Roundup: Media's Take

Scott MacLeod: A Proud Moment in Egypt's History

[Scott MacLeod is a professor at the American University in Cairo and managing editor of the Cairo Review of Global Affairs. He was Time magazine's Middle East correspondent from 1995 to 2010.] I'd been looking forward to greeting my Egyptian students Sunday, the first day of the spring semester at American University in Cairo. Instead, classes have been canceled and Egypt burns. I am hunkered down in my apartment with the cat. Outside, gunshots ring out through the nig

Dana Milbank: Glenn Beck vs. the Rabbis

[Dana Milbank is a columnist for the WaPo.] After MSNBC let go Keith Olbermann last week, Glenn Beck couldn't resist celebrating. "Keith Olbermann is the biggest pain in the ass in the world," he judged. But Olbermann's departure really should give Beck pause: With political speech coming under new scrutiny, how much longer can Beck's brutal routine continue at Fox News? The latest omen of Beck's end times came on Thursday -- Holocaust Remembranc

Anne Applebaum: Egypt's Uprising Should Be Encouraged

[Anne Applebaum is a columnist for the WaPo.] As fate would have it, I am in Davos, at the World Economic Forum, and not in Cairo. All around me is gloom. The markets are down. Oil is up. A thorny bundle of uncertainties has just been thrown at the fragile economic recovery - just as it was all going so well! The other night, I heard a famous economic pundit admit that someone had asked him only a few days earlier whether events in Tunisia had any significance for the world economy.

Andrew C. McCarthy: Fear the Muslim Brotherhood

[Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.] At the Daily Beast, Bruce Riedel has posted an essay called “Don’t fear Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood,” the classic, conventional-wisdom response to the crisis in Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood is just fine, he’d have you believe, no need to worry. After all, the Brothers have even renounced violence! One might wo

Taylor Dinerman: A Sputnik Moment?

[Taylor Dinerman is a senior editor at the Hudson Institute’s New York branch and co-author of the forthcoming Towards a Theory of Spacepower: Selected Essays, from National Defense University Press.] Democrats should be careful when they invoke Sputnik. Their party’s response to the Soviet Union’s achievement may have helped win them three elections, in 1958, 1960, and 1962, but it also helped bring about the Cuban missile crisis and durably poisoned the political atmosphere around

Nicole Gelinas: Twenty-First-Century Reaganomics

[Nicole Gelinas, a City Journal contributing editor and the Searle Freedom Trust Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is a Chartered Financial Analyst and the author of After the Fall: Saving Capitalism from Wall Street—and Washington.] The president took the oath of office facing an “economic Dunkirk,” as his top advisors warned. The unemployment rate was 7.5 percent, up from 5.6 percent 18 months earlier. In his inaugural address, the president acknowledged that America was “confron

Eli Rosenberg: Do Revolutions Create Good Governments?

[Eli Rosenberg is a writer for the AtlanticWire.] Much has been written, voiced, and tweeted in eager support of the revolution that took place in Tunisia, and the movements currently fomenting in Egypt, Lebanon, Algeria, and even Yemen. The prospect of democracy in places where it has been denied is undeniably exciting. But one only needs to look at revolutionary movements of the past to understand that they don't always lead to favorable or their purported outcomes. In fact, there

David Brooks: Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Burke

[David Brooks is a columnist for the NYT.] Every Thursday my gurus, Mr. Burke and Mr. Hamilton, get together at the Heavenly Rest to drink and talk politics. Mr. Burke prefers a whiskey and water, while Mr. Hamilton likes a good strong Sex on the Beach. This week, they ended up talking about President Obama. Burke: I congratulate you. Your president is most prudent and wise. He has decided to focus on three things: education reform, infrastructure investment and s

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: Appeasement is the proper policy towards Confucian China

[Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is the Telegraph's International Business Editor.] We all learned at school how the status quo powers mismanaged the spectacular rise of Germany before World War I, a strategic revolution so like the rise of China today. And we all learned how the Kaiser overplayed his hand. That much was obvious. Yet it is difficult to pin-point exactly when the normal pattern of great power jostling began to metamorphose into something more dangerous,

Robert H. Nelson: Sin, Sacrifice, and the State of the Union

[Robert H. Nelson is a professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland and the author, most recently, of “The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion versus Environmental Religion in Contemporary America” (Penn State Press, 2010).] Mainstream Protestantism has declined sharply in recent decades in the United States but the big speeches of our political leaders still routinely echo the Protestant history of the nation. The message is one of sin and redemption. We have

Fareed Zakaria: How Russia Created Its Own Islamic Terrorism Problem

[Fareed Zakaria is editor-at-large for Time Magazine.] ...It's now conventional wisdom that Moscow faces a brutal Islamic terrorist movement, bent on jihad, unwilling to compromise and determined to inflict pain on Russians almost as an end in itself. That's the view presented by Russian officials and accepted by Western leaders. Over the past decade, George W. Bush and Tony Blair reacted to terrorist incidents in Russia by quickly condemning them and describing them as instances of

Benyamin Korn: Will Obama Repeat Carter's U.N. Mistake on Israel?

[Benyamin Korn, former executive editor of the Jewish Exponent, is director of Jewish Americans for Sarah Palin and JewsForSarah.com.] An anti-Israel resolution, coming up before the United Nations Security Council. A Democratic president in a quandary over what position to take. Cracks appearing in the Jewish community's traditional Democratic leanings, just as the campaign season heats up. Sounds like Barack Obama's latest foreign policy conundrum? Try

Stephen Brockmann: Sorry for the Destruction of the Humanities

[Stephen Brockmann is professor of German at Carnegie Mellon University and president of the German Studies Association.] I was a graduate student in the 1980s, during the heyday of the so-called “culture wars” and the curricular attacks on "Western civilization." Those days were punctuated by some Stanford students chanting slogans like "Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go," and by fiery debates about Allan Bloom’s book The Closing of the American Mind, wh

Jonathan Schell: The 'Sputnik Moment' That Wasn't

[Jonathan Schell is an author and a visiting fellow at Yale University.] I haven’t noticed any surprising new satellites in the heavens recently. Why, then, does the president of the United States say that we are in a “sputnik moment?” Why has that moment, now more than a half century past, been dragged out of obscurity to define the present? And why was the associated theme of American competitiveness in the world market chosen as the theme of the President’s State of the Union spe

Moshe Adler: Obfuscating Unemployment

[Moshe Adler teaches economics at Columbia University and at the Harry Van Arsdale Center for Labor Studies at Empire State College. He is the author of “Economics for the Rest of Us: Debunking the Science That Makes Life Dismal.”] ...During the Great Depression, high rates of unemployment prevailed for 11 years and declined only when the U.S. entered World War II. The experience of seeing a free market system drive itself into a rut that it cannot pull itself out of is nothing new.

John Gordon Steele: Is It 1848 in the Arab World?

[John Gordon Steele is the author of numerous histories of Wall Street. He blogs for Commentary Magazine.] ...John Kenneth Galbraith wrote that “all successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.” The regimes that appear strong, with massive security forces, are suddenly revealed to be hollow. This is what happened in Tunisia. Ben Ali, in power since 1987, fled to Saudi Arabia after riots started when a fruit vendor immolated himself after his wares were seized by a gov

William Gibson: 25 Years of Digital Vandalism

[William Gibson is the author, most recently, of the novel “Zero History.”] IN January 1986, Basit and Amjad Alvi, sibling programmers living near the main train station in Lahore, Pakistan, wrote a piece of code to safeguard the latest version of their heart-monitoring software from piracy. They called it Brain, and it was basically a wheel-clamp for PCs. Computers that ran their program, plus this new bit of code, would stop working after a year, though they cheerfully provided th

E.J. Dionne Jr.: Obama Finds a New Angle to Reach Old Goals

[E.J. Dionne Jr. is a columnist for the WaPo.] ...What Americans must be ready for now is the paradoxical phase of Barack Obama's presidency. Many things will not be exactly as they appear. Paradox No. 1: Because over the next two years he can't get far-reaching, progressive legislation through the Republican-led House, Obama will be doing far more to make the core progressive case that energetic government is essential to prosperity, growth and equity. Par

Robert Reich: Why our Sputnik moment will fall short

[Robert Bernard Reich is an American political economist, professor, author, and political commentator.] President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address was everything his supporters hoped it would be – dignified, thoughtful and moderate. It was a call for fiscal prudence at a time of growing budget deficits and a summons to improve competitiveness to counter the gravitational pull of the Great Recession. In short, it hit all the right notes. But there was no melody, at least no

Godfrey Hodgson: American Tragedy, Political Response

[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. Among his books are A Great and Godly Adventure: The Pilgrims and the Myth of the First Thanksgiving (PublicAffairs, 2007) and The Myth of American Exceptionalism (Yale University Press, 2009)] ...Almost fifty years ago, I was in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to celebrate a minor victory in the civil-