Roundup: Media's Take

David Brooks: The Storm After the Storm

Hurricanes come in two waves. First comes the rainstorm, and then comes what the historian John Barry calls the "human storm" - the recriminations, the political conflict and the battle over compensation. Floods wash away the surface of society, the settled way things have been done. They expose the underlying power structures, the injustices, the patterns of corruption and the unacknowledged inequalities. When you look back over the meteorological turbulence in this nation's history,

William Greider: Alan Greenspan's Legacy

When Alan Greenspan retires as Federal Reserve chairman early next year, we can expect waves of adulation for his extraordinary eighteen-year reign over the American economy. The financial press is already offering nostalgic retrospectives on the highlights: the crash of '87 and rapid rebound, the chairman's total victory over price inflation, his swift interventions to avoid financial panics and to reverse the stock market's massive meltdown of 2000-01. In tempestuous times, this Fed chairman a

Peggy Noonan: On Political Leadership in a Crisis

Katrina is a huge and historic story. The human cost, the financial cost, the rendering uninhabitable of a great and fabled American city--all of it amazing. A quick look at the good, the bad, and the let's-shoot-them-now. Political leadership in times of crisis is a delicate thing. You have to be frank about the fix you're in without being demoralizing. You have to seem confident without seeming out of touch with reality. You have to be human without indulging all your very human e

Todd Gitlin: Anti-War America

[Todd Gitlin contributes regularly to TPMcafe.com and is the author of The Intellectuals and the Flag, forthcoming from Columbia University Press.] ... The historical analogy game is as irresistible as it is tricky, so here goes. The Sheehan vigils are reminiscent of a moment in the fall of 1969 when the anti-Vietnam-war Moratorium organized thousands of events across the country. There were big demonstrations in the usual locations, but the striking thing was the turnout in small

Larry Elliott : Welcome to The Balmy Days of Another Edwardian Summer

[Larry Elliott is the Guardian's economics editor.] Crinoline and croquet are out. As yet, no political activist has thrown themselves in front of the royal horse on Derby Day. Even so, some historians can spot the parallels. It is a time of rapid technological change. It is a period when the dominance of the world's superpower is coming under threat. It is an epoch when prosperity masks underlying economic strain. And, crucially, it is a time when policy-makers are confident that a

Adam Curtis: Creating Islamist Phantoms

[Adam Curtis wrote and produced The Power of Nightmares: the Rise of the Politics of Fear, which was broadcast on BBC2 last October.] ... Modern Islamism is a complex political movement with a history that goes back more than 50 years. Its most influential ideologist was an Egyptian school inspector, Sayyid Qutb. In the 50s he wrote a series of books that put forward a powerful critique of modern western culture and democracy, and called for a new type of utopian society in Muslim l

Henry Blodget: The 10th Anniversary of the Dot Com Revolution

[Henry Blodget, a former Wall Street analyst, writes frequently for Slate.] TEN years ago this month, the initial public offering of the Internet pioneer Netscape set off a dot-com boom that today is usually viewed as a sort of financial kindergarten recess, a regrettable free-for-all of idiocy and greed. Although this view does capture an aspect of the period - the arrogance and punch-drunk frivolity that come with easy money - it misses the big picture. It also implies that had we

Jack M. Balkin: No One Truly Believes in Originalism

[Jack M. Balkin is knight professor of constitutional law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School. His latest book is What Roe v. Wade Should Have Said.] We are all living constitutionalists now. But only some of us are willing to admit it. The notion of a Constitution that evolves in response to changing conditions didn't start with the Warren Court of the 1960s; it began at the founding itself. The framers expected that their language, not their intentions, would c

Martha Bayles: Now Showing ... The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Americans

When Benjamin Franklin went to France in 1776, his assignment was to manipulate the French into supporting the American war for independence. This he accomplished with two stratagems: First, he played the balance-of-power game as deftly as any European diplomat; and second, he waged a subtle but effective campaign of what we now call public diplomacy, or the use of information and culture to foster goodwill toward the nation. For Franklin, this meant turning his dumpy self into a symbol. "H

Matthew Continetti: The Evolution of Modern Conservatism (Neo And Otherwise)

[Matthew Continetti is a staff writer at the Weekly Standard.] Believe it or not, I had never noticed the similarity between Saint Augustine, the 5th-century archbishop of Hippo, and Michael K. Deaver, the late-20th-century presidential adviser and media consultant. But both men are interested in conversion narratives -- stories about how people leave one set of beliefs for another. Saint Augustine's conversion, of course, was from paganism to Christianity. But conversions aren't al

John Nichols : Bush V. History

[John Nichols is the author of Against the Beast: A Documentary History of American Opposition to Empire (Nation Books).] As I am not an Iraqi, I have no interest in meddling in the affairs of that troubled land. Of course, I would prefer that the Iraqis establish a system of self-governance that, like ours in the United States, seeks to erect a wall of separation between church and state, preserve the rights of small states and political minorities, protect against military and po

Andrew Gumbel: All I Did Was Say They Can't Run a Fair Election

[The writer is Los Angeles correspondent for the 'The Independent. 'Steal This Vote: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America' is out in the US from Nation Books and available at amazon.co.uk] I've got bad news for anyone already made queasy by the marathon length of American presidential elections. Not only is the 2008 race already concentrating political minds, it is becoming ever clearer the country has not recovered from the infamous mano a mano between Al

Billmon Blog: Philadelphia on the Tigris

The Iraqi constitutional"process" (now careening towards a bitter and divisive referendum) has already inspired one of the silliest historical analogies I think I've ever heard, at least since Ronald Reagan shuffled off the stage. Hardcore supporters of the democratic transformation of Iraq -- i.e. the deadenders -- have taken to comparing the political camel market in Baghdad to the American

David Brooks: To Win in Iraq We Need a Strategy

Andrew Krepinevich is a careful, scholarly man. A graduate of West Point and a retired lieutenant colonel, his book, "The Army and Vietnam," is a classic on how to fight counterinsurgency warfare. Over the past year or so he's been asking his friends and former colleagues in the military a few simple questions: Which of the several known strategies for fighting insurgents are you guys employing in Iraq? What metrics are you using to measure your progress? Th

Frank Rich: The Vietnamization of Bush's Vacation

ANOTHER week in Iraq, another light at the end of the tunnel. On Monday President Bush saluted the Iraqis for "completing work on a democratic constitution" even as the process was breaking down yet again. But was anyone even listening to his latest premature celebration? We have long since lost count of all the historic turning points and fast-evaporating victories hyped by this president. The toppling of Saddam's statue, "Mission Accomplished," the transfer of

Daniel Henninger: A Quiet Majority Replaces Vietnam's "Silent Majority."

[Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page] "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" is an aphorism of uncertain truth everyone seems to have etched into their minds. Who can forget? From the sound of the "antiwar" tom-toms thumping across the land, forgetting the past is the one thing America doesn't have to worry about. We routinely open the sepulchers of memory, and just now it is the "ghost of Vietn

Sidney Blumenthal: A Servile Congress Has Let Bush Go on Permanent Vacation

President Bush took a brief break this week from his month-long vacation to deliver speeches in Utah and Idaho calling for staying the course in Iraq. Because American soldiers have died there, we must continue. "We will finish the task that they gave their lives for," Bush said in Salt Lake City on Monday. He moved his vacationing in between to the Tamarack Resort in Donnelly, Idaho, where he made a short statement to the traveling White House press corps. He described t

Manuel Miranda: The Original Borking

[Mr. Miranda, former counsel to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, is founder and chairman of the Third Branch Conference, a coalition of grassroots organizations following judicial issues.] For liberals and conservatives alike, the touchstone for beleaguered Supreme Court nominations is the rejection of Judge Robert Bork in 1987. Supreme Court nominees had been rejected before, 27 times, but never with so much orchestrated fury. Usually the nominees were lesser jurists, if not less

Gary Hart: Who Will Say 'No More'?

"Waist deep in the Big Muddy and the big fool said to push on," warned an anti-Vietnam war song those many years ago. The McGovern presidential campaign, in those days, which I know something about, is widely viewed as a cause for the decline of the Democratic Party, a gateway through which a new conservative era entered. Like the cat that jumped on a hot stove and thereafter wouldn't jump on any stove, hot or cold, today's Democratic leaders didn't want to make that mista

Vincent Browne: The Pope's Impressive Act of Reparation

The new pope, Benedict XVI, visited the oldest synagogue in northern Europe during his trip to Germany last Friday. The synagogue had been destroyed in the anti-Jewish Kristallnacht riots of November 1938 and was rebuilt in 1959. The visit was loaded with significance. A German pope identifying so vividly with the victims of the pogroms and Holocaust. It was impressive. A silent act, perhaps, of reparation for the crime against the Jewish people perpetrated by Germans,