Roundup: Media's Take

Oct 22, 2004

First Lady's Duties And Role Explored

Susan Page, USA TODAY, 20 Oct. 2004 In the households of most married couples in America, it's now the norm: working husband, working wife. But when it comes to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, public attitudes toward the appropriate roles for the wives of presidents and presidential candidates remain so traditional that spouses who stretch the boundaries risk rebuke at the polls. "It's one of the great opportunities for a woman or for a man if you accept it for what it is -- that

Oct 22, 2004

U.S. Whiskey Producers To Emulate Scottish Marketing, Tourism Techniques

William Lyons, The Scotsman, 20 Oct. 2004 It was a Scot, James Anderson, who persuaded George Washington, the first president of the United States, to distill whisky on his estate in Mount Vernon, Virginia. Now more than 200 years after the first bottles of whisky went on sale on the east coast of the US, bourbon distillers are once again taking inspiration from Scotland with the launch of an American whisky trail. Travelling through five states from New York in the north

Oct 22, 2004

Plan To Make Canada More Like Belgium Politically

Joanne Laucius, Ottawa Citizen, 20 Oct. 2004 Conservative leader Stephen Harper's proposal to make Canada more like Belgium will result in long-term pain for Canada and play into the hands of separatists, warns a constitutional historian. Mr. Harper's proposal"runs contrary to the idea of pan-Canadian duality and would create Quebec as the only homeland of francophones," argues Michael Behiels, a University of Ottawa professor. And Prime Minister Paul Martin has helped, s

Oct 22, 2004

Anti-Kerry Documentary, 'Stolen Honor', Riddled With Errors

Jim Rutenberg and Kate Zernike, The New York Times, 20 Oct. 2004 The documentary that Sinclair Broadcast Group has instructed 40 of its television stations to feature in a broadcast on Friday night makes some of the most serious accusations against Senator John Kerry of the campaign. The accusations include that he single-handedly prolonged the Vietnam War, worsened the torture of prisoners of war and ultimately caused countless, needless deaths with his antiwar activism 30 years ago.

Oct 22, 2004

Writing, Revolution Keep Carter Energized At 80

Don Aucoin, The Boston Globe, 19 Oct. 2004 In the years since he left the White House, President Jimmy Carter has marshaled his seemingly boundless energies on behalf of world peace - a quest rewarded two years ago with the Nobel Prize. But when Carter decided to write a novel and thereby become the first US president to turn his hand to fiction (the published kind, anyway), he chose as his subject a bitter, protracted, and, in Carter's view, much-misunderstood conflict: the Revolutio

Oct 20, 2004

The Washington Post Compares the Choices Bush and Kerry Made During Vietnam

Michael Dobbs and Lois Romano, in the Wash Post (Oct. 15, 2004): It was December 1968, and the United States was in turmoil. The number of U.S. troops in Vietnam had reached a peak of half a million. Antiwar protests were paralyzing American campuses after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. In Vietnam, a gangly U.S. Navy lieutenant named John F. Kerry stee

Oct 20, 2004

The Use of Deception to Snare Al Qaeda

Michael Schrage, in the Wash Post (Oct. 17, 2004): When "unnamed U.S. government officials" leaked the story this fall that al Qaeda computer expert Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan had been arrested in Pakistan, media reports described British and Pakistani intelligence officials as furious about the resulting firestorm of coverage. Officials were quoted as saying that the news had blown a global sting operation by destroying Khan's value as a "double agent" who'd been

Oct 20, 2004

Frank Rich: Will We Need a New 'All the President's Men'?

Frank Rich, in the NYT (Oct. 17, 2004):SUCH is the power of movies that the first image ''Watergate'' brings to mind three decades later is not Richard Nixon so much as the golden duo of Redford and Hoffman riding to the nation's rescue in ''All the President's Men.'' But if our current presidency is now showing symptoms of a precancerous Watergate syndrome -- as it is, daily -- we have not yet reached t

Oct 19, 2004

James Webb: The Scots-Irish Are the Key to Republican Party Success

James Webb, in the WSJ (Oct. 19, 2004): [Mr. Webb, a former secretary of the Navy, is the author of"Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America," just published by Broadway.]To an outsider George W. Bush's political demeanor seems little more than stumbling tautology. He utters his campaign message in clipped phrases, filled with bravado and repeated

Oct 18, 2004

An Interview with John J. Miller, Co-author of Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America's Disastrous Relationship with France

From Frontpagemag.com (Oct. 18, 2004):Frontpage Interview’s guest today is John J. Miller, co-author of Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America's Disastrous Relationship with France. FP: Mr. Miller, welcome to Frontpage Interview. It is a pleasure to have you here.Miller: Thank you. I’m an admirer of your website.FP: What motivated you to write this book?

Oct 16, 2004

Why the U.S. Succeeded in Selling the Marshall Plan but Not Democracy in the Middle East

Roger Cohen, in the NYT (Oct. 16, 2004):It is a time of war, and an implacable enemy seeks to sully America's image, destroy its way of life and undermine its allies. Sound familiar? But the time in question here is not the present and the enemy is not Al Qaeda. This is the cold war, fought against the Soviet Union and played out against the backdrop of shatter

Oct 16, 2004

How the 9-11 Report Came to Be a Best-Seller--and Well-Written

Johanna Neuman, in the LAT (Oct. 15, 2004): The instructions from the "front office"-- a core group of editors -- were straight out of a college expository writing class: Divide complex sentences in two. Remember that clear, plain prose is a virtue. Don't get bogged down in nuance or detail; the overarching story is everything. But this was no classroom or dormitory cram session. The writers were staff members of a government commission, a type of body typica

Oct 16, 2004

Daniel Henninger: Bush Could Be the Deng Xiaoping of American Politics

Daniel Henninger, in the WSJ (Oct. 15, 2004): If the people of the United States hand him victory in the 2004 election, George W. Bush could emerge as the Deng Xiaoping of American politics. Mr. Bush would become the leader who sent his people forward into a world both uncertain and inevitable.Deng, who died in 1997, was the former Communist Chinese revolutionary who recognized in the 1980s

Oct 16, 2004

Nicholas Lemann: The Early Signals We Missed About the Kind of Man George W. Is

Nicholas Lemann, in the New Yorker (Oct. 18, 2004): When something important doesn’t turn out the way you expected, you go back to the beginning and try to see if there were clues you missed....[One] early Bush event—this one not only indicative but consequential—was a dinner in Chicago, on July 18, 2000, not long before the Republican National Convention, attended by Bush; John C. Danforth,

Oct 16, 2004

Franklin Foer: The Conservatives Who Are Returning to Their America First Roots

Franklin Foer, in the NYT (Oct. 10, 2004):ON May 4, American conservatism took an unexpected turn. That morning, George Will -- the movement's most influential columnist, one of its icons -- slapped George W. Bush with a tart reprimand. For a year, Will had obliquely hinted of his grave misgivings about the Iraq war and the push to democratize the Middle East. But with the insurgenc

Oct 16, 2004

How Relentless Is Karl Rove? This Relentless!

Joshua Green, in the Atlantic Monthly (Nov. 2004):It is the close races that establish the reputations of great political strategists, and few have ever been closer than the 2000 presidential election. From the tumult of the lengthy recount, the absentee-ballot dispute, the charges of voter fraud, and, ultimately, the Supreme Court decision, George W. Bush emerged victorious by a margin of 537 votes in Florida&

Oct 14, 2004

Bush Wants a Khaki Election

DeWayne Wickham, USA TODAY, 12 Oct. 2004 What Paul Boller wrote recently about this election campaign probably won't surprise you. Its squabbling factions, the presidential historian said, included"peace groups castigating the president for taking the country into war and calling for a speedy end to the conflict; harsh critics harping on the president's mismanagement of the war effort and blaming him for reverses on the battlefield; and administration supporters insisting that a

Oct 13, 2004

The Nobel Prize Goes to ... Once Again a Hater

Ben Johnson, at frontpagemag.com (Oct. 13, 2004):The Nobel Prize has sunk to a new and discrediting low by honoring an environmental activist who insists white scientists created the AIDS virus to eradicate the world’s black population. The media have portrayed Kenyan activist Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement, as a latter day Johnny Appleseed who has planted million

Oct 13, 2004

Grover Norquist: The GOP Really Is Reagan's Party

Grover Norquist, in the WSJ (Oct. 13, 2004):We must wait three more weeks to learn who will serve as President from January 2005 to January 2009. But one question asked in 2000 can now be answered: Will the Reagan coalition continue to define the nature and structure of the modern Republican Party?In 2000, Texas governor George W. Bush ran as the heir to Ronald Reagan's coalition, dedica

Oct 13, 2004

Virginia Tribes Fight For Sovereignty

Emma Schwartz, Los Angeles Times, 12 Oct. 2004 Nearly 400 years ago, British colonists came ashore near this verdant watershed of Chesapeake Bay, surviving the first brutal winter only with the help of the Native Americans who had lived on the land for centuries. But as the Commonwealth of Virginia prepares for the commemoration of that 1607 arrival in Jamestown, the descendants of those Indians are embroiled in a fight over a different legacy of that year: acknowledgment of the