Roundup: Media's Take

John Dean: Leading Experts Say Congress Must Stop An Attack on Iran: Is That Constitutionally Possible? Absolutely.

In a February 5 OpEd in the Los Angeles Times, Leon Weiss and Larry Diamond explained that they were uncertain whether President Bush's recent tough talk toward Iran was bully pulpit bluster, meant solely to control Iran's dangerous actions, or if the President was again on the road to war. (Weiss is a senior science fellow at the Center for International Security at Cooperation at Stanford University; Diamond is a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution.) Accordingly, Weiss

Waleed Ziad and Laryssa Chomiak: Crimea's Tatars have created a promising model to lessen ethnoreligious conflict

[Waleed Ziad, an economic consultant and a principal at the Truman National Security Project, writes extensively on Islamic fundamentalist movements. Laryssa Chomiak, a Department of Homeland Security fellow, covered the Crimean Tatar minority for the University of Maryland's Minorities at Risk Project. They recently returned from Crimea, where they interviewed Tatar leaders.] The effort to help Muslim moderates and democratic reformers, President Bush insists, is a primary bulwark

Scott Jaschik: U. of Illinois retires chief

Last summer, Vernon Burton gave lectures on history and the use of computing in humanities research at meetings in Britain and France. When he finished each talk, the first question wasn’t about his research, but about Chief Illiniwek, the mascot at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and why the university would keep a symbol that is offensive to American Indians. “What people knew about the university was the chief, not the research and teaching here,” said Burton, a c

Roger Pulvers: Japan's Governing '70s Legacy

[Roger Pulvers is an Australian author, playwright and theater director, and a professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology. His latest book is a collection of 12 secular bible stories, "The Honey and the Fires," from ABC Books (Australia). Click here for his website.] O

Jim Rasenberger: Barack Obama and the Springfield race riot

[ Jim Rasenberger is the author of America, 1908, coming from Scribner in the fall of 2007, and of High Steel: The Daring Men Who Built the World's Greatest Skyline (HarperCollins).] ... Though now largely forgotten, the events and aftermath of the Springfield Race Riot, as it came to be known, are as relevant to the hopes of Obama as is the legacy of Abraham Lincoln. The year was 1908. It was mid-August and America was in the throes of a very different presidential rac

Jim Wallis: The Religious Right's Era Is Over

[Jim Wallis is the founder of Sojourners and the author of God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It] ... Most people I talk to think that politics isn't working in America and believe that the misuse of religion has been part of the problem. Politics is failing to resolve the big moral issues of our time, or even to seriously address them. And religion has too often been used as a wedge to divide people, rather than as a bridge to bring us together on

Adam Cohen: What W. B. Yeats’s ‘Second Coming’ Really Says About the Iraq War

The Brookings Institution, the prominent Washington research organization, just released a report on the Iraq war entitled “Things Fall Apart.” When Representative Jim McDermott, Democrat of Washington, took to the House floor last year to demand that President Bush present a plan for Iraq, he called his speech “The Center Cannot Hold.” Blogs are full of the observation that “the blood-dimmed tide is loosed” in Iraq these days. These phrases all come from William Butler Yeats’s “Sec

John Fund: Some pundits and pols think the 2008 election is a sure thing. They've been wrong before.

The first 2008 presidential primary is nearly a year away, and the general election won't be for another 631 days. But to hear some pundits and politicians talk, you'd think the outcome was already settled. Columnist Robert Novak reports that leading Washington Democrats, buoyed by Hillary Clinton's successful debut in Iowa, are now saying their party can't lose. Bill Daley, a former Clinton commerce secretary who was Al Gore's 2000 campaign manager, is emphatic: "I don't care

Henry Mark Holzer: Congress and the Court gang up on the president

[Henry Mark Holzer, Professor Emeritus at Brooklyn Law School, is an appellate lawyer who specializes in constitutional law. You can contact him via his website: www.henrymarkholzer.com.] Recently, President George W. Bush—constitutional Commander-in-Chief of the military forces of the United States —stated what should be obvious to anyone who has not failed Civics 101: Mr. Bush is the “decision-maker” on issues of war. Period!

Weekly Standard Scrapbook: The Sounds of Jane Fonda's Silence

THE SCRAPBOOK never turns down a seat in the front row of history, and last week was no exception. There was a modest antiwar rally on the Mall in Washington--modest by Vietnam-era standards, that is, with about 10,000 people. But around lunchtime, when THE SCRAPBOOK arrived with reporter's pad in hand, the Mall was largely empty. Of course, the Washington Post found the glass half-full, as it were. "Thousands Protest Bush Policy" screamed a front-page headline the next m

Chris Hedges: The Rise of Christian Fascism and Its Threat to American Democracy

[Chris Hedges is the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times and the author of "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning."] Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told his students that when we were his age -- he was then close to 80 -- we would all be fighting the "Christian fascists." The warning, given 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and television evangelists began speakin

Rob Boston: The Most Important Church-State Decision You Never Heard of

[Rob Boston is the editor of Church and State magazine.] Television preacher Pat Robertson can barely contain his anger when he talks about a 1947 Supreme Court decision calledEverson v. Board of Education. Robertson attacked the ruling on his"700 Club" several times last year. Everson came out of anti-Catholicism, he sputtered in January of 2006. Four months later, he blasted the decision because in it the justices"relied on a letter written by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury

Brent Staples: On Race and the Census ... Struggling With Categories That No Longer Apply

Imagine the Census Bureau announcing that it would end the practice of asking people to identify themselves by race beginning in 2010. Black elected officials and their allies in the civil rights community would fight the proposal tooth and nail by arguing that racial statistics were necessary for enforcing civil rights laws — especially the Voting Rights Act — and that dropping race from the census would dilute black political strength. Enemies of affirmative action would jump for joy, believin

Roger Pulvers: Whatever befell Japan's heady '60s hopes?

[Roger Pulvers is an Australian author, playwright and theater director, and a professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology. His latest book is a collection of 12 secular bible stories, "The Honey and the Fires," from ABC Books (Australia). Click here for his website.] Over the past two weeks in this column, I have looked at Japanese society in the 1980s and '90s in

Alan Dershowitz: Why I now have doubts about Jimmy Carter's integrity

I have known Jimmy Carter for years. I first met him in the spring of 1976 when, as a relatively unknown candidate for president, he sent me a handwritten letter asking for my help in his campaign on issues of crime and justice. I had just published an article in The New York Times Magazine on sentencing reform, and he expressed interest in my ideas and asked me to come up with additional ones for his campaign. Shortly thereafter, my former student, Stuart Eisenstadt, brought Carter to Harvard t

Sidney Blumenthal: How Libby became Cheney's pawn

Few issues more agitated and preoccupied Vice President Dick Cheney in the early months after the declaration of "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq than former ambassador Joseph Wilson's disclosure that the intelligence underlying the administration's central justification for the invasion was bogus. So far as the occupation of Iraq was concerned, Cheney was in a triumphal mood. In a speech before a conservative group in Washington on July 30, 2003, he repeated his rationales for the war w

Mark Scaramella: Our Founding War Profiteers

[Mark Scaramella is the Managing Editor of the Anderson Valley Advertiser in Boonville California. A weekly newspaper of general circulation established in 1953. For selected articles or a sample newspaper go to www.theava.com.] In 1776 Revolutionary fever ran high in America, stoked by the famous apostle of independence, freedom and democracy, Tom Paine. England was making life increasingly difficult for American merchants and craftsmen and King

Thomas Friedman: High oil prices killed the USSR and could kill Iran, too

... How Russia deals with its oil and gas windfall is going to be a huge issue. But today I’d like to focus on how the Soviet Union was killed, in part, by its addiction to oil, and on how we might get leverage with Iran, based on its own addiction. Economists have long studied this phenomenon, but I got focused on it here in Moscow after chatting with Vladimir Mau, the president of Russia’s Academy of National Economy. I mentioned to him that surely the Soviet Union died because oi

David Rivkin & Lee Casey: The president and Congress in wartime

[Messrs. Rivkin and Casey served in the Justice Department under Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.] ... Fundamental disagreements between the president and Congress over strategic decisions are not unique to this war and have occurred in the past; doubtless many congressmen believed that Lincoln's early determination to destroy Lee's army in Virginia was counterproductive when more could be gained along the Mississippi River in the West, just as some congressional Republicans felt

James Bamford: Bush Is Not Above the Law

[James Bamford is the author of two books on the National Security Agency, “The Puzzle Palace” and “Body of Secrets.”] LAST August, a federal judge found that the president of the United States broke the law, committed a serious felony and violated the Constitution. Had the president been an ordinary citizen — someone charged with bank robbery or income tax evasion — the wheels of justice would have immediately begun to turn. The F.B.I. would have conducted an investigation, a Unite