Middle East
Pay Check
A FEW MONTHS AGO, when Democrats proposed letting workers form unions without elections, Republicans recoiled in horror, issuing ringing paeans to workplace democracy. “After two hundred-plus years of our American democracy, it is breathtaking to see the right to a secret ballot rejected so flatly and so strongly,” said Representative Howard P. “Buck” McKeon, in a typical example of the Jeffersonian rhetoric then coursing through Washington. Today, Democrats are proposing to let a company’s shareholders hold an advisory vote on how much they pay their CEO. Sounds democratic, right?
Squeeze Play
Missile Salve
When the United States deploys missiles in Europe, big things tend to happen. In 1979 President Jimmy Carter decided to install American Pershing II and cruise missiles on the continent to counter a Soviet missile known as the SS-20. Carried out four years later under Ronald Reagan, the deployment of these "Euromissiles" sparked a huge peace movement along with a wave of anti-Americanism.
Athwart History
Although he remains the most eminent conservative in the United States, his face and voice recognized by millions, William F. Buckley, Jr. has all but retired from public life. At the apex of his influence, when Richard Nixon and, later, Ronald Reagan occupied the White House, Buckley received flattering notes on presidential letterhead and importuning phone calls from Cabinet members worried about their standing in the conservative movement.
The Mullah
The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 By Dinesh D'Souza (Doubleday, 333 pp., $26.95) I. American conservatism is in crisis. That much is almost universally clear. But the next period in American politics will be determined not least by how clearly we understand the crisis of the right. For it may be that the remarkably successful Republican coalition of the last three decades is not at all doomed at the polls. A Giuliani or Romney candidacy, especially up against a Clinton candidacy, could well eke out a victory in 2008.
Crude Joke
IF THERE WAS one thing George W. Bush and his clique were supposed to know, it was oil. That, at least, was the widespread consensus back in 2000, when Bush first sought the White House, and it was easy to understand why. Bush’s grandfather was an oilman. His father was an oilman. He himself had worked in oil. His vice presidential nominee, Dick Cheney, was the former CEO of energy giant Halliburton. His campaign’s chairman, Donald Evans, was CEO of the oil company Tom Brown.
The Big Test
The New Hegemon
From The Middle East Fellow Of The Carter Center
Jimmy Carter is now embroiled in the kind of controversy that no former president of the United States has ever been embroiled in before. The question is about simple truth. Carter has lied, lied so brazenly that he is not to be trusted about any assertion he makes ever again. I know that he has a big fan club in the Democratic Party, and that is the party's own and particular problem. Either he is in the Michael Moore wing of the party, or Michael Moore is in the Jimmy Carter wing of the party. Either way, that wing is rotten to the core, rotten, dishonest, demagogic, and bigoted.
Keep It Whole
It is a measure of just how unmanageable the war in Iraq has become that an increasing number of politicians and foreign policy analysts are subscribing to Senator Joe Biden's plan to partition Iraq into independent Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish "statelets." On the surface, partition seems like an attractive option. After all, the argument goes, Iraq is already bitterly divided along sectarian lines. Partitioning the country would only formalize what is taking place on the ground. But, despite portrayals to the contrary, Iraq is not so cleanly divided along sectarian lines. The homogenization of Ir
