Roundup: Media's Take

Geoffrey Wansell: So what can we learn from the Crash of 1929 to avoid a 21st Century Great Depression?

[Geoffrey Wansell is an author and journalist.] By the end of September 1929, the American stock market on New York’s Wall Street was riding the wave of a decade of intoxicating growth. The Roaring Twenties — that era of the Jazz Age, bootleggers and gangsters like Al Capone — had seen millions of ordinary Americans caught up in the excitement of owning shares, and making money. The Dow Jones Industrial Average of leading shares had grown five-fold in the

David McKitterick: When digging up the past only harms the future

[David McKitterick writes for the Independent.] Of course the people who lost loved ones in the Omagh bombing should have the right to find out what happened on that sunny summer day in 1998 when a Real IRA bomb ripped apart their families and their lives. Of course they should be able to discover the whole truth; the guilty should be put behind bars; there should come a day when it can credibly be said that justice has been done. The history and the circumstances of No

E.J. Dionne, Jr.: Forget about hockey moms and Paris Hilton--the financial collapse is a stark reminder of what actually matters in this election

In democracies, all political factions run against an elite. Since the New Deal, Democrats have cast themselves against the financial and business elite. Since the 1960s, Republicans have thrashed the cultural and intellectual elite. Over the weekend, the moneyed class became much more vulnerable. The foolishness of our financial geniuses now threatens to bring economic sorrow to Main Street. Franklin Roosevelt's 1936 attack on "the privileged princes of these new economic dyna

Leon Aron: What Russia's New Government-Sanctioned Textbooks Tell Us About Putin's Horrifying Worldview

On June 18, 2007, a national conference of high school historians and teachers of social sciences was convened in Moscow. The agenda called for the discussion of "the acute problems in the teaching of modern Russian history," and for "the development of the state standards of education." It soon became clear that the real purpose of the gathering was to present to the delegates--or, more precisely, to impress upon them--two recently finished "manuals for teachers."

Michael Nelson: Newsweek's Woman Problem

[Michael Nelson: a former editor of The Washington Monthly, is a professor of political science at Rhodes College and a nonresident senior fellow at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. Among his most recent books are How the South Joined the Gambling Nation: The Politics of State Policy Innovation, with John Lyman Mason, and The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1787-2008, with Sidney M. Milkis. He is currently writing books about the 1968 electi

Robert Draper: Prisoner of War

... JOHN MCCAIN HAS been to Iraq eight times. Those trips, he maintains, have been indispensable in informing his thinking about the war. You cannot appreciate Iraq’s complexity, McCain says, until you see it. Correspondingly, he tends to belittle those war critics—most noticeably presidential rival Barack Obama—whose passports are less well-worn. As his friend and surrogate Senator Lindsey Graham pointedly asserts: “It matters to go.” Of course, simply touching down in-country does

Steve Fraser: The End of a Gilded Age

[Steve Fraser is working on a book about the two gilded ages. A TomDispatch regular and co-director of the American Empire Project series at Metropolitan Books, he is the author of, among other works, the recently published Wall Street: America's Dream Palace.] What is Washington to do as the financial system collapses? Clearly, stark differences in appro

Glen Johnson: McCain leads a dual life as powerbroker

John McCain embraces and expels Washington like an accordion player belting out a song. Squeeze in and he touts his vast knowledge of the capital city. Draw out and he casts himself a reformer bent on changing its ways. It's a remarkable dichotomy echoed throughout the Republican establishment, as a party that's held the White House for the past eight years tries to retain its grip in what has shaped up as a change election. "Reform becomes contagious

E.J. Dionne: Whose Elitism Problem Now?

In democracies, all political factions run against an elite. Since the New Deal, Democrats have cast themselves against the financial and business elite. Since the 1960s, Republicans have thrashed the cultural and intellectual elite. Over the weekend, the moneyed class became much more vulnerable. The foolishness of our financial geniuses now threatens to bring economic sorrow to Main Street. Franklin Roosevelt's 1936 attack on "the privileged princes of these new economic dyna

Bret Stephens: Palin and the 'Experience' Canard

If nothing else, the media meltdown over Sarah Palin's candidacy for the vice presidency has exposed the not-unsuspected truth that, when it comes to historical ignorance and political amnesia, our cultural panjandrums are in a class by themselves. ABC's Charlie Gibson is only the latest to offer himself upon the altar of self-parody with his pop-quizzing of the Alaska governor during their interview last week. Gibson: "Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?"

Aaron David Miller: Searching for Arab-Israeli Peace

SOURCE: Spring 2008 Wilson Quarterly [Aaron David Miller is a public policy scholar at the Wilson Center. He worked in both Republican and Democratic administrations as an adviser to the secretary of state on Arab-Israeli negotiations. His new book, The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace, was published in March by Bantam Books.] “The only lesson of history,” the British historian A. J. P. Taylor once observed, “is that there are no

Robert Higgs: Ticking Time Bomb Explodes, Public Is Shocked

The failure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, setting in motion the biggest government bailout/takeover in U.S. history, brings a grim sense of fulfillment to competent economists. After all, what did people expect, that water would flow uphill forever? This financial mega-mess is the same sort of event as the collapse of the USSR’s centrally planned economy, another economically unworkable Rube Goldberg apparatus that was kept going, more or less badly, for decades before it fell apar

Rupert Cornwell: What was Roosevelt's New Deal, and is something like it needed today?

[Rupert Cornwell has written articles published in The Independent.] Why are we asking this now? The current financial and economic turmoil is increasingly likened to the crisis that began with the Wall Street crash of 1929, paving the way to the Great Depression of the 1930s. That slump, the deepest and most prolonged economic downturn of modern times, continued through much of the decade. The response of Franklin Roosevelt, who became President of the United States i

Daniel Finkelstein: Sarah Palin and the man who wanted Robert Kennedy dead

[Daniel Finkelstein is Chief Leader Writer of The Times and writes a weekly column.] When Sarah Palin used this phrase in her acceptance speech: We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity she attributed it to "a writer". And added: I know just the kind of people that writer had in mind when he praised Harry Truman. I didn't think much more of it. But now the identity of the writer is ca

Steven Aftergood: Overcoming declassification

The next President could achieve a systematic reduction in government secrecy by directing each agency that classifies information to conduct a detailed public review of its classification policies with the objective of reducing secrecy to the essential minimum and declassifying everything that does not meet the standard for classification.Modeled on the Fundamental Classification Policy Review that was performed by the Department of Energy in 1995, this approach may be the

Daniel Gross: Lehman's failure marks the end of an era

Aside from signaling the end of an era for Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, this weekend's activity definitively drew a line at the end of another historical era: the Age of Glass-Steagall. The Glass-Steagall Act is the Depression-era law that separated commercial and investment banking. It was functionally repealed in 1998, when Travelers (the parent company of Salomon Smith Barney) acquired Citicorp. And it was officially repealed in 1999. But recent events on Wall Street-the fa

Sasha Abramsky: Running after Reagan

[Sasha Abramsky is a senior fellow at the New York-based think tank Demos.] I've been having strange emotions recently. Somehow, I have become nostalgic for Ronald Reagan. It's a somewhat bizarre feeling to have, since I've always thought Reagan's election represented one of the great calamities in modern American history. So let me explain. Reagan was a smiling, genial extremist. He promised a new dawn for a country that suddenly seemed no longer young; a new lease of

Frank Rich: Palin borrowed a quote from an extreme right-winger of forties

... Aligning herself with “a young farmer and a haberdasher from Missouri” who “followed an unlikely path to the vice presidency,” she read a quote from an unidentified writer [in her acceptance address at the Republican National Convention] who, she claimed, had praised Truman: “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity.” Then Palin added a snide observation of her own: Such small-town Americans, she said, “run our factories” and “fight our wars” and are “al

Thomas Frank: Palin loves the heartland to death

It tells us something about Sarah Palin's homage to small-town America, delivered to an enthusiastic GOP convention last week, that she chose to fire it up with an unsourced quotation from the all-time champion of fake populism, the belligerent right-wing columnist Westbrook Pegler. "We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity," the vice-presidential candidate said, quoting an anonymous "writer," which is to say, Pegler, who mus

Fareed Zakaria: This is not a cold war

[Fareed Zakaria is the editor of Newsweek International and author of "The Post-American World".] I'm sure you've heard the news. The cold war is back. Or history has returned. Or we're now in the 19th century world of great power politics. Russia's attack on Georgia has unleashed a barrage of cliches. Globalisation and integration have been exposed as shams. Our naive idea that we were living in a benign international environment has been shattered. Most of t