Roundup: Media's Take

Robert Scheer: King George W. ... James Madison's Nightmare

George W. Bush is the imperial president that James Madison and other founders of this great republic warned us about. He lied the nation into precisely the "foreign entanglements" that George Washington feared would destroy the experiment in representative government, and he has championed a spurious notion of security over individual liberty, thus eschewing the alarms of Thomas Jefferson as to the deprivation of the inalienable rights of free citizens. But most important, he has used

Mark Helprin: Maybe a deal IS possible in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

[Mark Helprin, a fellow at the Claremont Institute, is the author of, among other works, “A Soldier of the Great War.”] WHEN considering President Bush’s new plan for peace between Israel and the Palestinians, it would be wise to bear in mind that because political initiatives in the Middle East are cursed with such a high failure rate analysts sometimes use the odds as a substitute for craft. After Anwar Sadat’s spectacular trip to Jerusalem in November 1977, the press, mistaking c

Harvey Wasserman: The earthquake that screamed "NO NUKES!!!"

[Harvey Wasserman's SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030, is at http://www.solartopia.org/. He is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and senior editor of http://www.freepress.org/, where this piece originally appeared. In 1975 he spoke near the Kashiwazaki complex, urging its shut down. ] The massive earthquake that shook Japan this week nearly

Norman Solomon: From the Grave, a Senator Exposes Bloody Hands on Capitol Hill

[The new documentary film “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” is based on Norman Solomon’s book of the same title. Grassroots groups have begun to show the DVD around the country. For information about the full-length movie, produced by the Media Education Foundation and narrated by Sean Penn, go to: www.WarMadeEasyTheMovie] It was a chilling moment on a split-screen of history. While the Senate deba

Ed West: Profile of Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch

Academics don’t write books with titles like The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (And the Crusades) without expecting some harsh criticism, and Robert Spencer has heard it all. “The major death threat came from Adam Gadahn of al-Qaeda,” he says. In a September 2006 video Gadahn invited Spencer and various other “Zionist crusader missionaries of hate and counter-Islam consultants” to “abandon their unb

Sean Gonsalves: A Cruel Distortion of History (Upturning Brown)

[Sean Gonsalves is a Cape Cod Times staff reporter and a syndicated columnist.] The Roberts Supreme Court didn't reinstitute segregation as the law of the land in its recent ruling on Seattle's and Louisville's integration plans but in a land where schools are, in fact, still mostly segregated by race (and class), it does signal the death of integration; the end of King's dream; or at least, the abandonment of a means to a moral end envisioned by King. To me, the most d

Peter W. Galbraith: The Way to Go in Iraq

[Peter W. Galbraith, a former US Ambassador to Croatia, is Senior Diplomatic Fellow at the Center for Arms Control and a principal at the Windham Resources Group, a firm that negotiates on behalf of its clients in post-conflict societies, including Iraq. His The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End (http://www.amazon.com) is now out in paperback .] ... The Iraq war is lost. Of

David Brooks: Heroes and History

... Bush is not blind to the realities in Iraq. After all, he lives through the events we’re not supposed to report on: the trips to Walter Reed, the hours and hours spent weeping with or being rebuffed by the families of the dead. Rather, his self-confidence survives because it flows from two sources. The first is his unconquerable faith in the rightness of his Big Idea. Bush is convinced that history is moving in the direction of democracy, or as he said Friday: “It’s more of a t

Robert Fisk: TE Lawrence had it right about Iraq

Back in 1929, Lawrence of Arabia wrote the entry for "Guerrilla" in the 14th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It is a chilling read - and here I thank one of my favourite readers, Peter Metcalfe of Stevenage, for sending me TE's remarkable article - because it contains so ghastly a message to the American armies in Iraq. Writing of the Arab resistance to Turkish occupation in the 1914-18 war, he asks of the insurgents (in Iraq and elsewhere): "... suppose they

Ghada Karmi: A historic anomaly ... The rift between Fatah and Hamas is far more damaging to Palestinians than to their enemies

[Ghada Karmi is the author of Married to Another Man: Israel's Dilemma in Palestine.] It's a pity that no one learns from history. This truism is nowhere better illustrated than in today's savage rift between Fatah and Hamas. What a nadir in Palestinian fortunes for one side in Ramallah to trumpet western support while the other starves in Gaza. This shocking spectacle is a sad echo of an earlier scenario, then as now, infinitely more damaging to the Palestinians than to their enemi

William Kristol: Bush will be seen as a successful president

I SUPPOSE I'll merely expose myself to harmless ridicule if I make the following assertion: George W. Bush's presidency will probably be a successful one. Let's step back from the unnecessary mistakes and the self-inflicted wounds that have characterised the Bush administration. Let's look at the broad forest rather than the often unlovely trees. What do we see? First, no second terrorist attack on US soil, not something we could have taken for granted. Se

Timothy Noah: A short history of health care

[Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.] ... What we recognize as modern medicine, [Jonathan] Cohn writes [in Sick: The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis—And the People Who Paid the Price], began in the 1920s. That's when doctors and hospitals, having only during the previous decade learned enough about disease that they could be reliably helpful in treating sick people, began charging more than most individuals could easily pay. To close this gap, which worsened with

Bill Moyers, Bruce Fein, John Nichols: Impeach President Bush?

Bill Moyers: Welcome to the Journal. Impeachment...the word feared and loathed by every sitting president is back. It's in the air and on your computer screen, a growing clamor aimed at both President Bush and Vice-President Cheney. This week's news only agitated the clamor. The president acknowledged that someone in his administration did leak the name of a CIA agent to the press, but he said let's move on - even as he refused to let his former White Ho

Brendan Miniter: The first lady never expected to be spending so much time on foreign affairs

... Mrs. Bush has done what few others in the administration have managed to do over the past six years: She's remained very popular with the American people. She draws crowds at events; her approval ratings have been consistently high, hitting 85% at one point, the highest ever for a first lady. With her natural grace and wit, she has been described as "the most popular Republican in the country." In our conversation Mrs. Bush laments that "it's too bad" that po

Michael Tomasky: Is it possible to know Hillary?

The 1988 presidential campaign is generally thought of as a low point in political journalism, if not national politics itself, during which coverage of politics was gravitating more and more toward polls, cheap symbolism—a ride in a tank, a visit to a flag factory, and Willie Horton—and even tawdrier matters. It was in the 1988 campaign that a candidate, Gary Hart, was first asked directly by a reporter, Paul Taylor of The Washington Post, if he had cheated on his wife. Because of what was wide

John McGlynn: North Korean Criminality Examined

This is the first article by John McGlynn in a series that meticulously dissects US charges of North Korean criminality, notably the forgery of US currency and money laundering, the significance of the legal instruments it has imposed on North Korea through Banco Delta Asia, and the significance of US actions for the resolution of the interrelated issues of North Korean nuclear weapons and the normalization of US-North Korean relations. At the Beijing talks in February this year, th

Amy Sullivan: The Origins of the God Gap

[Sullivan's book, The Party Faithful, will be published in February by Scribner.] In the beginning, as they say, religion in America was a decidedly nonpartisan affair. Presidents of all political stripes sprinkled their speeches with references to the Almighty. Religious Americans led political movements to battle communism and poverty, to promote temperance and civil rights. If anything, the contours of the religious landscape favored Democrats: their voters were evangelical So

Raymond Arroyo: Why the pope brought back the Latin mass

[Mr. Arroyo is the author of "Mother Angelica" and news director of EWTN, a Catholic broadcasting network.] ... The legislation (made public on Saturday) allows a pastor, on his own authority, to celebrate the Tridentine Mass, codified in the 16th century. Following the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), the venerable Mass--in which cries of "sanctus, sanctus" rose like incense around the altar--fell out of practice. It was actively suppressed in some quarters--th

Peggy Noonan: We can't fire the president right now, so we're waiting it out

[Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father" (Penguin, 2005).] It's been a slow week in a hot era. I found myself Thursday watching President Bush's news conference and thinking about what it is about him, real or perceived, that makes people who used to smile at the mention of his name now grit their teeth. I mean what it is apart from the huge and obvious issues on which they might dis

Robert Samuelson: Why aren't we happier?

... Scholars such as Cornell University economist Robert Frank are asking why [Americans today aren't any happier than they were in the 1970s despite the fact that the US is far wealthier]. In "Falling Behind," he argues that rising affluence condemns us to self-defeating consumption contests. People want ever-bigger homes, because their friends have ever-bigger homes. But the extra pleasure of owning these grander homes is muted, because (yes) all our friends have them too. Meanwhile,