Roundup: Media's Take

March 23, 2004

The Hysteria About Gay Marriage: A Minister's Perspective

Rev. Mark Gallagher, minister of the Michael Servetus Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, Vancouver, WA, in Columbian.com (March 21, 2004): Two men of my Vancouver congregation recently got a marriage license from Multnomah County, and I traveled to their Portland home to conduct the ceremony. Given their loving and committed relationship of over 13 years, they were perhaps the most deeply ready of any couple I have married.     I ask,"Why on Earth should thes

March 23, 2004

Rush Limbaugh: Clarke's Got His History Wrong

From the Rush Limbaugh Show, transcript by Limbaugh (March 22, 2004): RUSH: Now, I'm not going to use any video of Clarke from 60 Minutes, but he was on Good Morning, America today, and here's just a couple, maybe three sound bites. Charlie Gibson says,"So, you deal with the exigencies of the day on September 11th. You come in September 12th ready to plot what response we take t

March 22, 2004

Balkans Risk Sliding Back into Turmoil

Judy Dempsey, writing for the Financial Times (London) (March 20, 2004) The Balkans risk being plunged into a new cycle of instability and bloodshed if the three main international decision-makers in the region do not act quickly and start political negotiations over the status of Kosovo, diplomats and analysts warned yesterday......Nato, the EU and the UN have invested much time, money and personnel in the small province that the U

March 22, 2004

When Spin Spins Out of Control

Sheryl Gay Stolberg, writing for the NYT (March 21, 2004): Last week, an obscure government actuary named Richard S. Foster rocked Washington with accusations that the Bush administration had muzzled his economic forecasts for overhauling Medicare. Mr. Foster calculated that it would cost more than $500 billion to provide a prescription drug benefit over the next 10 years, but says his boss threatened to fire him if he shared the information with C

March 20, 2004

Discord Amid the Rubble of the Transatlantic Bargain

Financial Times (London) 3-19-04 Philip Stephens A year ago we were present at the destruction. The march of US and British troops into Iraq did more than divide old allies over how best to confront Saddam Hussein. It marked the final collapse of the geopolitical architecture that had safeguarded the peace for 50 years. Amid the rubble of the postwar order, we now have incoherence and argument. The consequent risks to the west's security

March 20, 2004

Decisive Events in History According to Al Qaeda

Radio Netherlands 3-17-04 Hans de Vreij Security and Defence editor The battle of Poitiers in 732, Spain 1492, Vienna 1693 and Turkey 1917. These combinations of years and places most probably mean little or nothing at all to the average Westerner in 2004. Yet the events to which they refer are all significant moments in the history of two religions: Islam and Christianity. In 732, Christi

March 20, 2004

Paul Bremer's Indifference to History

South China Morning Post 3-16-04 Sunanda Kisor Datta-Ray Visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, SingaporeIraq could explode again as soon as American troops have gone, because American administrator Paul Bremer seems to have learned nothing from the past. He is inviting disaster by defying the logic of numbers to placate US allies among Iraq's Sunni Arab neighbours and to contain Shi'ite Iran. No wonder Shi'ite

March 20, 2004

Did Kerry Deserve All Those Medals?

Peter Kammerer, in the South China Morning Post (March 16, 2004):United States Democratic Party presidential contender John Kerry is under increasing pressure to prove his Vietnam war bravery, which has become the centrepiece of his election campaign. Senator Kerry, the commanding officer of a US naval boat in the Mekong river delta for four months at the height of the war, rarely fails to invoke Vietnam, its legacy or his service re

March 20, 2004

Athens Is a Terrible Place to Hold the Olympics This Year--But If All Goes Well, It Could Be the Best Place

Christine Brennan, in USA Today (March 18, 2004):The timing and the location of the upcoming Summer Olympic Games in Athens, Greece, could not be more ominous. Never has there been a modern Olympic Games situated in a worse spot at a worse time in history. There have been sadly ironic locations, such as Hitler's Berlin in 1936. There have been tragic locations, such as Munich in 1972. There have been controversial locations, such as M

March 20, 2004

Benny Morris Revealed the Truth About Zionism

Ghada Karmi, a research fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, and author of In Search of Fatima; in the Guardian (March 18, 2004):It is not simply Israel's current hardline government that is to blame for the subjugation of Palestinians, but Zionism itself Israel's deputy defence minister, Ze'ev Boim, recently wondered whether there was a genetic defect that made Arabs terrorists. "What is i

March 19, 2004

Bush II Is Running a Dirty Campaign (Just Like His Dad Did)

William Saletan, in Slate (March 19, 2004): If you oppose George Bush's policies, or if you're supported by anybody who opposes George Bush's policies, you're anti-American. That was the message of the 1988 presidential campaign of George H.W. Bush, who suggested that his opponent from Massachusetts was against the Pledge of Allegiance. Now it's his son's campaign message, too. Facts don't matter when you run on

March 19, 2004

Iraq: A Year of Lies

Dilip Hiro, author of Iraq: In the Eye of the Storm and Secrets and Lies: Operation"Iraqi Freedom" and After, A Prelude to the Fall of U.S. Power in the Middle East?; in www.tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, run by Tom Engelhardt (March 19, 2004): Enough hard facts have surfaced since the war on Iraq a y

March 19, 2004

Justice Anthony Scalia: Just Because I'm Friends with Dick Cheney Doesn't Mean I Can't Rule on His Case

Justice Anthony Scalia, in defense of his decision not to recuse himself from the case before the Supreme Court involving Vice President Dick Cheney (March 18, 2004): ... For five years or so, I have been going to Louisiana during the Court’s long December-January recess, to the duck-hunting camp of a friend whom I met through two hunting companions fro

March 19, 2004

Masculinity as a Factor in the Presidential Election

James Rainey, in the LAT (March 18, 2004): In a campaign that has seen candidate Howard Dean infamously appeal to"guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks," many political scientists, historians and gender experts say that a good portion of the presidential image-making in 2004 will center on masculinity. Driving the patern

March 19, 2004

Before We Fought Over Same-Sex Marriages, We Fought Over Black-White Marriages

From NPR's "All Things Considered" (March 16, 2004): ROBERT SIEGEL: In this season of national argument over same-sex marriage, we're taking a look at two historical controversies over marriage and the law. Yesterday, we heard about polygamy and, today, racial intermarriage, or miscegenation as it was called. From the earliest Colonial times until the 1960s, the marriage of two people of different races was illegal in much of the country.

March 19, 2004

A Nasty Campaign

Elisabeth Bumiller, in the NYT (March 14, 2004): The 2004 presidential campaign has opened with a snarl. President Bush and Senator John Kerry, two gentlemen from Yale, wasted no time attacking each other eight months before the election. Last week alone, Mr. Kerry called Republicans" crooked" and"lying" in off-the-cuff comments, then refused to apologize to what he ca

March 18, 2004

Shelby Steele: From Selma to San Francisco?

Shelby Steele, a fellow of the Hoover Institution, and author of A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America (Harper Collins, 1998), in the WSJ (March 18, 2004): It is always both a little flattering and more than a little annoying to blacks when other groups glibly invoke the civil rights movement and all its iconic imagery to justify their agendas for social change. I will never forget, nor forgive, the feminist rallying cry of the early '70

March 18, 2004

John Kerry's No Michael Dukakis. He's Worse.

Brendan Miniter, in the WSJ (March 17, 2004):John Kerry is right about one thing: He's no Michael Dukakis. A look at the record shows that in his bid for the White House in 1988, Massachusetts' then-governor ran to Mr. Kerry's right on national defense. Mr. Kerry has not repudiated his opposition to the weapon systems Mr. Dukakis promised to support. Everyone rem

March 18, 2004

Was Kerry Present at a Meeting of Veterans Against the War at which the Assassination of Conservative Politicians Was Discussed?

Thomas H. Lipscomb, in Oregon Magazine (March 15, 2004): The anti-war group that John Kerry was the principal spokesman for debated and voted on a plot to assassinate politicians who supported the Vietnam War.      Mr. Kerry denies being present at the November 12-15, 1971, meeting in Kansas City of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and says he quit the group before the meetin

March 18, 2004

One Member of John Kerry's Vietnam Crew Isn't Thrilled with Him at All

Michael Kranish, in the Boston Globe (March 11, 2004): Steven Michael Gardner served side by side with John Forbes Kerry in Vietnam, was wounded under Kerry's command, and was manning twin .50-caliber machine guns on a night that has forever haunted Kerry -- the night his crew killed a young boy in a sampan. But unlike many of Kerry's crewmate