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Edited by Peter Davison
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One of JFK’s “best and brightest” died wondering how the Vietnam War could have gone so wrong. Now, in an important new book, we have some answers.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — In naming retired Gen. Eric K. Shinseki as veterans affairs secretary, President-elect Barack Obama made what may be the most politically and morally significant choice of his transition.
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By William Pfaff — The evidence suggests that American policy under Barack Obama will be a continuation of the neoconservative foreign policy of the Bush administration, given a human face.
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lemonodor.com
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It looks like a pact to ban current cluster bomb designs will take another step forward, with more than 100 countries slated to sign the treaty in the next couple of days. However, the U.S., Russia and China—the largest cluster bomb manufacturers—so far have refused to sign on.
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By William Pfaff — Barack Obama has said that he is not against war, only against stupid wars. One might then reasonably ask if the present war in Afghanistan is not a stupid war?
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Archive / White House Press Office / Cecil Stoughton
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By Stanley Kutler — The 36th president of the United States seems strangely absent in the current celebrations. Perhaps Lyndon B. Johnson is not fondly remembered, but his triumphs paved the long road to Barack Obama’s historic presidency.
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nndb.com
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This is spooky: A group of journalism students from the City University of New York filed a Freedom of Information request and discovered that the FBI tracked the late Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam for more than two decades.
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By Amy Goodman — Perhaps the job that qualified Obama most for the presidency was the one most vilified by his opponents: community organizer. Yet community organizing is inherently at crosscurrents with the massive infusion of campaign cash.
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By William Pfaff — Governments, like corporations and modern organizations of all kinds, make much of systematically teaching “lessons learned” to those newly arrived to responsibilities, yet they seem infrequently to succeed.
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Collage: AP photo / Chip Somodevilla, pool / Wikimedia Commons
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James G. Blight and janet M. Lang —
The leading issue in the current face-off between Barack Obama and John McCain is the economy. Once elected and inaugurated, however, a U.S. president’s politics become global literally overnight.
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By Joe Conason — Nothing in the presidential campaign so far has been as instructive as its swift descent into the politics of personal destruction. Although voters have probably heard little lately that they did not already know about Sen. Barack Obama, they have learned something very important about Sen. John McCain.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Tuesday night’s debate, a town-hall discussion dominated by economic questions, made it clear that John McCain’s effort to change the campaign’s focus to the culture wars of the 1960s is not going to work.
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AP photo
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By Mary Hershberger — Troubling questions hover over Lt. Cmdr. McCain’s actions in the catastrophic 1967 fire aboard the aircraft carrier Forrestal and the period immediately afterward. His later accounts of events following the accident also raise issues. American voters, after hearing so much from the senator’s campaign about his military record, deserve to know all the facts.
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mtv.com
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Paul Newman, the iconic blue-eyed film star of big-screen classics like “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” “The Sting” and “Cool Hand Luke,” died on Friday at his Connecticut home after a long battle with cancer. Newman, who also made a name for himself as a philanthropist with his Newman’s Own food product line and Hole in the Wall Gang camps, was 83.
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Carolyn Eisenberg takes a close look at Melvyn Leffler’s “For the Soul of Mankind” to ask whether our current troubles are rooted in a history that continues to haunt us.
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By William Pfaff — The United States has just invaded Cambodia. The name of Cambodia this time is Pakistan, but otherwise it’s the same story as in Indochina in 1970.
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Just how dangerous are evangelical zealots? A new book by Jeff Sharlet takes a close and disturbing look at the group known as The Family and its disturbing and apparently widespread influence on mainstream political culture.
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John McCain, a lobbyist and fixture of Congress for more than 30 years, nominee of the incumbent party and self-proclaimed foot soldier in the Reagan revolution, tried to convince Americans Thursday night that only he could bring real reform to that wretched place called Washington. Updated
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Flickr / soggydan
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Patriotism and sacrifice for one’s country usually make for reliable go-to topics for politicians, but according to Talking Points Memo, John McCain’s detractors and admirers alike are starting to suggest that the Republican presidential hopeful and his campaign honchos dial it down a bit on the subject of McCain’s time as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.
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In “One Minute to Midnight,” Michael Dobbs’ definitive book on the 1962 crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation, the question of lessons learned and unlearned remains as acute as ever.
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AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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By Robert Scheer — The world according to John McCain is one in which America is triumphant at home and abroad thanks to the Bush legacy, rolling to victory internationally and mastering its domestic economic problems. If daily news would seem to deny such a rosy scenario, then that only shows skeptics lack the courage that sustained McCain as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
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By William Pfaff — When large and powerful countries intervene in the affairs of smaller countries, they take for granted that they are, or should be—and certainly could be—in control. The reverse is often true.
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By Ellen Goodman — For a long time, John McCain has believed that Vietnam should have, could have had a different ending. So, too, his attention on Iraq has been less on the war’s origin than on some undefined victorious conclusion.
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What are we to make of this new John McCain campaign ad, in which colorful countercultural degenerates prance through the opening frames, and, near the end, a still of Noble Older McCain is superimposed over footage of Hunky Younger Ex-POW McCain?
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thecia.com.au
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The recent spate of war movies about Iraq and Afghanistan has proved to be a hard sell with American audiences—even more so with the U.S. military. Now, the Pentagon is combating a certain lack of nuance, as military officials see it, in flicks like “Redacted” and “In the Valley of Elah” by offering script consultation services to Hollywood types looking to make movies about the current conflicts in the Middle East.
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By Joe Conason — Despite all the feigned outrage fanned by the mainstream media and the right-wing noisemakers, Wesley Clark—retired four-star general, former supreme commander of NATO, wounded and highly decorated veteran of ground combat in Vietnam and a military man to his core—assuredly did not denigrate the war record of John McCain when he talked about the Republican candidate on television last Sunday.
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AP photo / Danny Johnston
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Monday brought yet another round of political Mad Libs, which proceeds as follows: 1. (Insert surrogate name here), adviser to (candidate)‘s presidential campaign, slams (rival candidate) for lack/excess of (personal quality) on (major media outlet); 2. (Rival candidate) blasts (surrogate), hints that such antics reveal opposition’s true character; 3. (Candidate) distances self from (surrogate), who goes on to apologize and perhaps step down; 4. Repeat as necessary.
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By William Pfaff — The Bush government was elected in 2000 on a platform including vigorous opposition to the United States Army’s doing “nation-building.” What a difference a five-year-long military disaster can make!
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For 50 years, Tom Hayden has been an indefatigable organizer on behalf of the disenfranchised, and now, with the publication of his “Writings for a Democratic Society,” we have a chance to trace the arc of activism of an American original who continues to make history.
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Barack Obama’s vice presidential vetting committee has been meeting with lawmakers in Washington, so naturally a few names have started to filter out. Most were to be expected (Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Jim Webb and so on), but among them is someone you may not have heard of: retired Gen. James Jones, a veteran of the Vietnam War and former supreme allied commander of NATO. Of course it’s far too soon to place bets.
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AP photo / LM Otero
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The Brits are in on the American election speculation game, judging by this Daily Mail article about John McCain’s first wife, Carol, which, despite reporter Sharon Churcher’s “tsk-tsk” tone about McCain’s possible philandering and his eventual wife-swap (enter Cindy, beer heiress, pictured), also allows that Carol McCain still cares about her ex-husband and supports him in his political ventures.
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AP photo / LM Otero
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By Robert Scheer — What should be the most important issue in this election is one that is rarely, if ever, addressed: Why is U.S. military spending at the highest point, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than at any time since the end of World War II?
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AP Photo/Reed Saxon
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By Ron Kovic — As a former United States Marine Corps sergeant who was shot and paralyzed from my mid-chest down during my second tour of duty in Vietnam on Jan. 20, 1968, I am sending my complete support and admiration to all those now involved in the courageous struggle to stop military recruitment in Berkeley and across the country.
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Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges recently spoke to Father Daniel Berrigan, who at 87 is observing the 40th anniversary of a crucial act of civil disobedience in Catonsville, Md. The priest offers Hedges a frank assessment of our times: “I have never had such meager expectations of the system.”
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By Ellen Goodman — As the dust settles from the recent roundup of allegedly abused children from a fundamentalist retreat, some are asking whether saving these kids is worth the human cost.
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By Joe Conason — It is hard to blame John McCain for mocking Barack Obama as an “elitist” following that silly remark about bitter folks who cling to guns and religion. Rarely does the Arizona senator—one of the wealthiest members of Washington’s most exclusive club—encounter such a tempting chance to masquerade as a populist.
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Flickr / Kevindooley
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By James Harris — Harvard scholar Linda Bilmes speaks about the book on the Iraq war’s costs that she wrote with Joseph Stiglitz. The two former Truthdiggers of the Week have been working hard to uncover even more hidden expenses for the war, which they estimate will cost the taxpayers and their children trillions of dollars.
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By Robert Fisk — The president’s twisting of words in an attempt to justify continuing the war has become sickening.
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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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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 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 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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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Let’s ask the hard question about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright: Is he as far outside the African-American mainstream as many of us would like to think?
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By Amy Goodman — Last weekend, in the lead-up to the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, a remarkable gathering occurred just outside Washington, D.C., called Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan, Eyewitness Accounts of the Occupations.
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By Robert Fisk — The Independent’s Robert Fisk looks back at five years of catastrophe in Iraq and is reminded of Winston Churchill’s depiction of Palestine as a “hell-disaster.”
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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 Warren I. Cohen — Just who are the “neocons,” where did they come from and how was it they came to wield so profound an influence among the highest circles of America’s policy elites? These are some of the questions asked by Jacob Heilbrunn in his new book, “They Knew They Were Right.”
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