Roundup: Media's Take

Source: NYT
May 7, 2007

Nicholas Kristof: America's dynastic politics

Before I get to the “but,” let me say that Hillary Rodham Clinton would make a terrific president. She has spent decades wrestling with public policy questions about poverty and health care. She is smart and pragmatic on foreign policy issues. And while it would be tough for a liberal or centrist woman to be elected (it’s much easier for a conservative like Margaret Thatcher), the rising Democratic tide increasingly makes her look electable. But ... there is another iss

Source: WSJ
May 8, 2007

Michael Barone: The Realignment of America

[Mr. Barone is a senior writer at U.S. News & World Report and author of "Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval That Inspired America's Founding Fathers," published this month by Crown.] ... Americans are now moving out of, not into, coastal California and South Florida, and in very large numbers they're moving out of our largest metro areas. They're fleeing hip Boston and San Francisco, and after eight decades of moving to Washington they're moving ou

Source: TomDispatch.com
May 10, 2007

Dilip Hiro: Head-Scarf Politics in Turkey

[Dilip Hiro is the author of many books on the Middle East and Central Asia. His most recent book is Blood of the Earth: The Battle for the World's Vanishing Oil Resources (Nation Books).] Recently Turkey came close to experiencing a soft military coup. In late April, faced with the prospect of the moderate Islamist Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul becoming president, the country's top generals threatened to overthrow the elected government under the guise of protecting "secularis

Source: WSJ
May 11, 2007

Fred Barnes: Can Bush Recover?

[Mr. Barnes is the executive editor of The Weekly Standard and co-host of "The Beltway Boys" on Fox News Channel.] Can President Bush recover? It matters enormously in the 2008 election -- particularly in the presidential race -- whether he does or not. Either way, recovery or no recovery, the president will have a powerful impact on the outcome. If he fails to lift himself out of the political doldrums, his successor in the White House is likely to be a Democrat. But shou

Source: Slate
May 8, 2007

Anne Applebaum: So, Farewell Then, Jacques Chirac

[Anne Applebaum is a Washington Post and Slate columnist. Her most recent book is Gulag: A History.] "All political careers end in failure," a British statesman once wisely said. Judging by the wreckage of the famous political career that ended this week, he was even wiser than he knew. With the election of a new president of France on Sunday, the lengthy professional life of Jacques Chirac—French president for 12 years, mayor of Paris for 18 years, twice French prime mini

Source: Newsweek
May 14, 2007

Evan Thomas: The Truman Primary

They all want to be Harry Truman. Hillary Clinton invokes his iconic sign (THE BUCK STOPS HERE) to call for better treatment of wounded veterans. Barack Obama reminds us that Truman was the first politician bold enough to call for universal health care. Rudy Giuliani notes that Truman was unpopular in his day, but if he hadn't stood up to the Soviets in the late 1940s, asks Giuliani, "Who knows how much longer the cold war would have gone on?" There are some eternal veriti

Source: Slate
May 4, 2007

Daniel Gross: How hating Bush is wrecking the economy

Quick quiz: Is the dollar weak because Americans think President Bush is a miserable failure? Tom Gallagher of the ISI Group has observed a bizarre, and obscure, economic indicator: The fortunes of the American president and the fortunes of the American currency seem to move in tandem. Though there is no clear reason the dollar and the president's popularity should be connected, as the chart shows, for at least the past 18 years, there has been what Gallagher calls "a loose cor

Source: Counterpunch
May 2, 2007

Saul Landau: Falwell and Robertson, Incorporated

[Saul Landau's new book is A BUSH AND BOTOX WORLD. His new film, "We Don't Play Golf Here," is available on DVD from roundworldmedia@gmail.com.] As Bush implodes from scandal, a German friend asked why poor and middle class Americans voted for him and other Republicans. Two words help explain this discordant phenomenon: Falwell and Robertson. These two religious swindlers would give him a clue about how the super rich work an

Source: National Review Online
May 4, 2007

Charles Krauthammer: George Tenet’s War Against History

George Tenet has a very mixed legacy. On the one hand, he presided over the two biggest intelligence failures of this era — 9/11 and the WMD debacle in Iraq. On the other hand, his CIA did devise and carry out brilliantly an astonishingly bold plan to overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan. Tenet might have just left it at that, gone home with his Presidential Medal of Freedom, and let history judge him. Instead, he’s decided to do some judging of his own. In his just-released book an

Source: WaPo
May 6, 2007

Bob Woodward: About Tenet's Memoir

In his remarkable, important and often unintentionally damning memoir, George Tenet, the former CIA chief, describes a meeting with Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, two months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In much more vivid and emotional detail than previously reported, Tenet writes that he had received intelligence that day, July 10, 2001, about the threat from al-Qaeda that "literally made my hair stand on end." According to At the Center of the St

Source: San Francisco Chronicle
April 29, 2007

Vicki Haddock: Are we ready for a woman president?

The French may experience another revolution by doing it next week. India did it years ago, as did Israel, Great Britain and the Philippines. So did Germany, Chile and Liberia. Even Pakistan, where women in some regions are forbidden to leave their homes without a male escort, is among the 42 countries that have had at least one woman as president or prime minister over the last half century. So why has it taken the United States this long even to seriously consider doing it?

Source: NYT
May 6, 2007

George Prochnik: Would Freud's take on Wilson apply to Bush?

[George Prochnik is the author of “Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam and the Purpose of American Psychology.”] “WHEN a pretension to free the world from evil ends only in a new proof of the danger of a fanatic to the commonweal, then it is not to be marveled at that a distrust is aroused in the observer which makes sympathy impossible.” This bit of mordant critique does not come from a spectator of the current quagmire in Iraq, but from the founder of psy

Source: NYT
May 5, 2007

Francis X. Clines: When Madams in DC Got a Little Respect

If there’s one figure anxious Washingtonians might consider saluting with a moment of pained silence this week it is Mary Ann Hall, a young entrepreneur who caught the go-go wave of the Civil War when she built and managed one of Washington’s finest bordellos. It was erected a few blocks down from the bustling Capitol, in easier days of righteousness. Then, “prostitute” was an occupation on census lists, and the city’s lobbying arts more routinely extended to sexual quid pro quos. Ms. Hall ran a

Source: Newsweek
May 7, 2007

Evan Thomas and Andrew Romano: In God They Trust (About Presidents)

"I walked the floor of The White House night after night until midnight," President William McKinley recalled. "I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance." McKinley was trying to figure out whether to annex the Philippines, captured by U.S. troops in the Spanish-American War of 1898. Finally, it came to him: "There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them .

Source: Newsweek
May 7, 2007

George F. Will: Why Howard Dean Wants to Re-regulate the Media

Some illiberal liberals are trying to restore the luridly misnamed Fairness Doctrine, which until 1987 required broadcasters to devote a reasonable amount of time to presenting fairly each side of a controversial issue. The government was empowered to decide how many sides there were, how much time was reasonable and what was fair. By trying to again empower the government to regulate broadcasting, illiberals reveal their lack of confidence in their ability to compete in the marketp

Source: National Review Online
May 4, 2007

Mark Hemingway: Romney shouldn't have to answer questions about Mormon history

[Mark Hemingway is a writer in Washington, D.C.] ... The normally insightful and delightfully irascible Bob Novak published a column Thursday in advance of the debate titled “Will ignoring film mean curtains for Romney?” It’s about how Romney’s candidacy will be hurt by the fact that he won’t comment on a new film about the Mountain Meadows Massacre. For those of you who don’t know, the Mountain Meadows Massacre is arguably the darkest moment in Mormon history. Fueled by suspicion and facing hostilities from the U.S. government over the issue of polygamy, in 1857 a rogue band of Mormons and Paiute Indians slaughtered 120 settlers passing through Utah and stole their cattle. It was an atrocious crime, no question. Speculation has run rampant since the event that the slaughter was personally ordered by the Mormon prophet Brigham Young himself. Though suggestions of Young’s involvement are not beyond the pale, there is no proof he was involved in the killing.

Source: City Journal
May 1, 2007

Stephen B. Presser: Books on Clarence Thomas more positive now

... With the exception of a few evenhanded works such as Scott Gerber’s 1998 First Principles, which praised Thomas as a dedicated champion of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, most assessments of Thomas tended to be much more critical than favorable. Then two books came along that convincingly argued both that Anita Hill had fabricated her charges and that Thomas was anything but in over his head as a justice: attorney and author Andrew Peyton Thomas’s Clarence Thomas: A Bio

Source: Fox News
April 30, 2007

Susan Estrich: Obama's Inexperience Apparent at Debate

[Susan Estrich is the Robert Kingsley Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of Southern California. She was Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the first woman President of the Harvard Law Review. She is a columnist for Creators Syndicate and has written for USA Today and the Los Angeles Times.] ... The two people with the most to lose in the debate were the two who entered with the most support, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. While Friday morning's poll

Source: San Francisco Chronicle & Counterpunch
May 2, 2007

Carla Blank: The worst massacre in US history?

The mass media coverage of how 32 students and faculty members were fatally shot and at least 15 injured on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, Va., is punctuated by phrases such as, "the worst massacre in U.S. history," or, as the New York Times put it, the "Worst U.S. Gun Rampage." CNN called it the "Deadliest Shooting Rampage in U.S. history."

Source: A Discussion Paper prepared for the 10th Anniversary Conference of the Council on Contemporary Families, May 4-5, 2007, at the University of Chicago
May 1, 2007

Molly Monahan Lang & Barbara J. Risman: A "Stalled" Revolution or a Still-Unfolding One? The Continuing Convergence of Men's and Women's Roles

[Molly Monahan Lang, Visiting Assistant Professor, Bloomsburg University Department of Sociology, Social Work, and Criminal Justice. Barbara J. Risman, Professor and Head, Department of Sociology, University of Illinois at Chicago.] After over 35 years of continuous change toward more egalitarian gender attitudes and behaviors, recent signs of a slowdown have led some observers to suggest that the gender revolution is coming to an end. Evidence for this claim includes a slight dip