Roundup: Media's Take

E.J. Dionne Jr.: It’s Time to Fast-Track Sainthood for Pope John XXIII

E.J. Dionne Jr. is an op-ed columnist for the Washington PostThe Vatican’s decision to speed Pope John Paul II on the road to sainthood aroused great elation among many Catholics — and a backlash among others in the church who see the rush as unseemly. There is an obvious remedy that could bring contending Catholics together and send exactly the right message about the church’s attitude toward the modern world: It’s time to declare Pope John XXIII a saint....

Hendrik Hertzberg: Tomlinson and Trump

Hendrik Hertzberg writes for the New Yorker.

Lynn Peril: Do Secretaries Have a Future?

Lynn Peril, a secretary, is the author of Swimming in the Steno Pool: A Retro Guide to Making It in the Office. THE 1950s and ’60s brought many new things to American offices, including the Xerox machine, word processing and — perhaps less famously — the first National Secretaries Day, in 1952. Secretaries of that era envisioned a rosy future, and many saw their jobs as a ticket to a better life.

Khaled Mattawa: The Milk of Libyan Resistance

Khaled Mattawa, an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Michigan, is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection Tocqueville.

Ian Jack: Time for a Royal Wedding ... While England Is Royally Screwed

Jack is a British journalist and author of The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain....The country is used to the idea of national decline: “declinism” became a feature of British historical study many years ago—the U.S. is just now catching up. Public fears over the nation’s capability date back to at least the Boer War.

Michael Lind: What is a "Good" Job, Anyway?

Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and is the author of "The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution."

Tim Rutten: Obama's Lack of Moral Clarity on Armenian Genocide Issue

The line between prudence and moral cowardice can be a fine one, particularly when it comes to the conduct of diplomacy.

Noam Chomsky: Is the World Too Big to Fail?

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. He is the author of numerous best-selling political works.

Robert Park: When Will We Stop the Genocide in North Korea?

The writer is a human rights activist and missionary who was detained in North Korea from December 2009 to February 2010.“Holocaust” is the word used to describe the systematic extermination of millions of innocent European Jews during World War II. In the aftermath of this mammoth failure of humanity, many nations “repented” and declared that “never again” would such inhumanity and absolute disregard for human dignity and life be tolerated.

Peter Godwin: Making Mugabe Laugh

Peter Godwin is the author of The Fear: Robert Mugabe and the Martyrdom of Zimbabwe....The parallels between Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe are striking: both were once viewed as the singular successes in their respective regions, the envy of their neighbors. Both Mr. Gbagbo, a former history professor, and Mr. Mugabe, a serial graduate student, are highly educated men who helped liberate their countries from authoritarian regimes.

Bret Stephens: Damascus Needs Regime Change

[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.] It's coming on close to four decades since the U.S. foreign policy establishment got into the business of making excuses for the Assad regime in Syria. Maybe it's time to stop. The excuses come in many forms.

Alexander Golts: NATO's Half-Hearted War

Alexander Golts is deputy editor of the online newspaper Yezhednevny Zhurnal.

John B. Judis: Can American Democracy Survive the Demise of Impartial Institutions?

John B. Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic....Disinterestedness was an important part of the Founders’ vision for the country. In The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton described the “independence of the judges” as “requisite to guard the Constitution and the rights of individuals from the effects of those ill humors, which ... occasion dangerous innovations in the government, and serious oppressions of the minor party in the community.” But it was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that disinterested institutions truly became integral to the functioning of the American polity. At the time, the rise of giant corporations and the growth of an industrial working class had given the lie to the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian dream of democracy based upon the dispersion of small-property owners. As business and labor clashed, the preservation of democracy appeared to rest on finding a way to reconcile these two groups. But who could possibly mediate between labor and business, and ensure an outcome acceptable to both? Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson both staked out this ground; but the role also fell to a new kind of policy group and publication that was committed to being above party, class, interest, and ideology.The first of these groups was the National Civic Federation, which one of its founders described as a “sort of Hague tribunal” that would provide “a neutral ground where conflicting interests can meet and adjust themselves.” The Brookings Institution also dates from this period. Retired St. Louis businessman Robert Brookings, who founded it in 1916, said he wanted an institution “free from any political or pecuniary interest” that would “lay before the country in a coherent form the fundamental economic facts.” Brookings’s first president, Harold Moulton, was a laissez-faire economist, yet, when coal operators complained bitterly about a Brookings study in 1928 calling for the nationalization of the industry, he rebuked them for demanding that his think tank heed their interests in its research....

Erwin Chemerinsky and James J. Sample: You Get the Judges You Pay For

Erwin Chemerinsky is the dean of the law school at the University of California, Irvine. James J. Sample is an associate professor of law at Hofstra.LEGAL elites must come to terms with a reality driven by the grass-roots electorate: judicial elections are here to stay. Given this reality, we should focus on balancing important First Amendment rights to financially support campaigns with due process concerns about fair trials....

Jeff Bridoux: Why Libya will not be a second Iraq

[Jeff Bridoux is the author of American Foreign Policy and Postwar Reconstruction, published by Routledge in 2011, and a Postdoctoral Fellow in ‘Politico-Economies of Democratisation’, Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University.]

Daniel J. Flynn: Echoes of Carter

[Daniel J. Flynn is the author of Why the Left Hates America, Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas, A Conservative History of the American Left, and the forthcoming Blue Collar Intellectuals.] Do you ever get the feeling that you’re really living in a television program? For 2011 America, the rerun we are collectively forced to act in is That ’70s Show. Supermarket prices have skyrocketed. An energy crisis looms. The economy sputter

Patrick Cockburn: Libya's parallels with Iraq under Saddam are truly ominous

[Patrick Cockburn is a foreign correspondent at The Independent.] The conflict between pro and anti-Gaddafi forces in Libya could, according to Moussa Koussa, the former Libyan foreign minister, who has fled to Britain, turn the country into another Somalia. The ingredients are certainly there for a prolonged conflict. Claims that Muammar Gaddafi is about to fall sound unnervingly similar to predictions in 1991 that Saddam Hussein was going to lose power in Iraq after his calamitous

Walter Rodgers: Rural American Tradition of Disregard for Law Still Thrives

[Walter Rodgers, a former senior international correspondent for CNN, writes a biweekly column.] The classic children’s story begins, “A wild, ringing neigh shrilled up from the hold of the Spanish galleon.” “Misty of Chincoteague” is one of those books you really wanted to believe as a kid: A shipload of Moorish ponies destined for the New World founders in a storm off the Virginia and Maryland barrier islands. The author tells us that for centuries they roamed “free, free, free,”

Scott Horton: How Not to Declare a War

[Scott Horton is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine who teaches at Columbia Law School.] In 2007, the Boston Globe's Charlie Savage asked then-U.S. Sen. Barack Obama whether the president could authorize the bombing of Iran without first seeking congressional authorization in circumstances in which there was no imminent threat to the United States. Obama's answer was clear and succinct: "The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize

Stephan Vormann: The End of German “Normalization“?

[Stephan Vormann is working on a PhD on German Foreign and Security Policy at the “Centre for the Study of Wider Europe” at NUI Maynooth.] For the last 20 years German foreign policy has been remarkably continuous. Despite widespread fears over the future course of the country after the end of the Cold War, a mix of strong normative and material interests has ensured that Germany continued to work towards further European integration and towards the further development of NATO and t