Roundup: Media's Take

Lionel Shriver: Change 80 years on ... America and Race

[Lionel Shriver is a London-based, American-born journalist and author.] Anyone who wants to appreciate the scale of the miracle that a black man is now poised to be nominated for president by one of America's two leading parties - and is, according to a Newsweek poll, an astonishing 15 points ahead of his Republican rival - should sit down with Scottsboro, a fine novel by Ellen Feldman published this month. Obama's nomination proves America has come a long way since th

Peter Beinart:

When critics challenge Barack Obama's patriotism, his supporters have a ready reply: True patriotism has nothing to do with little flags on politicians' lapels. It's not about symbols; it's about actions. It's not about odes to American greatness; it's about taking on your government when it goes astray But there Obama is, in his first TV advertisement of the general-election campaign, talking about his "deep and abiding faith in the country I love." And there, perched bel

Jonathan Steele: The Milosevic Model and Mugabe

[Jonathan Steele is a Guardian columnist, roving foreign correspondent and author.] While Zimbabwe's obscene charade of a runoff election played itself out yesterday, foreign reaction still seemed stuck in two grooves: either Mugabe-bashing or hand-wringing. The former is well justified, after everything the Zimbabwean president has done over the past few months. But, however muscular the rhetoric, it will be no more effective in producing regime change than passive despair.

Duncan Campbell: The ghosts of the past ... Foreign Office versus Chagos

[Duncan Campbell is a senior correspondent with the Guardian where he has worked since 1987.] If there is a clanking sound in the corridors of parliament on Monday, it could well be "the chains of the ghosts of the past" - the phrase used by high court judges to describe the Foreign Office's behaviour towards a small group of Indian Ocean islanders who next week take a strange and shocking case to the law lords. A deputation of Chagos islanders has arrived in

Sanford Levinson: DC v. Heller ... A Dismaying Performance By The Supreme Court

[Sanford Levinson is a professor of law at the University of Texas. The author of several articles on the Second Amendment, he is the author, most recently, of Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (and How We the People Can Correct It).] One can interpret today's decision in the Heller case from both"external" political perspectives or from a more"internal" legal one. I begin with the former: My own hope, which was spectacularly unrealized, was that the Supr

Shmuel Rosner: Protecting the Oil Supply

"Let our position be absolutely clear," Jimmy Carter declared. It was January 1980, and a year later he would no longer be president. But the doctrine he espoused in his final State of the Union address was, arguably, one of the few policies that outlasted his tenure. The Carter Doctrine: "An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America." Two weeks aft

Jim Castagnera: The Firearms Dilemma

[Jim Castagnera is the Associate Provost and Associate Counsel at Rider University.] After the U.S. Constitution was completed, some of the founders felt that the document --- devised after the predecessor Articles of Confederation failed to provide sufficient central authority to keep the newly liberated colonies from one another’s throats --- gave the federal government too much power. The upshot of this fear was the Bill of Rights, i.e., the first ten amendments. Durin

E.L. Doctorow: The White Whale

[E.L. Doctorow’s novels include World’s Fair, City of God and, most recently, The March (2005). His selected essays, Creationists, was published in 2006.] In April 2007 in Washington there was a joint meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society on the theme of "The Public Good: Knowledge as the Foundation for a Democratic Society." E.L. Doctorow's keynote address was titled "The White Whale." --The Editors

Editorial in the Independent: Plight of the Roma ... echoes of Mussolini

Fingerprint the lot of them: the idea had the satisfying smack of firm government. Now the Italian government was doing something tough; something long overdue. The Interior Minister, Roberto Maroni, a leader of the rabble-rousing Northern League – close allies of Silvio Berlusconi on the government benches – has explained his next step in his assault on the "emergenza di sicurezza", the "security emergency": fingerprinting all Gypsies. It was the

Max Boot: 100 years in Iraq

Joe Klein and Andrew Sullivan, who used to be for the war before they were against it, are having conniptions over my suggestion, itself made in response to an intemperate posting by Klein, that we need to makelong-term commitment in Iraq–for 100 years if need be, as John McCain has said. That doesn’t mean 100 years of fighting; clearly, that would be unsustainable. It does mean a long-t

Johann Hari: Our infantile search for heroic leaders

[Johann Hari is a columnist for the Independent.] Do you find yourself staring at the television and pining for a good leader – a person who will rise and make the world right again? Do you long for a Mandela, a Churchill, a Gandhi? Then grow up. Our political debate – what passes for it – increasingly focuses on a search for an elusive Messianic leader who will show us the way. This is the opposite of rational politics. This search for leaders is based on a desire to

Seumas Milne: The Recolonization of Iraq

[Seumas Milne is Guardian columnist and associate editor.] Whatever the Iraq war was about, we were assured, it definitely wasn't about oil. Tony Blair called the idea a "conspiracy theory". It was about democracy and dictatorship, weapons of mass destruction and human rights, anything but oil. Donald Rumsfeld, then US defence secretary, insisted the conflict had "literally nothing to do with oil". When Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, w

Gary Hart: America’s Next Chapter

THE novelties of race and gender have largely distracted the nation from the more profound aspect of the 2008 presidential election: This campaign presents the potential for a new cycle of American history. The idea that American politics moves in cycles is usually associated with the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., but it has an even longer currency. Ralph Waldo Emerson noted the political oscillations between the party of memory and the party of hope, the party of conservatism a

Max Boot: The danger in summits

Question: "In 1982 [sic], Anwar Sadat traveled to Israel, a trip that resulted in a peace agreement that has lasted ever since. In the spirit of that type of bold leadership, would you be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea, in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries?"Barack Obama: "I would."With

David Frum: The history behind organizing a White House

[David Frum was special assistant to George W Bush, 2001-02, and is the author of Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again (Doubleday).] Almost nobody in the US has a good word to say for Scott McClellan, Bush's former press secretary turned critic. The right condemned the disloyalty of his memoir, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and What's Wrong with Washington (PublicAffairs). The left complained that McClellan's change of heart arrived too late. The old Washington han

Peter Maass: Mugabe's Africa's Worst Dictator ... Think Again

[Peter Maass, a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, is working on a book about oil that will be published in 2009.] A pop quiz: Who is the worst dictator in Africa? a) Robert Mugabe b) Robert Mugabe c) Robert Mugabe d) None of the above The answer seems obvious. Thanks to extensive coverage in the news media and abundant criticism by Western governments, everyone knows that Zimbabwe's leader is trying to hang onto power

Max Boot: The NYT's hypocrisy, terrorism, and 9-10 mentality

There are a number of points to make about this front-page New York Timesarticle, “Inside a 9/11 Mastermind’s Interrogation,” in which the Times continues its self-appointed task of exposing to the world as many of the nation’s intelligence secrets as they can get their hands on. The first and most obvious point is the

Jonathan Fenby: To understand China's future, look to its past

[Jonathan Fenby is a British author, journalist, and former editor of The Observer.] Visitors flying in to Beijing's new Norman Foster-designed airport, or gazing across Shanghai's Huangpu River from the Bund to the tower city of Pudong, are liable to think of China as a land that has turned its back on the past. Watch the destruction of old Beijing to make room for a city of concrete, steel and glass, take the world's highest railway to Tibet or drive across 20-mile br

Gregory McNamee: TV, Family Values, and Presidential Elections

Blame it on television. In 1992, then vice president Dan Quayle took the television comedy Murphy Brown to task because its lead, played by Candice Bergen, was to give birth out of wedlock. The show and its sponsors’ apparent endorsement of this transgression, Quayle argued, was proof that the entertainment industry was antifamily—or, at least, against the traditional American family as defined by Ozzie and Harriet, by the Cleavers and the Ricardos. Quayle was right: te

Dick Morris & Eileen McGann: Obama's taking a Sept. 10 approach to terrorism

In an ABC interview on Monday, Sen. Barack Obama urged us to go back to the era of criminal-justice prosecution of terror suspects, citing the successful efforts to imprison those who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. It was key to his attack on the Bush administration, which he charged, has "been willing to skirt basic protections that are in our Constitution . . . It is my firm belief that we can crack down on threats against the United States, but we can do so within th