Roundup: Media's Take

Paul Joseph Watson: America's Fascist Coup Owes to Bush's Nazi Grandfather

Author Naomi Wolf, who made headlines earlier this year after she identified the ten steps to fascism that were being followed to a tee by the Bush administration, spoke publicly for the first time yesterday about the origins of what we see unfolding today, Prescott Bush's attempt to launch a Nazi coup in 1930's America. Speaking on the Alex Jones Show, Wolf said that she was first alerted to begin researching America's slide into fascism when her friend, the daughter of a Holocaust

Scott Horton: The President-Tyrant

The irreplaceable Fritz Stern reminds us that as a democracy with two-hundred thirty years of experience, America is better situated than most to weather the storms of a wannabe tyrant. “But that,” he adds, “would presuppose that such a nation really understood its heritage and had a genuine historic sense.” We live now with a Government that shamelessly fabricates and alters history—both from the last two hundred years and from the last six years. It does so with a purpose—making its outrageous

Steve Fraser: War, Depression, and Turning-Point Elections

[Steve Fraser is a writer and editor, as well as the co-founder of the American Empire Project. He is the author of Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life. His latest book, Wall Street: America's Dream Palace, will be published by Yale University Press in March 2008.] Will the presidential election of 2008 mark a turning point in American political history? Will it terminate with extreme prejudice the conservative ascendancy that has dominated the country

Dilip Hiro: Bush in a Humiliating Zero-Sum Iranian Game of His Own Making

[Dilip Hiro is the author of The Iranian Labyrinth, Secrets and Lies: Operation "Iraqi Freedom" and After, and, most recently, Blood of the Earth: The Battle for the World's Vanishing Oil Resources, all published by Nation Books.] Bush's woefully misguided invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, carried out under false pretences, has not only drained the United States treasury, but reduced Washington's standing in the Middle East in a way not yet fully grasped by most com

Jeffrey Herf: Where Are the Anti-Fascists? ... The danger of Germany's strange silence on Ahmadinejad

The memory of the crimes of the Nazi era and the determination to oppose anti-Semitism in all its forms have been constitutive and distinctive features of German democracy since 1949, when it was articulated by the founding generation of political leaders of West Germany's Federal Republic. Judging by the memorials, commemorative days, books, and films about Nazism and the Holocaust, this tradition of remembering the murdered Jews of Europe remains firmly embedded in the political culture of con

NYT Editorial: Dissing Romney's Religion Speech

... Mr. Romney tried to cloak himself in the memory of John F. Kennedy, who had to defend his Catholicism in the 1960 campaign. But Mr. Kennedy had the moral courage to do so in front of an audience of Southern Baptist leaders and to declare: “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.” Mr. Romney did not even come close to that in his speech, at the George Bush Presidential Library in Texas, before a carefully selected crowd. And in his speech, he

Emily Bazelon: The Bush administration's bogus use of history to defend its position on the Gitmo detainees

Every bad argument needs a good sound bite, and in that respect the Bush administration is on its game in the Guantanamo cases being argued tomorrow. Here's the shiniest nugget from the government's brief, too quotable to resist: "The detainees now enjoy greater procedural protections and statutory rights to challenge their wartime detentions than any other captured enemy combatants in the history of war." The sentence basks in the glow of relativity: If the men being held

Peggy Noonan: How Mitt Romney came to give The Speech--and how he did.

Did Mitt Romney have to give a speech on religion? Yes. When you're in a race so close you could lose due to one issue, your Mormonism, you must address the issue of your Mormonism. The only question was timing: now, in the primaries, or later, as the nominee? But could he get to the general without The Speech? Apparently he judged not. (Mr. Romney's campaign must have some interesting internal polling about Republicans on the ground in Iowa and elsewhere.)... He started with a full

David Brooks: Faith vs. the Faithless

... When this country was founded, James Madison envisioned a noisy public square with different religious denominations arguing, competing and balancing each other’s passions. But now the landscape of religious life has changed. Now its most prominent feature is the supposed war between the faithful and the faithless. Mitt Romney didn’t start this war, but speeches like his both exploit and solidify this divide in people’s minds. The supposed war between the faithful and the faithless has exact

Philip Dray: Noose ... The true history of a resurgent symbol of hate

[Philip Dray is the author of "At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America." ] [While the strong words of disapproval greeting stories] about nooses indicate a broad intellectual recognition that the noose, a symbol of lynching, is offensive, few Americans know the full story. The lynching of black America was not an occasional or aberrational event, the momentary outburst of an angry mob, but a sustained reign of terror visited on an entire people. It t

Kenneth L. Woodward: Mitt Romney Is No Jack Kennedy

[Kenneth L. Woodward, a contributing editor at Newsweek, is writing a book about religion and American culture since 1950.] INEVITABLY, Mitt Romney’s long-awaited speech on faith and religious freedom tomorrow at the George Bush Presidential Library at Texas A&M will be compared to John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech to Protestant ministers in Houston, just 90 miles away. Like Kennedy, Mr. Romney faces questions about his religious beliefs and how they might affect his judgments as pr

Gregory Rodriguez: The Puritanical roots of our fatalism and anxiety over American exceptionalism.

The sky is falling! The end is near! Just in time for the Christmas season, Pat Buchanan has published yet another jeremiad warning that America is about to go belly up. You'd think that the American public would get tired of the unrelenting gloominess of the far right and left. But you'd be wrong. Already the book is climbing up the bestseller lists, giving us further proof that, despite our collective obsession with living the good life, we Americans love the sweet rush of anxiety

Gregory Rodriguez: The Puritanical roots of our fatalism and anxiety over American exceptionalism.

The sky is falling! The end is near! Just in time for the Christmas season, Pat Buchanan has published yet another jeremiad warning that America is about to go belly up. You'd think that the American public would get tired of the unrelenting gloominess of the far right and left. But you'd be wrong. Already the book is climbing up the bestseller lists, giving us further proof that, despite our collective obsession with living the good life, we Americans love the sweet rush of anxiety

Max Boot: Sharif’s Return

The differences are greater than the similarities, but somehow the Saudi decision to send exiled politician Nawaz Sharif back to Pakistan on an airplane belonging to King Abdullah reminds me of the Germans’ decision to transport V.I. Lenin from his exile in Switzerland back to Russia in a sealed railway car in 1917. Winston Churchill famously wrote of the Germans: “It was with a sense of awe that they turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed tru

Walter Cronkite and David Krieger: Our Troops Must Leave Iraq

[Walter Cronkite is the former long-time anchor for CBS Evening News. David Krieger is President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.] The American people no longer support the war in Iraq. The war is being carried on by a stubborn president who, like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon during the Vietnam War, does not want to lose. But from the beginning this has been an ill-considered and poorly prosecuted war that, like the Vietnam War, has diminished respect for America. We bel

David Fiderer: Chris Matthews Rewrites History about the Clintons and the Origins of the Iraq War

[For his day job, David works at a global financial institution in New York. After his postmortem review of Enron, a company he had covered, he decided to moonlight as a freelance writer covering ethical lapses among high profile professionals in journalism and the law. He is trained as a lawyer.] On last Wednesday's Hardball, Chris Matthews asked a rhetorical question that no one answered. So I will. "I'm amazed now that Bill Clinton has come out and said he's Jer

Theo Lippmann: Political mudslinging has a long and successful history

[Theo Lippman Jr. is a retired Sun editorial writer and columnist and an author.] In the debate of Democratic presidential candidates in Nevada, Sen. Hillary Clinton rebuked John Edwards for his charge that she was "part of a corrupt political class." She said, "I don't mind taking hits on my record on issues, but when somebody starts throwing mud, at least we can hope that it's both accurate and out of the Republican playbook." Ahh, mud. Where would

Harry Mount: It's too bad our pols didn't take Latin (as most of our presidents have)

[Harry Mount is the author of “Carpe Diem: Put a Little Latin in Your Life.”] AT first glance, it doesn’t seem tragic that our leaders don’t study Latin anymore. But it is no coincidence that the professionalization of politics — which encourages budding politicians to think of education as mere career preparation — has occurred during an age of weak rhetoric, shifting moral values, clumsy grammar and a terror of historical references and eternal values that the Romans could teach u

Anthony Lewis: What's happened to the Supreme Court?

At the end of his first Supreme Court term, in July 2006, Chief Justice John Roberts was interviewed by Jeffrey Rosen for a book on the Court. Roberts emphasized the aim of having the justices subordinate their individual preferences to an effort to achieve unanimity. "I think it's bad, long-term," he said, "if people identify the rule of law with how individual justices vote.... You do have to put [the justices] in a situation where they will appreciate, from their o

Robert McHenry: Dear Workers: Thanks for the Cash (Re: Social Security)

[Robert McHenry is a former editor-in-chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica and author of How to Know.] Tomorrow I retire. If my financial calculations are correct, it’s for good. Of course, in making my calculations I had to guess about Social Security, which I’m not taking yet but which I assumed would be available when I decide to. I had to assume it because it has proved impossible to induce any of the present candidates for the highest office in the land to say an honest word about