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The Most Fascinating Read of the Summer ... The Republican Party Platform of 2000

by HNN Staff

Excerpts from the Republican Party Platform, 2000: "The duties of our day are different. But the values of our nation do not change. Let us reject the blinders of isolationism, just as we refuse the crown of empire. Let us not dominate others with our power — or betray them with our indifference. And let us have an American foreign policy that reflects American

Hello ... So There Weren't Atrocities in Vietnam?

by Fran Shor

In any case, anyone who spends five minutes reading the Swift Boat Veterans' book ("Unfit for Command") will quickly realize that their attack has nothing to do with Mr. Bush. This is all about Mr. Kerry and what the veterans believe was his blood libel against their service when he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the spring of 1971 that all American soldiers had committed war crimes as a matter of official policy."Crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the ful

How Do You Ask a Man to Be the Last Man to Die in Vietnam?

by John Kerry

“One day he’s saying that we were shooting civilians, cutting off their ears, cutting off their heads, throwing away his medals or his ribbons,” Dole said. “The next day he’s standing there, ‘I want to be president because I’m a Vietnam veteran. “Maybe he should apologize to all the other 2.5 million veterans who served. He wasn’t the only one in Vietnam,” said Dole, whose World War II wounds left him without the use of his right arm. -- Associated Press (Aug. 22, 2004)

John Marshall, Sitting Bull, and the Law of Nations

by Paul VanDevelder

The storm of public bitterness that has attended several recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions issued from Indian country dramatically illustrates how few facts of American life have more deeply contentious freight than Native-

Alan Keyes's Daffy Idea to Repeal the 17th Amendment

by Lewis Gould

Alan Keyes, the Republican senatorial candidate in Illinois, has now joined Senator Zell Miller of Georgia and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay in calling for repeal of the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution, the one that provides for the direct election of United States senators. Senator Miller, who has introduced his own amendment to repeal the Seventeenth, contends that the direct election of senators “was the death of the careful balance between state and federal governments.

Would It Be Better for Democrats If the Protesters Stayed Home?

by Jules Tygiel

I recently got together with an old Brooklyn friend and fellow veteran of the Anti-Vietnam War Movement. As we now both live in San Francisco, he expressed regret that he could not participate in the demonstrations planned to coincide with the Republican Convention in New York in September. Another friend sends me enthusiastic e-mail updates about the anti-Bush activities slated for that week. But rather than feeling inspired, I am far more chagrined. It strikes me that the romance of the ol

Swift Boat Veterans For the Truth?

by Gary Kulik

Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth, an organization composed of former Naval officers who served as peers or superiors to John Kerry in Vietnam, has sponsored a TV ad sharply critical of Kerry’s conduct in Vietnam. The ad, funded by a Houston businessman with close ties to the Republican Party, has run in only three states, but can be seen on the Internet. John McCain, recently stumping with George Bush, has called it “dishonest and dishonorable.”In the ad, retired Nav

Should Bush Dump Cheney?

by Joshua Spivak

Vice President Dick Cheney is taking a lot of flak from friends and foes in George W. Bush's reelection effort. Considered by many to be both the power behind the throne and an anchor on Bush's reelection hopes, prominent Republicans, including former Sen. Al D'Amato (R-N.Y.), are calling for Cheney to be replaced with a more popular candidate on the Republican ticket, with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani prominently mentioned. Perhaps worried about projecting the a

Why the Odds Don't Favor John Kerry

by Allan Lichtman and Vladimir Keilis-Borok

John Kerry can hope to shorten the long odds he faces against President Bush only with a bold, imaginative approach to winning the election. This challenging conclusion for Kerry comes from the Keys to the White House, a prediction system we developed in 1981 by applying the mathematics of pattern recognition to the outcomes of every presidential election since 1860. We subsequently used the Keys to predict correctly, well ahead

Reparations for Slavery? It's an Old Idea

by Roy E. Finkenbine

Reparations for Slavery: An Old and Not-So-Strange Idea

Care About Civil Liberties this Election? You're in Trouble

by William J. Watkins, Jr.

In this election year, there are significant parallels between the USA Patriot Act of 2001 and the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Enacted in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, the Patriot Act has augmented the power of federal authorities to pry into the affairs of innocent Americans. In the summer of 1798, the United States Congress passed and President John Adams signed similar legislation. At base, the Alien and Sedition Acts prohibited criticism of the federal government and gave

No, the Catholic Church Isn't Being Hypocritical for Going After Liberal Politicians

by Timothy Furnish

The recent decision by some Roman Catholic bishops to deny communion to pro-choice politicians has set off a firestorm of criticism in this country. The brouhaha was magnified following the ban's endorsement by Cardinal Joseph Arinze of Nigeria, head of the Vatican secretariat that oversees sacramental observance and a front-runner to be the next pope. Critics of this policy include: the allegedly-incensed Congressional Catholics in their letter to the highest ranking American prelate,

It's too Late to Talk About Postponing the Election in the Event of a Terrorist Attack

by Robert "KC" Johnson

During the last four weeks, the Election Assistance Commission, the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security have considered asking Congress for authority to delay this year's election if a terrorist attack were to coincide with the November vote. Members of Congress from both parties have said that a delay would represent a concession to the terrorists. They were right in questioning the idea, but they should have recognized that at this point, developing a plan for d

What Presidential Speechwriters Need to Know

by Martin E. Marty

Some front-rank religious thinkers fed Peter Steinfels (New York Times, July 24) good recommendations for the presidential and vice-presidential candidates. I'll add a P.S. by pushing for a little article by Michael E. Bailey and Kristin Lindholm called "Tocqueville and the Rhetoric of Civil Religion in the Presidential Inaugural Addresses" from the Christian Scholar's Review(XXXII, No. 3, Spring 2003), a

Will Edwards Make a Difference in the South?

by Mark J. Rozell

Leading political observers say that having a native son Southerner on the presidential ticket matters to the Democrats, that John Edwards now makes the party ticket competitive in some of the Old South. Yet some recent polling data suggest that this may not be the case. Most telling, Kerry has actually lost some ground in a North Carolina poll since Edwards’s selection. If Edwards cannot improve the party’s prospects in his home state, where else in the South can he boost his tea

Baseball Player Carlos Delgado’s Summer of Discontent: Dissent and the National Pastime

by Ron Briley

Carlos Delgado is one of major league baseball’s best kept secrets. The slugging first baseman of Puerto Rican descent is the career home run leader for the Toronto Blue Jays. But he is less well known south of the Great Lakes. That is until some sportswriters noticed that whenever “God Bless America” is played, Delgado usually stays in the clubhouse until the song, which has replaced “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” in some ballparks during the seventh

Why New Yorkers Will Feel Under Siege When the Republicans Invade

by Nicholas Turse

The tagline for John Carpenter's 1981 cult sci-fi classic Escape From New York went"New York City is now a maximum security prison. Breaking out is impossible. Breaking in is insane." In that movie set in a then-unimaginable, futuristic"1997" Gotham, criminal Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) was charged with rescuing the President of the United States, whose plane had been downed in the walled-in, armed and angry prison island that Manhattan had become. With his life and freedom riding on

Why the Networks Should Still Be Covering the Conventions

by Rick Shenkman

This is the story about the significance of a man straightening his tie. A few years ago when I was researching the history of television I discovered that briefly one of the talked about events of the exciting 1948 Democratic convention was when the television cameras caught Harry Truman straightening his tie as he approached the dais to deliver his acceptance speech. The significance of the event was that millions watched it. There's a lesson in this for us and the networks today. The netw

Could Terrorists Disrupt Our Election?

by John Dean

If the Bush Administration's intelligence can be believed, the 2004 presidential election, or the related democratic processes associated with the election, have been targeted by terrorists. Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge has repeatedly said,"Al Qeada is moving forward with plans to carry out a large-scale attack in the United States aimed to disrupt our democratic process."This raises the question of what the Bush Administration is (or isn't) doing about it. B

Review of Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas?

by Jonathan Rees

What is it with liberal journalists and doctorates in American history? The pioneering blogger Josh Marshall has one. The Nation columnist and MSNBC blogger Eric Alterman has one too. If you like the work of these two writers, you should also enjoy Thomas Frank. Frank turned his University of Chicago Ph.D. into the 1997 book, The Conquest of Cool. This study of advertising during the sixties focuses on the efforts of companies to instill their products with what were the