“Nixonland”—that’s Rick Perlstein’s term for the political world where candidates win power by mobilizing people’s resentments, anxieties and anger, where politics destroys its victims. Do we still live in Nixonland, and if so, when will we leave?

Related Entries

• February 17, 2012 This Gay Man Represented the President
• February 17, 2012 Will We Choose a Chinese Future?
• February 9, 2012 Political Divide
• February 6, 2012 The Cancer in Occupy
• February 3, 2012 Kim Jong Un, This One’s for You

As opening day of the Beijing Olympics approaches, the Chinese government and official media have intensified their attacks on the Dalai Lama, blaming him for the recent violent demonstrations in Tibet. Pico Iyer, whose new book is “The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama,” talks with Truthdig’s Jon Wiener about this intercultural conflict and about the Dalai Lama himself.

Related Entries

• February 18, 2012 Syrian Troops Kill Mourner at Damascus Funeral
• February 17, 2012 ‘Left, Right & Center’: Cars, Contraception and China
• February 17, 2012 Will We Choose a Chinese Future?
• February 17, 2012 Pay Close Attention to China
• February 16, 2012 The Imperial Way: American Decline in Perspective, Part 2

Related Entries

• February 16, 2012 What’s Really at Stake in 2012
• February 14, 2012 Santorum Rising
• February 8, 2012 What Santorum’s Surge Means for Romney
• January 25, 2012 Obama’s Late Payment to Mortgage-Fraud Victims
• January 23, 2012 Surviving the Hell of War, and Then Some

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter on Watergate has just published “A Woman in Charge,” a biography of Hillary Clinton, for which he interviewed almost 100 of her friends and enemies.  Carl Bernstein spoke recently with Truthdig’s Jon Wiener about the first former first lady to make a bid for the presidency.

Related Entries

• February 14, 2012 Obama Brings Chinese VP to the White House
• January 27, 2012 Hillary Clinton Says She Won’t Re-Up as Secretary of State
• January 15, 2012 Newt’s Venom Is Mitt’s Medicine
• January 14, 2012 ‘The Iron Lady’: Power in Spectator Pumps
• January 11, 2012 White House Denies Involvement in Iranian Nuke Scientist’s Death

Jon Wiener spoke with Hitchens in 2007 about his views on religion and the book that would turn out to be one of the milestones of Hitch’s career as a public intellectual.

Related Entries

• February 17, 2012 This Gay Man Represented the President
• February 17, 2012 Will We Choose a Chinese Future?
• February 15, 2012 Will Catholic Bishops and the Religious Right Save Obama?
• February 15, 2012 ‘Colbert Report’: Contraception Crusade
• February 14, 2012 A Religious War Out of Thin Air

Palestinian intellectual, political figure and former PLO official Sari Nusseibeh (above) talks with Jon Wiener, historian and contributor to The Nation, about Nusseibeh’s new memoir, future prospects for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and the 2006 July War in Lebanon—a war, he says, that “both sides lost.”

Related Entries

• November 28, 2011 Scissors
• November 21, 2011 CIA Takes a Big Hit in Lebanon
• November 15, 2011 Twoeth by (c)
• September 27, 2011 Palestine Vote Showcases the Decline of American Power
• September 21, 2011 Obama’s Contradictory U.N. Speeches

A historian and contributor to The Nation uses a stark metric to evaluate the presidencies of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush.

Related Entries

• February 15, 2012 ‘Losing’ the World: American Decline in Perspective, Part 1
• January 14, 2012 ‘The Iron Lady’: Power in Spectator Pumps
• January 6, 2012 Truthdigger of the Week: Daniel Ellsberg
• December 30, 2011 Truthdigger of the Week: Rep. Dennis Kucinich
• November 30, 2011 Occupy 2012

The documentary “The U.S. vs. John Lennon,” which opens today, recounts President Richard NixonÂ’s campaign to deport the Beatle because of his antiwar activism. In this report, Jon Wiener, a Lennon historian who consulted on the film, writes that President Bush has gone much further than Nixon in using immigration law to get rid of noncitizens whom the White House doesnÂ’t like.

Related Entries

• February 9, 2012 ‘Crazy Horse’: A Study in Erotic Abstraction
• February 6, 2012 Why Russia Just Can’t Quit Syria’s Dictator
• February 3, 2012 ‘The Dictator’ Meets the Super Bowl
• January 30, 2012 ‘Dragon Tattoo’ Shows Too Much Skin for India
• January 6, 2012 The Best (and the Rest) of 2011