Roundup: Media's Take

Albert Hunt: Beck's Pitch Channels Depression-Era Invective

[Albert R. Hunt is the executive editor for Washington at Bloomberg News.] Glenn Beck, at his successful “Restoring America” rally in Washington, wrapped himself in the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. He fits much better with another religious-political figure, the late Charles E. Coughlin, the Catholic priest who led a populist-right crusade against President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s. Beck and King, the erudite civil-rights legend, share little in common. Beck

Andrew Malcolm: War is hell on presidents' approval ratings

[Andrew Malcolm is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.] No wonder President Obama used only his second Oval Office address to get the Iraq war so publicly off the domestic debate table just nine weeks before his first midterm elections. He even flew Vice President Joe Biden over for another quick tour of duty in Baghdad to underline for the public (media) the occasion of the end of U.S. combat operations — officially, at least, since 50,000 U.S. troops remain there.

Paul Moses: Islamophobia and Anti-Catholocism

[Paul Moses teaches journalism at Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.] For the past few months, I’ve been doing some research in New York newspapers on the anti-Catholic vitriol the Irish faced in the nineteenth century. It’s been hard to avoid noticing how similar those attacks are to the biting comments being made against Islam and the backers of a Muslim community center proposed for a lower Manhattan building near the World Trade Center site. Lo

Steve Kornacki: The GOP's new fake racial history

[Steve Kornacki is Salon's news editor.] Almost 50 years ago, the Republican Party made a decision to embrace the backlash generated by civil rights among white Southerners. Traditionally, they had been staunch Democrats, but they were also culturally conservative, and as Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Party embraced civil rights once and for all, they were up for grabs. The Republican Party offered them a home, a steady, decades-long realignment ensued, and today co

Alyssa Battistoni: Glenn Beck's revisionist, apolitical history

[Alyssa Battistoni is a writer and graduate student in geography and environment at Oxford University.] ...By invoking great American leaders in a call for apolitical heroism, Beck seeks to whitewash the political struggles and debates of earlier eras: to suggest that our finest leaders have always been above politics, and that to achieve their greatness, we need to rise above politics and do "the right thing." It's certainly true that Franklin, Jefferson, Was

Norman Solomon: A Speech for Endless War

[Norman Solomon is the author of many books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” He is co-chair of the Healthcare Not Warfare campaign, launched by Progressive Democrats of America.] On the last night of August, the president used an Oval Office speech to boost a policy of perpetual war. Hours later, the New York Times front page offered a credulous gloss for the end of “the seven-year American combat mission in Ira

Stephen M. Walt: Whitewashing the failure in Iraq

[Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.] On the eve of President Obama's speech to the nation on Iraq, some of the people who dreamed up this foolish war or helped persuade the nation that it was a good idea are getting out their paintbrushes and whitewash. I refer, of course, to the twin op-eds in today's New York Times by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and neoconservative columnist David Brooks.

Simon Tisdall: Sorry General Petraeus, Iraq and Afghanistan are only too similar

[Simon Tisdall is an assistant editor of the Guardian and a foreign affairs columnist.] General David Petraeus, who commanded US forces in Iraq and does so now in Afghanistan, argues the two conflicts differ in key respects. But it was plain from Barack Obama's Oval office speech yesterday that, in the president's mind at least, there are some basic similarities. That's a shift from his 2008 campaign when he contrasted Afghanistan, the "necessary war", with Iraq – George B

Brad Hirschfeld: Who's Your Nazi?

[Brad Hirschfeld is an author, rabbi, and columnist for the Washington Post.] We seem to have a love affair with comparisons to Nazis and Hitler these days, at least when it comes to finding analogies for those with whom we disagree. Some cause or policy we oppose? Compare it to Nazism. Some people whose actions disturb us? Compare them to Hitler. An event that appalls us? It's a Holocaust. This practice of comparing people and things to Nazis and the Holocaust has been

Simon Jenkins: A trillion-dollar catastrophe. Yes, Iraq was a headline war

[Simon Jenkins is a journalist and author.] Today the Iraq war was declared over by Barack Obama. As his troops return home, Iraqis are marginally freer than in 2003, and considerably less secure. Two million remain abroad as refugees from seven years of anarchy, with another 2 million internally displaced. Ironically, almost all Iraqi Christians have had to flee. Under western rule, production of oil – Iraq's staple product – is still below its pre-invasion level, and homes enjoy f

Bob Herbert: We Owe the Troops an Exit

[Bob Herbert is a columnist for the New York Times.] Wars are not problems that need managing, which suggests that they will always be with us. They are catastrophes that need to be brought to an end as quickly as possible. Wars consume lives by the thousands (in Iraq, by the scores of thousands) and sometimes, as in World War II, by the millions. The goal when fighting any war should be peace, not a permanent simmer of nonstop maiming and killing. Wars are meant to be won — if they

Paul D. Wolfowitz: In Korea, a Model for Iraq

[Paul D. Wolfowitz, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, was the deputy secretary of defense from 2001 to 2005.] Vice President Joe Biden, who traveled to Iraq this week to mark the formal end of United States combat operations there, has claimed that peace and stability there could be “one of the great achievements” of the Obama administration. Of course, the largest share of credit belongs to the brave men and women of the American military, who have sacrificed

David Rieff: At Least President Bush Was Sincere About Afghanistan

[David Rieff is the author of eight books, including A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis.] When President Obama named his cabinet, people harkened back to Lincoln and said that he had assembled a team of rivals. To put it charitably, this is an exaggeration. Lincoln brought not just his principal rival, William Seward, into his cabinet as secretary of state, he also brought in his two other main contenders for the Republican nomination for president in 1860. Salmon Chase,

Stephen Hadley: Why We Fought and What We Achieved

[Mr. Hadley was national security adviser to President Bush from 2005-2009.] The U.S. effort in Iraq is not over. Some 50,000 U.S. troops, together with a robust diplomatic presence, continue to train and assist Iraq's security forces and support its democratic progress. The American people, our coalition allies and especially the Iraqi people have paid an enormous price. It is important to remember why. For over two decades, the regime of Saddam Hussein had threatened

Mark Helprin: The World Trade Center Mosque and the Constitution

[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" (HarperCollins).] The plan to erect a mosque of major proportions in what would have been the shadow of the World Trade Center involves not just the indisputable constitutional rights that sanction it, but, providentially, others that may frustrate it.

Hayder al-Khoei: Did Iran really do so well out of the Iraq war?

[Hayder al-Khoei is a researcher at the Centre for Academic Shi'a Studies in London.] Many people argue the biggest winner of the 2003 Iraq war is neighbouring Iran. The American-led forces removed one of Iran's bitterest enemies, Saddam Hussein, and paved the way for successive Shia-dominated governments in Baghdad. The Iranians have not shied away from interfering in domestic Iraqi affairs and the power vacuum created by the American administration in Iraq gave them ample room to

Richard Cohen: In the Middle East, it's still 1947

[Richard Cohen is a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post.] Say what you will about the Arab world, it's hard to earn its gratitude. President Obama went to Egypt and not Israel. He demanded that Israel cease adding new settlements in the West Bank. He treated Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu with a chilling disdain. For all of that, though, Obama's approval rating in Arab countries has sunk. Unlike almost a fifth of Americans, the Arab world clearly knows Obama is no Muslim

Edward E. Curtis IV: Five Myths About Mosques in America

[Edward E. Curtis IV is millennium chair of liberal arts at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.] Mosques have been here since the colonial era. A mosque, or masjid, is literally any place where Muslims make salat, the prayer performed in the direction of Mecca; it needn't be a building. One of the first mosques in North American history was on Kent Island, Md.: Between 1731 and 1733, African American Muslim slave and Islamic scholar Job Ben Solomon, a cattle driver,

Dana Milbank: Religious Tolerance Then and Now

[Dana Milbank is a columnist for the Washington Post] Two hundred twenty years ago today, the Jews of Newport, R.I., wrote a proclamation for President George Washington on his visit to their synagogue the next day."Deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free Citizens," the Jews wrote to their famous visitor, we now"behold a Government, erected by the Majesty of the People . . . generously affording to All liberty of conscience, and immunities of

Gadi Taub: In Israel, Settling for Less

[Gadi Taub, an assistant professor of communications and public policy at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is the author of “The Settlers.”] Will Israel remain a Zionist state? If so, what kind? These are the important questions in Israeli politics today, and will be looming over the direct talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority scheduled to begin Thursday in Washington. The secular Zionist dream was fundamentally democratic. Its proponents, from Theodor Herz