Roundup: Media's Take

Michael Rubin: Bubba Dubya?

[Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is editor of the Middle East Quarterly.] ON SEPTEMBER 20, 2001, President George W. Bush put the world on notice. "We will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." Unanimously, senators and congressmen gave Bush a standing ovation. Now, faced with falling

Daniel Altman: Immigration Math ... It's a Long Story

MUCH of today's debate about immigration revolves around the same old questions: How much do immigrants contribute to production? Do they take jobs away from people born in the United States? And what kinds of social services do they use? Yet every immigrant represents much more than just one worker or one potential citizen. To understand fully how immigration will shape the economy, you can't just look at one generation — you have to look into the future. Sociologists and economist

Peter Beaumont: Noam Chomsky has allowed bile and rhetoric to replace intellectual rigour in his latest diatribe

... Like him, I was opposed to what I believed was an illegal war in Iraq. In my travels in that country, I, too, have been troubled by the consequences of occupation. Where I differ from him, however, is that I reject Chomsky's view that American misdeeds are printed through history like the lettering in a stick of rock. Instead, the conclusions I have drawn from more than a decade of reporting wars on the ground is that motivations are complex, messy and contradictory, that the best intentions

Michael Barone: Vietnam, Watergate and Rove

It has been a tough 10 days for those who see current events through the prisms of Vietnam and Watergate. First, the Democrats failed to win a breakthrough victory in the California 50th District special election--a breakthrough that would have summoned up memories of Democrats winning Gerald Ford's old congressional district in a special election in 1974. Instead the Democratic nominee got 45% of the vote, just 1% more than John Kerry did in the district in 2004. Second, U.S. forc

Jonatrhan Rauch: Cold War strategies might help us handle Tehran’s nuclear ambitions

... Here are some things we have seen before: a nuclear-armed country with a brittle and aggressive ideology, world-revolutionary aspirations, and a belief in the historic inevitability of its triumph against a decadent and ultimately hollow West. In that country, an unpopular and divided regime, with hard-liners and relative pragmatists squabbling for influence. A crumbling, resource-dependent economy. A paranoid worldview in which America is an omnipresent military and ideological threat. A ta

Jonathan Chait: Conservatives regurgitate George W. Bush

n "The Man Who Would Be King," the late-nineteenth-century Rudyard Kipling story later turned into a movie, an English adventurer named Daniel Dravot becomes the regent of Kafiristan, a remote mountainous region north of India. Dravot leads the Kafiri people to a string of battlefield victories, and they receive him as a God, the son of Alexander the Great, and turn their treasure over to him. But then they see him bleed, and--discovering he is mortal after all--turn on him with unbrid

Denver Post Editorial: CIA inaction inexcusable

Recently released documents show that the Central Intelligence Agency kept secret the whereabouts of World War II criminal Adolph Eichmann in order to protect the identity of Nazis serving in the West German government. Even the deadly Cold War rivalry between the United States and the former Soviet Union doesn't excuse such morally bankrupt conduct. Eichmann, a lieutenant colonel in the Nazi SS, was the architect of the so-called "final solution," the Third

George F. Will: Zarqawi ... arguably the worst terrorist in history

The dust having settled -- 500-pound bombs can raise, and even manufacture, a lot of dust -- it is time to give the devil his due. To understand the diabolical genius of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, that pornographer of violence, begin with this: He was a primitive who understood the wired world and used an emblem of modernity, the Internet, to luxuriate in gore. But although he may have had an almost erotic enjoyment of the gore, it was also in the service of an audacious plan. And he exe

Peggy Noonan: What's happened to the Democratic Party?

The Democratic Party is that amazing thing, out of power for six years and yet exhausted. They're pale, tired and unready. Too bad, since it's their job to be an alternative, not an embarrassment.... One can argue about why the Democratic Party no longer seems to have a reason for being. I believe the reason is this: They have achieved what they set out to achieve in 1932, when the modern Democratic Party began. They got what they asked for, achieved what they fought for. They got a

Jonathan Steele: Experts confirm that Iran's president did not call for Israel to be 'wiped off the map'

My recent comment piece explaining how Iran's president was badly misquoted when he allegedly called for Israel to be "wiped off the map" has caused a welcome little storm. The phrase has been seized on by western and Israeli hawks to re-double suspicions of the Iranian government's intentions, so it is important to get the truth of what he really said. I took my translation - "the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time" - from the indefatig

Max Boot: Truman acted alone, too

WHEN HE delivered the West Point commencement address last month, President Bush compared his efforts to stand up to terrorists to Harry Truman's efforts to stand up to communists during the early years of the Cold War. Liberal pundits were outraged. How dare this Republican cite a sainted Democrat as his inspiration? Commentators such as Peter Beinart, the former New Republic editor, suggested that Bush should instead learn from Truman about the need to recognize the limits of American strength

James Ottavio Castagnera: The More Things Change ...

[Mr. Castagnera, a Philadelphia journalist and attorney, is the Associate Provost at Rider University and author of the weekly newspaper column “Attorney at Large.”] Faithful readers (if any) of this column, who have followed my series --- on U.S. incursions into the Philippines (1899) and Iraq (2003); recurring oil crises; repetitive waves of illegal immigration; and the way the rich always seem to stay that way --- may be asking by now, “So what’s your point?” P

Loro Horta: East Timor ... a nation divided

The terrifying civil conflict engulfing the tiny half-island nation of East Timor is the most traumatic moment in a country that secured its independence only in May 2002 after a quarter-century of occupation by its giant neighbour Indonesia. The violence has since 28 April 2006 cost the lives of at least thirty people, led more than 100,000 to flee the capital, Dili, and created calamitous destruction across the territory. The immediate origins of the crisis in East Timor (Timor-L

Michael Parenti: Still Soft on (Corporate) Crime

[Michael Parenti's recent books include The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press), Superpatriotism (City Lights), and The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories Press). For more information visit: www.michaelparenti.org.] A half century ago, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black reminded us in Griffin v. Illinois (1956) that there “can be no equal justice where the kind of trial a man gets depends on the amount of money he has.” The corporate exe

William O. Beeman: The Journalism/Think Tank Merry-Go-Round and the Dilemma of the Academic Public Intellectual

[William O. Beeman is Professor, Anthropology; and Theatre, Speech and Dance, Brown University] ' [I want to address] the question of the sad, sad state of American academics in policy formation in the United States today. Think tanks, where no one ever has to go through peer review before publishing the most questionable material, are in the ascendancy. Real scholars are derided as the academy is openly attacked by these quasi-intellectual bodies. No wonder! If the think-tankers' s

Stephen Moore: Remember History ... Forget Tax Hikes in Exchange for Spending Cuts

Back in 1982, President Reagan got snookered into a grand bipartisan deficit reduction deal known as the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act. He "reluctantly" agreed to what was then one of the largest tax increases in American history -- only because he was assured there would be $3 of federal spending cuts for every dollar of higher taxes. For the remainder of his presidency, whenever new taxes were proposed, the Gipper huffed: "I'm still waiting for those $3 of spending cu

Jacob Laksin: New Report Debunks Politically Motivated Attack on David Horowitz’s book, The Professors

[Jacob Laksin is a senior editor at FrontPageMagazine.com. He is available for interviews. Contact Elizabeth@cspc.org] In a detailed report released today called “Discounting Facts,” Jacob Laksin refutes the allegations of a union-sponsored coalition calling itself “Free Exchange on Campus,” which has repeatedly and maliciously attacked the Academic Bill of Rights

Anne E. Kornblut: Why hasn't a women been elected president?

... There are countless theories, chief among them that the right candidate hasn't come along, which would seem to explain everything and nothing. Invoking this reasoning, some of Mrs. Clinton's detractors maintain that if she loses, her sex will have little to do with it — that it will be more about Iraq, or Clinton fatigue, or what they call her polarizing effect. Those who study the larger trend, however, say there are concrete reasons no woman has ever come close to winning the

Greg Palast: They Got Him

[Greg Palast is the author of Armed Madhouse out this week from Penguin Dutton, from which this is adapted. Armed Madhouse: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, the Scheme to Steal '08, No Child's Behind Left and other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War.] They got him -- the big, bad, beheading berserker in Iraq. But, something's gone unreported in all the glee over getting Zarqawi … who invited him into Iraq in the first place? If you

David Corn: The Death of Zarqawi

It's good news that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is dead. Any member of the civilized world ought to cheer the demise of a terrorist who killed civilians with bombings and beheadings. But his death--brought about by a US air strike that was apparently ordered after a captured Zarqawi lieutenant disclosed Zarqawi's favorite hiding places--may not mean much in terms of bringing peace, democracy and stability to Iraq. His al Qaeda in Iraq--which was estimated to number no more than several hu