Roundup: Media's Take

Gabriel Winant: Obama Needs to Learn from Wilson and Truman to Get Things Done

[Gabriel Winant is a freelance writer and graduate student, currently living in the United Kingdom.] ...Woodrow Wilson was a generally pretty detestable guy (this is one thing Glenn Beck gets sort of right), but there’s something Obama could learn from him. At the end of World War I, Wilson expended massive, futile effort trying to convince Americans that the League of Nations was the world’s only hope for peace and stability. The Republicans who opposed Wilson over the League succe

Martin Kettle: The Perfect Match of Sarah Palin and Margaret Thatcher

[Martin Kettle is an associate editor of the Guardian and writes on British, European and American politics, as well as the media, law and music.] ...If it's true that Sarah Palin is trying to arrange an audience with Mrs T, then it is not exactly hard to see why. Rightwing female icons don't grow on trees, so a Palin-Thatcher meeting has a sort of marketing inevitability – although the ignorance of the one and the infirmity of the other mean that two public figures with a shakier g

Doug Kendall & Hannah McCrea: The Tea Party Ought to Remember the Whiskey Rebellion

[Doug Kendall is President & Founder, and Hannah McCrea is Online Communications Director of the Constitutional Accountability Center.] The efforts of Tea Partiers to wrap their anti-government agenda within the imagery of our Nation’s Founding reached absurd and dangerous heights this morning with the release of Alabama congressional candidate Rick Barber’s “Gather Your Armies” campaign ad, which portrays a George Washington-like figure authorizing armed rebellion in response t

John Battersby: South Africa's Great Leap Forward

[John Battersby is a former southern Africa correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor and a former editor of the Sunday Independent in Johannesburg. He is co-author of “Nelson Mandela: A Life in Photographs.” He is a trustee of the Aaron Mokoena Foundation, which supports young soccer players.] In recent months, South Africans of all races have been donning their country’s national team shirts on Fridays, flying the national flag from their car windows, wrapping their rear-view

Thomas Frank: The Old "Widows and Orphans" Defense

[Thomas Frank is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal.] The great oil spill may have caused the American right to suspend momentarily its fight for drilling, but now opinion leaders in Britain are rallying to the defense of oil giant BP as it squirms under the heel of big government. While American pundits demand that President Obama must do more, their British counterparts shriek that he has already gone much too far. Among the first to denounce was Lor

Melissa Harris-Lacewell: You've Got to Be Carefully Taught

[Melissa Harris-Lacewell, an associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University, is completing her latest book, Sister Citizen: A Text for Colored Girls Who've Considered Politics When Being Strong Isn't Enough. She is a contributor to MSNBC.] I spent Memorial Day in New Orleans, where I watched a group of citizens lay a wreath at the foot of a statue of Jefferson Davis. It was a jarring reminder of how the South understands American history. Memori

Josh Kron: Burundi and Rwanda, Mirror Images of Each Other

[Josh Kron is a freelance journalist based in Kampala, Uganda.] Behind one of the beaches that line Burundi's capital city, Bujumbura, 10 men sat at a bar in the afternoon sun, passing cigarettes, buying bottles of beer. I had just arrived on the bus from Rwanda to report on the neighboring country. They welcomed me to their group, and soon I asked, nervously, whether ethnicity was still a problem. One of them threw his arm around my shoulder and gave me a cold Primus beer. He laugh

Ramesh Ponnuru: The Right’s Civil Wrongs

[Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor at National Review, in whose June 21, 2010, issue this article first appeared.] Civil rights are a problem for the American Right: a political problem, an intellectual one, a moral one. In the civil-rights debates of the 1950s and 1960s, many conservatives — including William F. Buckley Jr., other figures associated with this magazine, and Sen. Barry Goldwater — took positions that the vast majority of conservatives now reject. Most contemporary co

Jeffrey Lord: The Original Mr. Anti-Establishment: Ronald Reagan

[Jeffrey Lord is a former Reagan White House political director and author. He writes from Pennsylvania at jlpa1@aol.com.] They didn't like him. To be more precise, they thought him an extremist, un-electable, an ultra-right wing nut, dumb, ignorant and, more to the point, not one of their crowd. One out of six was absolutely correct. Ronald Reagan was not one of their crowd. Ever. The "cro

John C. Wohlstetter: Cuba 1962 and Iran 2010: Will There Be a Mideast Nuclear Castro?

[John C. Wohlstetter is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, author of The Long War Ahead and the Short War Upon Us, and founder of the issues blog Letter From the Capitol.] Team Obama has jettisoned sanctions against Iran that would prevent the regime, a crude oil producer with a shortage of refinery capacity, from importing refined oil, as part of American concessions to win passage of a fourth weak UN sanctions resolution. In testimony to Congress, Secretary of State Clint

Gregory Rodriguez: In America, Old Glory Represents More than Just Patriotism

[Gregory Rodriguez is a columnist for the LA Times.] Poor Flag Day. It has to be the single most ignored national holiday in an otherwise patriotic country that loves its holidays — and no, it's not just because we don't get the day off. Nor is it because Flag Day gets lost between Memorial Day and the Fourth of July. The real reason that most Americans ignore the June 14 holiday is that it's utterly redundant. In the United States, every day is Flag Day.... The inheren

Richard Cohen: Fighting the Viet Cong in Afghanistan

[Richard Cohen is a columnist for the Washington Post.] Gregor Samsa, the general counsel of an exterminating company, was in New York on business when he was hit on the head by a flowerpot (geraniums) being watered by one Dorothy Obdean three floors above street level. This happened in 1970. Samsa went into a coma from which he awakened only last week. Almost immediately, he read the major newspapers with astonishment. "For some reason, they've changed the name of Vietnam to A

Kevin R. Kosar: The Anger is Real; the Media Picture Isn't

[Kevin R. Kosar is a political scientist in Washington who blogs at www.kevinrkosar.com.]Sharron Angle's Senate primary victory Tuesday in Nevada was the latest in a string of high-profile tea party movement victories. Last week, the insurgency also helped Nikki Haley finish first in South Carolina's GOP gubernatorial primary.Tea party voters helped Rand Paul defeat an establishment GOP Senate candidate in Kentucky last month, drove F

Bret Stephens: Requiem for a Revolution ... The Iranian Green movement is dead

[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.] Suppose that in the days following last year's fraudulent election in Iran, the U.S. and its Western allies had warned Tehran's leaders that their repression at home would be met, swiftly and severely, with consequences abroad. For every Neda Soltan shot dead in the street, an Iranian diplomat posted abroad would be expelled. For every foreigner put on trial in Iran, a Western firm doing business

Anne Applebaum: The oil spill isn't Obama's Katrina

[Anne Applebaum is a weekly columnist for The Post, writing on foreign affairs.] In the Gulf of Mexico, plumes of black oil are gushing into the ocean, coating the wings of seabirds, poisoning shellfish, sending tar balls rolling onto white Florida beaches. It is an ecological disaster. It is a economic nightmare. And there is absolutely nothing that the American president can do about it. Nothing at all. Here is the hard truth: The U.S. government does not possess a s

Roberto Cintli Rodriguez: Arizona: Rushing Toward the Wrong Side of History

[Roberto Cintli Rodriguez, the author of "Justice: A Question of Race" and an assistant professor at the University of Arizona, can be reached at XColumn@gmail.com.] The dust bowl of the 1930s is symbolic of the violence unleashed in rural America and the rest of the world by industrialized farming or agribusiness, which mechanized what used to be a way of life on the land into a factory for the extraction of profits. In

Evaggelos Vallianatos: Ill Fares the Land (Literally)

[Evaggelos Vallianatos, former EPA analyst, is the author of "This Land Is Their Land" and "The Passion of the Greeks.] The dust bowl of the 1930s is symbolic of the violence unleashed in rural America and the rest of the world by industrialized farming or agribusiness, which mechanized what used to be a way of life on the land into a factory for the extraction of profits. Industrialized agriculture found expression in large farms that turned out to be un

Martin Marty: The Chosen People

[Martin Marty is the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he taught chiefly in the Divinity School for 35 years and where the Martin Marty Center has since been founded to promote “public religion” endeavors. This article originally appeared in Sightings, published by the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.] The grand theological themes don’t fade or disappear from headlines or prime time. “Being c

John Dickerson: Presidential Anger Management

[John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent and author of On Her Trail. He can be reached at slatepolitics@gmail.com.] ...Here's the thing about presidential anger. It's never seen in public—not just from our first smooth jazz president, but from any president. If presidents show anger in public, they risk looking out of control, which in moments of crisis is the exact opposite of what people want. When there is

John Feffer: Pax Ottomanica?

[John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, writes its regular World Beat column, and co-directs its Balkans Project. His past essays, including those for TomDispatch.com, can be read at his website.  He would like to thank Alexander Atanasov, Rebecca Azhdam, and Noor