Stuart Lyle The denouement of a week of public testimony in the US House of Representatives Impeachment Inquiry was Adam Schiff’s closing statement. He alternated between sneering at the Republicans and getting furious with their character assassinations and stonewalling. In contrast with Devin Nunes’ obscurantist approach, Schiff quoted the Republican Ranking Member of a different…
Intro by b. traven Bill Clinton, that paragon of marital fidelity, could not wait when he was president to rush to Richard Nixon’s funeral to pay his respect to the man who was drummed from the of Presidency for his alleged crimes and misdemeanors while in office. Clinton has now, in concert with his equally…
Julian Assange is a divisive figure. He’s been cheered and then reviled by progressives over the course of the last five years. Like the ACLU’s effort to defend the Nazi march in Skokie IL in the late 70s, Peter Van Buren sees past Assange’s feud with Hillary Clinton and his intent to hurt her presidential…
Tom Engelhardt. Introduction by William Astore. And Nixon said, “Let there be tapes.” And there was surveillance — and knowledge of good and evil — and a multitude of dirty tricks. And Nixon thought it was good. And American democracy was fallen, forevermore. And after Nixon slew democracy, the Founders asked him where it was. …
W.J. Astore On 30 April 1970, 45 years ago this month, President Richard M. Nixon ordered an invasion into Cambodia. Explaining his reasoning for widening the war in Southeast Asia, Nixon declared: If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy…
Daniel N. White James Fallows, a noted journalist and author of National Defense (1981), is tits on a boar useless these days. That’s my conclusion after reading his Atlantic Monthly cover story, The Tragedy of the American Military, in which he asks, Why do the best soldiers in the world keep losing? It is a truly terrible…
W.J. Astore Christian G. Appy, professor of history at U-Mass Amherst, has written a new and telling book on the Vietnam War: American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (New York, Viking Press). Reading his book made me realize a key reason why the U.S. lost the war: for U.S. leaders it was…
Richard Sahn The other night I was watching the movie “Platoon” on television. An American soldier was killed every few seconds while the platoon was immersed in a firefight with North Vietnamese regulars near the Cambodian border. In one scene the body of a dead GI was used as a shield as bullets were being…
The Contrary Perspective 