Return to Realism
The Opportunity: America’s Moment to Alter History’s Course by Richard N. Haass (Public Affairs, 242 pages, $25.00) Gulliver Unbound: America’s Imperial Temptation and the War in Iraq by Stanley Hoffmann with Frederic Bozo (Rowman and Littlefield, 168 pages, $19.95) Some books derive their significance not only from what they say but also from who…
California’s Master Builder
California Rising: The Life and Times of Pat Brown by Ethan Rarick (University of California Press, 501 pages, $29.95) On the rainy January morning in 1959 when Pat Brown took the oath as governor of California, he delivered an inaugural address that today would stun listeners as breathtakingly bold, if not suicidal. Seven times…
Vast Write-Wing Conspiracy
Idea and reality are often miles apart, especially when it comes to business schemes. It’s a Panglossian truism displayed a few weeks ago with the release of Ed Klein’s The Truth About Hillary, the first high-visibility title from Sentinel, the imprint of the august publishing house Penguin that was launched in August 2004 for the…
Four Wars
In the Iraq War, we failed to commit the troops necessary to secure the country, and now we are in a mess. In the Terrorism War, we are creating more terrorism. In the Afghanistan War, we have yet to capture Osama bin Laden. And in the Trade War, our manufacture is so outsourced that an…
Letter From London: Britannia Stays Cool
Finished with their Sunday morning of studying the Koran, the dozens of young boys in the Muslim Center in east London raced to put their shoes back on. Talking excitedly, they filed upstairs to spend the rest of the afternoon playing Arabic board games and Ping-Pong. Three days earlier, terrorist bombs had ripped open three…
With God on Our Side?
Time to Take Our Faith Back Jim Wallis “Religion does not have a monopoly on morality.” I’ve made that statement virtually every night on the tour for my recent book, God’s Politics. We’ve been holding town meetings disguised as book signings; 56 cities over 20 weeks during the spring and summer, and the watchword has…
Dreamers Without Borders
Europe is in shambles: France sleepwalking, Germany in a tailspin, the euro falling, the left in disarray. Now, just weeks after the defeat in France and Holland of the innovative new treaty that was supposed to usher in a new constitutional era for an enlarged Europe of 25 nations, terrorist bombings in London are reinforcing…
High Court, High Stakes
As we go to press, we don’t know the name of President Bush’s Supreme Court nominee or nominees. But it is clear that he will eventually get two, and maybe more — enough to lead a radical transformation of constitutional law. The challenge is to keep this point at the center of the debate and…
The Fraud Caucus
On the evening of May 23, a bipartisan group of 14 senators emerged from a series of semi-secret meetings to announce that they’d brokered a deal ending the standoff over Democratic filibusters of several of President Bush’s judicial nominees. The group’s seven Republicans agreed to vote against the “nuclear option” and to kill the nominations…
The Wrong Litmus Test
The battles over George W. Bush’s Supreme Court nominees are about to be waged on the wrong terrain — on the bloody fields of America’s culture wars. Sandra Day O’Connor was the swing vote on many of the nation’s most divisive social issues, and activists on both right and left are mobilized for the fight…
Down Is Up (or So Some Say)
New projections from the congressional Budget Office suggest that this year’s deficit will be $75 billion or so less than last year’s record level. Similar figures will be reported by the Bush administration just after this column goes to press. The right is already claiming victory. “Our policies continue to boost the economy and tax…
Exit With Honor
The American people want out of Iraq, but critics of the Iraq War seem stymied by the mess that the Bush policy has created. Here is an exit strategy that makes sense as geopolitics and domestic politics: The U.S. commits to leave Iraq on a date certain, say August 1, 2006. We use this yearlong…
Dossier: To Arms, To Arms
Global military expenditures topped $950 billion in 2003 … Arms transfers accounted for $25.6 billion of this figure … 60 percent of all arms sales from 2000–03 were made to developing nations … The five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) are the…
London Bawling
If it’s true that conventional wisdom, like quick-dry cement, usually hardens within 48 hours of an event — think of the January 1998 Lewinsky revelations and the immediate pronouncements that the matter would lead to impeachment — the reactions to the July 7 London terrorist bombings provide a case study in how the right seeks…
Howard’s Beginning
There is little room left to stand in the Atlanta nightclub Eleven50, a cavernous former opera house that sports an outsized mirror ball and the thumping electronic dance music favored by the hip, scantily clad, under-35 set. But on this humid weeknight in early June, the crowd is decidedly unhip, mostly well past its fourth…
Rove on the Ropes
From the very beginning, the white house propaganda assault against former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV and his wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, a longtime officer in the CIA, looked like the work of Karl Rove. The malicious leaks against the Wilsons — which have led to the appointment of a special prosecutor and the imprisonment…
Downsizing, Iraq-Style
On July 6, President George W. Bush celebrated his 59th birthday in Copenhagen with a friend, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. It was an important moment for Bush, and not only because of the Greenland stamp collection he received as a birthday present. He also got a chance to show his appreciation to members…
Judge-ment Day
The verb “bork” is one of the more tendentious entries in Webster’s New Millennium Dictionary. Webster’s records “bork” as meaning “to seek to obstruct a political appointment or selection; also, to attack a political opponent viciously.” While the first half of the definition is accurate, the second element is but one version of recent history,…
Bubblehead
Most economists expect something bad to happen to the U.S. economy sometime this decade, due to the deficit and debt overhang, the trade imbalance, the dependence on foreign borrowing, the sundry asset bubbles, and more. When the history of the next crash is written, President Bush’s appointment of California Republican Congressman Christopher Cox to chair…
