The Nation

This week: Gender segmentation still prevails in the workplace, the greenery of West Virginia hides the scars of strip mining and Canada's border service holds off on capturing terror suspects until new terrorism legislation is up for debate. Speaking of terrorists, Americans are as likely to be killed by them as by their own furniture.

— Alleen Brown focuses on education.

The opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas, Texas, last week has led to a re-examination of the forty-third president’s legacy. An article in The Washington Post noted Bush’s approval rating has enjoyed a steady increase in the four years since he left office, attributing that spike to “the passage of time and Bush’s relative invisibility.” While that public invisibility has indeed been enjoyable, the library dedication should be an occasion to remember what it actually felt like in America during the Bush years. To take a tour through The Nation’s early judgments of Bush—before the wars, the cronyism, and the rejection of the rule of law brought such criticisms mainstream—is to be truly spoiled because there is so much to choose from, and there are many articles that deserve a second reading.

An early article on Bush’s first presidential campaign, “Running on Empty: The Truth About George W. Bush’s ‘Compassionate Conservatism,’ ” from April 1999, tried and failed to find a single way Bush had been compassionate to any constituency in Texas apart from his oil and gas industry cronies, arms manufacturers, polluters and other corporate malefactors. It also previewed Bush’s penchant for “speaking in tongues intended to be understood by the Christian right” and the regular-guy routine that became an important and effective component of his electoral strategy. “You think that if you could only forget the policies, the appointment and the vetoes, you could really love this guy,” Texas Observer editor Louis Dubose wrote. “He’s that good.”

An article published just before the 2000 election by David Corn, recent Polk Award winner and former Washington bureau chief for The Nation, considered the governor’s performance during the campaign—in which “Bush’s intelligence became a campaign issue”—and weighed the candidates’ respective closing arguments. “The dominant theme is, trust people, not the government,” Karl Rove told Corn. His boss’s own argument was more, well, succinct. “The greatness of America exists because our country is great,” Bush declared. At a certain point, one does feel a little nostalgic.

Stigmatization of abortion, along with factors such as high cost, complicates the process of having an abortion. (Courtesy of Flickr, CC 2.0.)  

The Australian government announced today that it will most likely add RU-486, the abortion pill, to the list of drugs that are heavily subsidized under the country’s universal healthcare system.

Jill Abramson. (AP Photo/Evan Agostini)

Feminists put up with a lot: the mainstream media constantly announcing the movement’s death, mansplainers, stereotypes about Birkenstocks. The whole pervasive political and cultural sexism thing is no picnic, either. But there’s one thorn in this particular feminist’s side that beats all others—the inability of some men to believe and trust women when they say something is sexist.