Roundup: Media's Take

Bill McKibben: My Road Trip With a Solar Rock Star

[Bill McKibben is the founder of 350.org and author most recently of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College.]I got to see the now-famous enthusiasm gap up close and personal last week, and it wasn’t a pretty sight.The backstory: I help run a global warming campaign called 350.org.  In mid-summer, we decided to organize an effort to ask world leaders to

George Neumayr: Neocolonial Dreams from Obama's Mother

[George Neumayr is editor of Catholic World Report and press critic for California Political Review.] Newt Gingrich said to National Review Online recently, "What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anticolonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?" Gingrich's comment sparked off Dinesh D'Souza's Forbes article, which argues that America is "governed by the ghost" of Obama's "Luo tribesman"

Kathleen Parker: Is Obama an 'anti-colonialist'?

[Kathleen Parker is an American syndicated columnist.] Of course I knew it all along. President Obama is a Kenyan anti-colonialist and that's why he doesn't get us. He's a ticked-off African. So goes the latest in Obama-theory, originated by the usually rational conservative thinker Dinesh D'Souza and endorsed by none other than Newt Gingrich, Republican anarchist and onetime speaker of the House of Representatives. Cue soundtrack to "Twilight Zone.&

Andreas Whittam Smith: The French fear of 'the other'

[Andreas Whittam Smith is co-founder of The Independent.] In France the fear of "the other" has flared up again. The list of groups that have been given this status at one time or another in French history is quite long. On this occasion the "others" are the Les Roms, that is the Roma or, as we prefer to describe them, Gypsies or travelers. As in Britain, they suddenly arrive, put up their camps and immediately engender local opposition and even fear. President S

David Brooks: The Day After Tomorrow

[David Brooks is a columnist for the NYT.] Every political movement has a story. The surging Republican Party has a story, too. It is a story of virtue betrayed and innocence threatened. Through most of its history, the narrative begins, the United States was a limited government nation, with restrained central power and an independent citizenry. But over the years, forces have arisen that seek to change America’s essential nature. These forces would replace America’s t

Timothy Sandefur: Comes a Horseman

[Timothy Sandefur is a principal attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation and author of The Right to Earn a Living (Cato Institute, 2010). This article originally appeared in the Sep. 20, 2010, issue of National Review.] Franklin Roosevelt’s clash with the Supreme Court is one of history’s greatest legal dramas, but it has generated an unfair and misleading mythology. In this legend, the Court greeted the New Deal with a blast of reactionary decisions in 1935 and 1936 — invalidating

Patrick Buchanan: America is Caught in a Clash of Civilizations

[Patrick Buchanan is the author, most recently, of Churchill, Hitler, and ‘The Unnecessary War,’ now available in paperback.] The Rev. Terry Jones may just have exposed the ultimate futility of America’s war in Afghanistan. Consider the portrait of frustrated impotence America presented to the world last week. Our president and the secretaries of state and defense deplored Pastor Jones’ plan to burn 100 Korans but could do nothing to stop him, other than to plead with h

Laura Miller: The Paranoid Style in American Punditry

[Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon.] I spent most of August more or less disconnected from TV, the Internet and print news outlets, so when I caught up with a friend on the phone, I asked him to brief me on which stories had captured the nation's attention. He tried to explain the controversy over the Park51 Islamic culture center, but it wasn't easy. "So, why is this anti-Muslim panic coming up now?" I asked. "What triggered it?" "I keep going back

Enrique Krauze: In Mexico, a War Every Century

[Enrique Krauze is the editor of the magazine Letras Libres and the author of “Mexico: Biography of Power.” This article was translated by Hank Heifetz from the Spanish.] EVERY 100 years, Mexico seems to have a rendezvous with violence. As the country gathers on Wednesday night for the ceremony of the “grito” — the call to arms that began the war for independence from Spain — we are enduring another violent crisis, albeit one that differs greatly from those of a century and two cent

Joseph S. Nye: Can Russia Be Great?

[Joseph S. Nye Jr., a former U.S. assistant defense secretary, is a professor at Harvard University and author of the forthcoming book “The Future of Power.”] In the 1950s, many Americans feared that the Soviet Union would surpass the United States as the world’s leading power. The Soviet Union had the world’s largest territory, the third-largest population and the second-largest economy, and it produced more oil and gas than Saudi Arabia. Moreover, the Soviet Union pos

Seth J. Frantzman: Terra Incognita ... Israel is neither Athens nor Sparta

[The writer is a PhD researcher at Hebrew University and a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies.] There is a lot of talk these days, as there has been since the beginning of Zionism, about the future of Israel, the people, the state and the land. Inevitably it devolves into two central questions: What kind of Jew are you and which Jewish culture is the State of Israel supposed to live up to? The answers are more diverse than the question. Some will say t

Jonah Goldberg: You Can't Rule on Personality Alone

[Jonah Goldberg is a nationally syndicated columnist.] ...Though it is hard to fathom today, given that [Jimmy] Carter is one of the dullest personalities in American public life, there was a time when he was seen as a deeply charismatic figure. One of his aides privately urged him in a memo to "capitalize on your greatest asset — your personal charm." Newsweek insisted that he "evokes memories of Kennedy's style." Jules Witcover, who chronicled the 1976 campaign

Gregory Rodriguez: Australia's Identity Crisis Keeps Resurfacing

[Gregory Rodriguez is an Irvine Senior Fellow and Director of the California Fellows Program at New America Foundation, a non-partisan public policy institute.] In the mid-1990s, Australia's then-Prime Minister John Howard sought to quash his nation's "perpetual seminar on … national identity" by insisting, as he later said, that his countrymen never really "had any doubt as to what their identity was." A little more than a decade later, however, there are plenty

Jonah Goldberg: The Next Hoover

[Jonah Goldberg is editor at large for the National Review.] ...I’m beginning to think Barack Obama isn’t the next FDR — as so many promised — but the next Hoover. The creation myth of the modern Democratic party goes something like this: After years of capitalist excess, exemplified by Hoover’s “market fundamentalism,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced reasonable and pragmatic reforms that not only conquered the Great Depression but “saved democracy” itself.

Jonathan Chait: Obama's Biggest Problem is with Liberals and the Left Wing

[Jonathan Chait is a senior editor of The New Republic. This article ran in the September 23, 2010 issue of the magazine.] This is a season of liberal disappointment. Or, rather, another season of liberal disappointment. Liberal disappointment follows liberal triumph as night follows day. It is a multitudinous thing, its varieties including, but not limited to, despair, recrimination, impotent rage, potent rage, and existential angst.... Now, structural factors don’t ex

Michael Kinsley: The Least The Boomers Can Do

[Michael Kinsley is an editor at Atlantic Media Company. He was editor of The New Republic, founding editor of Slate, and a panelist on Crossfire.] As they prepare to leave the stage, even Boomers themselves concede that things have not exactly gone according to script. Generalizations about generations are often foolish. Who’s to say when one generation ends and the next one starts? And people are individuals: any characteristic intended to describe almost 80 million people will be

Richard Cohen: Pastor Terry Jones, as Right as John Brown

[Richard Cohen is a columnist for the WaPo.] There is a glint of John Brown in the eyes of the Rev. Terry Jones, a bit of theatrical madness and a Gingrichian lust for the spotlight.... John Brown confronted pre-Civil War America with a dilemma. He had either murdered or approved of murder in the cause of anti-slavery and he led an insurrection at Harpers Ferry. The vicissitudes of life (the deaths of children and of his first wife) and especially the searing injustice

Anne Applebaum: For the U.S., Britain's Austerity is a Foreign Concept

[Anne Applebaum writes a column for the WaPo.] "Vicious cuts." "Savage cuts." "Swingeing cuts." The language that the British use to describe their new government's spending reduction policy is apocalyptic in the extreme.... And the British love it.... Austerity...has a deep appeal. Austerity is what made Britain great. Austerity is what won the war. It cannot be an accident that several British television channels are running

Michael Lind: The War Socialism of the American Right

[Michael Lind is policy director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation.] When American conservatives denounce Keynesianism and socialism, it is difficult not to detect a note of jealous resentment on their part. After all, since Reagan, the American right has made Keynesian fiscal policy and the socialization of American industry its own specialty. Conservatives are rhetorical libertarians but operational Keynesians, when they are not operational socialists --

Thomas de Waal: Call Off the Great Game

[Thomas de Waal is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of The Caucasus: An Introduction, published this week by Oxford University Press.] Twenty years after the end of the Soviet Union, news from the South Caucasus is bleak. The region's two longest borders, which stretch between Armenia and Azerbaijan and between Georgia and Russia, remain wholly or partially shut. Corrupt bureaucrats make even the nominally open borders closed to free tr