Roundup: Media's Take

David Paul Kuhn: Obama's Dukakis Moment ... Bowling Blunders Matter

[David Paul Kuhn, a Politico.com senior political writer, is author of the The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma.] Last week many had their fun poking fun at Barack Obama's gutter balls. Monday on Ellen Hillary Clinton decided to toss a little ball at some pins on set in order to keep Obama's bowling blunder in the conversation. It wasn't the most tactful response. But Obama's poor showing was again talked about. Forest for the trees, bad bowling rea

Alvaro Vargas Llosa: Four lessons learned from Mugabe's horrific regime

[Alvaro Vargas Llosa, author of Liberty for Latin America, is the director of the Center on Global Prosperity at the Independent Institute.] Robert Mugabe's defeat in the recent elections in Zimbabwe is the beginning of the end for that country's octogenarian tyrant. Although the government claims that opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai fell short of the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff election, only a massive fraud in the second round followed by a brutal clampdown o

Evelyn Pringle: Barack Obama - The Wizard of Oz (An investigation of his finances and political ties)

... This article is the first in a series that will give the details of Obama's rise to fame. As for the most recognized allegation against Obama, that helped slumlords operate in Chicago, while accepting their campaign contributions, its true. Obama was a member of the political machine that helped a whole gang of slumlords funnel local, state and federal tax dollars, over the backs of poor people in need of affordable housing, to line their own pockets and fund the campaigns of po

Richard Reeves: On the Matter of Torture

The order from the commander in chief regarding torture of prisoners was clear: "It has been recognized at all times that this manner of interrogating human beings, of putting them under torture, produces nothing good. The unfortunates say whatever comes into their heads, and everything they think we want to know." The commander in chief, and that was the title he preferred then, was Napoleon Bonaparte, leader of the French invasion and occupation of Egypt in 1798. The tor

Edward McClelland: How 1968 changed Hillary

| Forty years and four days ago, Hillary Rodham stormed into a friend's dorm room at Wellesley College and slammed her book bag against a wall. "I can't stand it anymore!" she screamed, in tears. "I can't take it!" It was April 4, 1968, and Hillary had just heard the news of Martin Luther King's assassination. The entire nation was grieving that day, but Hillary's anguish was especially palpable, because King himself had started her on her path to po

Roger Pulvers: Why is there no Japanese Barack Obama?

[Roger Pulvers is an Australian author, playwright and theater director, and a professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology. His latest book is a collection of 12 secular bible stories, "The Honey and the Fires," from ABC Books (Australia).] Sometimes journalists ask themselves questions that appear to border on the absurd. Here goes one of them. Why is there no Japanese Barack Obama? Obama's message of "Change we can believe in" would see

Kathy Shaidle: Obama's Church ... Gospel of Hate

[A blogger since 2000, Kathy Shaidle runs FiveFeetOfFury.com. Her new e-book Acoustic Ladyland has been called a "must read" by Mark Steyn.] Barack Obama’s pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, became a household name last month when ABC News reported on some of Wright’s inflammatory sermons. As his applauding congregation cheered him on, the former leader of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ condemned the U.S. government for “killing innocent people” and for treating Amer

Todd Crowell: McCain is a brat

[Todd Crowell is the son of a career air force officer.] Does it Matter? The presumptive Republican Party presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain, has embarked on a biographical tour to highlight the places and early personal experiences that have helped to shape the kind of person he is and the kind of president he might be. Everyone knows, of course, that he is the son and grandson of four-star admirals and that he had a distinguished career as a naval avi

David Treuer: If native tongues of Native Americans are lost, what remains of Indian culture?

[David Treuer is Ojibwe from Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota and a translator of Ojibwe texts. His most recent novel is "The Translation of Dr. Apelles: A Love Story."] LEECH LAKE, Minn. I am not supposed to be alive. Native Americans were supposed to die off, as endangered species do, a century ago. And so it is with great discomfort that I am forced, in many ways, to live and write as a ghost in this haunted American house. But perhaps I am not

Michael Barone: Obama Appeals to Academics and Clinton Appeals to Jacksonians

In reviewing the maps of the Democratic primary results, in Dave Leip's electoral atlas, I was struck by the narrow geographic base of Barack Obama's candidacy. In state after state, he has carried only a few counties—though, to be sure, in many cases counties with large populations. There are exceptions, particularly in the southern states with large numbers of black voters in both urban and rural counties. But overall, the geographic analysis has pointed up to me a divide between Democratic co

Robert P. Lockwood: Why JFK's speech on religion and Obama's on race sounded so different

... When Kennedy gave his speech in 1960, he faced a very real problem of a normative anti-Catholicism in American culture. This was not primarily fundamentalist, old-time anti-Catholic rhetoric about Catholics worshipping the Blessed Mother and urban legends about the Inquisition. Instead, Kennedy faced a sizable portion of the electorate and white Anglo-Saxon Protestant leadership in business, education, religion and politics that was convinced that a Catholic was unfit to serve a

Robert Creamer: What's wrong with Clinton's last argument in favor of her candidacy

[Robert Creamer is a long-time political organizer and strategist, and author of the recent book: "Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win," available on amazon.com.] The Clinton campaign's only remaining argument for her superior "electability" rests on the contention that her ability to win primaries in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania makes her more "electable" in the general election. There are many reasons why this argument is fal

Jim Geraghty: Comparing the Campaign To 'The Bataan Death March'

Obama, at a fundraiser, last night: “For those of you who are just weary of the primary, and feeling kind of ground down or that it’s like a Bataan death march, I just want everybody to know that the future is bright.” Jen Rubin: "Yeah, just like that. (Note to o

Bernard Chazelle: Saving the American Left ... The Case for a New Progressive Creed

[Bernard Chazelle is a professor of computer science at Princeton University.] ... By virtually any measure, the United States is the least progressive nation in the developed world.(1) It trails most of Western Europe in poverty rates, life expectancy, health care, child care, infant mortality, maternity leaves, paid vacations, public infrastructure, incarceration rates, and environmental laws. The wealth gap in the US has not been so wide since 1929. The Wal-Mart founders' family

Roger Pulvers: What happened to Ireland?

"It happened, I think, some time in the mid-'90s," wrote Irish novelist Roddy Doyle in December, 2006, in a collection of short stories titled "The Deportees." "I went to bed in one country and woke up in a different one." One of the stories, "Guess Who's Coming for the Dinner," is about a young woman who brings home a Nigerian friend and her outspoken father who has never shaken hands with a black man before.

David Horowitz vs. Peter Beinart ... Hard Liberals vs. Conservatives

[In our last issue, we ran an exchange between Peter Beinart and David Horowitz on the issue: Can Only Liberals Win the War on Terror? We ended the discussion with Beinart's last response, reprinted again below, which argued that Horowitz had confused conservatives with hard liberals. Horowitz's rejoinder follows. We are most grateful to Peter Beinart for joining us and our pages are open to him if he wishes to continue this dialogue -- The Editors of Frontpagemag]. Beinart: Our fund

Doug Kendall: Obama is just the latest person to get the history of the Constitution wrong by ignoring the Reconstruction amendments

[Doug Kendall is the founder and executive director of Community Rights Counsel, a public interest law firm that promotes constitutional principles.] The American conversation right now suffers from an odd pathology--our tendency to leave the fundamental changes to our Constitution made after the Civil War out of discussions of our nation's most important document. At the Supreme Court last week, the justices endlessly debated what the Second Amendment meant in 1789. But, as Charles

Daniel Gross: FDR is saving us again

[Daniel Gross is the Moneybox columnist for Slate and the business columnist for Newsweek. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com. He is the author of Pop! Why Bubbles Are Great for the Economy.] In the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt saved American capitalism from its own self-inflicted wounds by erecting a new financial infrastructure—often over the vociferous opposition of the bankers and investors whose poor judgment had helped precipi

Mark Danner: A Defeat Only American Power Could Have Brought About

[Mark Danner is the author, most recently, of Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror (2004) and The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History (2007). He has covered the Iraq war from its beginning for the New York Review of Books. He teaches at both Bard College and the Gradua

Andrew Ferguson: The Wit & Wisdom of Barack Obama

[Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.] There's still room for whimsy at the New Yorker magazine, I don't care what you've heard. Just the other day two of the New Yorker's bloggers (now there's a phrase to send Harold Ross spinning) were chewing over the widely noted eloquence of Barack Obama. They were struck by "Obama's wonderful line," as one of them described it, to the effect that "We are the ones we've been waiting for." Obama uses it