Roundup: Media's Take

Joshua Spivak: The incumbent-free election of 2008

[Joshua Spivak is an attorney and media consultant. ] As candidates start jumping into the presidential sweepstakes, observers might miss an important fact about 2008: The upcoming presidential primary elections may be the most democratic and wide-open in American history, one that could result in a full debate on each party's basic core beliefs. This election is different not because of Iraq or the Democrats' recent electoral success. Rather it is a rare anomaly: 2008 is the first pr

Frances Harrison: Reporter puzzled by how to cover the Teheran Holocaust meeting

Iran has been severely criticised for hosting a conference questioning the Holocaust. Delegates included not only some of the world's best-known Holocaust deniers, but also white supremacists and anti-Semites. In the BBC there's a lot of talk about impartial broadcasting. I've always wondered how that would work if you were the BBC correspondent in Nazi Germany reporting on Hitler. Would you not have to take sides? Well I got closer than ever before to this problem re

Andrew Sullivan: Thirty Years' War brewing in the Middle East

Americans, by and large, are unfamiliar with much of history. Their passion is the future, not the past; and their focus is understandably on their own vast and varied continent, not on the minute details of distant foreign lands. The new chairman of the House intelligence committee cannot tell the difference between Sunni and Shi’ite, and his predecessor was not much better. And I’d wager that no one in the US Congress was forced in school, as I sadly was, to study Europe’s Thirty Years’ War. B

Fred Barnes: Lincoln's Fifth Column (and Bush's)

As if Abraham Lincoln didn't have enough distractions while pursuing a war to restore the Union, he also had to worry about what he called "the fire in the rear." He was speaking metaphorically. The fire was actually a group of Northern Democrats known as Copperheads. They opposed the Civil War, sympathized with the Southern secessionists, were mostly racists themselves, loathed Lincoln, blamed him and not the Southerners for starting the bloody fight, and impeded the war

David Brooks: The truth about poverty stats

... In “The Mismeasure of Poverty” in Policy Review, [Nicholas] Eberstadt notes that the percentage of Americans living under the poverty rate has been stagnant for 30 years, suggesting that antipoverty efforts have failed, and that life has not improved for the nation’s poor. The problem, Eberstadt continues, is that there are anomalies in the official statistics. Why does the poverty rate tend to go up as unemployment falls? Why hasn’t it budged while the amounts of money the gove

Charles Krauthammer: Past the Apogee ... America Under Pressure

[Charles Krauthammer writes an internationally syndicated column for the Washington Post Writers Group. He is also a monthly essayist for Time magazine, a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and The New Republic, and a weekly panelist on Inside Washington. He was awarded the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary, and Financial Times recently named him America's most influential commentator. This enote is based on his keynote address at FPR

Max Boot: Throw the Iraq report in the trash

BLUE-RIBBON panels are easy to mock, but some actually do perform a valuable service. The base-closing commissions, for example, were able to close down military installations that weren't needed but that Congress couldn't pull the plug on. The 9/11 commission produced a definitive and enthralling account of the worst terrorist attack on American soil. And then there is the Iraq Study Group. The money spent on its deliberations should have been redirected to some worthier purpose, s

Jim Castagnera: Caught in the Draft

[Mr. Castagnera, a Philadelphia journalist and attorney, is the Associate Provost at Rider University and author of the weekly newspaper column Attorney at Large.] Congressman Charlie Rangel has proposed reinstating the draft. The last time Representative Rangel raised the issue, at the onset of the present Iraqi War in 2003, the bill went down in flames on a vote of 402-2. Its chances are no better now. Talk of reinstating the Selective Service system brought back memorie

Jim Castagnera: We Never Seem to See It Coming

[Mr. Castagnera, a Philadelphia journalist and attorney, is the Associate Provost at Rider University and author of the weekly newspaper column Attorney at Large.] “Life is what happens when you’re making plans.” So said John Lennon, who never saw Mark David Chapman coming on December 8, 1980. Twenty-six years ago I was a beleaguered law student who seldom saw anything coming. As the eighties proceeded apace, I sure never saw the computer revolution, even though it was screa

Mark D. Tooley: The "School of the Assassins" Fiction

[Mark D. Tooley directs the United Methodist committee at the Institute on Religion and Democracy.] A record number of left-wing demonstrators (14,000-22,000), many of them church officials and activists, showed up for this year’s annual march in November against the Defense Department’s formerly named School of the Americas at Ft. Benning, Georgia. Now officially called “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), its left-wing critics prefer “School

Harlan Cleveland: Iraq ... What to Do Before Walking Away

[Harlan Cleveland, political scientist and public executive, a Princeton graduate and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, is President Emeritus of the World Academy of Art and Science. In government he has been a high official of the Marshall Plan, Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs and U.S. Ambassador to NATO. In academia he has served as dean of two graduate schools of public affairs (the Maxwell School at Syracuse University and the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute at the

Frank Rich: The Sunshine Boys Can't Save Iraq

... THE Iraq-Vietnam parallels at this juncture are striking. In January 1968, L.B.J. replaced his arrogant failed defense secretary, Robert McNamara, with a practiced Washington hand, Clark Clifford. The war’s violence boiled over soon after (Tet), prompting a downturn in American public opinion. Allies in our coalition of the willing — Thailand, the Philippines, Australia — had balked at tossing in new troops. Clifford commissioned a re-evaluation of American policy that churned up such ideas

Peter Steinfels: In Politics, the ‘God Gap’ Overshadows Other Differences

Why is there so much fascination with the so-called God gap, the finding that the more religiously observant Americans are, the more likely they are to vote Republican? Or, to put it the other way round, the more secular Americans are, the more likely they are to vote Democratic? The question was raised Tuesday by Karlyn Bowman, a resident fellow and public opinion expert at the American Enterprise Institute, at a conference for journalists sponsored by the Pew Forum on Religion and

Ralph Peters: From Metternich to Jim Baker

[Ralph Peters is a retired military officer, columnist, and the author of 21 books, including the recent Never Quit the Fight.] THE SUPERANNUATED membership of the Iraq Study Group shepherded by former secretary of state James Baker conjures a line from the film The Sixth Sense: "I see dead people." Two centuries ago, Europeans dreaming of reform and freedom must have felt just as crestfallen as they watched their continent's ghoulish elder statesmen gather for the Congres

Christopher Hayes: 9/11 ... The Roots of Paranoia

[Christopher Hayes, a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute, is a senior editor of In These Times.] According to a July poll conducted by Scripps News Service, one-third of Americans think the government either carried out the 9/11 attacks or intentionally allowed them to happen in order to provide a pretext for war in the Middle East. This is at once alarming and unsurprising. Alarming, because if tens of millions of Americans really believe their government was

Jordan Tama: Why some national security panels have worked better than others

[Jordan Tama, a former special assistant to Lee Hamilton at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, is writing his dissertation at Princeton University on national and international security commissions.] Debating the fate of the Iraq Study Group report has become, for now, Washington’s favorite parlor game. Senator John Kerry has said the report will “change the debate in this country.” Time has predicted President Bush will follow the commission's advice. But respond

Derek Jennings: The N-Word. Is It Ever OK to Say?

[Derek Jennings lives in Raleigh and is a columnist for the Carolina Independent Weekly.] Nigger. Without question, this is the most loaded word in the English language. Six letters. Say it three times and you've got the number of the beast. Forged white-hot in the fires of hell, that word has, for half a millennia, been seared into the collective psyche of black people in America. N-I-G-G-E-R. Though buried under layers of keloidal scars, those letters still ache and throb like a

Robert Parry: Robert Gates ... A Cold War Bombthrower Becomes Iraq War Saviour

While in charge of the CIA's analytical division in the mid-1980s, Robert M. Gates made wildly erroneous predictions about the dangers posed by leftist-ruled Nicaragua and espoused policy prescriptions considered too extreme even by the Reagan administration, in one case advocating the U.S. bombing of Nicaragua. Gates -- now President George W. Bush's nominee to replace Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary -- expressed his alarmist views about Nicaragua and the need to bomb the cou

David Swanson: Be All That You Can Be ... Leave the Army

As long as there has been a U.S. military, people have been leaving it. That choice has never been more appropriate than today.... Approximately 8,000 Americans have refused to report for duty or deserted in order to avoid taking part in this war, or to avoid taking further part in it.... Robert Fantina has just published a careful survey of past wars titled"Desertion and the American Soldier, 1776-2006." During the Revolutionary War, he tells us, one reason for desertion was the

Gordon Chang: China in Revolt

[Gordon G. Chang writes widely on China and North Korea and is the author most recently of Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes On the World (Random House).] ... The assertiveness of the Chinese people is manifesting itself mostly out of sight of Westerners, but its one plainly visible form is protest in the streets. Once Mao consolidated his power over China, the People’s Republic became largely free of popular demonstrations, at least against the party or the state. Scattered worke