Roundup: Media's Take

Source: National Review Online
May 4, 2007

Mark Hemingway: Romney shouldn't have to answer questions about Mormon history

[Mark Hemingway is a writer in Washington, D.C.] ... The normally insightful and delightfully irascible Bob Novak published a column Thursday in advance of the debate titled “Will ignoring film mean curtains for Romney?” It’s about how Romney’s candidacy will be hurt by the fact that he won’t comment on a new film about the Mountain Meadows Massacre. For those of you who don’t know, the Mountain Meadows Massacre is arguably the darkest moment in Mormon history. Fueled by suspicion and facing hostilities from the U.S. government over the issue of polygamy, in 1857 a rogue band of Mormons and Paiute Indians slaughtered 120 settlers passing through Utah and stole their cattle. It was an atrocious crime, no question. Speculation has run rampant since the event that the slaughter was personally ordered by the Mormon prophet Brigham Young himself. Though suggestions of Young’s involvement are not beyond the pale, there is no proof he was involved in the killing.

Source: Atlantic Monthly
May 2, 2007

Marc Ambinder: Candidates who invoke the spirit of Reagan may live to regret it

[Marc Ambinder is an associate editor of The Hotline.] ... Comparing oneself to Reagan is less likely to elevate one’s own Reaganesque attributes than to invite invidious and memorable comparisons from one’s opponents and the media—courting the conclusion that one is barely like Reagan at all. Mitt Romney ran into this problem early on. To conservatives at a National Review dinner, he allowed that he had changed his position on abortion, and that he had not always been

Source: Counterpunch
May 2, 2007

Saul Landau: Falwell and Robertson, Incorporated

[Saul Landau's new book is A BUSH AND BOTOX WORLD. His new film, "We Don't Play Golf Here," is available on DVD from roundworldmedia@gmail.com.] As Bush implodes from scandal, a German friend asked why poor and middle class Americans voted for him and other Republicans. Two words help explain this discordant phenomenon: Falwell and Robertson. These two religious swindlers would give him a clue about how the super rich work an

Source: San Francisco Chronicle & Counterpunch
May 2, 2007

Carla Blank: The worst massacre in US history?

The mass media coverage of how 32 students and faculty members were fatally shot and at least 15 injured on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, Va., is punctuated by phrases such as, "the worst massacre in U.S. history," or, as the New York Times put it, the "Worst U.S. Gun Rampage." CNN called it the "Deadliest Shooting Rampage in U.S. history."

Source: News of Delaware County PA
May 2, 2007

James Castagnera: Tuning in to Terrorism

[Jim Castagnera is a Philadelphia lawyer and writer, and the Associate Provost/Associate Counsel at Rider University, Lawrenceville/Princeton, NJ.] I’m a coward. And I’m not afraid to admit it. In Catholic grade school I was one of the weenies the class bully picked on. My high school letter is in “newspaper.” You jocks out there didn’t know a guy could letter in something as wimpy as that, did you? When my 2-S (college-student) deferment ran out, I enlisted in the Coast Gua

Source: City Journal
May 1, 2007

Stephen B. Presser: Books on Clarence Thomas more positive now

... With the exception of a few evenhanded works such as Scott Gerber’s 1998 First Principles, which praised Thomas as a dedicated champion of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, most assessments of Thomas tended to be much more critical than favorable. Then two books came along that convincingly argued both that Anita Hill had fabricated her charges and that Thomas was anything but in over his head as a justice: attorney and author Andrew Peyton Thomas’s Clarence Thomas: A Bio

Source: A Discussion Paper prepared for the 10th Anniversary Conference of the Council on Contemporary Families, May 4-5, 2007, at the University of Chicago
May 1, 2007

Molly Monahan Lang & Barbara J. Risman: A "Stalled" Revolution or a Still-Unfolding One? The Continuing Convergence of Men's and Women's Roles

[Molly Monahan Lang, Visiting Assistant Professor, Bloomsburg University Department of Sociology, Social Work, and Criminal Justice. Barbara J. Risman, Professor and Head, Department of Sociology, University of Illinois at Chicago.] After over 35 years of continuous change toward more egalitarian gender attitudes and behaviors, recent signs of a slowdown have led some observers to suggest that the gender revolution is coming to an end. Evidence for this claim includes a slight dip

Source: Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
May 1, 2007

Martha Burk and Eleanor Smeal: U.S. Needs a Women’s Equality Amendment

[Martha Burk directs the Corporate Accountability Project for the National Council of Women’s Organizations <http://www.womensorganizations.org/> . Eleanor Smeal is president of the Feminist Majority <http://www.feminist.org/> . ] Some members of Congress are looking to do something long overdue: pass the Equal Rights Amendment. Recently renamed the Women’s Equality Amendment a

Source: Foreign Policy (May/June 2007)
May 1, 2007

Alvaro Vargas Llosa: The Return of the Idiot (leftist, populist leaders in Latin America)

[Alvaro Vargas Llosa is director of the Center on Global Prosperity at the Independent Institute. Ten years ago, Colombian writer Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, Cuban writer Carlos Alberto Montaner, and I wrote Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot, a book criticizing opinion and political leaders who clung to ill-conceived political myths despite evidence to the contrary. The “Idiot” species, we suggested, bore responsibility for Latin America’s underdevelopment. Its beliefs—revolutio

Source: Fox News
Apr 30, 2007

Susan Estrich: Obama's Inexperience Apparent at Debate

[Susan Estrich is the Robert Kingsley Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of Southern California. She was Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the first woman President of the Harvard Law Review. She is a columnist for Creators Syndicate and has written for USA Today and the Los Angeles Times.] ... The two people with the most to lose in the debate were the two who entered with the most support, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. While Friday morning's poll

Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Apr 29, 2007

Vicki Haddock: Are we ready for a woman president?

The French may experience another revolution by doing it next week. India did it years ago, as did Israel, Great Britain and the Philippines. So did Germany, Chile and Liberia. Even Pakistan, where women in some regions are forbidden to leave their homes without a male escort, is among the 42 countries that have had at least one woman as president or prime minister over the last half century. So why has it taken the United States this long even to seriously consider doing it?

Source: NYT
Apr 29, 2007

Tim Weiner: Walling off your enemies

.... The British are the prime example of success in modern times. At the close of their colonial era, after World War II, they isolated the ethnic Chinese population in Malaya, building “new villages” and herding hundreds of thousands of people into them. In doing so, they controlled the population within the walls — actually, fences that included barbed wire — and attacked Chinese insurgents outside them. “If the insurgency is countrywide,” wrote Sir Robert Thompson, the architect

Source: Zmag
Apr 27, 2007

Norman Finkelstein: Distorting Camp David

This article, excerpted from a longer essay deconstructing Dennis Ross's book on the Palestinian-Israeli peace process from 1993 to 2000, focuses on the Camp David summit. In particular, it examines the assumptions informing Ross's account of what happened during the negotiations and why, and the distortions that spring from these assumptions. The article demonstrates that, judged from the perspective of Palestinians' and Israelis' respective rights under international law, all the concession

Source: Time
Apr 26, 2007

Tim McGirk: The end of Israel's oldest kibbutz

When Israel's oldest kibbutz, Degania, announced that it was giving up its socialist ideals and going private--members could own homes and earn salaries based on how hard they worked--few other than the kibbutzniks themselves were happy. For many Israelis, Degania was a symbol of rosier days, a Zionist idyll of honest work and camaraderie. But for those who called it home, the kibbutz had become an anachronism as rusty as the battered farm tools on display for tourists. Today, the younger genera

Source: Village Voice
Apr 26, 2007

Nat Hentoff: J. Edgar Bloomberg ... COINTELPRO in NY

On May 2, 1972, when news suddenly broke that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had died in his sleep, the Savannah (Georgia) Morning News spoke for many Americans, some of us much relieved: "It was a shocker. If anyone on this earth seemed immortal, it was Mr. Hoover." He had molded the FBI into the most fearsome official investigative presence in American history, creating far more apprehension—not only among lawbreakers—than the fabled, relentless national 19th-century Pinke

Source: WSJ
Apr 25, 2007

Max Boot: Name That 'War'

Admiral William Fallon has just made his first major move as Central Command chief. He's begun his tenure by ostentatiously banning the term "Long War" that was coined by his predecessor, Gen. John Abizaid. Yet, so far at least, he has not offered up any superior alternative to describe the "whatchamacallit" that we're in the middle of. The change of nomenclature was first reported by the Tampa Tribune, Centcom's hometown newspaper, which quoted an email from a s

Source: http://asiacable.blogspot.com
Apr 24, 2007

Todd Crowell: Australian Psycho

[For fourteen years (1987-2001) Todd Crowell worked as a Senior Writer for Asiaweek, the leading English-language newsmagazine, published in Hong Kong by Time Warner. This position gave him a perch from which to observe the tumultuous events of modern history in East Asia, from the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989 to the handover of Hong Kong in 1997. He has published three books: Farewell, My Colony: Last Years in the Life of British Hong Kong (1998); Tokyo: City on the Edge (2001) and Discover Macau

Source: FrontpageMag.com
Apr 24, 2007

Aaron Hanscom: Confronting Worldwide Jew-Hatred

[Mr. Hanscom is a freelance writer in LA.] Shortly before his death in 2005, Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal expressed a deep foreboding about the resurgent anti-Semitism spreading across the world. But even Wiesenthal, a man who helped track down Nazi war criminals, would have been surprised to learn that some teachers in Britain are dropping Holocaust lessons because they fear the anti-Semitic sentiments of their Muslim students. Stories like this prove the importance of Holo

Source: Jamie Glazov at frontpagemag.com
Apr 24, 2007

R. Emmett Tyrrell: On What Clinton's Been Doing Since He Left Office

Conservative columnist and author R. Emmett Tyrrell has not really spent half his career reporting scandals about Bill and Hillary Clinton. It just seems that way. The American Spectator, the conservative monthly magazine he founded in 1967, broke some of the earliest stories about "Troopergate," "Travelgate," and "Filegate" in the early 1990s. And two of his books, 1997's Boy Clinton and 2003's Madam Hillary, were unflattering but best-selling biographies of his fa

Source: American Conservative
Apr 23, 2007

Scott McConnell: Algeria ... The Model

When contemplating Iraq, Americans look into a murky crystal ball. History naturally presents itself as a tool to clarify the choices and possibilities that lie before us. But what history? Before the invasion, neoconservatives soaked the capital in the rhetoric of Winston Churchill and the “lessons” of the 1930s. Later, after Saddam was found to have no weapons of mass destruction, they sought to rebrand the Iraq War as a part of the long struggle against totalitarian “Islamofascism” and thus a