Roundup: Media's Take

David Brooks: The Coming Activist Age

... The Democrats are the natural party of federal vigor. Voters prefer Democratic approaches to issues like health care and education by as much as 25 percentage points. Yet, historically, periods of great governmental change have often been periods of conservative rule. It’s as if voters understand that they need big changes, but they want those changes planned and enacted by leaders who will restrain the pace of change and prevent radical excess. Two of the most prom

Robert Fisk: When propaganda turns out to be fact

[Robert Fisk is a British journalist and is Middle East correspondent for The Independent.] What happens when myths turn out to be true? I'm talking about the "myth" of the German army's atrocities in little Belgium in 1914, the raped nuns and the babies spitted on Prussian bayonets. "Hun barbarism" was the powerful propaganda tool to send the British Tommies and the French poilus – literally, "the hairy ones" – off to the killing fields of the Somme, Y

Ryan L. Cole: Vietnam Syndrome ... The war that has yet to produce a commander-in-chief

[Ryan L. Cole is a writer based in Washington, D.C.] Two million Americans fought in Vietnam. But not one of them has ever been elected president. If John McCain's bid for the presidency is unsuccessful, no veteran of that war will ever occupy the White House. This would make it unique among American wars and the political fortunes of their heroes. From the beginning of the republic Americans have looked to former warriors for leadership. Am

Michael I. Meyerson: Is McCain a natural born citizen?

[Michael I. Meyerson, a professor of law at the University of Baltimore, is the author of “Liberty’s Blueprint: How Madison and Hamilton Wrote The Federalist, Defined the Constitution and Made Democracy Safe for the World.”] ARTICLE II of the Constitution declares that “No person except a natural-born citizen ... shall be eligible to the office of president.” This undemocratic provision could prevent voters from selecting their top choice, be it Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian-b

Susan Estrich: It Should Be a Democratic Year

July polls don't tell you who's going to win in November. Just ask President Dukakis or President Gore, both of whom were well ahead in July and went on to lose in the fall (although Mr. Gore still doesn't quite see it that way). Or ask President Clinton, who was running third in some polls after clinching his party's nomination, and won comfortably in the fall. Polls are, at best, snapshots of the present, not predictors of the future. But that doesn't mean they're meaningless. The

Philip Klein: Forgetting the Forgotten War ... Obama's Selective History

[Philip Klein is a reporter for The American Spectator.] "Leaders like Truman and Acheson, Kennan and Marshall, knew that there was no single decisive blow that could be struck for freedom," Barack Obama declared on Tuesday at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, D.C. "We needed a new overarching strategy to meet the challenges of a new and dangerous world." In what his campaign billed as a "major" foreig

Kevin Phillips: Lies, Damn Lies and Government Inflation Statistics

[Author and commentator Kevin Phillips' most recent book is Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism, published by Viking in April.] Describing the decade that began in 2000 as the "naughties" or "oughties" offers a useful shorthand -- and particularly for people interested in discussing the U.S. economy's perilous dual pathway of rising commodity inflation coupled with financial assets deflation. Ough

John Judis: John McCain's Approach To Terrorism Is Almost As Old As He Is, A True Relic Of The Cold War

John McCain likes to compare himself to Theodore Roosevelt, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan. But, if he were to become president, could he more closely resemble Richard Nixon? Not Nixon the Watergate dirty trickster, but Nixon the statesman. Could the Arizona senator, despite his extreme rhetoric of the bomb-bomb-Iran variety, be less like a cowboy politician and more like the man who re-opened relations with China and signed a wealth of arms control agreements with the Soviets?

Michael Knox Beran: McCain's Cult of Teddy Roosevelt

[Michael Knox Beran is a contributing editor of City Journal. His most recent book is Forge of Empires 1861-1871: Three Revolutionary Statesmen and the World They Made.] Asked recently by the New York Times to name a conservative model, John McCain cited Theodore Roosevelt. Teddy, of course, had no shortage of virtues. Conservatism, alas, wasn’t one of them. It’s one thing for a conservative to admire T. R.’s style and gallantry, the charge up San Juan Hil

Richard A. Clarke: Lessons Relearned

[Mr. Clarke, counter-terrorism "czar" in the White House under Presidents Clinton and Bush, writes in his new book, YOUR GOVERNMENT FAILED YOU: Breaking the Cycle of National Security Disasters, that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are not wholly to blame for the Iraq War mess. The system is also at fault. In the following excerpt from his new book he explains how.]

Bruce Bartlett: The GOP Is the Party of Civil Rights

[Mr. Bartlett is the author of "Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past," recently published by Palgrave Macmillan.] ... Everyone knows this, but it's worth repeating: The Republican Party is the party of Abraham Lincoln and was established in 1854 to block the expansion of slavery. The Democratic Party was the party of slavery: Its two founders, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, owned large numbers of slaves, and every party platform before the Civil War defe

Daniel Weintraub: Don't expect new drilling off the coast anytime soon

It has been nearly 40 years since a well a half-mile beneath the Pacific off the shore of Santa Barbara blew a gasket, spewing 200,000 gallons of gooey black oil over 800 square miles of ocean and fouling 35 miles of coastline. But even in a fast-changing world where memories are short, the Santa Barbara oil spill in January 1969 still stands as a vivid reminder of the risks from offshore oil development. Californians don't forget when you mess with their beaches. And w

Lizzy Davies: War story ... 64 years after massacre, villagers of Maillé may get some answers at last

[Lizzy Davies writes for the Guardian.] On August 25 1944, as General Philippe Leclerc led triumphant allied troops into the newly liberated French capital, Nazi soldiers entered the village of Maillé and razed it. Moving house to house through the quiet streets with machine guns, bayonets and firebombs, the Germans killed everyone they found - men, women and children. While Paris erupted in joy and patriotic pride, Maillé lay still: burned, ruined and bloody.

Eli Lake: Obama isn't Jimmy Carter--he's Ronald Reagan

[Eli Lake is a senior reporter on national security issues for The New York Sun.] ... Before unpacking the Obama view of the war on terrorism, let's dismiss the comparisons to Jimmy Carter. A bit of a refresher course in the horrors of the late 1970s: Jimmy Carter pledged to enshrine human rights as a central value in U.S. foreign policy. That was an admirable goal, but Carter didn't just inject human rights into U.S. foreign policy; he allowed it to rule policy, no matter the impli

Media Matters: CBS Evening News aired portion of Floyd Brown's anti-Obama attack ad, failing to report Obama is not a Muslim

On the June 30 edition of the CBS Evening News, correspondent Dean Reynolds aired a clip of an attack ad against Sen. Barack Obama in which the narrator says,"Obama was enrolled in school as a Muslim while living in Indonesia." Nowhere in his report did Reynolds note that Obama is in fact not a Muslim but, rather, a practicing Christian. Earlier in the report, Reynolds stated that Obama"has faced s

Michael Barone: We're Not Leaving

Sixty years ago this month, the top story in campaign year 1948 was not the big poll lead of Republican nominee Thomas Dewey or the plight of President Harry Truman. It was the Berlin airlift. On June 23, the Soviets cut off land access to West Berlin. Gen. Lucius Clay, the military governor in Germany, called for sending convoys up the autobahns, but Allied troops were vastly outnumbered by the Red Army, and everyone feared they would overrun Western Europe unless the United States

Anna Mulrine: Afghan Warlords, Formerly Backed By the CIA, Now Turn Their Guns On U.S. Troops

[Anna Mulrine is a senior editor at U.S. News & World Report magazine in Washington, D.C.] The war in Afghanistan reached a wrenching milestone this summer: For the second month in a row, U.S. and coalition troop deaths in the country surpassed casualties in Iraq. This is driven in large part, U.S. officials point out, by simple cause and effect. Marines flowed into southern Afghanistan earlier this year to rout firmly entrenched Taliban fighters, prompting a spike in combat in

Leon Aron: Back In the USSR?

[Leon Aron is director of Russian studies and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author, most recently, of "Russia's Revolution: Essays 1989-2006."] Vladimir Putin's appointment this spring as prime minister of the symbolic "union" of Russia and Belarus was yet another example of the troubling similarities between today's Russia and the other most stable and prosperous Russian regime of the past 80 years: Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet U

Ryan Lizza: How Chicago shaped Obama

One day in 1995, Barack Obama went to see his alderman, an influential politician named Toni Preckwinkle, on Chicago’s South Side, where politics had been upended by scandal. Mel Reynolds, a local congressman, was facing charges of sexual assault of a sixteen-year-old campaign volunteer. (He eventually resigned his seat.) The looming vacancy set off a fury of ambition and hustle; several politicians, including a state senator named Alice Palmer, an education expert of modest political skills, pr

William Rees-Mogg: This recession could easily tip into a depression

[William Rees-Mogg is a distinguished journalist. He was Deputy Editor of The Sunday Times before becoming Editor of The Times in 1967, a position he held until 1981.] Today I am celebrating my 80th birthday, an age that seems less formidable when one has reached it than when one can see it only from afar. I was born on July 14, 1928, about 15 months before the American boom of the 1920s came to its rather abrupt end. Like everyone else, I am naturally curious to see w