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In dealing with foreign journalists who cover American politics, I’ve noticed a consistent view about the White House press corps. I strain to recall a positive word ever being uttered…

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Following President Obama’s assumption of office, a single member of the core Rumsfeld team at Defense has managed to hold on to his position: the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, Bryan Whitman.…

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Many critics–some writing in Harper’s—have seen Leo Strauss as the thinker behind the modern neoconservative movement and have blamed him for the neocons’ sins. Now Peter Minowitz, a self-described Straussian…

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Are major media making a mistake by failing to join in the current frenzy over the ACORN video? Ken Silverstein thinks so. The public editors of the Washington Post and…

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As yesterday’s Links points out, Garry Wills has a fine essay in the New York Review of Books that puts the fundamental dilemma of the Obama presidency in historical context:…

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Remember when a federal judge in Virginia was pressing for information about tapes made of CIA interrogations, and—after the Inspector General and Agency lawyers had determined that the tapes had…

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Listen to Denzel Washington recite Langston Hughes’s poem I, too, sing America (from the movie The Great Debaters (2007)):…

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Since what is intended by man’s existence is that he attain supreme happiness, he—in order to achieve it—needs to know what happiness is, make it his end, and hold it…

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Nabucco is an opera by Giuseppe Verdi that contains the famous chorus “Va, pensiero.” Nabucco is also the name of a massive new pipeline project that promises to bring gas…

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The German historian Heinrich August Winkler, best known for his historical survey The Long Journey West (Der lange Weg nach Westen), has just published the first volume of a planned…

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One of the basic assumptions of liberal democratic thought in the postwar era has been that free trade and economic development would tend to retard war and create a world…

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Advocates often portray torture, like waterboarding, as black magic that quickly enables the interrogator to break through his subject’s defenses and force him to divulge the location of the bomb…

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A couple of weeks ago, I met with Ahmed Rashid in Madrid and heard his verdict about the rigging of Afghanistan’s presidential elections. Nevertheless, Rashid managed to be upbeat about…

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The position of Carl Gustav Jung in the intellectual history of the twentieth century remains sharply disputed. He introduced the concept of the archetype and developed a school of psychiatry…

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Rick Stengel’s makeover of Time magazine continues apace this week with a cover salute to Fox News’s emerging superstar, Glenn Beck. Even in the days of Henry Luce, Time had…

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Merk Dir: jeder Schritt im Leben ? ist ein tiefrer. Worte! Worte! ? Merk Dir nichts als dies, Tarquinius: ? wer nicht wahr ist, wirft sich weg! ? . .…

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Und nun gedenken wir auch die Größe unserer Verpflichtung gegen die Vergangenheit als geistiges Continuum, welches mit zu unserem höchsten geistigen Besitz gehört. Alles was im Entferntesten zu dieser Kunde…

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The dean of Washington’s national security reporters, Walter Pincus, wrote a column back on September 1 in which he described the case of a former Army lieutenant colonel who brandished…

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Defenders of former president George W. Bush now focus their efforts on claims that he enhanced the nation’s security. There aren’t many objective metrics for assessing security, but there’s only…

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Republican commentator and former presidential speechwriter David Frum has offered the most serious and most introspective take on the destructive role played by the twin talking heads who now become…

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Although coverage of the Gaza War of December 2008-January 2009 was dominated by spin at the time, the conclusion that serious violations of the laws of war occurred can no…

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Few people in recent years have made better use of being a retired Supreme Court justice than Sandra Day O’Connor. Her recent appearance at a conference in Seattle contained some…

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Writing at Salon, Alexander Zaitchik offers us an introduction to the world of Mormon fundamentalist Cleon Skousen, the man who Glenn Beck says changed his life and whose book, The…

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The cover story for the October Atlantic is an open letter from Andrew Sullivan to former President Bush. The subject is torture. Sullivan appeals to Bush to end his silence…

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Max Blumenthal launched his journalistic career with an award-winning exposé of the deaths of hundreds of young women in the Mexican border city of Juárez. More recently, he has specialized…

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In remarks delivered on Monday at the nation’s first capitol, New York’s Federal Hall, President Obama marked the first anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers—an event that launched the…

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Back in 1856, South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks took offense to an anti-slavery speech delivered by Massachusetts abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner. Accompanied by another congressman from the Palmetto state, Laurence…

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Last week, the New York Times Magazine ran an intriguing interview with the longtime editor of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz, which was closely attuned to his new book Why Are Jews…

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