Roundup: Media's Take

March 3, 2005

James P. Pinkerton: People Power Wins Again

James P. Pinkerton, in Newsday (3-3-05): War is hell. Worse, it's unpredictable. That's the lesson that the Syrians are learning in Lebanon, as the new-style war they've been fighting there appears to have backfired badly. It seems likely the Damascus government of Bashar al-Assad will be forced to relinquish much or all of its decades-long domination of its neighbor, the once-and-future independent country of Lebanon. If so, historians will identify the Fe

March 3, 2005

Greg Abbott: Texas to Supreme Court ... Leave Us Alone

Greg Abbott, in the WSJ (3-2-05):[Mr. Abbott is attorney general of Texas.]President Truman once told us, "The fundamental basis of this nation's laws was given to Moses on the Mount." We might say it differently now, but the point would be the same: The Ten Commandments are a religious text, yes, but they are also a foundational document in the developmen

March 2, 2005

Dirk Olin: Why Judges Shouldn't Be Elected

Dirk Olin, in the NYT (3-2-05): [Dirk Olin is the national editor of The American Lawyer magazine.]WHEN the Supreme Court resumed its term last week after its winter recess, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist was once again missing from the bench. His absence, due to illness, has fueled speculation about when he will retire and who will replace him.Given the state of American politics, the nomination p

March 2, 2005

William S. Lind: A Grim Sign of Anti-Americanism in Turkey

William S. Lind, at lewrockwell.com (3-2-05):[William Lind is Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation. The views expressed in this article are those of Mr. Lind, writing in his personal capacity.] The February 15 Christian Science Monitor describes a situation which, to anyone familiar with American-Turkish relations in the post-World War II period, is almost beyond i

March 2, 2005

Ray McGovern: Iran Is Next

Ray McGovern, at TomDispatch.com (3-1-05):[Ray McGovern served as a CIA analyst for 27 years -- from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush. During the early 1980s, he was one of the writers/editors of the President's Daily Brief and briefed it one-on-one to the president's most senior advisers. He also chaired National Intelligence Estimates. In January 2003, he and f

March 2, 2005

Dan Gardner: Tenant from hell ... The U.S. Base at Cuba's Guantanamo Bay

Dan Gardner, in the Ottawa Citizen (2-27-05):Fidel Castro may have seen off every American president since Eisenhower, but in all the long years of the Cuban dictator's rule the Americans have had something that bothers Castro at least as much as Castro annoys the Americans. Officially, it is called the United States Naval Base Guantanamo Bay. The soldiers, sailors and Marines who live there know it as Gitmo."The naval base is a dagger plunged into

March 2, 2005

Ross K. Baker: Can Bush Engineer a Political Realignment Like FDR?

Ross K. Baker, in the LAT (2-27-05):Partisan realignments, for political historians, are the stuff of which dreams are made.When a sizable number of Americans abandon one party and embrace its opponent, it's big news. So, like vulcanologists who wait for great eruptions and astronomers who watch for eclipses, people whose job is following politics eagerly anticipate the tectonic shifts in the political loyalties of Americans.The watch has been dis

February 25, 2005

Gavan McCormack: How Bush Created the North Korean "Crisis"

Gavan McCormack, at TomDispatch.com (2-24, 05):[Gavan McCormack is a professor of the Australian National University and visiting professor at International Christian University in Tokyo. He is the author of many works on modern and contemporary East Asia, including most recently Target North Korea: Pushing North Korea to the Brink of

February 25, 2005

Ford & Carter: These Are the Most Partisan Times They've Seen

Mark Bixler, in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (2-22-05):Former Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter survey the nation they once led and frown at its split into red and blue states. They say they have never before seen such bitter division between Republicans and Democrats. They have forged a 25-year friendship that defies the partisan rancor swirling around them. Historians say they are closer than any former presidents since John Adams and Thomas Jef

February 25, 2005

Johann Hari: It's Time to Face the Fact that Anti-Semitism Is Resurgent

Johann Hari, in the London Independent (2-23-05): Don't be lulled into complacency by the bogus campaign over the past week to present Ken Livingstone as an anti-Semite. We are in the middle of a global resurgence of Jew-hating - and no foolish newspaper witch-hunt should make us doubt it.Figures released this month show that anti-Jewish attacks in Britain rose by 40 per cent last year, with teenagers beaten for wearing yarkmulkas, and swastikas carved into the side of synago

February 25, 2005

Myron Magnet: President Bush Is Deliberately Making War on LBJ's War on Poverty

Myron Magnet, in the WSJ (2-25-05): [Mr. Magnet is editor of City Journal.]... Implicit in compassionate conservatism was the epochal paradigm shift that is now all-but explicit. Taken together, compassionate conservatism's elements added up to a sweeping rejection of liberal orthodoxy about how to help the poor, which a half-century's worth of experience had discredited. If

February 25, 2005

WSJ: Europe Is Wondering Now If Bush Was Right

Editorial in the WSJ (2-25-05): Visits by U.S. Presidents to Europe tend to have a template-making quality: Wilson, the peace maker, in Paris, 1919; Truman, the victor, at Potsdam, 1945; Kennedy, the stalwart, in Berlin, 1963; Reagan, the visionary, in Berlin, 1987. If President Bush's trip this week has some kind of new theme, the word for it is probably conciliation. But our sens

February 25, 2005

George Weigel: The Striking Parallels Between Bush's 2005 Inaugural and the Pope's 1995 Freedom Speech

George Weigel, in Tidings Online (2-25-05): Commentators have noted parallels between President Bush's second inaugural address and President Kennedy's 1961 inaugural; one witty historian suggested that it was "the best speech Woodrow Wilson ever wrote." What struck me, however, was the remarkable similarity between the president's second inaugural and Pope John Paul II's second address to the United Nations

February 24, 2005

Steven Mufson: How FDR and Bush Differ on Social Security

Steven Mufson, in the Wash Post (2-20-05): ... How we talk about policy says a lot about how we think about it. Is Social Security a planning vehicle that an individual uses for his or her own retirement, or is it a pooling of resources so that all of society can meet the needs of its older members? Is it about each person saving for himself, or is it a matter of young helping old and rich helping poor? In couching the Social Security debate largely as a matter of personal ra

February 23, 2005

Salil Tripathi: Debunking the Poverty-Causes-Terrorism Myth (WSJ)

Salil Tripathi, in the WSJ (2-23-05): Some bad ideas refuse to die. Like the apparent causal link between poverty and terror. In the elevated mood of the World Economic Forum, the French President Jacques Chirac -- who could not reach there due to bad weather -- attempted to sound statesmanlike in a live, televised address. Embracing several popular causes, he called on the world's richest nation

February 22, 2005

John Nichols: What We Could Learn from George Washington About Anti-Imperialism

John Nichols, in the Nation (2-20-05): [John Nichols's new book, Against the Beast: A Documentary History of American Opposition to Empire (Nation Books) was published January 30.]America has become a profoundly--and tragically--ahistoric country. As such, the 273rd anniversary of the birth of George Washington will pass this Tuesday with little note. Washington's legacy has been so disregarded by its h

February 21, 2005

Ellen Goodman: The Republicans Turn to FDR to Help Sell Social Security "Reform"

Ellen Goodman, in the Boston Globe (2-20-05):IS IT TOO late to put a family trademark on the New Deal? The way things are going, the founding father of Social Security will be an icon for the crowd that wants to unravel it. All that's left is for the Bush administration to change its theme song from ''Hail to the Chief" to ''Happy Days

February 19, 2005

Why There's Still a Chance for a Stanley Cup Championship This Season

Anil Adyanthaya, in the NYT (2-18-05): [Anil Adyanthaya is a lawyer.]THE National Hockey League took a giant step on its inexorable march toward oblivion this week. Still, while Commissioner Gary Bettman has canceled the current season because of a labor dispute, there is hope for hockey's future. It is in the hands of the trustees who control the Stanley Cup, the oldest and m

February 18, 2005

Hendrik Hertzberg: Iraq's Election Was a Lot More Meaningful than Vietnam's in 1967

Hendrik Hertzberg, in the New Yorker (2-14-05):... There are plenty of Vietnam echoes in America’s Iraq adventure, especially in the corrosive effects on domestic comity, the use of false or distorted intelligence to create a sense of immediate threat, and the arrogance, combined with ignorance of local realities, of many senior strategists. But the differences are large, beginning wi

February 18, 2005

Dov S. Zakheim: A Former Bush Defense Official Questions the Party Line About the Desirability of Planting Democracies in the Middle East

Dov S. Zakheim, in a speech delivered before the National Conference of World Affairs Councils (1-28-05):[Mr. Zakheim was Undersecretary of Defense in the first term of President George W. Bush and is a trustee of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He holds a doctorate.] ... This month in particular, democracy has come to mean the ability to vote freely in nationwide elections. Earlier in the month, the Palestinian people held elections for