Roundup: Media's Take

June 21, 2005

William Raspberry: A 'Sorry' Excuse From Cochran

William Raspberry, in the Washington Post (6-20-05):...But when the U.S. Senate sought to speak to that past, with a resolution of apology for the body's failure to enact anti-lynching legislation, missing from a list of 85 sponsors were Mississippi's Republican senators, Trent Lott and Thad Cochran.Okay, maybe I wasn't too surprised by Lott

June 21, 2005

Jill Stewart: Rise of the Political Machines

Jill Stewart, in NYT (6-20-05)Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, may have electrified his supporters by deciding to hold a special election in November on his reforms for electoral redistricting, the state budget and teacher tenure. The trouble is that Mr. Schwarzenegger may have electrified his detractors even more, and his needless rush to enact his worthy measures thro

June 21, 2005

Mark Steyn: Durbin Slanders His Own Country

Mark Steyn, in the Chicago Sun-Times (6-19-05):Throughout the last campaign season, senior Democrats had a standard line in their speeches, usually delivered with righteous anger, about how "nobody has a right to question my patriotism!" Given that nobody was questioning their patriotism, it seemed an odd thing to harp on about. But, aware of their touchiness on the subject,

June 20, 2005

Alan Bock: When Judicial Fantasies Take a Toll

Alan Bock, in the OCR (6-16-05):[Mr. Bock is Sr. editorial writer at the Orange County Register and author of Waiting to Inhale: The Politics of Medical Marijuana.]Despite its considerable impact on the rest of society, the judicial system often operates like a hermetically sealed environment, safely locked away from the di

June 19, 2005

Laura Wexler: Why an Apology From the Senate Can't Make Amends

Laura Wexler, in the Washington Post (6-19-05):[Ms. Wexler is the author of Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America (Scribner).]"Dear Pres. Truman," the letter begins, "I am a little girl about 12 year old and I think that someone up there in Wash DC ought to put a stop to these murder . . . because it is getting terr

June 19, 2005

Robert Kagan: Whether This War Was Worth It

Robert Kagan, in the Washington Post (6-19-05):Serious scholars still debate whether the Civil War was necessary, never mind the more obvious "wars of choice" such as World War I, the War of 1812, the Spanish-American War, the Korean War, wars in Vietnam and Kosovo, and the Persian Gulf War. To a certain brand of American isolationist, even World Wa

June 19, 2005

Jim Hoagland: Third World Civics Lesson

Jim Hoagland, for the Washington Post (6-19-05):The enormous amount of chutzpah required for European Union leaders to fly to Baghdad and lecture the Iraqis on constitution-writing and consensus-building may never be quantified precisely, but it was readily available to Jack Straw and Co.The foreign secretary of Great Britain, a country that has never written

June 19, 2005

David Gelernter: We Are Our History -- Don't Forget It

David Gelernter, for the LA Times (6-17-05):...Ignorance of history destroys our judgment. Consider Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill), who just compared the Guantanamo Bay detention center to Stalin's gulag and to the death camps of Hitler and Pol Pot -- an astonishing, obscene piece of ignorance. Between 15 million and 30 million people died fr

June 18, 2005

Colbert I. King: The Filibuster: A Tool for Good and Bad

Colbert I. King, in the Washington Post (6-18-05):Since reaching the so-called bipartisan compromise on judicial nominees -- in which Democrats were sold the idea of laying down their arms, i.e., the filibuster -- the Senate has confirmed six of the Bush administration's most conservative judges, including the most extremist: Priscilla Owen, Janice Rogers Brown a

June 17, 2005

Daniel Henninger: Is America Losing the Will to Fight?

Daniel Henninger, from the WSJ Opinion Journal (6-17-05):[Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.]...It is possible to extend this headline exercise of Iraq news to the horizon. As a physical principle no less established than the second law of thermodynamics, U.S. opinion polls in June outputted these headlines and stories:

June 17, 2005

Max Boot: Defend America, Become American

Max Boot, from the LA Times (6-16-05):The Army is getting desperate. Having fallen 25% short of already reduced recruiting goals last month, it is raising enlistment bonuses to $40,000 in some cases and lowering standards to accept and retain soldiers who would have been turned away in years past. A minor criminal record? No high school diploma? Uncle Sam

June 17, 2005

Peter Bergen and Swati Pandey: The Madrassa Myth

Peter Bergen and Swati Pandey, from the NYT (6-14-05):[Peter Bergen, the author of Holy War Inc., is a fellow at the New America Foundation. Swati Pandey is a research associate there.]It is one of the widespread assumptions of the war on terrorism that the Muslim religious schools known as madrassas, catering to families that are often poor, are graduating students

June 17, 2005

Howard Kurtz: Backlash on the Left

Howard Kurtz , in WashingtonPost.com (6-15-05)It's official: The Democrats are fed up with the press.From the day George W. Bush won the Florida recount, resentment toward the MSM [main stream media] has been building on the left, to the point where it may well match the intensity on the right. Liberal bias? Ha! These journalists roll over for conservatives an

June 17, 2005

Robert J. Samuelson: The End of Europe

Robert J. Samuelson, in the Washington Post (6-15-05)Europe as we know it is slowly going out of business. Since French and Dutch voters rejected the proposed constitution of the European Union, we've heard countless theories as to why: the unreality of trying to forge 25 E.U. countries into a United States of Europe; fear of ceding excessive power to Bruss

June 17, 2005

Peggy Noonan: We Need PBS, but We Could Do Without the Politics

Peggy Noonan, in the WSJ Opinion Journal (6-16-05)[Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal]You know what would be fun, and actually helpful? If in the latest struggle over funding for public television, people said what they know to be true.The argument, once again, is about whether PBS has a liberal bias. There are charges and countercharges, studies, specific

June 17, 2005

WSJ Editorial: The Doughnut Democrats

WSJ Opinion Journal Editorial (6-16-05)...[W]e aren't saying that modern Washington Democrats are socialists, Party Chairman Howard Dean notwithstanding. But this also isn't your father's Democratic Party. As tough as these columns have been on the current Republican majority in Congress, Democrats bear their share of the blame for its dysfunction.The Democratic leadership has arguabl

June 17, 2005

Jonathan Schell: The Exception Is the Rule

Jonathan Schell, from Tomdispatch.com (6-16-05):[Mr. Schell, author of The Unconquerable World, is the Nation Institute's Harold Willens Peace Fellow. The Jonathan Schell Reader was recently published by Nation Books.]Sometimes the truth of a large, confusing historical enterprise can be glimpsed in a single news report. Such is the case in regard to the Iraq War, it seems

June 16, 2005

Alan Block: Europe Interrupted

Alan Bock, in the Orange County Register (6-12-05):For decades now, advocates of a "greater Europe" - to serve as a counterbalance to the United States, to secure greater prosperity for European inhabitants, to restore former glory, or perhaps to enhance the power of European Union bureaucrats in Brussels - has been a dream of European statesmen, leaders

June 16, 2005

R. Emmitt Tyrell: Pariah Status For Dean

R. Emmett Tyrrell, in the New York Sun (6-16-05):[Mr. Tyrrell is the founder and editor in chief of the American Spectator, a contributing editor to The New York Sun, and an adjunct scholar at the Hudson Institute.] He is a skilled politician talking to his party's activists, and this "raw meat" is just

June 16, 2005

Anthony Gancarski: Karen Kwiatkowski Deep Throats Bush

Anthony Gancarski, in Frontpagemag.com (6-16-05):Former Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, writing at Hate America Right websiteLewRockwell.com, makes the self-serving and somewhat ahistorical argument that Deep Throat was just anot