Roundup: Media's Take

James Mann: It's Not Just D'Souza ... British People Think Obama Is a Kenyan Anti-Colonialist, Too

[James Mann has written three books on America’s relationship with China. He is an author-in-residence at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.] The assertion of Newt Gingrich and of the conservative author Dinesh D’Souza that President Obama’s actions can somehow be explained by a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview has already been greeted with the ridicule it deserves. But the funny thing is that while this theory (let’s cal

Stephen Biddle: Obama's War by Other Means

[Stephen Biddle is the Roger Hertog senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.] Bob Woodward's new book, Obama's Wars, quotes the president expressing concern about the domestic political implications of military strategy in Afghanistan: "I can't lose the whole Democratic Party," he tells Sen. Lindsey Graham in defending his decision to announce July 2011 as the date for the beginning of U.S. troop withdrawals. Some have denounced this as evidenc

Isi Leibler: Islamophobia and the Jews

[Isi Leibler chairs the Diaspora-Israel relations committee of the Jerusalem Center Public Affairs and is a former chairman of the governing board of the World Jewish Congress.] It is surely high time for Diaspora leaders to stop living in denial and get their act together. Instead of competing with each other in oozing political correctness, they should display some backbone and call a spade a spade. We are currently witnessing the greatest revival of global anti-Semit

Nikolas K. Gvosdev: Obama as Gorbachev

[Nikolas K. Gvosdev is the former editor of the National Interest, and a frequent foreign policy commentator in both the print and broadcast media. He is currently on the faculty of the U.S. Naval War College.] One cannot help but be struck by the comparisons that can be drawn between Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Barack Obama—at least when it comes to Afghanistan. Within a year or so of taking office as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev had come to

Bret Stephens: What Ahmadinejad Knows

[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.] Let's put a few facts on the table. • The recent floods in Pakistan are acts neither of God nor of nature. Rather, they are the result of a secret U.S. military project called HAARP, based out of Fairbanks, Alaska, which controls the weather by sending electromagnetic waves into the upper atmosphere. HAARP may also be responsible for the recent spate of tsunamis and earthquakes.

WaPo: Va. Gov. McDonnell Gets Slavery's History Right and Remedies a Wrong

IT TOOK GUTS for Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R) to issue a blunt and humble apology for his ham-handed attempts last spring to minimize the importance of slavery in the history of Virginia and the Civil War. In doing so on Friday -- in an eloquent speech at Norfolk State University, Virginia's oldest public historically black college -- Mr. McDonnell disassociated himself not just from his own offensive remarks but from some in his conservative Republican base who leaped to defend and embrace a di

Roman Kabachiy: Latest on Ukraine’s History Wars: Orange Fighter Down

[Roman Kabachiy is History and Science Department Editor at the “Ukrainian Week” magazine in Kiev.] Marina Ostapenko, press secretary of the Ukrainian Security Service, has a difficult job. Just six months ago she had to take part in Security Service initiatives aimed at reviving Ukrainian historical memory. Unknown documents on the Holodomor [Ukr. famine, ed] were published, which resulted in genocide charges against a dozen former heads of the Ukrainian SSR and an exhibition of th

David Gordon Wilson: A Bold -- and Painless -- Way to Unleash Energy Innovation and Create Jobs

[David Gordon Wilson is emeritus professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. He wrote about the first version of this policy in the The Christian Science Monitor of March 15, 1974.] The energy crisis from 1973 to 1981 was not a happy period for Americans, but it was also a time when entrepreneurs and engineers formed a huge number of new businesses aimed at producing low-cost solar cells, high-efficiency engines for automobiles, better insulation for our houses, and so on.

Fareed Zakaria: Rising Powers Need to Rise Up

[Fareed Zakaria writes a column for the WaPo.] You can count on a few things during the annual U.N. General Assembly: New York traffic will be bad, the speeches will be worthy (if a bit dull) -- and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will say something absurd. This year the Iranian leader suggested that U.S. officials orchestrated the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to save Israel and "reverse the declining American economy." (Has he noticed the actual effect the war against terrorism has had on

Robert J. Samuelson: The Makings of a Trade War with China

[Robert J. Samuelson is a weekly columnist for the WaPo, writing on political, economic and social issues] No one familiar with the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 should relish the prospect of a trade war with China -- but that seems to be where we're headed and probably should be where we are headed. Although the Smoot-Hawley tariff did not cause the Great Depression, it contributed to its severity by provoking widespread retaliation. Confronting China's export subsidies risks a simil

E.J. Dionne Jr.: The GOP's Northeast Achilles' Heel

[E.J. Dionne Jr. is a columnist for the WaPo.] "Where are our plans for a New Deal or a Great Society?" asked Edward W. Brooke, the legendary Massachusetts Republican. It's not a question anyone in today's Republican Party would dare get caught even considering, but Brooke had the temerity to raise it in "The Challenge of Change," a book published in 1966, the year he became the first African American elected to the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction.

Gregory Rodriguez: Is the American dream slipping away?

[Gregory Rodriguez is an Irvine Senior Fellow and Director of the California Fellows Program at New America Foundation, a non-partisan public policy institute.] For all the talk these days of porous borders and external threats to the United States, the core of our sense of security and identity as a nation has always come from within. What's surprising, perhaps, is that it derives less from our vaunted democracy or our freedoms than it does from that rather nebulous notion we call

Robert D. Kaplan: While U.S. is Distracted, China Develops Sea Power

[Robert D. Kaplan is the author of "Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power." He is a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a national correspondent for the Atlantic magazine.] The greatest geopolitical development that has occurred largely beneath the radar of our Middle East-focused media over the past decade has been the rise of Chinese sea power. This is evinced by President Obama's meeting Friday about the South China Sea, wher

Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson: Wall Street's Attacks Could Turn President Obama into a True Populist

[Jacob S. Hacker is a professor of political science at Yale University, and Paul Pierson is a professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley. They are the authors of "Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer -- and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class."] Corporate America's stance toward the Obama administration has recently deteriorated into vitriolic attacks and outright opposition. Blackstone Group chief executive Stephen

Joan C. Williams: Obama and the Democrats Must Reconnect with Working-Class Voters

[Joan C. Williams, a professor at the University of California's Hastings College of the Law, is the author of "Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter."] ...For two generations, the Democrats have failed to relate to white working-class voters. Black working-class voters never abandoned the party, but the percentage of working-class whites who identified as Democrats fell from 60 percent in the mid-1970s to 40 percent in the mid-1990s. George W. Bush wo

Ted Sorensen: When Kennedy Met Nixon: The Real Story

[Ted Sorensen was a special counsel, speechwriter and adviser to President John F. Kennedy.] FIFTY years ago today, the “Great Debate” between Vice President Richard M. Nixon, the Republican nominee for president, and Senator John F. Kennedy, the Democratic nominee, attracted 70 million viewers — the largest audience in American history for any political event. Six myths have persisted throughout the innumerable reports on this historic confrontation. As someone who hel

Todd Gitlin and Liel Leibovitz: Chosen

[Todd Gitlin and Liel Leibovitz are the authors of The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election. They’ll be speaking at the 92nd St Y on Monday, September 27, with Tablet’s editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse and contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg.] Two years ago, when we set out to write a book about Israel, America, and the ways in which the nations saw themselves as having been singled out by God to shine their light on a benighted world, we had little dou

Dilip Hiro: America Is Suffering a Power Outage

[Dilip Hiro, a London-based writer and journalist, is the author of 32 books, the latest being After Empire: The Birth of a Multi-Polar World (Nation Books).]“Make poverty history!”  A catchy slogan, and an admirable aim, it was adopted by world leaders at the United Nations summit in New York on the eve of the New Millennium. A decade later, it is America which has made history -- even ifin the opposite direction. The latest U.S. Census Bureau statistics show that, in 2009, one i

Cord Jefferson: Enough of That Old South Nostalgia!

[Cord Jefferson is The Root's Washington correspondent.] Students and alumni of that venerable Southern institution Ole Miss are currently reeling at the news that the university has decided to replace its controversial mascot, Colonel Reb, a white-bearded Confederate Army officer, with an as-yet-undetermined new one -- a horse, perhaps. To many, abandoning the controversial colonel, who hasn't been the school's official mascot since 2003, makes sense. Even if just some among the Ol

Shikha Dalmia: Obama is a Keynesian Stimulator, Not a Kenyan Anti-Colonialist

[Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at Reason Foundation and a Forbes columnist.] Just when the ObamaCare debate was heating up, I was dining with a renowned conservative professor with impeccable Ivy credentials when the conversation suddenly turned surreal. Encouraged that I too had deep misgivings about the direction in which the new president was taking the country, the good professor opined that America had put in the White House a subversive radical. Obama wasn’t a well intenti