Roundup: Media's Take

September 18, 2004

Noam Chomsky: The Bush Doctrine of Force

Noam Chomsky, at TomDispatch.com (Sept. 16, 2004): [Noam Chomsky is a Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. In addition to Hegemony or Survival, America's Quest for Global Dominance (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books), he is the author of numerous books on linguistics and on U.S. foreign policy.]As Colin P

September 18, 2004

Stephen Hayes ... Dan Rather: On the Hot Seat

Stephen Hayes, in the Weekly Standard (Sept. 20, 2004): LAST WEDNESDAY, CBS News's 60 Minutes II aired a report that strongly challenged George W. Bush's service in the National Guard. It's a story that has been explored dozens of times in the past five years. Two things in the 60 Minutes II story made it fresh--or, in newsroom parlance, gave it a peg. Ben Barnes, who ser

September 18, 2004

Maggie Thatcher's Been Long Gone, But Has Tony Blair Really Reinvented Government?

Malcolm Dean, in the Guardian (Sept. 15, 2004):It was easier 25 years ago to predict the future. As the first extract in this 25th anniversary edition of Society demonstrates (see page 2), we got our first projection right. For the first time since the welfare state was established after the second world war, it was no longer possible in 1979 to forecast that society was going to continue getting better following the election of Margaret Thatcher. Fo

September 17, 2004

Bush Campaign's View Of Post-9/11 History

Paul West, The Baltimore Sun, 11 Sept. 20004 WASHINGTON - It is President Bush's most reliable applause line as he campaigns for re-election. "I had a choice," he says of the decision to invade Iraq and force Saddam Hussein from power. "Do I take the word of a madman, forget the lessons of September the 11th, or take action to defend America?" Bush asks his audience."Given that choice, I will defend America every time." The bloody postwar insurgency in Iraq, which the pr

September 17, 2004

General Frank's Memoir Examined

Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times, 11 Sept. 2004 ... Today, throughout American public life, the memoir -- and its attendant cash advance -- are regarded simply as another retirement benefit, like lifetime health care. Presidents, cabinet secretaries, generals and senior bureaucrats hardly have time to cash their first pension checks before their editors start demanding manuscript pages. Everyone has a story to tell and every story is for sale. Marshall's example may have seemed ext

September 17, 2004

Fears And Threats Of Past Compared To Today

Lynne Duke, The Washington Post, 11 Sept. 2004 Back then, there were blacklists. Now, we've got no-fly lists. Then, we had the Doomsday Clock. Now, we've got the looming Code Red terror alert. Schoolchildren trained a generation ago to duck for cover under their desks (as if that was protection from a nuclear bomb!). Now, they are parents who fine-tune their families' terror evacuation plans (and wonder: Can we really escape?). We live once again in an era defined by fea

September 17, 2004

Michelle Malkin Defends Racial Profiling During WWII

Charles Burress, The San Francisco Chronicle, 10 Sept. 2004 Conservative columnist Michelle Malkin chastised shouting protesters at UC Berkeley Tuesday night and won a standing ovation from sympathizers who came to hear her defense of racial profiling and World War II Japanese internment camps. Despite a din of noise from demonstrators outside that sometimes competed with Malkin's remarks, the chief organizer of the event, UC junior Amaury Gallais, said Wednesday that he was ple

September 17, 2004

L.A. County Seal In Light Of Original Design Intent

Christopher Parkes, Financial Times (London, England), 10 Sept. 2004 Under pressure from the ever-vigilant American Civil Liberties Union, Los Angeles's political leaders have agreed to remove a Christian cross from the county seal and, in the process, tangled with traditionalists promising a fight to keep the emblem as it has been since 1957. A new design, commissioned after the ACLU threatened legal action against"an impermissible endorsement of Christianity", will be consider

September 15, 2004

William Kristol: Why FDR/Truman Hawks Now Naturally Are Bush Supporters

William Kristol, in the Weekly Standard (Sept. 13, 2004): Fortunately, we had a resolute president named Truman, who, with the American people, persevered, knowing that a new democracy at the center of Europe would lead to stability and peace. George W. Bush, at the Republican convention Those policies--containing communism, deterring attack

September 15, 2004

John Kerry Wanted to Appease the Sandinistas

Hugh Hewitt, in the Weekly Standard (Sept. 9, 2004): [Hugh Hewitt is the host of a nationally syndicated radio show, and author most recently of If It's Not Close, They Can't Cheat: Crushing the Democrats in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends Upon It

September 14, 2004

Do Republicans Play Rougher Politics?

John M. Broder, in the NYT (Sept. 12, 2004):Do Republicans play a rougher game of politics than Democrats?The question has been tossed around since Vice President Dick Cheney, in apparently unscripted remarks, suggested last week that electing the Democratic ticket in November would invite a devastating terrorist attack. The Democrats cried foul, but of cou

September 14, 2004

Katrina vanden Heuvel: We Should Follow RFK's Example to Revive New Themes in the Election

Katrina vanden Heuvel, in the Nation (Sept. 11, 2004): "As long as everyone is talking about what did or did not happen 35 years ago in Vietnam," writes Matt Miller, columnist and fellow at the Center for American Progress, "they're not talking about the candidates' rival visions for the future, or domestic policy differences between the parties that are huge." Of course,

September 14, 2004

1,000 Deaths and Counting: Will Americans Turn Against the War?

James Dao, in the NYT (Sept. 12, 2004): In the fall of 1965, the death toll for American troops in Vietnam quietly passed 1,000. The escalation in the number of American forces was just underway, the antiwar movement was still in its infancy and the word "quagmire" was not yet in common usage. At the time, the Gallup Poll found that just one in four Americans thought sending troops t

September 14, 2004

The Folly of Imperialism as Explicated by John B. Judis

James Chace, in the NYT (Sept. 12, 2004):The debate over why the Bush administration launched the war in Iraq is now at full tide. The American people were told that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, that the Iraqi regime was in contact with the international terrorists of Al Qaeda and that the most effective way for the United States to prevent Hussein from

September 10, 2004

Bush's Advantage on Military Service

Ben Johnson, Managing Editor of FrontPage Magazine, at frontpagemag.com (Sept. 9, 2004):"Mr. President, you and I know that…if service or non-service in the [Vietnam] war is to become a test of qualification for high office…our nation would never recover from the divisions created by that war."– Sen. John Kerry on the Senate floor, 1992.

September 10, 2004

Alain de Bottom: Americans Were the First People to Worship Work

Alain de Botton, in the NYT (Sept. 6, 2004):[Alain de Botton is the author of "How Proust Can Change Your Life" and "Status Anxiety."]The most remarkable feature of the modern workplace has nothing to do with computers, automation or globalization. Rather, it lies in the Western world's widely held belief that our work should make us happy. All so

September 10, 2004

Turkey's Legacy Casts Long Shadow Over Talks With EU

Daniel Dombey and Kerin Hope, Financial Times (London, England), 06 Sept. 2004 The ghosts of the past are brooding over one of the most important decisions yet to face the European Union. The decision is over when to begin the practical business of extending EU membership to Turkey, a relatively poor Muslim country of 70m people. Today Gunter Verheugen, the EU's enlargement commissioner, will hold talks in Ankara with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's prime minister. A

September 10, 2004

History Of South Korea's Atom Bomb Program Discussed

James Brooke, The New York Times, 04 Sept. 2004 Officials in South Korea continued Friday to try to assure the world that the nation had no nuclear arms program, with its top nuclear researcher saying government scientists had enriched a speck of uranium ''smaller than a sesame seed'' merely ''to satisfy their curiosity.'' ''Some misunderstood this experiment as a step to build nuclear weapons, but atomic energy experts would probably laugh at such claims,'' Chang In Soon, direc

September 10, 2004

Arnie's History Is Scorned In Austria

AP, The Guardian (London), 04 Sept. 2004 Austrian historians are ridiculing Arnold Schwarzenegger for telling the Republican convention in New York that he saw Soviet tanks in his homeland as a child and left a"socialist" country when he moved away in 1968. Recalling that the Red Army once occupied part of Austria after the second world war, the California governor told delegates on Tuesday:"I saw tanks in the streets. I saw communism with my own eyes." One historian, Stef

September 9, 2004

Alan Murray: Tax Cuts Are the Past ... The New Republican Mantra is OWNERSHIP

Alan Murray, in the WSJ (Sept. 7, 2004): I spent Thursday evening on the floor of the Republican convention, and I can report with confidence that the delegates didn't once break into a chant of "OWN-ER-SHIP." They were happy, of course. They would have been happy if George W. Bush had read from the phone book. But when he started discussing his "ownership society," some looked as if they thought he was reading from the phone book. Still, despite daz