Politics

Analyzing the relative dearth of monetary aid to the victims of recent flooding in Pakistan, experts theorized that Americans were being tight with donations partly because the crisis was so distant — both literally and culturally. It’s a fact of life that if people can’t empathize with a problem on a very visceral level, it’s…

President Obama’s Oval Office speech earlier this week should have felt like a win for the administration. The official transfer of power that came hours later in Iraq should have been the “victory lap” the president desperately needs from a political standpoint. Instead, many critics of the White House saw the speech and subsequent ceremony…

The outcomes of wars are intimately connected to the decisions about whether to fight them in the fist place. And the Bush administration’s determination in 2003 to march into Baghdad was based on costly hallucinations. The goals of the invasion were to destroy the Iraqi army, destroy the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein, rid Iraq…

At the beginning of Manderlay, Lars von Trier’s underrated 2005 film about the legacy of American slavery, the audience is given a brief glimpse at the gates of fictional Alabama plantation Manderlay. Atop the wrought iron fence, which overlooks a modest but healthy cotton crop, is a short passage from Alabama’s eponymous state song: “Little,…

It is not often that we don’t know where to begin, but this is one of them. A Newsweek public opinion poll shows that a majority of Republicans believe that President Barack Obama “sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world,” according to a survey released on…

Is it over for President Obama? Yes, says Fouad Ajami in The Wall Street Journal, arguing that the president can’t salvage his presidency and he is doomed to fall into Jimmy Carter-like irrelevance. Not so fast, says David Rothkopf at our sister publication Foreign Policy. He argues that it is simply too soon to write off…

President Barack Hussein Obama is keeping it real, dismissing rumors that just won’t quit about his religious practices. In an interview with NBC’s Brian Williams in New Orleans, where he was marking the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, President Obama said, “The facts are the facts, right?” when discussing the persistent rumors that he is Muslim.…

For a lot of the people who joined Al Sharpton’s Reclaim the Dream rally and march, it was their first opportunity to experience something close to what people saw and felt when they marched in Selma, Ala., or sat in at Greensboro, N.C.As the marchers made their way from Washington’s Paul Laurence Dunbar High School…