Roundup: Media's Take

Stephen Marche: Byrd and the Bard

[Stephen Marche, a columnist for Esquire, is writing a book about Shakespeare’s effect on world history.] SHAKESPEARE scholars, and the literary community generally, have selfish motives for missing Robert Byrd, the West Virginia senator who died last week at 92. Historians will long debate his complicated legacy, but scholars will no doubt agree that he was the greatest Shakespeare-quoter in American political history. His death marks the passing of an entire style of literate poli

Frank Rich: Fourth of July 1776, 1964, 2010

[Frank Rich is a columnist for the NYT.] ALL men may be created equal, but slavery, America’s original sin of inequality, was left unaddressed in the Declaration of Independence signed 234 years ago today. Of all the countless attempts to dispel that shadow over the nation’s birth, few were more ambitious than the hard-fought bill Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law just in time for another Fourth of July, 46 summers ago. With the holiday weekend approaching, Johnson summ

Steve Clemons: Lindsey Graham: In Today's Republican Party, Reagan Wouldn't Make It as a Republican

[Steve Clemons publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note. Clemons can be followed on Twitter @SCClemons] The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz profiles reactions to Tea-Partyism today and notes that Senator Lindsey Graham, who once told me that his favorite film was Seven Days in May and that one of his biggest fears for the country was national security and military demagoguery, doesn't have much time for the Tea Party. From Kurtz's good piece:

Dahlia Lithwick: Kagan v. Marshall

[Dahlia Lithwick is a contributing editor at Newsweek.] When Senate Republicans decided to turn the first day of Solicitor General Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearing into a referendum on her mentor, Justice Thurgood Marshall, they made two mistakes. The first was tactical: most Americans don’t care much about Marshall’s jurisprudential style. They think of him as a lion of the civil-rights movement, and deriding him as a “judicial activist” and “results oriented” served only to insu

William Bradley: The Afghan War and the Spirit of Jefferson

[William Bradley is an award-winning columnist and investigative reporter and a former political advisor. His NewWestNotes.com is the California leader in real-time political analysis.]"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."Today he is best known as the principal author of the Declaration of Indep

Chris Weigant: The Forgotten Battle Which Won The American Revolution

[Chris Weigant is a political commentator. He has been a regular contributor to Arianna Huffington’s The Huffington Post since June of 2006, and also writes on his own website, ChrisWeigant.com.]>p>The Revolutionary War lasted a lot longer than most of us realize. Begun in 1775, the war didn't end for six long years, and wasn't fully resolved for another two. During this time, American forces had some notable victories, and also more than a few ignoble defeats at the hands of the Briti

Mary Dejevsky: A Spy Mission Left Behind by History, or a New Tactic by post-Soviet Russia?

[Mary Dejevsky is a columnist at The Independent.] Having worked as a reporter in Moscow, Washington and indeed London, I have learnt only two lessons from the periodic eruption of espionage dramas. The first is that, however seductive and meticulous the detail, things are seldom completely as they seem. The second is that, despite the end of the Cold War, pretty much everyone is still at it: note the terse "no comment" given by Britain's former ambassador in Moscow Tony

Christopher Dickey: Take Up the White Man's Burden

[Christopher Dickey is the Paris Bureau chief and Middle East Regional Editor for Newsweek. Alongside this, he is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and of the Anglo-American Press Association in Paris. He is the author of six books, having most recently published Securing the City: Inside America's Best Counterterror Force - The NYPD.] It’s always interesting and a little frustrating to talk to the Brits about the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan. Having established lo

John Cassidy: Back to the Thirties? Now It’s Britain’s Turn

[John Cassidy has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995. He has written many, many articles for the magazine, on topics ranging from Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke to the Iraqi oil industry and the economics of Hollywood.] For the past year and a half, I have been in the unusual (for me) position of being relatively optimistic about the U.S. and the global economy. While Nouriel Roubini and other pessimists banged on about a W- or L-shaped recession, I was reasonably con

Jeffrey Rosen: Why Louis Brandeis Matters

[Jeffrey Rosen is the legal affairs editor for The New Republic.]Melvin I. Urofsky, Louis D. Brandeis: A Life (Pantheon, 955 pp., $40)I.In 1916, Herbert Croly, the founder and editor of The New Republic, wrote to Willard Straight, the owner of the magazine, about the Supreme Court nomination of Louis Brandeis. Croly enclosed a draft editorial called “The Motive of Class Consciousness,” and also a chart prepared by a lawyer in B

Josh Marshall: Was Byrd Compromised By the Klan?

[Josh Marshall is an editor at Talking Points Memo.] While remembering Robert C. Byrd today we would not do him justice without taking stock of the major blot on his public life: the fact that his early life and political career was inextricably bound up with the politics of racism. That much is not in dispute. Byrd spent the latter part of his life admitting as much and apologizing for it. The outstanding question is whether it compromised him in the bulk of his public career that

Fred Branfman: When Rolling Stone Calls the Shots, It’s Time to Negotiate

[Fred Branfman is a book author, journalist and anti-war activist. In addition to being published in Truthdig, his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harper’s, Playboy, the New Republic and other publications.] It is amazing how little commentary there has been on the key issue raised by the McChrystal Affair: Should U.S. war policy be made by Rolling Stone? The very fact that it took a magazine article for President Barack Obama to remove Gen. Stanley Mc

Jeffrey Herbst: Why Dictators Love the United Nations

[Jeffrey Herbst is president of Colgate University.] The U.N.'s relationship with autocracy has always been fraught, but the organization has only grown more schizophrenic toward repressive rulers like Mugabe since the fall of the Berlin Wall, becoming more openly pro-democracy even as it has remained at times astonishingly accommodating of dictators. It's true that the U.N.'s commendable corps of experts has provided important technical assistance for elections in dozens of develop

James K. Glassman: Notes on Europe’s Economic Decadence

[James K. Glassman, former undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, is executive director of the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas.] In 1930, with the Great Depression in its early stages and British unemployment already around 15 percent, John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay about the economic glory to come. He wanted, he said, “to disembarrass myself of short views and take wings in the future,” and his conclusion was that “the economic problem may be solved

Ann Jones: Counterinsurgency Down for the Count in Afghanistan…

[Ann Jones, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of Kabul in Winter. Her new book, War Is Not Over When It’s Over: Women Speak Out from the Ruins of War, about her work with women in post-conflict countries, is to be published by Metropolitan Books in September. She is at work on her next book about what happens when America’s wars come home. To visit her website, click here.] President Obama’s Afghanistan strategy isn’t working.  So said a parade of Afghanistan watc

Texas Freedom Network: Politics and Curriculum Standards in Texas

Gov. Rick Perry has been doing all he can to solidify his support among far-right pressure groups. This weekend (July 2-3), for example, Gov. Perry will be speaking at the Americans for Prosperity Foundation’s Texas Defending the American Dream Summit in Austin.... Here was a panel that especially caught our eye: “Texas Textbook Wars & Curriculum Controversies.” Seeing that panel topic at an AFP confab is hardly a surprise to us. During the long debate at the Texas State Board o

Robert Parry: Rethinking Iran-Contra

[Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.] The co

Suzy Khimm and David Corn: Michael Steele's Thurgood Marshall Fail

[Suzy Khimm is a reporter in the Washington bureau of Mother Jones. E-mail her with tips and ideas at skhimm(at)motherjones(dot)com. For more of her stories, click here. Follow her on Twitter here. David Corn is Mother Jones' Washington bureau chief. For more of his stories, click here. He's also on Twitter.] During confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, it almost seemed as if the late and legendary Justice Thurgood Marshall was the one being vette

George Ball: The United States Should Join the Commonwealth

[George Ball is chairman of W. Atlee Burpee & Co. in Warminster. He can be reached at hordubal@aol.com.] ...Just seven months before the Declaration of Independence was approved by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, Thomas Jefferson, its principal author, wrote to an English friend, "Believe me, dear Sir: there is not in the British Empire a man who more cordially loves a union with Great Britain than I do. But by the God that m

David S. Broder: Sen. Robert Byrd's Vanished Ethic

[David S. Broder is a columnist for the Washington Post.] The paradox of Robert C. Byrd's life -- and the reason his death was recognized by his Senate colleagues as so significant a milestone -- is the balance he struck between the parochial and the profound. On one hand, he was known as the "king of pork" and was immensely proud of the way he used his long years on the Appropriations Committee to funnel billions in federal funds into his home state of West V