Quote/Unquote 2005 March
March 31, 2005
Michael Tomlan, the director of the graduate program in historic preservation at Cornell University, commenting on the support the National Trust for Historic Preservation gave to the decision to tear down a historic building in St. Louis for parking garage:
It's morally and in any number of senses ethically inappropriate. It violates preservation's Hippocratic oath: if you can't be supportive, for gosh sakes shut up.
March 30, 2005
Editorial in the WSJ:
Robert Byrd is an expert on Senate rules and procedures, on which he has written a four-volume history. So we paid notice when a friend called our attention to the West Virginia Democrat's latest pronouncement on the confirmation of President Bush's judicial nominees.
Shortly before Congress recessed for Easter vacation, here's what the Senator said on Fox's "Hannity & Colmes": "The President is all wrong when he maintains that a nominee should have an up-or-down vote. The Constitution doesn't say that. The Constitution doesn't say that that nominee shall have any vote at all. There doesn't have to even be a vote."As the Senator says, Article II of the Constitution is silent on how the Senate shall exercise its "advice and consent" power in confirming judicial nominees. For more than 200 years, however, that body has interpreted the Founders' injunction to mean that a simple majority of Senators -- 51 in our age -- must vote to confirm. That's why we cried foul in President Bush's first term when Democrats filibustered 10 appeals-court nominees, thereby denying them an up-or-down vote on the floor -- even though every candidate had the support of a bipartisan majority. A vote to end a filibuster requires a super-majority of 60 Senators.
But now that Senator Byrd has expressed the view that the Senate doesn't have to vote at all, here's a better idea for ending the impasse over judicial nominations: Fifty-one of the 55 Republican Senators can simply send the President a letter expressing their support for his candidates. Under Mr. Byrd's Constitutional analysis, the Senate will have exercised "advice and consent" and the judges will be confirmed.
March 28, 2005
Martha Joynt Kumar, a professor of political science at Towson University in Maryland:
He [President Bush] could be the first president since Eisenhower to hold more news conferences in his second term than in the first.
March 27, 2005
How will future historians explain it? How will they possibly explain why President George W. Bush decided to ignore the energy crisis staring us in the face and chose instead to spend all his electoral capital on a futile effort to undo the New Deal, by partially privatizing Social Security? We are, quite simply, witnessing one of the greatest examples of misplaced priorities in the history of the U.S. presidency.
March 25, 2005
D.D.Guttenplan, in the Nation:
To an American, Europe is a cautionary tale. From Jefferson's warning that when we"get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall be as corrupt as Europe" to Madison's explanation that separation of church and state was the only way to avoid"the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries," the Founding Fathers used the Continent to signify everything our new nation was not. A century later the Gilded Age's yearning for cultural validation complicated matters, requiring a Henry James or an Edith Wharton to do justice to the shifting balance of social insecurity, moral superiority, confidence and na vet . But even the most starry-eyed grand tourist knew they were traveling backwards in time. Well into the last century, Europe was the"old world," a fading catalogue of postcard views and primitive plumbing where Americans came to lose their innocence.
March 25, 2005
Conservatives are of 2 opinions about the possibility of Jeb Bush running for president in 2008:
Larry Schweikart, author of A Patriot's History:
Jeb will not be a candidate because Americans will not elect a third person from a family so as to create a"dynasty." Even the Kennedys could not pull that off.David Horowitz, founder of frontpagemag.com:
I disagree with Larry Schweikart's view that Americans don't like dynasties. On the contrary, they love dynasties. Adams, Roosevelt and yes Kennedy. Dynastyphobia wasn't the problem with the Kennedys, it was assassination and character -- despite Chappaquiddick, Teddy was perennially at the top of the list of potential Democratic candidates. Look at America's love affair with the Princess Di.
March 24, 2005
David Garrow, referring to the Terri Schiavo case:
"This is perhaps the most thoroughly reviewed and litigated death in American history."
March 22, 2005
Ian Buruma:
It is a common human illusion that heroes live forever. Elvis, in the minds of the faithful, will never die. He is still regularly sighted in the back lands of the US. But immortality doesn't have to be literal. In China, Chairman Mao has joined a select number of historical figures and become a folk god, whose sacred image, in peasant dwellings, taxis and long-haul trucks, protects the believers against ill fortune. The talismanic power of Mao Zedong is curious, considering his personal responsibility for more deaths (up to 30 million in one man-made famine alone) than Hitler. Official propaganda might have made it easier for the Chinese to think of him as"great", the usual cliche about the late Great Helmsman in the People's Republic of China. But perhaps that isn't the point. When villainy reaches the scale of Mao's misrule, moral distinctions can seem to be redundant; he was great in his murderousness too. What matters is the charisma of absolute power. Hitler's image is not commonly used by German taxi drivers as a form of magic protection. And few Germans would find it adequate to describe Hitler as simply"great". This may be because Germans, unlike the Chinese, don't have the excuse of censorship for ignorance of his crimes - or, indeed, their parents' complicity in them. Europe also has less of a folk tradition of worshipping historical figures as deities. And yet I would argue that Hitler's spirit, too, still haunts us in ways that are no less marked by religious idolatry. The latest German movie about Hitler, The Downfall, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, is a case in point.
March 22, 2005
From an interview in the NYT with the blogger Jim Guckert aka Jeff Gannon:
NYT:
Scott McClellan, the press secretary to President Bush, called on you and allowed you to ask questions on a nearly daily basis. What, exactly, is your relationship with him?Jim Guckert aka Jeff Gannon:
I was just another guy in the press room. Did I try to curry favor with him? Sure. When he got married, I left a wedding card for him in the press office. People are saying this proves there is some link. But as Einstein said,"Sometimes a wedding card is just a wedding card.''NYT:
You mean like"sometimes a cigar is just a cigar''? That wasn't Einstein. That was Freud.Jim Guckert aka Jeff Gannon:
Oh, Freud. O.K. I got my old Jewish men confused.NYT:
You should learn the difference between them if you want to work in journalism.Jim Guckert aka Jeff Gannon:
I'd like to get back into journalism. I'm hoping someone will offer me a job as a commentator or one of those political analysts that you see on the news shows all the time.
March 22, 2005
... if the principle at stake is"majority rule," consider that the Senate is, by its very nature, an affront to majoritarian principles. The 52 senators from the nation's smallest states could command a Senate majority even though they represent only 18 percent of the American population. According to the Census Bureau's July 2004 population estimates, the 44 Democratic senators represent 148,026,027 people; the 55 Republican senators 144,765,157. Vermont's Jim Jeffords, an independent who usually votes with the Democrats, represents 310,697. (In these calculations, I evenly divided the population of states with split Senate delegations.) What does majority rule really mean in this context? If the Republicans pushing against the filibuster love majority rule so much, they should propose getting rid of the Senate altogether. But doing so would mean acknowledging what's really going on here: regime change disguised as a narrow rules fight. We could choose to institute a British-style parliamentary system in which majorities get almost everything they want. But advocates of such a radical departure should be honest enough to propose amending the Constitution first.
March 22, 2005
I really think Lee Bollinger has damaged every academic in the United States by his refusal to articulate a view on academic freedom. I don't know how to construe his unwillingness to speak out, except to say that either he's afraid to, or that he does not support academic freedom. I find both alternatives disappointing and unpleasant.
March 18, 2005
So why is the United Iraqi Alliance, the coalition of Shiite parties that can count on about 53% of the members of the Iraqi parliament to vote for it in the wake of the Jan. 30 elections, not able to form a government? If it were the Labor Party in the UK, which is the parliament described above, Ibrahim Jaafari would already be Prime Minister.
The US spiked the Iraqi parliamentary process by putting in a provision that a government has to be formed with a 2/3s majority. This provision is a neo-colonial imposition on Iraq. The Iraqi public was never asked about it. And, it is predictably producing gridlock, as the UIA is forced to try to accommodate a party that should be in the opposition in the British system, the Kurdistan Alliance.
Likewise, in France, a simple majority of the National Assembly can dismiss the cabinet. Likewise in India. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the 2/3s super-majority is characteristic of only one nation on earth, i.e. American Iraq. I fear it is functioning in an anti-democratic manner to thwart the will of the majority of Iraqis, who braved great danger to come out and vote.
It is all to the good if the Shiites and Kurds are forced to come to a set of hard compromises. But not everything can be decided at the beginning of the process. Some issues (Kirkuk is a good example) must be decided by a long-term negotiation. I perceive this latest Kurdish demarche to consist in a power play where they grab all sorts of concessions on a short-term basis, just because they are needed to form a government, even though no national consensus has emerged on these issues.
I think there is also a real chance that Iraqis will turn against the idea of democracy if it only produces insecurity, violence, and gridlock.
March 18, 2005
We do not yet know whether the Middle East today is Europe 1989 or Europe 1848. 1989 saw the swift collapse of the Soviet empire. 1848 saw a flowering of liberal revolutions throughout Europe that, within a short time, were all suppressed. Nonetheless, 1848 did presage the coming of the liberal idea throughout Europe. (By 1871, it had been restored to France, for example.) It marked a turning point from which there was no going back. The Arab Spring of 2005 will be noted by history as a similar turning point for the Arab world.
March 18, 2005
Many years ago the abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote an essay,"Women and the Alphabet," in which he made the point that if you didn't like uppity women the place to start was at the beginning. Once you teach girls the alphabet they'll want to read, once they read they'll get ideas, once they get ideas they'll make claims. Once Harvard decided to educate female students, it should not have been surprised that the institution would face questions about the social arrangements in which scholarship takes place. Women have been earning Ph.D.'s in the academy in equal numbers to men for more than a decade. Why be surprised that we now demand that workplaces be user-friendly to us -- and to all?
March 18, 2005
Rafael Medoff, Director, The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, in response to C-Span's decision to"balance" coverage of Deborah Lipstadt's new book on Holocaust denier David Irving by broadcasting a lecture by Irving:
Just a few weeks ago, we concluded Black History Month. Presumably C-SPAN did not consider broadcasting a program about Black history that would be"balanced" by a program featuring someone denying that African-Americans were enslaved. C-SPAN should not broadcast statements that it knows to be false, nor provide a platform for falsifiers of history, whether about the Holocaust, African-American history, or any other subject.
March 17, 2005
Of course nearly all the professors are left-of-center, and this often comes across in their teaching – but the most stridently left-wing departments are also the ones that have the fewest opportunities to talk overtly about politics, because they’re occupied teaching French literature or art theory or something. Whereas the history department, which tends to grapple with political controversies a bit more, is one of the few departments that has an actual conservative or three teaching in its ranks. Not that many, of course, and most history courses are taught from a left-of-center perspective. But it’s usually more implicit than overt.
March 17, 2005
He would follow in the great tradition of World Bank president Robert McNamara, who also helped kill tens of thousands of people in a poor country most Americans couldn't find on a map before getting the job.
March 16, 2005
From the President's White House news conference:
Q Mr. President, you faced a lot of skepticism in the run-up to the Iraq war, and a lot of criticism for miscalculating some of the challenges of postwar Iraq. Now that the Iraq elections seem to be triggering signs of democratization throughout the broader Middle East, do you feel any sense of vindication?
THE PRESIDENT: First of all, I fully understand that as long as I'm the President I will face criticism. It's like part of the job. Frankly, you wouldn't be doing your job if you didn't occasionally lay out the gentle criticism. I welcome constructive ideas as to how we might do our job better. So that doesn't bother me. And, therefore, since it doesn't bother me and I expect it, I don't then seek vindication.
Look, history -- shall I give you my talk on history and presidencies? Okay, thank you. I don't -- what's interesting is George Washington is now getting a second, or third, or fifth, or tenth look in history. I read the Ellis book, which is a really interesting book, and --"His Excellency," it's called. And McCullough is writing a book on George Washington, as well. People are constantly evaluating somebody's standing in history, a President's standing in history, based upon events that took place during the presidency, based upon things that happened after the presidency, based upon -- like in my case, hopefully, the march of freedom continues way after my presidency. And so I just don't worry about vindication or standing.
The other thing, it turns out, in this job you've got a lot on your plate on a regular basis, you don't have much time to sit around and wander, lonely, in the Oval Office, kind of asking different portraits, how do you think my standing will be? (Laughter.) I've got a lot to do. And I like to make decisions, and I make a lot of them.
March 14, 2005
Noel Malcolm, in the course of a review of John Lukacs's new book, Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred:
Yale University Press is one of the best publishers in the world; but this book is badly written and seems not to have been copy-edited or proof-read at all. Misprints, ungrammatical English, unnecessary repetitions: it has them all. It would have been enough, surely, to produce a book about the new barbarism, without making it a specimen of it too.
March 14, 2005
Historian Lawrence Wittner:
It is amazing to see how cut off almost all American academics are from the communications media and, therefore, from the general public. After all, here are hundreds of thousands of this country's most highly educated and best thinkers, many of them doing work on important issues, and -- beyond teaching their students and reaching a very limited number of scholars through specialized journals and books -- they have no access to the broader society, which instead lives on a steady diet of TV drivel and worse. It's really a scandal -- and very depressing from the standpoint of Enlightenment assumptions about knowledge lighting the way to human progress.
March 11, 2005
Whittier College historian Laura McEnaney:
"Bringing [Stanley] Kutler to the [Nixon] library was going to be like Nixon going to China."
March 10, 2005
Texas Senator John Cornyn, in a letter to the NYT:
To the Editor:
"The Senate on the Brink" (editorial, March 6) supports the "historic role of the filibuster," which is a curious position for a newspaper that 10 years ago said filibusters were "the tool of the sore loser" and should be eliminated ("Time to Retire the Filibuster," editorial, Jan. 1, 1995).
Federal judicial appointments have certainly been controversial, but surely all Americans can agree that the rules for confirming judges should be the same regardless of which party has a majority.
Now you praise the filibuster as a "time-honored Senate procedure." In 1995, when Bill Clinton was president, you called it "an archaic rule that frustrates democracy and serves no useful purpose."
You disparage the Republicans' view that 51 votes should be enough for judicial confirmation. Yet the 51-vote rule is a consistent Senate tradition. By calling for an end to filibusters, the Senate is simply contemplating restoring its traditions by traditional methods you disparage as "nuclear," even though they were once endorsed by such leading Democrats as Senators Edward M. Kennedy, Charles E. Schumer and Robert C. Byrd.
March 10, 2005
Joel Beinin:
For the last several months, a disparate collection of burgeoning movements among several sectors of Egyptian society has converged upon one message: opposition to the status quo. Since December 11, 2004, the Kifaya (Enough) movement has organized three demonstrations demanding that Mubarak step down and that he refrain from handing off the presidency to his son, as happened in Syria and in the"democratic" US-allied monarchies of Jordan and Morocco. Kifaya activists have collected well over 1,000 signatures of public figures on a petition calling for a direct and contested presidential election.Members and supporters of the Ghad (Tomorrow) Party have loudly protested the incarceration of their leader Ayman Nur. Human rights activists have continued to criticize the regime's arbitrary roundups of Islamists in response to the October 7, 2004 terrorist bombings in the Sinai resort of Taba. Workers have engaged in long strikes protesting the business-friendly policies favored by Mubarak -- and, even more so, his son Gamal. In covering these developments, the non-governmental media have gone well beyond previous limits on freedom of the press.
Since 1952, no Egyptian head of state has been targeted directly in this manner. A taboo has been broken, and there is no telling where these popular movements may lead.
March 9, 2005
The simplistic master narrative constructed by the partisans of President George W. Bush held that the January 30 elections were a huge success, and signalled a turn to democracy in the Middle East. Then the anti-Syrian demonstrations were interpreted as a yearning for democracy inspired by the Iraqi elections. This interpretation is a gross misunderstanding of the situation in the Middle East. Bush is not pushing with any real force for democratization of Saudi Arabia (an absolute monarchy) or Pakistan (where the elected parliament demands in vain that General Pervez Musharraf take off his uniform if he wants to be president), or Tunisia (where Zayn Ben Ali has just won his 4th unopposed term as president), etc. Democratization is being pushed only for regimes that Bush dislikes, such as Syria or Iran. The gestures that Mubarak of Egypt made (officially recognized parties may put up candidates to run against him, but not popular political forces like the Muslim Brotherhood) are empty. In fact the Jan. 30 Iraqi elections were deeply flawed. 42 percent of the electorate did not show up. The elections could only be held by locking down the country for 3 days, forbidding all vehicular traffic to stop car bombings. The electorate had no idea for whom they were voting, since the candidates' names were secret until the last moment. The Sunni Arabs boycotted or were prevented from voting by the ongoing guerrilla war, which started right back up after the ban on traffic lapsed. The Lebanese have been having often lively parliamentary election campaigns for decades. The idea that the urbane and sophisticated Beirutis had anything to learn from the Jan. 30 process in Iraq is absurd on the face of it. Elections were already scheduled in Lebanon for later this spring.
March 8, 2005
Warren Buffett recently made headlines by saying America is more likely to turn into a"sharecroppers' society" than an"ownership society." But I think the right term is a"debt peonage" society - after the system, prevalent in the post-Civil War South, in which debtors were forced to work for their creditors. The bankruptcy bill won't get us back to those bad old days all by itself, but it's a significant step in that direction.
March 7, 2005
There are still some in the United States who hope that Iranians will rise up and overthrow the mullahs. They even imagine that American intervention, in the form of either a full-scale invasion or air strikes against nuclear facilities, might set off such an uprising. That is an illusion. Iranians learned a bitter lesson after they overthrew the Shah: that no matter how bad life may be, a revolution can always make it worse. They will not start another one....There is every possibility that in time, Iran will return to the democratic course from which the United States so violently forced it in 1953. If Americans allow events there to proceed at their own pace, they will finally see the result for which they hope. It is also the result most Iranians want: an Iran that respects the will of its people and helps to stabilize a dangerously unstable region.
March 7, 2005
Bloody Sundays: If you are Irish, Bloody Sunday is 30 January 1972. If you are an Iraqi, Bloody Sunday is 13 September 2004. If you are an American, Bloody Sunday is 7 March 1965. Please, Lord, no more bloody Sundays.
March 4, 2005
Vladimir Putin's presidency proves that Stalinism will never end in Russia. Emerging from the past, Russian dictatorship continues into the future almost without pause, changing only in name: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Koba the Dread. Fourteen years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia's people discovered that their lives fare better with dictators. Hence the readiness with which we came to like"Vova" Putin's firm hand. We support his jailing the"dishonest" oligarchs, his clamping down on the"irresponsible" press and promoting a dictatorship of order over transparent laws. We are eager to sing his praises -- a hit pop song goes,"I want one like Putin" -- and make chocolate statues of this, oh, so pleasantly sweet modern autocrat....Today there is little doubt that Mr. Putin's politics is a modern version of a strong-hand rule. Ever so obedient, Russian citizens take cues from the Kremlin: In the last few years, over a hundred books have been published praising Stalin. In one such, Elena Prudnikova, a journalist from St. Petersburg, insists,"The country, deprived of the high ideals, in just a few decades has rotted to the ground. After the denunciation of Stalin in [1956] we lived on, increasingly useless and dirtier." Marshal of the Soviet Union Dimitry Yazov, former defense minister and a coup leader against Gorbachev's"bourgeois influence" in August 1991, a political criminal only a decade ago, has become a hero. His memoirs are a bestseller. Moreover, today Yazov is shown as a victim: All those Khrushchevs, Gorbachevs and Yeltsins manipulated public opinion into wanting unnecessary freedoms back then.
Thanks to the steady and stately leadership of Vladimir Putin in a new century, people have returned to their senses.
March 3, 2005
David Beito, at the HNN blog, Liberty & Power:
I have already argued that Ward Churchill is best regarded as the Larry Flynt of academic freedom. If students and professors (conservative, libertarian, and otherwise), know that this doctrine protects"even Ward Churchill," they can be more secure in their own rights.There is another reason to defend academic freedom in this case. With each passing day, the evidence mounts that the"fire Churchill" movement has the unintended and highly unfortunate result of making its intended quarry even stronger. It has produced spectacular blowback in Churchill's favor by tranforming him into a martyr. A case in point was the response to Churchill's speech yesterday at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He drew a capacity audience of over five hundred who listened to his ravings with"rapt" admiration. Few speakers on any campus, outside perhaps of the highly politicized Ivy Leagues, can attract that kind of friendly crowd.
Had the"fire Churchill" partisans limited themselves to the pen rather than the sword at the beginning of this controversy, I doubt that more than hundred would have bothered to show up. Churchill would be just another marginal, aging, Guevara/Indian wannabe. By their actions, Newt Gingrich and friends have turned the source of their anger into a marketable celebrity who, no doubt, now is negotiating the terms of a lucrative T-Shirt concession. They are proving to be Ward Churchill's best friend.
March 3, 2005
Alonzo Hamby:
"[T]riumphalism is premature because we have not triumphed yet!
March 2, 2005
Tom Engelhardt, commenting on President Bush's visit to Europe:
"The great motorcade," wrote Canadian correspondent Don Murray,"swept through the streets of the city… The crowds … but there were no crowds. George W. Bush's imperial procession through Europe took place in a hermetically sealed environment. In Brussels it was, at times, eerie. The procession containing the great, armour-plated limousine (flown in from Washington) rolled through streets denuded of human beings except for riot police. Whole areas of the Belgian capital were sealed off before the American president passed."Emile Zola (La D b cle), commenting on Emperor Napoleon III's visit to the front in the Franco-Prussian war:Murray doesn't mention the 19 American escort vehicles in that procession with the President's car (known to insiders as"the beast"), or the 200 secret service agents, or the 15 sniffer dogs, or the Blackhawk helicopter, or the 5 cooks, or the 50 White House aides, all of which added up to only part of the President's vast traveling entourage. Nor does he mention the huge press contingent tailing along inside the president's security"bubble," many of them evidently with their passports not in their own possession but in the hands of White House officials, or the more than 10,000 policemen and the various frogmen the Germans mustered for the President's brief visit to the depopulated German town of Mainz to shake hands with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
Intending it as a joke, he asked the serving girl, who was spreading a snow-white cloth over the table,"Is that all for the Emperor?""Why, yes indeed, just for the Emperor!" she replied, in her winsome, cheerful way, happy to show off her lovely white teeth.And she listed everything, no doubt informed by the grooms who had been coming to drink at the tavern since the day before: there was the staff, made up of twenty-five officers, sixty household guards, and the scout platoon of the Imperial Escort, six gendarmes from the military police; then the royal household, seventy-three persons in all, chamberlains, serving valets and chamber valets, cooks and pot- boys; then four saddle horses and two carriages for the Emperor, ten hourses for the equerries, eight for the grooms and bellboys, not to mention forty-seven post-horses; then a charabanc and twelve wagonloads of luggage, including two exclusively for the kitchen, which had won her admiration by the sheer quantity of utensils, bottles, and plates which could be seen, all beautifully laid out.