Roundup: Media's Take

David A. Graham: Bibi Is the New Bush

[David A. Graham is a reporter at Newsweek.] An ideological, right-wing leader comes to power. He seems sure to be more disciplined than his predecessor, a centrist politician who sailed from scandal to scandal. Domestically, the electorate is sharply polarized—they’re still sore over terrorist attacks that have killed many of their fellow citizens, but they have strong disagreements about how best to respond. The government, however, has no such hesitation. The cabinet is stacked w

Peter Ferrara: Obama's Total Eclipse for America

[Peter Ferrara is director of entitlement and budget policy at the Institute for Policy Innovation, a policy advisor to the Heartland Institute, and general counsel of the American Civil Rights Union. He served in the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, and as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under the first President Bush. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School.] In a seminal speech last week at Carnegie Mellon

Hendrik Hertzberg: Elena Kagan’s Not-So-Final Conflict

[Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker, where he frequently writes the opening Comment in The Talk of the Town.] If the undergraduate is mother to the Justice as the child is father to the man, then I’m ready to believe that Elena Kagan, Princeton ’81, just might grow up to be a terrific Justice of the Supreme Court. I’ve now had the pleasure of reading the senior thesis Ms. Kagan wrote at Princeton, under the kindly, avuncular eye of the master Ame

Ross Douthat: Israel and Outremer

[Ross Douthat is a columnist for the New York Times.] Watching the Israeli government’s botched, bloody attempt to enforce its blockade of Gaza, I kept thinking about Outremer. That’s the name — French for “beyond the sea” — given to the states that the Crusaders established in the Holy Land during the High Middle Ages: the principality of Antioch, the counties of Edessa and Tripoli, and the kingdom of Jerusalem. Out of a mix of amnesia and self-abnegation

Imani Perry: Putting the 'Public' in 'Public Intellectual'

[Imani Perry is a professor at the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University. She is author of Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Duke University Press, 2004). Her next book, More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States, will be published by New York University Press next year.] I entered graduate school in the mid-1990s, a period marked by the rise of the black public intellectual: Mi

Peter Beinart: The Gipper Wasn't the Warhound His Conservative Followers Would Have You Think

[Peter Beinart is senior political writer for the Daily Beast, associate professor of journalism and politcal science at City University of New York, and senior fellow at New America Foundation. This essay is adapted from his new book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris.] Not so much. These days, virtually every time someone on the American right bashes President Barack Obama for kowtowing to dictators or failing to shout that we're at war, they light a votive candle

Lewis H. Lapham: The CIA & Me & Other Adventures in American Sports

[Lewis H. Lapham is editor of Lapham’s Quarterly. Formerly editor of Harper’s Magazine, he is the author of numerous books, including Money and Class in America, Theater of War, Gag Rule, and, most recently, Pretensions to Empire. The New York Times has likened him to H.L. Mencken; 

Richard Cohen: What Helen Thomas Missed

Ah, another teachable moment! This one comes to us from Helen Thomas, the longtime White House reporter and columnist who announced her retirement on Monday. Thomas, of Lebanese ancestry and almost 90, has never been shy about her anti-Israel views, for which, as far as I'm concerned, she is wrong and to which she is entitled. Then the other day, she performed a notable public service by revealing how very little she knew. Asked at a White House event if she had any comments about I

R. Taggart Murphy: With Friends Like Us, Why Would Japan Need Enemies?

[R. Taggart Murphy joined the Graduate School of Business Sciences at the University of Tsukuba in September, 2004.] Japan has a new prime minister, Naoto Kan, but he comes from the same party—the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ)—as Yukio Hatoyama, who resigned last Wednesday. He will almost surely want to continue Hatoyama's policies of strengthening Japan’s political democracy and forging an independent foreign policy that is allied with the United States, but not subordinate to it

John Conyers: Ending America's Longest War

[Rep. John Conyers, Jr. is the chair of the Out of Afghanistan Caucus.] This past week, the United States recognized a dubious milestone in our country's history as direct war spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan topped $1 trillion. Unfortunately, we have reached a second milestone, with the War in Afghanistan passing the Vietnam War to officially become the longest military conflict in American history. Most historians agree that the Vietnam War began with the

David C. Rose: Elena Kagan and the Consequences of Consequentialist Thinking

[David C. Rose is a professor of economics at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.] President Obama certainly has a right to put a liberal on the Supreme Court because liberal political tastes can be perfectly consistent with an appropriate fidelity to upholding the rule of law. But there are moral beliefs that many liberals possess today that largely conflict with upholding the rule of law.... Moral philosophers divide theories of morality between those that are conse

David Brooks: Trading History for Dollars

[David Brooks is a columnist for the New York Times.] When the going gets tough, the tough take accounting. When the job market worsens, many students figure they can’t indulge in an English or a history major. They have to study something that will lead directly to a job. So it is almost inevitable that over the next few years, as labor markets struggle, the humanities will continue their long slide. There already has been a nearly 50 percent drop in the portion of lib

Clayton E. Cramer: Arizona Immigration Law Not Historically Unusual

[Clayton E. Cramer is a software engineer and historian. His sixth book, Armed America: The Remarkable Story of How and Why Guns Became as American as Apple Pie (Nelson Current, 2006), is available in bookstores. His web site is www.claytoncramer.com.] For all the screeching about Arizona’s new immigration law, you would think that this is a new question: may a state enforce federal immigration law? I know better than to predict how the U.S

Harrison Schmitt: Apollo 13, the Gulf Oil Spill, and BP

[Harrison Schmitt is a a former senator from New Mexico and a geologist. He walked on the Moon as part of the crew of Apollo 17.] Mr. Tony Hayward, CEO of British Petroleum, has again used the 1970 Apollo 13 experience as analogous to the effort to contain and cap the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. President Obama’s administration’s and the supportive media have done the same, repeatedly. Nothing could be further from the truth! The response after an

Amy Siskind: Why the 'Pro-Women' Movement Should and Will Replace Feminism

[Amy Siskind is the President and Co-Founder of The New Agenda, an organization dedicated to improving the lives of women and girls. Ms. Siskind has appeared on CNN, Fox, and PBS. Ms. Siskind also writes for The Daily Beast and MORE.] Ever since Sarah Palin gave a speech to pro-life organization Susan B. Anthony List, a firestorm has erupted over whether Susan B. Anthony was pro-choice or pro-life. What we do know is that Anthony and other women suffragists battled for decades to ga

Larry J. Sabato: The U.S. Supreme Court: Reforming the Least Democratic Branch

[The founder and director of the renowned Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, Larry J. Sabato has appeared on national television and radio programs including 60 Minutes, Today, Hardball, and Nightline. A Rhodes scholar, he received his doctorate in politics from Oxford, and has been at UVA since 1978.] The U.S. Supreme Court is neither democratic nor easily changed, to some Americans’ delight and others’ dismay. No one would seriously propose that we elect Justices—j

Rob Grace: U.S. vs. ICC?

[Rob Grace, a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus, blogs for the Foreign Policy Association. He is also an award-winning playwright whose work has been produced around the world.] The recent Council on Foreign Relations report "From Rome to Kampala: The U.S. Approach to the 2010 International Criminal Court Review Conference" tells one side of a complex story. The author Vijay Padmanabhan asserts that the "United States has historically been the leader in internati

Ehud Eiran: Are Israel’s Battles Costing the Country Its Soul?

[Eiran is a major in the IDF reserves and worked for Israel’s attorney general and on Prime Minister Barak’s foreign-policy team. His book The Essence of Longing: General Erez Gerstein and the War in Lebanon was published in Israel in 2007. He is currently a research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School.] I am in love with Israel. Yet the events off the shores of Gaza last week, in which Israeli commandos stormed a blockade-busting aid ship and killed nine activists, were a painful re

Timothy Egan: Backward, Into The Future

[Timothy Egan is a contributor to the New York Times.] After gaining control of much of the world’s copper supply, the 19th-century robber baron William A. Clark set out to buy a seat in the United States Senate. Openly, he went about bribing Montana legislators, $10,000 a vote, the cash paid in monogrammed envelopes. Mark Twain called Clark “as rotten a human being as can be found anywhere under the flag,” but the senator did not show any shame. “I never bought a man w

Gerald M. Steinberg: The War Against Israel

[Mr. Steinberg teaches political science at Bar Ilan University and heads NGO Monitor.] The blurring of terrorist-activists and civilians that characterizes 21st century warfare took on a new dimension in the violent confrontation between the "Free Gaza Flotilla" and the Israeli Navy last week. Ostensibly, the hundreds of passengers on a ship carrying a large Turkish flag were "peace activists" on a "humanitarian" mission to bring aid to Palestinians &q