As President George W. Bush sat down at a joint press conference with South African President Thabo Mbeki on June 1, he preempted a question about the crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan, one of the topics of the two men’s White House luncheon. It had been 142 days since Bush had uttered the […]
Dispatches
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Fork in the Road Map
When Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas visited Washington in early June, one might have expected him to be heralded as the poster boy for “freedom’s march” in the Middle East — democratically elected, a reformer, and a recognized man of peace. Yet after the meeting, Palestinian delegation members spoke to me in terms of only a […]
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Tune In, Turn On, Fight Back
Public television is under attack from within, undermined by a Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) that is stacked with highly political appointees who think any programming based on “freedom, imagination, and initiative” — the words are from the first section of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 — is inherently liberal. But can they be […]
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We’re Number 13!
Most Americans blithely assume that they live in the country that’s the world leader in information technologies. Ours is, after all, home to the most recognizable high-tech corporate brands and the land where the Internet’s fundamental architecture was first worked out. As a CIA assessment puts it, we enjoy “the largest and most technologically powerful […]
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True West
It’s 8:30 on a sparkling June evening, and leaders of Montana’s resurgent Democratic Party are hosting a river trip for the annual meeting of the party’s Western States Caucus. The group of nearly 100 party leaders and elected officials is motoring through the canyon of the Missouri River that Captain Meriwether Lewis, 200 years ago […]
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The Prince and the Dissident
As a former aide-de-camp to the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei and one of the founders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, Mohsen Sazegara was once at the radical, sharply anti-American vanguard of that country’s Islamic revolution. Operating from Khomenei’s exile headquarters in Paris during the 1970s, the U.S.–educated student revolutionary was so close to the theocrats plotting to […]
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Bolton From the Blue
About halfway through Senator Richard Lugar’s droning opening statement in the May 12 confirmation hearing of John Bolton to become the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, a yawn made its way around the press table. And it lingered — until Lugar ceded the floor to the incalculable senator from Ohio, George Voinovich, when […]
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Perfectly Legal
The troubles House Majority Leader Tom DeLay faces for allowing a lobbyist to pay for overseas trips in violation of House rules provide a perfect example of Los Angeles Times op-ed page editor Michael Kinsley’s famous dictum: The real scandal is what’s legal. And the congressional rules that may yet ensnare DeLay suggest another truism: […]
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Center Court
Two weeks past Congress’ spring break, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist still could not “with certainty” fulfill his oft-repeated vow to squelch Democratic filibusters of President Bush’s judicial nominations. Skeptics in his own caucus deny him the 51-to-50 majority (including the vice president’s tiebreaking vote) he needs to execute a maneuver known as the “nuclear […]
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The Mess In Mexico
Mexico’s fragile democracy is under attack from its own government — and may not survive. Yet the Bush administration’s neoconservatives, who almost daily proclaim their commitment to protect — and indeed impose — free elections in the world’s every nook and cranny, are silent. Turns out that their defense of democracy extends only to candidates […]
