Roundup: Media's Take

George F. Will: Where Republicans Went Wrong

... Twelve years after the high-water mark of postwar conservatism, this is the Republican rallying cry: Democrats would be even worse than we are! Even worse about spending, about government intrusiveness, etc. The Republicans' implosion began in March 2005 with their Terri Schiavo derangement, the attempt to intrude federal courts into a state's jurisdiction and a family's tragedy. Fourteen months later, after Katrina, Harriet Miers and the "Bridge to Nowhere," Republica

Jarrett Murphy: Three decades after the drama of '68, will Harlem make room for Columbia?

Chances are that walking down 131st Street 30 years from now, you will not miss Pedro y José Auto Body, nor, on 130th, mourn the absence of Boiler Repair Maintenance Company. It is unlikely that you ever planned to live in a walk-up like 3289 Broadway or enjoy a "100% brushless car wash" three blocks away. And even if you have patronized the nearby paint store, pharmacy, architect, personal trainer, building-supply store, moving companies, construction firms, U-Haul yard, drug treatmen

Edwin Meese: An Amnesty by Any Other Name ...

IN the debate over immigration, "amnesty" has become something of a dirty word. Some opponents of the immigration bill being debated in the Senate assert that it would grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants. Supporters claim it would do no such thing. Instead, they say, it lays out a road map by which illegal aliens can earn citizenship. Perhaps I can shed some light. Two decades ago, while serving as attorney general under President Ronald Reagan, I was in the t

James L. Payne: Does Nation-Building Work?

[James L. Payne is an independent writer who resides in Sandpoint, Idaho.] In plunging into war, hope generally triumphs over experience. The past—the quiet statistical tabulation of what happened when such plunges were taken before—tends to be ignored in the heat of angry oratory and the thump of military boots. At the outset, it is easy to believe that force will be successful in upholding virtue and that history has no relevance. Lately, this confidence in the force of arms has cen

Rosemarie Jackowski: From Galileo to Churchill (Ward Churchill, that is)

[Rosemarie Jackowski is an advocacy journalist living in Vermont. She is currently waiting for the State Supreme Court to render its decision on the Appeal of her conviction. She was arrested for participating in a peaceful protest of the war. She can be reached at: dissent@sover.net.] This is not the first time in history that mob rule has taken the place of intelligent reflection. The earth is flat; the sun revolves around the earth; 9/11 o

James Ottavio Castagnera: Immigrant Floods Are Recurrent

[Mr. Castagnera, a Philadelphia journalist and attorney, is the Associate Provost at Rider University and author of the weekly newspaper column “Attorney at Large.”] The nation’s first “immigrant crisis” of the new century, like a pimple on the body politic, is coming to a head. The president appeared on TV last week to try to pull the two houses of Congress together on the issue, while --- just incidentally --- pumping up his own sagging popularity balloon. Mr. Bush pai

Daniel Patrick Welch: Americans' unforgivable attitude toward immigration

[Writer, singer, linguist and activist Daniel Patrick Welch lives and writes in Salem, Massachusetts, with his wife, Julia Nambalirwa-Lugudde. Together they run The Greenhouse School (http://www.greenhouseschool.org).] Those who wish to read US history undistorted, rather than use its mythology for their own ends, are already hip to the never-ending plight of immigrants to "America"'s shores. "Give me your tired, your poo

James S. Robbins: Democrats should promise not to abuse the impeachment power

[James S. Robbins author of Last in Their Class: Custer, Picket and the Goats of West Point. Robbins is also an NRO contributor.] Imagine, if you will, a Republican president late in his second term, with low popular approval ratings and a recently elected Democratic Congress with its blood up. The Democrats’ are on a payback mission for the Republican-led impeachment of the current president’s Democratic predecessor. One pro-impeachment editorial goes on at length about the incumbe

John Dean: How Does President Bush Compare with Other Wartime Presidents With Respect to Free Speech Issues?

Lately, the Bush Administration has been talking of using the Espionage Act of 1917 to prosecute the New York Times and the Washington Post. Yet these veteran newspapers' "crimes" consist merely of publishing Pulitzer-Prize-winning articles on the CIA's secret prisons, and the NSA's secret surveillance programs. Not even Nixon sank so low. He might have initiated criminal prosecutions against the Times for printing the Pentagon Papers, yet did not. And in ot

Patrick J. Buchanan: Can We Win An Insurgents’ War?

The U.S. Army is not going to be defeated in Iraq, said one U.S. general, and he added pointedly: If we lose this war, we will lose it here in the United States. Correct. The only war America ever “lost” was lost in the United States. When Nixon pulled U.S. forces out of Vietnam in early 1973, the Viet Cong had been crushed, the North Vietnamese defeated, every provincial capital was in Saigon’s hands. Yet we lost Vietnam in 1975, when Hanoi, rearmed by Mosco

WSJ Editorial: Reagan on Immigration

One myth currently popular on the political right is that the immigration debate pits populist conservatives in the Ronald Reagan mold against Big Business "elites" who've hijacked the Republican Party. It's closer to the truth to say that what's really being hijacked here is the Gipper's reputation. One of the Reagan Presidency's symbolic highlights was the July 3, 1986, celebration of a refurbished Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, the gateway for immigrants a century

Max Boot: Forget privacy, we need to spy more

PRETTY MUCH everyone agrees that our human-spy capacity is missing in action. The chances that a CIA agent will be in the same cave as Osama bin Laden when the next 9/11 is being plotted are vanishingly small. The chances that our porous border security or transportation security will stop the next gang of Islamist cutthroats aren't much better. It's simply impossible to protect every inviting target in a continent-sized nation of almost 300 million people. When it comes to the war

Laurence H. Tribe: Bush Stomps on Fourth Amendment

[Laurence H. Tribe is a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and the Carl M. Loeb University Professor.] The escalating controversy over the National Security Agency's data mining program illustrates yet again how the Bush administration's intrusions on personal privacy based on a post-9/11 mantra of ''national security" directly threaten one of the enduring sources of that security: the Fourth Amendment ''right of the people to be secure in their persons, hou

Michael Parenti: The Hidden Politics of Deficit Spending

[Michael Parenti's recent books include Superpatriotism (City Lights), The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press), and most recently, The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories Press). For more information visit: www.michaelparenti.org.] When government expends more than it collects in revenues, this is known as deficit spending. To meet its yearly deficits, it borrows from wealthy individuals and financial institutions in the United States

James Ottavio Castagnera: The Rich Remain Richer

Last week the Congress passed a new tax bill. The law was enacted along largely partisan lines with Democrats denouncing the measure as yet another GOP-generated windfall for the rich. The statute, which President Bush says he anxious to sign, extends reduced rates on capital gains and dividends for another couple of years. Appropriately, the act, passed by the House on May 10 th and the Senate a day later, is entitled the Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act. Net cost to the count

Daniel Henninger: The CIA's leakers lack the Cold Warriors' sense of purpose

... We used to live in simpler times. From 1950 to 1991, America's enemy took the form of a country with hundreds of ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads aimed at the U.S. mainland, and a global espionage force called the KGB with a single address, Moscow. This was the Cold War, and in those days the U.S. intelligence community had a common worldview. That ideology was laid out in the now-famous National Security Council document 68, delivered in April 1950 to President Harry Truman. T

Thomas Powers: Spy vs. Spy

THE resignation of Porter Goss after 18 months of trying to run the Central Intelligence Agency and the nomination of Gen. Michael Hayden to take his place make unmistakable something that actually occurred a year ago: the C.I.A., as it existed for 50 years, is gone. Once the premier American intelligence organization, the agency has now been demoted to a combination action arm and support service for the rapidly growing Office of the Director of National Intelligence, headed by Joh

Jonathan Alter: What President Bush and his new press secretary could learn from FDR

It’s not about the mike. As Tony Snow takes over as presidential press secretary, you’ll likely see a spate of stories about how Snow’s low-key charm is working to improve White House media operations. But the honeymoon will last only a couple of weeks at most. That’s not Snow’s fault: President Bush could have Oprah as his mouthpiece and it still wouldn’t change his coverage. The only way to do that is to take a leaf from the greatest communicator of all—Franklin D. Roosevelt. Most

Max Boot: Stop coddling despots

DURING HIS first four years in office, President Bush made impressive strides toward achieving the improbable goal laid out in his second inaugural address — "ending tyranny in our world." American troops liberated 50 million people and midwived representative governments in Afghanistan and Iraq. The United States also provided important support to peaceful uprisings in Ukraine, Georgia, Lebanon and Kyrgyzstan. The ripples of those revolutions reverberated throughout the

Andrew Kuchins: Russia's Back (Boo!)

U.S. Vice President Richard Cheney made clear last week in Vilnius that he is not pleased with Russia's democratic backsliding, human-rights abuses and rough behavior in its neighborhood. And to hammer the point home Mr. Cheney then broke bread with the noted democrat, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazerbayev, who got a complete pass on his dubious record. Alert the media: We've identified double standards in U.S. foreign policy! But the real story that Mr. Cheney and many in Washingto