Roundup: Media's Take

April 12, 2005

Terry M. Neal: Bush's Historically Low Poll Numbers

Terry M. Neal, in the Wa Po (4-11-05): With apologies to George Tenet, the first 100 days of President Bush's second term have been no slam-dunk. How rough has it been? Bush has the lowest approval rating of any president at this point in his second term, according to Gallup polls going back to World War II. Bush's erosion of support among independents in particular has hel

April 11, 2005

NYT: Is the Growing Population of Old People Really a Burden for Social Security?

Eduardo Porter, in the NYT (4-10-05): ... some economists are sanguine about the country's ability to support the elderly and at the same time provide for the young. Gary Burtless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, noted that the decline in fertility rates since the 1960's means that the burden of caring for the young has decreased dramatically - freeing resources to cha

April 8, 2005

David Ignatius: Why Bush Is Dropping in the Polls

David Ignatius, in the Wa Post (4-8-05): Polls show striking erosion in support for the president and in confidence about the nation's course. An NBC/Wall Street Journal survey released Wednesday found that only 34 percent of those polled felt the country was headed in the right direction, a decline of eight percentage points since the previous survey in February. The president's job appr

April 8, 2005

Mark Danner: What Iraqis Thought About the January Elections

Mark Danner, commenting on the January 30 elections in Iraq, at tomdispatch.com (4-8-05): [Mark Danner, a longtime New Yorker Staff writer, is Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard College. His most recent book is Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror, wh

April 7, 2005

Sidney Blumenthal: How the White House Is Exploiting the Pope

Sidney Blumenthal, in the Guardian (4-7-05): President Bush, a militant evangelical Protestant, has lowered the American flag to half-staff for the first time at the death of a pope. Also for the first time, a US president will attend a papal funeral. Bush's political rhetoric is deliberately inflected with Catholic theological phrases, in particular "the culture of life", words he used to justify h

April 7, 2005

John Brown: Why World War IV Is a Misnomer

John Brown, at tomdispatch.com (3-30-05):[John Brown, a former Foreign Service officer who resigned in protest against the invasion of Iraq, is affiliated with Georgetown University. Brown compiles a daily Public Diplomacy Press Review (PDPR) available free by requesting it at johnhbrown30@hotmail.com. Aside from public diplomacy, PDPR covers items such as anti-Americanism, cultural diplomacy, propaganda, foreign pu

April 7, 2005

Jonathan Schell: Our Fake Civil Society

Jonathan Schell, at tomdispatch.com and the Nation (4-6-05): [Jonathan 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.]Perhaps the most

April 6, 2005

Yoshi Tsurumi: When Bush Was My Student at Harvard, He Denounced Social Security

Yoshi Tsurumi, in the Harvard Crimson (4-6-05):[Yoshi Tsurumi is a professor of international business at Baruch College. He earned his Doctor of Business Administration from Harvard in 1968, and he taught at Harvard Business School from 1972 to 1976. ] Thirty years ago, President Bush was my student at Harvard Business School. In my class, he called former president Franklin D. Roosevelt, Clas

March 31, 2005

Sidney Blumenthal: How the Right Is Using Bush After He Tried to Use them (Schiavo Case)

Sidney Blumenthal, at Salon.com (3-31-05):The Bush administration doesn't have a faith-based initiative; it is a faith-based initiative. When President Bush rushed back to the White House from his Crawford, Texas, ranch to show his urgency to sign the congressional bill intervening in the Terri Schiavo case, a bill like many others he could have signed wherever he was located, h

March 29, 2005

Can Republicanism Survive Without the IRA?

| Deaglan de Breadun, in the Irish Times (3-26-05): Winston Churchill famously said in the aftermath of the first World War: "The whole map of Europe has been changed. The position of countries has been violently altered. The modes of thought of men, the whole outlook on affairs, the grouping of parties, all have encountered violent and tremendous changes in the deluge of the world." However, Churchill could still observe today, as he did in his House

March 25, 2005

Hendrik Hertzberg: George Bush, Ingrate (Re: Social Security)

Hendrik Hertzberg, in the New Yorker (3-28-05): As an institution, the trust fund has been good to the Bush clan. Thanks to this ingenious financial tool, through which part of a family fortune can be protected for its intended beneficiaries, George W., among other Bushes, has been spared some of the material difficulties that afflict so many of their fellow-citizens. It is the trust fund that, in p

March 25, 2005

Tom Friedman: We Should Be Appalled that 26 POW's Died While in American Custody

Thomas Friedman, in the NYT (3-24-05): A ... I've been reading "Washington's Crossing," the outstanding book by the Brandeis historian David Hackett Fischer about how George Washington and his troops rescued the American Revolution after British forces and German Hessian mercenaries had routed them in the early battles around New Jersey.What is particularly moving is one of Mr. Fischer's conclu

March 24, 2005

Robert Reich: The Democrats Need a New Narrative

Robert Reich, in the New Republic (3-28-05):Democrats are finally waking up to the fact that Republicans have succeeded in framing the issues to their advantage. Tax "relief," tort "reform," regulatory "burden," and "opportunity society," for example, have all defined public debate in a way that benefits the GOP. But, though Democrats have finally started t

March 24, 2005

Mark Weisbrot and Dean Baker: Let's Be Honest About Social Security

Mark Weisbrot and Dean Baker, in the Boston Globe (3-20-05): POLLS CAN provide important guidance for politicians, but there are times when it is foolish and dangerous to rely on a temporarily misinformed public for a political compass. The current debate over Social Security provides one of the most compelling examples in modern history of the pitfalls of poll-driven political strategy.On Thursday two

March 23, 2005

Clifford Krauss (NYT): Anti-Americanism Is Canada's State Religion

Clifford Krauss, in the NYT (3-23-05):Every Canadian student of foreign policy knows the story, but few Americans remember. In 1965, at the height of the Vietnam War buildup, Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson suggested to a college audience in Philadelphia that the United States stop bombing North Vietnam in the pursuit of a negotiated settlement. President Lyndon B. Johnson wa

March 23, 2005

Thomas W. Hazlett: Why Conservatives Should Thank Dan Rather

Thomas W. Hazlett, in the Weekly Standard (3-21-05):[Thomas W. Hazlett is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a visiting professor at the Wharton School. ] WHEN CBS Evening News faded out on March 9, marking the end of Dan Rather's career as a network anchor, bubbly conservatives toasted a momentous victory in the struggle against liberal bias. I propose quit

March 22, 2005

Martin E. Marty: Are We Really in Danger in this Era of TR-Style Politicians of Namby-Pamby Men?

Martin E. Marty, in Sightings, the newsletter of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School: Harvard notable Harvey Mansfield's review article of two new editions of books by Theodore Roosevelt begins: "The most obvious feature of Theodore Roosevelt's life and thought is the one least celebrated today, his manliness. Somehow America in the twentieth century went from the explosion of assertive manliness that was TR to the sensitive males of our time w

March 22, 2005

Dilip Hiro: America's Sorry Record Undermining Democracy in the Middle East

Dilip Hiro, at www.tomdispatch.com (3-17-05): [Dilip Hiro is the author of The Essential Middle East: A Comprehensive Guide (Caroll & Graf) and Secrets and Lies: Operation "Iraqi Freedom" and After (Nation Books).]The United States flaunts the banner of democracy in the Middle East only when that advances its economic, military, or strategic interests. The history of the past six decades shows that whenev

March 21, 2005

Iain Duncan Smith: Take the Advice of a British MP ... Don't Cut Off Filibusters

Iain Duncan Smith, in the NYT (3-21-05): [Iain Duncan Smith is themember of Parliament for Chingford and Woodford Green.]AS Republicans in the United States decide whether to do away with filibusters by changing Senate rules - the so-called nuclear option - they would do well to cast their eyes at their Conservative cousins across the Atlantic. Britain's backbench members of Parliament, whom I led as

March 18, 2005

Peter Grier: Why Reforming Social Security in 2005 Is Harder than It Was in 1983

Peter Grier, in the Christian Science Monitor (3-11-05): Congress begins formal debate on the retirement system, but a 1983-style deal looks hard to reach. On the unseasonably cold morning of April 20, 1983, a coatless Ronald Reagan sat down on the South Lawn and signed a bill intended to rescue Social Security from imminent doom. Neither Republicans nor Demo-crats were thrilled by everything in the legislation. But by agreeing to raise both payroll taxes a