Institute.] President Obama came to power intending to rectify the perceived mistakes of George W. Bush in the Middle East. With that goal in mind, he announced two major initiatives: reac

Philip Terzian: Comedy Central at the House of Representatives

[Philip Terzian is literary editor of The Weekly Standard.] On the Thursday after Memorial Day, 1933, J. Pierpont Morgan Jr. sat at the witness table awaiting the resumption of a hearing by the Senate Banking Committee investigating the practices of New York investment banks. Suddenly, a publicist with the Ringling Brothers circus thrust a German-born dwarf named Lya Graf onto Morgan’s lap: “The smallest lady in the world wants to meet the richest man in the world!” announced the pu

Samanth Subramanian: The Ayodhya Ruling Could Be Dangerous

[Samanth Subramanian is a deputy editor at Mint, a New Delhi–based newspaper. His first book, Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast, was published by Penguin in 2010.] On the last day of September, the Allahabad High Court announced its verdict on a disputed shard of land in the town of Ayodhya, where the Babri Masjid mosque once stood and where some Hindu organizations claim the deity Rama was born. This appeared to be fine news—not least because a verdict materialized at

Sally Kohn: Glenn Beck Says "Collective Salvation" is Anti-American -- Tell That to the Founding Fathers

[Sally Kohn is Founder and Chief Education Officer of the Movement Vision Lab, a grassroots popular education organization.] Fox News television host Glenn Beck says the idea of “collective salvation” – that our fates are linked – is “dangerous to the Constitutional republic.” He argues that related notions of social justice, redistribution, and ending oppression are fundamentally anti-American, communist creeds. American’s Founding Fathers would disagree. They embraced collective r

Leon Hadar: No World Order

[Leon Hadar is a Cato Institute research fellow in foreign-policy studies and author, most recently, of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East.] Since the end of geostrategic competition between the U.S. and the (former) USSR, pundits have been proposing new conceptual frameworks for understanding the evolving global political and economic balance — or imbalance — of power. Indeed, for close to two decades, scholars have been debating the direction that the “parad

Christopher Boucek: Yemen ... Ten Years After the USS Cole Bombing

[Christopher Boucek is an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and editor of the book, Yemen on the Brink.] Ten years ago, a U.S. Navy destroyer was bombed while refueling in the Yemeni port of Aden. The suicide attack killed seventeen American sailors and injured thirty-nine. Since the strike, the danger originating out of Yemen has only grown. While Osama bin Laden and other top U.S. targets continue to hide in Pakistan, al-Qaeda in Yemen is now even more da

James Traub: How Lebanon Was Lost

[James Traub is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and author of, most recently, The Freedom Agenda. "Terms of Engagement," his column for ForeignPolicy.com, runs weekly.] Last month, Saad Hariri, the prime minister of Lebanon and the son of Rafik Hariri, the beloved former prime minister who was murdered five years ago in a massive car-bomb explosion, publicly recanted his allegation that high-level Syrian officials had ordered the killing. "During

Daniel Hannan: Why Europeans Can't Throw a Tea Party

[Mr. Hannan is a British Conservative member of the European Parliament and the author of "The New Road to Serfdom: A Letter of Warning to America," just out by HarperCollins.] Tea partiers don't get much positive press here in Europe. They are generally portrayed either as a gaggle of stump-toothed Appalachian mountain men or as a KKK lynch-mob. A typical column in Britain's Guardian newspaper last month described them as "a movement most of whose emergent stars woul

Alice Fordham: Yemen ... wrong lesson from Iraq

[Alice Fordham is a middle-east specialist based in Iraq.] In late September, ministers and diplomats gathered in New York to discuss assistance for the Arab world’s poorest country, Yemen. Fighting the terrorist threat within this fragile state has become an urgent priority for America and its allies. But this time, bruised by mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan, they are taking a rather different approach. In Iraq, instability was deemed a price worth paying for democracy; in Yemen,