Roundup: Media's Take

February 17, 2005

David Corn: Negroponte's Dark Past

David Corn, in the Nation (2-17-05):How many times can I write the same piece about John Negroponte? Today George W. Bush named him to the new post of Director of National Intelligence. Previously, Bush had hired Negroponte to be UN ambassador and then US ambassador to the new Iraq. On each of those earlier occasions, I noted that Negroponte's past deserved scrutiny. After all, durin

February 12, 2005

Fareed Zackaria: Bush Should Remember that Even Lincoln Changed Strategies When They Weren't Working

Fareed Zackaria, in Newsweek (2-14-05): President Bush has often said that he emulates Abraham Lincoln. In a recent letter to a Civil War historian, he wrote, "Lincoln set the goal and stayed the course. I will do the same." But what is remarkable about Lincoln is how willing he was to admit that his choices weren't working, and to insist on changes. He ran through seven generals in three years (George McCl

February 12, 2005

Nicholas Confessore: How Bush Is Breaking the Rules By Going for Broke without a Mandate (NYT)

Nicholas Confessore, in the NYT (2-7-05):... Most transformative presidents of the past have acted with the wind at their backs. When he set out to birth the New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed high approval ratings and Congressional majorities that were gigantic by today's standards. Lyndon Johnson capitalized on the shock of President Kennedy's assassination to pass

February 12, 2005

Muzamil Jaleel: My Search for a Village in Kashmir Untouched by Violence--And Why I Almost Gave Up

Muzamil Jaleel, at TomDispatch.com (2-11-05):[Muzamil Jaleel is the Chief of Bureau, Kashmir, for The Indian Express and contributes as well to the British Guardian.]Former President Bill Clinton called Kashmir the ‘most dangerous place in the world' just days before his South Asia visit in March 2000. As a disputed territory, it locked nuclear neighbors India and Pakistan into a bitter hostility that

February 11, 2005

Oliver Morton: Why Biologists Need to Study History

Oliver Morton, in the NYT (2-11-05): Oliver Morton is a co-author of "Safe: The Race to Protect Ourselves in a Newly Dangerous World" and a contributing editor at Wired.... The ability to design genomes and their components holds great practical promise. Late last year the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave $42.6 million to a project at the University of California,

February 11, 2005

Patrick Buchanan: They Attacked Us Because We Love Freedom?

Pat Buchanan, at LewRockwell.com (2-9-05): In his Inaugural, President Bush described Sept. 11 as "a day of fire ... when freedom came under attack." But was it really freedom that was under attack on 9-11? Was bin Laden really saying, "Give up your freedom!"? Or was he saying, "Get out of our world!"?If Al Qaeda was attacking our freedom, which of the freedoms in the Bill of Right

February 11, 2005

James Jay Carafano: Why We Have to Rethink the Use of Army Reserves

James Jay Carafano, in the Foreign Policy Research Institute (2-3-05): [James Jay Carafano is a Senior Fellow at The Heritage Foundation. He is the coauthor of the forthcoming book, "Winning the Long War: Lessons from the Cold War for Defeating Terrorism and Preserving Freedom." This essay is a condensed version of a paper that he presented at the FPRI's December 2004 conference on "The Future of the Reserves and National Guard."]The Abrams Doctrine

February 9, 2005

Marc Sandalow: Proof that 2nd Term Presidents Are Handicapped

Marc Sandalow, in the SF Chronicle (2-6-05): ... As historians look to modern presidents, there are limited examples of second-term success stories. "What's most characteristic is that events control these guys, rather than these guys controlling events," said presidential historian Robert Dallek, the author of biographies of Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. "Their great rhetoric doesn't necessarily put them on the path to great achievement

February 9, 2005

Patrick Buchanan: Is Democracy on the March--Or Wild, Out-of-Control Revolution?

Patrick Buchanan, at WorldNetDaily.com (2-7-05):Following the attempted assassination of Israel's ambassador in London in 1982, Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon invaded Lebanon to eradicate the PLO nest of Yasser Arafat, who was then holed up in Beirut. Mission accomplished. The Israelis triumphed. Arafat and his PLO were expelled to Tunis. But that was not the end of it. In occupied L

February 5, 2005

George F. Will: Why Did George Bush Mention the Homestead Act in His Inaugural?

George F. Will, in the Wa Post (1-30-05):In his inaugural address, which was largely about America's stance toward the world, President Bush's reference to the Homestead Act was tantalizingly tangential: "In America's ideal of freedom, citizens find the dignity and security of economic independence, instead of laboring on the edge of subsistence. This is the broader definition of liberty that motivated the Homestead Act, the Social Security A

February 3, 2005

Tom Wolfe: What Bush and Monroe (And Some President In-between) Have in Common

Tom Wolfe, in th NYT (1-30-05): SURELY some bright bulb from the Council on Foreign Relations in New York or the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton has already remarked that President Bush's inaugural address 10 days ago is the fourth corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. No? So many savants and not one peep out of the lot of them? Really?The president had barely warmed up: "There is only one force of history that can brea

February 3, 2005

Thane Peterson: Iraq's Lesson ... History Matters

Thane Peterson, in Business Week (1-14-05): [Peterson is a contributing editor at BusinessWeek Online.]Americans seem to have a great appetite for history. Serious books on the subject regularly make the best-seller lists, and cable TV's History Channel is now beamed into some 87 million homes. Interest in military history has become so huge -- spurred, no d

February 3, 2005

John Nichols: It Would Be Nice If the Dems Could Muster At Least as Many Votes Against Gonzales as Against Meese

John Nichols, in the Nation (2-3-05):There is not much chance that the full Senate will block the nomination of White House counsel Alberto Gonzales to serve as Attorney General. But, as the vote approaches, critics of Gonzales have the potential to garner a stronger vote against his confirmation than they did in one or both of the last two fights over controversial conservative nomin

February 1, 2005

Daniel Gross (Slate): The One Democrat Republicans Are Still Scared of: FDR

Daniel Gross, in Slate (1-28-05):Why are today's Republicans so hellbent on changing Social Security? Clearly they're not driven by concern over government deficits. After all, they've engineered a taxing and spending regime that intentionally created record deficits. And it can't be that they oppose entitlement programs as a matter of principle. Medicare has an unfunded liability larg

January 29, 2005

NYT: Those Striking Vietnam Parallels with Iraq

Todd S. Purdum, in the NYT (1-29-05):Not quite 38 years ago, enmeshed in a drawn-out war whose ultimate outcome was deeply in doubt, Lyndon B. Johnson met on Guam with the fractious generals who were contending for leadership of South Vietnam and told them: "My birthday is in late August. The greatest birthday present you could give me is a national election." George W. Bush's birthday is in early July, but his broad goals for the Iraqi ele

January 28, 2005

Robert Kagan: Bush Has Now Moved Beyond the War on Terrorism

Robert Kagan, in the WSJ (1-27-05):The most significant thing about President Bush's inaugural address was the word he did not utter: terror. The War on Terror has been the administration's foreign policy paradigm, giving unity and coherence to disparate and morally contradictory policies: promoting democracy in the Middle East, for instance, while ignorin

January 28, 2005

Peggy Noonan: Why I Disliked Bush's Inaugural Address

Peggy Noonan, in the WSJ (1-27-05):I have been called old, jaded, a sourpuss. Far worse, I have been called French. A response is in order. You know the dispute. Last week I slammed the president's inaugural address. I was not alone, but I came down hard, early and in one of the most highly read editorial pages in America. Bill Buckley and David Frum also had critical reactions. Bill Saf

January 26, 2005

Rev. Jesse Jackson and Greg Palast: Does America Have an Apartheid Vote-Counting System?

Rev. Jesse Jackson and Greg Palast, in the Seattle Times (1-26-05):The inaugural confetti has been swept away and with it, the last quarrel over who really won the presidential election. But there is still unfinished business that can't be swept away. After taking his oath, the president called for a "concerted effort to promote democracy." The president should begin with the United States. More than 133,000 votes remain uncounted in

January 24, 2005

Demoracy Isn't Built on One Election Alone ... And Certainly Not in Iraq

Samuel Issacharoff, in the Wash Post (1-23-05):By itself, the election is a milestone. But it is not the key to their country's democratic legitimacy. The lasting success of democracies lies not in seeing that the will of the majority is expressed through the ballot box, but by two more long-standing factors: first, a commitment by a nation's elites that a victorious electoral coalition will not use its hold on power to exact revenge on the losers; and s

January 24, 2005

Could There Be a Bush III Someday?

Dave Montgomery, in the Ft. Worth Star Telegram (1-23-05):The man of the hour, of course, is George W. Bush. But, to a larger extent, his second-term inauguration Thursday was also a family affair, another passage in a decades-long journey by one of America's most enduring political dynasties. The Bushes have been at the forefront of American political life since the early 1900s, steadily evolving and recasting themselves with an incongruous mixture