Roundup: Media's Take

July 1, 2005

Richard Cohen: I Changed My Mind ... It Is Vietnam

Richard Cohen, in the Wa Po (6-30-05): About two years ago I sat down with a colleague and explained why Iraq was not going to be Vietnam. Iraq lacked a long-standing nationalist movement and a single charismatic leader like Ho Chi Minh. The insurgents did not have a sanctuary like North Vietnam, which supplied manpower, materiel and leadership, and the rebel cause in Ir

June 30, 2005

Sidney Blumenthal: Bush's Empty Words

Sidney Blumenthal, at Salon.com (6-30-05): "They're just wrong about our strategy. We've had a strategy from the beginning," said President Bush on May 13, 2003. It was only 13 days since he had made his triumphant tailhook landing of an F-18 Hornet on the USS Lincoln ("I flew it"), stepped before the sailors in a flight suit and declared the conflict concluded as a larg

June 28, 2005

Edward Lazarus: Presidents Seeking an Ideological Legacy Have Often Been Sorely Disappointed.

Edward Lazarus, in LA Times (6-26-05)[Mr. Lazarus, a lawyer in private practice, is the author of Closed Chambers: The Rise, Fall, and Future of the Modern Supreme Court.] To extend his political legacy through his Supreme Court appointments, President Bush will have to overcome a fairly common historical phenomenon —

June 28, 2005

Howard Kurtz: Downplaying Durbin, Jumping on Rove

Howard Kurtz, in Washington Post (6-27-05)When Senate Democratic whip Dick Durbin used a Nazi analogy to describe incidents of prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay, it wasn't much of a story at first.Even when White House spokesman Scott McClellan called Durbin's remarks "reprehensible," "NBC Nightly News" gave the matter three sentences and the ot

June 25, 2005

Dan Froomkin: They Don't Apologize

Dan Froomkin, in Washington Post (6-24-05)There are at least two reasons why no one should expect any apologies from Karl Rove or the White House for Rove's controversial comments Tuesday night, in which he described the liberal approach to national security as being weak and possibly even treasonous.1) This White House doesn't apologize. 2) Why apologi

June 24, 2005

Paul Krugman: The War President

Paul Krugman, in the NYT (6-24-05)In this former imperial capital, every square seems to contain a giant statue of a Habsburg on horseback, posing as a conquering hero.America's founders knew all too well how war appeals to the vanity of rulers and their thirst for glory. That's why they took care to deny presidents the kingly privilege of making war at their own discretion. But after

June 24, 2005

Daniel Henninger: On Iraq, Echoes of Vietnam from the Democrats

Daniel Henninger, in the WSJ Opinion Journal (6-24-05):[Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.]Democratic Senator Richard Durbin's now-historic comment likening U.S. detention facilities at Guantanamo to the Nazis, Soviet gulags,

June 24, 2005

Jonathan Chait: Hustling on K Street

Jonathan Chait, in the LA Times (6-24-05):[Mr. Chait is a senior editor at The New Republic, where he has worked since 1995.]When faced with evidence of corruption and sleaze by such Republican stalwarts as Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay, conservatives have responded in three ways.The first is to deny the accusations alt

June 24, 2005

John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge: Cheer Up, Conservatives, You're Still Winning!

John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge, in the WSJ Opinion Journal (6-21-05):[Mr. Micklethwait and Wooldridge, who work for The Economist, are the authors of The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, just out in paperback from Penguin.]The second-century physici

June 23, 2005

Norman Solomon: Voluntary Amnesia in the Service of War

Norman Solomon, in his newsletter (6-23-05):[Norman Solomon is a syndicated columnist on media and politics. His weekly column Media Beat has been in national syndication since 1992. Solomon's new book War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death was published in early summer 2005.] Forget it! That seems to be an unstated motto for American media c

June 23, 2005

Harold Meyerson: No One to Demonize

Harold Meyerson, in the Washington Post (6-22-05):In the absence of an antiwar movement, the American people have turned against the war in Iraq. Those two facts, I suspect, are connected.There was a very real antiwar movement early on. In the months before

June 23, 2005

Sidney Blumenthal: Blinded by the Light at the End of the Tunnel

Sidney Blumenthal, in the Guardian (6-23-05):[Mr. Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is author of The Clinton Wars.] On June 21, network news reported that the Pentagon had claimed that 47 enemy operatives had been killed in Operation Spear in western Iraq. Last mon

June 23, 2005

Patrick Devenny: Amnesty for North Korea

Patrick Devenny, in FrontPageMagazine.com (6-22-05):[Mr. Devenny is the Henry M. Jackson National Security Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington D.C.]The far-Left is nothing if not tenacious. Not only has Amnesty International condemned the United States in the harshest pos

June 22, 2005

Thomas L. Friedman: Bush's Cheney Problem

Thomas L. Friedman, in the NYT (6-22-05):...It is the fact that his vice president has made clear that he is not running for president after Mr. Bush's term expires in 2008. So Mr. Bush has no heir apparent. And that explains, in part, why his second term is drifting aimlessly, disconnected from the problems facing the country."If President Bush had a vice president, or someone

June 22, 2005

Karl Fleming: A Reporter Goes Home to a New South

Karl Fleming, in the LA Times (6-22-05):I was one of the first two reporters to arrive in Philadelphia, Miss., in 1964, on the day Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman went missing. I was there as Newsweek's main reporter on the Southern civil rights beat, and I went directly to the courthouse with Claude Sitton of the Ne

June 22, 2005

Kofi Annan: There's Progress in Iraq

Kofi Annan, in the Washington Post (6-21-05):Today I am traveling to Brussels to join representatives of more than 80 governments and institutions in sending a loud and clear message of support for the political transition in Iraq.A year ago, in Resolution 1546, the U.N. Security Council set out the timetable that Iraq, with the assistance o

June 22, 2005

E. J. Dionne Jr.: How Cheney Fooled Himself

E. J. Dionne Jr., in the Washington Post (6-21-05):President Bush planted the seeds of the destruction of his Iraq policy before the war started. Salvaging the venture will require an unprecedented degree of candor and realism from a White House that was never willing to admit -- even to itself -- how large an undertaking it was asking the American

June 22, 2005

Richard Cohen: Piling on Dick Durbin

Richard Cohen, in the Washington Post (6-21-05):Those of us who have read accounts of the gulag or of the interrogation methods of the Nazis and similar barbaric regimes are familiar with the infinite varieties of torture. Maybe for that reason I did not feel it was anything of a stretch for Sen. Dick Durbin to refer to those regimes when reciting

June 22, 2005

David Ignatius: Rice's Useful Rhetoric

David Ignatius, in the Washington Post (6-22-05):Speeches don't change the world, but they sometimes put down markers for policymakers and help ordinary folks understand what's going on. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's speech in Cairo this week about Middle East democracy struck me as one of those important yardsticks.The initial take on Rice's speec

June 21, 2005

Anthony Lewis: Guantánamo's Long Shadow

Anthony Lewis, in the NYT (6-21-05):When Vice President Dick Cheney said last week that detainees at the American prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, were treated better than they would be "by virtually any other government on the face of the earth," he was carrying on what has become a campaign to whitewash the record of abuses at Guantánamo. Right-wing co