Quote/Unquote 2005 April
April 30, 2005
Muhar Altubi, recalling what he told looters trying to steal Iraqi treasures from the dead city of Uruk:
When I saw them, I shouted at them to leave, get off this land. What is buried here doesn't belong to any man. It belongs to the world.
April 29, 2005
Reagan biographer Edmund Morris, commenting on the president's diaries, which will now be published by HarperCollins:
He's very meticulous about quantifying the kind of applause he got for all his speeches - the number of standing ovations, the length of applause - which might seem like vanity at first, but really it's the professional actor calibrating his performance.
April 29, 2005
Historian Richard Jensen, dismissing worries that terrorists might sneak across the Mexican border:
On the immigration issue, I suggest that terrorism connections are irrelevant. Over a third of the illegal border crossers get caught, and all of them have to rely on" coyotes" or guides. For Mexicans who want to work in the US, the risk of capture means they're merely sent back to Mexico and can try again. For terrorists it means capture by the Feds and the likely unraveling of their plot. (That's what happened in the case of the LA Millennium bomber who tried to cross the Canadian border with a car full of explosives to set off on Jan 1, 2000) That's too risky and so they use other means, like tourist and student visas. Bottom line: the last thing we have to worry about is terrorists sneaking across the southern border.
April 25, 2005
It is of course old news that television journalism has become the medium of spectacle, catastrophe, emotion, and entertainment, while the print press remains the primary -- and often lonely -- conveyor of in-depth, grown-up coverage. But as I watched the elevation of the new pontiff on television and read about it in newspapers and on news websites, it occurred to me that this dichotomy had reached new extremes.
April 25, 2005
Roger Pulvers, in a news story:
This month marks the 30th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, a war that in Vietnam is known as the"American War."
April 24, 2005
I blame Congress over the last fifty to a hundred years for not standing up and taking its responsibility given to it by the Constitution. The reason the judiciary has been able to impose a separation of church and state that’s nowhere in the Constitution is that Congress didn’t stop them. The reason we had judicial review is because Congress didn’t stop them. The reason we had a right to privacy is because Congress didn’t stop them.
April 24, 2005
David Brooks, commenting on the study that shows thin people live shorter lives:
In reality, life is perverse and human beings don't get what they deserve. The people with the worst grades start the most successful businesses. The shallowest people end up blissfully happy and they are so vapid they don't even realize how vapid they are because vapidity is the only trait that comes with its own impermeable obliviousness system. The people regarded as lightweights, like F.D.R., J.F.K. and Ronald Reagan, make the best presidents, while you - so much more thoughtful and better read - would be a complete disaster.... Darwin was wrong when he talked about the survival of the fittest: it's really the survival of the healthy enough to get by. As it says in the Good Book, the last shall sometimes be first, the meek shall inherit the earth, and the chubby will get extra biscuits at the breakfast buffet.
April 21, 2005
Justice Harry Blackmun did more inadvertent damage to our democracy than any other 20th-century American.
April 20, 2005
In choosing Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger to succeed Pope John Paul II as Pope Benedict XVI, the Catholic Church has cast a vote for the survival of Europe and the West. “Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century,” historian Bernard Lewis predicted not long ago; however, judging from the writings of the new Pope, he is not likely to be sanguine about this transition. For one thing, the new Pope seems to be aware of the grave danger Europeans face: he has called upon Europe to recover its Christian roots “if it truly wants to survive.”
April 19, 2005
Associated Press account of a history conference on Lincoln:
It must have been the first conference in the history of Abraham Lincoln scholarship to call the Great Emancipator"a terrifically sexual guy."
April 18, 2005
The civil rights establishment was once a fiercely independent force that bedeviled politicians on both sides of the aisle and evaluated policies based on whether those policies harmed or helped the poor. This tradition of independence has disappeared. Over the last two decades, in fact, the old-line civil rights groups have evolved into wholly owned subsidiaries of the Democratic Party. The groups are disinclined to turn on their friends - or to openly embrace even beneficial policies that happen to have a Republican face.This posture has been painfully evident in the debate surrounding the No Child Left Behind education law, a signature Bush administration reform that also happens to be the best hope for guaranteeing black and Latino children a chance at equal education. The law is not perfect and will need adjustments. But its core requirement that the states educate minority children to the same standards as white children breaks with a century-old tradition of educational unfairness. The new law could potentially surpass Brown v. Board of Education in terms of widening access to high-quality public education.
April 15, 2005
Which part of North America makes the most cars? If you answered Michigan, you would have been right for 100 years. But you would not be right anymore. Last year the Canadian province of Ontario surpassed Michigan in car production. Of course, most of the cars made in Ontario are manufactured by America's Big Three—General Motors, Ford and Daimler-Chrysler. These companies are shifting production out of the United States for one overwhelming reason: massive health-care costs. An American worker costs them more than $6,500 in health care per year. In Canada, which has a government-funded and -run health-care system, the cost to the employer per worker is just $800. While the Big Three are an unusual case, they highlight what might turn out to be the most significant threat to the competitiveness of American firms in an increasingly global economy: our out-of-control health system.
April 15, 2005
Juan Cole:
There is not going to be a draft of the new constitution by mid-August. Most of the agreements in the negotiations on the government between Shiites and Kurds have been hard won, when they should have been easy and done quickly. The idea that they could write a constitution, a complex and lasting document, in just a little more time seems fanciful.
April 15, 2005
Remember how exercised everyone around the world was about the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib? Infinitely worse deeds are being done in Darfur every day. Where's the outrage? Where are the street rallies that might spur Western governments into action? Aside from a handful of journalists and human rights activists, the only Westerners who have shown any sustained interest in the Sudan are evangelical Christians, who've been exercised primarily about the fate of their coreligionists in the south. The silence of the"antiwar" masses speaks volumes about their priorities: They don't object to war crimes as long as they're not committed by Americans.
April 15, 2005
The toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad will be recorded, alongside the fall of the Berlin Wall, as one of the great moments in the history of liberty.
April 13, 2005
"In actuality, there is no evidence proving that Japanese war crimes were any worse than war crimes committed by other nations."
April 12, 2005
Editorial in the WSJ (4-12-05):
A year ago, on the first anniversary of the capture of Baghdad, the Boston Globe carried a doleful op-ed by Clinton Administration diplomat Peter Galbraith. In handling the postwar effort, he wrote, President Bush had"transformed a difficult mission into an unachievable one." ... In this respect, Mr. Galbraith and his ilk are heirs to that generation of '60s leaders who took the U.S. into Vietnam only to turn against the war in fits of self-doubt, self-flagellation, excessive fine-tuning and political cravenness, after thousands of servicemen had lost their lives. Sad to say, this time around the doubters included all too many conservatives who supported the war at first but then distanced themselves from it as the insurgency grew. They had their own reputational"exit strategies."
April 11, 2005
It's often noted that Pope John Paul II chose all but three of the cardinals who will choose the next pope, but that doesn't necessarily mean another conservative pope. After all, Pope Pius XII chose all but two of the cardinals who in 1958 chose his successor, the far more open-minded Pope John XXIII.
April 8, 2005
To a historian with a long view, the remarkable thing about the American response to 9/11 is its familiarity. In the face of the horrific attack, we asked with the American president,"Why do they hate us?" That question is as much a cry from the heart as a search for answers. It expresses a sense of incomprehension and incredulity: how could a nation unique in world history, a nation born in colonial rebellion against imperial rule, founded on liberty and self-government, attracting millions of immigrants with its promise of opportunity, and prospering on the energies and talents of a free people, evoke such murderous anger? For all his seeming indifference to history, President Bush shares those sentiments, and he has put them into action with all the fervor of Woodrow Wilson. Whether they suit the situation we must all decide.
April 7, 2005
Sander L. Gilman, forthcoming professor of liberal arts and sciences at Emory University:
The central cultural problem of Europe today is not how different national cultures will be integrated into a European Union, but how secular society will interact with European Muslims. Anyone interested in contemporary Europe before September 11, 2001, knew that the 800-pound gorilla confronting France, Germany, and Britain, and to a lesser extent Spain and Italy, was the huge presence of an"unassimilatable" minority. Much attention has been given recently to the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, and his pronouncements about the dangers of Hispanic immigrants rejecting American values. Such fears are already being voiced in Europe about Muslims. But exactly the same things were said about the Jews for 200 years. What does that tell us?
April 6, 2005
In the 1970's, even Democrats like Daniel Patrick Moynihan conceded that the Republican Party was the"party of ideas." Today, even Republicans like Representative Chris Shays concede that it has become the"party of theocracy."
April 6, 2005
Luigi Irdi, a spokesman for the state railroad of Italy:
"If everyone tries to leave from St. Peter's station, it will be the end of the world."
April 5, 2005
We're living in the age of the liberal copycat. Al Franken tries to create a liberal version of Rush. Al Gore announced his TV network yesterday. Many Democrats have tried to create a liberal Heritage Foundation.The theory is that liberals must create their own version of the conservative pyramid. Conservatives have formed their foundations, think tanks and media outlets into a ruthlessly efficient message machine. Liberals, on the other hand, have been losing because they are too fractious, too nuanced and, well, too freethinking.
Much as I admire my friends on the left for ingeniously explaining their recent defeats without really considering the possibility that maybe the substance of their ideas is the problem, I have to say that this explanation for conservative success and liberal failure is at odds with reality.
Conservatives have not triumphed because they have built a disciplined and efficient message machine. Conservatives have thrived because they are split into feuding factions that squabble incessantly. As these factions have multiplied, more people have come to call themselves conservatives because they've found one faction to agree with.
April 4, 2005
Message from Ren Teygeler posted on the Iraq Crisis list:
Dear friends,It is indeed a shame that now the top of the Malwiya has been blown up by the terrorists. The more as it took me over 2 months to convince the occupying forcers in Samarra to retire the snipers on the minaret. At first the minaret was used by terrorists when coalition forces moved into Samarra October last year. The Iraqi soldiers surrounded the Golden Mosque to protect it and the troops had the same in mind with the famous ziggurat. However a battle took place at the minaret and the US troops conquered the tower and occupied it. Nevertheles the presence of soldiers attracted fire from the terrorists and the tower got damaged by gunfire and a rocket. These troops stayed on mainly for strategic reasons. According to the 1954 The Hague Convention the local commander can make such a decision. Fortunately I convinced them to leave the ziggurat and protect it instead of occupy it. Not soon after the tower got damaged by the insurgents. Let there be no mistake that this example shows that the insurgents are the ones who damaged their own 1100-year-old splendid ziggurat, a highlight of Iraqi cultural heritage.
Regards
Drs Ren Teygeler
former Senior Advisor [July 2003 - March 2004] IRMO Ministry of Culture
April 4, 2005
A close reading of history leads me to believe that the order is usually the reverse. When foreigners get out, insurgencies stop; they do not stop, no matter how massive the force used against them or how costly in blood and treasure the cost of fighting is, until the foreigners leave.
April 4, 2005
John Paul II was the most visible human being in history, having been seen live by more men and women than any other man who ever lived; the remarkable thing is that millions of those people, who saw him only at a great distance, will think they have lost a friend.
April 1, 2005
Anthony Paul in the Straits Times (Singapore):
MR GEORGE Frost Kennan has been widely acclaimed as the greatest Sovietologist the United States ever produced. Yet the famed Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at Harvard University, which acknowledges his expertise, does not have Soviet in its title. He was asked, shortly after the institute's 1974 opening, to explain this omission. His response: 'Because there will not always be a Soviet Union, but Russia will always be there.'