Commentary
April 2009

Have you ever found yourself in the position of asking, on your own behalf or on behalf of others, how many or precisely which people it would be useful to kill in order to secure a benefit for yourself or your cause? And just how to do it? No? Others have. Their answers have ranged from Cain’s original “Abel, with my bare hands” to Hitler’s “all the Jews, mainly by gas,” and the widespread Hutu view in the Rwanda of 1994, “the Tutsis, with machetes.” The question burns today for the government of Sudan and in the Congo.

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Commentary 

The Essential Guide to the Bush Tax Plan by Paul Krugman, Norton. 128 pp. $17.00

PAUL KRUGMAN is an economist at Princeton University and a twice-weekly op-ed columnist for the New York Times. The two occupations would seem to be conjoined in Fuzzy Math, a slim but energetic polemic against the tax-cut proposal that George W. Bush made the centerpiece of his 2000 presidential campaign.

The timing of Krugman’s book turned out to be inauspicious: Fuzzy Math had barely made its way to bookstores before Congress reached final agreement in late May on a major tax cut only slightly modified from what Bush had proposed. Krugman’s “Essential Guide to the Bush Tax Plan” is thus somewhat less essential than it might have been. But in any case, the illumination it casts on the debate over the tax cut is mostly of the inadvertent kind.

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Commentary

Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas. By Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson. Houghton Mifflin. 406 pp. $24.95.

The media blitz that accompanied the publication of Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, by Wall Street Journal reporters Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, ought to be studied and analyzed by publicists much as the campaigns of Hannibal, Nelson, and Rommel are studied by military tacticians. Now here was a brilliant public-relations barrage: a massive excerpt in the Wall Street Journal; an hour-long edition of ABC’s Turning Point devoted to the book, with Ted Koppel’s Nightline and Larry King Live in tow; a volley of morning shows; articles landing everywhere from Newsweek to Mirabella; and even a National Book Award nomination announced in a feat without precedent in the annals of history before the tightly-held volume was in the hands of anyone but the publishers and the competition’s judges.

This tally is hardly exhaustive, merely illustrative. Strange Justice clearly struck a chord that set virtually the entire American media culture humming in sympathetic vibration.

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Commentary

IS THERE a more celebrated journalist, or for that matter a more reviled one, than Bob Woodward, the Pulitzer prize-winning assistant managing editor for investigations at the Washington Post? No one can deny that, for better or worse, his daily reporting with Carl Bernstein on Watergate contributed mightily to the downfall of the Nixon administration twenty years ago. The two books that came out of that episode, All the President’s Men and The Final Days, are as classic as they are controversial still.

Since then, Woodward has given us a look inside the Supreme Court (The Brethren, written with Scott Armstrong); an explosive and heavily litigated biography of a Hollywood superstar (Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi); Veil, a chronicle of “the secret wars of the CIA” during the Reagan administration, including, incredibly, a purported death-bed interview with the CIA’s William Casey; and The Commanders, a portrait reaching to the very top of the United States military establishment, published as the nation prepared to go to war in the Persian Gulf.

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Commentary

Demosclerosis: The Silent Killer of American Government. By Jonathan Rauch. Times Books. 250 pp. $22.00.

“Demosclerosis,” in Jonathan Rauch’s diagnosis, is “government’s progressive loss of the ability to adapt.” Ever since World War II, he maintains, powerful underlying social forces have intersected with a structural weakness in modern democratic politics to allow entrenched interests to dominate government. This brief but sweeping book, by a contributing editor of the National Journal, is an attempt to describe and analyze those forces. Rauch’s hope is that if we cannot liberate ourselves from their grip, we can at least prevent them from choking off whatever vitality remains in American life.

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