Roundup: Historians' Take

April 29, 2005

Sean Wilentz: Repubs Blocked Far More of Clinton's Judicial Nominations

Sean Wilentz, in a letter to the editor of the NYT (4-29-05): To the Editor:Bob Dole contends that the" current obstruction effort of the Democratic leadership" over judicial nominations is"extraordinary."Yet between 1995, when the Republicans regained control of the Senate, and 2001, the Republican majority blocked 35 percent of President Bill Clinton's nominees to the federal appeals bench without giving them an up-or-down vote. Many did not even receive a hear

April 28, 2005

Max Boot: So What If Bolton's a Tough Guy

Max Boot, in the LSAT (4-28-05):Nomination battles are known for introducing new standards for officeholders. John Tower's failed bid to be Defense secretary in 1989 meant that public drunkenness was now a disqualification. The near-failure of Clarence Thomas' nomination to the Supreme Court in 1991 added sexual harassment to the list. The withdrawal of Zoe Baird's name f

April 27, 2005

Daniel Pipes: American Border Secrets

Daniel Pipes, in th NY Sun (4-27-05):What steps should Western border agencies take to defend their homelands from harm by Islamists?In the case of non-citizens, the answer is simple: Don't let Islamists in. Exclude not just potential terrorists but also anyone who supports the totalitarian goals of radical Islam. Just as civilized countries did not welcome fascists in the early 1940s (or communists a decade later), they need not welcome Islamists today.But what about one

April 26, 2005

Diane Ravitch: No Child Left Behind Was a Bipartisan Achievement and Should Be Renewed

Diane Ravitch, in the WSJ (4-25-05): The protests against the No Child Left Behind legislation are growing. Anti-testing activists opposed it from the get-go, but now conservative states like Utah are complaining that the federal government should not trample on states' rights, and liberal states like Connecticut insist they will not test children every year from grades three through eight. And no surp

April 25, 2005

Daniel Pipes: Washington Finally Gets It on Radical Islam

Daniel Pipes, at his website (4-25-05):Does the Bush administration really believe, as its leadership has kept repeating since right after 9/11, that Islam is a"religion of peace" not connected to the problem of terrorism? Plenty of indications suggested that it knew better, but year after

April 24, 2005

Paul Gaston: The Republican Attack on Christian Judges

Paul Gaston, in the Wa Post (4-23-05): [The writer is professor emeritus of southern and civil rights history at the University of Virginia. ]People calling themselves Christians are gathering once again for a crusade against what they consider to be the secular humanist subversion of Christian values. This time the object of their wrath is the judiciary. In the wake of the fanatical and fruitle

April 22, 2005

Eric Alterman: The Bush Administration's War on the Media

Eric Alterman, in the Nation (5-9-05): Journalists, George Bernard Shaw once said, "are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization." How odd, given the profession's un-equaled reputation for narcissism, that Shaw's observation holds true even when the collapsing "civilization" is their own. Make no mistake: The Bush Administration

April 20, 2005

Cass R. Sunstein: The Republican Assault on the Judiciary

Cass R. Sunstein, in the LAT (4-15-05):In the last half-century, conservative politicians have mounted three dramatically different attacks on the federal judiciary. The first attack, in which they emphasized the need for judicial restraint, was principled and coherent. The second, which called on judges to consider the original meaning of the Constitution, was more radi

April 16, 2005

Juan Cole: Thomas Friedman's Slander of Middle East Studies and How it is Wrong and Ignorant

Juan Cole, at his blog (4-10-05): On April 7, 2005, in his New York Times op-ed piece, Thomas Friedman wrote:' Until the recent elections in Iraq and among the Palestinians, the modern Arab world was largely immune to the winds of democracy that have blown everywhere else in the world. Why? That's a pretty import

April 16, 2005

Eric Alterman: How Did Neo-Cons Take Over America?

Eric Alterman, at MediaTransparency.org (4-5-05): How did this happen? How did a few renegade New York intellectuals associated with a few tiny publications who converted from liberalism to conservatism back in the late sixties and early seventies give birth to a movement that conquered the focal points of US political debate and convinced the Congress and the president to launch an ill-considered and deeply counterproductiv

April 13, 2005

Neve Gordon: What Bush Has Learned from Israel About Occupations

Neve Gordon, in the Baltimore Sun (4-11-05): [Neve Gordon teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University in Israel and is currently a visiting scholar at the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the editor of From the Margins of Globalization: Critical Perspectives on Human Rights and can be reached at nevegordon@gmail.com ] ISRAEL IS THE key to understanding President Bush's strategy in Iraq. Not because it had any influence over

April 12, 2005

Daniel Pipes: The Forcible Removal of Israelis from Gaza

Daniel Pipes, at frontpagemag.com (4-11-05):My column last week,"Ariel Sharon's Folly," noted the likelihood that more than 8,000 Israelis living in Gaza will soon be removed by their own government, with force, if necessary. I called this step historically unprecedented and then challenged the reader to name"another democracy that has forcibly removed thousands its own citizens from their lawful homes."Not surprisingly, r

April 12, 2005

Eric Foner: What the NYT Got Wrong About the Columbia University Dispute

The following letter appeared in the NYT 4-11-05: To the Editor: "Intimidation at Columbia" conflates two different issues under the rubric of intimidation: charges that certain faculty members have behaved in an unprofessional manner toward students, and the ideas of those teaching Middle Eastern studies at Columbia. Professors who do not treat students properly should be reprimanded. But for a student to encounter unfamiliar or even unple

April 12, 2005

Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin: Oppie Was Fighting the Same Forces Many Are Today

Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (4-11-05):[Kai Bird is a biographer and contributing editor to The Nation. Martin J. Sherwin is a professor of history at Tufts University. Their book, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, has just been published by Alfred A. Knopf.]Despite the menacing weather and bitter cold that chilled the

April 8, 2005

Steven Calabresi and James Lindgren: Why Supreme Court Justices Should Be Term Limited

,Steven Calabresi and James Lindgren, in the WSJ (4-8-05): [Mr. Calabresi is the George C. Dix Professor of Constitutional Law, and Mr. Lindgren the Benjamin Mazur Research Professor, at Northwestern University.]It has been almost 11 years since the last vacancy opened up on the Supreme Court. The current group of justices has served together for longer than any other group

April 7, 2005

Kevin Baker: Defending Massachusetts from Republican Attacks

Kevin Baker, in Am Heritage (April-May 2005): The seemingly interminable 2004 presidential campaign is well behind us now, but I’m still not willing to let it go yet. I want to hear an apology from someone about the most egregious smear to emerge from the campaign. I’m not talking about the Swift Boat Veterans, or “flip-flopping,” or anything perpetrated by Michael Moore. What I m

April 7, 2005

Jeffrey L. Pasley: How History Helped Me Realize the Importance of Social Security

Jeffrey L. Pasley, at common-place.org (April 2005): ... Let us start with the basics. Until the middle of the twentieth century, becoming too old to work meant falling into dependence and poverty, and the onus for preventing this rested entirely on the family, the primary social, economic, and (in many ways) political institution of premodern times. Most communities had poorhouses or some other form of poo

April 7, 2005

Nick Turse: Making War Is the National Pastime

Nick Turse, at Tomdispatch.com (4-1-05): Lets face it, making war is fast superceding sports as the American national pastime. Since 1980, overtly or covertly, the United States has been involved in military actions in Grenada, Libya, Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Haiti, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Liberia, Sudan, the Philippines, Colombia, Haiti (again), Afghanistan (again) and Iraq (again) and that

April 7, 2005

Max Boot: Ahmad Chalabi, CIA Scapegoat

Max Boot, in the LAT (4-7-05): In 1987, after he was exonerated of corruption charges, former Secretary of Labor Raymond Donovan issued the classic plea of the wronged man: "Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?" Whichever office it is, Ahmad Chalabi may want to apply there as well. The leader of the Iraqi National Congress has been t

April 5, 2005

Daniel Pipes: Ariel Sharon's Folly Will Only Embolden Terrorists

Daniel Pipes, in the NY Sun (4-5-05):With the passage last week of a budget bill in Israel, the government of Ariel Sharon appears to be ready to remove more than 8,000 Israelis living in Gaza with force, if necessary.In addition to the legal dubiousness of this step and its historical unprecedented nature (challenge to the reader: name another democracy that has forcibly removed thousands its own citize