Week of August 2, 2010

He’s been dead for 23 years, and a black man is president, but Jimmy Baldwin is still angry.

We consider today the sad case of Charlie Rangel, the beloved 20-term Congressman from New York City.

You've probably heard of the Great Man Theory of History. The Charlie Rangel story can be explained by the Great Guy Theory of History.

Men have a shorthand way of sorting through the torrents of human behavior. They'll say someone is a"great guy."

Like in:"Have you ever met Charlie? Great guy."

That's it. Two words."Great guy." You're in the club. Vouched for. Cleared for take off.

The US did not ‘win’ the Iraq War. It simply outlasted it. It was strong enough to remain, during the Sunni guerrilla war and the Sunni-Shiite Civil War, until the Iraqis exhausted themselves with fighting. But the massive violence provoked by the US occupation so weakened the Bush administration that it was forced to accept a withdrawal timetable dictated by the Iraqi parliament, in part at the insistence of deputies loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr and others connected to Iran.

The lawyer for Rod R. Blagojevich urged jurors last week to acquit his client of corruption charges, in part because Mr. Blagojevich, the chatty former governor of Illinois, was simply too dull to carry out the devious schemes of which he stands accused.

No one would say he is “the sharpest knife in the drawer,” his lawyer, Sam Adam Jr., told jurors during closing arguments.

In the annals of public corruption cases, that would be a novel, though not entirely unprecedented, defense.

Pakistan, 63 years after its founding, still exists not to be India.