Roundup: Media's Take

October 22, 2004

Plan To Make Canada More Like Belgium Politically

Joanne Laucius, Ottawa Citizen, 20 Oct. 2004 Conservative leader Stephen Harper's proposal to make Canada more like Belgium will result in long-term pain for Canada and play into the hands of separatists, warns a constitutional historian. Mr. Harper's proposal"runs contrary to the idea of pan-Canadian duality and would create Quebec as the only homeland of francophones," argues Michael Behiels, a University of Ottawa professor. And Prime Minister Paul Martin has helped, s

October 22, 2004

Writing, Revolution Keep Carter Energized At 80

Don Aucoin, The Boston Globe, 19 Oct. 2004 In the years since he left the White House, President Jimmy Carter has marshaled his seemingly boundless energies on behalf of world peace - a quest rewarded two years ago with the Nobel Prize. But when Carter decided to write a novel and thereby become the first US president to turn his hand to fiction (the published kind, anyway), he chose as his subject a bitter, protracted, and, in Carter's view, much-misunderstood conflict: the Revolutio

October 20, 2004

The Washington Post Compares the Choices Bush and Kerry Made During Vietnam

Michael Dobbs and Lois Romano, in the Wash Post (Oct. 15, 2004): It was December 1968, and the United States was in turmoil. The number of U.S. troops in Vietnam had reached a peak of half a million. Antiwar protests were paralyzing American campuses after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. In Vietnam, a gangly U.S. Navy lieutenant named John F. Kerry stee

October 20, 2004

The Use of Deception to Snare Al Qaeda

Michael Schrage, in the Wash Post (Oct. 17, 2004): When "unnamed U.S. government officials" leaked the story this fall that al Qaeda computer expert Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan had been arrested in Pakistan, media reports described British and Pakistani intelligence officials as furious about the resulting firestorm of coverage. Officials were quoted as saying that the news had blown a global sting operation by destroying Khan's value as a "double agent" who'd been

October 20, 2004

Frank Rich: Will We Need a New 'All the President's Men'?

Frank Rich, in the NYT (Oct. 17, 2004):SUCH is the power of movies that the first image ''Watergate'' brings to mind three decades later is not Richard Nixon so much as the golden duo of Redford and Hoffman riding to the nation's rescue in ''All the President's Men.'' But if our current presidency is now showing symptoms of a precancerous Watergate syndrome -- as it is, daily -- we have not yet reached t

October 19, 2004

James Webb: The Scots-Irish Are the Key to Republican Party Success

James Webb, in the WSJ (Oct. 19, 2004): [Mr. Webb, a former secretary of the Navy, is the author of"Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America," just published by Broadway.]To an outsider George W. Bush's political demeanor seems little more than stumbling tautology. He utters his campaign message in clipped phrases, filled with bravado and repeated

October 18, 2004

An Interview with John J. Miller, Co-author of Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America's Disastrous Relationship with France

From Frontpagemag.com (Oct. 18, 2004):Frontpage Interview’s guest today is John J. Miller, co-author of Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America's Disastrous Relationship with France. FP: Mr. Miller, welcome to Frontpage Interview. It is a pleasure to have you here.Miller: Thank you. I’m an admirer of your website.FP: What motivated you to write this book?

October 16, 2004

Why the U.S. Succeeded in Selling the Marshall Plan but Not Democracy in the Middle East

Roger Cohen, in the NYT (Oct. 16, 2004):It is a time of war, and an implacable enemy seeks to sully America's image, destroy its way of life and undermine its allies. Sound familiar? But the time in question here is not the present and the enemy is not Al Qaeda. This is the cold war, fought against the Soviet Union and played out against the backdrop of shatter

October 16, 2004

How the 9-11 Report Came to Be a Best-Seller--and Well-Written

Johanna Neuman, in the LAT (Oct. 15, 2004): The instructions from the "front office"-- a core group of editors -- were straight out of a college expository writing class: Divide complex sentences in two. Remember that clear, plain prose is a virtue. Don't get bogged down in nuance or detail; the overarching story is everything. But this was no classroom or dormitory cram session. The writers were staff members of a government commission, a type of body typica

October 16, 2004

Daniel Henninger: Bush Could Be the Deng Xiaoping of American Politics

Daniel Henninger, in the WSJ (Oct. 15, 2004): If the people of the United States hand him victory in the 2004 election, George W. Bush could emerge as the Deng Xiaoping of American politics. Mr. Bush would become the leader who sent his people forward into a world both uncertain and inevitable.Deng, who died in 1997, was the former Communist Chinese revolutionary who recognized in the 1980s

October 16, 2004

Nicholas Lemann: The Early Signals We Missed About the Kind of Man George W. Is

Nicholas Lemann, in the New Yorker (Oct. 18, 2004): When something important doesn’t turn out the way you expected, you go back to the beginning and try to see if there were clues you missed....[One] early Bush event—this one not only indicative but consequential—was a dinner in Chicago, on July 18, 2000, not long before the Republican National Convention, attended by Bush; John C. Danforth,

October 16, 2004

Franklin Foer: The Conservatives Who Are Returning to Their America First Roots

Franklin Foer, in the NYT (Oct. 10, 2004):ON May 4, American conservatism took an unexpected turn. That morning, George Will -- the movement's most influential columnist, one of its icons -- slapped George W. Bush with a tart reprimand. For a year, Will had obliquely hinted of his grave misgivings about the Iraq war and the push to democratize the Middle East. But with the insurgenc

October 16, 2004

How Relentless Is Karl Rove? This Relentless!

Joshua Green, in the Atlantic Monthly (Nov. 2004):It is the close races that establish the reputations of great political strategists, and few have ever been closer than the 2000 presidential election. From the tumult of the lengthy recount, the absentee-ballot dispute, the charges of voter fraud, and, ultimately, the Supreme Court decision, George W. Bush emerged victorious by a margin of 537 votes in Florida&

October 14, 2004

Bush Wants a Khaki Election

DeWayne Wickham, USA TODAY, 12 Oct. 2004 What Paul Boller wrote recently about this election campaign probably won't surprise you. Its squabbling factions, the presidential historian said, included"peace groups castigating the president for taking the country into war and calling for a speedy end to the conflict; harsh critics harping on the president's mismanagement of the war effort and blaming him for reverses on the battlefield; and administration supporters insisting that a

October 13, 2004

The Nobel Prize Goes to ... Once Again a Hater

Ben Johnson, at frontpagemag.com (Oct. 13, 2004):The Nobel Prize has sunk to a new and discrediting low by honoring an environmental activist who insists white scientists created the AIDS virus to eradicate the world’s black population. The media have portrayed Kenyan activist Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement, as a latter day Johnny Appleseed who has planted million

October 13, 2004

Grover Norquist: The GOP Really Is Reagan's Party

Grover Norquist, in the WSJ (Oct. 13, 2004):We must wait three more weeks to learn who will serve as President from January 2005 to January 2009. But one question asked in 2000 can now be answered: Will the Reagan coalition continue to define the nature and structure of the modern Republican Party?In 2000, Texas governor George W. Bush ran as the heir to Ronald Reagan's coalition, dedica

October 13, 2004

Exploring Places Peripheral To Presidential Campaigns

Fran Silverman, The New York Times, 10 Oct. 2004 They've been oh, so near. Just next door in New York and to the north in Boston. One actually almost stopped by the state. But if residents are looking to shake hands this fall with the major presidential candidates, they will have to go out of state to do it. John Kerry and George Bush have no plans to come here. What a change from four years ago. In 2000, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut was Al Gore's running mate, and

October 13, 2004

Virginia Tribes Fight For Sovereignty

Emma Schwartz, Los Angeles Times, 12 Oct. 2004 Nearly 400 years ago, British colonists came ashore near this verdant watershed of Chesapeake Bay, surviving the first brutal winter only with the help of the Native Americans who had lived on the land for centuries. But as the Commonwealth of Virginia prepares for the commemoration of that 1607 arrival in Jamestown, the descendants of those Indians are embroiled in a fight over a different legacy of that year: acknowledgment of the

October 13, 2004

Decisions And Opinions Of Former Editor, Sir Harold Evans, Explored

David Usborne, The Independent (London), 11 Oct. 2004 Sir Harold Evans, 76, has a few secrets to keeping fit and spry. Leaving aside having a younger wife, Tina Brown, and two teenage children, there are his regular table-tennis tournaments with a friend in the basement of his apartment building on East 57th Street in Manhattan, and his visits to a nearby pool, where he practises distance swimming. But his most potent elixir, surely, is his determination to stay busy. The mornin

October 13, 2004

Internet Use On The Campaign Trail

Jay Bookman, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 11 Oct. 2004 In Friday's debate, President Bush rejected a renewal of the draft as just a rumor passed around on"the Internets." The term made the president seem a little out of touch; it just didn't sound like a word that he uses much. However, the word could also be seen as a bit of accidental wisdom on the president's part. There are indeed multiple Internets; in fact, there are as many Internets as there are people who use it. W