Roundup: Media's Take

Robert G. Rabil: Syria: The Death of a Nation?

Robert G. Rabil is an associate professor of political science and the LLS Distinguished Professor of Current Events at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of Embattled Neighbors: Syria, Israel and Lebanon (Lynne Rienner, 2003); Syria, the United States and The War on Terror in the Middle East (Praeger, 2006) and most recently Religion, National Identity and Confessional Politics in Lebanon: The Challenge of Islamism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

Joan Walsh: Walker Pulls a PATCO, Wins One for the Plutocrats

Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large.At about 3 pm Wisconsin time Scott Walker Tweeted: “President Reagan died on June 5, 2004. Let’s win one for the Gipper!” It was moment of grandiosity for a man who endured the shame of a recall election, then ultimately spent enough to survive it, but it wasn’t the first time Walker invoked Reagan on one of his big days.While talking to a prankster who pretended he was billionaire GOP funder David Koch more than a year ago, Walker confided what he did at a dinner for his staff the night before he unveiled his union-busting agenda. “I pulled out a picture of Ronald Reagan and I said ‘You know, this may seem a little melodramatic, but 30 years ago Ronald Reagan, whose 100th birthday we just celebrated the day before, had one of the most defining moments of his political career, not just his presidency, when he fired the air traffic controllers,’” Walker told the faux-Koch.

Joshua Spivack: What to Expect When You're Expecting a Recall -- Wisconsin Gubernatorial/Legislative edition

Joshua Spivack is Senior Fellow at the Hugh L. Carey Institute for Government Reform at Wagner College.

Paul Kengor: Obama's Walesa Moment

Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College, executive director of The Center for Vision & Values, and author of the new book, The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis, The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mentor.  Last week, President Barack Obama rejected the world's most powerful living symbol of anti-communism, anti-Sovietism, and victory in the Cold War. The White House declined to have Lech Walesa stand in for the late Jan Karski, who posthumously received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Our president spurned Walesa, first president of free Poland, who had once risked everything to courageously join Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II in keeping Solidarity alive in Poland.

Sunder Katwala: The Left Should Love the Queen

Sunder Katwala, the former head of the Fabian Society, runs the think tank British Future. "The King’s death really has swamped politics," wrote a bemused Richard Crossman, the New Statesman’s assistant editor, in his 1952 diary. Even the Staggers office had become convulsed by debate over whether the magazine’s front page should carry a black border or not. The Diamond Jubilee marks 60 years in which the British left has been consistently surprised by the enduring popularity of the monarchy. This year’s surprise is that the monarchy has arrived in 2012 looking just as secure as it did in 1952, and rather more robust than it did 20 years ago. Perhaps it would be asking too much to suggest that the left should learn to love the monarchy, but it could learn quite a lot if it were to pause and try to understand the popularity of the British Crown. For the Silver Jubilee in 1977, at least republicans could claim that the Sex Pistols captured the zeitgeist with their punk anthem "God Save the Queen", which was banned by the BBC but still reached number two in the singles charts. The song’s taboo-breaking lyrics – "God save the queen/The fascist regime/They made you a moron/Potential H-bomb" – spoke to a generation.

Jeremy Paxman: We’re All Monarchists Now – Even Me

Jeremy Paxman’s book Empire is out now. 'That’s SO cool!" It was an excited 14 year-old speaking. All I had done was to tell her I was going to an event that the Queen would be attending. This, surely, is one of the big changes of our time. When I was a teenager, I could have thought of few things more uncool than going to see the Queen. Mocking the Royal family was a staple of the 1960s satire boom. Johnny Rotten’s God Save the Queen marked the 1977 Silver Jubilee by comparing her – absurdly – to a "fascist regime". Everyone could stomp to that one. One of the rather priggish boasts of the newly founded Independent newspaper in 1986 was that it stood aside from the whole royal pantomime, and it did quite well out of it for a while. But last week even the Guardian printed a supplement to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee. In her old age, Queen Elizabeth II is held in an affection which 15 years ago, at the height of the hysteria following the death of Diana, was unimaginable. Now, we all love the Queen and the strangulated protests from republicans just sound like some petulant little boy stomping his feet and saying he hopes it rains on your birthday party. How did this happen?..

Brian Schweitzer: Mining for Influence in Montana

Brian Schweitzer, a Democrat, is the governor of Montana.IN Montana’s frontier days, we learned a hard lesson about money in politics, one that’s shaped our campaign-finance laws for a century and made our political system one of the country’s most transparent....Montana’s approach to campaign law began when a miner named William A. Clark came upon a massive copper vein near Butte. It was the largest deposit on earth, and overnight he became one of the wealthiest men in the world. He bought up half the state of Montana, and if he needed favors from politicians, he bought those as well.In 1899 he decided he wanted to become a United States senator. The State Legislature appointed United States senators in those days, so Clark simply gave each corruptible state legislator $10,000 in cash, the equivalent of $250,000 today.Clark “won” the “election,” but when the Senate learned about the bribes, it kicked him out. “I never bought a man who wasn’t for sale,” Clark complained as he headed back to Montana....

W. Joseph Campbell: 40 Years On: The ‘Napalm Girl’ Photo and Its Associated Errors

W. Joseph Campbell is a tenured full professor in the School of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C. He is a former professional journalist, having reported for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Hartford Courant, and the Associated Press in a 20-year career that took him across North America to Europe, Asia, and West Africa.Nearly 40 years have passed since an Associated Press photographer, Nick Ut, took one of the most memorable photographs of the Vietnam War — the image of a 9-year-old girl screaming in terror as she fled, naked, from a misdirected napalm attack.In a recent retrospective article, the AP said the famous photo, taken June 8, 1972, “communicated the horrors of the Vietnam War in a way words could never describe, helping to end one of the most divisive wars in American history.”

Karl Rove: Why the 2012 Presidential Election Is Not Like 2004

Mr. Rove is the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.President Barack Obama and Gov. Mitt Romney may be dead even in the polls, but some pundits insist the president will prevail on Election Day because 2012 is the new 2004. The story line goes like this: President George W. Bush had roughly the same numbers at this point in 2004 that Mr. Obama has today. Mr. Bush went on to win a narrow victory by building a massive ground game that focused on the GOP's base and by relentlessly attacking his opponent, Sen. John Kerry. Mr. Obama is executing the same strategy. What worked for Mr. Bush, the theory goes, will work for Mr. Obama. The only problem is the theory is based on a false premise. True, there are some similarities between 2004 and 2012. Mr. Obama's current job approval and personal favorability ratings are roughly the same as Mr. Bush's in 2004. So are the head-to-head matchups: In mid-May 2004, Mr. Bush trailed Mr. Kerry in Gallup, 46%-48%, while in the most recent Gallup tracking Mr. Obama is tied with Mr. Romney, 46%-46%. But there are crucial differences between the two elections...

Owen Jones: It's Time to Demolish the Myth About Tony Blair

Owen Jones is a columnist for The Independent.

Kevin D. Williamson: Yes, the Party of Civil Rights

Kevin D. Williamson writes for the National Review.Greetings from sunny Madrid, where I am observing the disintegration of the Spanish economy. You wouldn’t know that the country was in crisis, though: The local soccer team seems to have won an important match, and the streets are filled with singing. I am pleased to see that my piece on Republicans, Democrats, and civil rights has generated a great deal of discussion while I was en route. The reaction from the Left has been more or less what I expected: hysteria, intentional misreading, denial, angst, wailing, content-free sarcasm, aspersion-casting, and a great deal of attention to William F. Buckley’s 1957 column on civil rights (and, of course, no attention to his subsequent thinking on the issue). I will address the criticism thematically rather than case by case. The arguments go, roughly:

Rupert Darwall: Britain's Energy-Policy Time Warp

Rupert Darwall is the author of Global Warming: A Short History, forthcoming from Quartet.

Joschka Fischer: Germany Must Not Destroy the European Order for a Third Time

Joschka Fischer, Germany’s foreign minister and vice-chancellor from 1998 to 2005, was a leader in the German Green Party for almost 20 years. 

Heather Horn: The Controversial German Book Linking the Euro to Holocaust Guilt

Heather Horn is a writer based in Chicago. She is a former features editor and staff writer for The Atlantic Wire, and was previously a research assistant at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. It's hard to think of a good American equivalent to Germany's Thilo Sarrazin, the politician turned best-selling author. The closest one could be Pat Buchanan: in some circles, he and his writings are considered entirely legitimate. In others, they're considered shocking and revolting to the point of scandal. The last time that Sarrazin, the former German central bank director, wrote a book, he suggested that African and Middle Eastern immigrants were destroying the country, in part because of "hereditary factors" that made their children stupid and violent. He suggested educated Germans out-breed them. Controversy raged for months....

Helen Gao: After 50 Years of Silence, China Slowly Confronts the 'Great Leap Forward'

Helen Gao does story research for The Atlantic.When Bo Xilai, the now-sacked Chongqing party chief, blanketed the city with a Maoist-style campaign of nationalism and state control, the critics who worried about the dangers of reviving red culture in modern Chinese society included the Communist Party's top leaders.... Chinese officials and citizens alike are looking back into their country's recent past. The Great Leap Forward and the Great Famine, taboo subjects for half a century, are re-entering the public discourse....

David Brooks: The Role of Uncle Sam

David Brooks is a columnist for the NYT.From the dawn of the republic, the federal government has played a vital role in American economic life. Government promoted industrial development in the 18th century, transportation in the 19th, communications in the 20th and biotechnology today.But the federal role has historically been sharply limited. The man who initiated that role, Alexander Hamilton, was a nationalist. His primary goal was to enhance national power and eminence, not to make individuals rich or equal.This version of economic nationalism meant that he and the people who followed in his path — the Whigs, the early Republicans and the early progressives — focused on long-term structural development, not on providing jobs right now. They had their sights on the horizon, building the infrastructure, education and research facilities required for future greatness. This nationalism also led generations of leaders to assume that there is a rough harmony of interests between capital and labor. People in this tradition reject efforts to divide the country between haves and have-nots....

George Jonas: The West's Fatal Addiction to Democracy

The author's columns appear every Wednesday and Saturday on the Op Ed page of National Post. "We don’t yet have definitive evidence to suggest that the Pakistani military and intelligence establishment was actively housing and protecting [Osama] bin Laden in the garrison town of Abbottabad," wrote my colleague Jonathan Kay the other day. True, but what if we did? Let me suggest that if Sherlock Holmes himself shoved the evidence under our noses, whatever the current world record is for looking the other way, we’d break it. There are certain things we don’t want to know. If we did, we couldn’t go on practicing the ostrich routine that has served us so well over the years. Being oblivious to whatever strikes us as inconvenient works reliably up to a point, but now that a Pakistani court sentenced Shakil Afridi, the Pakistani doctor who played a role in the U.S. hit-team locating bin Laden, to 33 years in prison, it seems to me it is a point we have passed. We’ll have to start taking notice. The worst legacy of George W. Bush’s presidency may turn out to be something for which his opponents never blamed him.

Bret Stephens: On Iran, We'll Probably Get Fooled Again

Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs. In May 1981, John Kifner, a reporter for the New York Times who had covered the Iranian hostage crisis from start to finish, wrote a lengthy story seeking to explain how the embassy seizure had come about and why it dragged out for 444 agonizing days. Thirty-one years later, it still makes for timely reading: "The early attempts at negotiations," Mr. Kifner wrote, "all sank on the rock of Ayatollah Khomeini's moral absolutism. 'This is a war of Islam against blasphemy,' [Khomeini] said. He dismissed the possibility of armed attack, saying that much of the population was 'looking forward to martyrdom,' and he brushed off the threat of economic sanctions: 'We know how to fast.'" Give the late ayatollah his due: He had the courage of his convictions—and he had the West's number. So does his regime. The Islamic Republic has insisted all along that nuclear enrichment is its right. It has consistently responded to threats and sanctions by expanding its nuclear program, bearing the economic sacrifice while forcing the West to bargain for less and less. Yes, the regime is almost certainly lying when it says it has no interest in nuclear weapons.

William Luers and Thomas Pickering: The Nixon Option for Iran

William Luers served as U.S. ambassador to Czechoslovakia and Venezuela and president of the United Nations Association from 1999 to 2009. Thomas Pickering, under secretary of state for political affairs in the administration of U.S. President Bill Clinton, served as U.S. ambassador to Russia, Israel, Jordan and the United Nations.Rearranging the deck chairs would not have saved the Titanic. Nor did the endless debates on the shape of the table in the Vietnam negotiations advance the effort to end that malign conflict. Nevertheless, many U.S. presidents have successfully redesigned talks with adversaries in bold new ways to strengthen national security without war. Such boldness is now needed in the negotiations over Iran's nuclear program. In 1933, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt negotiated personally with Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov to open diplomatic relations between the two countries. U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower invited Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to the United States in 1959 to open the eyes of the first Soviet leader ever to visit the country. The bilateral U.S.-China talks in the 1960s were fruitless until U.S.

Peter Wilby: Forget the Queen's Jubilee. Let's Have a Knees-Up for the Magna Carta

Peter Wilby was for many years an education correspondent on various newspapers. He later became editor of the Independent on Sunday and, from 1998 to 2005, editor of the New Statesman. The glossy newspaper supplements are out, the BBC (supposedly a hotbed of subversive lefties) is preparing wall-to-wall coverage, MPs are going on holiday for two weeks, the populace is ready to put out the flags and the picnic tables. In an orgy of deference, we are celebrating Elizabeth II's 60 years on the throne.