BY DAN
KENNEDY
Serving the reality-based community since 2002.
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Friday, September 12, 2003
Electronic Nation.
The Nation
joins the other political weeklies -- the New
Republic and the
Weekly
Standard -- in making
all of its content available online to subscribers.
Unlike its ideological competitors,
the Nation does not appear to offer the option of downloading
the entire issue as a PDF file. In other words, you can't take your
laptop to the bathroom unless you've got WiFi. I also don't see an
option to buy an online-only subscription, as you can with TNR
and the Standard, but maybe I haven't looked closely
enough.
The new
cover story (subscribers
only), by John Nichols, befits the Nation's political stance.
At a moment when most pundits are asking if Howard Dean is too
liberal to defeat George W. Bush, the Nation asks instead
whether he's far enough to the left to warrant progressives'
supporting him over Dennis Kucinich. Writes Nichols:
It is Kucinich who has
fought the hard fights against the Bush Administration in Congress
-- frequently going against the party leadership in exactly the
manner Dean backers say Democrats should. As co-chair of the
Progressive Caucus, Kucinich has led challenges to the Bush
Administration not just on the war but on nuclear disarmament,
military spending and the Patriot Act. Even now, while Dean
supports keeping US troops in Iraq, Kucinich calls for bringing
them home. While Dean says he represents Paul Wellstone's
"democratic wing of the Democratic Party," there are few issues on
which Kucinich cannot claim to be a truer heir to Wellstone's
progressive populist mantle.
Well, okay. Of course, this doesn't
answer the question, "So just how badly do you want to lose,
anyway?"
Not that Nichols is any sort of
advocate for Kucinich. His bottom line, sensibly, is that it is Dean
who has energized the Democratic base, and though he might not
represent the fulfillment of every left-wing dream, he is a man of
progressive, populist instincts who continues to grow.
Whatever happened to Craig
Unger? The former
Boston magazine editor
answers that question with a major piece in the new Vanity
Fair on the unseemly favors that the Bush White House did for the
bin Laden family (and other well-connected Saudis) to help get them
out of the US in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
The article isn't online, but
according to National
Journal media columnist William
Powers, Unger "breathes new
life into an old story," and "dramatically
raise[s] the temperature around this touchy issue, with
enough suggestive material to make any reasonably curious soul want
to know more."
posted at 9:15 AM |
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MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
