Roundup: Media's Take

Ken Blackwell: Welcome Back, Carter

[Ken Blackwell is a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission and a senior fellow at the Family Research Council.] The Norwegian Parliament can't build a "spite fence" between themselves and the United States. But they have a more effective way of showing their contempt for some of our elected leaders. They give out Nobel Peace Prizes. Leftist Scandinavian lawmakers are not like members of the College of Cardinals. Roman Catholic pr

David Rothkopf: Why Obama is less like Carter than people think

[David Rothkopf is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and President and CEO of Garten Rothkopf, a Washington, DC-based international advisory firm.] Hope is the life's blood of American politics. This is a country built on the premise of boundless promise. The president certainly understood this when he entitled his autobiography The Audacity of Hope and his handlers understood it as they openly sought to emulate Ronald Reagan, the modern American p

Bret Stephens: The Carter Ricochet Effect

[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.] An idealistic president takes office promising an era of American moral renewal at home and abroad. The effort includes a focus on diplomacy and peace-making, an aversion to the use of force, the selling out of old allies. The result is that within a couple of years the U.S. is more suspected, detested and enfeebled than ever. No, we're not talking about Barack Obama. But since the c

Charles Cooper: Rage Nation 2.0

[Charles Cooper blogs for CBS News] In 1964, the Columbia University historian, Richard Hofstadter, described in a magazine piece the "paranoid style in American politics" (a theme he later expanded in a book on the same topic). Talk about political prescience. The American lexicon is suddenly chockablock with a collection of colorful descriptions forged in the cauldron of an increasingly heated political debate - terms like tea parties, three p

Melik Kaylan: Was the U.S. unfairly blamed for damage to Iraq's heritage?

[Melik Kaylan, a writer based in New York, writes a weekly column for Forbes. His story "Georgia In The Time of Misha" is featured in The Best American Travel Writing 2008.] Last Saturday I wrote a Wall Street Journal opinion deploring the archeological fraternity's relentless and exaggerated criticism of the U.S. for allowing damage to Iraq's heritage. From the Baghdad museum to ancient sites around Iraq--most prominently the site of Babylon, where coalition forces had a

Elyssa East: Thanksgiving, A Moveable Fast

[Elyssa East is the author of the forthcoming “Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town.”] “IT’S Thanksgiving — time to put our feedbags on,” my family likes to say as we elbow for room next to the Pilgrim and Puritan ghosts the holiday summons to our table. Our colonial forebears probably would not disapprove of our having second and third helpings of sweet potatoes and stuffing, or even rushing off to watch football after the meal — the Pilgrims themselves played

Akiva Eldar: Jerusalem Syndrome

[Akiva Eldar is an Israeli journalist and author, currently a chief political columnist and editorial writer for the Israeli national daily Ha'aretz. His columns also appear regularly in the Ha'aretz-International Herald Tribune edition, as well as in the Japanese daily Mainichi Shimbun.] Sometimes tourists show up at Jerusalem's mental health centers, convinced that a voice from the heavens told them they were the messiah. The illness, commonly known as Jerusalem Syndrome, usually

E.J. Dionne: Obama's Third Way in Afghanistan

[E.J. Dionne is a twice-weekly columnist for The Post, writing on national policy and politics. He is a University Professor at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution.] When there is no good solution to a problem, a president has three options. One is to avoid the problem. The second is to pick the least bad of the available options. The third is to mix and match among the proposed solutions and minimize the long-term damage any decision will cause.

Mary Anastasia O'Grady: The End of Bolivian Democracy

[Mary Anastasia O'Grady is a member of the editorial board at The Wall Street Journal and writes editorial columns on Latin America, trade and international economics. She is also editor of "The Americas," a weekly column that appears every Monday and deals with politics, economics and business in Latin America and Canada.] A dictatorship that fosters the production and distribution of cocaine is not apt to enjoy a positive international image. But when that same governmen

Reuel Gerecht: Major Hasan and Holy War

[—Mr. Gerecht, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.] For those of us who have tracked Islamic militancy in Europe, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan's actions are not extraordinary. Since Muslim militants first tried to blow a French high-speed train off its rails in 1995, European intelligence and internal-security services have increasingly monitored European Muslim radicals. Whether it's anti-Muslim bigotry, the large

Christopher Hitchens: The "war on terrorism" didn't cause the Fort Hood shootings

[Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Roger S. Mertz media fellow at the Hoover Institution.] It's both amusing and educational to observe a consensus when it suddenly starts to give way at all points without yielding an inch. A couple of weeks ago, the consoling view was that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was a man more to be pitied than feared, a full-blown officer in the U.S. armed forces who was too shaken up by the stories of returned veterans to be able to func

Allan Gerson: Lessons From Nuremberg

[Allan Gerson, a former deputy-assistant attorney general and counselor for international affairs in the Reagan administration, is involved in the representation of 9/11 families in their lawsuit against various Saudi financial institutions.] The Obama administration’s remarkable decision to hold the trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other masterminds of 9/11 in a civil court in New York, rather than use the conventional military tribunal structure, rests on one fundamental pillar

Gordon Cucullu: Fort Hood ... terror's 'third wave'

[Gordon Cucullu, a former Army lieutenant colonel, is author of "Inside Gitmo: The True Story Behind the Myths of Guantanamo Bay."] The Fort Hood killings were no isolated incident, but part of al Qaeda's "third wave." The 9/11 terrorists were the first wave: Their attacks culminated years of direct attacks on America and the West by al Qaeda operators -- a core group of Saudi, Yemeni and other identifiably Arab men. But Osama bin Laden and his key

Howard Fineman: How Obama Is Like Reagan

[Howard Fineman is Newsweek's Chief Political Correspondent, Senior Editor and Deputy Washington Bureau Chief.] A democratic president, you'd think, would stick to Franklin D. Roosevelt or Jack Kennedy as role models. Not Barack Obama. As he faces tough times—economically and politically—I am told that he and his advisers are turning to an unusual source for inspiration: Ronald Reagan. Looking back, it shouldn't be a total surprise. On the campaign trail in 2008, Obama said nice thi

Martin Jacques: Why America Must Learn to Bow

[Martin Jacques is the cofounder of the UK think tank Demos, writes a regular column for The Guardian, and is a visiting research fellow at the London School of Economics Asia Research Centre. His new book, When China Rules the World, is available now.] Obama’s visit to China last week was starkly different from previous such occasions. The United States has stumbled into a new era. Just a decade ago it all looked so different. President Bush—in one of history’s great miscalculation

Robert Wright: Who Created Major Hasan?

[Robert Wright, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author, most recently, of “The Evolution of God” and the editor in chief of the blog The Progressive Realist.] IN the case of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan and the Fort Hood massacre, the verdict has come in. The liberal news media have been found guilty — by the conservative news media — of coddling Major Hasan’s religion, Islam. Liberals, according to the columnist Charles Krauthammer, wanted to medicalize

Fareed Zakaria: Is America Losing Its Mojo?

[Fareed Zakaria was named editor of Newsweek International in October 2000, overseeing all Newsweek editions abroad. The magazine reaches an audience of 24 million worldwide.] By most measures, America remains the world leader in technological achievement. Consider the 2009 Nobel Prizes: of the 13 people honored, nine were American. Once you take out the economics, literature, and peace prizes, the United States, with 5 percent of the world's population, still won close to 70 percen

David Jackson: Obama follows in the Chinese footsteps of Richard Nixon

[David's journalism career spans three decades, including coverage of five presidential elections, the Oklahoma City bombing, the 2000 Florida presidential recount and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He has covered the White House for USA TODAY since 2005. His interests include history, politics, books, movies and college football -- not necessarily in that order.] Of all the images of the U.S. presidency, few have been more startling than the one seen by millions of Americans on Feb. 2

Jonathan Movroydis: Another Misinformed Vietnam Analogy

[Jonathan recently graduated from the University of California, Irvine. His research and writing interests include political ideology, religion, and their respective impact on domestic and world politics.] The Daily Mail’s Andrew Alexander is the latest: When Vietnam was at its worst, President Nixon made the bogus claim that the Government in the South had reached the stage where it could fight the Viet Cong without outside support. An und

David R. Stokes: A Joke Too Far (Obama in light of the Kennedy Assassination)

[David R. Stokes (www.davidrstokes.com) is a minister, broadcaster, and free-lance writer. He currently serves as Senior Pastor of FAIR OAKS CHURCH in Fairfax, Virginia (www.fairoakschurch.org )] A tasteless joke – one that saw earlier popularity during the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush – has resurfaced across America. It is being told in whispers, emails, and even bumper st