Roundup: Media's Take

John Noonan: West Point needs to emphasize humanities not math

[John Noonan is an Air Force officer and a military blogger. He writes at Op-For.com.] FOR NEARLY 200 years, cadets at the United States Military Academy have been guided by the "Thayer System," a rigid structure of unyielding regulation, austere discipline, fierce loyalty, and strong emphasis on math, science, and engineering. The method is calculated to produce Army officers of the highest caliber. And the system has worked. West Point graduates constitute some of the mo

Robert McHenry: Doomsday Theory ... Watch Out!

[Robert McHenry is a former editor-in-chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica and author of How to Know.] Sometime in the very early 1950s my family made a car trip from California to Missouri, and I’m guessing that we took Route 66, “the highway that’s the best.” My father drove right though the first night, and very early in the morning, before dawn, I remember hearing a voice on the radio talking about an imminent test of an atomic bomb at Yucca Flats, Nevada. As we listened to the cou

Steven Pinker: Our weird obsession with genealogy

[Steven Pinker is Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard. His new book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature, will be published by Viking in September. ] New technologies often have unforeseeable consequences. Michael Faraday could not have anticipated the rise of the electric guitar and its effects on our culture, nor did the inventors of the laser realize they had laid the ground for a thriving industry of tattoo removal. And it is safe to say

Jacob Laksin: The Times vs. Rudy

[Jacob Laksin is a senior editor for FrontPage Magazine. His e-mail is jlaksin@gmail.com.] You would expect the New York Times to come down against Rudy Giuliani. Indeed, it’s a safe bet that American liberalism’s paper of record would find little to admire in any Republican candidate for the presidency. What you might not expect is that, months before primary season, the paper would commit its full resources to flinging dirt at the Republican

Nicholas Thompson: What Kennan could teach us about fighting terrorism

[Nicholas Thompson, a senior editor at Wired magazine, is writing a book about George Kennan.] SIXTY years ago this month, writing under the byline of X, George Kennan supposedly laid out America’s cold war foreign policy. Kennan’s essay is often said to be the most influential article in the history of this country’s foreign policy, but neither Harry Truman, nor any president after him, actually followed X’s recommendations. “Containment,” the word the essay introduced, was applied

Kimberly Strassel: The U.S. attorneys controversy is about politics, not the law

A president removes a U.S. attorney, and Congress demands to see privileged files related to the firing. The president refuses, noting that "these suspensions are my executive acts," and "based upon considerations addressed to me alone." The Senate has a meltdown, arguing it has oversight authority over the removal of administration officials and threatens to censure the attorney general. If this sounds familiar, it shouldn't, since it's the story of a long-forgo

Humberto Fontova: Sicko Propaganda

[Humberto Fontova is the author of Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him.] "We cannot for a second abandon propaganda" wrote Fidel Castro in a letter to a revolutionary colleague in 1954. “Propaganda is vital -- propaganda is the heart of all struggles.” Michael Moore claims that Cuba's Stalinist regime played it as straight with him during the filming of Sicko, his new documentary, as he plays it with its viewers. “I asked them t

Robert Kagan: End of Dreams, Return of History

[Robert Kagan is author, most recently, of Dangerous Nation: America’s Place in the World from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (Knopf, 2006). He is senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and senior transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund. A version of this essay will appear in Melvyn P. Leffler and Jeffrey W. Legro, eds., To Lead the World: American Strategy After the Bush Doctrine (Oxford University Press, 2008).] T

David Hogberg: Congressmen push a cigar tax, proving they've learned nothing from history

[David Hogberg, a Washington writer, writes the Health Hog blog. ] I've often wondered exactly how severe is Congress's case of historical amnesia. In late 2005 we found out that many members of Congress clearly couldn't remember anything previous to 1980, as witnessed by their call for 1970s-type price controls on oil. But last week we learned that Congress's historical amnesia is much worse than anyone feared. Clearly it extends back to as recently as the early 1990s.

Nicholas Leman: Bush's legacy ... a conservative supreme court

George W. Bush, whose father was often accused of being to cautious and incremental by conservatives, came into office six years ago with an ambition to remake nearly everything about American government. In some cases, like Social Security and immigration, he hasn’t been able to get the big changes he wanted. I others—Iraq, tax cuts, civi liberties, the environment, education—it seems clear that his successor whoever it will be, will have to spend a good deal of time und

Glenn Greenwald: The Weekly Standard's "9/11 Generation"

[Who Greenwald is: "I was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. I am the author of the New York Times Bestselling book "How Would a Patriot Act?," a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, released in May 2006."] This week's issue of The Weekly Standard features a cover story by Hugh Hewitt blogger Dean Barnett. Entitle

Dean Barnett: The 9/11 Generation (Better than the Boomers)

[Dean Barnett blogs at HughHewitt.com.] In the 1960s, history called the Baby Boomers. They didn't answer the phone. Confronted with a generation-defining conflict, the cold war, the Boomers--those, at any rate, who came to be emblematic of their generation--took the opposite path from their parents during World War II. Sadly, the excesses of Woodstock became the face of the Boomers' response to their moment of challenge. War protests where agitated youths derided Ameri

Blake Hounshell: 10 things President Bush has done right

I just realized that today, July 6, is the 61st birthday of U.S. President George W. Bush. Passport is usually pretty critical of the Prez. So for a change of pace and out of respect for the man's special day, here are the top ten things Bush and his team have gotten right during his time in office. No wisecracks, I promise: Boosting aid to Africa threefold Preventing a nuclear war between India and Pakistan Taking down the A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation

John Yoo: The Democrats' attack on executive privilege shows blatant disregard for the Constitution

[Mr. Yoo is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He served in the Justice Department from 2001-03.] Republicans aren't exactly racing to defend President Bush's assertion of executive privilege against Congress's investigation of his firing of nine U.S. attorneys. This leaves former political director Sara Taylor and Harriet Miers, former White House counsel, facing possible contempt sanctions. If this

Max Boot: Iraq isn't Vietnam, Henry

[Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is the author of"War Made New: Weapons, Warriors, and the Making of the Modern World," due out in paperback in August.] As congress debates the war in Iraq, it's becoming clear that many lawmakers want to bring the troops home while avoiding the likely consequences -- a ruinous civil war and a calamitous victory for Iran and Al Qaeda. This has led to much pining for some kind of negotiated solution -- what the Iraq S

James Castagnera: Is It Déjà vu All Over Again, Where Our Food Is Concerned?

[Jim Castagnera is the associate provost/associate counsel at Rider University and a 2007-08 Fellow of the Foundation for Defense of Democracy.] Last April MSNBC reported from Shanghai, “The list of Chinese food exports rejected at American ports reads like a chef’s nightmare: pesticide-laden peapods, drug-laced catfish, filthy plums and crawfish contaminated with Salmonella.” The report went on to say, “China’s chronic food safety woes are now a national concern.” Yogi Berra might respond

Adam Cohen: Just What the Founders Feared ... An Imperial President Goes to War

The nation is heading toward a constitutional showdown over the Iraq war. Congress is moving closer to passing a bill to limit or end the war, but President Bush insists Congress doesn’t have the power to do it. “I don’t think Congress ought to be running the war,” he said at a recent press conference. “I think they ought to be funding the troops.” He added magnanimously: “I’m certainly interested in their opinion.” The war is hardly the only area where the Bush administration is tr

John Perazzo: Hillary Rodham Clinton ... Her Career and Agendas

Born in Chicago on October 26, 1947, Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton has been the junior U.S. Senator from New York since her election in 2000. Re-elected in 2006, she is currently a member of ten Senate Committees and Subcommittees. Immediately prior to holding elected office, she was the First Lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001, during the presidency of her husband, Bill Clinton. She is the author of three books: Living History (2003); An Invitation to the White House: At Home with Histo

Lawrence Wright: Lady Bird’s Lost Legacy

[Lawrence Wright is the author of “The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.”’] AT one in the morning on Oct. 8, 1965, the House of Representatives finally voted on the Highway Beautification Act — “Lady Bird’s bill,” as Representative Bob Dole, one of the leaders of the opposition, patronizingly called it. The representatives were supposed to have been at the White House six hours earlier for a “Salute to Congress” dinner, and the gallery was filled with hungry, impatient s

Ted Sorensen: Is Barack Obama the next JFK?

[Ted Sorensen worked with John F. Kennedy for eleven years, first as his senatorial assistant and then in the White House as his special counsel and adviser. He is presently working on his memoirs, to be published in 2008. ] At first glance, the Democratic nominee for president in 1960, John Fitzgerald Kennedy--the millionaire Caucasian war hero for whom I worked for eleven golden years--seems notably different from the most interesting candidate for next year's nomination, Senator