Roundup: Media's Take

Alan Dershowitz: Debunking the Newest – and Oldest – Jewish Conspiracy

The publication, on the Harvard Kennedy School web site, of a “working paper,” written by a professor and academic dean at the Kennedy School and a prominent professor at the University of Chicago, has ignited a hailstorm of controversy and raised troubling questions. The paper was written by two self-described foreign-policy “realists,” Professor Stephen Walt and Professor John Mearsheimer.3 It asserts that the Israel “Lobby” – a cabal whose “core” is “American Jews” – has a “stranglehold” on m

Elizabeth de la Vega : Asking the Right Question About the President's Involvement in the CIA Leak Affair

[Elizabeth de la Vega is a former federal prosecutor with more than 20 years of experience. During her tenure, she was a member of the Organized Crime Strike Force and Chief of the San Jose Branch of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California. Her pieces have appeared in The Nation magazine, the L.A. Times, Salon, and Mother Jones. She writes regularly for TomDispatch. She may be contacted at ElizabethdelaVega@Verizon.net

Jill Abramson: When Will We Stop Saying 'First Woman to (fill in the blank)'

IT was the Platonic ideal of the ladies' lunch. There was chicken salad, parfait and blue Tiffany gift boxes. There was the first woman president, her friend Louise and, though we did not know it for certain, the first female solo network news anchor. This was Monday at the annual Matrix Awards, given to women who are leaders in the New York media and communications business. As the first woman to be Washington bureau chief at The Times, and then managing editor, I got one award, f

Robert Dreyfuss: Cutting and Running in Baghdad

[Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. He covers national security for Rolling Stone and writes frequently for The American Prospect, Mother Jones, and the Nation. He is also a regular contributor to TomPaine.com, the Huffington Post, and other sites, and writes the blog, The Dreyfuss Report at his

Sandy English: Three years after looting of Iraqi National Museum: an official whitewash of US crime

Three years have now passed since thieves looted the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad following the American invasion. Nearly 15,000 objects of inestimable scientific and cultural value were stolen, although initial figures were over 10 times that number.... There was an international outcry, and the United States military, groping to set right a public relations disaster, sent in Marine Reserve Col. Matthew Bogdanos, in civilian life a Manhattan assistant district attorney, to cond

Noam Chomsky: War Crimes in Iraq

[Noam Chomsky is the author of numerous best-selling political works. His latest books are Failed States, The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy and Hegemony or Survival, both in the American Empire Project series at Metropolitan Books. He lives in Lexington, Massachusetts, and is a professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2002, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales passed on to Bush a memorandum on torture b

David Leonhardt: The Economics of Henry Ford May Be Passé

HENRY FORD was 50 years old, and not all that different from a lot of other successful businessmen, when he summoned the Detroit press corps to his company's offices on Jan. 5, 1914. What he did that day made him a household name. Mr. Ford announced that he was doubling the pay of thousands of his employees, to at least $5 a day. With his company selling Model T's as fast as it could make them, his workers deserved to share in the profits, he said. His rivals were horri

Norman Solomon: When War Crimes Are Impossible

[Norman Solomon’s latest book is “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” For information, go to: www.WarMadeEasy.com.] Is President Bush guilty of war crimes? To even ask the question is to go far beyond the boundaries of mainstream U.S. media. A few weeks ago, when a class of seniors at Parsippany High School in New Jersey prepared for a mock trial to assess whether Bush ha

Fareed Zakaria: To Become an American

... Many Americans have become enamored of the European approach to immigration -- perhaps without realizing it. Guest workers, penalties, sanctions and deportation are all a part of Europe's mode of dealing with immigrants. The results of this approach have been on display recently in France, where rioting migrant youths again burned cars last week. Across Europe one sees disaffected, alienated immigrants, ripe for radicalism. The immigrant communities deserve their fair share of blame for this

Bill Buckley on Bush, Iraq & Past Presidents

William F. Buckley Jr., the longtime conservative writer and leader, said George W. Bush's presidency will be judged entirely by the outcome of a war in Iraq that is now a failure. ``Mr. Bush is in the hands of a fortune that will be unremitting on the point of Iraq,'' Buckley said in an interview that will air on Bloomberg Television this weekend. ``If he'd invented the Bill of Rights it wouldn't get him out of his jam.'' Buckley said he doesn't have a formula for ge

Gary Younge: University professors denounced for anti-Americanism ... is academic life just too liberal?

After the screenwriter Walter Bernstein was placed on the blacklist during the McCarthyite era he said his life "seemed to move in ever-decreasing circles". "Few of my friends dropped away but the list of acquaintances diminished," he wrote in Inside Out, a memoir of the blacklist. "I appeared contaminated and they did not want to risk infection. They avoided me, not calling as they had in the past, not responding to my calls, being nervously distant if we met in public

Joseph Finder: Fiction was a con game long before The Da Vinci Code

IN the next week or two, a British judge will rule on whether one of the biggest-selling novelists of all time is a thief. The co-authors of a 1982 work of nonfiction, "Holy Blood, Holy Grail," are suing the novelist Dan Brown, author of "The Da Vinci Code," for breach of copyright. They charge that Mr. Brown's novel stole their hypothesis — which, in case you've been holed away for the past few years rereading Proust, is that Jesus and Mary Magdalene married, a

Paul Findley: About the Israel Lobby

[Paul Findley was an Illinois Representative in Congress, 1961-83. He is the author of the bestseller, They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby. He and Mrs. Findley reside in Jacksonville, Illinois. ] Words spoken years ago by George W. Ball, a distinguished diplomat, author and champion of human rights, have vivid, new currency: "When Israel's interests are being considered, Members of Congress act like trained poodles. They jump du

James Ottavio Castagnera: This Is Not Your Grandpa’s America, So Get Over It

Mr. Castagnera, a Philadelphia journalist and attorney, is the Associate Provost at Rider University and author of the weekly newspaper column “Attorney at Large.” This may sound a little nasty… but the dumbest reason I’ve heard for legalizing the 11 million illegal aliens in the U.S. is “My grandparents got to come here. These people deserve the same chance.” I’ve heard that a lot lately. So let’s follow the logic of this notion and see where it le

Kevin Phillips: How the GOP Became God's Own Party

Now that the GOP has been transformed by the rise of the South, the trauma of terrorism and George W. Bush's conviction that God wanted him to be president, a deeper conclusion can be drawn: The Republican Party has become the first religious party in U.S. history. We have had small-scale theocracies in North America before -- in Puritan New England and later in Mormon Utah. Today, a leading power such as the United States approaches theocracy when it meets the conditions currently

WSJ Editorial: Immigration and the GOP ... Is it still the party of Reagan, or of Tom Tancredo?

As Congress battles over immigration, the consequences are likely to be far greater than the details of border walls or green cards. The most important political outcome may turn out to be the message that Republicans send about the kind of the party they are and hope to be. To wit, do Republicans want to continue in the Reagan tradition of American optimism and faith in assimilation that sends a message of inclusiveness to all races? Or will they take another one of their historic

MJ Rosenberg: Was the Israeli election a watershed?

The most spectacular voter turnout in recent American Presidential elections was in 1960 when John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon competed for the top job. No election since has stirred the American public the way that one did. Nevertheless, it was not a particularly significant election. No major issues divided the two candidates who ran not to change the country but simply to achieve the office. The lack of serious differences between the two was so pronounced that Arthur Schles

Amir Taheri: Mideast dictators try to "wait Bush out." They may be miscalculating.

Hassan Abbasi has a dream--a helicopter doing an arabesque in cloudy skies to avoid being shot at from the ground. On board are the last of the "fleeing Americans," forced out of the Dar al-Islam (The Abode of Islam) by "the Army of Muhammad." Presented by his friends as "The Dr. Kissinger of Islam," Mr. Abbasi is "professor of strategy" at the Islamic Republic's Revolutionary Guard Corps University and, according to Tehran sources, the principal foreign p

Max Boot: Policy analysis -- paranoid style

IN HIS CLASSIC 1964 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," the late Richard Hofstadter noted: "One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality that it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed." As examples, he cited a 96-page pamphlet by Joseph McCarthy that contained "

Sidney Blumenthal: Bush is the most blinkered and rigid president since Depression-denying Herbert Hoover

More senior White House aides have left as a result of criminal indictments in Bush's second term -- the vice president's chief of staff, the top administrator for federal procurement policy at the Office of Management and Budget and the director of domestic policy -- than through normal attrition. So when physically depleted chief of staff Andrew Card submitted his resignation after five years on the job it was treated in Washington as a seismic event. In a fit of wishful thinking, the Washingt