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The author describes how "The New York Review of Books" has become increasingly politicized since the election of President George W. Bush. In the wake of the Vietnam War, the "Review" became a formidable--and, in some sense, unique--journalistic institution. Many of its readers reside in academia, but the paper has a devoted following in the upper reaches of media, politics and philanthropy, which gives it an influence vastly out of proportion to its circulation of 130,000. The publication has always been erudite and authoritative--and because of its analytical rigor and seriousness, frequently essential--but it hasn't always been lively, pungent and readable. But the election of George W. Bush, combined with the furies of 9/11, jolted the editors. Since 2001, the "Review's" temperature has risen and its political outlook has sharpened. In stark contrast to "The New Yorker" or "The New York Times Magazine," the "Review" opposed the Iraq war in a voice that was remarkably consistent and unified. What blew the dust off "The New York Review?" As war drew closer, and the press grew more accommodating and deferential, the "Review's" disgust increased, and the editors fired their heavy weaponry. The fall of Baghdad only deepened the fury of the "Review's" contributors. Judt is not the "Review's" only critical voice on Israel. What accounts for the "Review's" post-9/11 revival? One word that continually tumbles from the lips of seasoned "Review"-watchers is "Vietnam." In the case of Iraq, as with Vietnam, the "Review" saw what many other commentators missed or ignored.

He's not the quickest calf in the pasture, so it took U.S. President George W. Bush, and his White House handlers, a few months to grasp a basic rule of modem American electoral politics: Don't look bad on the environment. After thirty-one years of Earth Days, the environment has become a mom-and-apple-pie issue; 68 percent of Americans say they support the goals of the green movement. Thus it was no surprise to see Bush's poll numbers sliding, even among Republicans, as his Administration abandoned lower limits on arsenic in drinking water, the Kyoto Protocols on climate change and a host of other urgent measures. Bush has a problem. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to release a major study of dioxin's health effects that, if uncensored, will surely increase pressure for dioxin's rapid phase-out. Meanwhile, the chemical, paper and other dioxin-related industries are pressing the U.S. Government to block the study's release. If Bush heeds their call, he shields industry from costly new regulations but reinforces his anti-green reputation.

The article discusses what has gone wrong in John Kerry's campaign for the U.S. presidency. If a presidential candidate is truly the Real Deal, does he have to repeatedly pronounce himself the Real Deal? That's the dilemma confronting Senator John Forbes Kerry, who at the start of the pre-primary season was tagged the front-runner among the Democratic contenders. On paper, he looked real. He's a Vietnam War hero who protested that war. He's mostly in sync with Democratic primary voters. But Howard Dean, a nobody governor from Vermont, zoomed past him in the pre-voting indicators: money, poll results, volunteers and buzz. In the aftermath of a late-in-the-game staff shake-up, Kerry began pitching himself as the "Real Deal" candidate who could undo Bush's "raw deal," which favors "powerful interests." So when the Senate passed the Medicare bill, Kerry complained, "By caving in to the special interests, the Senate has given our seniors a raw deal." In New Hampshire, he unveiled a "Real Deal" agenda he would move to enact in the first 100 days of a Kerry presidency. The problem: Kerry is trying too hard to be "real." It's an obvious reaction to the criticism that Kerry, not known for exciting the voters, has yet to present an inspiring message or persona to fire up grassroots Democrats. In some respects, Kerry has been running a campaign more suitable for re-electing an incumbent senator: Look at my résumé, look at my record, look at my advisers.

The article discusses U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich's announcement that U.S. President George W. Bush should be impeached. The author points out that U.S. President Richard Nixon resigned well into his second term, and impeachment papers were filed against U.S. President Harry Truman. The U.S. Senate even considered removing U.S. President Andrew Johnson in the final year of his administration. Kucinich's charges include disregard of U.S. Congress's authority to declare war.

In this article the author discusses what he calls the undeclared war on the media conducted by the administration of President George W. Bush. The F.B.I. is conducting an investigation into the papers of the late journalist Jack Anderson, files thought to contain leaked classified information, and will prosecute the Anderson family under the 1917 Espionage Act if access is not granted. The author notes that administration officials have leaked classified information.

The article discusses the media's coverage of the United States presidential election of 2004 between President George W. Bush and Democratic candidate John Kerry. One problem with trying to write critically about the 2004 presidential election coverage is that by choosing any single aspect of its manifold failures, one automatically does an injustice to the full scope of its immense, almost stupefying awfulness. When the New York Times ran its May 26 admission that it gullibly swallowed the Bush Administration's deception about Iraq's nuclear weapons program, which helped win support for a ruinous war, the story was, according to the invaluable Media Matters, reported thirty-eight times in U.S. newspaper and wire reports during the following forty-eight hours and seven times on cable news. It was entirely ignored on Fox News Channel. By contrast, in the forty-eight hours following CBS's admission that it "should not have used" memos critical of Bush's military service because of questions regarding their provenance, the story was reported 167 times in U.S. newspaper and wire reports and fifty-seven times on cable news broadcasts. Times columnist William Safire has played a powerful role in misinforming the paper's readers about a meeting he alleges took place between Al Qaeda terrorist Mohamed Atta and the former head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service in Prague, in April 2001. The meeting is, according to all available evidence, entirely made up. CBS's slip-up was such big news because it fit the right-wing script designed to shield the Bush Administration from democratic accountability.

We return this week to the conservative crusade to destroy the reputation of financier and philanthropist George Soros. He has turned his attention to the United States, where he is spending as much as $15 million to help various liberal groups improve their efforts to expose the malfeasance of the President George W. Bush Administration and defeat it in the elections of 2004. The Republican National Committee has circulated a briefing paper on Capitol Hill in which Soros is referred to as "Lord of the Democrats" and the "Daddy Warbucks" of the drug legalization movement, and which highlights what it deems to be his controversial positions on abortion, gun control and the right to end one's own life. In Richard Mellon Scaife's NewsMax magazine, a writer named Richard Poe has extended the attack against the "somewhat loony" Soros, who, he says, "hates America" and is seeking to engineer a "coup" against Bush. Using unmistakably anti-Semitic tropes and metaphors, editor Tony Blankley appeared on Fox's Hannity & Colmes to call Soros a "robber baron" and "pirate capitalist." All of the above bespeaks the desperation that Republicans apparently feel at the prospect of being challenged by someone with the resources to make a difference in an election in which polls show that a majority of voters disapprove of Bush and that a plurality plan to vote for his opponent.

The author claims that the administration of President George W. Bush sanctioned the use of torture in interrogating Iraqi detainees. So there were WMDs in Iraq after all. They're called digital cameras. Partly because of them, the United States faces one of the most humiliating defeats in imperial history. But there's also a clear paper trail. Not just the long and copiously documented record of US torture, with many of its refinements acquired by the CIA from the Nazis after World War II, but the more recent lineage of encouragement. Within a few days of the Trade Towers going down in September 2001, a vacationing FBI agent told an acquaintance of mine in Puerto Vallarta that detainees in the United States were being tortured. By October of 2001, public opinion here was being softened up for the use of torture. It was not far into the Afghan war that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld made plain his views on prisoners, after horrifying accounts began to surface of the treatment of Taliban POWs. He first said the United States was "not inclined to negotiate surrenders." From spring 2003, the Red Cross was complaining to US Army commanders in Iraq, and later to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in Washington, about frightful treatment of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

The author comments on claims by U.S. conservatives that they are being unfairly attacked by liberals. What's the matter with conservatives? They have the White House, both houses of Congress, the majority of governorships and more money than God. They rule talk-radio and the TV political chat shows, and they get plenty of space in the papers; for all the talk about the liberal media, nine out of the fourteen most widely syndicated columnists are conservatives. What I want to know is, Why can't they just admit it, throw a big party and dance on the table with lampshades on their heads? Why are they always claiming to be excluded and silenced because most English professors are Democrats? They've taken to lecturing the opposition on manners whenever it shows signs of life. Ted Kennedy says the Iraq war was "a fraud made up in Texas" and Bush complains that he's" uncivil." As "New York Times" columnist David Brooks, at least, acknowledges, the right is in a weak position when it claims to be shocked, shocked, shocked by liberal speech today. Well, they wanted state power, and thanks to the Supreme Court Five, they got it. But unfortunately, running the country turns out to be harder than it looked when Bill Clinton was killing off Hillary's lovers between Cabinet meetings. He made it seem so easy! Now, unemployment is way up, the government's awash in red ink, Iraq is a mess. So, everything has to be someone else's fault -- mean liberals who really, really want to win in 2004, Osama loving pranksters who forward e-mail jokes about the President's IQ, Bill and Hillary, still magically pulling the strings three years after leaving the White House, having thoughtfully arranged for 9/11 before they departed. They can dish it out, but they sure can't take it.

While some new security measures are obviously necessary, U.S. President George W. Bush's administration's zeal to shut down the free flow of information goes well beyond any legitimate need. Consider November's Executive Order 13233, which eviscerates the nation's access to its own history, effectively overturning the Presidential Records Act of 1978 by fiat. Current law insists that all presidential papers be declassified within twelve years, with an exception made for those whose publication could demonstrably affect the national security. Bush now wants to allow Presidents to refuse to declassify the decision-making process virtually forever. This is a catastrophe not only for historians but also for history.

The article discusses the paper "Bowling Alone," by Robert D. Putnam. He quotes approvingly a passage from an oral history of the war: "you just felt that the stranger sitting next to you in a restaurant, or someplace, felt the same way you did about the basic issues?" Like the importance of keeping black people out of that very restaurant, perhaps, and of putting Japanese-Americans in internment camps. As for war bonds, one has to be a true masochist to buy war bonds today, given that U.S. President George W. Bush has just engineered, under the guise of economic stimulus, another gigantic tax cut for wealthy corporations and the rich, and an airline-bailout package that underwrites the multimillion-dollar salaries of industry executives while offering nothing to the nearly 100,000 who've lost their airline jobs.