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By Christopher Hitchens
$16.19
By Peter Longerich
$19
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White House photo / Paul Morse
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George W. Bush has said that history will determine the greatness of his presidency. According to an informal poll by George Mason University’s History News Network, 98 percent of historians polled rated Bush’s presidency a failure. Sixty-one percent ranked him last among presidents, while only 4 percent placed him among the top two-thirds.
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AP photos / left: Gautam Singh / right: Uwe Lein
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By Chris Hedges — The battle under way in America is not a battle between religion and science. It is a battle between religious and secular fundamentalists. It is a battle between two groups intoxicated with the utopian and magical belief that humankind can perfect itself and master its destiny.
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latimes.com
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The Swedish vodka company known for its memorable advertising has stirred a bit of controversy in the United States with an ad running in Mexico that shows what the two countries would look like “in an Absolut world.” Updated
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — In 1968, American liberalism suffered a blow from which it has still not recovered.
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By Eugene Robinson — Much has changed in the years since Martin Luther King Jr.‘s death, and yet many black Americans struggle now more than ever. We must acknowledge progress if we are to take up the work that is left incomplete.
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Kelly Branan
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Forty years after his death, Martin Luther King, one of the great prophets of American democracy, has been reduced to little more than a lifeless statue. Yet his courageous call for peace and criticism of his government at a time of war must not be lost to history.
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By Ellen Goodman — Many families are split when it comes to the race for the Democratic nomination, and that says something about the dialogue between generations.
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By Amy Goodman — It has been 40 years since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., while standing on the balcony outside his room at the Lorraine Motel.
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By Marie Cocco — Have you noticed something similar about those Obama campaign surrogates and the media soothsayers who have started a drumbeat to force Clinton out of the campaign? Hint: They tend to share a certain anatomical attribute.
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By Eugene Robinson — Quite a “defining moment” in Iraq, wasn’t it? At this rate, John McCain is going to be proved right: The war will last a century.
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By Fred Branfman — What kind of look back to the ‘60s manages to almost entirely ignore or miss the point of the Vietnam War?
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By Marie Cocco — Some days, there’s just no forgetting that Dick Cheney is still the vice president. We’ve had a few of these recently, with Cheney traveling to Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East on what might be called a goodwill mission, if the person making the trip were not Dick Cheney.
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By Amy Goodman — We just passed the grim milestone of 4,000 U.S. military members killed in Iraq since the invasion five years ago. Still, the death toll climbs.
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runcynthiarun.org/votenader.org
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By Chris Hedges — Those of us who oppose the war, who believe that all U.S. troops should be withdrawn and the network of permanent bases in Iraq dismantled, have only two options in the coming presidential elections—Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney.
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By Anthony Heilbut — What accounts for the strange need of some white scholars—from the plantation nostalgists of the late 1890s to the “Blues Mafia” of the 1960s—to honor African-American culture by trying to save black people from themselves?
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By Joe Conason — John McCain says that when it comes to Iraq, Americans should look to the future, but that’s to be expected of such an enthusiastic supporter of the disaster.
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thewashingtonnote.com
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Five years, nearly 4,000 dead Americans, millions of killed or displaced Iraqi civilians and $500 billion later, George W. Bush still thinks the Iraq war was a good move. In remarks leaked on the eve of his speech marking the anniversary of the war, the president says the high costs “are necessary when we consider the cost of a strategic victory for our enemies in Iraq.”
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By Eugene Robinson — Barack Obama tells the columnist why he chose to ignore the collective political wisdom and confront the issue of race head-on. Having survived the encounter, his speech on the subject could change the way Americans understand one another.
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AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Stanley Kutler — The president must be delighted with the Arizona senator, a candidate who is credited as a foreign policy authority despite his devotion to the long-term occupation of Iraq.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — There they go again. Democrats have contrived a nominating contest that even Rube Goldberg would have considered too convoluted, too dysfunctional and too improbable to name as his own.
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By Ellen Goodman — In the end, the most memorable line of the primary season may belong to Bill Clinton: “I’ve been waiting all my life to vote for an African-American president. I’ve been waiting all my life to vote for a woman for president. ... I feel like God is playing games with our heads and our hearts.”
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weblogs.newsday.com
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Once again the candidates are headed toward what has been billed as a climactic showdown, but which is likely to turn out like the others before it: one more bump in the road.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Barack Obama’s critics bear a remarkable resemblance to the liberals who labored mightily to dismiss Ronald Reagan in 1980.
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By David Sirota — In 1976, a young political consultant named Patrick Caddell sent a memo to Jimmy Carter telling the president-elect to wage “a continuing political campaign” that fuses public policy and political goals. This doctrine became known as the permanent campaign, and it is now changing from a White House tactic into a national grass-roots organizing strategy.
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By Marie Cocco — The mystery of the missing White House e-mails is likely never to be solved, its plot so convoluted that even Henry Waxman, the dogged House investigator who has brought to light such unseemliness as contracting scandals in Iraq reconstruction, seems to be flummoxed.
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AP photo / Hussein Malla
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By Scott Ritter — Imad Mughniyeh was once America’s most-wanted terrorist, and his crimes were truly abhorrent. But his assassination, Ritter argues, will only lead to more violence.
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AP photo
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By Chris Hedges — There’s an ugly secret behind the “success” of the surge: The United States is paying off Iraqi militants with weapons and cash. It’s a recipe for disaster, one that reminds Chris Hedges of “Yugoslavia before the storm.”
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By Larry Blumenfeld — Ned Sublette’s remarkable new book tells an inspiring story of resilience and resistance by ordinary men and women who won’t cooperate in their own erasure.
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By Eugene Robinson — Humor me while we conduct a little thought experiment. Imagine that Barack Obama lost 10 states in a row.
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By Amy Goodman — Yuri Kochiyama’s remarkable life took her from a Japanese internment camp in Arkansas to the Audubon Ballroom, where she witnessed the assassination of her friend Malcom X, and on to Oakland, where she continues to struggle for social justice.
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AP photo / Javier Galeano
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Fidel Castro announced on Tuesday that he “neither will aspire to nor will I accept the position of president of the Council of State and commander in chief.” He had stayed in firm control of Cuba for nearly 50 years despite all the best efforts of a superpower some 90 miles away. In the end, he was forced from office not by coup or assassination, but trouble with his intestine.
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By Eugene Robinson — John McCain has the advantage of getting to run right away. Too bad he’s campaigning on failed policies and bad ideas.
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By Timothy Snyder — One of the great crimes of the 20th century—the mass murder of Jews in the Nazi-occupied Soviet territories—is all but forgotten. “The Unknown Black Book” helps us remember.
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By Eugene Robinson — Are the news media being beastly to Hillary Clinton? Are political reporters and commentators—as Bill Clinton suggested but didn’t quite come out and say in a radio interview Tuesday—basically in the tank for Barack Obama?
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Hollywood bigwig Ari Emanuel knows a thing or two about superdelegates. His brother, Congressman Rahm Emanuel, is one. But, as Ari writes on the Huffington Post, “as much as I love and respect him, I don’t trust him and his fellow superdelegates to decide for me and the American people who should be the Democratic nominee—and, therefore, most likely the next president of the United States.”
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By Mark Arax — It is said that behind every great fortune there is a crime. Here’s a true-life drama of self-invention, greed and ambition involving four larger-than-life men who singly, and together, helped create California. A book to be read after you’ve watched “There Will Be Blood.”
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By David Sirota — For all the hype about generational and gender wars in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, we have a class war on our hands. And incredibly, corporate America’s preferred candidate is winning the poorer “us” versus the wealthier “them.”
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AP photo / Baz Ratner
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By Milton Viorst — Can decent Israelis, caught between complacency and conscience, save their beleaguered country from the corruptions of power, religious fanaticism and crippling hubris?
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By Ellen Goodman — The Kennedy clan, like many families across the country, is divided. It’s a struggle between the appeal of experience and idealism, and will ultimately decide the Democratic race.
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By Marie Cocco — Election Day began with voting machines refusing to start up. It ended with them refusing to shut down.
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By Amy Goodman — It’s the deadliest conflict since World War II. More than 5 million people have died in the past decade, yet it goes virtually unnoticed and unreported in the United States.
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AP photo / Mizzima News
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By Sarah Stillman — Remember when the world turned its attention to Burma and promised to no longer ignore the suffering of the people there? Truthdig contributor Sarah Stillman sat down with Burmese democracy organizer Maung Maung to check in on the Saffron Revolution and the brave men and women who continue to resist oppression, whether anyone is watching or not.
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By Eugene Robinson — Six months ago, Bill Clinton seemed to be settling comfortably into roles befitting a silver-maned former president: statesman, philanthropist, philosopher-king. Now he has put all that high-mindedness on hold—maybe it was never such a great fit, after all—to costar in his wife Hillary’s campaign as a coldblooded political hit man.
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AP photo / Haraz N. Ghanbari
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“Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.” —Martin Luther King Jr.
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politics-now.com
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Roger Morris, who served on the National Security Council staff under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, has written a fascinating history of the United States’ many interventions in Pakistan. It’s the sordid story of “the world’s longest running military despotism, and of America’s most generous and tragic patronage.”
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Clinton and Obama would court failure by ignoring the white working class, a group that has reasons to be discontented.
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By Michael Gorra — The Nobel Prize-winning author of such stunning (and controversial) novels as “Waiting for the Barbarians” and “Disgrace” offers up his 19th book, about a South African writer, like Coetzee himself, who now lives in Australia and tries to understand the role of a writer caught between hope and history.
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AP photo / David Guttenfelder
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By Scott Ritter — Pervez Musharraf’s recent actions remind us, Ritter argues, that America’s special relationship with Pakistan serves neither country’s best interests.
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By Marie Cocco — With the economy teetering on recession, there’s a way out of the usual political impasse, if the politicians want to find it.
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AP photo / David Furst, pool
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By Chris Hedges — The Gilbert and Sullivan charade of statesmanship played out by George W. Bush and his enabler, Condoleezza Rice, as they wander the Middle East is a fitting end to seven years of misrule.
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