Roundup: Media's Take

Monica Crowley: Obama and American Exceptionalism

[Monica Crowley is a nationally syndicated radio host, a panelist on "The McLaughlin Group" and a Fox News contributor.] One day in 1984, at the height of his fame, Michael Jackson made a visit to the White House. President and Nancy Reagan may not have dug his music, but they understood the power Mr. Jackson commanded as a common pop-cultural touchstone for just about everyone else. Mr. Jackson had given the White House permission to use his smash hit "Beat It"

Obama's Favorite Theologian? A Short Course on Reinhold Niebuhr

Ever since then-Sen. Barack Obama spoke of his admiration for Reinhold Niebuhr in a 2007 interview with New York Times columnist David Brooks, there has been speculation about the extent to which the 20th-century theologian has influenced Obama's views on faith, politics and social change. At the Pew Forum's biannual Faith Angle Conference in May 2009, Wilfred McClay, a historian specializing in American intel

Christina Hoff Sommers: Persistent Myths in Feminist Scholarship

[Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. She is the author of Who Stole Feminism? (Simon & Schuster, 1994) and The War Against Boys (Simon & Schuster, 2000), and editor of The Science on Women and Science, forthcoming from the AEI Press.] "Harder to kill than a vampire." That is what the sociologist Joel Best calls a bad statistic. But, as I have discovered over the years, among false statistics the hardest of all to slay

Adam Holland: The NY Times, John Birch Society and Father Feeney

[Mr. Holland runs an investigative blog.] Last week, the Times ran an article on the John Birch Society which was brief but good. It's especially vital reading for people who hear about the conspiracy theories driving a lot of far-right politics without knowing their historical context. The John Birch Society invented a number of these theories, and they're still going strong in promoting them. By the way, their national convention this year featured a keynote address by a John Birch

Con Coughlan: Why Iran hates Britain so much

[Con Coughlan is the author of 'Khomeini's Ghost: Iran Since 1979', published by Macmillan.] Not so long ago, Britain was held in such low esteem in Iran that it was simply dismissed as the "little Satan". So far as the ayatollahs were concerned, the real enemy was America, the "great Satan", whose love of liberty and free market capitalism was thought to pose the gravest threat to the Islamic revolution's survival. It was for this reason that the Am

Caroline Glick: Obama, Like Carter, is No 'Realist'

[Caroline Glick is an American-Israeli Journalist and is the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post.] For a brief moment it seemed that US President Barack Obama was moved by the recent events in Iran. On Friday, he issued his harshest statement yet on the mullocracy's barbaric clampdown against its brave citizens who dared to demand freedom in the aftermath of June 12's stolen presidential elections. Speaking of the protesters Obama said, "Their bravery in t

Fareed Zakaria: Historical parallels don't work in Iran

[Fareed Zakaria is Editor of Newsweek International whose column appears in Newsweek, Newsweek International and The Washington Post.] whenever we see the kinds of images that have been coming out of Iran over the past two weeks, we tend to think back to 1989 and Eastern Europe. That time, when people took to the streets and challenged their governments, those seemingly stable regimes proved to be hollow and quickly collapsed. What emerged was liberal democracy. Could Iran yet under

Rupert Cornwell: Left and right turn on 'Bush-like' Obama

[Rupert Cornwell writes for the Independent.] Like their British counterparts at Westminster, American Congressmen are not people who normally arouse much sympathy. If the former specialise in fiddling expenses, the latter are best at avidly seeking publicity – usually to the detriment of doing anything that actually benefits the country. Right now though, you have to feel sorry for them. If any one deserves a decent 4 July holiday break, it is these grossly overworked souls.

Laura Bush: Do Not Forget Burma

[The writer is the former first lady of the United States.] For two weeks, the world has been transfixed by images of Iranians taking to the streets to demand the most basic human freedoms and rights. Watching these courageous men and women, I am reminded of a similar scene nearly two years ago in Burma, when tens of thousands of Buddhist monks peacefully marched through their nation's streets. They, too, sought to reclaim basic human dignity for all Burmese citizens, but they were

Peggy Noonan: By trying to do too much, Obama risks not doing enough

Something seems off with our young president. He appears jarred. Difficult history has come over the transom. He seemed defensive and peevish with the press in his Tuesday news conference, and later with Charlie Gibson on health care, when he got nailed by a neurologist who suggested the elites who support a national program seem not to mind rationing for other people but very much mind if for themselves. All this followed the president's first bad numbers. From Politico, on Tuesday: "Erodi

John Bolton: The Post-American Presidency

[John R. Bolton is the former US ambassador to the United Nations. He is now senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of Surrender is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations.] Judging a new American President's national security policies after six months in office is a perilous enterprise, especially in the case of Barack Obama, where constant incantations of "change" and serial criticisms of his predecessor are the order of the day.

Simon Jenkins: Obama must call off this folly before Afghanistan becomes his Vietnam

[Simon Jenkins is a journalist and author. He writes for the Guardian and the Sunday Times, as well as broadcasting for the BBC.] If good intentions ever paved a road to hell, they are doing so in Afghanistan. History rarely declares when folly turns to ­disaster, but it does so now. Barack Obama and his amanuensis, Gordon Brown, are uncannily repeating the route taken by American leaders in Vietnam from 1963 to 1975. Galbraith once said that the best thing about the Great Depressio

Michael Gerson: Obama Is Just Like Bush, the First

[Michael Gerson is a columnist with The Washington Post and served as President George W. Bush's speechwriter.] PRESIDENTS dealing with foreign uprisings are haunted by two historical precedents. The first is Hungary in 1956, in which Radio Free Europe encouraged an armed revolt against Soviet occupation, a revolt that the US had no capability or intention of materially supporting. In the contest of Molotov cocktails v tanks, about 2500 revolutionaries died; 1200 were later executed

David Loyn: 5 Afghan History Lessons for Obama's New General

[David Loyn is the BBC's developing world correspondent.] Afghanistan is a country of deserts crossed by a right-angled wall of mountains -- the Hindu Kush to the north, and the frontier with Pakistan to the east. The frontier range is 200 miles long and 600 miles wide, with peaks topping 15,000 feet, and only a handful of major passes crossing it -- the most famous being the Khyber Pass. In the 19th century, the British, trying to secure a western frontier for their In

Bill Clinton: The Legacy of F.D.R.: Getting It Right

My grandfather was a dirt farmer with only a sixth-grade education. During the Depression, he eked out a living selling blocks of ice. But in those days, even though he was poor, he knew someone special: from listening to the fireside chats on the radio, he knew Franklin Roosevelt. And he believed that Roosevelt knew what his life was like — and cared about it too. I grew up listening to my grandfather's tales of what it was like to live through the Depression and the war and what R

Martin Davis: Resetting the American Faith Dialogue

[Martin Davis is an independent journalist and founder of Davis Communications working out of Washington, D.C. He operates the blog Faith and Fumbles.] After eight years of teeth-gnashing by journalists over President George W. Bush’s evangelical leanings and fears that he’ll bring his faith into play when making policy decisions, a new evangelist has appeared up the street from Capitol Hill: President Barack Obama. First, he “threw open the doors” of the White House

Jonathan Chait: The Obama Method

The thing that people haven't figured out about President Obama's conduct of foreign policy is that it's the same as his conduct of domestic policy. Obama believes in the power of negotiation and public dialogue to split his adversaries--Republicans at home, Islamists abroad--and strengthen his own position. Obama's speech in Cairo to the Muslim world was simply the foreign analogue of his dealings with the GOP. Obama's method begins with attempts to find common ground, expressions

E.J. Dionne: Politics very much influence Supreme Court decisions--and to pretend otherwise is dangerous

The United States Supreme Court claims to be above politics, and it sometimes even achieves that aspiration. The court has occasionally solved problems that the more conventionally political branches of government have allowed to fester, and oppressed minorities have periodically been able to use the court to vindicate their rights. But far more than we want to admit, the justices of the Supreme Court reflect the country's competing political tendencies and often reach

Steven R. Ward: What previous protests and revolutions in Iran can teach us about the current crisis

[Steven R. Ward is a senior Middle East analyst for the U.S. government. He is the author of Immortal: A Military History of Iran and Its Armed Forces (Georgetown University Press, 2009). The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of any U.S. government agency.] On the eve of the centennial of Iran's first modern revolution, the country is experiencing the latest in a series of popular eruptions against an oppressiv

Bernard Avishai : Why US presidents have failed to make Israel accept a plan for regional peace

[Bernard Avishai is the author, most recently, of The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace at Last (Harcourt). He blogs at www.bernardavishai.com.] A writer can't tackle a subject as immense as the United States and the Middle East without a kind of working conundrum. Patrick Tyler, a former New York Times and Washington Post correspondent, does not tell us what prompted him to write A World