Roundup: Media's Take

Jonathan Karl: Bob Woodward takes a novel approach in his new book on the Bush administration.

[Mr. Karl is senior national security correspondent for ABC News.] It may seem like another lifetime, but just over five years ago China forced down an American EP-3 spy plane for venturing into Chinese airspace and held its 24-member crew hostage for 11 days. It was the Bush administration's first international crisis, and it was a big one. So how did the president's national security team deal with it? They called Prince Bandar. At least that's what Bob Woodward tells

Randall Caroline Forsberg: Gone Nuclear... How the World Lost Its Way

Nation Editor's Introduction: The Reykjavik Summit in October 1986 will long be remembered because the leaders of the world's two superpowers, Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan, seriously entertained for one brief moment the goal of a non-nuclear world. The end of the cold war reduced the fear of a nuclear exchange, but it did not bring us closer to a world free of nuclear weapons. Indeed, with the subsequent proliferation of nuclear weapons to India, Pakistan and North Korea,

Jimmy Carter: Solving the Korean Stalemate, One Step at a Time

IN 1994 the North Koreans expelled inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency and were threatening to process spent nuclear fuel into plutonium, giving them the ability to produce nuclear weapons. With the risk of war on the Korean Peninsula, there was a consensus that the forces of South Korea and the United States could overwhelmingly defeat North Korea. But it was also known that North Korea could quickly launch more than 20,000 shells and missiles into nearby Seoul. Th

Max Boot: America's Wilsonian Instinct (it predates Wilson)

THERE ARE few epithets more damning in American politics than "Wilsonian." It carries connotations of purblind self-righteousness, of senseless moralizing, of good intentions gone awry. Granted, most of those pejoratives apply to Woodrow Wilson, whose failures in peacemaking after World War I are notorious and helped set the stage for World War II. The fiasco in Iraq will undoubtedly strengthen the demonization of the Wilsonian impulse that was said to have animated the invasion.

Myles Kantor: The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Cuban Shame

[Myles Kantor is a columnist for FrontPageMagazine.com and editor-at-large for Pureplay Press, which publishes books about Cuban history and culture. His e-mail address is myles.kantor@gmail.com.] Strong affirmations entail strong actions. Simon Wiesenthal weighed less than 100 pounds when American troops liberated Austria’s Mauthausen concentration camp on May 5, 1945.[1] The former architect then devoted his life to bringi

Garrison Keillor: Congress' shameful retreat from American values

I would not send my college kid off for a semester abroad if I were you. Last week, we suspended human rights in America, and what goes around comes around. Ixnay habeas corpus. The U.S. Senate, in all its splendor and majesty, decided that an"enemy combatant" is any non-citizen whom the president says is an enemy combatant, including your Korean greengrocer or your Swedish grandmother or your Czech au pair, and can be arrested and held for as long as authorities wish

Sanford Levinson: It Is Time to Repair the Constitution's Flaws

[Sanford Levinson is a professor of law at the University of Texas Law School. This essay is adapted from Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (And How We the People Can Correct It), to be published next month by Oxford University Press. Copyright © 2006 by Oxford University Press.] In 1987 I went to a marvelous exhibit in Philadelphia commemorating the bicentennial of the drafting of the U.S. Constitution. The exhibit concluded with two scrolls, each wit

Adam Cohen: American Elections and the Grand Old Tradition of Disenfranchisement

The House of Representatives struck a major blow against democracy last month. It passed a bill that would deny the vote to anyone who shows up at the polls without a government-issued photo ID. The bill’s requirements are so onerous and inflexible that they could prevent millions of eligible voters without driver’s licenses — who are disproportionately poor, minority or elderly — from casting a ballot. With that vote Congress joined a growing number of states that are erecting new

Dave Swanson: The Genius of Impeachment

[David Swanson, co-founder of the AfterDowningStreet.org coalition, works for ImpeachPAC.org, which is funding pro-impeachment candidates. Each one has committed to making the introduction of articles of impeachment his or her first act in office. Swanson also works for MyDem.org, which is giving people tools to help make sure their votes are counted. A former newspaper reporter, he was the press secretary for Dennis Kucinich's 2004 presidential campaign.] With

James Castagnera: The Abuse Excuse ... One Size Fits All ?

[Mr. Castagnera, a Philadelphia journalist and attorney, is the Associate Provost at Rider University and author of the weekly newspaper column Attorney at Large.] Perhaps it’s Clarence Darrow’s fault. The famous trial attorney, best known for the Scopes Monkey Trial immortalized in “Inherit the Wind,” also represented the thrill killers Leopold and Loeb. That 1924 trial inspired at least four feature films: Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rope” (1948), “Compulsion” with Orson Wells

Spencer Ackerman: The Other Vietnam Syndrome

... On the right, the latter half of 2006 is feeling a lot like 1968, the year that the American public finally lost faith in the Vietnam war. And, just as they did then, conservatives are turning causality on its head: People aren't growing disillusioned with the war because we're not winning it; we're not winning because people have grown disillusioned. After Vietnam, this analysis enabled the right to avoid the agonizing reappraisal of U.S. foreign policy that has been that war's legacy for l

Arch Puddington: Budapest 1956 (Lessons for Today?)

[Arch Puddington is director of research at Freedom House and the author, most recently, of Lane Kirkland: Champion of American Labor.] The United States today is fighting an adversary at least as menacing as the one it confronted during the cold war, and bearing some of the same traits. Like the Soviet Union, al Qaeda, its affiliates, and its imitators are in the thrall of a totalizing ideology, are implacably hostile to liberal democracy, and are determined to overthrow

Paul Farhi: Republicans have a harder time surviving sex scandals than Democrats

Sex scandals involving politicians are as old as Thomas Jefferson, but the outcome seems to depend on which party you represent. In recent years, for the most part, Democrats have been able to survive their sordid escapades while Republicans have paid with their political lives. The latest example: Mark Foley, a Republican congressman from Florida, who abruptly became an ex-congressman from Florida last week amid revelations that he had sent sexually explicit e-mails to teenage boys

David Swanson: Impeachment Anyone?

[David Swanson, co-founder of the AfterDowningStreet.org coalition, works for ImpeachPAC.org, which is funding pro-impeachment candidates. Each one has committed to making the introduction of articles of impeachment his or her first act in office. Swanson also works for MyDem.org, which is giving people tools to help make sure their votes are counted. A former newspaper reporter, he was the press secretary for Dennis Kucinich'

Bruce Thornton: Conquest reveals Western “traitors to the human mind.”

I’ve been reading one of the great works of recent history, Robert Conquest’s Reflections on a Ravaged Century. His chapter on “Soviet Myths and the Western Mind” is particularly fascinating, and ripe with parallels to our own battles today against Islamic jihad. As Conquest documents, many Western intellectuals and academics were delusional about the reality of the communist threat. For a host of reasons — a quasi-religious faith in utopian socialism, neurotic hatred of their own c

James Castagnera: The Amish School Tragedy

[Jim Castagnera, a Philadelphia lawyer and writer, is the Associate Provost at Rider University. He writes a weekly newspaper column, “Attorney at Large.”] I’ve been writing newspaper columns since I was an undergraduate at Lancaster’s Franklin & Marshall College in the 1960s. My “MO” has been humor. Take the Congressman Mark Foley affair… sad and sordid as it is, it’s brimming with humor, too. The shooting deaths of nearly half a dozen Amish girls in a

Maureen Dowd: Don’t Pass the Salted Peanuts, Henry

Tom Lehrer said that political satire was rendered obsolete when Henry Kissinger won a Nobel Peace Prize for prolonging the Vietnam War. But even the inventive Lehrer could never have imagined that Dr. Strangelove would get a second chance to contribute to misleading the public about a military catastrophe in a misunderstood land — a do-over in scarring the American psyche and reputation in profound ways. Yet, as Bob Woodward reveals in “State of Denial,” the sequel to

Joseph Califano, Jr.: When the House Could Clean Itself

The most troubling aspect of the Mark Foley scandal is not his conduct, disgusting as it was, but what the response of the leadership reveals about the rancid state of partisanship and the consequent decline of the House of Representatives. Speaker Dennis Hastert presides over a legislative body so infested with mistrust that it doesn't even have a functioning ethics committee. Since the House is incapable of washing its own dirty laundry and policing itself, the speaker has to turn over that re

George F. Will: Why Republicans may live to regret their stated desire for more Truman-style Democrats

Republicans regret, or say they do, that there are no more "Truman Democrats"—Democrats as hardheaded about national security as was the president who formulated the cold-war policy of containment. That regret must amuse the gangly, soft-spoken 15-term congressman from Truman country—western Missouri, where they pronounce it "Massouruh." If Democrats capture the House in November, Ike Skelton will become chairman of the Armed Services Committee. The Republicans might wish the

Christopher Dodd: What My Father Saw at Nuremberg

SIXTY YEARS AGO today, at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, Germany, the verdicts were read in a trial that will forever define the punishment of war criminals. One by one, the 22 top surviving Nazi officers of Adolf Hitler were sentenced. By the time the gavel sounded, three had been acquitted, seven sent to prison and 12 condemned to death. One of the people in court that day was my father, 38-year-old attorney Thomas Dodd, who was the No. 2 prosecutor for the United States behi