Roundup: Historians' Take

Robert S. McElvaine: Jesusless: The Church of Conservatism

Robert S. McElvaine teaches history at Millsaps College and is the author of Eve's Seed (McGraw-Hill). He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled ChristianityLite: Getting to Heaven without the Hassle. In Godless, her latest and most ill-tempered book-length rant, Ann Coulter asserts that liberalism is a "godless" religion. In fact, however, the most fundamental problem in Christianity in America and the world today is that the "fundamentalist" religi

Jim Sleeper: Journalists should be jolting one another and the rest of us out of the frog bowl, before it boils over

[Jim Sleeper is a lecturer in political science at Yale.] A little-remarked virtue of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth is its graphic rendering of The Parable of the Frog. What? You don’t know about it and aren’t haunted by it day and night? Well, if you’re a journalist in Washington or New York, it’s no wonder. You and some colleagues are probably the hapless frog himself.... As I noted here before the 2004 election, the nation’s Founders were worried about republican

Gary Leupp: Yassar Talal Al-Zharani, R.I.P.

Yassar Talal Al-Zahrani killed himself June 10, hanging himself in his cell in the “professionally run, humane facility” in Guantanamo. Yassar was a 17-year-old boy when US forces in Afghanistan captured him in 2001. He was a Saudi who had gone to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban, which at that time ruled most of Afghanistan, against the Northern Alliance forces who had ruled Afghanistan from 1993 to 1996. He followed in the footsteps of thousands of Saudis who would never hav

Jonathan Zimmerman: Phils Set Bad Example

[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University and lives in suburban Philadelphia. He is the author of “Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century,” which will be published in the fall by Harvard University Press. I live near Philadelphia, and I love our hard-luck, up-and-down baseball team. Until the Phillies take Brett Myers off the field, however, I won't attend any more of their games. And neither should anybody else. Last Friday morning

Daniel Pipes: How Muslims Think

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] How do Muslims worldwide think? To find out, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press carried out a large-scale attitudinal survey this spring. Titled"The Great Divide: How Westerners and Muslims View Eac

Eric Alterman: Truth is for 'Liberals'

Here we are, five and a half years into the Bush Administration, and the press corps still hasn't figured out how to handle the White House's primary tactic of media management: lying. During George W. Bush's first term, reporters had a powerful confluence of motivations for their difficulty in calling the President to task. First was tradition; mere journalists lacked the authority to call a President a liar. Second, post-9/11 they were intimidated by Bush's McCarthyite with-us-or

Jay Cost: Is 1994 a Model for Democratic Success?

In recent weeks, the talk among pundits about the inevitability of Democratic triumph has simmered down. For some reason - one that I have not yet ascertained - Bush in the high-30s induces an entirely different storyline than Bush in the mid-30s. While the logic does not make sense, the result is nonetheless a move in the right direction. We seem to have returned to the much more sensible conversation that we were having in March: for the Democrats to win the House, they will actually have to d

Tom Engelhardt: Green Zoning History

[Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. His novel, The Last Days of Publishing, is now out in paperback.] As every political junky in the country now knows, just before finding himself not indicted by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, Karl Rove went to

Randall Balmer: Jesus Is Not a Republican

[Randall Balmer is a professor of American religious history at Barnard College. This essay is excerpted from Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America: An Evangelical's Lament, to be published next month by Perseus Books.] In November 2002, 30 years after my previous visit to Wheaton College to hear George McGovern, I approached the podium in Edman Chapel to address the student body. At evangelical colleges like Wheaton, in Illinois, there are two

Gary Leupp: Making the Case for Impeachment

The just-published The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office by CounterPuncher Dave Lindorff and Barbara Olshansky is more than a manual for the members of Congress---those who under the constitution are empowered to impeach high officials---who might consider Bush’s impeachment after the November elections. It’s a compact (275 pages, including 60 pages of appendices and footnotes) catalogue of administration deceit and criminality that should

Jonathan Zimmerman: About those cell phones only kids hear ringing

[Jonathan Zimmerman (jlzimm@aol.com) teaches history at New York University and lives in Narberth.] According to recent news articles, American teenagers are using a high-pitched cell phone tone that many adults cannot hear. The reports have sparked alarm among schoolteachers, who fear that the new tone will let their students take calls in class. But the captains of American industry aren't afraid of change. Instead, they embrace it!

Juan Cole: Bush's Abuse of History

The president of the United States is in some ways the nation's leading public historian. More people hear about American history from him than from virtually any other source, with the possible exception of Hollywood. It has therefore been dispiriting to witness the falsehoods about American history consistently purveyed by the Bush administration. Bush and his officials have repeatedly made allegations that simply are not true, but they sin most grievously against the muse of Cl

Victor Davis Hanson: Socrates on Illegal Immigration

After Socrates was convicted by a court of questionable charges, his friends planned to break him out of his jail in Athens. But the philosopher refused to flee. Instead, he insisted that a citizen who lived in a consensual society should not pick and choose which laws he finds convenient to obey. Selective compliance, Socrates warned, would undermine the moral integrity of the entire legal system, ensuring anarchy. And so, as Plato tells us, the philosopher accepted the court's dea

Neve Gordon: The U.S.-Israeli “Somalia Plan”

[Neve Gordon teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University, Israel, and is the editor of From the Margins of Globalization: Critical Perspectives on Human Rights. He can be reached at nevegordon@gmail.com] In his first visit to the White House on May 23, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told President Bush that Israel will “devote six to nine months to find a Palestinian partner” before it pursues the unilateral “Convergence Plan.” It was an e

Henry Graff: Bush and the Plight of the Presidency

President Bush’s constantly dropping approval rating should not be misunderstood as simply a response to the Iraq debacle. A variety of mistakes and missteps must be considered factors in the public’s disapproval of his performance. As chief executive he is being given a judgment unique in history. The words of criticism leveled at him come from all directions. The Democratic leader in the Senate, Harry Reid of Nevada, declares without hesitation: “We see no end of Bush’s dangerous incompe

Andrew Meyer: The Complex Specter of Vietnam

[After living in mainland China and Taiwan for four years and in Japan for one year Mr. Meyer returned to the U.S. and earned a doctoral degree in Chinese history, which he teaches at the City University of New York.] Comparisons to Vietnam began haunting the Bush administration's Iraq policy even before the Coalition invasion was launched in 2003. The specter of Vietnam is not a simple or univalent influence on the US political climate surrounding the Iraq conflict, however. It imp

Daniel Pipes: Does the Police Department Profile? Should It?

[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.] The NYPD, like every Western law enforcement agency, indignantly denies profiling. Its spokesman, Paul Browne, said in August,"Racial profiling is illegal, of doubtful effectiveness, and against department policy."But it does, in fact, profile.

Juan Cole: Paul Bremer's Still Not Learned Anything

Paul Bremer says he hopes Bush's cabinet summit will develop an effective military plan for defeating the insurgency in Iraq. Bremer came to Iraq saying appalling things like "we will go on imposing our will on this country" or words to that effect, and appears to have learned nothing. Counter-insurgency is tough. The best the hawks can usually do is cite the British in their colony of Malaya in the 1950s, when they curbed a communist movement. But 1960 was a long time ag

Gary Leupp: The Occupiers and the Worsening Plight of Iraqi Gays

[Gary Leupp is a Professor of History, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion, at Tufts University and author of numerous works on Japanese history. He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu.] Last May, Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith interviewed seven young Iraqi men on the program. CBS News summed up the interview: “Many Iraqis think conditions have gotten so bad in their country, they’d like to see Saddam Hussein back in power…” One stated, &ldq

Lee Cassanelli: Somalia's Islamists differ from Taliban

Lee Cassanelli is professor of history and chair of the African Studies Committee at the University of Pennsylvania The reported takeover of Mogadishu by Islamic militias last week raised fears that war-torn Somalia might be on the verge of turning into another Afghan. Somalia has experienced more than a decade of misrule by predatory warlords and their locally recruited militias. Armed gangs terrorize Somali civilians and extort money from travelers at roadside checkpo