Commentary’s new blog Contentions continues to feature excellent posts by Commentary regulars. Commentary senior editor Gabriel Schoenfeld is the author of the essential Commentary article “Has the New York Times violated the Espionage Act?” (March). On Friday Schoenfeld updated his March Commentary article with a post on the aftermath of the Times’s exposure of the administration’s terrorist financial tracking program: “Damage done.”
I never got around to noting Schoenfeld’s most recent Commentary articles, but they address other subjects we have discussed at length here and are essential reading. In “Dual loyalty and the Israel Lobby” (November), Schoenfeld examines the confluence of Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer and CAIR. In “Jews, Muslims and the Democrats,” Schoenfeld studies the rise of Keith Ellison and Ellison’s soulmates in the Democratic Party. (Schoenfeld errs only in his footnote 1 suggesting that Ellison has distanced himself from CAIR. I think that Ellison and CAIR remain joined at the hip.)
Most recentyly, in the February issue of Commentary Schoenfeld has returned to issues involving the press in “Why journalists are not above the law.” Here Schoenfeld takes up the question of the proposed, profoundly misguided Lugar-Specter shield law. Schoenfeld notes the proposed law’s striking limitation to millionaires who own printing presses and their employees:
In the Internet age, the functional equivalent of the lonely pamphleteer is the lonely blogger, working at home in front of his computer screen. Internet blogs have become a major force in the dissemination of news and opinion; one has only to recall the role played by the website PowerLine.com in unmasking the fraudulent documents employed by Dan Rather and CBS in their 2004 election-eve coverage of the military service of George W. Bush. In the Lugar-Specter version of a shield law, bloggers would be ineligible for membership in the new privileged caste.
Having nothing in common with this article except its excellence and its friendly mention of Power Line is Peter Berkowitz’s Policy Review essay on The Way to Win by Mark Halperin and John Harris: “New media and old.”
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