Roundup: Media's Take

James Castagnera: In 2005 the Law Still Wrestles with Witchcraft

With Halloween less than a week away, the 21 st century is nearly five years old. Yet in our age of the Internet and laser surgery and space travel and extreme makeovers, witches and witchcraft continue to fascinate. For instance, when I googled “witchcraft” on my PC, Google came back with 26,001 web sites. The one I like best is www.academyofsorcery.com, where you’re asked, “Are you looking for Easy-to-Do, Easy-to-Read R

Sidney Blumenthal: Conservatives are raging against Bush to hide the utter failure of their ideology

President Bush is the most conservative president in modern times. He consciously modeled himself as the opposite of his father's split political personality. Fiercely attacked as a betrayer, the elder Bush was partially defeated by a conservative revolt. In a classic case of reaction formation, George W. Bush was determined never to make an enemy on the right. President Bush brought the neoconservatives, banished by Ronald Reagan and Bush Sr., back into government, and followed th

Oliver Kamm: Noam Chomsky's Dismal Record

Last month, the political journals Foreign Policy and Prospect held a joint poll to rank the world’s top public intellectuals. Choosing from a list of 100 people, over 20,000 people cast their vote. The winner – reportedly by an overwhelming margin – was the Hate-America guru Noam Chomsky.... In his book Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, Richard Posner noted that "a successful academic may be able to use his success to reach the general public on matters about which h

Peggy Noonan: Testing Time for Bush

We make presidents crazy. They receive endless encomiums from friends and staff telling them of their brilliance, their courage, their foresight. "God sent you to lead us." And the authors of such statements aren't always or even usually sucking up. They mean it. They're excited, fervent, full of belief. All a president has to do to get a standing ovation is walk into a room. He signs his name to a placard at a rally and it's treated as a historic relic--"He touched

Jonathan Tepperman: Why the Bushies Love Big-Picture Intellectuals (And the Problem with That)

[Jonathan Tepperman is the deputy managing editor of Foreign Affairs.] The library of books on American foreign policy, which has swollen rapidly since Americans rediscovered the world four years ago, can be split into two basic types. First are the Big Ideas books: eye-catching volumes with a single, sexy, overarching theme, often one that promises to revolutionize the world. Then, on the back shelves, are the more nuanced guidebooks, sober, sometimes tedious tomes that scout the t

James Ricci: Veteran Pilot's Airport Buzz Reflects How Technology Has Changed Air Force, Military Behavior

At a quarter past noon on Jan. 21, a U.S. Navy F-18 Super Hornet jet fighter flown by a combat-tested pilot named Richard Webb appeared over the Edna Valley and streaked toward San Luis Obispo County Regional Airport. On its first pass, the Super Hornet screamed along at more than 650 miles an hour, just 96 feet above the main runway. Soon it circled back, touched down on the tarmac for an instant, then went into a steep climb, afterburner roaring, and disappeared in the skies.

Michael Hill: Hussein's Trial Follows Path Taken By Other Nations

As the trial of Saddam Hussein was set to open today, Iraq joins the long list of nations - from Germany to South Africa, Yugoslavia to Cambodia - that have tried to deal with a violent and oppressive past to help carve out a more peaceful future based on the rule of law. The experience of these countries has shown that it is a difficult task that could either rally Iraqi society around its nascent democracy or deepen the divisions that threaten to pull the country apart.

Victor Davis Hanson: Pelopennesian War Analogized To Present Iraq War

[Victor Davis Hanson, VICTOR DAVIS HANSON is a classicist and military historian and the author of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War," published by Random House this month.] Modernists like to believe that we have entered an entirely new era of armed conflict. To some military thinkers, it's the primordial nature of the terrorists' beheadings, suicide bombings and improvised explosive devices that has marked a completely new

David Streitfeld: U.S. Labor In Retreat As Global Forces Overpower Compensation

Workers at auto parts maker Delphi Corp. will be asked this week to take a two-thirds pay cut. It's one of the most drastic wage concessions ever sought from unionized employees. Workers at General Motors Corp., meanwhile, tentatively agreed on Monday to absorb billions of dollars in healthcare costs. Ford Motor Co. and DaimlerChrysler employees are certain to face similar demands. The forces affecting Delphi and GM workers are extreme versions of what's occurring acros

Malcolm Farr: Long-time Australian Politician. Kim Beazley, Still Trying To Find Identity

Kim Beazley today marks a quarter of a century in Parliament with celebrations marred by opponents insisting no one knows what he stands for. It's a remarkable record of political service, that makes the Liberal attacks on Beazley particularly extraordinary. The suggestion is that, after 25 years, the Labor Leader has managed a profile which contains little other than the fact he is a nice bloke. Mark Latham's rancid recollections gave that profile a jolt b

G. Jefferson Price III: Racism Lingers in Hispaniola

[G. Jefferson Price III is a former foreign correspondent and an editor at The Sun who has been traveling on behalf of Catholic Relief Services.] The name of the river here that separates Haiti and the Dominican Republic is a reminder of the dark and bloody history of the two countries that share the island known as Hispaniola. It is called the Massacre River. Whatever the reason for that name, it must evoke an event seven decades ago when the Dominican dic

Martin E. Marty: Evangelicals Who Want to Run the Show

This is not a column about who should be on the U. S. Supreme Court. It is about how various religious groups in pluralist America, this time particularly the agents of the Christian Right, conceive their contributions and hoped-for payoffs. It is occasioned by the stream of reports in print and voicings on talk radio from enraged members of this Right, who feel betrayed because they did not all get a candidate who would declare him- or herself on controversial Court issues. David

Norman Solomon: Judith Miller, the Fourth Estate and the Warfare State

More than any other New York Times reporter, Judith Miller took the lead with stories claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Now, a few years later, she’s facing heightened scrutiny in the aftermath of a pair of articles that appeared in the Times on Sunday -- a lengthy investigative piece about Miller plus her own first-person account of how she got entangled in the case of the Bush administration’s “outing” of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent. It now seems that

James L. Payne: Deconstructing Nation Building

[Political scientist James L. Payne’s latest book is A History of Force: Exploring the Worldwide Movement Against Habits of Coercion, Bloodshed, and Mayhem.] When plunging into war, hope generally triumphs over experience. The past—the quiet statistical tabulation of what happened when this was tried 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

Frank Furedi: The Market in Fear

[Frank Furedi is professor of sociology at the University of Kent. His new book, The Politics of Fear: Beyond Left and Right, is published by Continuum.] ... In one sense, competing claims about what to fear is not a phenomenon unique to current times. During the Cold War, ideological conflicts were often conducted through the medium of fear. While some politicians argued for expanding arms expenditure by raising alarm about the threat of communism, others demanded disarmament and appeal

Dick Kreck: Brewers Seek Revival Of Mead

There were 377 breweries at this year's Great American Beer Festival. And one meadery. Which is just fine with David Myers, founder and "Chairman of the Mead" for Redstone Meadery in Boulder. It's his kind of crowd - potential lovers of mead. Myers, whose grandfather was founder of London Fog coats, has made it his mission to revive from obscurity what is generally regarded as the world's oldest fermented beverage. "I'm not trying to reinvent

Joshua Kurlantzick : What the return of Japanese militarism means for Japan

In the halls of an office building near the Diet, Japan's parliament, aides are scurrying down corridors, planning for an upcoming national election. But Masaaki Nakayama, a former longtime MP from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), isn't focused on the poll. In a small hideaway office, he's drawing me a map of what he says is China's nefarious history of territorial conquest in Asia. Since the map goes back several thousand years, Nakayama has been drawing for more than an hour, his wri

Max Boot: The Bottom Line for Bush

COMMENTATORS ARE writing George W. Bush's political obituary. And why not? Things do seem pretty grim for the president, with surveys indicating that public disapproval (53% in Realclearpolitics.com's poll of polls) outweighs support (42.2%) by a hefty margin. The top item on his second-term agenda — Social Security reform — has no chance of passage. His party is mired in scandal, with former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and ex-federal procurement czar David Safavian under indic

George F. Will: Unstable Earth

Earth, that living, seething, often inhospitable and not altogether intelligently designed thing, has again shrugged, and tens of thousands of Pakistanis are dead. That earthquake struck 10 months after the undersea quake that caused the tsunami that killed 285,000 in Asia. Americans reeling from Katrina, and warned of millions of potential deaths from avian flu, have a vague feeling of pervasive menace from things out of control. Too vague, according to Simon Winchester. His timely

Brendan Miniter: What the Miers fight means for future nominees, and for politics in Washington

[Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com.] In contrast to John Roberts, who sailed through Senate confirmation, Harriet Miers is taking no shortage of criticism from Republicans, many of whom admit they know little if anything about her. Sen. Arlen Specter says she needs a "crash course" in constitutional law, while admitting he didn't ask her any constitutional law questions when he met with her "because I don't think she's ready to face