Opinion: In today’s pages: Fair pay, unfair pope-bashing
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New Republic executive editor J. Peter Scoblic says if you like George W. Bush’s foreign policy, you’ll love John McCain’s:
Weaned by a military family on the lessons of that most classically Manichaean of modern conflicts, World War II, and psychologically defined by his own maverick streak, McCain’s worldview may be more instinctual than intellectual. But it doesn’t matter. Like Cold War conservatives, McCain has taken a moral observation that the United States is a force for good battling the forces of evil and turned it into a strategic guide. Thus, he rejects negotiation with our enemies in favor of ‘rogue state rollback,’ repeatedly deriding as ‘appeasement’ the 1994 deal that froze North Korea’s plutonium program and mocking calls for unconditional talks with Iran....
Columnist Tim Rutten argues that immigrant bashers weren’t right to rough up the pope. And author John M. Barry thinks paying for New Orleans should be the federal government’s responsibility.
The editorial board urges Congress to pass a bill that would make it easier to assert pay discrimination in the work place, and analyzes Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s new budget. Finally, the board tells the Writers Guild of America to stop chastising the few members who broke ranks.
On the letters page readers discuss Jimmy Carter’s meeting with Hamas. San Francisco’s Joanne Minsky says, ‘I proudly voted for him twice, but his failure of memory and judgment calls into question the value of his forays into international politics. It is time to retire, Mr. President.’