American Civil Liberties Union
How Human Rights Became our Ideology
The International Human Rights Movement: A History By Aryeh Neier (Princeton University Press, 379 pp., $35) I. READ MORE >>
Could Rick Scott Hand Florida to Obama?
The War On Terror And The Bush-Obama Presidency
I take it is a relief that, aside from its rhetorical pandering to the civil libertarian absolutists who can’t seem to grasp that Muslim terror networks are in a worldwide war with the United States and its remaining allies, the Obama administration is actually extending the life of the Bush presidency in its defense against jihad. READ MORE >>
Obama Tells The Aclu "enough Is Enough"
President Obama is now caught between memory and reality, between the ecstatic experience of campaigning and the stringent expectations of governing. Promises made (or, more aptly, vaguely suggested) are not promises delivered. And oftentimes they shouldn't be and wouldn't be. Wise men and women know this. So they also know that their candidate's victory on election day is also a prelude to a gradual but inevitable incline of disenchantment. READ MORE >>
Empire Falls
A Fighting Faith
On January 4, 1947, 130 men and women met at Washington's Willard Hotel to save American liberalism. A few months earlier, in articles in The New Republic and elsewhere, the columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop had warned that "the liberal movement is now engaged in sowing the seeds of its own destruction." Liberals, they argued, "consistently avoided the great political reality of the present: the Soviet challenge to the West." Unless that changed, "In the spasm of terror which will seize this country ... READ MORE >>
Misjudged
LAST YEAR, CONSERVATIVES responded to Lawrence v. Texas—in which the Supreme Court struck down all 13 state anti-sodomy statutes and overruled Bowers v. Hardwick, the infamous 1986 case that denied “a fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy”—with dire warnings that the decision would open the floodgates to radical social changes, including the advent of gay marriage. READ MORE >>
Closed Sessions
Trent Lott must think he's living in a nightmare. More than one week has passed since his segregationist cheerleading at Strom Thurmond's century celebration, and the chorus of anti-Lottism has swelled ever louder. Conservatives in particular can't scream loud enough. READ MORE >>
The Government Gap
Why Americans Hate Politics: The Death of the Democratic Process by E. J. Dionne Jr. (Simon and Schuster, 430 pp., $22.95) The United States of Ambition: Politicians, Power, and the Pursuit of Office by Alan Ehrenhalt (Random House/Times Books, 309 pp., $23) READ MORE >>
