Roundup: Media's Take

Robert J. Samuelson: The End of Entitlement

We middle-class Americans are in a funk. "The overarching economic narrative of the 2008 campaign is the idea that life for the middle class has gotten more difficult," writes Paul Taylor of the Pew Research Center, which has just published a massive report on middle-class anxieties. By its survey, more than half of Americans believe they either have not moved ahead in the past five years (25 percent) or have fallen behind (31 percent). Pew pronounces this "the most d

Robert Parry: The Bushes and Hitler's Appeasement

[Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His new book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com.] The irony of George W. Bush going before the Knesset and mocking the late Sen. William Borah for expressing surprise at Adolf Hitler's 1939 invasion of Poland is that Bush's own family played a much bigger role assisting the Nazis. If Borah,

David Talbot: Obama/Kennedy vs. McCain/Goldwater

[David Talbot is the founder of Salon. He is the author of the New York Times Bestseller, "Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years," which will be released next week in paperback by Free Press.] May 21, 2008 | If John McCain is running for George W. Bush's third presidential term, as Democrats have suggested, Barack Obama is campaigning for John F. Kennedy's second term. That was driven home again this week when the Obama and McCain campaigns squared

Lincoln Mitchell: Not since 1964 have Dems won white male vote. So?

[Lincoln Mitchell joined Columbia University in January of 2006 as the Arnold A. Saltzman Assistant Professor in the Practice of International Politics. ] Political campaigns are, to a great extent, about numbers; and this year's presidential race has been no exception. The numbers we have heard throughout the campaign include 2025 - the number of delegates needed to secure the democratic nomination. Even this number had been disputed as the Clinton campaign has briefly tried to float th

Glenn Greenwald: Ronald Reagan ... Chamberlainian appeaser of the 1980s

One of the most significant political developments over the last decade or so is that the defining views of what was once the extremist right-wing fringe have become mainstream. Few things illustrate that development more than this week's branding by George Bush, John McCain and Bill Kristol of Barack Obama (and anyone who prefers negotiations to knee-jerk wars with Israel's enemies as the optimal method for conflict re

George Packer: The fall of conservatism

The era of American politics that has been dying before our eyes was born in 1966. That January, a twenty-seven-year-old editorial writer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat named Patrick Buchanan went to work for Richard Nixon, who was just beginning the most improbable political comeback in American history. Having served as Vice-President in the Eisenhower Administration, Nixon had lost the Presidency by a whisker to John F. Kennedy, in 1960, and had been humiliated in a 1962 bid for the C

Kevin Phillips: The Old Titans All Collapsed. Is the U.S. Next?

... Premature fears have also dogged the United States. The decades after the 1968 election were marked by waves of a new national apprehension: that U.S. post-World War II global hegemony was in danger. The first, in 1968-72, involved a toxic mix of global trade and currency crises and the breakdown of the U.S. foreign policy consensus over Southeast Asia. Books emerged with titles such as "Retreat From Empire?" and "The End of the American Era." More national malaise follow

Charles Krauthammer: Israeli Miracle ... The crime is not its policies but its insistence on living

Before sending Lewis and Clark west, Thomas Jefferson dispatched Meriwether Lewis to Philadelphia to see Dr. Benjamin Rush. The eminent doctor prepared a series of scientific questions for the expedition to answer. Among them, writes Stephen Ambrose: “What Affinity between their (the Indians’) religious Ceremonies & those of the Jews?” Jefferson and Lewis, like many of their day and ours, were fascinated by the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, and thought they might be out there on the Great Plain

Timothy Lynch and Robert Singh: What will be the Bush legacy in the next US presidency?

[Timothy Lynch and Robert Singh are authors of After Bush: The Case for Continuity in American Foreign Policy.] Two possible reasons account for Barack Obama’s recent embrace of George H. W. Bush. The first is that he wants to portray himself within the mainstream of the US foreign policy tradition and that he sees Bush Sr has standing squarely within it. He is in effect asking us to consider him as a welcome return to a diplomacy which was cautious and limited, more Kissinger than

Max Boot: So George H.W. Bush is Obama's role model?

David Brooks [1] reports today that, like a lot of other Democrats, Barack Obama has become a born-again believer in the presidency of George H.W. Bush. The Democratic candidate tells Brooks: “I have enormous sympathy for the foreign policy of George H. W. Bush. I don’t have a lot of complaints about their handling of Desert Storm. I don’t have a lot of complaints with their handling of the fall of the Berlin Wall.” This new-found admiration conveniently overlooks some decisions by th

Clifford D. May: History is back ... But whose side is it on?

[Clifford D. May, a former New York Times foreign correspondent, is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism.] ... After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was widely believed that liberal democracy had become, self-evidently, the only rational way to organize society. If that was so, it meant the greatest ideological debate of all times was settled. Francis Fukuyama famously called that “the end of history.” No

Daniel J. Flynn: Top Ten Skeletons in the Left's Closet

[Daniel J. Flynn is the author of Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas and A Conservative History of the American Left. He is also the editor of www.flynnfiles.com.] When the Left writes its own history, the past gets rewritten to suit the needs of the present. This is why I wrote A Conservative History of the American Left, to conserve not only fascinating figures now forgotten but to retrieve from the me

Harvey Wasserman: Is Obama this year's Jackie Robinson?

[HARVEY WASSERMAN’S HISTORY OF THE UNIITED STATES is at www.harveywasserman.com, as is his SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030. This article first appeared at http://freepress.org.] Sixty-one years ago, a truly great athlete broke the color line in America’s "National Pastime," which still resides near the core of our culture. Now the question of whether Barack Obama ca

Kimberly A. Strassel: People are angry

... The state of the union is angry. Citizens are furious about gas prices and health-care costs, broken schools and property taxes. These are the leaky hydrants, the constant reminders that government hasn't done much for them lately. Their fury has bubbled as they've watched Washington obsess over itself – dealing out earmarks, paying off constituencies, launching probes into political enemies. Accomplishing zip. This anger is the best way to describe today's political landscape.

Jerusalem Post Editorial: How Bush stacks up against earlier presidents on Israel

Of all the US presidents over the past 60 years, it is hard to think of a better friend to Israel than George W. Bush. No president has been more committed to steering the Middle East toward the values of liberty and tolerance which Americans naturally cherish, and presuppose to be universal. Bush combines a personal affinity toward Israel with policies that are generally responsive to its concerns. His performance as president is best understood in historical context.

Leon Wieseltier: The False Prophesy Of Jeremiah Wright

I was tired of hearing Jeremiah Wright, so I started reading him. This did not improve matters. In his books I found mainly (in the words of one of his admirers) "Africentric Christian manhood," a panic about the situation of the African American male raised into a truculent paranoid theology. There are many expressions of love in Wright's preaching, but only for his own, which is not love's strongest test. In 1991, he inaugurated a series of sermons honoring Martin Luther King Jr., wi

A.B. Yehoshua: The Jews' journey back to history

[The writer is a novelist and essayist. His most recent book is A Woman in Jerusalem. - Project Syndicate ] Ten years ago, on Israel's 50th anniversary, the peace process begun by the path-breaking Oslo Accord, reached by Israel and the Palestinian Authority in 1993, established the legitimacy of two peoples' national existence in their shared homeland on the basis of territorial compromise. There was a general feeling that this long conflict was being resolved. Unfortu

Marilyn Gardner: Was It Easier Being a Mother in 1908?

[Marilyn Gardner is a staff writer for The Christian Science Monitor.] On the first Mother's Day 100 years ago, moms had a tough -- but rewarding -- job, just as they do today. Motherhood ranks as one of the hardest jobs to do, yet one of the easiest to romanticize. This Sunday, May 11, as families shower mothers with cards, gifts, and superlatives, they will be part of an observance that had its humble beginnings 100 years ago. On Sunday, May 10, 1908, sim

Thomas Frank: Our Great Economic U-Turn

Twenty years ago, when I started out as a writer, the problems of mass prosperity were the ones that intrigued me most. America was then, as I thought it would always remain, the great middle-class nation. And in the permanent affluent society, questions of taste and waste and marketing and alienation were what really mattered, now and forever. When moved to consider workplace issues in those days, I instinctively placed them in the category of brutal-things-settled-long-ago: Without even thinki

John B. Judis: Obama and the psychology of the color barrier

... Now, with Barack Obama inching closer to the Democratic nomination, race looms yet again as a central factor in American politics. Already, race has played a key part in the Democratic primary, almost certainly hurting Obama among swaths of voters in states like New Jersey, Ohio, and, most recently, Pennsylvania. If he manages to win the nomination anyway--and it appears he will--race seems likely to play an even larger role in the general election. What role, exactly, will that