From Commentary, Norman Podhoretz on Jerusalem and the Scandal of Particularity: Thinking about the future of Israel's capital city—and about the mystery of Jewish survival. A review of The Last Resistance by Jacqueline Rose. Three for Thought: What you need to read about the Six-Day War. Forty years ago next week, Israel and its Arab neighbours went to war. Harvey Morris explores the causes and the consequences. The introduction to Barriers to Democracy: The Other Side of Social Capital in Palestine and the Arab World by Amaney A. Jamal.
A pair of histories show the unprecedented effects of two technologies of terror: A review of Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb by Mike Davis and On Suicide Bombing by Talal Asad. Iraq’s Curse: No faction has been able to secure absolute power, and that has only sharpened the hunger for it. Life in the Inferno of Baghdad: Political reconciliation will take years. Cleansing Baghdad's soul will take generations. Patrick Cockburn interviews Moqtada al-Sadr. If President Bush is committed to fighting on in Iraq, then he needs a fundamentally different military strategy — one that offers the only realistic chance of compelling a ceasefire between Iraq's warring factions.
Hillary’s War: Hillary Rodham Clinton’s decisions on Iraq may point to what sort of president she would be. Will the real Hillary please stand up? Elizabeth Kolbert reviews Carl Bernstein's A Woman in Charge (and an excerpt) and Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta's Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton.
From New York, a covers story on The Politics of Personality Destruction: Candidates for president are asked hundreds of times a day to feign every possible emotion. Such a task should be repugnant to any authentic human—but do we really want a normal person in the world’s most stressful job? Can conservative Protestants vote for a member of what they consider a cult? An article on Mitt's Mormonism and the evangelical vote. Romney candidacy has resurrected last days prophecy of Mormon saving the Constitution. Is Fred Thompson too lazy to get nominated? John Dickerson investigates. Ron Paul wants to drag the U.S. out of Iraq, can the war on drugs, and overturn the Patriot Act. No wonder Republican power brokers want to boot him off the stage. Here's a question for Giuliani: What, exactly, do you want government to stop doing? Or do you simply want all of government to be less effective and more wasteful? Imagine how the media would cover the divorced rich Republican presidential candidates, if they were Democrats.
From The Politico, an interview with Al Gore and more and more on The Assault on Reason. Al Gore has more to lose than to gain from running for president, and the response to Al Gore’s new book helps prove his point. We need a brainiac president, a regular Mister or Miss Smarty-Pants. We need to elect the kid you hated in high school, the teacher's pet with perfect grades. The quixotic political startup known as Unity08 is not the first third-party movement in the United States, but it may be one of the brashest and most original.
Forget the campaigns. Disregard the position papers and attack ads. One of the best ways to tell who's going to win an election is to see the candidates on TV, watching them for 10 seconds and keeping the sound off. The Brookings Institution creates a special project designed to inject ideas into the 2008 presidential debate, with papers on nuclear proliferation, the budget deficit, U.S.-Muslim world relations, and more. Will electronic voting reform create new ways to steal elections? Steven Rosenfeld investigates. As a candidate for the U.S. Senate in Minnesota, Al Franken has become painfully aware of the role money plays in politics.
