Roundup: Media's Take

Max Boot: A general disgrace

THE AMERICAN officer corps tried to blame the fall of Saigon on their civilian masters. If not for political restrictions — in particular, no invasion of North Vietnam — the U.S. would have won the war. So argued the late Col. Harry Summers in his celebrated 1981 book, "On Strategy: The Vietnam War in Context." That was, at best, a gross oversimplification. As then-Maj. Andrew Krepinevich showed in "The Army and Vietnam" (1986), the U.S. defeat could be attribut

Verlyn Klinkenborg: The Future of Journalism as Told by Hilaire Belloc in 1918

... No newspaper, or TV network, of our own day can stand in for Lord Northcliffe's dominant suite of newspapers, including The Times of London, which embodied Belloc's notion of the Official Press. The balance of power has shifted, and many of the ideals implicit in the free or independent press, as Belloc describes it, have been absorbed by modern newspapers. There is also no shortage of the small, independent journals of opinion that Belloc was championing. But "The Free Pr

Humberto Fontova: Ted Kennedy's New Book Hails JFK's Cuba Policy

[Humberto Fontova is the author of "Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant," described as "absolutely devastating. An enlightening read you'll never forget" by David Limbaugh. David Horowitz says: "Humberto has performed a valuable service to the cause of decency and human freedom. Every American should read this book."] "In a forthcoming book, Senator Edward M. Kennedy invokes the leadership of his brothers during the Cuban missile crisis to launch a

Edward Rothstein: Conference at Yale Explores the Complicated Dance Between Strong Leadership and the Popular Will

Be careful what you wish for, particularly when it comes to politics. Wish for democratic elections, and you may get duly elected tyranny and terror. Wish for democratic debate, and you may get polarized parties and a divided electorate. Wish for democratic responsiveness and you may get opinion-poll leadership. Wish for statesmanship and you may get demagoguery. One temptation might be to wish for nothing in particular, but then who knows what might happen? The difficulty seems to

David Brooks: Mr. Past Vs. Mr. Future

Mr. Past: Your big problem is you don't understand the limits of what governments can achieve. Before this whole Iraq thing, you should have read Elie Kedourie's essay on the British occupation in the 1920's. This isn't history repeating itself, it's the same unbroken pattern. Kedourie shows the whole history of Iraq is a story of "bloodshed, treason and rapine." He shows how Iraqi politics have always been marked by "murderous currents," "demonic hatreds,&

David Corn: Will 2008 be a replay of 1968?

[David Corn writes The Loyal Opposition twice a month for TomPaine.com. Corn is also the Washington editor of The Nation and is the author of The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception (Crown Publishers). Read his blog at http://www.davidcorn.com.] Last week , Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton was giving a speech on "Women Leaders" before a crowd of thousands at Brown University when a fellow interrupted her and shoute

Max Boot: Fighting for citizenship

RECENTLY, I HAPPENED to read two of the best military memoirs ever published: "Bugles and a Tiger" and "The Road Past Mandalay." Both were written by John Masters, a British officer with a literary flair who joined the Indian army in 1934, participated in one of the last imperial campaigns on the Northwest Frontier, invaded Iraq to overthrow a pro-German dictator in 1941 and then led a commando brigade operating behind Japanese lines in Burma. His writing is suf

Michiko Kakutani: The Ford Administration as a Dress Rehearsal for Today

The title of Barry Werth's compelling but somewhat cursory new book, "31 Days: The Crisis That Gave Us the Government We Have Today," refers to the tumultuous period following President Richard M. Nixon's resignation — a period in which President Gerald R. Ford tried to stabilize a country reeling from Watergate, reach a decision about pardoning his disgraced predecessor and establish an administration of his own. Those 31 days and the ensuing months were a period in which some of the

Larry Johnson: An Updated Plamegate Timeline

The frantic spinning by the White House and its crazy right-wing allies, including Michael Ledeen and Christopher Hitchens (a neo-righty), to explain why George Bush was in the middle of the effort to discredit Ambassador Joe Wilson is failing on the facts. Ledeen and Hitchens insist that the reports that Iraq was trying to a

Michael Barone: Remembering the immigration act of 1965

I watched the Senate debate the immigration issue the last two weeks with a certain sense of déjà vu, for I can remember sitting in the Senate Gallery more than 40 years ago and watching Sen. Edward Kennedy floor manage what became the immigration act of 1965. It was the first major piece of legislation Sen. Kennedy managed, and he did a good job, though the debate was little noticed, coming after the rush of Great Society legislation enacted under the stern direction of President Lyndon Johnson

Alan Dershowitz: Debunking the Newest – and Oldest – Jewish Conspiracy

The publication, on the Harvard Kennedy School web site, of a “working paper,” written by a professor and academic dean at the Kennedy School and a prominent professor at the University of Chicago, has ignited a hailstorm of controversy and raised troubling questions. The paper was written by two self-described foreign-policy “realists,” Professor Stephen Walt and Professor John Mearsheimer.3 It asserts that the Israel “Lobby” – a cabal whose “core” is “American Jews” – has a “stranglehold” on m

Todd Gitlin: Why the left is so determined to eat its own

[Todd Gitlin is a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of "The Intellectuals and the Flag."] SECTS ARE ALWAYS in need of heretics to blame, expel and punish. First, fervor takes hold, then rigidity. Righteousness dictates uniformity. Dissent seems dangerous, even treasonous. The spirit hardens: You're either with us or with the evildoers. This is nowhere more true than on the left. I've been rediscovering

Dick Polman: It's not unusual for journalists to be assailed during wartime

... It's not unusual for journalists to be assailed during wartime - President John F. Kennedy tried to get New York Times correspondent David Halberstam ejected from Vietnam because of his downbeat dispatches; Vice President Spiro Agnew later skewered Vietnam-era reporters as "nattering nabobs of negativism" - but the attacks on the Iraq coverage may set new standards for both fervor and frequency. Fox News host Sean Hannity condemned what he called "a total and almo

Matthew B. Stannard: Journalism's current crisis

... Biased to the right? Biased to the left? Some academics suggest the Iraq war coverage wasn't so different from the way past wars have been covered. "The press treated the war at the beginning the way the press treated other wars at the beginning, and that was: There's nothing to discuss. We're off to war," said Theodore Glasser, of Stanford University's Graduate School of Journalism. "There was no debate among Democrats and Republicans (about the ex

Elizabeth de la Vega : Asking the Right Question About the President's Involvement in the CIA Leak Affair

[Elizabeth de la Vega is a former federal prosecutor with more than 20 years of experience. During her tenure, she was a member of the Organized Crime Strike Force and Chief of the San Jose Branch of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California. Her pieces have appeared in The Nation magazine, the L.A. Times, Salon, and Mother Jones. She writes regularly for TomDispatch. She may be contacted at ElizabethdelaVega@Verizon.net

Jill Abramson: When Will We Stop Saying 'First Woman to (fill in the blank)'

IT was the Platonic ideal of the ladies' lunch. There was chicken salad, parfait and blue Tiffany gift boxes. There was the first woman president, her friend Louise and, though we did not know it for certain, the first female solo network news anchor. This was Monday at the annual Matrix Awards, given to women who are leaders in the New York media and communications business. As the first woman to be Washington bureau chief at The Times, and then managing editor, I got one award, f

Sandy English: Three years after looting of Iraqi National Museum: an official whitewash of US crime

Three years have now passed since thieves looted the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad following the American invasion. Nearly 15,000 objects of inestimable scientific and cultural value were stolen, although initial figures were over 10 times that number.... There was an international outcry, and the United States military, groping to set right a public relations disaster, sent in Marine Reserve Col. Matthew Bogdanos, in civilian life a Manhattan assistant district attorney, to cond

Robert Dreyfuss: Cutting and Running in Baghdad

[Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. He covers national security for Rolling Stone and writes frequently for The American Prospect, Mother Jones, and the Nation. He is also a regular contributor to TomPaine.com, the Huffington Post, and other sites, and writes the blog, The Dreyfuss Report at his

David Leonhardt: The Economics of Henry Ford May Be Passé

HENRY FORD was 50 years old, and not all that different from a lot of other successful businessmen, when he summoned the Detroit press corps to his company's offices on Jan. 5, 1914. What he did that day made him a household name. Mr. Ford announced that he was doubling the pay of thousands of his employees, to at least $5 a day. With his company selling Model T's as fast as it could make them, his workers deserved to share in the profits, he said. His rivals were horri

Noam Chomsky: War Crimes in Iraq

[Noam Chomsky is the author of numerous best-selling political works. His latest books are Failed States, The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy and Hegemony or Survival, both in the American Empire Project series at Metropolitan Books. He lives in Lexington, Massachusetts, and is a professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2002, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales passed on to Bush a memorandum on torture b