Roundup: Media's Take

Patrick Hennessy and Melissa Kite: Labour revolt against Gordon Brown: Party like it's 1990

[Patrick Hennessy is Political Editor at the Sunday Telegraph. Melissa Kite is Deputy Political Editor at the Sunday Telegraph.] As her black, chauffeur-driven Jaguar swept through the familiar gates of Chequers yesterday, Margaret Thatcher's thoughts might well have turned to the subject of plots against prime ministers. Eighteen years ago, her own premiership fell victim to an assassination attempt that began among her own backbenchers. It became terminal when a significant number

Andy Beckett: Crisis? What crisis? ... Worrying Parallels for Brown

[Andy Beckett is writing a book for Faber about British politics in the 1970s.] All ailing governments have an atmosphere. In the mid-1990s, John Major's slowly expired amid pinstriped rebellions by Eurosceptics and Tory sleaze stories in the papers. In the early 90s, Margaret Thatcher's sickened more suddenly as poll tax protesters rioted and Michael Heseltine quietly plotted. In the early 70s, Ted Heath's was stalked and then strangled by the National Union of Mineworkers.

James Castagnera: In November, We Make History… Let’s Do It Right!

[Jim Castagnera is the Associate Provost and Associate Counsel at Rider University. A collection of his columns is available at www.lulu.com.] Barring the unforeseen, in January 2009 America will have either its first black president or its first female vice president. Either way we will have made history. For this writer, the 2008 national election has the main qualities of a great rollercoaster ride. For me it feels both exciting a

James Taranto: South Side Veterans for Truth

Last week we wrote that " 'community organizer' is to Barack Obama what 'war hero' was to John Kerry." We didn't know the half of it.Kerry staked his claim to the presidency on the pretense that he was a war hero, notwithstanding his showy repudiation decades earlier of the war and his fellow veterans. According to a new exposé in the liberal

Paul Theroux: The bloody rise of the vote hunter

All this talk about moose hunting! It is as though, because of the animal's enormous size and imposing antlers, bringing one down is a heroic feat of marksmanship. Nothing could be further from the truth. As Henry David Thoreau wrote in The Maine Woods, killing these big, gentle, myopic creatures is more "like going out by night to some woodside pasture and shooting your neighbour's horses". Thoreau's descriptions of the moose he saw in Maine are inspired and fanciful: &q

Daniel Koffler: We shouldn't repeat Britain's mistake of World War I in our response to Russia's invasion

[Daniel Koffler is a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Oxford.] The abortive war over South Ossetia and Abkhazia has inspired a surge of historical analogies. According to overwrought commentators like Roger Kimball of The New Criterion, "August 8 was the date when Russia began reassembling the former Soviet empire in earnest," while in the comparatively temperate assessment of John McCain, Putin merely wants "to restore the old Russian empire."

Paul Rogat Loeb: Pit Bull Palin

[Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time. See www.paulloeb.org To receive his articles directly, email sympa@lists.onenw.org with the subject line:

Joe Klein: Sarah Palin's Myth of America

... Nearly 50 years ago, in The Burden of Southern History, the historian C. Vann Woodward argued that the South was profoundly different from the rest of America because it was the only part of the country that had lost a war: "Southern history, unlike American ... includes not only an overwhelming military defeat but long decades of defeat in the provinces of economic, social and political life." Woodward believed that this heritage led Southerners to be more obsessed with the past t

WSJ Editorial: Obama's lost years

Barack Obama makes his first campaign visit today to his alma mater, Columbia University. Just don't ask the prolific self-diarist to talk about his undergraduate days in Morningside Heights. The Columbia years are a hole in the sprawling Obama hagiography. In his two published memoirs, the 47-year-old Democratic nominee barely mentions his experience there. He refuses to answer questions about Columbia and New York -- which, in this media age, serves only to raise more of the

David R. Stokes: Palin, Roosevelt, and American Originals

[Mr. Stokes is the senior pastor of Fair Oaks Church in Fairfax, VA.] The rollout of Sarah Palin as the Republican vice presidential nominee appears to be morphing into a full-fledged juggernaut. Democratic strategists, not to mention their nominees, continue to scratch their heads while trying to play the familiar political games of catch-up and gotcha. Governor Palin is a breath of fresh air to some, and a dangerous tornado to others. But all agree that she has changed the dyna

Jessica Bloustein: From ancient Greece to the modern day, people in power have been mocked

As long as there have been people in power, there have been wiseacres mocking the people in power. Those Paleolithic French cave paintings of horses? It's a safe bet that at least one of them is an old-school political cartoon meaning"Tribal leader Gary is a jackass." Greek playwright Aristophanes' satirical comedies were filled with jabs at influential citizen leaders of Athens during the Peloponnesian War. While in exile, Dante Alighieri wrote his"Divine Comedy," in which he placed

Richard Bernstein: Do Palin's credentials compare to Truman's?

[Richard Bernstein writes for the International Herald Tribune.] The word among Republicans seems to be that if Sarah Palin becomes our next vice president, she will be in the distinguished company of others who came to that office while young and relatively inexperienced, and yet, in the judgment of history, rose splendidly to the occasion when fate offered them the presidency itself. In her rousing speech to the Republican convention last week, Palin put herself in th

Alan M. Dershowitz: Dems Diss Jimmy Carter

[Alan M. Dershowitz is a Professor of Law at Harvard. His most recent book The Case Against Israel’s Enemies: Exposing Jimmy Carter and Others Who Stand In The Way of Peace is being published by Wiley at the end of this month.] It is long been traditional for living ex-presidents to be invited to address their party’s quadrennial convention during presidential election years. The fact that Jimmy Carter was not invited to give the traditional address was no accident. Nor is it true

Robert Dreyfuss: Cambodia, 1970 ... Remember how well that worked? Bush is trying that in Pakistan

[Robert Dreyfuss, a Nation contributing editor, is an investigative journalist in Alexandria, Virginia, specializing in politics and national security.] The Times reports today that President Bush gave an order in July allowing US Special Forces "to carry out ground assaults inside Pakistan without the prior approval of the Pakistani government, according to senior American officials." They'll notify the Pakistani government, but won't ask permission. Somewha

David Schenker: A Dangerous Precedent ... The moral and political cost of Libya's rehabilitation

[David Schenker is director of the Program on Arab Politics at The Washington Institute.] SECRETARY OF STATE Condoleezza Rice's visit to Libya last week represents the final step in a decades-long U.S. effort to reform and rehabilitate the rogue state. A charter member of the U.S. Department of State's list of State Sponsors of Terrorism, after its nuclear program was disclosed in 2003, Tripoli demonstrated contrition and agreed to compensate American victims of a 1988 terrorist att

William McGurn: Bob Woodward offers a strange lens on history

When Abraham Lincoln famously sent word to Gen. George McClellan that he'd like to "borrow" the army if the general wasn't planning on using it, the commander of Union forces likely did not take it kindly. McClellan, after all, was a man whose letters home referred to Lincoln as an "idiot," "a well-meaning baboon" and other colorful language. AP Gen. George Casey. In the first few pages of "The War Within," Bob Woodward ope

Michael Isikoff vs. David Horowitz: Who Lied When People Died?

[HNN Editor: David Horowitz's response follows Isikoff's article. At issue: The claims made in Horowitz's Party of Defeat (co-authored with Ben Johnson.]Michael Isikoff [Isikoff is an investigative correspondent for Newsweek and the co-author (with David Corn) of Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War.] There was a time that David Horowitz (with Peter Collier) wrote absorbing works of history, filled with fresh r

Jeff Madrick: How big government helps the economy take off

[Jeff Madrick is editor of Challenge magazine and senior fellow of the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis, The New School. His new book, "The Case for Big Government," will be published in November.] IN LISTENING TO this year's candidates for the White House talk about their ambitions for the economy, there's no escaping one undercurrent of contemporary American thinking: the idea that minimizing government and lowering taxes will help the economy grow.

Ezra Klein: Why it might not be a bad idea to have a senator become president

[Ezra Klein is an associate editor at the American Prospect. He blogs at EzraKlein.com.] Since LBJ, six sitting or former U.S. senators have been nominated to run for president. None was elected. It has been more than four decades since we last elected a sitting senator to the White House. But this year, that dry spell will end. Not only are the two presidential candidates both sitting senators, but so is the Democratic nominee for vice president. Combined, the three of

George F. Will: Are You Better Off? That Depends

- John McCain, who is in what Macbeth called "the sear, the yellow leaf" of life, has revived an oldie from seven elections ago with a campaign commercial asserting: "We're worse off than we were four years ago." This, of course, derives from Ronald Reagan's question, addressed to the nation with devastating effect on his opponent, during Reagan's debate with President Jimmy Carter in 1980. The nation considered the answer obvious. Reeling from oil shocks worse t