Roundup: Media's Take

Scott M. Liell: Shaking the Foundation of Faith

AN event that occurred 250 years ago today stands as a singular reminder that the war between faith and science in America did not start in Dover, Pa., where several school board members who promoted the teaching of intelligent design were voted out of office last week, or even in that Tennessee courthouse in 1925 where John Scopes was tried for teaching evolution. It has been a recurring theme in our history since the very seedtime of the republic. In the early hours of Nov. 18, 1

Wilson Quarterly Review Essay: Overselling Democracy

“The Freedom Crusade” by David C. Hendrickson and Robert W. Tucker, in The National Interest (Fall 2005), 1615 L St., N.W., Ste. 1230, Washington, D.C. 20036; “Can Democracy Stop Terrorism?” by F. Gregory Gause III, in Foreign Affairs (Sept.–Oct. 2005), 58 E. 68th St., New York, N.Y. 10021. Invoking the Founding Fathers and Abraham Lincoln, President George W. Bush declared in his second inaugural address last January that “America’s vital interests and deepest beliefs are now one,

David Gelernter: Lincoln's Words, Our Pledge

The Pledge of Allegiance has been in legal jeopardy for years, all because it contains the words "under God" -- a phrase Abraham Lincoln stamped on the American consciousness when he used it on Nov. 19, 1863, 142 years ago, in the Gettysburg Address. The pledge originated in 1892, was modified in 1923 and again in 1924, and most recently in 1954 when the words "under God" were added. In 2004, and again in 2005, a California atheist named Michael Newdow filed laws

Keelin McDonell: France's History of Violence

[Keelin McDonell is a reporter-researcher at TNR.] In the spring of 2003, as the Iraq war got underway, I spent many hours learning about violence in a creaky lecture hall at the Sorbonne. It was a sensitive time to be an American in Paris. "La guerre" had made the city's formerly convivial atmosphere heavy and indignant, and I expected my new class--"Shattered Texts," a literature course about the effects of destruction on people and cultures--to be mired in con

Sydney H. Schanberg: Bob Woodward's Own Scandal

. . . a media marketplace that long ago concluded having access to power is more important than speaking truth to it. —Newsweek's Christopher Dickey, October 2005 essay Bob Woodward rightly became a beacon in the journalism world for the groundbreaking shoe-leather reporting he and Carl Bernstein did on the Watergate scandal in 1972 for The Washington Post. Since then he has become known for his books gleaned from rarely given interviews with presidents and other powerful people in

Max Boot: We should pay to plan for nation building

AMERICA REMAINS an empire in denial. Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. has been engaged nonstop in trying to rebuild war-ravaged lands. U.S. troops have taken the lead in Panama, Somalia, Haiti (twice), Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. The U.S. has also offered considerable support to international efforts in East Timor, Cambodia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Rwanda, Sudan and other places. A hundred years ago, this type of involvement in other countries' interna

Sidney Blumenthal: Bush's White House is dismissive of history, yet increasingly desperate to rewrite it

One year ago, after his re-election, President Bush brashly asserted: "I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style." Twelve months later, Republicans were thrashed in elections for the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey. In St Paul, Minnesota, the Democratic mayor who endorsed Bush for re-election a year ago was defeated by another Democrat by 70% to 30%. Then the Republicans in the Congress split and failed to pass Bush's bud

Anthony Lewis: Why the Senate Shouldn't Try to Stop the Supreme Court from Ruling on the Guantanamo Cases

AFTER the Northern victory in the Civil War, laws passed by Congress during the era of Reconstruction imposed military governments on the former Confederate states. A Mississippi editor, William H. McCardle, was arrested by the military and charged with publishing incendiary and libelous articles. He was held for trial before a military commission. But he went to a federal court and sought his release on a writ of habeas corpus, arguing that military rule of civilians was unconstitutional.

David Corn: Bush Rewrites History To Criticize His Antiwar Critics

In a Veterans Day speech on Friday, delivered to troops and others at the Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsylvania, George W. Bush veered from the usual commemoration of sacrifice to strike at critics who have questioned whether he steered the country into war by using false information. This has become a tough and troubling issue for his presidency. A poll taken before his speech found that 57 percent of the respondents now believe that Bush "deliberately misled" the nation into war. That

Ben Johnson: Jimmy Carter's Warped View of America and History

The 39th president has been testing our endangered patience by delivering homilettes on any mainstream media outlet that will have him (which is all of them), hawking his newest book, Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis – this week’s number one New York Times bestseller. In the Left’s latest, lamest appeal to the “values voters” who tipped the 2004 election, Jimmy Carter tells them an unpleasant truth: they are all bloodthirsty, hard-hearted, racist,

Jeffrey Rosen: Supreme Court Confirmations Are as Messy as They Should Be

[Jeffrey Rosen is a law professor at George Washington University and legal-affairs editor of The New Republic. His new book, The Most Democratic Branch: How the Courts Serve America, will be published next year by Oxford University Press.] In the wake of Harriet E. Miers's withdrawal of her nomination to the Supreme Court, and with a looming battle over the confirmation of her successor, Samuel A. Alito Jr., there is a chorus of laments, in books and in the news media, that the pro

Doug Ireland: Why Is France Burning?

[Doug Ireland, a longtime radical journalist and media critic, runs the blog DIRELAND.] ... If France's population of immigrant origin -- mostly Arab, some black -- is today quite large (more than 10% of the total population), it is because there was a government and industrial policy during the post-World War II boom years of reconstruction and economic expansion which the French call "les trentes glorieuses" -- the 30 glorious years -- to recruit from France's foreign co

Max Boot: Fires illuminate Europe's problems

BACK IN 1992, when cars were burning in Los Angeles, not Paris, French President Francois Mitterrand thought he knew why. It was, he explained, because of the "absence of social legislation and protection" in a "conservative and economically capitalist" country. "There can be no comparison between us and what happens elsewhere," he assured his countrymen, "for France is the country where the level of social protection is the highest in the world.&

James Pinkerton: The War Between the Civilizations

... From the Euro-jihad in Paris, to the anti-American violence in Iraq, to the intifada in the Palestinian territories, to the recent threat of the president of Iran to "wipe Israel from the map," to the string of terror-bombings in India and Indonesia, the common thread is a basic hostility between the Judeo-Christian West and the Islamic East. That was the argument made by Samuel Huntington, a Harvard professor, in his 1996 book "The Clash of Civilizations and the

Andrew M. Siegel: Alito's Frightening Geniality

[Andrew M. Siegel is an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law and a former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.] The nomination this week of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. to succeed Justice Sandra Day O'Connor set off a predictable scurry to divine what kind of justice he might make and, in particular, to decipher whether the judge commonly tagged "Scalito" would live up to that moniker. The verdict on the latter question was sw

Franklin Foer: How Catholics Became the Brain Behind Evangelical Politics

[Franklin Foer is a senior editor at TNR.] In 1994, the eminent evangelical historian Mark Noll wrote a scorching polemic about his own religion called The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. The book lamented the "intellectual disaster of fundamentalism" and its toll on evangelical political and theological thought. All around him, Noll saw "a weakness for treating the verses of the Bible as pieces in a jigsaw puzzle that needed only to be sorted and then fit together t

Ronald Brownstein: History Suggests Bush Will Have a Hard Time Recovering

...If he stays where he is, Bush could drag Republicans down with him in the 2006 and 2008 elections. The more relevant question is whether Bush can climb out of this hole.... Bush's situation overlaps least with two of the modern two-term presidents. Richard M. Nixon's second term was consumed by scandal, and he resigned in the face of impeachment for his role in the Watergate coverup. Despite Fitzgerald's indictment of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice Presiden

David Horowitz & Ben Johnson: The Wrong Argument, at the Wrong Place, at the Wrong Time

FALSE CHARGES THAT PRESIDENTS LIED US INTO WAR are nothing new, nor are the recriminations leveled against President Bush’s Iraq war the most outrageous on record. The toxic allegation that FDR knew about Pearl Harbor in advance and deliberately allowed the Japanese to destroy the Pacific fleet to get reluctant Americans to join the war was the subject of a congressional investigation at the time, the subject of a book by America's leading historian Charles Beard (President Roosevelt and the Com

David Ignatius: Iraq strategists are looking to Vietnam for models of success?

It's a telling fact that the hot book among Iraq strategists this season is "A Better War," an upbeat account of American counterinsurgency policy in the last years of the Vietnam conflict. I noticed that Centcom commander Gen. John Abizaid was reading it when I traveled with him in September. The influential State Department counselor Philip Zelikow read the book earlier this year. Perhaps it's a measure of just how bad things are going in Iraq that the strategists are lo

Dan Gardner: World Wrongly Honors Equatorial Guinea'sTeodoro Obiang

On a June evening in 2004, Washington's elite gathered at the Marriott hotel for a black-tie dinner in honour of Condoleezza Rice, currently the U. S. Secretary of State but then the national security adviser to President George W. Bush. Rice was to receive the Leon H. Sullivan International Diplomacy Award, an honour named after the black American minister who fought for human rights in Africa and around the world. As Senator Hillary Clinton and others looked on, Rice began her acc