Roundup: Media's Take

Bret Stephens: Our 'Moderate Muslim' Problem

[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.] Items of interest in the news media's coverage of "moderate Muslims": • The New York Times, Oct. 19, 2001: "Imam Anwar Al-Awlaki, spiritual leader at the Dar al-Hijra mosque in Virginia, one of the nation's largest. . . . is held up as a new generation of Muslim leader capable of merging East and West." • NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, Dec. 9, 2

Toby Harnden: The battle over the mosque at Ground Zero

[Toby Harnden is the Daily Telegraph's US Editor, based in Washington DC.] August tends to be an inauspicious month for elevated debate in American politics. Last year, everyone was bickering about whether health-care reform would usher in "death panels" that could dispatch Granny to her grave. Now, as Europe holidays, the United States is in a frenzy about the building of a mosque at Ground Zero, principal site of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Polls indicate t

Joan Walsh: Why Catholics Should Thank Anti-Catholic Bigots

[Joan Walsh is editor-in-chief of Salon.] I would like to thank New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, on behalf of my Irish Catholic relatives; indeed, on behalf of all Irish Catholics, including the Kennedy family, for reminding us of the debt we owe to anti-Catholic "Nativists." Yes, even though I was raised to believe the Nativists spread anti-Catholic prejudice and bigotry with lies about who we were and what we believed, Douthat says I was raised wrong (not surprisin

Ross Douthat: Islam in Two Americas

[Ross Douthat is a columnist for the NYT.] There’s an America where it doesn’t matter what language you speak, what god you worship, or how deep your New World roots run. An America where allegiance to the Constitution trumps ethnic differences, language barriers and religious divides. An America where the newest arrival to our shores is no less American than the ever-so-great granddaughter of the Pilgrims. But there’s another America as well, one that understands itsel

Andrew Leonard: Jimmy Carter: Worst. American. Ever!

[Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon.] Let's get the big honking disclaimer out of the way first. As a callow 18-year-old, I cast my first vote for president of the United States in 1980 to reelect Jimmy Carter. While I can't claim to be have been a hugely enthusiastic supporter of the much-beleaguered president (he reinstated registration for the draft, for crying out loud!), there was no doubt in my mind that he was infinitely superior to that joke from California, a has-bee

Waller R. Newell: It's the Ideology, Stupid

[Waller R. Newell is professor of political science and philosophy at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.] Wherever the global jihad strikes, it does so with the same goal: the establishment of a worldwide Islamist state. This is as true when the Taliban conducts suicide operations in Pakistan as it is when Turkey’s Islamist government sends a “freedom flotilla” seeking martyrdom in support of Hamas. It is true of terrorists plotting attacks on America, Europe, Asia, and Africa,

Jennifer Lind: Apology Diplomacy at Hiroshima

[Jennifer Lind is Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College and the author of Sorry States: Apologies in International Politics. She has worked as a consultant for RAND and for the Office of the Secretary, U.S. Department of Defense; lived and worked in Japan; and written previously for The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy.] Tad Akiba, Mayor of Hiroshima, didn't listen to instructions. During his visit to the White House last January, Akiba and a throng of

Gregory Rodriguez: Attack on 14th Amendment: It's Wrong

[Gregory Rodriguez is an Irvine Senior Fellow and Director of the California Fellows Program at New America Foundation, a non-partisan public policy institute. He has written widely on issues of national identity, social cohesion, assimilation, race relations, religion, immigration, ethnicity, demographics and social and political trends in such leading publications as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist. He is the author of Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans and Vagabonds: M

Fareed Zakaria: Gates's Lonely Battle to Rationalize the Pentagon

[Fareed Zakaria is editor of Newsweek International.] ...Gates is an unabashed admirer of President Dwight Eisenhower, whose portrait hangs behind Gates's desk. He respects Ike's restraint, his emphasis on the trade-offs involved in funding the military and his reluctance to create what he called a "military-industrial complex." Eisenhower understood, Gates reminded his audience at the presidential library in May, "that even a superpower such as the United States -- t

Mort Zuckerman: The End of American Optimism

[Mr. Zuckerman is chairman and editor in chief of U.S. News & World Report.] Are we at the end of the post-World War II period of growth? Tons of money have been shoveled in to rescue reckless banks and fill the huge hole in the economy, but nothing is working the way it normally had in all our previous crises. Rather, we are in what a number of economists are referring to as the "new normal." This is a much slower-growing economy that, recent surveys have

Peter Wehner: In Bush v. Obama, Bush Wins in a Rout

[Peter Wehner is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. He served in the Bush White House as director of the office of strategic initiatives.] According to Reuters: "President Barack Obama attacked the economic policies of his Republican predecessor George W. Bush in Bush's home state ... as evidence of the way Republicans would operate if given power in Nov. 2 U.S. congressional elections. At a fund-raising event

David A. Graham: A Short History of Presidential Vacation Outrage

[David A. Graham is a reporter at Newsweek.] The only thing worse than having to work while lots of people are on vacation must be having to work in the press pool covering people on vacation. Because just as predictable as the pundit machine's August fixation on silly stuff is that the press corps will find something scandalous to say about a presidential vacation. Not just Obama. Every president. Despite White House spokesman Bill Burton's suggestion that the Obamas are being hara

WSJ Editorial: The Mosque of Misunderstanding

How fraught is the debate over the proposed Ground Zero mosque? Even President Obama can't seem to decide, or at least to say clearly, what he thinks about it. First, at a White House dinner in honor of Ramadan on Friday, the President gave an unqualified defense of building the mosque on religious freedom grounds. Then a day later he said he was only backing the "right" to build the mosque, not the wisdom of doing so near such a politically sensitive site. On the latter,

Michael Gerson: Republicans are Ramping Up the Birthright Battle

[Michael Gerson writes a column for the WaPo.] The final state to ratify the 14th Amendment was Ohio -- in September 2003. The Ohio Legislature had passed the amendment in 1867 but rescinded its approval a year later, claiming it was "contrary to the best interests of the white race." When Ohio finally rectified this embarrassing bit of history, just one legislator -- Republican state Rep. Tom Brinkman from Cincinnati -- voted against it. His opposition was viewed as an is

Terry Lautz: China's Deficit in American Studies

[Terry Lautz, a visiting professor at Syracuse University, is a former vice president and program director for Asia at the Henry Luce Foundation.] China faces a worrisome imbalance of intellectual trade with the United States. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Chinese know less about the United States than Americans know about China. Most Chinese students and scholars interested in the United States concentrate either on English language and literature or on Sino-American diplomatic

Washington Times Editorial: Obama's Islamic America

President Obama says Islam has always been part of America, which raises the question, does the president know something about American history that we don't?... Throughout most of American history, the Muslim world was perceived as remote, alien and belligerent. Perhaps the president was thinking about the Barbary Pirates and their role in the founding of the U.S. Navy, or Andrew Jackson's dispatch of frigates against Muslim pirates in Sumatra in the 1830s. Maybe he was recalling R

Trita Parsi: Pro-Israel crowd is Hyping the Iran Threat

[Dr. Trita Parsi is the author of "Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel and the United States" and recipient of the Council on Foreign Relation's 2008 Arthur Ross Silver Medallion and the 2010 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order.] Obama administration officials, as well as U.S. lawmakers and European diplomats passionately made the argument this spring that tough sanctions on Iran were necessary to avoid war. But contrary to their predicti

Steve Kornacki: What Carter-Bashing Tells Us About Bush-Bashing

[Steve Kornacki is the news editor for Salon.] In a Hardball segment last night on Democrats' efforts to resurrect the Bush bogeyman, Chuck Todd noted that Republicans once played the same game with Jimmy Carter, backing it up with Carter-bashing clips from the 1984, 1988 and 1992 Republican conventions. This is quite true. But the story of the GOP's Carter attacks is actually a complicated one, simultaneously providing today's Democrats with a hopeful example and a cau

Mark Engler: Can We Calculate the True Cost of Our Dependence on Oil?

[Mark Engler is a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus, a TomDispatch regular, and the author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books). He can be reached via the website Democracy Uprising

Martha Minow: Confirmation Battle: Justice Thurgood Marshall and Justice Elena Kagan

[Martha Minow is Dean and Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor of Law, Harvard Law School. Her most recent book is In Brown's Wake: Legacies of America's Educational Landmark (Oxford University Press 2010).] Now that the Senate has confirmed Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, there will be post-mortems about the confirmation process. Many members of the Judiciary Committee criticized Kagan for her admiration of Justice Thurgood Marshall, for whom she clerked. I also clerked for Marshall, an