Quote/Unquote 2005 July-Aug.

WEEK of August 29, 2005

Re: Hurricaine Katrina HNN blogger Ralph Luker:

The activist side of me recognizes how pitifully small my taxes and philanthropy are, in comparison to the need, and I'm comforted only a little by the fact that they add up when joined to those of others. What, further, can I do? I have no useful skills to put into the relief effort. I'd only get in the way of it. I can't even envision what a New Orleans might be like. What I can do, in the face of tragedy, is to resolve to be a better teacher and a better historian – to better fulfill the role in life to which I'm called. At our best, historians have done that. We've been spurred by tragedy to be more engaging teachers and to produce more thoughtful history than we'd done in the past. The pioneers in the Annales School looked in the face of central European tragedies and conceived of history that was not merely a function of nationalist ambitions. C. Vann Woodward saw the South's tragic history and told its story in ways such that its endings might be other than what they had been. Their examples assure me that, when I've paid my dues and done my mourning for the loss of life, of memory, of spaces, of records, it can spur me to be a better historian than I have been.

Re: Hurricaine Katrina Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 8, 2004:

It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.

Re: Iraq's Parliament Juan Cole:

The Iraqi parliament attempted to legislate sanctions against perpetually absent members of parliament on Monday. But they could not legislate on the issue because there were too many absentees.

Re: Clinton's Costly Lie David Corn:

Bill Clinton lied and hundreds of thousands died. What do I mean by that? Watch the film Hotel Rwanda, as I did this weekend. It's a brilliant and sad reminder of the horrors of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, when the Clinton administration--like most of the governments of the West--took virtually no steps to try to impede the awful massacre that claimed perhaps as many as a million lives.

Re: Beset by Woes Oscar Chamberlain:

In Wisconsin, in January 1853, Governor Leonard Farwell began his annual message to the legislature with this statement: “Since your last session, nothing has transpired, of extraordinary importance, in the civil affairs of the state.” Isn’t that glorious? You know immediately that the rest of the message will be of good cheer, and it is of good cheer. The weather has been fine, the land fertile, the markets good, and the “emigrants” (to use the parlance of the time) keep coming and settling and building. Don’t you wish for times that would call for such an opening? I do.

Re: George Bush, Rancher News story in the LAT:

President Bush calls his Prairie Chapel Ranch"a slice of heaven," a special place where he can ride his mountain bike, fish his man-made pond and clear brush to his heart's content. But is it really a ranch? Here's a clue: The Secret Service agents now outnumber the cows.

Re: Gays Are to Blame for the Iraq Mess News story:

Members of a church say God is punishing American soldiers for defending a country that harbors gays, and they brought their anti-gay message to the funerals Saturday of two Tennessee soldiers killed in Iraq.

Re: George W. Bush, Historian-in-Chief Billmon:

... as a student of American history it's hard not to be contemptuous of anyone who would dare compare what the framers tried to do in Philadelphia to the deal that just went down in the Baghdad bazaar. Whatever you think of their politics -- or the utter hypocricy of slaveowners and slave merchants posing as champions of liberty -- the men of 1787 were giants.

The boys of 2005 (and their American sponsors), on the other hand, are just pygmies pretending to be giants. And the Iraqi people are going to be footing the bill for those pretensions -- in blood -- for a long time to come.

Re: George W. Bush, Historian-in-Chief Juan Cole:

[In response to the completion of the draft constitution for Iraq President] Bush also trotted out his completely wrong version of American history to suggest a parallel to the dissension over the adoption of the American constitution in 1789. Delegates representing twenty percent of the population did not refuse to sign (a number of the delegates who did not sign had just drifted away for business or other reasons, not because of opposition). And a handful who did explicitly refuse, including Elbridge Gerry and George Mason, did so to protest the lack of a Bill of Rights. Their stance was vindicated when one was added later. (I.e. even they were ultimately brought on board).

A sitting president is a kind of historian for the nation. In this regard Bush has gone from being a"C" student to an"F" one.

WEEK of August 22, 2005

Re: Quagmire Jonathan Dresner:

Our"vital interests" are not limited by geography to our borderlands, or even the Monroe-esque Western Hemisphere. When you are an empire, the world is your quagmire.

Re: Iraq, Bush, and Mortality Maureen Dowd:

For political reasons, the president has a history of silence on America's war dead. But he finally mentioned them on Monday because it became politically useful to use them as a rationale for war - now that all the other rationales have gone up in smoke.

"We owe them something," he told veterans in Salt Lake City (even though his administration tried to shortchange the veterans agency by $1.5 billion)."We will finish the task that they gave their lives for."

What twisted logic: with no W.M.D., no link to 9/11 and no democracy, now we have to keep killing people and have our kids killed because so many of our kids have been killed already? Talk about a vicious circle: the killing keeps justifying itself.

Re: President Bush and the War Andrew Cohen, professor of journalism and international affairs at Carleton University:

There is a memorable photograph of John Fitzgerald Kennedy taken on Feb. 13, 1961, less than a month after he became president. He is on the telephone, pressing his hand to his forehead. His eyes are closed, his brow furrowed, his expression pained. He has just learned that Patrice Lumumba, the premier of the Congo, had been assassinated shortly before Mr. Kennedy's inauguration. Mr. Kennedy is devastated -- and the picture shows it. One wonders how George W. Bush would have reacted. As the war in Iraq spun out of control, as the mother of a dead American soldier held a vigil near Mr. Bush's ranch in Texas, this president expressed no remorse or regret. No self-doubt. No self-criticism. No self-examination.

Re: Gaza Ari Shavit, a historian and writer for the Israeli daily Haaretz, commenting on the plight of the Israel Gaza settlers who were forced to move from their homes:

It was a blow, in the sense that they failed to frighten off the government, and it was proven that it could be done. They are also facing a deep theological crisis, because their rabbinical leadership made very messianic and irresponsible promises about how it would not happen and were proven wrong. They've had a really lethal clash with reality.

Re: Cindy Sheehan Frank Rich:

CINDY SHEEHAN couldn't have picked a more apt date to begin the vigil that ambushed a president: Aug. 6 was the fourth anniversary of that fateful 2001 Crawford vacation day when George W. Bush responded to an intelligence briefing titled ''Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States'' by going fishing.

Re: Prettifying History Paul Krugman:

[W]e aren't doing the country a favor when we present recent history in a way that makes our system look better than it is. Sometimes the public needs to hear unpleasant truths, even if those truths make them feel worse about their country. Not to be coy: election 2000 may be receding into the past, but the Iraq war isn't. As the truth about the origins of that war comes out, there may be a temptation, once again, to prettify the story. The American people deserve better.

Re: Historical Accuracy Alessandra Stanley, commenting on HBO's $100 million epic on Rome:

[H]istoric accuracy in made-for-television dramas is a bit like frugality in the restaurant business: admirable, but not the kind of virtue that attracts four stars.

Re: Iraq and the Founding Fathers Joseph Ellis:

[E]ven if we could miraculously construct a time machine to transport the American founders — our all-time Hall of Fame statesmen — to advise the current Iraqi leadership, it would make little difference in the outcome. The presumption that the deserts of Iraq were fertile ground for our Jeffersonian seeds seems more and more like an illusion. (One can only imagine the prickly John Adams being deposited in Baghdad and asking, in his famously unrestrained style, what idiot sent him on this fool's errand.) That illusion is now being exposed for all the world to see, as Iraqi leaders grapple with the task we have imposed upon them. How can there be a unified Iraqi state if there is not, and never has been, a unified Iraqi people?

WEEK of August 15, 2005

Re: 9-11 From a news story in the NYT about the upcoming commemoration of 9-11:

Those who try to explain the observance of the anniversary inevitably cite history, but in contradictory ways: as precedent for slowly forgetting the date, and yet also for slowly re-remembering it. The first camp argues that disaster inevitably dissipates with time. Memorial Day is now a festive occasion, marked more by vigorous sales of charcoal briquettes than by parades. Franklin D. Roosevelt called Dec. 7, when Pearl Harbor was attacked,"a date which will live in infamy," but today it no longer feels particularly infamous. Letitia Baldrige, who was chief of staff for Jacqueline Kennedy in the White House, said the date stopped being a sacred one in the 1970's, and that"now it's not even a topic of conversation." But Dr. Eviatar Zerubavel, a professor of sociology at Rutgers, argues that as the years pass, the 9/11 commemoration will grow stronger."You need to take some time away from it to make it historical: you can't put yesterday's newspaper in a museum," he said. It wasn't until 15 years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. that his birthday became a holiday. And after a summer of terrorist attacks in London and new revelations about American intelligence failures, it may be that no one needs a special day to mark the event."I don't always think about what happened on Sept. 11 on Sept. 11," said Jodi Plass, a financial analyst in Chicago who is having a bridal shower on that date."You think about it watching the news every day."

Re: Iraq & Bush Harold Meyerson:

It looks increasingly as if President Bush may have been off by 74 years in his assessment of Iraq. By deposing the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, Bush assumed he would bring Iraq to its 1787 moment -- the crafting of a democratic constitution, the birth of a unified republic. Instead, he seems to have brought Iraq to the brink of its own 1861 -- the moment of national dissolution.... [Meanwhile] the Bush presidency is perilously close to one of the greatest, and surely the strangest, foreign and military policy failures in American history. We lost in Vietnam, to be sure, but Vietnam would have gone to the Communists whether or not we intervened. The dissolution of Iraq, however, should it proceed further, is the direct consequence of Bush's decision to intervene unilaterally and of the particular kind of occupation that he mandated.

Re: Bush's Bike Ride Maureen Dowd:

How could President Bush be cavorting around on a long vacation with American troops struggling with a spiraling crisis in Iraq? Wasn't he worried that his vacation activities might send a frivolous signal at a time when he had put so many young Americans in harm's way?"I'm determined that life goes on," Mr. Bush said stubbornly. That wasn't the son, believe it or not. It was the father - 15 years ago. I was in Kennebunkport then to cover the first President Bush's frenetic attempts to relax while reporters were pressing him about how he could be taking a month to play around when he had started sending American troops to the Persian Gulf only three days before.

Re: One Gangster to Another (Stalin/Tito) Doug Macdonald, on H-Diplo:

In his new biography of Stalin, Robert Service notes that when they looked into Stalin's desk following his death they found only several items that he had saved. One of them was a note from Tito that said:"Stalin: stop sending people to kill me. We've already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle... [sic] If you don't stop sending killers, I'll send one to Moscow, and I won't have to send a second." [Robert Service, *Stalin: A Biography" (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 592.] As Service notes:"Thus did one gangster write to another." [Ibid.] As they say, you couldn't make this stuff up.

Re: Iraq's Constitution Juan Cole:

The real question isn't the constitution. The real question is actual, concrete politics. How do you keep the Kurds in without giving away the north? How do you bring the Sunni Arabs back in to ordinary politics? How do you satisfy the Shiites without implementing Islamic law as the law of the land? Those aren't even necessarily constitutional problems (Nigeria wrestles with similar issues every day, just in the framework of provincial statute). They are political ones. Resolving them requires compromises that the major political forces seem unwilling to make. It looks, in fact, like Nigeria circa 1966 (google Biafra).

Re: Tax Cuts Brendan Miniter, assistant editor of the WSJ's OpinionJournal.com:

It was bound to happen eventually, but Republicans may now be concluding that there is no longer any political benefit to pushing for deep tax cuts. This may come as a shock to those long convinced that tax cuts are not only good politics but also good economic policy because they spur growth. But the national tax-reform movement--kicked off by California's Proposition 13 in 1978, which froze property taxes, and propelled forward by Ronald Reagan winning the White House in 1980 with promises to roll back big government by rolling back taxes--now appears to be running out of steam. The reason is that the Laffer Curve applies to politics too. There's a point at which further tax cuts won't spur any more economic growth, and there's also a point after which they won't win any more elections.

Re: Iraq Milestones Tom Engelhardt:

Ellen Knickmeyer of the Washington Post reported last week that"a U.S. general said... the violence would likely escalate as the deadline approached for drafting a constitution for Iraq." For two years now, this has been a dime-a-dozen prediction from American officials trying to cover their future butts. For the phrase"drafting a constitution" in that general's quote, you need only substitute "after the killing of Saddam Hussein's sons" (July 2003),"for handing over sovereignty" (June 2004),"for voting for a new Iraqi government" (Jan. 2005) -- or, looking ahead,"for voting on the constitution" (October, 2005) and, yet again,"for voting for a new Iraqi government" (December 2005), just as you will be able to substitute as yet unknown similar "milestones" that won't turn out to be milestones as long as our President insists that we must"stay the course" in Iraq as he did only recently as his Crawford vacation began.

Re: Baghdad Blues News Story, NYT:

Baghdad seems a city transported from the Middle Ages: a scattering of high-walled fortresses, each protected by a group of armed men. The area between the forts is a lawless no man's land, menaced by bandits and brigands.

Re: Iraq War PollsFrank Rich:

A president can't stay the course when his own citizens (let alone his own allies) won't stay with him. The approval rate for Mr. Bush's handling of Iraq plunged to 34 percent in last weekend's Newsweek poll - a match for the 32 percent that approved L.B.J.'s handling of Vietnam in early March 1968. (The two presidents' overall approval ratings have also converged: 41 percent for Johnson then, 42 percent for Bush now.) On March 31, 1968, as L.B.J.'s ratings plummeted further, he announced he wouldn't seek re-election, commencing our long extrication from that quagmire. But our current Texas president has even outdone his predecessor; Mr. Bush has lost not only the country but also his army.

WEEK of August 8, 2005

Re: Hiroshima and Revisionism Thomas Sowell:

The alternative to the atomic bombs was an invasion of Japan, which was already being planned for 1946, and those plans included casualty estimates even more staggering than the deaths that have left a sea of crosses in American cemeteries at Normandy and elsewhere."Revisionist" historians have come up with casualty estimates a small fraction of what the American and British military leaders responsible for planning the invasion of Japan had come up with.

Whom are we to believe, those who had personally experienced the horrors of the war in the Pacific and who had a lifetime of military experience, or leftist historians hot to find something else to blame America for?

Re: War Fatigue Daniel Henninger:

The ebb of martial emotion is of course not new. In his biography of George Washington, Joseph Ellis writes:"During the Valley Forge encampment the officers of the Continental Army . . . based on their revolutionary credentials as the ultimate repository of commitment to the cause of American independence . . . were the 'band of brothers' that sustained the virtuous ideal amidst an increasingly corrupt and disinterested civilian society."

In"Lincoln," David Herbert Donald describes the passage of public sentiment during the Civil War from enthusiasm to condemnation:"Many Northerners were euphoric at the outbreak of war, confident that the Union with its vast natural resources, its enormous superiority in manufactures, its 300% advantage in railroad mileage was bound to prevail. . . . Seward thought the war would be over in 90 days. . . . The New York Times predicted victory in 30 days." We know what happened. And the mood changed. Ohio Rep. Clement L. Vallandigham took to the House floor and"denounced Lincoln's effort to restore the Union by war as an 'utter, disastrous, and most bloody failure.' The President, Vallandigham said, had made the United States into 'one of the worst despotisms on earth.'"

Sounds familiar ....

Re: Peter Jennings Debbie Schlussel:

It's sad when anyone dies of cancer, but we cant' let the human side of the Peter Jennings story obscure his real"achievements." While the rest of the world is blindly singing Jennings' praises, here's a reality check: Peter Jennings did more for the cause of Islamic terrorism than any media figure today. And that's nothing to celebrate, honor, or even memorialize. It is no coincidence that al-Jazeera's chief Washington correspondent praised ABC -- and Jennings, in particular -- for their"objectivity." Before there was al-Jazeera, there was Peter Jennings.

Re: The South and History Christopher Clausen:

While teaching at a state university in Virginia during the late 1970s, I once pointed out to an undergraduate class that when their parents were their age, the university had been racially segregated by law. Not only did many of the students not know this fact, they refused to believe it and thought I was making it up. (All of them were white.) Some times progress takes the form of historical amnesia.

Re: The Axis of Evil Sociologist Michael Schwartz:

In 1998, neo-conservative theorist Robert Kagan enunciated what would become a foundational belief of Bush Administration policy. He asserted that"a successful intervention in Iraq would revolutionize the strategic situation in the Middle East, in ways both tangible and intangible, and all to the benefit of American interests." Now, over two years after Baghdad fell and the American occupation of Iraq began, Kagan's prediction appears to have been fulfilled -- in reverse. The chief beneficiary of the occupation and the chaos it produced has not been the Bush administration, but Iran, the most populous and powerful member of the"Axis of Evil," and the chief American competitor for dominance in the oil-rich region.

Re: Lying PolsFreelance writer Jack Kenny:

Henry Adams, I believe it was, observed in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century that the succession of presidents from Washington to Grant had pretty well disproved the theory of evolution. Lesser and more recent wits have chronicled the decline in veracity among presidents, from Washington, who could not tell a lie, to Clinton who could not tell the truth, to"W," who cannot tell the difference. Or to put it another way, Washington could not tell a lie and Washington has been making up for that defect ever since.

Re: Bush and AfricaJulius E. Coles:

A generation from now, when historians analyze the turning point in Africa's development, they may have to credit George W. Bush with playing a surprisingly important role in the continent's economic progress.

WEEK of August 1, 2005

Re: Saudi ArabiaJuan Cole:

The late King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, who died on Aug. 1, should have been nicknamed"King Blowback." Along with his ideological soul mate, Ronald Reagan, who shared his long twilight, Fahd played a key, if inadvertent, role in nurturing Islamist extremism. Together, Reagan and Fahd -- one using proxy armies and arms, the other petrodollars -- launched a worldwide crusade against what they saw as the radical specters of communism and Khomeinism. To fight this battle, they gave massive support to Sunni Muslim fundamentalists as well as Saddam Hussein's Stalinist Baath Party. The rash decisions taken by the two leaders are in large part responsible for the crisis the world faces today.

Re: Hiroshima and TrumanEditorial, in the WSJ:

Looking back after 60 years, who cannot be grateful that it was Truman who had the bomb, and not Hitler or Tojo or Stalin? And looking forward, who can seriously doubt the need for might always to remain in the hands of right? That is the enduring lesson of Hiroshima, and it is one we ignore at our peril.

Re: Hiroshima and Osama bin LadenKai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin:

Ironically, Hiroshima's myths are now motivating our enemies to attack us with the very weapon we invented. Bin Laden repeatedly refers to Hiroshima in his rambling speeches. It was, he believes, the atomic bombings that shocked the Japanese imperial government into an early surrender -- and, he says, he is planning an atomic attack on the U.S. that will similarly shock us into retreating from the Mideast.

Re: Middle East ExpertsMartin Kramer:

Now area experts, on the Middle East or any other area, often suffer from one of two weaknesses (and sometimes from both of them). The first is an attitude to the peoples they study that is colored by emotion, so that expertise is vitiated by bias. The second is an overwhelming knowledge of detail, enough to defeat any generalization, including useful and valid ones. These two weaknesses explain why so many policymakers and generalists have decided that Middle East experts are useless, or even worse than useless.

Re: Bush Administration George McGovern:

It is my firm belief that the Bush administration is the most immoral, the least patriotic, the most anti-family and anti-life in our national history. From the beginning, Karl Rove, George Bush and Dick Cheney have talked much about being Christ-like, patriotic, pro-family and pro-life. But for 4 1/2 years, they have turned their backs on the Judeo-Christian ethic; they have desecrated the nation's true values; they have weakened the American family and undercut the foundations of the good life. This administration is un-Christian, unpatriotic and anti-family.

Re: Jane Fonda/Evolution Bill McClellan:

HISTORIANS will tell you that the first Missouri Compromise didn't work, but in the spirit of Henry Clay, maybe we ought to try again. That first compromise, you might remember, had to do with slavery. The new Missouri Compromise would have to do with evolution and creationism. Actually, the new term for creationism is intelligent design, and the idea, as I understand it, is that life is so amazing and so complex that it could not have happened by accident. What should schools teach? So here is the Missouri Compromise: Schools will teach that we did indeed evolve from lower forms of life -- yes, we are related to monkeys -- but life has now gotten so crazy that things cannot be happening on their own. We are in a novel, and a Higher Power is writing it. The signs are everywhere. The item that pushed me over the edge was the news about Jane Fonda. The 67-year-old actress has decided to become an anti-war activist again. She is going to tour the country on a bus that runs on vegetable oil. Huh? If Jane Fonda really opposes the war in Iraq, the very best thing for her to do would be to keep quiet. Certainly, she would know that. Everybody of a certain age remembers Hanoi Jane posing with those North Vietnamese guns. She was not just against the war in Vietnam, she was rooting for Americans to be killed. That is a terrible legacy to bring to a new anti-war movement. More germane to our argument, it's just too incredible to believe. Jane Fonda is coming back? On a bus fueled by vegetable oil? That's intelligent design.

Re: Gay History Nigel Hannaford, a columnist for the Calgary Herald:

My colleague at the Calgary Herald, Naomi Lakritz, took note on this page yesterday of the strenuous efforts of gay activists to posthumously"out" famous people. Abraham Lincoln, for instance, claimed by gay activist-author Clarence Tripp as one of their own in a book published before Christmas. I mean, who knew? But, here's the thing: What makes these people so sure everybody who's commonly thought to have been gay really was? How do they know history's iconic homosexuals didn't have their reasons for affecting affectation? Take Oscar Wilde, for instance. Everybody thinks he was bent as a fiddler's elbow. Pish. All that scandal with Lord Alfred Douglas? The dear boy was just a skirt, or whatever the opposite of a beard is. He played the part of Oscar's pansy to give the pair of them cover for their disgraceful, but entirely heterosexual debauches.... So, where's my proof? Actually, don't have a shred. But, when you're outing people, who needs it? To say it is enough. Just get the rumour started, and sooner or later it'll turn up in a history book. Which is the plan, of course, that Grade 3 classes will know Lincoln was gay before they hear he was president. As Wilde said,"To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture." Well, I'm claiming my inalienable privilege. Get over it.

WEEK of July 25, 2005

Re: OppieSteven Aftergood:

If [Manhattan] Project leader [Robert] Oppenheimer was the"father" of the atomic bomb, who did more than any other individual to ensure the success of the U.S. nuclear weapons program, then the 1954 Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) hearing which resulted in the loss of his security clearance was an oedipal revolt writ large.

Re: Memin Controversy Mexican historian Enrique Krauze, in defense of Memin:

When an American tosses charges of racism toward a Mexican the retort should be one question: Have you, in your 229 years of independent history, had a Native American or Afro-American president? Of course not.

Re: Rove and Plame and LeaksMark Feldstein:

If history is any guide, this issue [of leaks] won't go away anytime soon, regardless of the outcome of the current investigation. Anonymous sources have been leaking secret information to the press ever since the republic was founded. President George Washington was incensed upon discovering that verbatim accounts of his confidential treaties and Cabinet minutes were being published in the newspapers of the day, especially since his secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, was believed to be behind the leaks. In the 19th century, journalists routinely bribed clerks to give them government documents; sometimes competing reporters even pooled their money to raise the necessary funds to pry out particularly costly information.

Moreover, reporters have been getting locked up for protecting their sources since at least 1848, when John Nugent of the New York Tribune refused to tell Congress who leaked him the draft of a secret treaty with Mexico. While in custody, the journalist continued to file stories and doubled his salary, emerging as a hero a month later.

Re: Iraq & Vietnam Patrick Cockburn:

For future historians Iraq will probably replace Vietnam as the stock example of the truth of Wellington's dictum about small wars escalating into big ones. Ironically, the US and Britain pretended in 2003 that Saddam ruled a powerful state capable of menacing his neighbours. Secretly they believed this was untrue and expected an easy victory. Now in 2005 they find to their horror that there are people in Iraq more truly dangerous than Saddam, and they are mired in an un-winnable conflict.

Re: Whales and OilRebecca Solnit:

While we were looking at humpbacked whales a few months ago, my companion asked me if I ever thought about how Moby Dick's narrator, Ishmael, survived -- by floating away from the destroyed ship Pequod in his friend Queequeg's coffin. Whales themselves survived into the twenty-first century in part because of petroleum, the black stuff seeping out of the Pennsylvania earth that made the Rockefellers rich and whale oil unnecessary for lighting lamps (and because of the first international whaling treaty in 1949). Of course, petroleum went on to create the climate change that threatens habitat for whales and trashes their world in other ways. Typically, there isn't an easy moral to this, any more than there is to Ishmael floating away safely because his friend had terrible premonitions of death. And that's part of the richness of Herman Melville's telling. The world is full of tales in which morals are hard to extract from facts.

WEEK of July 18, 2005

Re: Judge John Roberts WSJ columnist Manuel Miranda:

Just after the First World War, President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, was not very successful in garnering support in the Senate for American membership in the League of Nations. Opposition was led by Republican Sen. William Borah of Idaho. Years later Borah was asked why he thought the League was such a bad idea."I didn't," he answered."I was against it because it was Wilson's idea." So far the opposition on the left to President Bush's nominee as the next associate justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts Jr., has mustered no more intellectual firepower than that.

Re: Affirmative Action David Gelernter:

... [Sandra Day] O'Connor herself was the first woman on the Supreme Court. When President Reagan nominated her in 1981, affirmative action was fairly new; O'Connor made it look good. She was superbly qualified, yet presumably would have been overlooked had Reagan not searched expressly for a female.

But that was long ago. Today, affirmative action is ripe for the junkyard. There's dramatic evidence in President Bush nominating a garden-variety white male to O'Connor's seat. He said something important by doing so. Consider the fact that for much of the 20th century, the"Jewish seat" was a Supreme Court convention. To have one Jew on the court (no more, no less) seemed proper and fitting. But in time Jews went mainstream and the single"Jewish seat" quietly disappeared. (There are now two Jewish justices).

Bush has delivered a comparable message to women and minorities: Welcome to the mainstream! We don't need a"woman's seat" on the court. There are no more outsiders in American life.

Now let's get rid of affirmative action.

Re: John Roberts Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, commenting on the Democrats criticism of Judge John G. Roberts:

It's a little bit like biblical Pharisees, you know, who basically are always trying to undermine Jesus Christ.

Re: Blogging from Iraq Will Hickox, a young historian manque who was sent to Iraq when his Army Reserve unit was activated:

Where to begin? You have stumbled onto the journal of this guy .... My goal is to keep a running account of my service with the U.S. Army in the Middle East. I also plan to include pictures, provided I can find a digital camera within my price range (don't hold your breath). What you won't find here: maudlin effusions of patriotism a la that annoying"Proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free" song that might as well be the national anthem for all the airtime it gets. Neither will you have to suffer through endless acronym-laden descriptions of military hardware, because, luckily enough, I don't know much about that stuff myself. In the tradition of other great"bloggers" of the recent past and present, I will write about what I want to write about, and I hope you enjoy it, As Yet Nonexistant Reader. I have also decided to name my blog Tales from the Desert, because that was the most silly and pretentious title I could think of at the moment. Kinda gives the whole thing a"Lawrence of Arabia" feel, don't you think?

Re: Iraq & Vietnam Stanley Karnow, referring to Iraq and Vietnam:

These are totally different kinds of situations. Nonetheless, there are some similarities. People who used the word 'quagmire' at the beginning were wrong. But it's turned into a quagmire.

Re: Karl Rove/Plame David Brooks:

If I thought my source was putting a CIA agent’s life at risk, I’d burn him.

WEEK of July 11, 2005

Re: Karl Rove/Plame Editorial in the WSJ:

Democrats and most of the Beltway press corps are baying for Karl Rove's head over his role in exposing a case of CIA nepotism involving Joe Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame. On the contrary, we'd say the White House political guru deserves a prize--perhaps the next iteration of the"Truth-Telling" award that The Nation magazine bestowed upon Mr. Wilson before the Senate Intelligence Committee exposed him as a fraud.

For Mr. Rove is turning out to be the real"whistleblower" in this whole sorry pseudo-scandal. He's the one who warned Time's Matthew Cooper and other reporters to be wary of Mr. Wilson's credibility. He's the one who told the press the truth that Mr. Wilson had been recommended for the CIA consulting gig by his wife, not by Vice President Dick Cheney as Mr. Wilson was asserting on the airwaves. In short, Mr. Rove provided important background so Americans could understand that Mr. Wilson wasn't a whistleblower but was a partisan trying to discredit the Iraq War in an election campaign. Thank you, Mr. Rove.

Re: Deep Throat David Kipen:

For this we waited 30 years? Early reviews of Bob Woodward's book about Deep Throat are trickling in, and even for readers like me determined to avoid them, the upshot looks pretty clear: The co-author of"All the President's Men" hasn't really gotten to the bottom of why Mark Felt, a high-ranking FBI man from Idaho, now living in peaceful retirement in Santa Rosa, helped Woodward unravel Nixon's Watergate conspiracy.

Re: Bush and Global Warming Harvbey Wasserman:

The horrific terrorist bombings in London are a pale reflection of the terror erupting from George W. Bush's energy plan, which will ultimately kill far more people and wreck far more planetary havoc than four bombs and fifty deaths on a single city's streets.

Amidst Thursday's awful carnage, Bush leapt to deliver his set sermon on good versus evil. But in the same breath he bullied the G-8 nations into groveling at the feet of Big Oil, on whose behalf he is slaughtering thousands in Iraq.

Bush is the Osama bin Laden of climate change. Even conservative Republicans on the American corporate right are growing nervous about the continued emission of carbon dioxide into the earth's atmosphere, which has reached apocalyptic proportions.

Re: Serbia Courtney Angela Brkic:

Instead of coming to terms with its past, Serbia has circumvented the issue with the narrative skills befitting a psychopath.

WEEK of July 4, 2005

Re: Democracy Historian Wilson J. Moses:

If this country were truly democratic, I would still be picking cotton.

Re: London Attacks David Zurawik:

While the American news channels and commercial networks that aired in Britain yesterday were filled with images of carnage and talk of confusion in the wake of bombings in London, the government-supported BBC, the most-watched news outlet in the United Kingdom in times of crisis, offered viewers an oasis of relative calm. Interviews with correspondents and government officials interspersed with videotaped images of emergency workers restoring order provided a sense of stability even as the death toll climbed.... The marked contrast in coverage offers clues to differences in national history and character. It also stems from a philosophy at the BBC that is decidedly at odds with that of the ratings-driven networks and all-news cable channels of the U.S.

Re: London Attacks Daniel Henninger:

Every Islamic terrorist, from bin Laden and al-Zarqawi down to the next suicide bomber, knows how politics in the West works now. They know that many people of the West react to acts of violence differently than they did in 1940 when Winston Churchill demanded"Victory in spite of all terrors. Victory, however long and hard the road may be."

But there were no cameras and satellite feeds set up on every corner of that death-strewn road. Yesterday's attack produced another new-media first: Grainy video images fed by a cell phone from a bombed subway tunnel. If the American people had seen daily the up-close reality of every battle and bomb in 1943, might we have"withdrawn" before June 1944?

Re: London Attacks Timothy Naftali:

At the risk of seeming callous, the other message [Homeland Security Secretary] Chertoff should have sent is that Americans need to toughen up a bit. Be vigilant; don't panic. Look at how the British are handling these attacks. Their endurance of the Irish Republican Army's 30-year terror campaign has made them masters at picking up the pieces after an attack and moving on. Did they institute a national alert today? No. Did they close down the subways indefinitely? No. Some theaters canceled shows scheduled for tonight, but that was a small and sensible measure taken to lessen the pressures on London's transportation system as it stretched to the limit to get people home from work. Could we possibly expect this sort of sane moderation had Los Angeles been the bombers' target rather than London?

Re: Iraq and Terrorism Norman Solomon, media critic:

When the French government suggested a diplomatic initiative that might interfere with the White House agenda for war, the president responded by saying that the proposed scenario would “ratify terror.” The date was July 24, 1964, the president was Lyndon Johnson and the war was in Vietnam.

Re: Public Support for Iraq WarJuan Cole:

Forty-nine percent of Americans in a recent poll think the war in Iraq has made the US safer. Only 15 percent think that it has made the US less safe. The American public annot entirely be blamed for this level of ignorance, since their mass media has not told them the truth about the dangers created for the US by all the mistakes Bush has made in Iraq. The CIA believes that the place is a virtual incubator of anti-American terrorism, as do many other analysts. On the other hand, Forty-nine percent are skeptical that Iraq will become peaceful and democratic. I suppose that they just have not connected the dots there. Friends, if Iraq remains violent and a failed state, that just cannot be good for US security.

Re: Bush's Bike CrashNYT news story:

Mr. Bush, apparently aiming to burn off some of his birthday calories after arriving at the Gleneagles resort in Scotland, took his mountain bike out for a spin. He was pedaling along at what his spokesman, Scott McClellan, described as"a pretty good speed" when he crashed into a local police officer who had been standing guard along the road. The president, who was wearing a helmet, slid across the asphalt, suffering"mild to moderate" scrapes on his hands and arms, Mr. McClellan said, and was bandaged by the White House physician, Dr. Richard Tubb. The White House provided no details of any damage to Mr. Bush's ego.

Re: History Quiz

Question asked in a July 4th quiz published by the Sacramento Bee:

Which actress is a descendant of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence?

a) Lindsay Lohan

b) Reese Witherspoon

c) Natalie Portman

d) Jodie Foster

(The answer: Reese Witherspoon is a descendent of John Witherspoon, who signed the Declaration of Independence as a representative of New Jersey. He was a Presbyterian clergyman (the only clergyman to sign the document) and president of the college that became Princeton University. Reese Witherspoon's historical connection to the declaration is one reason she was chosen to host a video about it as part of the Declaration exhibit opening today at the California Museum for History, Women and the Arts.)

Re: Bush, Patton and Woodrow WilsonFrank Rich on President Bush's war rhetoric:

To start off sounding like Patton and end up parroting Woodrow Wilson is tantamount to ambushing an audience at a John Wayne movie with a final reel by Frank Capra.

Re: Gerald Ford Margalit Fox

William J. Brink, a former managing editor of The Daily News of New York who was responsible for one of the most memorable headlines in American journalism, FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD, died yesterday morning in Norwalk, Conn.... Set in huge bold letters, the headline screamed across Page 1 of the paper on Oct. 30, 1975. In six taut syllables, it brought home its message with the power of a knockout punch: At the height of New York's fiscal crisis, President Gerald R. Ford had declined to bail the city out. Those six syllables, as Mr. Ford later acknowledged, almost certainly lost him New York State in his 1976 race against Jimmy Carter, and with it, the presidency.... Displayed on the three major television networks and reproduced in newspapers around the world, Mr. Brink's headline has endured in the national memory for almost 30 years. The corresponding headline in The New York Times that day, FORD, CASTIGATING CITY, ASSERTS HE'D VETO FUND GUARANTEE; OFFERS BANKRUPTCY BILL, remains unsung.