Roundup: Media's Take

Humberto Fontova: Obama's Supporters Say "Viva Che!"

[Humberto Fontova is the author of Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him. Visit www.hfontova.com . ] During recent interviews of Obama campaign workers on Houston's Fox TV station, the offices of two Texas Obama campaign volunteers (including a precinct captain and head of the "Houston Obama Leadership Team") were found prominently decorated with Che Guevara images, against the backdrop of Cuban flags. The

Ron Rosenbaum: Why Hillary doesn't mention her work on Nixon's impeachment

[Ron Rosenbaum is the author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler.] ... I'd always thought that her work on the Impeachment Committee was an unambiguously shining moment of her career: Hillary I enters politics. Even if, as I believe, the committee failed to find out the full truth of Nixon's Watergate crimes, the Big Truth (I'll get to that), she was a junior staffer, and any such failings surely weren't her fault. And even if the committee failed to find Nixon guilty of t

Thomas E. Mann & Norman J. Ornstein: Superdelegates will help not hurt the democratic process

[Thomas E. Mann is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. They are the co-authors of “The Broken Branch.”] ... Superdelegates were created by the Hunt Commission, set up in 1982 and led by Gov. James Hunt of North Carolina. The commission was reacting in part to a nominating process in which the weight of influence was with a relatively small cadre of ideological activists whose involvement with th

Scott Horton: So Bush is another Lincoln?

As Bush runs down to his last months as the nation’s chief executive, and his popularity continues to sink into hitherto unheard-of depths, his retainers remain concerned about the “Bush Legacy.” Efforts are underway on several fronts to attempt to burnish his record. And one figure regularly trotted out to help prop up the Great Leader is the nation’s greatest president, Abraham Lincoln. Two examples of this effort came in an extended exclusive interview that Bush granted to Fox News’s Bret Bai

Kathleen Parker: Just what century are we living in?

Traveling to Europe's Dark Ages, one might expect to find newspaper headlines like these: • Archbishop of Canterbury says sharia law to be incorporated into British laws. • A Danish cartoonist is placed under indefinite police protection as three would-be assassins are arrested. •Renegade Muslim author seeks country to protect her from Islamist fanatics promising to kill her. Alas, these are headlines from the past few weeks in modern-day Europ

Robert McHenry: How Low Can Ben Stein Go? (To the Maligning of Charles Darwin)

[Robert McHenry is a former editor-in-chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica and author of How to Know.] You laughed at his affectless droning high school economics teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off ; you may have enjoyed his repartee with Jimmy Kimmel or his command of trivial knowledge on “Win Ben Stein’s Money”; you may even have run out and bought some eyedrops on his recommendation. But don’t ask him about evolution, Charles Darwin, science, or any related topic, for on those Ben

Gary Hart: Politics as Transcendence

Only once in a very long time does politics become more than politics, that is something more than partisan struggle, vote bartering, or arena of ambition. In ordinary times, ordinary political leaders suffice, more or less. But on rare occasion, old arrangements and conventional wisdom come unstuck. This happens in periods of rapid if not revolutionary change. We find ourselves now in one of those periods. The forces of globalization, information, eroding sovereignties, and transfo

Tom Fawthrop: Agent Orange Deforming a Third Generation in Vietnam

[A London-born journalist, Tom Fawthrop has extensively covered the developing world. He has been working in South-East Asia for the past 25 years and is currently based in Chiangmai, Thailand. He is co-author of Getting away with Genocide, the history of the Cambodia Tribunal.] Long after the last bullet has been fired in a war, unexploded bombs, landmines and toxic chemicals continue to maim and kill civilians. This is particularly true of the Vietnam war. Three decades after US

Robert Reich: The American binge is over

[Robert B. Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author, most recently, of “Supercapitalism.”] ... The underlying problem has been building for decades. America’s median hourly wage is barely higher than it was 35 years ago, adjusted for inflation. The income of a man in his 30s is now 12 percent below that of a man his age three decades ago. Most of what’s been earned in America since then has gone to the richest 5 percent.

Michael Crowley: Is Obama's Iraq record really a fairy tale?

[Michael Crowley is a senior editor at The New Republic.] It was a cool, damp afternoon when Barack Obama arrived to speak at an antiwar rally in Chicago's Federal Plaza on October 2, 2002. The scene was ragtag. A metal tower had been festooned with strips of white cloth upon which rally attendees wrote personalized peace messages. Protesters danced to a band featuring kazoos and a marching skeleton. Jesse Jackson was to be the day's marquee speaker. But it was Obama, wearing a war

Joseph Loconte: The Decade of Appeasement (75th anniversary of Hitler's rise to power)

[Joseph Loconte is a senior fellow at Pepperdine University's School of Public Policy and a frequent contributor to THE DAILY STANDARD. He is the editor of The End of Illusions: Religious Leaders Confront Hitler's Gathering Storm.] LAST WEEK GERMANY marked the 75th anniversary of Adolf Hitler's rise to power, on January 30, 1933. Within a decade the Nazi juggernaut had devoured much of Europe, and its death camps had incinerated millions. No nation in Europe bears the shame of Nazis

Max Boot: Good Riddance ... The death of terrorist Imad Mugniyeh

Great news from Syria. Imad Mughniyeh, one of the world’s worst terrorists, has been killed by a car bomb in Damascus. He is all but forgotten now, but Mughniyeh, a leader of Hezbollah, was the original Osama bin Laden—a terrorist kingpin who was responsible for hundreds of deaths, primarily Americans and Israelis. He had a $25 million American bounty on his head, the same size as the reward for bin Laden. It’s not hard to see why. This AP story sums up his reign of terror:

Chris Hedges: Christianizing US History

Here is an event I have no intention of honoring: American Religious History Week. OK, it's not official yet. But it is spelled out as Resolution 888 in the bowels of a House committee, sponsored by Republican Congressman Randy Forbes and backed by thirty-one other Representatives. This is an insidious attempt by the radical Christian right to rewrite American history, to turn the founding fathers from deists into Christian fundamentalists, to proclaim us officially to be a Christian nation. If

James Moore: Leaving it Up to Texas? Again? Seriously?

[Mr. Moore is an Emmy-winning former television news correspondent and the co-author of the bestselling, Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential. ] The state that gave the planet George W. Bush is poised to play a historic role in the selection of the Democratic presidential candidate. Oh irony of ironies. We always manage to stumble into destiny's crossroads and force detours. March 4th, a date that wasn't supposed to mean much in the Democratic primary process

Leon Wieseltier: More Reasons To Be Skeptical Of Barack Obama And His Legions Of The Blissful

[Leon Wieseltier is the Washington Diarist for TNR.] ... One of the striking features of Obama's victory speeches is the absence from these exultations of any lasting allusion to the darker dimensions of our strategic predicament. He makes no applause line out of American defense. And jihadist terrorism is only one of the disorders in an increasingly disordered world. The most repercussive fact of our time is surely the transformation of China. The "metrics" are all stagge

Debra Burlingame: The Clintons' Terror Pardons

[Ms. Burlingame, a former attorney and a director of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, is the sister of Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III, the pilot of American Airlines flight 77, which was crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.] It was nearly 10 p.m. on New Year's Eve, 1982. Two officers on New York Police Department's elite bomb squad rushed to headquarters at One Police Plaza, where minutes earlier an explosion had destroyed the entrance to the building.

Godfrey Hodgson: America’s change election ... reality or mirage?

[Godfrey Hodgson was director of the Reuters' Foundation Programme at Oxford University, and before that the Observer's correspondent in the United States and foreign editor of the Independent. He reported the presidential elections of 1964, 1968, 1972, and 1976 for various British and American media, and was co-author (with Lewis Chester and Bruce Page) of the best-selling account of the 1968 campaign, An American Melodrama (Viking Press, 1969). ] The cumbersome calendar and complex arit

Paul Krugman: Hate Springs Eternal

In 1956 Adlai Stevenson, running against Dwight Eisenhower, tried to make the political style of his opponent’s vice president, a man by the name of Richard Nixon, an issue. The nation, he warned, was in danger of becoming “a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland.” The quote comes from “Nixonland,” a soon-to-be-published political

Richard Tanter: East Timor ... The Crisis Beyond the Coup Attempt

[Richard Tanter is Senior Research Associate at Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability, Director of the Nautilus Institute at RMIT and a Japan Focus associate. He has written widely on Japanese and Indonesia security policy, including 'With Eyes Wide Shut: Japan, Heisei Militarization and the Bush Doctrine' in Melvin Gurtov and Peter Van Ness (eds.), Confronting the Bush Doctrine: Critical Views from the Asia-Pacific, (New York: Routledge, 2005). His most recent book, co-edited with

Tad Devine: Superdelegates, Back Off

[Tad Devine, a Democratic strategist, was the chief political consultant to Al Gore’s presidential campaign in 2000.] ON the first Wednesday in June, the morning after the last day of voting in the 1984 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, the long, drawn-out battle that began with Gary Hart’s stunning victory in New Hampshire ended — but only after one last plot twist. I was Walter Mondale’s delegate counter, and I had stayed up all night to estimate the delegates w