Roundup: Media's Take

Ruel Marc Gerecht: The mess at the CIA is hardly the fault of Porter Goss

[Mr. Gerecht, a Middle Eastern specialist with the Central Intelligence Agency from 1985 to 1994, is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.] "In the last year-and-a-half, more than 300 years of experience has either been pushed out or walked out the door in frustration. This has left the agency in free-fall. I have visited these brave and committed women and men in nearly every corner of the globe, and urge the new director do so. They deserve maximum support a

Tim Rowland: The main achievement of Klan rallies is to speed the demise of the Klan

John Howard, superintendent of Antietam National Battlefield, probably felt that he had little choice but to allow the Ku Klux Klan to soil what many consider to be sacred ground. But he's too sharp a guy not to understand and at some level appreciate the myriad of ironies. In granting the Klan's request for a rally at Antietam, Howard did the right thing, and not just because the Constitution says he had little choice. Free speech is a federal foundation so nowhere can this

Myles Kantor: Frederick Douglass' Cuban Legacy

[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 MylesColumn@aol.com.] I recently corresponded with Professor James Colaiaco about his new book, Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July. I've often cited Douglass in my writings about Cuba in light of his moral relevance to Fidel Castro's subjugation of a black-majority

Robert Spencer: Betrayal at Brandeis

[Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of five books, seven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). He is also an Adjunct Fellow with the Free Congress Foundation.] Brandeis University began in 1948, according to its mission

James Ottavio Castagnera: Oil Crises Are Recurring Phenomena

[Jim Castagnera is a Philadelphia attorney and author who writes a weekly newspaper column, “Attorney at Large."] As the price at the pump flirts with three dollars, the doomsday crowd declares the end of the Oil Age. While, as a recent National Geographic cover-story proclaims, we Yanks may have just witnessed the end of cheap oil, a dearth of petroleum products is unlikely. A better bet is one more round in a recurring cycle of shortage scares, dating back to the late

Robert Samuelson: Why gas prices are soaring—and why they haven't hurt the brisk U.S. economy. Yet.

The United States has the energy policy it deserves, although not the one that it needs. Having been told for years that their addiction to cheap gasoline was on a collision course with increasingly insecure supplies of foreign oil, Americans are horrified to discover that this is actually the case. And yet, for all the public outcry and political hysteria over high gasoline prices, they haven't yet significantly hurt the economy—and may not do so. Since 2003, the economy has grown about 3.6 per

Mark Bowden: Playing to the Home Crowd in Iran

[Mark Bowden, a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, is the author of "Guests of the Ayatollah" and "Black Hawk Down."] JUST over a quarter-century ago, five Iranian college students hit upon the idea of seizing the American Embassy in Tehran and staging a sit-in. Among them were Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is now Iran's president, and Habibollah Bitaraf, the current energy minister. The takeover of the embassy did not play out exactly as its stud

Sidney Blumenthal: The secret passion of George W Bush

The urgent dispatch of Karl Rove to the business of maintaining one-party rule in the mid-term elections in November 2006 is the Bush White House's belated startle reflex to its endangerment. Besieged by crises of his own making, plummeting to ever lower depths in the polls week after week, Bush has assigned his political general to muster dwindling forces for a heroic offensive to break out of the closing ring. If the Democrats gain control of the House of Representatives or Senate they will la

Kevin Phillips: Theocons and Theocrats

Is theocracy in the United States (1) a legitimate fear, as some liberals argue; (2) a joke, given the nation's rising secular population and moral laxity; (3) a worrisome bias of major GOP constituencies and pressure groups; or (4) all of the above? The last, I would argue. The characteristics are not inconsistent. No large nation--no leading world power--could ever resemble theocracies like John Calvin's Geneva, Puritan Massachusetts or early Mormon Utah. These were all small pol

Peter Beinart: The Rehabilitation of the Cold-War Liberal

This fall, for the third time since 9/11, American voters will choose between Democrats and Republicans while knowing what only one party believes about national security. In 2002, Democratic candidates tried to change the subject, focusing on Social Security and health care instead. In 2004, John Kerry substituted biography for ideology, largely ignoring his own extensive foreign-policy record and stressing his service in Vietnam. In this year's Senate and House races, the party looks set to re

Tom Bethell: Congress is to blame for the energy crisis

[Tom Bethell, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, is available to discuss how Congress is to blame for the current uproar over surging gas prices.] For those with long memories, the uproar about the price of oil has deja vu written all over it. When I came to Washington, 30 years ago, the energy crisis topped the news. Oil prices were rising and (we were told) the "Arab oil embargo " was to blame. Wrong. No matter how despotic, Arab rulers ha

Max Boot: Filling tanks, funding dictators

FREE-MARKET purists are getting a lot of mileage out of scoffing at all the hysteria about rising oil prices. From a strictly economic point of view, they've got a point. Even with crude selling at more than $71 a barrel and gasoline at about $3 a gallon, the U.S. economy continues to expand. It grew at a healthy annualized rate of 4.8% in the first quarter, and there has been no sign of a slowdown since. Oil is a much smaller part of the economy than it was during the oil shocks of the 1970s, a

William Kristol: Iran's Unacceptable Nukes

IN THE SPRING OF 1936--seventy years ago--Hitler's Germany occupied the Rhineland. France's Léon Blum denounced this as "unacceptable." But France did nothing. As did the British. And the United States. In a talk last year, Christopher Caldwell quoted the great Raymond Aron's verdict: "To say that something is unacceptable was to say that one accepted it." Aron further remarked that Blum had in fact seemed proud of France's putting up no resistance. Indeed, Blum

Jonathan Alter: What FDR Teaches Us

On one level, it's unfair to compare a sitting president to his predecessors, especially when he has more than two and a half years to go. And it's doubly unfair to compare George Walker Bush, currently experiencing some of the lowest approval ratings in the history of polling, to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who is on the list of even conservative historians as one of our best presidents. But juxtaposing the two men may shed some light on both Roosevelt's unusual gifts and Bush's current troubles

Stan Winer: Abu Ghraib ... Tortured fragments of history (The view from South Africa)

[South African-based writer Stan Winer is author of the book Between the Lies: Rise of the media-military-industrial complex, (London: Southern Universities Press, 2004)] In April 2004, the world was momentarily shocked by televised photographs from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison showing hooded Iraqis stripped naked, posed in contorted positions, and visibly suffering humiliating abuse while amused American soldiers stood by. Responsibility for these acts has largely been confined to the

David Wise: Read the news, go to jail

Unencumbered by a 1st Amendment, Britain for almost 100 years has had an Official Secrets Act to prevent leaks to the media and to prosecute offenders, including journalists. Some Bush administration officials and members of Congress are casting a longing eye at the British law. If only the United States had a similar law, their reasoning goes, the reporters who revealed CIA-run prisons in Eastern Europe and the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping of terrorism suspec

Raffi Khatchadourian: Blowback in Africa

[Raffi Khatchadourian traveled to Chad in 2005 for the International Reporting Project at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.] EVER since Chad gained independence 46 years ago, it has been a world-class model of political dysfunction. In the 1970's, Chad's president, François Tombalbaye, compelled civil servants to renounce Western customs, undergo a tribal initiation rite known as yondo and profess belief in a nationalist creed he called Chaditude.

Richard Cohen: Questioning the 'Israel Lobby' Isn't Anti-Semitism

During the Jim Crow era, many American communists fiercely fought racism. This is a fact. It is also a fact that segregationists and others often smeared civil rights activists by calling them communists. This technique is sometimes called guilt by association and sometimes "McCarthyism." If you think it's dead, you have not been following the controversy over a long essay about the so-called "Israel Lobby." Recently, for instance, the Washington Post ran an op-e

Jay Cost: If Democrats can't win the Senate, GOP control of Congress is almost certainly safe.

[Jay Cost, creator of the Horse Race Blog, is a doctoral candidate of political science at the University of Chicago. He writes for RealClearPolitics.com.] The recent election talk from our pundit class has been about the chances of a Democratic takeover of the House. Many expect this. I am open to this possibility; however, as I have written in the past, I think the data favor a Republican retention. I am also open to, and would be interested to read, a thorough argument that suppo

James Ottavio Castagnera: The More Things Change: Iraq Sounds an Awful Lot Like ...

[Jim Castagnera is a Philadelphia attorney, author and educator, who writes the weekly newspaper column “Attorney at Large.”] The first president for whom my granddad ever voted was Teddy Roosevelt. Reelected by a landslide in 1904, TR became president in September 1901 as the result of a terrorist attack. An anarchist shot President William McKinley in Buffalo, New York. Anarchism was the international terrorist movement of its time. In the two decades between 1894 and 1914, adherents to