Fact & Fiction

Top 5 Myths About Christmas

by Rick Shenkman

#1 Myth: Retailers have ruined Christmas.

Did Churchill Want Nazis to Be Taken Out and Shot?

by Daniel Honan

"Winston Churchill had a simple solution to the problem of what to do with captured Nazi war leaders: as soon as their identities had been established by a senior officer, they should be taken out and shot, preferably within six hours. The Soviets rejected this idea, not because they had any doubts about the guilt of the German elite and certainly not because they had any qualms about summary executions, but because they recognized the political value of pu

Osama bin Nazi

by Adam Wolfson

IT IS SAID THAT GENERALS are always fighting the last war, and this is no less true of politicians and policymakers. As the first war of the new century begins, America's leaders have been reaching back to the two great struggles of the 20th century, against communism and fascism, to understand this one. Some, like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, think that the appropriate comparison is to the Cold War. Rumsfeld has said that today's war will be waged more as we fought the Communists than t

Robert Kennedy, Unlikely New Hero of the Right Wing

by Joseph A. Palermo

Some officials in the Bush administration have expressed admiration for RFK.

Media Watch: The Washington Post and the Bush Stimulus Plan

by HNN Staff

If you had to guess, how big is the stimulus plan President Bush has proposed? The Washington Post guessed this past week and guessed wrong.The Bush plan is to stimulate the economy by cutting taxes and spending money. Thus far, $55 billion has been spent: $15 billion on the airline industry; $20 billion on New York; $20 billion on counter-terrorism ($15b+$20b+$20b=$55b). Another $60 to $75 billion in stimulus is planned, most to come in the form of tax cuts. (House Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee passed a plan to provide $100 billion in tax cuts; Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill immediately denounced the vote as"show business.")The Washington Post on October 6 estimated that the Bush plan in total would be equal to about 1.5 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). So far so good. But the paper claimed that the Bush plan thereby equals Reagan's. Hmm. Maybe. Let's see. Uh ... no.Economist Dean Baker, to whom we turn in such matters, ran the Bush numbers through his calculator. It turns out the Bush plan is less than half Reagan's.

Getting Munich Wrong

by Alvin Finkel

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon likens renewed American pressure to implement a Middle East peace settlement to pressures on Czechoslovakia in 1938 to cave in to Hitler's demands for territorial concessions. By implication, doves in Israel are equally guilty of trying to placate a foe who will never be content with concessions and will only be satisfied when the Jewish state has been eradicated as Czechoslovakia was eradicated by Hitler in March 1939. Sharon's analogy is a false one, but per

Military: Hiroshima ... The Anniversary We Misremember

by Uday Mohan and Leo Maley III

Almost six decades after the fact, the 1945 unleashing of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima continues to be the subject of impassioned debate. Every year the bombing anniversary -- which falls on August 6 -- occasions heated exchanges between those who question the atomic bombing and those who adamantly defend President Harry Truman's use of the weapon on Japanese cities. In this debate Truman's most fervent defenders are World War II veterans and their self-appointed champions in the me

Jefferson-Adams: Round Two

by Bernard Weisberger

I believe it’s William Faulkner who said that the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past. Which is not necessarily a bad thing if it stimulates creative thinking. I’m moved to these reflections by an exchange of correspondence on the eve of July 4th last. Responding to an Op-Ed piece which suggested that we don’t sufficiently honor John Adams as an architect of American freedom, Floyd Abrams pointed out that Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the most brazen attempt ever made to mu

The Japanese Textbook that Gets American History Wrong

by HNN Staff

Editor's Note: Recently, Koreans and Chinese have protested the misrepresentation of history in Japanese textbooks. In particular, scholars have objected that the textbooks ignore the Rape of Nanking and the enslavement of thousands of Korean women as sex slaves during the 1930s. Now, it is Americans' turn to take umbrage. The authors of a Japanese textbook have used a phony document to mischaracterize the famous expedition of Commodore Matthew Perry. On July 10 Japanese scholars release

Jefferson: The Patron Saint of Hypocrisy

by HNN Staff

Evidence that the Jefferson myth survives: In the New York Times lawyer Floyd Abrams this week observed that Jefferson “took no legal action” “when Federalist newspapers made him the subject of fierce attacks.” Translation: Jefferson the Good put up with press criticism while his longtime nemesis John Adams the Bad did not. Adams, you will recall, signed the infamous Alien and Sedition Act, which permitted the jailing of critics. Jefferson upon taking office pardoned them. Abrams

Newt Flunks His Big Exam

by HNN Staff

Newt Gingrich in the current issue of Brill’s Content fails a history test probably the first hundred people in the phone book could pass. The test? Who or what was responsible for the long gas lines of 1979.Gingrich’s answer is Jimmy Carter, who, we are told, “in his efforts to outmaneuver the laws of supply and demand in gasoline prices, gave us the Department of Energy, long lines at gas stations, and a gas shortage.” Gingrich adds: “One of President Ronald Reagan’s first act

Exonerating FDR

by David Greenberg

Editor's Note: Recently, we posted a piece by Thomas Fleming which charged that FDR felt he was forced to resort to a"morally dubious pattern of deceit" to get us into a war with Japan he could have either delayed or averted. A reader recommended we run Mr. Greenberg's article, which was published in Slate last year, for an alternative view of the circumstances leading to war. In May 1999, the 10 World Wa

Media Watch: The Wall Street Journal’s Fantasy History

by George Beres

When Sen. James Jeffords (Vt.) bolted the Republican Party to become an Independent, the Wall Street Journal wore its ideology on its sleeve, criticizing him for"political disloyalty." An indignant commentary by John Fund, a member of the editorial board, concluded that Jeffords's defection was unlikely to make him a candidate for the Wayne Morse Integrity in Politics Award.The Wall Street Journal? Touting Morse the maverick? On the issue of integrity?This comes as a

Media Watch: Can the New York Times Count that High?

by HNN Staff

Evidence that numbers no longer mean anything now that Congress and the president are debating tax cuts in the trillions of dollars: In a front-page story in the New York Times on May 26 reporter David Rosenbaum noted that President Bush had succeeded in reducing taxes by $1.35 trillion, “slightly less than the $1.6 trillion” he had proposed. Slightly? The difference between what the president wanted and what he got was $250 billion.A slip of the pen by a fatigued reporter workin

Hitler's Pope?

by Jose Sanchez

By now, everyone knows the controversy over Pope Pius XII and his alleged silence on the Holocaust. Nearly six million Jews were killed by the Germans and the Pope's detractors claim that Pius never protested this murder, or did not protest it with the vehemence at his disposal as the leader of a church that counted many of the murderers among its adherents, or did not protest it with the force inherent in his position as the Vicar of Christ. 11This controversy has become one of the most hea

So Israel Is "Occupying" Palestinian Territory? Hardly

by David Harsanyi

The April 1 edition of Newsweek carried the ominous headline: How will Israel survive? Most of us thought we'd never have to hear the question again. But with psychopaths cashing in on Iraqi-sponsored life insurance policies at the expense of innocent Israeli civilians daily, the dramatic headline is more than fitting. The problem isn't the headline, however, it's that Newsweek answers its rhetorical question with cliches and historical misconceptions that have contaminated mai

LBJ's Lies About His War Record

by HNN Staff

Much to no one’s surprise perhaps, the more evidence that surfaces about Lyndon Johnson’s war record, the less there seems to it, according to two new reports filed on CNN. Johnson you’ll recall was awarded the Silver Star for gallantry in the summer of 1942 by Douglas MacArthur. LBJ, then a member of Congress, had persuaded FDR to send him on an inspection tour of our forces in the Pacific. The trip had always se