Roundup: Media's Take

Joel Mowbray: French court explores if infamous murder of Palestinian boy was staged

[Joel Mowbray is author of Dangerous Diplomacy: How the State Department Threatens America’s Security.] In the seven years since the start of what the Palestinians call the “intifada,” perhaps no incident has inspired more Western criticism of Israel, nor generated as much terrorism against the Jewish state, than the supposed cold-blooded murder of 12-year-old Mohammed al-Durra on September 30, 2000. The video of a terrified Mohammed taking refuge behind his father before bei

Gina-Marie Cheeseman: How the Military-Industrial Complex Continues to Exploit America’s Poor

[Gina-Marie Cheeseman is a writer. She can be reached at: ginamariecheeseman@yahoo.com.] It is more than a cliché to state that the rich make war while the poor fight them. As a character in the French movie Un Long Dimanche de Fiançailles (A Very Long Engagement) stated, “The poor make the cannons of their own self destruction, but the rich sell them.” History shows that America’s poor were disproportionately drafted into the milit

Paul Krugman: Why Jena's no surprise

... Racial tension, especially in the South, has never gone away, and has never stopped being important. And race remains one of the defining factors in modern American politics. Consider voting in last year’s Congressional elections. Republicans, as President Bush conceded, received a “thumping,” with almost every major demographic group turning against them. The one big exception was Southern whites, 62 percent of whom voted Republican in House races. And yes, Souther

Steve Coll: Petraeus is not Bush's lackey, but ...

… Petraeus is not Bush’s lackey; his views of the Iraq war overlap with the President’s, but they arise from very different antecedents. In 1987, Petraeus completed a three-hundred-and-thirty-seven-page doctoral dissertation at Princeton entitled “The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam,” a lucid and subtle review of civil-military relations in the United States from the Korean War until the mid-nineteen-eighties. In his conclusion, Petraeus argued against the Army doctrine that had bee

Amy Kaleita and Gregory R. Forbes: Environmental Alarmism in Context

[Environmental Studies Fellow Amy Kaleita is an assistant professor of agricultural and biosystems engineering at Iowa State University. Gregory R. Forbes holds a B.S. in forestry, with an emphasis on natural resources and environmental science, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a Masters of Public Administration, including emphasis in policy analysis and environmental politics and policies, from the Iowa State University.] Most people will recognize the name

Peggy Noonan: Now Greenspan tells us!

There is the story about a puffed-up political figure, or maybe it was a movie star, who came out with a memoir and began the requisite tour. A reporter cornered him at a cocktail party: "Did you write this book yourself?" "Write it?" the man said. "I didn't even read it." This crossed my mind while reading Alan Greenspan's memoir, in which the war for Iraq was all about oil, though the wise have long been prohibited from sharing this insig

Michael Lind: A new-model American foreign policy that unites liberal internationalism and Realpolitik is intellectually and politically flawed

[Michael Lind is the Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of The American Way of Strategy: U.S. Foreign Policy and the American Way of Life (Oxford University Press, 2006).] During the George W Bush years, two great currents of thinking about United States foreign policy - progressive and realist - have shared a critique of a third - neo-conservative. Both liberal internationalists and proponents of hard-nosed Realpolitik have rejected a US foreign po

Andrew O'Hehir: Long before Mitt Romney and "Big Love," Mormons were demonized

Almost a hundred years before Mitt Romney, Harry Reid and"Big Love," Mormonism had its first big pop-culture moment. It was not a happy one. In the early days of cinema, more than 30 films were made featuring villains drawn from a new and controversial sect, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Mormons were generally depicted as bearded, depraved and violent cultists who abducted wholesome American women into polygamous marriages. In fact, the Mormon church had repudiated

Robert Gates: The future of democracy

[William & Mary Editor: Following is the prepared text of the speech delivered by U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates to a special meeting for delegates to the World Forum on the Future of Democracy Conference hosted by Colonial Williamsburg and the College of William and Mary.] Thank you, Senator Warner. I must say that Senator Warner is a special friend. He has introduced me to the Senate for confirmation four times. The first time was more than 20 years ago

David Brooks: The Education of Robert Gates

Robert Gates has been a godsend. After a bombastic defense secretary, we now have a candid one. After ego, we have self-effacement. After domination, we have a man who welcomes discussion. Gates was decisive during the Walter Reed hospital fiasco. He is honest and trustworthy on Iraq. And on Monday, at the World Forum on the Future of Democracy at the Colonial Williamsburg here, Gates delivered a speech that could define the center ground of American foreign policy. He

Dick Cheney: Alan Greenspan discounts our fiscal success story

In his new book, "The Age of Turbulence," my longtime friend Alan Greenspan argues that President Bush's economic and budget policies have been fiscally irresponsible. I've known and admired Alan for years, and I believe he was a great chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. But I think his assessment is off the mark. Alan tells of his first meeting with then President-elect Bush on Dec. 18, 2000, at the Madison Hotel in Washington. I recall this breakfast meeting very well

Douglas Kmiec: What Judge Mukasey -- and Congress -- can learn from previous occupants of the post

[Mr. Kmiec, assistant attorney general and head of the Office of Legal Counsel to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, is a professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University.] The office of attorney general was created by an isolated paragraph in the Judiciary Act of 1789. And Judge Mukasey clearly meets its requirement of being "learned in law" -- Yale Law School, followed by ample experience as a federal prosecutor, in private practice, and for 18 years

Gabor Steingart: With a Congress like this, America could never have fixed Germany

[Mr. Steingart, Der Spiegel's Berlin bureau chief from 2000 to 2007, is now a senior correspondent in Washington.] ... If the supreme commander of the U.S. Army in Berlin had been subject to the same requirements Gen. David Petraeus is subject to today, the Americans would have had to turn the city over to the Soviets. Baghdad today and Berlin in those days are more similar than some would like to believe. The general contention is that the Iraqis, unlike the Germans, never had a de

Thomas F. Schaller: ould 2008 be the year that Democrats finally admit an old sweetheart is never coming back, and stop pandering to the white male voter?

Those who have been closely following the politics of the Democratic primaries may have noticed that someone is missing -- and I'm not referring to Bob Shrum, the Rev. Al Sharpton or an as-yet-undiscovered "Gravel Girl." I'm talking about the white male voter, or at least a certain long-coveted variety thereof. He is variously known as "NASCAR dad" -- that shirt-sleeved, straight-talkin', these-colors-don't-run fella who votes his cultural values above all else

Michael Barone: Don't look for either party to have a brokered convention next year

[Mr. Barone is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and senior writer at U.S. News & World Report. He is the principal co-author of"The Almanac of American Politics" (National Journal Group, 2005).] With multiple serious candidates competing for each party's nomination, it's possible that no candidate will emerge from the caucuses and primaries with a majority of delegates in each party. The theoretical possibility is greater in the Democratic Party, because

Tony Karon: Is a Jewish Glasnost Coming to America? Despite a Backlash, Many Jews Are Questioning Israel

[Tony Karon is a senior editor at TIME who also maintains his own website, Rootless Cosmopolitan, where he comments on everything from geopolitical conflict to Jewish identity issues."Rootless Cosmopolitan" was Stalin's euphemistic pejorative for"Jew" during his anti-Semitic purges of the late 1940s, but Karon, who grew up in South Africa and whose family roots lie in Eastern Europe, and before that France, takes the term as a badge of honor. Karon was a

Charlie Savage: Reaganites are criticial of Bush's policy on signing statements

[Mr. Savage is national legal affairs correspondent of the Boston Globe and won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.] History is littered with onetime revolutionaries who grew disillusioned as they watched events snowball into something they'd never intended. In the 1980s the Reagan Revolution brought a new generation of Republican legal activists to Washington determined to help the President reshape the nation in his conservative vision and to overcome the main obstacle

Ian Buruma: Norman Podhoretz's Toughness Problem—and Ours

... If Irving Kristol is the godfather of neoconservatism, Norman Podhoretz is the patriarch. Podhoretz himself might not see all neocons as his intellectual offspring, although his son John has certainly followed in his footsteps. In fact, Podhoretz has a rather narrow definition of neoconservatism. He talks about "repentant liberals and leftists," mostly Jewish, who broke ranks with the left and "moved rightward" in the 1970s. "Strictly speaking," he says, "o

Ryan Lizza: What Hillary makes of the Clinton legacy

... Whereas in 1999 and 2000 George W. Bush emphasized his independence from his father’s Administration, Hillary showed no hesitation in discussing the Clinton Presidency as a joint venture. Speaking of a recent address she gave on the credit-mortgage crisis, she told me, “We had the same kinds of events in ’92, in New Hampshire. And then, during the nineties, we didn’t have these problems. And it’s like déjà vu all over again. You know, here we are, with middle-class people worrying about whet

Andrew Jakabovics: FDR Solves the Mortgage Crisis

[Andrew Jakabovics is the Associate Director of the Economic Mobility Program at the Center for American Progress. ] "Here should be an objective of Government itself, to provide at least as much assistance to the little fellow as it is now giving to the large banks and corporations."--Franklin D. Roosevelt, April 7, 1932 he burgeoning home-mortgage crisis of 2007 bears an eerie resemblance to financial conditions 75 years ago, when FDR realized that only the