Roundup: Media's Take
This is where we excerpt articles from the media that take a historical approach to events in the news.
Johann Hari: The Other 9/11 Has Returned to Stalk Latin America
Max Boot: How Piracy Was Defeated in the Past and Can Be Again
Zbigniew Brzezinski: Russia must re-focus with post-imperial eyes
Obama's Favorite Theologian? A Short Course on Reinhold Niebuhr
Christina Hoff Sommers: Persistent Myths in Feminist Scholarship
Adam Holland: The NY Times, John Birch Society and Father Feeney
Peggy Noonan: By trying to do too much, Obama risks not doing enough
Friday, July 3, 2009
Eduardo Porter: Tales of Republicans, Bonobos and Adultery
Source: NYT (7-2-09)
... It is hard not to be bemused by the contrast between the straight-and-narrow political persona of Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina and his messy, steamy circumstances. Still, I am somewhat perplexed by the surprise and the outrage over a transgression that has been around forever.
We all have heard the Kinsey statistics: half of married men reported having an extramarital affair at some time during their marriage; a quarter of married women had an affair by the time they were 40. Even if we account for men’s propensity to brag, there is still a lot of illicit sex going on.
So it is curious how American society arrived at its current moral positions.
It’s been nearly 40 years since the biologist Robert Trivers posited that the evolutionary imperative to maximize offspring would lead to mostly promiscuous males and nonpromiscuous females. Because males only invest a small amount of sperm in reproduction, philandering increases their reproductive success. Females, who invest much more time and energy in each offspring, would prefer one high-quality mate.
But females could be unfaithful, too, if it improved their chances to pass on their genes. Female bonobo chimpanzees have sex with dozens of males to obscure the paternity of offspring and thus stop males from killing infants to get their mothers to stop breastfeeding and become fertile again.
Human strategies have responded to similar considerations of reproductive success. Polygamy stretches back at least thousands of years to the Babylonian empire, not only because powerful men wanted as many women as they could afford and could impose their will on. Even when women had a choice, it could make more sense for them to be the second wife of a rich man than the first wife of a poor one.
The anthropologist Laura Betzig is quoted as saying, “Which woman would not rather be John Kennedy’s third wife than Bozo the Clown’s first?” ...
Paul Krugman: The 30's Show
Source: NYT (7-2-09)
[Krugman is a Noble Prize Winner who blogs about the economy and politics.]
O.K., Thursday’s jobs report settles it. We’re going to need a bigger stimulus. But does the president know that?
Let’s do the math.
Since the recession began, the U.S. economy has lost 6 ½ million jobs — and as that grim employment report confirmed, it’s continuing to lose jobs at a rapid pace. Once you take into account the 100,000-plus new jobs that we need each month just to keep up with a growing population, we’re about 8 ½ million jobs in the hole.
And the deeper the hole gets, the harder it will be to dig ourselves out. The job figures weren’t the only bad news in Thursday’s report, which also showed wages stalling and possibly on the verge of outright decline. That’s a recipe for a descent into Japanese-style deflation, which is very difficult to reverse. Lost decade, anyone?
Wait — there’s more bad news: the fiscal crisis of the states. Unlike the federal government, states are required to run balanced budgets. And faced with a sharp drop in revenue, most states are preparing savage budget cuts, many of them at the expense of the most vulnerable. Aside from directly creating a great deal of misery, these cuts will depress the economy even further.
So what do we have to counter this scary prospect? We have the Obama stimulus plan, which aims to create 3 ½ million jobs by late next year. That’s much better than nothing, but it’s not remotely enough. And there doesn’t seem to be much else going on. Do you remember the administration’s plan to sharply reduce the rate of foreclosures, or its plan to get the banks lending again by taking toxic assets off their balance sheets? Neither do I.
All of this is depressingly familiar to anyone who has studied economic policy in the 1930s. Once again a Democratic president has pushed through job-creation policies that will mitigate the slump but aren’t aggressive enough to produce a full recovery. Once again much of the stimulus at the federal level is being undone by budget retrenchment at the state and local level.
So have we failed to learn from history, and are we, therefore, doomed to repeat it? Not necessarily — but it’s up to the president and his economic team to ensure that things are different this time. President Obama and his officials need to ramp up their efforts, starting with a plan to make the stimulus bigger....
Johann Hari: The Other 9/11 Has Returned to Stalk Latin America
Source: Huffington Post (7-2-09)
[Johann Hari is a columnist for the London Independent. He has reported from Iraq, Israel/Palestine, the Congo, the Central African Republic, Venezuela, Peru and the US, and his journalism has appeared in publications all over the world. In 2007 Amnesty International named him Newspaper Journalist of the Year. In 2008 he became the youngest person ever to win Britain's leading award for political writing, the Orwell Prize.]
The ghost of the other, deadlier 9/11 has returned to stalk Latin America. On Sunday morning, a battalion of soldiers rammed their way into the Presidential Palace in Honduras. They surrounded the bed where the democratically elected president, Manuel Zelaya, was sleeping, and jabbed their machine guns to his chest. They ordered him to get up and marched him onto a military plane. They dumped him in his pyjamas on a landing strip in Costa Rica and told him never to return to the country that freely chose him as their head of state.
Back home, the generals locked down the phone networks, the internet, and international TV channels, and announced their people were in charge now. Only sweet, empty music plays on the radio. Government ministers have been arrested and beaten. If you leave your home after 9pm, the population have been told, you risk being shot. Tanks and tear-gas are ranged against the protesters who have thronged onto the streets.
For the people of Latin America, this is a replay of their September 11th. On that day in Chile in 1973, Salvador Allende -- a peaceful democratic socialist who was steadily redistributing wealth to the poor majority -- was bombed from office and forced to commit suicide. He was replaced by a self-described "fascist," General Augusto Pinochet, who went on to "disappear" tens of thousands of innocent people. The coup was plotted in Washington D.C., by Henry Kissinger.
The official excuse for killing Chilean democracy was that Allende was a "communist." He was not. In fact, he was killed because he was threatening the interests of US and Chilean mega-corporations by shifting the country's wealth and land from them to its own people. When Salvador Allende's widow died last week, she seemed like a symbol from another age -- and then, a few days later, the coup came back.
Honduras is a small country in Central America with only seven million inhabitants, but it has been embarked on a programme of growing democracy of its own. In 2005, Zelaya ran promising to help the country's poor majority -- and he kept his word. He increased the minimum wage by 60 percent, saying sweatshops were no longer acceptable and "the rich must pay their share."...
Rick Salutin: Repression in Tehran is a sign of hope
Source: Globe and Mail (7-3-09)
[Rick Salutin was Globe and Mail media columnist from 1991 to 1999 and is now an op-ed columnist.]
In the gathering global gloom - economic, political, climatic - try seizing as a sign of hope the gory brutal aftermath to Iran's election. Seriously.
I take my cue on this from young Canadian academics of Middle Eastern background who see themselves as Muslims with a secular and liberal democratic bent. They include Nader Hashemi - quoted in Time this week calling it a “turning point” for “popular mobilization and discontent” - and the irrepressible Jehad Aliweiwi. You may recall him for his battle with the Ontario government. They wanted to revoke his vanity licence plate - JEHAD - after 9/11, on security grounds. He fought back, refusing to let Osama bin Laden define that venerable Muslim term. He won.
Their source of optimism is the breadth of Iran's opposition. It includes not just students, women, liberals and secularists but pillars of the theocracy, including former presidents and the speaker of parliament. Ex-president Mohammad Khatami said: “This is not in the interest of the establishment.” He spoke for the establishment, against the regime. With so broad an, er, coalition, sheer repression will only be effective to a point. The one thing that could derail it would be a plausible charge of foreign power behind it. That's how the Red Scare worked during the Cold War.
In 1946, for instance, in Quebec, Kent Rowley went to prison as a young labour leader, for fighting the repressive Duplessis regime. Also jailed there was Canada's sole Communist MP, Fred Rose. He'd been charged with acting as a Soviet agent. Kent smuggled a message to him asking if there was any truth to all the “crap about spying.” Fred Rose signalled back that, alas, there was - hugely undermining efforts by reformers such as Kent.
So Barack Obama's reticence on Iran makes sense. You can imagine him calling in his security team and saying, “Guys” - as is his wont - “what are we actually doing there?” Then hanging his head deeper as he hears about past and present covert U.S. actions in Iran.
I don't mean Barack Obama is not a Yankee imperialist. He is. He said in his campaign that the Bush policies harmed the ability to “project American power” globally. This week, a U.S. general in Afghanistan said: “We're going to seize the population from the Taliban and never let them go.”
Iran, too, has its imperial motives, though they're more regional than global. It has an ancient imperial heritage. Saddam Hussein told the FBI that he lied about having WMDs to intimidate not the U.S. or Israel but Iran, which he feared. The Iraq war has been partly a proxy clash between Washington and Tehran over who will dominate the area. At this point, Iran is ahead.
Given these realities of global politics, is it possible to have imperial policies that promote democracy?..
A. Serwer: Obama, Lincoln, and Gay Rights
Source: Atlantic blog (7-2-09)
[Serwer is a staff writer for The Atlantic.]
Sean Wilentz's lengthy book review of several Lincoln biographies isn't up on The New Republic's website yet, [actually it is, my bad] but his criticism of several books on Lincoln--and his general objection to the "two Lincolns" narrative that rejects the fact that Lincoln was anti-slavery to begin with, may offer some insight into President Obama's perplexing stances on gay rights.
Wilentz objects to an academic trend he sees as priviledging radicals over politicians, which he feels fails to take into account the exigencies of politics and what brilliant politicians are able to accomplish. More specifically, in one part of the review, he takes Skip Gates to task for taking Lincoln's words at face value only when it suits his preconcieved narrative of who Lincoln was:
He takes Lincoln's words at face value when it suits his own arguments--such as his remarks to the Chicago ministers in September 1862 about black military incompetence--but he is unable to see Lincoln for what his finest biographers have shown he was: a shrewd leader who could give misleading and even false impressions when he wanted to do so, and made no public commitments until the moment was ripe.
Lincoln made a number of statements, that, viewed out of context, would cause us to question his commitment to ending slavery, most notably his statement, responding to liberal Republican editor Horace Greeley that he was determined to save the Union whether it meant freeing all of the slaves or freeing none of them. Wilentz points out that this statement was meant to shore up Lincoln's right flank during the election, but did not actually contradict his anti-slavery views or goals--Lincoln had already secretly begun drafting the Emancipation Proclaimation.
What Obama "privately believes" about gay rights has been the subject of great speculation, and I think there's reason for that. We are, I think, if only by virtue of greater access to information, far more scrutinizing of what politicians say. So it's worth noting again that Obama's position on gay marriage, which TNC parsed the other day, doesn't actually preclude Obama eventually supporting marriage equality:
I'm a Christian. And so, although I try not to have my religious beliefs dominate or determine my political views on this issue, I do believe that tradition, and my religious beliefs say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman.
This is at least as noncomittal about the extension of secular marriage rights to gays as Lincoln's statement was about emancipation. And yet it gives the impression that Obama is opposed, which may be precisely what it is meant to do.
It's possible that I am parsing out of wishful thinking, so I'm going to quote from Obama's speech the other night:
So this story, this struggle, continues today -- for even as we face extraordinary challenges as a nation, we cannot -- and will not -- put aside issues of basic equality. (Applause.) We seek an America in which no one feels the pain of discrimination based on who you are or who you love.
And I know that many in this room don't believe that progress has come fast enough, and I understand that. It's not for me to tell you to be patient, any more than it was for others to counsel patience to African Americans who were petitioning for equal rights a half century ago.
Like Lincoln's statements on slavery, these statements give contradictory impressions, but they are not, in matter of fact, contradictory. Obama's invocation of black rights and "basic equality" cannot be read as anything other than a rhetorical endorsement of full rights for the LGBT community.
It's worth noting that Lincoln was, as Wilentz writes, pretty adept with the racist joke or occasional n-bomb on the campaign trail. It was a different time, and Lincoln could use bigotry to maneuver himself into a favorable position in a way in which Obama can't or shouldn't. Likewise, it's possible for us to divine in hindsight that Lincoln's anti-slavery ambitions preceded his presidency, and that they were in fact sincere, because of how much he accomplished. Obama really hasn't done anything yet to where his cautiousness on gay rights can be read as part of a larger political strategy. That administration's frustrating foot-dragging on DADT in defiance of public opinion may have to do with internal administration politics, or it may be an indication that everything I am reading into his stance is wrong. At the same time, his incremental moves--extension of federal benefits to same sex couples, appointing John Berry to the Office of Personnel Management--mirror Lincon's baby steps towards emancipation and recruitment of black soldiers.
But I think it's possible, indeed probable, that Obama's slow progress on gay rights may be the kind of political maneuvering Lincoln displayed prior to the Emancipation Proclaimation or the recruitment of black soldiers. Earlier, TNC wrote this:
I've heard it said, many times, on this board that Obama is actually pro-gay marriage, but that he can't come out all the way. If that's the case, then we must conclude that he is lying about his stance. Moreover, he's invoking his relationship with religion, and his God, in that lie. Perhaps worse, he isn't being fully honest with the very audiences he wants credit for addressing--the very audiences, that by his logic, would most benefit from that honesty.
Wilentz writes that current trends in history privilege "idealists who they imagine were unblemished by expedience and compromise" rather than the "scheming, self-aggrandizing political professionals" who are decisive in "the achievement of America's greatest advances."
I think he has a point. We love radicals because they can afford to be honest, they can afford not to compromise. Preferring the radicals over the schemers makes us feel better about ourselves, but if we're being honest we'll admit that there is more of the schemer in our radical heroes than we would like to believe, MLK was not merely an idealist. But honesty is not necessarily a virtue in a schemer or a politician, except when it can be used in pursuit of a larger goal. It is the job of public voices and radicals to be honest--it is the job of politicians to create favorable political circumstances by all available, appropriate means and seize the opportune moment.
Now maybe I'm completely wrong. Maybe Obama is merely two-faced, and there is no skillful maneuvering here. I'm certainly not arguing that advocacy organizations should cease pressuring him. I just think it's not that far fetched that Obama, like his hero, sees himself as carefully laying the groundwork for full equality and that he genuinely believes that someday, we will judge him favorably "not by words, not by promises I've made, but by the promises that my administration keeps."
UPDATE: I should acknowledge, that at the end of his essay, Wilentz spends a great deal of time explaining how Obama isn't Lincoln. I think this is basically a straw man--I'm not arguing above that Obama is "like" Lincoln but rather that he may be imitating some of his methods. What's really ironic, I suppose, is that Wilenz attacks Obama for disdaining politics during his campaign in the same manner as academic historians, while practicing the same dirty politics all along, in order to achieve his goal of winning the primary. Forgive me, but isn't that the exact kind of thing Wilentz argues effective politicians do and why it makes them able to accomplish great things? If anyone has failed to misunderstand politics in the manner Wilentz describes, it isn't Obama.
Also, isn't it about time to get over Hillary Clinton losing?
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Max Boot: How Piracy Was Defeated in the Past and Can Be Again
Source: Foreign Affairs (7-1-09)
[MAX BOOT is Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power and War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today. He is currently writing a history of guerrilla warfare.]
The world's attention was riveted in April 2009 when Somali pirates tried to seize the Maersk Alabama, a U.S. cargo vessel delivering relief supplies to Africa. Although the crew was able to fight off the intruders, the pirates seized the ship's skipper, Richard Phillips, and spent the next five days holding him hostage in a lifeboat bobbing in the Gulf of Aden, until U.S. Navy SEAL snipers killed the three remaining pirates and freed Phillips. There was a sigh of relief back in the United States, but it hardly meant an end to the pirate menace. In fact, within two days of Phillips' rescue, pirates had seized four more merchant ships and more hostages.
Piracy off the coast of East Africa is growing at an alarming rate, with 41 ships attacked in 2007, 122 in 2008, and 102 as of mid-May 2009. The more high-profile captures include a Saudi supertanker full of oil and a Ukrainian freighter loaded with tanks and other weapons. An estimated 19 ships and more than 300 crew members are still being held by pirates who are awaiting ransom payments from ship owners or insurers. Such fees have been estimated to total more than $100 million in recent years, making piracy one of the most lucrative industries and pirates one of the biggest employers in Somalia, a country with a per capita GDP of $600. Reported connections between the pirates and al Shabab -- "the youth," a Taliban-style group of Islamist extremists with ties to al Qaeda -- make the situation even more worrisome, notwithstanding some recent evidence of an Islamic backlash against the marauders in parts of Somalia....
Justin Raimondo: History Haunts Honduras
Source: Antiwar.com (7-1-09)
About the crisis in Honduras, let’s get this out of the way from the very beginning: the U.S. government has no right to lecture the Hondurans about the virtues of democracy. It was, after all, Uncle Sam that encouraged, even masterminded, the dominance of the military that colors so many chapters in the history of Honduras. For the president of the United States to get up on his high horse and call for the return of democratic rule is like the Iranians hectoring us about Waco – as they did recently – even as the regime’s thugs shoot unarmed civilians down in the streets.
That said, the question of what exactly is going on in Honduras is a subject of much dispute, and – as is usual when it comes to foreign affairs – the debate takes place without consideration of the context: that is, without any knowledge of (or apparent interest in) specific conditions inside the country.
Right-wing blogs aver that the military takeover isn’t really a coup – because, you see, President José Manuel “Mel” Zelaya Rosales was in violation of the constitution himself by insisting on a national referendum to change that document. After defying the Honduran Congress and Supreme Court, Zelaya issued orders to the military to assist in the distribution of ballot boxes. When the commander refused, he was summarily fired by Zelaya. That’s when the military moved in. The presidential palace was invaded in the early morning hours, and Zelaya was sent on a plane to Costa Rica, where he arrived in his undershirt.
So what’s the real story? Is the Honduran military destroying democracy, as its critics claim, or saving it, as its mostly foreign cheerleaders would have it? With both sides posturing as defenders of liberal democracy, it’s hard for anyone not immersed in Honduran politics and history to come up with a halfway convincing answer. As always, American commentators barge into these matters without any real knowledge of the context in which they occur – so let’s educate ourselves, first, and then take a position. (Gee, what a novelty!)
The history of modern Honduras is a narrative about the struggle against militarism as a socio-political system. Ever since Honduras emerged as a separate entity from the early Mexican "empire" and a short-lived "Central American Federation," the Honduran military has had a monopoly on the economic as well as the political life of the nation: corruption was rampant, and the army ruled with an iron hand, albeit not without a measure of popular support. In this, it was not unlike many of its neighbors.
However, Honduras, unlike other Central American countries where big landowners monopolized scarce land, had a relatively generous land reform program and a moderate welfare state that managed to keep a lid on popular discontent. The military also protected the entrepreneurial class from fierce competition unleashed by regional free-trade agreements. In the 1970s, however, there was an upsurge on the part of virtually every sector of society against military domination: As J. Mark Ruhl put it in "Militarism and Democratization in Troubled Waters": "Peasant and labor support eroded as social reform slowed, while the private sector blamed military mismanagement for rising fiscal deficits and foreign debt." The economy under the generals was in decline, and the social and political turmoil that was roiling the region had reached the streets of Tegucigalpa as well as more rural areas.
The current Honduran constitution was written and promulgated under pressure from the Carter administration to make a transition to civilian rule. For decades, the country had been lorded over by this or that general or junta: under Gen. Policarpo Paz Garcia, the army moved to install its own version of democracy, which allowed elections to take place, set up a tripartite constitutional system – with an executive, a national legislature, and a Supreme Court – and yet maintained the near-complete autonomy of the military.
The 1982 constitution says that the chief of the armed forced is to be picked, not by the president, but by the Congress, from a list of candidates supplied by CONSUFFAA (Consejo Superior de las Fuerzas Armadas), the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (made up of senior military officers trained in the U.S.). Dismissal of the army chief requires a two-thirds vote of Congress.
Furthermore, Gen. Paz insisted on a number of conditions before he allowed the constitution to go into effect: the army demanded of the two presidential candidates veto power over cabinet appointments, complete control of the internal security apparatus, and – perhaps most importantly – a ban on investigations into military corruption.
The de facto military dictatorship was given a cosmetic makeover, but the real power continued to be held by the armed forces, which ran much of the country’s economic infrastructure as well as overseeing its political institutions. This was a slight improvement, however, over the previous constitutions, which explicitly stated that the military had the right to ignore presidential orders!
With the ascension of Ronald Reagan to the White House, however, U.S. pressure to democratize ended, and the military strengthened its stranglehold over the economy as well as the military. Tens of millions in military aid poured into the generals’ coffers, and the country was used as a base for U.S. covert actions in the region. The Americans’ target was Nicaragua, which had come under the sway of the leftist Sandinista movement. Honduras was used as a base for the so-called contras in their efforts to destabilize the Sandinista regime. The president was reduced to a figurehead, while the army chief, Gen. Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, a fanatical anti-Communist, wielded the real power....
George F. Will: Will It Be 1972 Forever?
Source: Newsweek (6-27-09)
[A Newsweek Contributing Editor since 1976, Will produces a back page column addressing diverse topics from politics to baseball.Will's newspaper column appears twice weekly in 480 newspapers and has been syndicated nationally by The Washington Post Writers Group since 1974...Will was born in Champaign, Illinois in 1941, and educated at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut; Magdalene College, Oxford University, and at Princeton, where he received an M.A. and Ph.D. in politics. He has taught political philosophy at Michigan University and at the University of Toronto.]
The high court's misplaced modesty.
The question to which the Supreme Court recently gave a mistaken answer was: Has the revolution in race relations since enactment of the 1965 Voting Rights Act rendered the act's Section 5 anachronistic and hence unconstitutional as a no-longer defensible encroachment on the rights of the affected jurisdictions? The court's 8–1 ruling to preserve Section 5 is a reminder how misguided are conservatives' indiscriminate denunciations of "judicial activism."
Clarence Thomas, the court's only black justice, and arguably its most conservative, cast the only vote to strike down Section 5. He did so because of social changes made vivid by the election of the first black president.
Because a number of states and some jurisdictions in others had been ingenious in devising tactics to suppress voting by blacks, the 1965 act required them to seek -permission—"preclearance"—from the Jus-tice Department for even minor changes in voting procedures, such as locating polling places. The act's "bailout" provision, which ostensibly provides a process by which jurisdictions can seek to end federal supervision, is extremely burdensome: Since 1982, only 17 of the more than 12,000 political subdivisions subject to the preclearance requirement have been allowed to bail out.
In 1965, the preclearance requirements were authorized for just five years. But they have been extended four times, most recently in 2006 for 25 years. By 2031, when Congress probably will extend it again, Barack Obama will be collecting Social Security.
The latest electoral data used to justify the 2006 extension was from 1972. Then gasoline cost 36 cents a gallon, the Dow's high was 1036, the most-watched television program was All in the Family, and the winner of the Academy Award for best picture was The Godfather.
In 2006, an Austin, Texas, utility district, which did not even exist until 1987, went to court seeking relief from preclearance. The court held that the bailout provision was unavailable to the district because it does not register its own voters. The district appealed, arguing that no such restriction on bailouts is in the Voting Rights Act, and that if it is, the preclearance requirement is unconstitutional....
Rhodes Cook: Is the GOP poised for another quick comeback?
Source: Larry Sabato's newsletter (7-2-09)
[Rhodes Cook is a senior columnist.]
The current state of the Republican Party is a good-news, bad-news situation. The good news is that the GOP has gone through several debilitating elections over the last generation and each time has recovered quickly.
The bad news is that the conditions may not be as ripe this time for a fast Republican comeback as they were after the elections of 1964, 1976 and 1992.
The presidential election of 2008 is the fourth since 1964 that has left the Democrats in control of both the White House and Congress. And in the past, Republicans benefited from a confluence of favorable factors to rebound with alacrity.
They had pragmatic leadership that muted ideological differences within the party. Democratic presidents had troubles governing, even with strong congressional majorities. And by the time of the midterm election, the sitting presidents had acquired a beleaguered look, with presidential approval ratings that had fallen below 50 percent.
The result in each case was an environment conducive to a quick GOP rebound.
Just four years after Barry Goldwater's landslide loss to Lyndon Johnson in 1964, Republicans won the White House. The Vietnam War, urban race riots and a bout of inflation all served to damage the Democratic "brand."
Four years after the post-Watergate election of 1976 left the GOP diminished and hunkered down, the GOP again won the presidency. The ill-starred administration of Jimmy Carter invited ridicule, spawning the term "misery index" to define a new scale of economic ineptitude.
And just two years following the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, Republicans captured both houses of Congress. Like Johnson and Carter before, the mood between Clinton and the Democratic congressional majority was often fractious.
Yet if LBJ, Carter and Clinton all offered examples of "Velcro" presidencies, Barack Obama's thus far has seemed pure "Teflon."
Relations between the White House and Capitol Hill have started well. Obama has added to his historic stature by acting boldly on both the national and world stage. And he was elected president in 2008 with a far more zealous base of support than Johnson, Carter or Clinton. Thus far, Obama's job approval ratings have stayed mainly around the 60-65 percent range, and the incumbent has shown a political nimbleness capable of preventing the sharp decline in popularity that befell his Democratic predecessors.
Moreover, the political leadership of the Republican Party these days is much more problematic than it was when the party mounted its successful comebacks in the past. Then, the Republican National Committee (RNC) was headed by experienced professionals, who had led successful party-building efforts in their home states before taking their skills to the national level.
Ray Bliss, who chaired the RNC in the mid-1960s, had been the long-time leader of the Republican Party in Ohio. Former Sen. Bill Brock, the national party chairman in the late 1970s, had been in the forefront of the revival of the Tennessee GOP more than a decade earlier. And Haley Barbour, RNC chairman in the early 1990s, was a prime player in the emergence of the Republican Party in Mississippi. (He is presently the state's governor.)
Ideological litmus tests were not on the radar screen of any of the three. As national party leaders, their prime goal was electing Republicans of all stripes.
Probably no RNC leader has been more successful in orchestrating a "big tent" philosophy than Bliss in the midterm elections of 1966. The GOP gained nearly fifty seats in the House and four in the Senate, to go with dramatic gains at the state and local level. But it was not just the numbers that stood out--it was the ideological range of the Republicans who won that year that was so impressive.
On the right, Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California while John Tower was reelected senator in Texas. In the moderate middle, Howard Baker won a Senate seat in Tennessee, as did Charles H. Percy in Illinois. And on the left, Edward Brooke was elected senator in Massachusetts (becoming the first African American since Reconstruction to win a Senate seat), while Nelson Rockefeller was reelected governor of New York--all this following the election of liberal Republican Congressman John Lindsay as mayor of New York City the previous fall.
It is highly questionable whether the present RNC leader, Michael Steele, can lead the construction of such a "big tent." For the moment, the party shows signs of shrinking, both in the ranks of elected officials (highlighted by the recent defection of veteran Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania to the Democrats) as well as rank-and-file voters who identify with the GOP. A Gallup Poll released in May indicated that Republican loyalties had declined since 2001 among virtually every demographic group except frequent churchgoers.
Compounding Steele's problems in base broadening is the political tenor of the times. The voices that resonate most loudly through the party are not those of elected officials, but of tart-tongued conservative talk-show hosts. In their quest for ideological purity, they pose a threat to Steele's party-building efforts that Bliss, Brock and Barbour did not have to contend with....
Zbigniew Brzezinski: Russia must re-focus with post-imperial eyes
Source: FT (7-1-09)
[The writer was US National Security Adviser 1977-1981. He is co-author with Brent Scowcroft of the recently published ‘America and the World’.]
President Barack Obama should have three central goals in mind when he meets Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin next week: first, to advance US-Russian co-operation in areas where our interests coincide; second, to emphasise the mutual benefits in handling disagreements between the two countries within internationally respected “rules of the game”; and third, to help shape a geopolitical context in which Russia becomes increasingly conscious of its own interest in eventually becoming a genuinely post-imperial partner of the Euro-Atlantic community.
Of the three, the first is the easiest; the second is sensitive but needs to be faced, lest there be repetitions of what happened last August, when Russian troops invaded Georgia ; and the third can only be sought indirectly – but the effort has to be strategically deliberate. In any case, it is evident that both countries would benefit from better relations. Fortunately, the financial crisis has made the Russian elite aware that, for the first time in its history, Russia’s well-being depends on the well-being of the outside world and especially of America. That reality of inter-dependence creates a felicitous setting for the summit.
Moreover, on some important issues collaboration is not only possible, but mutually beneficial. That is especially true with reciprocal reductions in nuclear weaponry, a compromise on US plans for an anti-ballistic-missile shield and joint efforts to enhance the nuclear non-proliferation treaty , among other security arrangements.
Unfortunately, on Iran, it is uncertain that the conventional wisdom – which asserts that Russia genuinely wants to be helpful – is correct. To the Russian leadership, the two long-term challenges to its power come from the US and China. Both countries would suffer grievously, while Russia would greatly benefit, if a US-Iranian crisis triggered a surge in energy prices. Hence Russian willingness to be helpful may be more formal than real.
Nor should one ignore the reality that there are serious – though not war-threatening – geopolitical conflicts of interest between the US and the Russian Federation. The bottom line is that Mr Putin resents and wants in some fashion to reverse the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Gaining control over Ukraine would restore in effect an imperial Russia, with the potential to ignite conflicts in Central Europe. Subduing Georgia would cut the west’s vital energy connection (the Baku-Çeyhan pipeline) to the Caspian Sea and to Central Asia. Azerbaijan then would have no choice but to submit to Moscow’s control.
Indeed, in the summit meetings, Mr Putin and Mr Medvedev will be looking for signs that the new US administration disowns the charters on partnership with Ukraine and Georgia signed by former President George W. Bush. Even an unintentional signal to that effect would be seen as a green light for more muscular Russian actions against these two countries.
Hence a frank discussion is needed to lay down some mutually accepted “rules of the game”. The US can indicate that Nato membership is not imminent for either country, but that the US and Russia have to respect Ukraine’s or Georgia’s right to make that choice. In the meantime, Russia must understand that the use of force or promotion of ethnic conflicts to destabilise Ukraine or Georgia would poison American-Russian relations.
Clarity on these matters, achieved through respectful but realistic discussions, would reduce the risks of Russia trying to restore an imperial system in the space previously occupied by the Tsarist empire and then the Soviet Union. Gradual consolidation of the existing national pluralism in that space would accelerate the fading of historically futile imperial ambitions...
Monica Crowley: Obama and American Exceptionalism
Source: Washington Times (7-1-09)
[Monica Crowley is a nationally syndicated radio host, a panelist on "The McLaughlin Group" and a Fox News contributor.]
One day in 1984, at the height of his fame, Michael Jackson made a visit to the White House. President and Nancy Reagan may not have dug his music, but they understood the power Mr. Jackson commanded as a common pop-cultural touchstone for just about everyone else. Mr. Jackson had given the White House permission to use his smash hit "Beat It" in a campaign to halt teen drinking and driving, and the Reagans wanted to bestow on him a public-safety award and their personal thanks.
The now-iconic photograph of their visit reveals much about the towering personalities and even more about America. Mr. Jackson stands between the Reagans, wearing a tamer version of his famous sequined faux-military costume. Hands clasped in front of him, he waits silently as the president finishes making a point to Mrs. Reagan. He gazes up at the president, his eyes as wide as saucers. His awe is palpable. The world's greatest performer has discovered himself on a stage even bigger and more profound than the ones he is used to occupying.
The boy from Tampico, Ill., standing with the boy from Gary, Ind.: two children of the Midwest who went on to become among the most influential people the world has ever known. Their stories, although distinct, share one thing in common: They are quintessentially American.
During his public life, Barack Obama has often referred to his biracial background and itinerant childhood and has said, "In no other country on Earth is my story even possible." True.
But earlier this year, while attending the European summit of the Group of 20 major economic countries, the president was asked if he believed in American exceptionalism. He replied, "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism, and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism."
Not exactly the way Mr. Reagan would have answered...
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Obama's Favorite Theologian? A Short Course on Reinhold Niebuhr
Source: Pew Research Center (6-26-09)
Ever since then-Sen. Barack Obama spoke of his admiration for Reinhold Niebuhr in a 2007 interview with New York Times columnist David Brooks, there has been speculation about the extent to which the 20th-century theologian has influenced Obama's views on faith, politics and social change. At the Pew Forum's biannual Faith Angle Conference in May 2009, Wilfred McClay, a historian specializing in American intellectual history, offered an overview of Niebuhr's unique form of progressive Christianity and its influence on 20th-century American politics and international affairs. E.J. Dionne, columnist for The Washington Post, remarked on the recent revival of interest in Niebuhrian thought and the role Niebuhr played as a public intellectual active during the worldwide political upheavals of the 1930s, '40s and '50s.
Speaker: Wilfred M. McClay, SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanities, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Respondent: E.J. Dionne Jr., Columnist, The Washington Post; Senior Advisor, Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life
Moderator: Michael Cromartie, Vice President, Ethics & Public Policy Center; Senior Advisor, Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life
In the following excerpt, ellipses have been omitted to facilitate reading. Find the full transcript, including audience discussion, at pewforum.org.
MCCLAY: The occasion for this -- the hook -- is an interview between David Brooks and then-Sen. Obama in 2007 [in which David noted] that Obama gave a sort of perfect description of the book in perfect sentences and perfect paragraph structure for 20 minutes, which does suggest that he knew the book in question, The Irony of American History, one of the books I'm going to talk about.
Obama's not the first American president to declare his fondness for Niebuhr. Jimmy Carter notably did, both before and after his election. Some people think that the famous "malaise" speech had some Niebuhrian input. I'm not going to get into the question of whether Obama really understands Niebuhr or not. What I really want to do is to lay out [Niebuhr's] vision, his worldview in a kind of short course. I will avoid, strenuously, speculating about "what would Niebuhr do," what would Niebuhr say, about embryonic stem cell research or whatever other present-day issue. I think there's plenty to talk about, just with respect to what he did say and think.
Niebuhr is the outstanding public theologian of the 20th century, [but he] has become a figure of obscurity in recent decades, and that's partly because the term "public theologian" has come to represent something of a null set in recent times. But Niebuhr had an unusually long and productive career. He turned out many books, many articles; wrote journalistically; wrote densely scholarly works. He was engaged in the politics of the day, from World War I all the way to the Vietnam War. So he was not only a theologian of great distinction, but also a public intellectual who addressed himself to the full range of public concerns and had an enormously capacious mind that really could take in all kinds of issues that he wouldn't necessarily have discussed in his books. His importance in his time tells you something about his time. It was a time when theologians were important people. And it was a time when there was that great vitality in the mainline of Protestantism.
Niebuhr is something of a counterpuncher as an intellectual; it's hard to know what he thinks about somebody or about some subject unless he's reacting to them, taking exception to or responding to other thinkers, which is why I think it's very important to see him in context. One thing about the context is, I think it's impossible to imagine him operating in anything other than a modern, Western, liberal environment, where there's a strong tradition of science, of belief in the idea of progress -- a society that is in some ways poised on the cusp of a transformation into secularity, or at any rate a world in which a secular option exists. He was very much a creature of that historical moment and a critic of liberalism from within liberalism, a breed that flourished particularly in the late '40s and '50s -- and doesn't seem to exist, at least in the same form, today
The issues that he struggled with are quintessentially related to problems of advanced modernity, and science is one of them. Niebuhr upholds the idea of progress and remorselessly critiques it at the same time. [Y]ou may know Niebuhr for what's called the "serenity prayer," which goes something like "God, grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things that can be changed, and the wisdom to know the one from the other." I'm reciting from memory. But the interesting thing to me anyway, as someone of conservative disposition, is what he leaves out, and that is preserving the things that need to be preserved. [I]t shows how thoroughgoing a progressive he was.
Niebuhr has an understanding of Christianity that's grounded in a very complicated view of human nature. Actually, a lot of his persuasiveness derives from the fact that this view is more complicated and adequate than its secular equivalents. But first, let me give you a little background biography. He was born in 1892, not in a log cabin, you'll be happy to know, but in rural Missouri, the son of a German immigrant pastor, Gustav Niebuhr, a member of a tiny Protestant group called the German Evangelical Synod. Reinhold inherited from his father this sense of pastoral vocation and a keen interest in social and political affairs. He built on this with two years at Yale Divinity School, and so he began his career as a theologian and pastor as an advocate of what was called the "social gospel."
The social gospel was a movement within liberal Protestantism which located the meaning of the Christian Gospel in its promise as a blueprint for progressive social reform, rather than its assertions about supernatural reality. It arose out of a crisis within, particularly, Protestantism -- although Catholicism had its own version of this -- in response to industrialization and urbanization. In the Protestant case, particularly salient were the challenges to biblical authority rising out of these things, but more so out of Darwinism. Not so much the idea of evolution per se, which was a doctrine that easily comported with Christian faith, but natural selection. It was the randomness of the process of natural selection that was viewed as particularly threatening. An equally powerful threat came from the so--called "higher criticism" of the Bible, which deconstructed the Bible, for all intents and purposes, into a collection of redactions of successive texts by multiple authors over long periods of time, and therefore not a text that should be regarded as having any kind of organic or authorial unity. All of these things were terribly threatening, especially to Protestants, because the whole basis of the Protestant Reformation, to oversimplify grandly, was to see the authority of the Bible as superseding the authority of the historical institutional church. So that tremendous weight is placed on the authority of that text.
...Christina Hoff Sommers: Persistent Myths in Feminist Scholarship
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed (6-29-09)
[Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. She is the author of Who Stole Feminism? (Simon & Schuster, 1994) and The War Against Boys (Simon & Schuster, 2000), and editor of The Science on Women and Science, forthcoming from the AEI Press.]
"Harder to kill than a vampire." That is what the sociologist Joel Best calls a bad statistic. But, as I have discovered over the years, among false statistics the hardest of all to slay are those promoted by feminist professors. Consider what happened recently when I sent an e-mail message to the Berkeley law professor Nancy K.D. Lemon pointing out that the highly praised textbook that she edited, Domestic Violence Law (second edition, Thomson/West, 2005), contained errors.
Her reply began:
"I appreciate and share your concern for veracity in all of our scholarship. However, I would expect a colleague who is genuinely concerned about such matters to contact me directly and give me a chance to respond before launching a public attack on me and my work, and then contacting me after the fact."
I confess: I had indeed publicly criticized Lemon's book, in campus lectures and in a post on FeministLawProfessors.com. I had always thought that that was the usual practice of intellectual argument. Disagreement is aired, error corrected, truth affirmed. Indeed, I was moved to write to her because of the deep consternation of law students who had attended my lectures: If authoritative textbooks contain errors, how are students to know whether they are being educated or indoctrinated? Lemon's book has been in law-school classrooms for years.
One reason that feminist scholarship contains hard-to-kill falsehoods is that reasonable, evidence-backed criticism is regarded as a personal attack.
Lemon's Domestic Violence Law is organized as a conventional law-school casebook — a collection of judicial opinions, statutes, and articles selected, edited, and commented upon by the author. The first selection, written by Cheryl Ward Smith (no institutional affiliation is given), offers students a historical perspective on domestic-violence law. According to Ward:
"The history of women's abuse began over 2,700 years ago in the year 753 BC. It was during the reign of Romulus of Rome that wife abuse was accepted and condoned under the Laws of Chastisement. ... The laws permitted a man to beat his wife with a rod or switch so long as its circumference was no greater than the girth of the base of the man's right thumb. The law became commonly know as 'The Rule of Thumb.' These laws established a tradition which was perpetuated in English Common Law in most of Europe."
Where to begin? How about with the fact that Romulus of Rome never existed. He is a figure in Roman mythology — the son of Mars, nursed by a wolf. Problem 2: The phrase "rule of thumb" did not originate with any law about wife beating, nor has anyone ever been able to locate any such law. It is now widely regarded as a myth, even among feminist professors....
Adam Holland: The NY Times, John Birch Society and Father Feeney
Source: Adam Holland's blog (6-28-09)
[Mr. Holland runs an investigative blog.]
Last week, the Times ran an article on the John Birch Society which was brief but good. It's especially vital reading for people who hear about the conspiracy theories driving a lot of far-right politics without knowing their historical context. The John Birch Society invented a number of these theories, and they're still going strong in promoting them. By the way, their national convention this year featured a keynote address by a John Birch supporter named Ron Paul, whose presidential campagin got some of these crackpot theories more attention than they've had in years.
Readers of this blog will find the following quote concerning John McManus, president of the John Birch Society, interesting.
from NYTimes.com:Holding Firm Against Plots by Evildoers by Dan Barry
In late 2005 . . . (Arthur) Thompson became chief executive (of the John Birch Society) after staging a coup with the help of John McManus, the society’s most prominent member, its longtime president and an ultraconservative Roman Catholic. This prompted some ousted Birchers to disseminate recorded snippets of Mr. McManus lecturing to Catholic groups that Judaism became a dead and deadly religion after the establishment of the Catholic Church.
Mr. McManus is also heard to say that militant Jews have influenced the Freemasons, who are “Satan’s agents,” “the enemies of Christ Church” — and, in the view of the John Birch Society, part of the Illuminati conspiracy to cause world upheaval.
Mr. Thompson said that he was initially outraged by these comments, but that he now understands they were made in the context of Mr. McManus’s belief in Catholicism as the one true faith. He said the John Birch Society has Jewish and black members and has never tolerated anti-Semitism or racism, notwithstanding its notorious opposition to much of the civil rights movement.
So McManus' Birch Society conspiracy mongering has roots in radical traditionalist Catholic thinking, which promotes the idea that a conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons works covertly to destroy the Catholic church. Read here for an example of this line of thinking -- an example which praises McManus by name.
Better yet, try this website which features the anti-Jewish writings of the notorious bigot Father Leonard Feeney, founder in 1949 of the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. This group runs facilities known as the St. Benedict Center of Still River, Massachusetts and Richmond, New Hampshire. Before founding his radical order, Feeney made a habit of espousing extreme hatred of Jews from atop a soap box in Boston Common, as well as from church pulpits and in college classrooms. The church condemned these activities. When Feeney responded with even more provocative activism, he was excommunicated. (Read here. More on this below.)
Three weeks ago, John McManus gave the commencement speech at the Feeneyites' Immaculate Heart of Mary School. According to that school's website (read here), McManus has been
" a friend of the Center and Third Order member of the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary since the 1970's."
Con Coughlan: Why Iran hates Britain so much
Source: Telegraph (UK) (6-29-09)
[Con Coughlan is the author of 'Khomeini's Ghost: Iran Since 1979', published by Macmillan.]
Not so long ago, Britain was held in such low esteem in Iran that it was simply dismissed as the "little Satan". So far as the ayatollahs were concerned, the real enemy was America, the "great Satan", whose love of liberty and free market capitalism was thought to pose the gravest threat to the Islamic revolution's survival.
It was for this reason that the American embassy, rather than the British, was occupied by the Revolutionary Guards in Tehran soon after Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in 1979, and its 66 staff held hostage. The expansive grounds of Britain's diplomatic mission, which hosted Winston Churchill during the Tehran conference in 1943, were briefly occupied by the Guards during Iran's revolutionary turmoil, but then evacuated because the mullahs did not regard Britain as being of sufficient importance to hold it to ransom.
But 30 years later it seems all that has changed as it is now Britain, rather than America, that finds itself on the receiving end of the ayatollahs' ire. After initiating last week's tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions, which saw two middle-ranking British diplomats expelled from Tehran for allegedly fomenting anti-government demonstrations, the Iranian authorities have arrested a further nine British embassy employees. Although some of the workers have since been released, there has been no let-up in the regime's anti-British rhetoric.
After Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, launched the initial anti-British tirade by denouncing Britain as the "most treacherous" of the regime's enemies, there has been no shortage of prominent Iranians lining up to denounce the "devious" British. At the heart of the dispute is Tehran's insistence that British spies have been responsible for stirring up the worst street protests Iran has experienced since 1979. Manouchehr Mottaki, Iran's Foreign Minister, even went so far as to accuse Britain of sending planes filled with agents to Iran "with special intelligence and security ambitions".
In the past, Iran's purges and executions have been directed against those accused of spying for America or Israel. But the emergence of Britain as the mullahs' latest bête noire suggests Anglo-Iranian relations are about to undergo another period of intense strain.
To some extent the decision by the Iranian regime to direct its anger against Britain is a consequence of President Barack Obama's impact on the international scene. During the Bush administration, when Washington regarded Iran as part of the "axis of evil" of rogue states, Tehran had no hesitation about denouncing Washington's attempts to undermine the Islamic revolution.But Mr Obama's arrival at the White House has signalled a new start in Washington's approach to Iran,
with the American President offering to conduct face-to-face talks with Tehran if the regime agrees to "unclench its fist".
Similarly, Mr Obama's Cairo speech earlier this month, in which he spoke of a new beginning between the US and Muslims around the world, has already made a deep impression on the Middle East. The result of Lebanon's general election, in which the moderate, pro-Western parties defeated the radical, Iran-backed Hizbollah Islamic group, has been attributed to the "Obama effect".
Although the hardline conservatives who run Iran would be loath to admit it, Tehran is also starting to feel the pressure from the Obama administration, particularly over
its nuclear programme. Soon Washington will seek to establish a dialogue with Iran to resolve the nuclear crisis, and the Iranian government is well aware that it will be far harder to say "no" to Mr Obama than it was to spurn Mr Bush.
The removal of America as the focal point of Iran's anti-Western rhetoric makes Britain, which remains America's closest ally in Europe, a ready-made replacement. And whereas the hostility between Iran and the US only goes back three decades – to Khomeini's revolution, to be precise – the climate of mutual suspicion, recrimination and antipathy that exists between London and Tehran dates back centuries...
Caroline Glick: Obama, Like Carter, is No 'Realist'
Source: Jerusalem Post (6-30-09)
[Caroline Glick is an American-Israeli Journalist and is the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post.]
For a brief moment it seemed that US President Barack Obama was moved by the recent events in Iran. On Friday, he issued his harshest statement yet on the mullocracy's barbaric clampdown against its brave citizens who dared to demand freedom in the aftermath of June 12's stolen presidential elections.
Speaking of the protesters Obama said, "Their bravery in the face of brutality is a testament to their enduring pursuit of justice. The violence perpetrated against them is outrageous. In spite of the government's efforts to keep the world from bearing witness to that violence, we see it and we condemn it."
While some noted the oddity of Obama's attribution of the protesters' struggle to the "pursuit of justice," rather than the pursuit of freedom - which is what they are actually fighting for - most Iran watchers in Washington and beyond were satisfied with his statement.
Alas, it was a false alarm. On Sunday Obama dispatched his surrogates - presidential adviser David Axelrod and UN Ambassador Susan Rice - to the morning talk shows to make clear that he has not allowed mere events to influence his policies.
After paying lip service to the Iranian dissidents, Rice and Axelrod quickly cut to the chase. The Obama administration does not care about the Iranian people or their struggle with the theocratic totalitarians who repress them. Whether Iran is an Islamic revolutionary state dedicated to the overthrow of the world order or a liberal democracy dedicated to strengthening it, is none of the administration's business.
Obama's emissaries wouldn't even admit that after stealing the election and killing hundreds of its own citizens, the regime is illegitimate. As Rice put it, "Legitimacy obviously is in the eyes of the people. And obviously the government's legitimacy has been called into question by the protests in the streets. But that's not the critical issue in terms of our dealings with Iran."
No, whether an America-hating regime is legitimate or not is completely insignificant to the White House. All the Obama administration wants to do is go back to its plan to appease the mullahs into reaching an agreement about their nuclear aspirations. And for some yet-to-be-explained reason, Obama and his associates believe they can make this regime -- which as recently as Friday called for the mass murder of its own citizens, and as recently as Saturday blamed the US for the Iranian people's decision to rise up against the mullahs -- reach such an agreement.
IN STAKING out a seemingly hard-nosed, unsentimental position on Iran, Obama and his advisers would have us believe that unlike their predecessors, they are foreign policy "realists." Unlike Jimmy Carter, who supported the America-hating mullahs against the America-supporting shah 30 years ago in the name of his moralistic post-Vietnam War aversion to American exceptionalism, Obama supports the America-hating mullahs against the America-supporting freedom protesters because all he cares about are "real"
American interests.
So too, unlike George W. Bush, who openly supported Iran's pro-American democratic dissidents against the mullahs due to his belief that the advance of freedom in Iran and throughout the world promoted US national interests, Obama supports the anti-American mullahs who butcher these dissidents in the streets and abduct and imprison them by the thousands due to his "hard-nosed" belief that doing so will pave the way for a meeting of the minds with their oppressors.
Yet Obama's policy is anything but realistic...
Fareed Zakaria: Historical parallels don't work in Iran
Source: Newsweek (6-27-09)
[Fareed Zakaria is Editor of Newsweek International whose column appears in Newsweek, Newsweek International and The Washington Post.]
whenever we see the kinds of images that have been coming out of Iran over the past two weeks, we tend to think back to 1989 and Eastern Europe. That time, when people took to the streets and challenged their governments, those seemingly stable regimes proved to be hollow and quickly collapsed. What emerged was liberal democracy. Could Iran yet undergo its own velvet revolution?
It's possible but unlikely. While the regime's legitimacy has cracked—a fatal wound in the long run—for now it will probably be able to use its guns and money to consolidate power. And it has plenty of both. Remember, the price of oil was less than $20 a barrel back in 1989. It is currently $69. More important, as Zbigniew Brzezinski has pointed out, 1989 was highly unusual. As a historical precedent, it has not proved a useful guide to other antidictatorial movements.
The three most powerful forces in the modern world are democracy, religion, and national-ism. In 1989 in Eastern Europe, all three were arrayed against the ruling regimes. Citizens hated their governments because they deprived people of liberty and political participation. Believers despised communist leaders because they were atheistic, banning religion in countries where faith was deeply cherished. And people rejected their regimes because they were seen as having been imposed from the outside by a much--disliked imperial power, the Soviet Union.
The situation in Iran is more complex. Democracy clearly works against this repressive regime. The forces of religion, however, are not so easily aligned against it. Many, possibly most, Iranians appear to be fed up with theocracy. But that does not mean they are fed up with religion. It does appear that the more openly devout Iranians—the poor, the rural—voted for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad...
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Rupert Cornwell: Left and right turn on 'Bush-like' Obama
Source: Independent (UK) (6-28-09)
[Rupert Cornwell writes for the Independent.]
Like their British counterparts at Westminster, American Congressmen are not people who normally arouse much sympathy. If the former specialise in fiddling expenses, the latter are best at avidly seeking publicity – usually to the detriment of doing anything that actually benefits the country. Right now though, you have to feel sorry for them. If any one deserves a decent 4 July holiday break, it is these grossly overworked souls.
When he was inaugurated the eternity of five months ago, the experts said that Barack Obama would unleash the greatest flood of legislation since Franklin Roosevelt in the Great Depression. For once, the experts were absolutely right. This Congress has already passed the largest economic stimulus package in US history. Its toiling members have approved a historic bailout of the car industry. They have expanded child health care, and passed a bill stipulating equal pay for women. But that is only a start. These last couple of days, the weather in Washington turned sticky and hotter – and so did the pace of action on Capitol Hill.
On Friday the House of Representatives was considering a close-fought, hideously complicated 1,201-page bill tackling climate change and imposing the toughest clean energy standards in US history. Next up is an even more contentious and complicated measure, running to at least 850 pages, to overhaul the country's healthcare system.
But even then, no respite beckons. After healthcare comes a bill codifying Obama's controversial plans to give sweeping new powers to the Federal Reserve, America's central bank, to prevent a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis. Farther in the distance looms legislation on immigration reform – an issue that hopelessly divided the previous Congress – and to overhaul the country's creaking transport infrastructure.
Each one alone is a major undertaking. Together they add up to the biggest and most concentrated workload for Congress in three-quarters of a century. If they emerge in anything like the form the White House intends, they will amount to a peaceful American revolution. But the opposite is also true. If the enterprise fails then so, in all likelihood, will the Obama presidency and all the extravagant hopes placed upon it.
In short, if life is tough on the Hill, it's make-or-break time for the White House – and the omens are not entirely encouraging. The problem is not the President. According to a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, more than 70 per cent of Americans say they personally like Obama, remarkable at a time of economic suffering. The man himself continues to enjoy a honeymoon with voters.
But barely half these voters back his policies. One problem for the White House is that George W Bush, to whom all the nation's ills could conveniently be attributed, has totally vanished from view, presumably holed up in his new house in Dallas writing the promised memoirs. In his absence, the "Bush economy" is starting to become the "Obama economy".
Rightly or wrongly, a sense is growing that the fragile green shoots of recovery that the February stimulus package was designed to encourage, are withering. As often as they can, Obama aides pin the blame on the previous administration. But sooner rather than later, those problems will become Obama's problems.
It's not just Iran's President, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, who accuses Obama of behaving just like Bush. So too do liberals who press for more radical action on climate change and healthcare; why, they ask, does he not do more to push the country towards a "single payer" model for healthcare that offers the only realistic way of simultaneously cutting costs and insuring everyone? And why are there not more teeth in the "cap and trade" system at the heart of the energy bill?..
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Laura Bush: Do Not Forget Burma
Source: WaPo (6-28-09)
[The writer is the former first lady of the United States.]
For two weeks, the world has been transfixed by images of Iranians taking to the streets to demand the most basic human freedoms and rights. Watching these courageous men and women, I am reminded of a similar scene nearly two years ago in Burma, when tens of thousands of Buddhist monks peacefully marched through their nation's streets. They, too, sought to reclaim basic human dignity for all Burmese citizens, but they were beaten back by that nation's harsh regime.
Since those brutal days in September 2007, Burma's suffering has intensified. In the past 21 months, the number of political prisoners incarcerated by the junta has doubled. Within the past 10 days, two Burmese citizens were sentenced to 18 months in prison. Their offense: praying in a Buddhist pagoda for the release of the jailed opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. That is only the tip of the regime's brutality. Inside Burma, more than 3,000 villages have been "forcibly displaced" -- a number exceeding the mass relocations in genocide-racked Darfur. The military junta has forced tens of thousands of child soldiers into its army and routinely uses civilians as mine-sweepers and slave laborers. It has closed churches and mosques; it has imprisoned comedians for joking about the government and bloggers for writing about it. Human trafficking, where women and children are snatched and sold, is pervasive. Summary executions pass for justice, while lawyers are arrested for the "crime" of defending the persecuted.
Rape is routinely used as a "weapon of war." In 2006, I convened a roundtable at the United Nations to address the situation in Burma and listened as Burmese activist Hseng Noung described the rape victims she had aided. The youngest victim was 8; the oldest was 80. Her words silenced the room.
Yet time and again, the women of Burma, who are often the regime's chief targets, have responded to this brutality with inspiring courage. I will never forget visiting the remote and crowded refugee camps on the mountainous border between Burma and Thailand. There, I watched the tireless efforts of Dr. Cynthia Maung to provide lifesaving medical aid for hundreds of Burmese in need, many of them ill or injured. I sat with victims of land mines who had lost legs or feet and were waiting quietly, often for hours, for basic care. Last fall, it was my great privilege to present a Vital Voices award to Charm Tong, who testified before U.N. officials at the age of 17 and eloquently described the systematic military campaign of rape and abuse that is being waged against women in Burma's Shan state. She spoke unflinchingly even though her audience included representatives of the very regime she condemned.
More of us in America should make such courage our courage. At this moment, Aung San Suu Kyi, 64 and in fragile health, faces sentencing on trumped-up charges that could force her to endure five more years of brutal captivity. The junta leaders wish to undermine the Nobel Peace laureate's influence ahead of next year's elections. Leaders from around the world -- including the United States -- have called forcefully for the junta to release Aung San Suu Kyi and the 2,100 other political prisoners it is holding. Even Burma's closest allies in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations have called for her to receive proper medical care and have warned that Burma's "honor and credibility" are at stake. But the world must do more than express concern...
Friday, June 26, 2009
Peggy Noonan: By trying to do too much, Obama risks not doing enough
Source: WSJ (6-26-09)
Something seems off with our young president. He appears jarred. Difficult history has come over the transom. He seemed defensive and peevish with the press in his Tuesday news conference, and later with Charlie Gibson on health care, when he got nailed by a neurologist who suggested the elites who support a national program seem not to mind rationing for other people but very much mind if for themselves. All this followed the president's first bad numbers. From Politico, on Tuesday: "Eroding confidence in President Barack Obama's handling of the economy and ability to control spending have caused his approval ratings to wilt to their lowest level since taking office, according to a spate of recent polls." Independents and some Republicans who once viewed him sympathetically are "becoming skeptical."
You can say this is due to a lot of things, and it probably is, most especially the economy, which all the polls mentioned. But I think at bottom his problems come down to this: The Sentence. And the rough sense people have that he's not seeing to it.
[DECLARATIONS] Randy Jones
The Sentence comes from a story Clare Boothe Luce told about a conversation she had in 1962 in the White House with her old friend John F. Kennedy. She told him, she said, that "a great man is one sentence." His leadership can be so well summed up in a single sentence that you don't have to hear his name to know who's being talked about. "He preserved the union and freed the slaves," or, "He lifted us out of a great depression and helped to win a World War." You didn't have to be told "Lincoln" or "FDR."
She wondered what Kennedy's sentence would be. She was telling him to concentrate, to know the great themes and demands of his time and focus on them.
It was good advice. History has imperatives, and sometimes they are clear. Sometimes they are met, and sometimes not. When they're clear and met, you get quite a sentence.
Mr. Obama's White House is, at the moment, like most new White Houses. Every administration wants to do great things. Or, rather, it wants greatness. It wants to break through on some great issue or issues and claim to be, as they used to say, consequential. There's a busy hum of action. It can cause a blur. Everyone who works for a nation gets carried away. They're all swept up. It's understandable. They're working in the White House, they're mostly young—only the young can take the punishing hours, and only the young have lived through a limited enough history that they think everything counts and everything matters, which is how you want people in a White House to feel. In this they are like the young reporters and anchors on weekend TV. The storm comes and it's the biggest storm ever, or the most terrible brush fire. They're like this because it's their first hurricane. If the sin of the young is to blow things out of proportion, the sin of the old is no longer to notice true dimension and size. It's their 30th revolution after all, how big a deal could it be?...
Our economy and our security are intertwined. They are at the heart of everything, even to our ultimate continuance as a nation. Mr. Obama cannot replace his sentence with 10 paragraphs, and he can't escape it, either. Because history dictated it. History wrote it. "He brought America back from economic collapse and kept us strong and secure in the age of terror." Sentences don't really get better than that. He should stop looking for a better one. There isn't a better one.
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