Roundup: Media's Take

Bill Moyers, Bruce Fein, John Nichols: Impeach President Bush?

Bill Moyers: Welcome to the Journal. Impeachment...the word feared and loathed by every sitting president is back. It's in the air and on your computer screen, a growing clamor aimed at both President Bush and Vice-President Cheney. This week's news only agitated the clamor. The president acknowledged that someone in his administration did leak the name of a CIA agent to the press, but he said let's move on - even as he refused to let his former White Ho

Raymond Arroyo: Why the pope brought back the Latin mass

[Mr. Arroyo is the author of "Mother Angelica" and news director of EWTN, a Catholic broadcasting network.] ... The legislation (made public on Saturday) allows a pastor, on his own authority, to celebrate the Tridentine Mass, codified in the 16th century. Following the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), the venerable Mass--in which cries of "sanctus, sanctus" rose like incense around the altar--fell out of practice. It was actively suppressed in some quarters--th

Peggy Noonan: We can't fire the president right now, so we're waiting it out

[Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father" (Penguin, 2005).] It's been a slow week in a hot era. I found myself Thursday watching President Bush's news conference and thinking about what it is about him, real or perceived, that makes people who used to smile at the mention of his name now grit their teeth. I mean what it is apart from the huge and obvious issues on which they might dis

Amy Sullivan: The Origins of the God Gap

[Sullivan's book, The Party Faithful, will be published in February by Scribner.] In the beginning, as they say, religion in America was a decidedly nonpartisan affair. Presidents of all political stripes sprinkled their speeches with references to the Almighty. Religious Americans led political movements to battle communism and poverty, to promote temperance and civil rights. If anything, the contours of the religious landscape favored Democrats: their voters were evangelical So

Robert Samuelson: Why aren't we happier?

... Scholars such as Cornell University economist Robert Frank are asking why [Americans today aren't any happier than they were in the 1970s despite the fact that the US is far wealthier]. In "Falling Behind," he argues that rising affluence condemns us to self-defeating consumption contests. People want ever-bigger homes, because their friends have ever-bigger homes. But the extra pleasure of owning these grander homes is muted, because (yes) all our friends have them too. Meanwhile,

Peter Wallison: Today's world would be far worse if Saddam were still in power

[Mr. Wallison is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute; he was White House counsel in the Reagan administration. ] Given the problems and U.S. casualties in Iraq, polls show a large majority of the American people believe the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. Yet if we imagine what the world would look like today if Saddam Hussein had not been deposed, it seems clear that almost no outcome in Iraq would be as adverse to the interests of the United States as today's worl

Jim Castagnera: Women Warriors in the War on Terror

[Jim Castagnera of Havertown is the Associate Provost/Associate Counsel at Rider University and a 2007-08 Fellow of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.] As of June 25th, 80 U.S. servicewomen have died in the Iraq War. While this is only about two percent of all American military fatalities in the war to date, this figure exceeds the total number of U.S. servicewomen killed in Korea, Vietnam and the First Gulf War combined… this according to the Public Broadcasting System.

Louis Menand: Are the wrong people voting?

... The average voter is not held in much esteem by economists and political scientists, and [Bryan] Caplan [in his new book, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Politics” (Princeton; $29.95)] rehearses some of the reasons for this. The argument of his book, though, is that economists and political scientists have misunderstood the problem. They think that most voters are ignorant about political issues; Caplan thinks that most voters are wrong about the issues

Blake Hounshell: 10 things President Bush has done right

I just realized that today, July 6, is the 61st birthday of U.S. President George W. Bush. Passport is usually pretty critical of the Prez. So for a change of pace and out of respect for the man's special day, here are the top ten things Bush and his team have gotten right during his time in office. No wisecracks, I promise: Boosting aid to Africa threefold Preventing a nuclear war between India and Pakistan Taking down the A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation

William Kristol: Why Americans should be happy

[Mr. Kristol is the editor of the Weekly Standard.] About three-quarters of Americans, according to surveys, think the country is on the wrong track. About two-thirds of the public disapprove of the job performance of President Bush, and an even higher number disdain Congress. The media are excited about the prospect of a wealthy businessman running for President as an independent who could tap into broad public disgruntlement with the partisan politicians in Washington.

David Aaronovitch: Anti-Zionists should grow up

[David Aaronovitch is a regular columnist for The Times. He won the George Orwell prize for political journalism in 2001 and was the What the Papers Say Columnist of the Year for 2003.] It has long been one of the perverse talents of British middle-class activists to be able to devise campaigns which, instead of drawing attention to real grievances, divert attention away from them. I spent a lot of my early adulthood in observation of this phenomenon and recognise the inevitable mom

Jacob Laksin: Jimmy Carter’s War Against the Jews

When James Earl Carter left office in 1981, after suffering a decisive defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan, the popular verdict held that he was a decent man, if a dismal president. At home, Carter had shown a persistent inability to address domestic concerns like double-digit inflation and soaring interest rates, attributing them and other problems to an American “malaise.” Abroad, he struggled with a number of foreign-policy embarrassments, most notably the Soviet invasion of Afghanist

Peggy Noonan: 2 national languages?

... The question of whether America should have an "official language," of whether English should be formally declared our "national language," is bubbling, and will be back, in Congress, the next few sessions. When you look at papers outlining the facts of the debate, things break down into dryness very quickly. Should "issues of language diversity" be resolved by imposing "linguistic uniformity"? This is like asking if the robots should spea

Cokie Roberts: Dinner-Party Diplomacy

With barely more than a year and a half left in his term, George W. Bush has finally pulled out a centuries-old weapon in the political arsenal of Washington power players: the dinner party. As politicians of both parties emerge from evenings at the White House impressed with their host (and themselves), they ask the same question: What took the President so long? Here's an affable man with an engaging wife; you'd think he would have used the power of the invitation years ago. Intimate gathering

Michael Rose: How a Revolution Saved an Empire

[Michael Rose, a retired British Army general, commanded the United Nations forces in the former Yugoslavia from 1994 to 1995.] AS Lord Cornwallis’s defeated army marched out of Yorktown, Va., in October 1781, its band is said to have played a tune called “The World Turned Upside Down.” It seemed appropriate: Cornwallis, King George III and his ministers were convinced that this defeat and the withdrawal of British troops from the 13 colonies would result not only in anarchy in Amer

Norman Solomon: A Bloody Media Mirror

[The new documentary film “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” based on Norman Solomon’s book of the same title, has just been released on DVD. For information about the full-length movie, produced by the Media Education Foundation and narrated by Sean Penn, go to: www.WarMadeEasyTheMovie.org.] Many of America’s most prominent journalists want us to forget what they were saying and writing more than four years ago to boost the invasion of

Jim Castagnera: Remembering “Brown v. Board of Education”

[Jim Castagnera is the associate provost/associate counsel at Rider University and a 2007-08 Fellow of the Foundation for Defense of Democracy.] Last week the U.S. Supreme Court announced its decisions in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No.1. Yes, I said decisions, plural. No fewer than four separate opinions were filed in this 5-4 decision in which the bare majority struck down attempts by school-district defendants to assign students o

Brendan Miniter: Even Gen. Washington didn't win every battle

[Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com] In 1776 Lt. Col. Thomas Knowlton seemed to be precisely the kind of military officer the American military needed to win the Revolution. He was a veteran of the French and Indian War two decades earlier. He proved to be a supreme leader of men in combat outside Boston. And he was tapped by Gen. George Washington to start a new elite military unit--Knowlton's Rangers--that was capable of operating behind enemy lines.

Jack Beatty: Sisyphean History of Campaign Finance Reform

[Jack Beatty is a senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly and the editor of Colossus: How the Corporation Changed America, which was named one of the top ten books of 2001 by Business Week] In 1907 Congress banned corporate contributions to political campaigns; on June 25, 2007, in a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court gave a green light to such contributions. "After today," Justice David Souter wrote in his dissent to last week’s decision, Federal Election Commission v. Wi

Max Boot: GOP should stay the surge

SEN. RICHARD LUGAR's comments on Iraq came like a clap of thunder in the sultry summer skies of Washington. The ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee declared in a widely covered speech last week that he doesn't think "the current 'surge' strategy will succeed" and that we should therefore "downsize the U.S. military's role in Iraq." Other Republicans also have expressed frustration and impatience with the war effort, warning that they may start to defe