Roundup: Media's Take

Max Boot: How Not to Get Out of Iraq

[Max Boot is a senior fellow in national-security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of "War Made New: Weapons, Warriors, and the Making of the Modern World," coming out in paperback this month.] What about partitioning Iraq, either into three separate states or into some sort of confederation of regional authorities? Does that offer a better solution?... There is one set of conditions under which a partition might indeed make sense and

Joshua Green: The Rove Presidency

[Joshua Green is a senior editor of The Atlantic.] Karl Rove had the plan, the power, and the historic chance to remake American politics. What went wrong? --- With more than a year left in the fading Bush presidency, Karl Rove’s worst days in the White House may still lie ahead of him. I met Rove on one of his best days, a week after Bush’s reelection. The occasion was a reporters’ lunch hosted by The Christian Science Monitor at the St. Regis Hotel in Washingto

Joe Conason: Is everybody gay? The GOP's crowded closet.

[Joe Conason writes a weekly column for Salon and the New York Observer. His new book is "It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush."] That was the cry of the lovelorn schoolteacher in the classic 1997 film "In and Out," after her diffident fiancé reveals his true orientation (and dumps her for Tom Selleck). Ten years later, more than a few discombobulated Republicans must be muttering the same question, despite the fervent denial of Sen. Larry &

Alexander Burns: Larry Craig’s Antecedents

Yesterday, Fred Allen posted here an item that had shown up on Andrew Sullivan’s blog. It was a humorous story told by Tallulah Bankhead and repeated on Tuesday in connection with the breaking scandal involving Senator Larry Craig. This wasn’t the only post on Sullivan’s site about the Craig affair. Jamie Kirchick, a guest-blogger who normally writes for The New Republic, posted yesterday about a 1955 incident that provides some useful historical background to the contempora

Jamie Glazov: Interviews Robert Spencer about Islam and Jihad

[Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's managing editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in U.S. and Canadian foreign policy. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitz’s Left Illusions. ] Frontpage Interview's guest today is Robert Spencer, a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of seven books, eight monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including the New York Times B

David B. Rivkin, Jr., and Lee A. Casey: There Is Only One Executive

[Messrs. Casey and Rivkin served in the Justice Department under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush.] ... Whoever the new attorney general is, he or she must be just as determined to defend, beginning with the confirmation hearings, the president's legitimate constitutional authority against congressional encroachment as was Alberto Gonzales. The Constitution's framers wanted the federal government to have a strong executive power. Although few Americans were ever i

EyeontheUN.org: Notorious UN Committee Lies about its “Zionism is Racism" Origins

New York—The UN Committee scheduled to hold a virulently anti-Israel meeting on European Parliament premises in Brussels August 30-31, 2007 has just released a statement attempting to cover-up the date of its inception. The Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP) has recently come under unprecedented criticism for its extreme anti-Israel activity. In response it has now declared that it “would like to state most unequivocally that this

David Brooks: Bring back the wise men

In 1948, a Republican lawyer named Herb Brownell managed Thomas Dewey’s presidential campaign. When Dwight Eisenhower was beginning his run in 1952, Brownell flew to Paris to tell Ike how to campaign — how to do scheduling, how to organize a campaign team, which positions to take on Social Security and the budget. Brownell helped gather delegates for Ike at the 1952 convention and helped select Richard Nixon for the vice president nomination. Then, after Eisenhower won the presidenc

Robert D. Kaplan: Why vets and soldiers see things differently than civilians

... The relative obscurity of [Bud] Day's autobiography [Duty Honor Country, published in 1989 by American Hero Press, Fort Walton Beach, Florida] and other books like it about Vietnam constitutes a lesser-known aspect of our civilian-military divide. The books to which I refer should be part of our recollection of Vietnam, but they generally aren't. They aren't so much stories that soldiers tell civilians as those that soldiers tell each other. Of course, there are exceptions: most famously Jam

Matthew Yglesias: Why is George Bush suddenly making parallels between Iraq and Vietnam? Because he’s preparing to shift the blame for another disaster.

[Matthew Yglesias is staff writer at the American Prospect and author of an eponymous blog. His writing has also appeared in Foreign Policy, Slate and the New York Times Magazine.] Today, it seems, was “Asian Wars Analogy Day” in the Bush administration, as the president uncorked a whole series of odd historical analogies in defense of his Iraq policy. “In the aftermath of Japan’s surrender,” he reminded an audience of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Missouri, “many thought it naive

Walter Shapiro: Fred Thompson's revealing back story

[Walter Shapiro is Salon's Washington bureau chief] Books by presidential candidates generally boast the authenticity of Karen Hughes channeling the inner thoughts of George W. Bush in a quickie autobiography concocted for the 2000 campaign. But occasionally -- as with Barack Obama's 1995 "Dreams From My Father" -- a would-be politician publishes a book before he can afford a ghostwriter and before he acquires aides to scrub every sentence for any human revelation.

Stephen Schlesinger: Giuliani's Foreign Policy Would Be Worse Than Bush's

[Stephen Schlesinger is the former Director of the World Policy Institute at the New School University in New York City (1997-2006). Mr. Schlesinger received his BA from Harvard University and his JD from Harvard Law School. In the early 1970s, he edited and published The New Democrat Magazine. ] The Republican presidential frontrunner, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, has just written his foreign policy credo for Foreign Affairs magazine. It is a truly unnerving pronouncement -

Ben Cosgrove: How whales changed America into a world power

[Ben Cosgrove is a freelance writer in New York and the editor of the baseball anthology"Covering the Bases."] D.H. Lawrence famously called"Moby-Dick""one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world," and while plenty of readers might agree with only one or the other of those descriptors, there's no questioning the book's pride of place in America's literary imagination. Vast, unruly, shot through with poetry ("untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; li

Norman Solomon: The Warfare State Is Part of Us

[Norman Solomon’s book “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State” will be published in early fall. The foreword is by Daniel Ellsberg. For more information, go to: www.MadeLoveGotWar.com] The USA’s military spending is now close to $2 billion a day. This fall, the country will begin its seventh year of continuous war, with no end in sight. On the horizon is the very real threat of a massive air assault on Iran. An

Sidney Blumenthal: Washington's Fantasy Island

Karl Rove calls himself Moby Dick. One speechwriter sees himself as St. Francis. Another sees him as Iago. All regard Bush as Abraham Lincoln. In Washington, reality is a myth. *** Even before the date of his resignation from the White House took effect, Karl Rove furiously launched himself on his legacy tour. Appearing on three Sunday morning TV shows over the past weekend he was intent on demonstrating the range of his political, military and literary mastery. Rove ra

Carolyn Curiel: Hey, I Wrote That! But the President Said It — Out Loud!

White House speechwriting is glamorous, filled with state dinners, Oval Office meetings and no shortage of opportunities to prevail in heated internal debates that save democracy. At least that’s what you might conclude from recent books, films and television shows written by a growing number of former White House speechwriters. The job really is a plum, even with the long, anxious hours spent before blank computer screens, moments that usually get lost or airbrushed, even in nonfic

Dilip Hiro: The Sole Superpower in Decline

[Dilip Hiro is the author of Secrets and Lies: Operation "Iraqi Freedom" and, most recently, Blood of the Earth: The Battle for the World's Vanishing Oil Resources, both published by Nation Books.] With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States stood tall -- militarily invincible, economically unrivalled, diplomatically uncontestable, and the dominating force on information channels

Harvey Wasserman: "Nuke Nuggets" Glow for the Senate's Radioactive Rip-off

[Harvey Wasserman's SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030 is at http://www.solartopia.org/. He is senior advisor to the Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and senior editor of http://www.freepress.org/, where this piece first appeared. ] Gargantuan loan guarantees for a "new generation" of nuke reactors define the Senate's version of the Energy Bill tha

Adam Cohen: The Founders Had an Idea for Handling Alberto Gonzales

William Belknap, Ulysses S. Grant’s disgraced secretary of war, is experiencing a revival. Impeached in 1876 for taking bribes, he has become the inspiration for a movement to remove Attorney General Alberto Gonzales from office. Impeachment is usually thought of as limited to presidents, but the Constitution not only allows the impeachment of Cabinet members, in Belknap’s case, it was actually done. Impeaching Mr. Gonzales has moved beyond the hypothetical, now that Jay Inslee, Dem

Saul Landau: The FBI in peace and war--still the same

[Saul Landau writes a regular column for CounterPunch and progresoweekly.com. His new Counterpunch Press book is A BUSH AND BOTOX WORLD.] When I read a news story about the FBI "taking cues from the CIA to recruit thousands of covert informants in the United States as part of a sprawling effort to boost its intelligence capabilities," (ABCNews.com July 25) I had a déjà vu experience. As a kid, I listened to the radio show "The FBI in Peace and War,"