Roundup: Media's Take

April 29, 2005

Renato Redentor Constantino: Echoes of the War to Put Down the Insurrection in the Philippines

Renato Redentor Constantino, at tomdispatch.com (4-29-05):[Renato Redentor Constantino is a writer based in the Philippines. Constantino is also a full-time regional campaigner for Greenpeace in Southeast Asia. Previously, Constantino managed the energy campaign team of Greenpeace in China. His work includes documenting the impact of global warming and dirty energy as well as securing beachheads for the

April 29, 2005

Dana Milbank: Bush's Challenge and FDR's Were Far Different in Promoting Social Security Reform

Dana Milbank, in the Washington Post (4-26-05):... Roosevelt 's struggles in 1935 were in some ways similar to President Bush's attempt to steer a revised Social Security program through Congress in 2005 -- but their legislative styles are vastly different. Like FDR's, Bush's party enjoys control of both chambers of Congress, though by smaller margins. Like FDR,

April 29, 2005

Filibusters: Constitutional Option or the Nuclear Option?

Warren Richey, in the Christian Science Monitor (4-25-05): ... Republicans say the combination of Rule V [ "Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings."] and open-ended Democratic filibusters of judges can result in unconstitutional entrenchment, rendering Rule V invalid. This is why some Republicans are calling it the "constitutional option." Democrats say the rules are clear and fair, and should not be unilaterally changed in the middle of a

April 29, 2005

Dick Morris: Let the Dems Try to Talk a Nomination to Death!

Dick Morris, at frontpagemag.com (4-29-05):The Republican leaders in the Senate do not have to make the false choice between endless toleration of Democratic filibusters that enfeeble their majority and the so-called “nuclear option” — a ruling that filibusters of jud

April 29, 2005

Stephen J. Morris: The New Left Was Wrong About Vietnam and Today Is Wrong About Iraq

Stephen J. Morris, in the WSJ (4-29-05): [Mr. Morris is a fellow at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC and author of "Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia" (Stanford University Press, 1999).]Thirty years after the fall of Saigon the received wisdom among large sections of Western academia and journalism is li

April 28, 2005

David Broder: Bush Overreached

David Broder, in the Wa Po (4-28-05):In January, when interviewing at the White House on the prospects for President Bush's second term, I found that the reelected chief executive had instilled a belief among his close associates that the bigger and bolder the goals they set for themselves, the more they would accomplish. Whether it was political strategist Karl Rove or b

April 28, 2005

Donald Kirk: We Must Not Repeat the Mistake of Vietnam and Leave Before the Job Is Done

Donald Kirk, in the WSJ (4-28-05):[Mr. Kirk is an American correspondent who covered the wars in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos from the arrival of U.S. troops in 1965 until the departure of the last combat unit in 1974. He covered Iraq last year.] ... Those who think final defeat was inevitable and the United States could or should have done nothing more for the

April 28, 2005

Pete du Pont: So Now Dems Like Filibusters?

Pete du Pont, in the WSJ (4-27-05):Sen. Barbara Boxer is a longtime opponent of judicial nomination filibusters. Or she was. Suddenly the light has dawned, and she realizes how wrong she was to oppose them: "I thought I knew everything. I didn't get it. . . . I am here to say I was totally wrong." Other Democratic senators have had similar changes in belief: Joe Biden and Ro

April 22, 2005

Josef Joffe: A German Pope--Really?

Josef Joffe, in the WSJ (4-22-05):[Mr. Joffe is publisher and editor of the German weekly Die Zeit and Abramowitz Fellow of Stanford's Hoover Institution.]... Those who insist on putting a national label on Benedict XVI should actually prefer "Roman" to "German." For the last quarter-century, his spiritual and physical home has been the Vatican. More importantly, he was no believer in decentralization, an issue particularly dear to the German bishops

April 22, 2005

Andrew J. Bacevich: The New American Militarism

Andrew J. Bacevich, at www.tomdispatch.com (4-20-05):[Andrew J. Bacevich is Professor of International Relations and Director of the Center for International Relations at Boston University. A graduate of West Point and a Vietnam veteran, he has a doctorate in history from Princeton and was a Bush Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He is the author of several books, including the just published The New American Militaris

April 22, 2005

Jeffrey Hart: Populism, Evangelicalism--And the Bush Administration

Jeffrey Hart, in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (4-17-05):The Bush presidency often is called conservative. That is a mistake. It is populist and radical, and its principal energies have roots in American history, and these roots are not conservative. To understand what Bush's evangelicalism consists of, a glance at its history in America will be useful. Evangelicalism has always been based upon a sense of personal sin, which its preachers tend to excite, and r

April 21, 2005

George Weigel: What It Means to Be a Benedict

George Weigel, in the WSJ (4-21-05): [Mr. Weigel, senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, is the author, most recently, of "The Cube and the Cathedral," published this month by Basic Books.]Benedict XVI: The name is the program, and the name is the man.St. Benedict was born in 480, in a small Umbrian village. In 529, as a monastic

April 21, 2005

Sidney Blumenthal: Holy Warriors ... George Bush and Pope Benedict XVI

Sidney Blumenthal, at Salon.com (4-22-05): President Bush treated his final visit with Pope John Paul II in Vatican City on June 4, 2004, as a campaign stop. After enduring a public rebuke from the pope about the Iraq war, Bush lobbied Vatican officials to help him win the election. "Not all the American bishops are with me," he complained, according to the National Catholic Reporter. He p

April 21, 2005

David Ignatius: It's Not Just Bush Who's Nationalistic ... The Whole World Is

David Ignatius, in the WSJ (4-20-05):A funny thing is happening on the way to a globalized economy: Even as national boundaries are getting fuzzier because of free trade and instant flows of capital, the world is becoming more nationalistic. In this new nationalism, as in most things, America has been leading the way. American chauvinism and flag-waving are n

April 19, 2005

Fred Hiatt: China Is in No Position to Lecture Japan About Facing the Truth About History

Fred Hiatt, in the Wa Po (4-18-05):... There's no doubt, as [Chinese] Premier Wen [recently implied in opposing a seat on the Security Council for Japan], that some Japanese have a hard time admitting the terrible things their troops did in China, Korea and other occupied Asian countries before and during World War II. Apologies sometimes seem to be mumbled, and textbooks sometime

April 18, 2005

Ben Yagoda: Why We Got a Better Feel for What It Was Like to be a Soldier in WW II

Ben Yagoda, in the Columbia Journalism Review: At 5:30 a.m. on February 24, 1941, a twenty-one-year-old Dartmouth graduate named Walter Bernstein reported to Draft Board 179 in his native borough of Brooklyn. He and his fellow future soldiers were greeted by a member of the draft board: “a small, round, baldheaded man,” Bernstein wrote later, “who came in smiling and rubbing his hands, and immediately kno

April 18, 2005

Nicholas D. Kristof: Our History of Ignoring Massacres (Continued)

Nicholas D. Kristof, in the NYT (4-17-05): When Turkey was massacring Armenians in 1915, the administration of Woodrow Wilson determinedly looked the other way. The U.S. ambassador in Constantinople sent furious cables to Washington, pleading for action against what he called "race murder," but the White House shrugged.It was, after all, a messy situation, and there was no easy way to stop the ki

April 15, 2005

John Mcbeth: Is Indonesia Finally Coming to Terms with Its Communist Rebel Past?

John Mcbeth, in the Singapore Straits Times (4-13-05):TENS of thousands of surviving political prisoners, who were jailed without trial for unproven links to the outlawed Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), may be about to get their civil and legal rights fully restored. But it will probably take the death of an older generation before Indonesia rids itself of a mindset which cost the lives of 500,000 people in the horrific bloodletting of 1965-66 and also created an undercla

April 13, 2005

Sheldon Alberts: Clinton and Bush ... Their Strange Friendship

Sheldon Alberts, in the Montreal Gazette (4-9-05): Back when Bill Clinton was embroiled in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, photographs of the U.S. president and his raven-haired paramour suddenly became ubiquitous in almost every newspaper in the United States. Here was Clinton and Lewinsky gazing at each other on the White House lawn, shaking hands at the White House holiday party, embracing at a Washington fundraiser. For years, it turned out, Clinton had been hiding

April 13, 2005

Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren: Repeating Jimmy Carter's Mistaken Energy "Solutions"

Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren, in the WSJ (4-12-05):[Mr. Taylor is director of natural resource studies at the Cato Institute and Mr. Van Doren is editor of Cato's Regulation magazine.]Ever since the 9/11 attacks, a steady drumbeat has grown to reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil out of fear that imports from the Middle East leave America dangerously vulner