Roundup: Media's Take

Gary Alan Fine: George Orwell and the N.C.A.A.

Gary Alan Fine is a professor of sociology at Northwestern University and the author of “Difficult Reputations: Collective Memories of the Evil, Inept and Controversial.”On Monday, the National Collegiate Athletic Association made a remarkable — and disturbing — decision. As one of the sanctions against Pennsylvania State University, it determined that all of Penn State’s football victories from 1998 to 2011 were to be “vacated.” Whoosh! As a result, Joe Paterno no longer holds the major college coaching record for career wins. Someone else now has that honor. George Orwell would be amused.In his magnificent dystopia, “1984,” Orwell understood well the dangers of “history clerks.” Those given authority to write history can change the past. Those sweat-and-mud victories of the Nittany Lions — more points on the scoreboard — no longer exist. The winners are now the losers.

Conor Friedersdorf: Promises About Another American Century Are Pretty Lies

Conor Friedersdorf is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and national affairs. He lives in Venice, California, and is the founding editor of The Best of Journalism, a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction.

Alexis Madrigal: The Women Who Would Have Been Sally Ride

Alexis Madrigal is a senior editor at The Atlantic. He's the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology.[O]ne might have expected great movement when Valentina Tereshkova left the Earth's atmosphere on June 16, 1963 to become the first woman in space. After all, Tereshkova spent three days in space, completed 48 orbits around Earth, and logged more time in orbit than all the Americans (three) who had been in space to that point. She'd proven that a woman was physically capable of withstanding the rigors of spaceflight. Surely, the Americans would rush to get a woman into space! Rosie the Riveter, perhaps, dusting herself off after her stint as a factory laborer in the successful war effort? But no, there was no Tereshkova moment. In fact, one NASA official who declined to give his name to a reporter, said it made him "sick to his stomach" to think of women in space. Another called Tereshkova's flight "a publicity stunt."...

Mohammad Jamil: War in August?

The writer is Lahore-based senior journalist.

Pat Buchanan: America Needs No More Neo-Imperial Nonsense

The writer is a political commentator and a two-time candidate for the Republican nomination for president.Triumphant in the first Gulf war, George H.W. Bush, in October 1991, went before the UN to declare that the US’s goal was now to build a “New World Order”. Rejecting this as Wilsonian utopianism, my 1992 presidential campaign called for an end to US military intervention where no vital interest was imperilled, for federal action to secure our southern border and for a halt to the outsourcing of US manufacturing jobs. We advocated a Hamiltonian policy to support industry and a Jeffersonian foreign policy of peaceful commerce with all nations but entangling alliances with none. And we were denounced as isolationists and protectionists. We lost. But Mr Bush lost too, when Ross Perot, running on the same theme – putting America first – stripped away a third of the coalition Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan put together, leaving Mr Bush with an incumbent’s smallest share of the vote since William Howard Taft. Mr Bush’s foreign policy record could not save him. The US was looking inward in 1992, as it does today. As Mitt Romney burnishes his foreign policy credentials this week, he should keep this lesson in mind...

Chris Cillizza: Ross Perot 2012! His Message Was 20 Years Ahead of Its Time

Chris Cillizza writes the political blog The Fix for The Washington Post and is the author of The Gospel According to The Fix.

Daniel Pipes: Sixty Years of Egyptian Misery

Daniel Pipes is President of the Middle East Forum and Taube Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

Joseph S. Nye: Nixon Was Right About Political and Energy Independence

Joseph S. Nye, a former U.S. assistant secretary of defense, is a professor at Harvard University and the author of The Future of Power. The Daily Star publishes this commentary in collaboration with Project Syndicate © (www.project-syndicate.org).

Rami G. Khouri: Syria Marks the End of Colonialism

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly by The Daily Star.

David Brooks: A Brief History of Spree Killings

Early in the morning of Sept. 4, 1913, Ernst Wagner murdered his wife and four children in the town of Degerloch, Germany. Then he went to Mühlhausen, where he feared the townsmen were mocking him for having sex with an animal. He opened fire and hit 20 people, killing at least nine.This is believed to be one of the first spectacular rampage murders of the 20th century. Over the next 60 years, there was about one or two of these spree killings per decade. Then the frequency of such killings began to shoot upward. There were at least nine of these rampages during the 1980s, according to history Web sites that track such things, including the 1982 case of a police officer in South Korea who massacred 57 people.In the 1990s, there were at least 11 spectacular spree killings. Over the past decade, by my count, there have been at least 26 rampages. These include Robert Steinhäuser’s murder of 16 people in Germany, Seung-Hui Cho’s murder of 32 at Virginia Tech, Anders Breivik’s shooting spree at a summer camp in Norway in which 69 died, and the killing of 12 moviegoers in Aurora, Colo., last week....

William deBuys: Not a “Perfect Storm” But the New Norm in the American West

William deBuys, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of seven books, most recently A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest (Oxford, 2011). He has long been involved in environmental affairs in the Southwest, including service as founding chairman of the Valles Caldera Trust, which administers the 87,000-acre Valles Caldera National Preserve in New Mexico.Dire fire conditions, like the inferno of heat, turbulence, and fuel that recently turned 346 homes in Colorado Springs to ash, are now common in the West. A lethal combination of drought, insect plagues, windstorms, and legions of dead, dying, or stressed-out trees constitute what some pundits are calling wildfire’s “perfect storm.”They are only half right.

Sadanand Dhume: The House of Nehru-Gandhi

Sadanand Dhume is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.India will elect its 13th president on July 22, when votes cast earlier this week by about 5,000 national and state legislators are tallied. The almost certain winner is former finance minister Pranab Mukherjee, a career politician and the official candidate of the ruling Congress Party.Though the largely ceremonial office carries little clout-the prime minister wields executive power-India's president is nonetheless the country's official head of state. Not surprisingly, the national media has giddily covered every twist and turn in Mukherjee's likely ascent to Rashtrapati Bhavan, the palatial 340-room estate completed in 1929 for the viceroy of British India. But nobody has paused to ask why India needs an elected president in the first place. Perhaps it's time the world's largest democracy considered a constitutional monarch instead.

Jacob Weisberg: Nobody Actually Practices "Chicago-Style" Politics Anymore

Jacob Weisberg is chairman and editor-in-chief of the Slate Group and author of The Bush Tragedy. Follow him at http://twitter.com/jacobwe.If I hear one more person accuse the Obama campaign of practicing “Chicago-style politics,” I'm gonna kick all his nephews off the park-district payroll.  I’m gonna send some precinct captains over to straighten him out. Mitt Romney and his surrogates don’t understand what Chicago-style politics means. No one seems to have told them that it’s been gone for 25 years. And they don’t get that Barack Obama, in his Chicago days, never had anything to do with it.

Gar Alperovitz: Wall Street Is Too Big to Regulate

Gar Alperovitz, a professor of political economy at the University of Maryland, is the author of “America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy.”...Most liberals in Washington — President Obama included — keep hoping the banks can be more tightly controlled but otherwise left as is. That’s the theory behind the two-year-old Dodd-Frank law, which Republicans and Wall Street are still working to eviscerate.Some economists in and around the University of Chicago, who founded the modern conservative tradition, had a surprisingly different take: When it comes to the really big fish in the economic pond, some felt, the only way to preserve competition was to nationalize the largest ones, which defied regulation.

Franz-Stefan Gady: T. E. Lawrence's Prescient Warning about Syria

Franz-Stefan Gady is a foreign-policy analyst at the EastWest Institute.

Yossi Beilin and Benny Elon: Time to Rethink Oslo Accords

Dr. Yossi Beilin is a former Israeli minister of justice and deputy minister for foreign affairs and architect of the Oslo Peace Accords. Rabbi Benny Elon is a former Israeli minister of tourism. A longstanding critic of Oslo, he is president of the International Israel Allies Caucus Foundation.Let us start with a rare activity in that twilight zone that is called the Middle East peace process: talking about things we agree upon. Regional leaders and experts on all sides of the discussion have declared the peace process to be dormant, if not dead. No meaningful negotiations have taken place in almost three years. The Obama administration is hiding its head in the sand. Rumors have replaced ideas and action. Alas, that reality remains a taboo topic in Washington. So, for that reason, we and others have arrived on Capitol Hill to lay out the realpolitik of the peace process, to strip away the fig leaf, and to force us to see and act. The time has come, 20 years after Oslo, to reevaluate our thinking and try a new approach. It is the only hope of moving toward a lasting peace... 

Fawaz Turki: Declinist Historians are No Doomsayers

Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.In his State of the Union address in January, US President Barack Obama disputed the notion that America is in decline. “Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned doesn’t know what they’re talking about”, he declared. “America remains the one indispensable nation in world affairs”. Declinist historians, along with 69 per cent of Americans, beg to differ though.American declinists, whose morbid role in the world of academe is to look for universal rhythms that accompany the rise and fall of civilisations, have had a field day since the 1980s, pondering their nation’s potential fall from grace as a big power. Perhaps, in historical times, even imminent fall....

Sohrab Ahmari: The Sources of Iranian Conduct

Sohrab Ahmari is a Robert L. Bartley fellow at The Wall Street Journal and a nonresident research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society. The collapse of the latest round of negotiations between the great powers and the Islamic Republic of Iran in Moscow has prompted the usual soul-searching in Washington and Brussels: Did we misread the mullahs’ psychology yet again? Could a sweeter Western proposal have overcome their natural mistrust? These are worthwhile questions to ask. But the emotional rollercoaster accompanying each cycle of failed talks—from fear and trembling to boisterous optimism, then back to anxiety—suggests that the West lacks the proper conceptual framework for answering them. Thirty-three years since Shi‘a Islamists seized power in Tehran, we are far from appreciating the sources of their conduct. We therefore stand little chance of altering it. As George Kennan understood when he wrote "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" in 1946, the behavior of every long-term adversary is rooted in a specific combination of ideology and circumstance. The mullahs are no exception. Unlocking the sources of their conduct can narrow the range of realistic options, and disclose new ways for dealing with the Iranian threat. First, the ideology.

Robert Sarner: The Difference of a Minute, 40 Years Later

Robert Sarner, a former journalist in Israel, France and Canada, is the director of Communication and Public Affairs at Roots Canada in Toronto.

Franck Salameh: An Alawite State in Syria?

Franck Salameh is an assistant professor of Near Eastern Studies, Arabic and Hebrew at Boston College and the author of Language Memory and Identity in the Middle East: The Case for Lebanon (Lexington Books, 2010).