Roundup: Media's Take

Alan Colmes: How Democrats Made America Exceptional

Mr. Colmes is a liberal political commentator, author and host of "The Alan Colmes Show" on Fox News Radio. His book Thank the Liberals . . . For Saving America has just been published by Hay House.

Matt Apuzzo: First Since '52 ... No Talk of War in GOP Speeches

Matt Apuzzo is on AP's investigative team in Washington, where he focuses primarily on national security and intelligence matters.With America embroiled in its longest armed conflict, Mitt Romney became the first Republican since 1952 to accept his party’s nomination without mentioning war. Three election cycles after the 2001 terrorist attacks, neither Romney nor his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan, had anything to say about terrorism or war while on their party’s biggest stage. The only one who did Thursday was actor Clint Eastwood, who won cheers for suggesting invading Afghanistan was a mistake and calling for an immediate withdrawal of troops — a line that might have earned boos and catcalls four years ago. The Romney strategy reflects the weak public support for the Afghanistan war, fatigue over a decade of terrorism fears and the central role of the economy in the campaign. But it was still a remarkable shift in tone for a party that, even in times of peace, has used the specter of war to call for greater military spending and tough foreign policy...

Hedrick Smith: When Capitalists Cared

Hedrick Smith, a former correspondent and Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, is the author of “Who Stole the American Dream?”IN the rancorous debate over how to get the sluggish economy moving, we have forgotten the wisdom of Henry Ford. In 1914, not long after the Ford Motor Company came out with the Model T, Ford made the startling announcement that he would pay his workers the unheard-of wage of $5 a day.Not only was it a matter of social justice, Ford wrote, but paying high wages was also smart business. When wages are low, uncertainty dogs the marketplace and growth is weak. But when pay is high and steady, Ford asserted, business is more secure because workers earn enough to become good customers. They can afford to buy Model Ts.

Nicole Gelinas: New Orleans Owes George W. Bush

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.With Hurricane Isaac menacing New Orleans as Republicans meet in Tampa, the national media are reminding everyone how badly President George W. Bush screwed up the response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. But Bush’s real New Orleans legacy isn’t those images of storm survivors desperate for food and water. It’s New Orleans’ spanking-new flood-protection system — which helps protects the city from a catastrophic repeat. Seven years on, the images from Katrina remain indelible: survivors begging outside the city’s Convention Center and Superdome; rescuers terrified to enter the lawless metropolis without armed guard. Yet New Orleans has moved on. Visit now, and you won’t find a city wallowing in self-pity, but one whose people have rebuilt.That’s a small miracle...

Daniel P. Aldrich: How to Weather a Hurricane

Daniel P. Aldrich, an associate professor of public policy at Purdue University, is the author of “Building Resilience: Social Capital in Post-Disaster Recovery.”HURRICANE Isaac, which made landfall in Louisiana last night, has not only disrupted the Republican National Convention but also brought back painful memories of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the Gulf Coast seven years ago this week.In August 2005, my wife and our small children and I evacuated to Houston just before the storm destroyed the New Orleans home we had moved into six weeks earlier. We took with us just a bag of toys and a suitcase. We applied for federal aid, but especially in the immediate aftermath, it was family, friends and friends-of-friends who came through for us.

Imraan Coovadia: Mining for Stories

Imraan Coovadia teaches creative writing at the University of Cape Town and is the author, most recently, of the novel “The Institute for Taxi Poetry.” THE 34 miners killed by the police earlier this month in a wildcat strike at a Marikana platinum mine, in northern South Africa, were immediately engaged as bit players in various morality tales. Marikana reminded some of the 1960 police massacre at Sharpeville; suggested to others that poverty and division had survived apartheid; or foretold a sharp confrontation between capital and labor. To many, it either predicted or confirmed the political and moral disintegration of the ruling party, the African National Congress.I hesitated in choosing among these fables because a writer’s single item of professional knowledge is that a story is a speculation about the world, composed under the sign of luck rather than of law or reason. Good stories, like bad stories, have a way of escaping the facts.

Rob Rakove: Taking Nonalignment Seriously

Rob Rakove is a lecturer in International Relations at Stanford University. His first book, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World, will be published by Cambridge University Press in October.

Charles C. W. Cooke: Southerners and Gs

Charles C. W. Cooke is an editorial associate for National Review.Americans are not infatuated with class in the manner that the British are, but accents remain consequential nonetheless. How else to explain the Amazing Disappearing G, a trick of pronunciation that, whereabouts permitting, politicians on the campaign trail and beyond are keen to perform? Vice President Joe Biden, during his ignoble allegation that the Republican party has a secret plan to put black Americans “back in chains,” avoided the participial G as if he were fatally allergic.

Robert Reich: George W. Bush: GOP’s Persona Non Grata

Robert Reich, one of the nation’s leading experts on work and the economy, is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley.There is nothing Republicans would rather the American people forget more than George W. Bush, who doesn’t even have a bit part at the GOP convention opening in Tampa.But W’s ghost may be there, anyway.The National Weather Service says tropical storm Isaac is now heading for New Orleans, and Isaac is projected to become a Category 1 hurricane by the time it makes landfall  late Monday or early Tuesday.Isaac is very likely to revive memories of the Bush administration’s monumental incompetence in dealing with the needs of Americans caught in Hurricane Katrina....

Warren Kozak: Nuclear-Weapon States Aren't Created Equal

Mr. Kozak is the author of Presidential Courage: Three Speeches That Changed America, an eBook to be published in October.For the past 67 years, the United States has been criticized for being the only country to drop atomic bombs on another sovereign nation. But while the anniversaries of Hiroshima (Aug. 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (Aug. 9, 1945) rarely pass without comment or controversy, another crucial date is completely ignored: Aug. 29. Between July 16, 1945, the day the U.S. tested the first atomic device in New Mexico and realized that it actually worked, and Aug. 29, 1949—when the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb—the U.S. held a nuclear monopoly. No country has ever held a greater strategic advantage over the rest of the world—not Rome under Caesar, France under Napoleon, or Germany under Hitler. Yet between 1945 and 1949, America's friends and enemies lost very little sleep. Why not? Because the idea of the U.S. using its great advantage to take over the world with nuclear bombs was ludicrous to all but the most irrational minds...

Jamie M. Fly: Will Mitt Romney Discover His Inner Reagan?

Jamie M. Fly is executive director of the Foreign Policy Initiative.

Jacob Heilbrunn: Will Romney Discover His Inner Nixon?

Jacob Heilbrunn is senior editor at the National Interest.

Michael Tomasky: How Tricky Mitt Romney Is Aping Richard Nixon

Newsweek/Daily Beast special correspondent Michael Tomasky is also editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.

Michael Tomasky: How Tricky Mitt Romney Is Aping Richard Nixon

Newsweek/Daily Beast special correspondent Michael Tomasky is also editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.Apparently, there will be no sweeping effort undertaken to humanize Mitt Romney at this week’s convention. He told USA Today that during the daytime sessions, there will be “a series of vignettes, so people who attend the convention will get to know me a little better,” but during primetime, when millions are watching, “we won’t be talking about my life.” It’s the right decision in the sense that there’s almost nothing about his life that’s the least bit emotionally compelling. But it’s also a telling one, because it means the campaign is basically going to be: Vote for me, I’m white, and I’m not a socialist....

Megan Garber: What Died With Neil Armstrong

Megan Garber is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She was formerly an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab, where she wrote about innovations in the media.

Peter Rutland: What Links Pussy Riot With Dostoevsky

Peter Rutland is a professor of government at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.

Harold James: Why August Is the Worst Month for the Markets

Harold James is professor of history and international affairs at Princeton University and professor of history at the European University Institute, Florence. Summer is a time for beaches and relaxation — and, historically, for all sorts of destructive crises. Time and again, it has proven dangerous for the world to be on holiday. August is an especially bad month for financial markets. On Aug. 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon ended the commitment of the United States to a fixed gold price, and since then the world has lived with currency volatility and instability. On Aug. 13, 1982 (a Friday), Mexican Finance Minister Silva Herzog went to Washington to tell the International Monetary Fund and the U.S. government that Mexico would be unable to make its scheduled debt payment the following Monday. On Aug. 17, 1998, Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko announced that Russia would simultaneously default and devalue. And in the first week of August 2007, IKB Deutsche Industriebank disintegrated as the U.S. subprime crisis spread. The roots of this seasonal periodicity of crises predate World War I, in the era of the classic gold standard.

Emily Badger: The Uncomfortable Politics Behind the History of Urban Fires

Emily Badger is a contributing writer to The Atlantic Cities. She also writes for Pacific Standard, and her work has appeared in GOOD, The Christian Science Monitor, and The New York Times. She lives in the Washington, D.C. area...One of the most fascinating essays in the book is one by historian Daniel Kerr about much more recent history in Cleveland. The city experienced a spate of riots in the 1960s by blacks who sought more control over their own communities. Less well remembered is what happened next: In the '70s, some 24,000 housing units in some of these same neighborhoods were set on fire by arsonists – usually the property owners themselves – with the tacit approval of the city government. In all, more than 15,000 fires were intentionally set that decade, wiping out as much as 40 percent of the housing stock in some neighborhoods that the city hoped to redevelop.

Graham Allison: Thucydides's Trap Has Been Sprung in the Pacific

The writer is Director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. China’s increasingly aggressive posture towards the South China Sea and the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea is less important in itself than as a sign of things to come. For six decades after the second world war, an American "Pax Pacifica" has provided the security and economic framework within which Asian countries have produced the most rapid economic growth in history. However, having emerged as a great power that will overtake the US in the next decade to become the largest economy in the world, it is not surprising that China will demand revisions to the rules established by others. The defining question about global order in the decades ahead will be: can China and the US escape Thucydides’s trap? The historian’s metaphor reminds us of the dangers two parties face when a rising power rivals a ruling power – as Athens did in 5th century BC and Germany did at the end of the 19th century. Most such challenges have ended in war.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: Paul Ryan, JFK?

Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a nationally syndicated columnist. She speaks frequently on faith and public life and blogs on Catholic things at K-Lo@Large. "We both agreed that we care passionately about the future of this country. So we did find some common ground." At last, Sister Simone Campbell and I are seeing eye to eye on Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan! Sister Campbell, head of the social-justice lobby Network, commented on her meeting with Ryan after organizing a multi-state "Nuns on the Bus" tour to protest his budget plan. I’ve long been perplexed by why she doesn’t see what I see: The young, Catholic Ryan, House Budget Committee chairman and now vice-presidential running mate to presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, appears to take his faith seriously, including in discerning matters of public policy.