Roundup: Media's Take

August 18, 2004

George F. Will: Deciding When to Issue Warnings of a Terrorist Attack

George F. Will, in the WSJ (Aug. 17, 2004): On Nov. 12, 1940, Luftwaffe headquarters issued orders to German air forces throughout occupied Western Europe concerning operation"Moonlight Sonata." It was to be a mighty attack by 509 Heinkel bombers -- just 57 had razed part of Rotterdam in May -- on the English industrial city of Coventr

August 18, 2004

Norman Podhoretz: World War IV ... How It Started, What It Means, Why We Have to Win

Norman Podhoretz, at frontpagemag.com (Aug. 17, 2004): This past spring, when it seemed that everything that could go wrong in raq was going wrong, a plague of amnesia began sweeping through the country. Caught up in the particulars with which we were being assaulted 24 hours a day, we seemed to have lost sight of the context in which such details could be measured and understood and related to one another

August 17, 2004

Why Have We Become Willing Accomplices to Bush's War?

George Beres (Aug. 18, 2004): [The writer lives in Eugene, Ore, and is a baptized Greek Orthodox Christian. His current research is on whistleblowers in government, and the missed opportunity John McNaughton had to be one.]When I see reference to Peoria in a national news magazine, it usually relates to the entertainment business and names such as Fibber McGee & Molly and Richard Pryor. So I was startled to see Peoria among the communities featured in the TIME Mag

August 17, 2004

WSJ: Kerry's Cambodia Christmas Story Falls Apart.

Robert L. Polock, i the WSJ (Aug. 16, 2004):John Kerry volunteered for service in Vietnam. John Kerry was wounded in Vietnam. And a number of the men with whom John Kerry served testify to acts of courage on his part. This much seems beyond question, and I see no reason to weigh in on the factual disputes surrounding Mr. Kerry's medals being waged by pro-Kerry vets like Jim

August 13, 2004

Kerry's Call to Let America Be America Has Prompted a Conservative Attack by Bill Buckley

Joshua Glenn, in the Boston Globe (Aug. 8, 2004): SINCE MID-MAY, when John Kerry adopted as his campaign's central slogan Langston Hughes's ringing phrase"Let America be America again," would-be literary critics among the chattering classes have quarreled about the line's true significance.On June 1, David M. Halbfinger of The New York Times commented that Hughes's 1938

August 13, 2004

A Bush Defeat Might Not Be All Bad News for Conservatives

John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, in the Christian Science Monitor (Aug. 12, 2004): One of the secrets of conservative America is how often it has welcomed Republican defeats. In 1976, many conservatives saw the trouncing of the moderate Gerald Ford as a way of clearing the path for the ideologically pure Ronald Reagan in 1980. George H.W. Bush's 1992 defeat provoked celebration not just in

August 12, 2004

Pete Du Pont: Senators Make Bad Presidents ... Kerry Would Be No Exception

Pete Du Pont, in the WSJ (Aug. 12, 2004): My senior senator, Joe Biden of Delaware, gave a hometown speech earlier this year about U.S. foreign policy in Iraq. It was a thoughtful presentation, but it included a criticism of the election of former governors to the presidency because they had no foreign-policy experience and thus were insensitive and less capable regarding foreign policy and internatio

August 12, 2004

Was Bush a Deserter?

Ian Williams, in the Nation (Aug. 5, 2004): [Mr. Williams is the author of the new book, Deserter: George W. Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans, and His Past.]Even allowing for the usual military-bureaucratic incompetence, records relating to George W. Bush's National Guard Service have a suspiciously low survival rate, so there has been understandable incredulity about the rec

August 12, 2004

An Electoral College Tie? It Could Happen

Robert Bennett, in the NYT (Aug. 11, 2004): Almost since its inception more than 200 years ago, the Electoral College has had its critics. Most of the contemporary objections are structural: because the college is apportioned on a state-by-state basis, with most states then choosing their electors through a winner-take-all popular election, the system could lead to what is known as a "minority presiden

August 11, 2004

Would Kerry Help the Stock Market?

Eric Engen, in the WSJ (Aug. 11, 2004): [Mr. Engen is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.]In recent weeks, John Kerry and his supporters have claimed that his policies would stimulate the economy and that his election would be good for the stock market. Kerry supporters, for example, cite a Merrill Lynch study that shows that since 1943 the stock market returned 13.6% annually,

August 10, 2004

Henry Mark Holzer: The Anti-Kerry TV Ad Is Based on Solid Evidence

Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer, at frontpagemag.com (Aug. 10, 2004):[Henry Mark Holzer [www.henrymarkholzer.com; hank@henrymarkholzer.com], Professor Emeritus at Brooklyn Law School, specializes in federal appeals. Erika Holzer [www.erikaholzer.com] is a lawyer and novelist.]Presidential nominee John Kerry is working overtime to blunt growing criticism of his Vietnam serv

August 10, 2004

Jim Rassmann: John Kerry Saved My Life

Jim Rassmann, in the WSJ (Aug.10, 2004):I came to know Lt. John Kerry during the spring of 1969. He and his swift boat crew assisted in inserting our Special Forces team and our Chinese Nung soldiers into operational sites in the Cau Mau Peninsula of South Vietnam. I worked with him on many operations and saw firsthand his leadership, courage and decision-making ability un

August 10, 2004

Renée Loth: A National Service Corps Could Redefine Patriotism

Renée Loth, in the Boston Globe (August 10, 2004): [Renée Loth is editor of the Boston Globe's editorial page.] AFTER THE Sept. 11 attacks, I put a small American flag in my front window. Some of my most liberal friends were appalled. The flag conjured up visions of jingoistic, Fox-watching rednecks, they said. Displaying it tagged me as a guns, guts, and God kind

August 7, 2004

The Lessons of Hiroshima We Need to Remember Today

John Nelson, in the San Francisco Chronicle (Ag. 6, 2004): [John Nelson is an associate professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of San Francisco.] As U.S. politicians debate the intelligence failures that preceded the Iraq invasion as well as the war in Afghanistan, they can take little comfort that history will judge these wars c

August 7, 2004

Should Ex-Military Generals Be Endorsing Anybody?

Harry Levins, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Aug. 1, 2004):Missouri's Omar Bradley once said, "Thirty-two years in the peacetime Army taught me to do my job, hold my tongue and keep my name out of the papers." But last week's papers listed a dozen retired generals

August 6, 2004

The 9-11 Commission Adopted a Reform that Won't Work

Alexis Debat, in London's Financial Times (July 30, 2004):[The writer, a former official in the French defence ministry, is a senior consultant to ABC News and will publish a history of the CIA next year.]As reactions to the 9/11 Commission's conclusions about US intelligence failures continue to reverberate, historians of intelligence can only wonder how the commission could be so wrong for being so right. The report's clever diagnosis of the state

August 6, 2004

Michael Moore's Movie ... The Facts About Bush and the House of Saud

David Leigh, in the Guardian (July 29, 2004):...In his let's-join-up-all-the-dots way, this Emile Zola from Flint, Michigan, accuses Bush of a corrupt relationship with the Saudis. He says - or hints heavily - that Bush had business links with the Bin Laden family, which induced him to allow the lot of them to escape from the US on chartered planes in the aftermath of 9/11, and, secondly, to allow Osama himself to get away later, while Bush hastily diverte

August 6, 2004

Normon Solomon: Attica and Abu Ghraib ... The Connection

Norman Solomon, in his weekly column (Aug. 5, 2004): [Norman Solomon is co-author, with Reese Erlich, of “Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You.” His columns and other writings can be found at www.normansolomon.com]A recent obituary in the New York Times told about Frank Smith, “who as an inmate leader at Attica prison was tortured by officers in the aftermath of the prisoner uprising of 1971 and then spent a quarter century successfu

August 5, 2004

Al Hunt: The Effort to Smear John Kerry's War Record

Al Hunt, in the WSJ (Aug. 5, 2004): Suppose in the 1992 presidential election, after an unconfirmed rumor surfaced about an alleged affair then President Bush had years earlier, Clinton supporters decided to make marital fidelity a central issue. That would be almost as crazy as the current effort by some Bush backers to focus attention on John Kerry's Vietnam War record and subsequ

August 5, 2004

The "Root Causes" of Terrorism Are ... ?

Zachary Constantino, at campuswatch.org (August 5, 2004):[Zachary Constantino is a student research associate with Campus Watch. He is presently pursuing a B.A. in political science with a minor in international politics at American University in Washington, DC.]Militant Islam is an ideology embraced by political and economic elites, including those who hold American passports. Unfortunately, much of the aca