Roundup: Media's Take

May 13, 2005

Bill Kristol: Break the Filibuster

William Kristol, in the Weekly Standard (5-9-05): SUDDENLY DEMOCRATS ARE WRAPPING THEMSELVES in the Constitution. Emphasizing his commitment to maintaining the filibuster as a way to stop President Bush's judicial nominees, Senate Democratic whip Richard Durbin said last week, "We believe it's a constitutional issue. . . . It's a matter of having faith in the Constitution." The tro

May 13, 2005

Mark Ames: The Latvia President Bush Didn't Talk About

Mark Ames, in the Nation (5-23-05): [Mark Ames, editor of Moscow's alternative paper The eXile (http://www.exile.ru), is author of the upcoming Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (Soft Skull). Many analysts are saying that President Bush's decision to visit Latvia just two days before heading to Moscow to celebrate the vic

May 13, 2005

Sidney Blumenthal: Why Tony Blair Could Be the Last Prime Minister to Embrace a U.S. President's Mendacity

Sidney Blumenthal, in the Guardian (5-12-05):Tony Blair's near-fatal political strategy inadvertently but inevitably exposed him to the dilemma of his special relationship with George Bush. Blair had attempted to wage a campaign that sk

May 12, 2005

Jess Bravin: Officials at Guantanamo May Be Lucky They Won't Be Held to the Same Standards America Held the Japanese to

Jess Bravin, at the website of Japan Focus (May 2005):[Mr. Bravin is a reporter for the WSJ. These two articles appeared in the Wall Street Journal on April 6 and 7 in 2005.] April 6 During World War II, the American strategic bombing campaign targeted Tokyo and other Japanese cities. The U.S. considered the tactic legitimate, and eventually secured Japan's unconditional surrender by destroy

May 12, 2005

Thomas Friedman: Humiliation ... a Terribly Underestimated Force in History

Thomas Friedman, in his book, The World Is Flat (2005): [T]alk to young Arabs and Muslims anywhere, and ... the word"humiliation" always come up very quickly in conversation. It was revealing that when Mahathir Mohammed made his October 16, 2003, farewell speech as prime minister of Malaysia at an Islamic summit he was hosting in his own country, he built his remarks to his fellow Muslim leaders around the question of why their civilization had become so humiliated--a term he used

May 12, 2005

George Will: Why Paul Wolfowitz Insists He's Not a Wilsonian

George Will, in the Wa Po (5-12-05): "I can't tell you," Paul Wolfowitz says with justifiable asperity, "how much I resent being called a Wilso nian." As he retires as deputy secretary of defense and becomes head of the World Bank, the man most responsible for the doctrinal justification of the Iraq war, who has been characterized as representing Woodrow Wilson's ut

May 12, 2005

Catherine Donaldson-Evans: The President's New Speech Writer

Catherine Donaldson-Evans, at FoxNews.com (5-10-05):It's a White House job with an indisputable allure — one that didn't exist until the 20th century but has grown into a vital and respected position within the presidency. Speechwriters are to the man in the Oval Office what screenwriters are to characters in a film. They're the ones who write the lines — in the appropriate voice, of c

May 11, 2005

Holly Yeager: The Republican Attack on the Judiciary

Holly Yeager, in the London Financial Times (5-10-05): Over the past three months Regnery, a small rightwing publisher based in Washington, has had a provocative new hit on its hands. Regnery made a splash during the presidential campaign with Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry. Now the hot title is Men in Black, in which Mark Levin - a radio host and president of Landmark Legal Foundation, a conservative advocacy group - sets out &

May 11, 2005

George Mitchell: The Not-So-Secret History of Filibusters

Former Sen. George Mitchell, in the NYT (5-10-05): Since 1789, the Senate has rejected nearly 20 percent of all nominees to the Supreme Court, many without an up-or-down vote.In 1968 Republican senators used a filibuster to block voting on President Lyndon B. Johnson's nominee for chief justice of the Supreme Court. During the debate, a Republican senator, Robert Griffin, said:"It is important to realize that it has not been unusual for the Senate to indicate its lack o

May 10, 2005

James L. Payne: The Prospects for Democracy in High-Violence Societies

James L. Payne, at the website of the libertarian Independent Institute (Spring 2005): What does it take to implant democracy in a foreign land? For more than a century now, the United States has been sending troops into troubled countries, holding elections, and hoping democracy will take root. The results, overall, have been disappointing.The results of one of the first efforts,

May 10, 2005

Jude Wanniski: Our North Korean Mess

From the website of Lew Rockwell.com (5-27-05): Memo To: Nicholas Kristof, NYTimes From: Jude Wanniski Re: Just for the Fun of ItYour column today on North Korea and the six nuclear weapons you say it has produced since George W. Bush has been President is probably wrong in assuming it really does have nukes, even though it now says so, but it is correct in asking why in the world our government h

May 7, 2005

Sidney Blumenthal: George W's Incredibly Shrinking Presidency

Sidney Blumenthal, in Salon (5-5-05):On the 99th day of his second term, one day short of the fabled 100 days used to mark a president's progress since Franklin D. Roosevelt's whirlwind beginning of the New Deal, President Bush held a press conference to explain how far he had gotten in undoing the New Deal. Bush had allotted 60 days for a nationwide tour to sell his plan

May 7, 2005

Peter Carlson: Is Bob Jones University Changing?

Peter Carlson, in the Washington Post (5-5-05):Is Bob Jones University going to the Devil? Could America's most famous bastion of hard-core Christian fundamentalism and pugnacious political conservatism be getting a little . . . soft? There are signs, portents. In 2000, Bob Jones III, president of the university and grandson of the Founder, announced on "

May 6, 2005

Scot Lehigh: The Senate Was Never Supposed to Rubber Stamp Court Nominees

Scot Lehigh, in the Boston Globe (5-4-05): IN THE battle over the judiciary, the most powerful idea the White House has going for it is that a president deserves an up or down vote on all his judicial nominees. Lately, that assertion has become a virtual GOP mantra and it certainly sounds persuasive on first hearing. Yet what that notion really boils down to is this: President Bush has a majority in the Senate, and thus he is entitled to his way, whether the

May 4, 2005

David Ignatius: What the Civil War Can Teach UIs About Iraq and Successful Occupations (As Taught by James McPherson)

David Ignatius, in the Wa Po (5-4-05):The most famous battlefield of the American Civil War might seem an unlikely place to look for lessons about Iraq. But as historian James McPherson leads a group of Pentagon officials in a discussion of postwar reconstruction, some startling common themes emerge.... To prepare for the discussion, McPh

May 3, 2005

Tom Malinowski: Repeating Clinton's Mistake (Re: Darfur)

Tom Malinowski, in the Wa Po (5-3-05):[The writer is Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch.]In his willingness to confront evil head-on, President Bush likes to think he's more decisive than that mushy-headed multilateralist Bill Clinton. But when I look at the Bush administration's response to what it has itself called genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan,

May 2, 2005

Peter Maass: How El Salvador Became a Model for Counterinsurgency in Iraq

Peter Maass, in a cover story for the NYT Magazine (5-1-05): [In this article Mr. Maass profiles Adnan Thabit, an Iraqi general from Saddam's era who has been put in charge of a special force of 5,000 Iraqis (mostly Sunnis) whose goal is to root out the insurgency. Thabit operates with the advice of James Steele "one of the United States military's top experts on counterinsurgency. S

May 2, 2005

Sheryl Gay Stolberg: Sen. Frist May Be Right: that No Nominee with Majority Support Has Been Denied an Up or Down Vote

Sheryl Gay Stolberg, in the NYT (5-1-05): As part of his crusade to bar Democrats from using the filibuster to block President Bush's judicial nominees, the Senate Republican leader, Bill Frist, has a stock saying: "Never in the history of the Senate had a judicial nominee with majority support been denied an up-or-down vote, until two years ago."Democrats say Dr. Frist is wrong. In fact, the

May 2, 2005

Tim Russert: Repubs Blocked Judges from the Judiciary Commitee When Clinton Was President

From a transcript of Meet the Press (5-1-05):MR. TIM RUSSERT (Host): Let me turn to federal judges. Court of Appeals: Bill Clinton nominated 51 people to the Court of Appeals. Thirty-five were confirmed. Sixteen were blocked by the Republicans by not giving hearings or not allowed out of committee. George Bush nominated 52. Thirty-five were confirmed because the Democrats threatened filibuster. They don't run the comm

May 2, 2005

Martin E. Marty: Is the U.S. in Danger of Becoming a Theocracy?

Martin E. Marty, in Sightings, the newsletter of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School (5-2-05): In last week's U.S. News & World Report, Michael Barone reassured readers that the United States is not "headed toward a theocracy .... [W]hether the United States is on its way to becoming a theocracy is actually a silly question" ("Faith in Our Future?" April 25, 2005). He went on to claim that religion is a more up-front pub