Roundup: Media's Take

Arkady Ostrovsky: Flirting with Stalin

[Arkady Ostrovsky is a journalist who reported from Moscow.] "Dear friends! The textbook you are holding in your hands is dedicated to the history of our Motherland… from the end of the Great Patriotic War to our days. We will trace the journey of the Soviet Union from its greatest historical triumph to its tragic disintegration." This greeting is addressed to hundreds of thousands of Russian schoolchildren who will in September receive a new history textbook

Ben Macintyre: Assassination ... the most grimly familiar tale in US history

[Ben Macintyre is a columnist writing for The Times newspaper.] A few months ago Doris Lessing, the novelist and Nobel laureate, was discussing the life-expectancy of Barack Obama, should he win the race to the White House: “He would probably not last long, a black man in the position of president,” she mused. “They would kill him.” Lessing was roundly criticised for insensitivity, but in the light of the arrests in Colorado yesterday, her remarks now seem grimly presci

Scott McLemee: The End of the End of the End of History?

[Scott McLemee writes Intellectual Affairs each week. He also blogs at Quick Study.] One minor casualty of the recent conflict in Georgia was the doctrine of peace through McGlobalization — a belief first elaborated by Thomas Friedman in 1999, and left in ruins on August 8, when Russian troops moved into South Ossetia. “No two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald’s,” wrote Friedman in The Lexus and the Olive Tree (Farrar,

Jeffrey Rosen: The Myth of Biden v. Bork

[Jeffrey Rosen is the author, most recently, of “The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries That Defined America.”] WHEN Joseph R. Biden Jr. stands on the podium in Denver tonight as Barack Obama’s vice presidential nominee, conservatives of a certain age will see a bogeyman who, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, presided over the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. Those hearings are to conservatives what the Cli

Max Boot: Eastern Europe Can Defend Itself

Eastern Europeans are rightly alarmed about the brazenness and success of the Russian blitzkrieg into Georgia. For many living in Russia's shadow, this is reviving traumatic memories -- of 1968 for Czechs, 1956 for Hungarians, 1939 for Poles. It does not help that senior Russian generals are threatening to rain nuclear annihilation on Ukraine and Poland if they refuse to toe the Kremlin's line. Even those states which, unlike Georgia and Ukraine, are already in NATO can take scant

Jonathan Freedland: What Ted can teach Hillary

[Jonathan Freedland has been a columnist for the Guardian since 1997.] Every politician begins a speech with the words "It's wonderful to be here" – but it's rare for that sentence to be freighted with as much poignant meaning as it carried when uttered by Senator Teddy Kennedy at the Democratic convention in Denver on Monday. The mere fact of his presence on stage, just three months after his diagnosis of brain cancer, delighted and relieved the crowd at the

Dayo Olopade: The inside story of how Obama was chosen for his big night at 2004 convention

[Dayo Olopade is a reporter-researcher for The New Republic.] ... the chain of events that launched Obama into the keynote began in April 2004, when Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill was in the early stages of planning a convention that the Kerry team hoped would rejuvenate his sagging campaign. They were eagerly looking for "something that would be high impact and would be written about a lot and reported on," as Cahill puts it. And as she was helping compile a shor

Susan Faludi: Second-Place Citizens (Re: Hillary's women supporters)

[Susan Faludi is the author, most recently, of “The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America.”] ... The despondency of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters — or their “vitriolic” and “rabid” wrath, as the punditry prefers to put it — has been the subject of perplexed and often irritable news media speculation. Why don’t these dead-enders get over it already and exit stage right? Shouldn’t they be celebrating, not protesting? After all, Hillary Clinton’s campaign made

Glenn Church: What Barack Obama Learned From Richard Nixon

The Obama campaign has promised to contest all 50 states. Does that mean he plans to visit all 50? No, Obama has wisely chosen to say “contest” not “visit.” That is because he has learned an important lesson from the last President to try a 50-state campaign — Richard Nixon. In 1960, Richard Nixon made even a better promise. Nixon promised to visit all 50 states. He made that vow during his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention. It goes to show that Tricky Dick

Drew Westen: What Obama Needs to Do in Denver

[Drew Westen, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at Emory University, founder of Westen Strategies, and author of "The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation," recently released in paperback with a new postscript on the 2008 election.] In the presidential race of 2004 we had the Two Americas. In this year's race we have the Two Obamas: the one who has drawn repeated comparisons to JFK, RFK, and MLK, and the one who has drawn c

Leon Hadar: Czechoslovakia on Their Minds

[Leon Hadar is a Cato Institute research fellow in foreign-policy studies and author, most recently, of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East.] Neoconservatives and their useful idiots in the American media have been on overdrive this August, rewinding to their World War II analogies and applying them to the fast-forwarding world of global politics. Exhibit A: the obvious likeness of the 2008 Beijing Olympics to the 1936 Berlin Games. Hitlergram of the Month was the parallel

Paul Eddy: Spanair crash recalls 1987 Detroit disaster

[Paul Eddy has been writing about intrigue, corruption, mayhem and murder for more than 25 years, primarily for The Sunday Times of London.] Experts investigating last week’s Spanish air crash, in which 154 people died, are reviewing a disaster in Detroit two decades ago that had striking similarities. Mechanical failure, human error or a combination of the two are presumed to have doomed Spanair flight JK5022 as it tried to take off for the Canary Islands from Barajas

Keith Richburg: Don't heed these cries of 'colonialist'

[Keith Richburg is now the Washington Post's New York bureau chief.] On the streets of Kinshasa years ago, during a protest against the then-dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, I remember someone in the crowd cornering me, an American reporter, and demanding to know why the United States had not sent troops to intervene. 'You took out Duvalier! You took out Marcos,' he said, referring to deposed dictators in Haiti and the Philippines. 'Why not here?' It was a question that I heard often over

Mike Phillips: As racism fades into my memory, it begins yet again for others

[Mike Phillips is the co-author of Windrush: Irresistible Rise of Multi-racial Britain.] When the Notting Hill riots started 50 years ago, I had been in a London school for two-and-a-half years. I was 14 and it was probably the biggest, most dramatic event in my life up to that time, but nothing about it was totally astonishing, because it was precisely the sort of event I had been fearing since I arrived. Today, walking around London with my teenage son, it's hard to e

Michael Barone: The Chosen Obama Narrative

Once upon a time, the two parties' national conventions chose presidential nominees. Now, they are television shows that try to establish a narrative -- one that links the long-since-determined nominee's life story with the ongoing history of the nation, one that shows how this one man is perfectly positioned to lead America to a better future. The hope is that the nominee will get a bounce in the polls. And they usually do. Gallup poll data shows that nominees got a 5 percent or be

Nabil Al-Hadithy: The Kurds are stealing Kirkuk. The US should stop them.

[Nabil Al-Hadithy heads Berkeley's toxic management division addressing hazardous waste problems. He graduated in Geology from University of London in 1975 and obtained Master's Degree from Cranfield University in Material Science in 1977 and doctorate in Welding Technology in 1982. He joined City of Berkeley in 1993 as HazMat Inspector and then became HazMat Manager. An Iraqi, he voted in the country's elections.] Within a year of the 1958 independence from the British monarchy, Ir

Peter Dreier: Jerome Corsi's "NonFiction Bestseller" Is Neither

[Dreier is Dr. E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, Chair, Urban & Environmental Policy Program, Occidental College.] The publication on August 1 of Jerome Corsi's book, The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality, has triggered considerable controversy in political and publishing circles, not only because the book is filled with many lies and distortions, but also because Corsi has long been affiliated with the nut-case wing of the conservative

Rens Lee: In Havana, Waiting for Obama or for Putin?

[Rens Lee is the author of Smuggling Armageddon and a senior fellow at FPRI.] As I left Havana earlier this month, Cuba was eagerly awaiting the United States’ November presidential elections. The buzz around the capital, reportedly from a highly placed source, was that Barack Obama has already talked to Raul Castro by phone. Obama has publicly stated that if elected, he would immediately ease restrictions on Cuban American travel and remittances placed by the Bush administration in

Sarah E. Mendelson: The End of the Post-Soviet Era

[Sarah E. Mendelson is director of the Human Rights and Security Initiative at the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington.] The dream that many inside and outside Russia had since the Soviet collapse -- to see Russia integrated with the West -- was crushed long before Russian tanks rolled into Georgia. The Kremlin's assault on democratic institutions such as the press, political parties and the parliament began years ago. The controlled process by which Prime

Noam Scheiber: How Cindy Hensley invented John McCain

On Saturday, May 17, 1980, Cindy Lou Hensley married Navy Captain John McCain at the First United Methodist Church on Central Avenue in Phoenix, not far from the bride's childhood home. After the ceremony, the wedding entourage headed nearly three miles east to the Arizona Biltmore resort, a sprawling gray oasis designed by a Frank Lloyd Wright protégé in the 1920s. Guests fêted the couple in the resort's Aztec Room, an elegant, twelve-sided banquet hall with a vaulted, gold-leaf ceiling. The 25