Roundup: Media's Take

Kelly Shackelford: Why the Texas Textbook Wars Matter to Every American

[Kelly Shackelford, Esq., is president and CEO of Liberty Institute, a post he has held since 1997.] ...Texas is in the process of adopting its social studies standards, which only happens every ten years. The standards cover U.S. Government, American History, World History, and more, and they affect how students in grades K – 12 see America, its founding principles, and its heroes for the next decade. More than that, because Texas is one of the largest consumers of tex

Gabriel Winant: Texas Messes with History

[Gabriel Winant is a freelance writer and graduate student, currently living in the United Kingdom.] Texas chauvinists may think their state, with its past as an independent nation, has the coolest history. But they have a hell of a way of taking it out on the rest of us. With last Friday's lopsided vote, the Texas State Board of Education has preliminarily imposed new standards for the state’s history textbooks. Because the Texas market is so large, textbook publishers

John Havelock: Two Perceptions of America Speed Toward Decisive Clash

[John Havelock is a former Alaska attorney general. He lives in Anchorage.] The uproar over extending government-sponsored medical services is a replay of a regular theme in American politics: the clash between two perceptions of America. One view has it that America is or should be an interdependent community, bound by social ties, mutual duties and expectancies, an "American System." In the American System, the national government takes a leading role in sha

Kevin Cullen: Northern Ireland Remains a Segregated Society

[Kevin Cullen, a Globe columnist, was the Globe’s bureau chief in Dublin and London, and covered the conflict in Northern Ireland for more than 20 years.] For the men who killed Kieran Doherty a few weeks ago, it must have felt like old times. They bound his hands, stripped him of his clothes, and put two bullets in his head. Then they dumped his body on the Braehead Road, outside Derry, near the border, a border separating Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic whose existence has

John B. Judis: Obama Needs to Learn Reagan's Lessons from 1982.

[John B. Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic and a visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.] I have argued that rising unemployment inevitably imperils the political prospects of a president and his party. So I’m not surprised that President Barack Obama’s approval ratings have steadily fallen over the last year, or that Democrats have fared poorly in recent elections. And it’s fair to say that if unemployment continues to rise, or stays at the sam

Ismael Hossein-zadeh: Champions of Neoliberal Economics are Reversing New Deal Economics

[Ismael Hossein-zadeh, author of The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism, teaches Economics at Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa.] The “golden” years of the U.S. economy in the immediate post-WW II period, along with the recovery and expansion of the economies of other industrialized countries, afforded the working class of these countries a decent, even middle-class, standard of living. Combined with extensive social safety-net programs such as the New Deal reforms in the U.S. an

James Fallows: The Danger of Romanticizing China's Past

[James Fallows is a National Correspondent for The Atlantic. A 25-year veteran of the magazine and former speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, he is also an instrument-rated pilot and a onetime program designer at Microsoft.] Last April, the British writer J.G. Ballard died at age 79. By chance, on a trip to Shanghai a few days earlier, I'd seen the house where Ballard had lived as a boy in the 1930s, before the Japanese invasion and the experiences that gave rise to his unforgettable nov

Jeff Shesol: Obama Should Take Heed from FDR on the Supreme Court

[Jeff Shesol is the author of the forthcoming “Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court.”] IN his State of the Union address, when President Obama criticized the Supreme Court, Justice Samuel Alito shook his head, scowled and mouthed a two-word dissent: “Not true.” Chief Justice John Roberts, meanwhile, smiled serenely, apparently untroubled by the president’s attack. Now we know what Chief Justice Roberts really thinks. Last week, he fired b

Ralph Peters: Why our 'post-modern presidents' fail

[Ralph Peters has been a Post Opinion columnist since 2002.] Since the end of World War II, our country has had three great presidents: Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. Their politics varied, but these giants stand in sharp contrast to our last three presidents, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and now Barack Obama. The first two presided over gravely flawed presidencies; the third is on his way to outright failure. What makes these tw

Godfrey Hodgson: Barack Obama and America

[Godfrey Hodgson was director of the Reuters' Foundation Programme at Oxford University, and before that the Observer's correspondent in the United States and foreign editor of the Independent.] When Barack Obama was elected United States president in November 2008, he was instantly compared with Franklin D Roosevelt: a leader who would use the deep financial and economic crisis he had inherited to transform American politics. The moment seemed propitious to fuse his inspiring human

Ann Woolner: Liz Cheney Would Call John Adams a Terrorists’ Pal

[Ann Woolner is a columnist for Bloomberg News.] Liz Cheney, meet John Adams. Perhaps you have heard of him. A Founding Father of our nation, he became America’s first vice president and its second president. But before all that, back when he was practicing law in Boston, Adams did precisely what you say should disqualify lawyers from representing his country. He defended the enemy. Charged with murder for the Boston massacre of 1770, let’s cal

Alexander Zaitchik: Where Did David Brooks Get the Bizarre Idea That the Tea Party Crowd Resembles '60s Movements?

[Alexander Zaitchik is a Brooklyn-based freelance journalist and AlterNet contributing writer. His book, Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance, will be published by Wiley in June.] There is a fresh interpretive fad in the young field of Tea Party Studies: The New Right of 2010 as the New Left of the 1960s.According to this nascent meme, today’s conservative grassroots holds strong echoes of earlier radicalism on the left. The Tea Party movement that worshi

David Aaronovitch: Iraq Has Moved Forward. It's Time We Did Too

[David Aaronovitch is a writer, broadcaster and commentator on international politics and the media.] Imagine for a moment that you’ve woken up to the election results from North Korea. Or Syria. Or even China. The turnout is above 62 per cent, and millions of votes have been cast throughout the country for an exhaustingly wide range of candidates from all sorts of political parties and groups. No group will have a majority, so soon negotiations about forming a government will begin

Ariel Dorfman: Earthquate Exposes Chile's History

[Ariel Dorfman, the Chilean American author, teaches at Duke University. Website: adorfman.duke.edu. Dr. Dorfman has granted permission to reprint his op-ed in full.] Almost two weeks after the earthquake that devastated Chile, the country is still reeling from aftershocks. I speak to my sister-in-law in Santiago and she suddenly interrupts our conversation, telling me she has to hang up, está temblandoestá temblando, está temblando -- it's trembling, again and again. A

Uri Dromi: Will Israel Join the March of Folly?

[Uri Dromi was spokesman for the Rabin and Peres governments from 1992 to 1996.] Barbara Tuchman, in her classic book “March of Folly,” examined four cases in history when governments acted contrary to their own best interests: the Trojans who let the Greeks bring the fatal horse into their midst; the papacy, which allowed and even brought about the Protestant secession; the British who lost America, and America, which lost the war in Vietnam. When I heard that during V

George F. Will: As a Progressive, Obama Hews to the Wilsonian Tradition

[George F. Will writes a columnist for the Washington Post.] There are legislative miles to go before the government will be emancipated from its health-care myopia, but it is not too soon for a summing-up. Whether all or nothing of the legislation becomes law, Barack Obama has refuted critics who call him a radical. He has shown himself to be a timid progressive.... In a scintillating book coming in June ("The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris"),

Davidson Loehr: Beck, Coulter and Limbaugh are Avatars of Julius Streicher

[Davidson Loehr is a retired Unitarian minister, author of"America, Fascism & God: Sermons from a Heretical Preacher" (Chelsea Green, 2005).]Making fun of demagogues like Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh has become a kind of parlor game, an escape valve to let out some of the frustration of impotent rage. This was brought home again when I read "Defying Hitler" by Sebastian Haffner. Writing between 1933 and 1939, he came of age during Hitler's rise to power. His

Peter Beinart: Obama Gets His Mojo Back

[Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, is associate professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. His new book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, will be published by HarperCollins in June.] Amidst the speculation over whether David Axelrod hates Rahm Emanuel or Rahm Emanuel hates David Axelrod or Lawrence Summers hates them both, the punditocracy has glossed over

Joe Conason: The New McCarthyism

[Joe Conason writes for the New York Observer.] The national madness known as "McCarthyism" began 60 years ago in Wheeling, W.V., when Joseph R. McCarthy held up a scrap of paper that supposedly listed the names of 57 State Department officials he said were actually Communists and traitors. Eventually, America learned that the Wisconsin Republican's famous list was a fabrication, that he was a liar and a demagogue as well as an alcoholic -- and that his author

Daniel Henninger: Why Obama Is No LBJ

[Daniel Henninger is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal.] ...Barack Obama as LBJ is a metaphor worth pondering if one wants to understand Mr. Obama's difficulties with [his health care] project, and his presidency. The more useful comparison, though, isn't to LBJ's tortured 1960s presidency but to the famed Senate Majority Leader who in 1957 got a civil rights act passed.... From that January until Aug. 2, Johnson engaged in a mind-boggling effort of legislative po