On Mark Shields, Bill, I've pretty much given up on him. I'm surprised PBS still has him around and that he's on the CNN show on Saturday night, Capital Gang, with Novak and Hunt. But I gather the three, Shields, Novak, and Hunt are very, very tight buddies. On the Saturday night program, Shields does the moderating and has only quips to offer, not much information.
By contrast, Hunt is full of information, loves to debate, very aggressively, Novak, who loves to play the demonic right wing columnist role to the hilt. If you are looking for a bit of entertainment, though not a great deal of information, I recommend it.
As for Lehrer's Friday night political commentary crew, the two folk who've offered me the most were the Boston Globe columnist, Tom Oliphant, and David Gergen. Gigot always played to type, like Novak does, but did not bring the information base that Novak does, and Brooks, who doesn't play to type, and rarely has anything interesting to say.
You will find this strange, no doubt, but while I am reviewing the TV pundits, I watch Kristol with interest. He generally brings an argument not simply disdain for people who disagree with him. George Will, Britt Hume, etc. tend to the latter.
I do, however, agree with Shields, as you say, about the collapse of the dems on this one. I understand the politics and the arguments that have led them to muffle it, but there is a larger task here. Not only offering terms for a serious debate about Iraq but we are at a critical turning point in US foreign policy. It now looks to me as if the "strike first" part of the policy is only the tip of the iceberg. I want to read the new Bush statement featured in the Times yesterday, compare it with the earlier American Century proposal, published in 2000, and compare the two with the very recent Brookings Institution proposal which proposes the spread of democratic political institutions as the main goal of foreign policy, not military superiority, as it now looks as if the Bush folk want.
Further on this topic, I just got back from a trip out for breakfast to read the Times. I noticed the Sunday magazine has an article on Wolfowitz/ influence in the Bush administration. I won't get to it until this afternoon, but, if you are interested, you might find it online.
On The New York Review of Books, you nailed their style exactly. Take a book or two or three on a topic, find the expert or experts, and have them to an essay on the topic, and, oh by the way, refer to the books. Rashed did a bit more of a serious review of the books than is usual for those topic pieces. There is another style, more academic in character, which focuses directly on the books and arguments in the field.
The Pakistani piece was excellent, I completly agree. I read a good bit of his book on the Taliban and was not terribly impressed. However, looks to me now as if that was my problem, not his. I'm going to take a look at his other book.
Also, I'm going to put the Mary Anne Weaver book on hold at the library and have alread done so for an earlier (99) book she wrote on Islamists in Egypt. Someone on this thread said some nice things about her work. Can't recall just who that was.
Finally, the Pakistani dilemma, the pressing need to encourage democracy or one destabilizes governments over the long haul and builds grounds for Islamist movements to recruit as against the need to keep an illegitemate dictator in office to attack terrorism but also increase long term instability, that dilemma is the one that is central to the Brookings Institution paper.
All these issues should be at the center of a serious foreign policy debate, when debating Iraq. It's not and I think we have the Dems to blame for it.
I'm not even convinced they lose in the polls if they sponsor such a debate. That only happens for certain if another terrorist attack occurs in the US.
Bu then, perhaps, we know why I'm not a successful politician. At least not a nonacademic one. |
