Roundup: Media's Take

Source: Washington Post
June 13, 2007

Michael Gerson: Two Parties Fleeing the Center

Among the presidential candidates, Bushism is under siege. So is Clintonism. And there is no reason to celebrate the downfall of either. The immigration debate is a reminder to the memory-impaired that President Bush ran and won in 2000 as "a different kind of Republican" -- meaning the kind that isn't libertarian or nativist. Bush was orthodox on tax cuts and moral values. But from the earliest days of the nomination contest, he set out policies -- a federal role in impro

Source: Slate
June 13, 2007

Melonyce McAfee: How do they choose the holiest sites in Islam?

[Melonyce McAfee is a Slate copy editor.] The Golden Mosque in Samarra, Iraq, was bombed for the second time in more than a year on Wednesday, its minarets reduced to rubble. News reports described the mosque as one of the four most-revered Shiite shrines in Iraq. How do the holiest sites in Islam get ranked? According to their historical and spiritual importance within a sect or region. There is a hadith (one of the collected sayings and deeds of the Prophet Mohammed)

Source: Washington Post
June 10, 2007

Elizabeth Drew: Nostalgia for Nixon?

Anger and frustration with the president have produced an unusual turn of late. Numerous people have been moved to remark, "I'm beginning to miss Nixon," or, "I wish we could have Nixon back" -- this usually followed by, "He was so progressive on domestic policy." The nostalgists rightly see Richard Nixon as having been far more intelligent and thoughtful than George W. Bush; Nixon was indeed very smart, though no intellectual. Actually, he hated intell

Source: FrontpageMag.com
June 7, 2007

P. David Hornik: Boycotting the Jews in Britain

[P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Tel Aviv. He blogs at http://pdavidhornik.typepad.com/. He can be reached at pdavidh2001@yahoo.com.] BBC reporter Alan Johnston has been held since March 26 by a terrorist group in Gaza, where he had been the last international journalist to keep living and working. He appeared last Thursday in a video wearing an orange sweatshirt

Source: WSJ
June 7, 2007

Robert McFarlane: Iraq looking more and more like Vietnam in 1968

[Mr. McFarlane, a former Marine officer, served as National Security Adviser to President Reagan.] Thirty-nine years ago, half way through my second tour in Vietnam, the Tet Offensive was launched by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces, who were soundly defeated on the battlefield. Two measures of that battle -- both relevant to the situation in Iraq today -- stand out for me. The first relates to an important lesson U.S. forces had learned after three years of conflict: the vital

Source: Guardian
June 6, 2007

Simon Jenkins: This Russian risk could yet dwarf our blunder on Iraq

Will history tell us we were fools? We worried about the wrong war and made the wrong enemies. In the first decade of the 21st century the leaders of America and Britain allowed themselves to be distracted by a few Islamist bombers and took easy refuge in the politics of fear. They concocted a "war on terror" and went off to fight little nations that offered quick wins. Meanwhile these leaders neglected the great strategic challenge of the aftermath of cold war: the fate o

Source: NYT
June 5, 2007

John Tierney: Rachel Carson's bad science

For Rachel Carson admirers, it has not been a silent spring. They’ve been celebrating the centennial of her birthday with paeans to her saintliness. A new generation is reading her book in school — and mostly learning the wrong lesson from it. If students are going to read “Silent Spring” in science classes, I wish it were paired with another work from that same year, 1962, titled “Chemicals and Pests.” It was a review of “Silent Spring” in the journal Science written by I. L. Baldw

Source: Dissident Voice
June 2, 2007

Paul Street: Do Edwards and Obama Really Believe the Myth of Post WW II Benevolence?

[Veteran radical historian, journalist, and speaker Paul Street (paulstreet99@ yahoo.com) is an anti-centrist political commentator located in Iowa City. Street is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004), Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005), and Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, and Policy in Chicago (Chicago, 2005) and The Empire and Inequality Report. Street's next

Source: TomDispatch.com
June 5, 2007

Robert Dreyfuss: The Pentagon's Blank Check

[Robert Dreyfuss, an independent journalist in the Washington, D.C. area and Rolling Stone magazine's national security correspondent, is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. He writes frequently for Rolling Stone, The American Prospect, The Nation, Mother Jones, and the Washington Monthly. His web site is RobertDreyfuss.com.

Source: National Review Online (Click on SOURCE for embedded links.)
June 5, 2007

Michael I. Krauss & J. Peter Pham: The U.S. should move its embassy in Israel to the capital of Israel

Forty years ago this week, on the third day of the Six-Day War, Israel entered the Old City of Jerusalem. Returning to the Western Wall from which he and all other Jews had, in blatant violation of the terms of the 1949 armistice, been excluded by Jordanian occupiers, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan made a succinct announcement that reflected the weight of millennial hopes and yearnings: “The Israel Defense Forces have liberated Jerusalem. We have reunited the torn city, the capital of Israel. We h

Source: American Conservative
June 4, 2007

James P. Pinkerton: The Republican insiders’ guide to ethnic manipulation

[James P. Pinkerton is a columnist for Newsday and a fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. ] Hidden away, secreted in the dusty stacks of the Machiavellian Library, is the definitive how-to guide, Winning Through Ethnic Manipulation. Observing the immigration and affirmative-action policies favored by the current administration, it’s one book that I am sure George W. Bush—or at least Karl Rove—has read. Start with the chapter entitled “Divide and Conq

Source: NYT
June 3, 2007

Heather Rogers: Thomas Edison's still relevant

[Heather Rogers is a filmmaker and the author of “Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage.”] When Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently announced his vision of development in New York City over the next 25 years, he highlighted a plan to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 30 percent. To anyone who has studied the history of power consumption in the United States, his proposal sounded a curious echo. New York, after all, was home to one of the country’s first central power stations, bui

Source: WSJ
June 2, 2007

Ken Adelman: Scuttle diplomacy (Reagan compared with Bush)

[Mr. Adelman, a U.N. ambassador and arms control director under President Reagan, now directs the Arts & Ideas series for the Aspen Institute.] On May 15, President Bush announced vigorous support and urged the Senate to ratify the Law of the Sea Treaty. Mere mention of this treaty prompts a collective yawn. Yet herein lies a tale of dodgy diplomacy finally made right. More than 25 years ago, LOS emerged from the dark sea onto the political horizon. President Reagan

Source: Salon
May 29, 2007

Glenn Greenwald: Tony Blair argues that Iraqis should be grateful for the invasion and occupation and asks: "Why should anyone feel angry about us?"

[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. My second book,"Tragic Legacy," examines the Bush legacy and will be released by Random House/Crown in June 2007.] Tony Blair, in The Sunday Ti

Source: NYT
June 1, 2007

Michael Lind: Give legal residents a chance to become citizens fast

[Michael Lind is a fellow at the New America Foundation.] WITH the new immigration package already beginning to unravel, it would be wonderful if we could find one element of reform that everyone involved in the immigration debate can agree on. Here’s my candidate: lower the residency requirement for legal immigrants who seek to become citizens from five years to two. This is not a new idea. In fact, it’s 217 years old. In 1790, Congress passed the first na

Source: WSJ
June 1, 2007

Peggy Noonan: President Bush has torn the conservative coalition asunder

[Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of"John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father" (Penguin, 2005) .] ... For almost three years, arguably longer, conservative Bush supporters have felt like sufferers of battered wife syndrome. You don't like endless gushing spending, the kind that assumes a high and unstoppable affluence will always exist, and the tax receipts will always flow in? Too bad! You don't like expanding governmental authori

Source: Newsweek
May 31, 2007

Jonathan Alter: Phony Analogies (Re: Iraq & Vietnam)

Both the Vietnam and Iraq wars were started and perpetuated by heedless, arrogant leaders unwilling to change course when the facts on the ground changed. But the similarities mostly end there. President Bush thinks the Vietnam analogy for Iraq is wrong. Aside from the predictability of this (it’s understandable that he doesn’t like his policy called a “quagmire”), the president’s reasoning is historically ignorant. Bush said last week that the difference between Vietnam and Iraq is

Source: Commencement address to a group of Department of Rhetoric graduates at University of California, Berkeley. Published by TomDispatch.com
May 31, 2007

Mark Danner: Words in a Time of War

[Mark Danner, who has written about foreign affairs and politics for two decades, is the author of The Secret Way to War; Torture and Truth; and The Massacre at El Mozote, among other books. He is Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard College. His writing on Iraq and other subjects appear regularly in The New York Review of Books. His work is archived at MarkDanner.com.] ... When most of you arrived on this campus, in

Source: Black Commentator
May 31, 2007

Bill Fletcher: Anti-Immigrant in Black Face?

[BC Editorial Board member, Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a long-time labor and international activist and writer.] The picture in the ad immediately caught my attention. The photo was of a very dignified older African American man looking into the camera, very determined and equally pensive. Underneath his photo was a caption giving his name—T. Willard Fair—and the fact that he was the veteran of 40 years of struggle in the Civil Rights Movement. This was certainly enough to

Source: Commentary/WSJ
May 30, 2007

Norman Podhoretz: I hope President Bush bombs Iran

[Mr. Podhoretz is editor-at-large of Commentary. His new book, "World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism," will be released by Doubleday on Sept. 11. This essay, in somewhat different form, was delivered as an address at a conference, "Is It 1938 Again?," held by the Center for Jewish Studies at Queens College, City University of New York, in April. ] Although many persist in denying it, I continue to believe that what Sept 11, 2001, did was to plung