Roundup: Media's Take

Walter Shapiro: Fred Thompson's revealing back story

[Walter Shapiro is Salon's Washington bureau chief] Books by presidential candidates generally boast the authenticity of Karen Hughes channeling the inner thoughts of George W. Bush in a quickie autobiography concocted for the 2000 campaign. But occasionally -- as with Barack Obama's 1995 "Dreams From My Father" -- a would-be politician publishes a book before he can afford a ghostwriter and before he acquires aides to scrub every sentence for any human revelation.

Stephen Schlesinger: Giuliani's Foreign Policy Would Be Worse Than Bush's

[Stephen Schlesinger is the former Director of the World Policy Institute at the New School University in New York City (1997-2006). Mr. Schlesinger received his BA from Harvard University and his JD from Harvard Law School. In the early 1970s, he edited and published The New Democrat Magazine. ] The Republican presidential frontrunner, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, has just written his foreign policy credo for Foreign Affairs magazine. It is a truly unnerving pronouncement -

Ben Cosgrove: How whales changed America into a world power

[Ben Cosgrove is a freelance writer in New York and the editor of the baseball anthology"Covering the Bases."] D.H. Lawrence famously called"Moby-Dick""one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world," and while plenty of readers might agree with only one or the other of those descriptors, there's no questioning the book's pride of place in America's literary imagination. Vast, unruly, shot through with poetry ("untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; li

Norman Solomon: The Warfare State Is Part of Us

[Norman Solomon’s book “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State” will be published in early fall. The foreword is by Daniel Ellsberg. For more information, go to: www.MadeLoveGotWar.com] The USA’s military spending is now close to $2 billion a day. This fall, the country will begin its seventh year of continuous war, with no end in sight. On the horizon is the very real threat of a massive air assault on Iran. An

Sidney Blumenthal: Washington's Fantasy Island

Karl Rove calls himself Moby Dick. One speechwriter sees himself as St. Francis. Another sees him as Iago. All regard Bush as Abraham Lincoln. In Washington, reality is a myth. *** Even before the date of his resignation from the White House took effect, Karl Rove furiously launched himself on his legacy tour. Appearing on three Sunday morning TV shows over the past weekend he was intent on demonstrating the range of his political, military and literary mastery. Rove ra

Carolyn Curiel: Hey, I Wrote That! But the President Said It — Out Loud!

White House speechwriting is glamorous, filled with state dinners, Oval Office meetings and no shortage of opportunities to prevail in heated internal debates that save democracy. At least that’s what you might conclude from recent books, films and television shows written by a growing number of former White House speechwriters. The job really is a plum, even with the long, anxious hours spent before blank computer screens, moments that usually get lost or airbrushed, even in nonfic

Dilip Hiro: The Sole Superpower in Decline

[Dilip Hiro is the author of Secrets and Lies: Operation "Iraqi Freedom" and, most recently, Blood of the Earth: The Battle for the World's Vanishing Oil Resources, both published by Nation Books.] With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States stood tall -- militarily invincible, economically unrivalled, diplomatically uncontestable, and the dominating force on information channels

Adam Cohen: The Founders Had an Idea for Handling Alberto Gonzales

William Belknap, Ulysses S. Grant’s disgraced secretary of war, is experiencing a revival. Impeached in 1876 for taking bribes, he has become the inspiration for a movement to remove Attorney General Alberto Gonzales from office. Impeachment is usually thought of as limited to presidents, but the Constitution not only allows the impeachment of Cabinet members, in Belknap’s case, it was actually done. Impeaching Mr. Gonzales has moved beyond the hypothetical, now that Jay Inslee, Dem

Harvey Wasserman: "Nuke Nuggets" Glow for the Senate's Radioactive Rip-off

[Harvey Wasserman's SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030 is at http://www.solartopia.org/. He is senior advisor to the Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and senior editor of http://www.freepress.org/, where this piece first appeared. ] Gargantuan loan guarantees for a "new generation" of nuke reactors define the Senate's version of the Energy Bill tha

Saul Landau: The FBI in peace and war--still the same

[Saul Landau writes a regular column for CounterPunch and progresoweekly.com. His new Counterpunch Press book is A BUSH AND BOTOX WORLD.] When I read a news story about the FBI "taking cues from the CIA to recruit thousands of covert informants in the United States as part of a sprawling effort to boost its intelligence capabilities," (ABCNews.com July 25) I had a déjà vu experience. As a kid, I listened to the radio show "The FBI in Peace and War,"

Michael Ledeen: Why talking to Iran is pointless

[Mr. Ledeen is resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His book, "The Iranian Time Bomb," is forthcoming from St. Martin's Press.] For some time now, the chattering classes have debated whether the United States should negotiate with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Both sides have endowed the very act of negotiating with near-mythic power. The advocates suggest that "good relations" may emerge, while opponents warn it is somehow playing

Thomas Mayer: The Lessons of the '87 crash

[Mr. Mayer is chief European economist for Deutsche Bank.] ... When equity markets closed on Oct. 19, 1987, prices had fallen so much -- the Dow Jones Industrial Average, for instance, plummeted 508 points or 22.6% that day -- that no one knew what damage had been done to private and institutional investors' balance sheets. With the creditworthiness of almost every market participant in doubt, there was a serious danger that credit would dry up completely, causing the default of a g

Jerry Bower: It's time for President Bush to step in to calm the credit markets

[Jerry Bowyer is an economic advisor to Benchmark Financial Network and the author of The Bush Boom.] It's not sub-prime; that asset class just isn't nearly large enough. It's not the business cycle; profits are up substantially over the last quarter. It's not the consumer economy; our personal income statements and balance sheets are up to the challenge of paying our bills. It's not a cash drought; people are buying safe securities like Treasuries, which means they're buying, which

Mohsin Hamid: After 60 Years, Will Pakistan Be Reborn?

[Mohsin Hamid is the author, most recently, of the novel “The Reluctant Fundamentalist.”] SIXTY years ago, British India was granted independence and partitioned into Hindu-majority India and my native nation, Muslim-majority Pakistan. It was a birth of exceptional pain. Handed down to me through the generations is the story of my namesake, my Kashmir-born great-grandfather. He was stabbed by a Muslim as he went for his daily stroll in Lahore’s Lawrence Gardens. Indepen

Steve Plaut: The "Naqba" Offensive

[Steven Plaut is a professor at the Graduate School of the Business Administration at the University of Haifa and is a columnist for the Jewish Press. A collection of his commentaries on the current events in Israel can be found on his "blog" at www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com.] Israel’s critics have increasingly adopted the term Naqba (or Nakba), which means "catastrophe" in Arabic, to refer to the Jewish state's cr

Peter Hannaford: Republican losers vs. the Electoral College

[Mr. Hannaford is the author of "Recollections of Reagan" (Morrow, 1997). ] So far it's only affected California, but that means it soon may be heading your way, for what begins in California often spreads across the land. Take, for example, auto emissions, clean air standards and talentless Hollywood "celebrities" In this case, it's a new strategy devised by the California Republican Party. Call it the Table Scraps strategy. The party leaders have t

Max Boot: How Not to Get Out of Iraq

[Max Boot is a senior fellow in national-security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of "War Made New: Weapons, Warriors, and the Making of the Modern World," coming out in paperback this month.] What about partitioning Iraq, either into three separate states or into some sort of confederation of regional authorities? Does that offer a better solution?... There is one set of conditions under which a partition might indeed make sense and

David Bedein: Genesis of an Anti-Semitic State

[David Bedein is the bureau chief of the Israel Resource News Agency, located at the Beit Agron International Press Center in Jerusalem.] Imagine, if you would, that a nascent nation state, somewhere in the world, was in formation that had taken on these features: *Its new constitution would not allow for any juridical status for Judaism. *Jews would not even be allowed to live in the country. *Selling land to a Jew would be a capital crime. *The ne

Sidney Blumenthal: The Rise and Fall of Karl Rove

With the departure of Karl Rove the Bush administration now enters its last throes. As a legacy for his patron, Rove has designed the public relations offensive for the fall presidential campaign to attempt to corner congressional Democrats through a combination of Gen. David Petraeus' forthcoming report on the "surge" in Iraq and presidential budget vetoes; but once those tactics are played the political string runs out. President Bush will be left with the unalloyed counsel of Vice P

Mike Boyer: Blame the Humvee for U.S. failures in Iraq?

This month marks the 66th birthday of the Jeep. During WWII, more than 600,000 of the little green 4-wheelers helped the Allies win. In fact, the Jeep became synonymous with that conflict. Look at any news coverage from the war, and a Jeep is bound to be featured prominently. The image of the Jeep, historian Paul Fussell has noted, "conveyed the firm impression of purposeful, resourceful intelligence going somewhere significant, and going there with speed, agility, delicacy -- almost wit.&q