Roundup: Media's Take

July 12, 2005

John M. Broder: Have a Seat, Your Honor (Presidents Wish It Were That Easy)

John M. Broder, in the NYT (7-10-05): WHEN Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase died in 1873, President Ulysses S. Grant did not want to waste time naming a successor. He offered the job to Roscoe Conkling, the mercurial senator from New York, in the carriage ride to Chief Justice Chase's funeral. Mr. Conkling turned him down, which may have been a good thing, as he proved to have something less than a judicial temperament. He resigned his Senate seat in 1881 in pique over federal a

July 12, 2005

David E. Rosenbaum: "No Comment" Is Common at Judicial Hearings

David E. Rosenbaum, in the NYT (7-12-05): Each time senators asked Sandra Day O'Connor about her views on a specific topic like abortion during her Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1981, she looked down at a piece of paper that had been prepared for her and read, "I do not believe as a nominee I could tell you how I would vote."This response, known in the

July 12, 2005

Nick Cohen: We Have to Stop Blaming Ourselves for the Crimes of the Terrorists

Nick Cohen, in the Observer (7-10-05):The instinctive response of a significant portion of the rich world's intelligentsia to the murder of innocents on 11 September was anything but robust. A few, such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, were delighted. The destruction of the World Trade Centre was 'the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos,' declared the composer whose tin ear fail

July 12, 2005

David Horowitz: Taking the Threat to Us Seriously

David Horowitz, at frontpagemag.com (7-11-05):Of course everyone will take from the bombings in London the “lessons” they’re already seeking. The left claims that the bombings show the war in Iraq is producing the terror instead of fighting it, as though attacks on Muslims (so their logic goes) are of concern to the terrorists. Saddam and the terrorists have killed a hundred time

July 11, 2005

Sidney Blumenthal: What's at Stake in the Supreme Court Battle

Sidney Blumenthal, in the Guardian (7-7-05):Ever since Franklin D Roosevelt breached the conservative fortress of the US supreme court, Republicans have dreamed of restoration. Every Republican president attempted to fill the court with judges who would stall, overcome and even reverse change in the law and in American society. President Eisenhower felt that appointing Earl Warren as chief justi

July 11, 2005

Douglas McCollam: Why the Plame Case Is So Scary

Douglas McCollam, in the Columbia Journalism Review (March/April 2005): In November 1969 Paul Branzburg, a twenty-eight-year-old reporter with the Louisville Courier-Journal, spent a few days hanging out with two local men for a story about how they planned to clear $5,000 making and selling a batch of hashish. The resulting article, THE HASH THEY MAKE ISN'T TO EAT, ran in the paper’s November 15 edition. In it

July 8, 2005

Patricia J. Williams: Dick Durbin Was Wrong, But ...

Patricia J. Williams, in the Nation (7-18/25-05): A few weeks ago, I was going through some of my father's photo albums from the early 1930s, when he was in high school in Georgia. Among them was a picture of a prison gang, of black men dressed in black-and-white-striped uniforms, chained at the ankles, hoeing the field next-door to the school. At the moment the album fell open to this particular picture, th

July 8, 2005

Louis Menand: What Is Wanted in a Justice Is ...

Louis Menand, in the New Yorker (7-11-05): Theodore Roosevelt appointed Oliver Wendell Holmes to the United States Supreme Court, in 1902, because he believed that Holmes would be a reliable vote in cases arising out of Roosevelt’s trust-busting crusade. He had grounds for his faith: he had interviewed Holmes for the job himself, and Holmes had written pro-labor decisions as a member of the Massa

July 8, 2005

Norman Solomon Interview: The Lies Presidents Tell in Wartime

Normon Solomon, interviewed by Adrian Zupp (July 2005): [Norman Solomon is a syndicated columnist on media and politics, as well as founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, a national consortium of policy researchers and analy

July 8, 2005

Norman Solomon: Terrorism, “the War on Terror” and the Message of Carnage

Norman Solomon, in his weekly column (7-8-05): When the French government suggested a diplomatic initiative that might interfere with the White House agenda for war, the president responded by saying that the proposed scenario would “ratify terror.” The date was July 24, 1964, the president was Lyndon Johnson and the war was in Vietnam. Four decades later, the anti-terror rationale is not just another argument for revving up the U.S. war machinery. Fighting

July 7, 2005

Lou Cannon: How Reagan Came to Pick Sandra Day O'Connor

Lou Cannon, in the NYT (7-7-05):IN setting out his domestic agenda, President George W. Bush has made a point of following in the ideological footsteps of President Ronald Reagan. But if Mr. Bush wants to emulate his role model with his first Supreme Court appointment, he should give greater weight to politics and intuition than ideology. That was, after all, how Mr. Reagan chose Sa

July 7, 2005

Terry McDermott: Who Were the 9-11 Hijackers?

Terry McDermott, author of the new book Perfect Soldiers: The Hijackers: Who They Were, Why They Did It, interviewed by Jamie Glazov, at frontpagemag.com, (7-6-05): FP What led you to write this book?McDermott I’m a reporter at the Los Angeles Times. The book originated in an assign

July 6, 2005

James Pinkerton: What the "War of the Worlds" Says About Our Fears in a Post-9-11 World

James Pinkerton, in Newsday (7-5-05):... [T]he human mind is given to imagination and extrapolation. So while H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds," published in England in 1898, was ostensibly about an attack from Martians - at a time when most people believed that Mars did, indeed, harbor intelligent life - the novel was also written in response to fears of a rising militari

July 5, 2005

Martin E. Marty: Did Jesus Believe in the Rapture?

Martin E. Marty, in Sightings, the newsletter of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School (7-4-05): [Mr. Marty is Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Modern Christianity in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago and a member of the Committee on the History of Culture.] When I use the word "literally," I mean "literally" -- not metaphorically, as in "it was literally raining c

July 1, 2005

James Carroll: What We Can Learn from Our Reactrion to Billy Graham's Crusades

James Carroll, in the Boston Gl;obe (6-28-05): ...   Much is made of connections between right-wing politics and conservative Christian belief, with debate over such issues as life and death, homosexuality, textbooks, and even foreign policy being framed by fervently held dogma. President Bush and other Republicans are drawing powerful energy from this combination of politics and religion, a mix that also drives [Billy] Graham's rejuvenated appeal. His long-tim

July 1, 2005

Paul Loeb: When Soldiers Die in a Bad War

Paul Loeb, at TomDispatch.com (6-30-05): [Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, winner of the Nautilus Award for best social change book of last year. He's also the author of Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time and three other books.]"They died for their country," read the white granite m

July 1, 2005

David Glenn: When Justices Retire

David Glenn, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (7-1-05): "This is terrible." According to Newsweek, that is what Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said at a party on election night in 2000, when Al Gore seemed to have won. Her husband reportedly went on to say that the Supreme Court justice wanted to retire, but would not do so if Mr. Gore would choose her replacement. In his 2003 book Deciding to Leave: T

July 1, 2005

George Beres: A July 4th to Lament What's Happened to Our Country

George Beres, in a piece sent to HNN (7-1-05):[George Beres, retired in Eugene, Ore., is a first-generation American whose parents migrated here from Greece in search of greater freedom and truer independence.]Born in 1933, I've lived almost one-third the life of my nation, born in 1776. In those spans, much has evolved-- but probably nothing more than in our gradual slide away from national integrity as we celebrate our country's birthday. As a boy, I did what

July 1, 2005

Brendan Miniter: The Defeatists Learned All the Wrong Lessons from Vietnam

Brendan Miniter, in the WSJ (6-28-05): At a press conference with the new Iraqi prime minister last week, a reporter noted slipping public opinion of the war and asked President Bush if his administration is now stuck in the mud. Mr. Bush responded with a joke, saying the reporter might even call it a "quagmire." The reference is to Vietnam, of course, and some in the press corps these days hardl

July 1, 2005

Amitav Ghosh: Imperial Powers Love Setting Up Prisons

Amitav Ghosh, in the Nation (7-18-05):When the story of the abuses at Abu Ghraib broke, many were surprised that the American military had chosen to take over a prison complex at a time when libraries, museums, hospitals and weapons depots were unguarded. But this focus on incarceration has a long pedigree in the history of European--and specifically English--military expansion. It goes back to the seventeenth