The Real Rudy
Per our agreement with the publisher, we are unable to post the excerpt from “Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Guiliani” by Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins after September 30, 2006.
Out-Foxed, Finally?
When the Nielsen ratings for the second quarter of 2006 came in, FOX News Channel got some bad news. The network’s entire weekday lineup — every show — had lost viewers from the first quarter of the year. Special Report with Brit Hume, down 19 percent. The Big Story with John Gibson, down 13 percent.…
Shia Power and the West
Reaching for Power: The Shi’a in the Modern Arab World by Yitzhak Nakash (Princeton University Press, 226 pages, $19.95) The Shia Revival: How conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future by Vali Nasr (W.W. Norton, 287 pages, $25.95) The rise of Shia political parties in U.S.-occupied Iraq, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s violent verbal attacks on…
Be Not Afraid
Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism by Michelle Goldberg (W.W.Norton, 224 pages, $23.95) Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis by Jimmy Carter (Simon & Schuster, 224 pages, $25.00) The Faiths of the Founding Fathers by David l. Holmes (Oxford University Press, 240 pages, $20.00) American Theocracy: The Peril…
Beyond Hope
Leslie Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations and veteran of policy circles dating back to the Johnson administration, was an unlikely candidate to surprise the routine world of Washington national-security roundtable discussions. But debating Iraq with Lawrence Korb on July 20 at the Center for American Progress, he did just that. When…
September Issue PDF
To download the September 2006 issue in PDF format, click here.
Field Notes
If you look at the polls and nothing else, it seems almost self-evident that Nancy Pelosi will be wielding the speaker’s gavel come January. Nationally, voters give Democrats a 10-point edge over Republicans in their congressional preferences. Another survey, of 50 swing House districts conducted for National Public Radio, found Democrats leading in the 10…
The Trouble With Diversity
“The rich are different from you and me” is a famous remark supposedly made by F. Scott Fitzgerald to Ernest Hemingway, although what made it famous — or at least made Hemingway famously repeat it — was not the remark itself but Hemingway’s reply: “Yes, they have more money.” In other words, to Hemingway, the…
Innocents (Not) Abroad
The size of the trade deficit with China is one of the hottest potatoes in American economic policy these days. It is about to get a little hotter, thanks to Beijing’s highly provocative, if hitherto largely overlooked, controls on outbound tourism. In theory the United States should be a major beneficiary — perhaps the major…
Memo to House Democrats
Democrats: Odds are, come November 7, you will gain the 15 seats you need to take back the House (the odds are much lower in the Senate). So it’s not too early to start thinking about what you should do during the two years leading up to the 2008 presidential election. You’ll be sorely tempted…
A Rendezvous with Failure
Many liberals in recent years have been smitten with political envy. The conservative movement and Republican Party have seemed so much shrewder in their use of language, tougher in their tactics, and better organized than their progressive and Democratic counterparts. Perhaps so. But let us put to rest one supposed source of advantage for conservatives:…
Funny Business
What would the legendary labor leader Walter Reuther have said if 40 years ago he was told that American business was going to spend millions to register workers and encourage them to vote? He would probably have been ecstatic: “They’re spending their money to turn out my people?!” And indeed, since World War II, business…
Illusion and Reality
On the evening of September 11, 2001, I was one of a small group of State Department staffers called in to confer with Secretary of State Colin Powell and work through the night to produce a diplomatic strategy for assembling an international coalition to destroy Osama bin Laden’s base in Afghanistan. Powell took this strategy…
Complete Sentence
A week after the supreme court delivered a stinging rebuke to the Bush administration in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, holding that the military tribunals it had fashioned to try Guantanamo detainees were illegal, I went to the base to visit my detainee-clients and to inform them joyfully of the Court’s ruling. To say the least, they…
Just a Gigolo
The late 1990s were heady times for technology companies in Virginia. The future looked bright, and arguably nowhere more so than in Northern Virginia’s new technology corridor, where boxy, smoked-glass structures filled with well-capitalized startups sprouted by the dozens along the highway leading from Washington, D.C., to Washington Dulles International Airport. While California had Silicon…
The Unaccountables
One December night in 2003, Adel L. Nakhla, a chunky, broad-shouldered Egyptian American interpreter with a soft, almost feminine voice, went to Cell 43 in Abu Ghraib’s Tier 1A. He was accompanied by Army Specialist Charles A. Graner Jr., a reservist convicted in January 2005 of abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib, to the…
The Rise of the Republicrats
Taking its name from a series of antityranny pamphlets published in the early 18th century, the libertarian Cato Institute is the foremost advocate for small-government principles in American life. Its 95 full-time employees, 70 adjunct scholars, 20 fellows, and army of interns work out of an eye-catching cube of glass and steel on Massachusetts Avenue…
