Week of April 30, 2007

They stood earnestly in a row, combed, primped and prepped, as Nancy Reagan gazed up at them with courteous interest. But behind the hopeful candidates, a dwarfing shadow loomed, a shadow almost palpable in its power to remind Republicans of the days when men were men and the party was united. His power is only increased by his absence. But enough about Fred Thompson.

This is a piece about Thursday night's Republican presidential debates, but first I would like to note that the media's fixation with which Republican is the most like Reagan, and who is the next Reagan, and who parts his hair like Reagan, is absurd, and subtly undermining of Republicans, which is why they do it. Reagan was Reagan, a particular man at a particular point in history. What is to be desired now is a new greatness. Another way of saying this is that in 1960, John F. Kennedy wasn't trying to be the next FDR, and didn't feel forced to be. FDR was the great, looming president of Democratic Party history, and there hadn't been anyone as big or successful since 1945, but JFK thought it was good enough to be the best JFK. And the press wasn't always sitting around saying he was no FDR. Oddly enough, they didn't consider that an interesting theme.

They should stop it already, and Republicans should stop playing along. They should try instead a pleasant,"You know I don't think I'm Reagan, but I do think John Edwards may be Jimmy Carter, and I'm fairly certain Hillary is Walter Mondale."

Win was a very special colleague. As a Quaker, he was not one to stand on ceremony, and was averse to anything approaching ostentation. Thus he arrived for lunch every day carrying a little brown paper sack from Ace Hardware Store. He used the same sack every day until it was literally worn out, which would lead him back to Ace to buy another screw or bolt, and thus to get another"free" sack.

I will not post any more blogs on the subject [of the relgious views of the Founding Fathers], because the whole reason I wrote Moral Minority was to acquaint the general reader with the actual words and thoughts of the Founders themselves on this subject, rather than with the endless and Jesuitical interpretations of these words and thoughts by politically driven journalists and bloggers (I won’t say “such as ourselves”). Anyone who is truly interested in the subject, interested that is in what the Founders really thought, would do better to read the original sources, which are more than eloquent. My own recommendations would include James Madison’s Detached Memoranda and his “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments”; Jefferson’s “Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom” and Notes on the State of Virginia; the correspondence between Jefferson and Adams, and the correspondence between Adams and Benjamin Rush. The letters to the Christian Rush show a rather different side to Adams than those to the openly skeptical Jefferson, which makes everything all the more fascinating.

The initial judgment was that the Cheyenne and Arapaho people had it coming. It wasn’t a massacre but a"battle." There weren’t victims, only"savages." And the butchers were heroes. That was the view of the Rocky Mountain News in 1864, shortly after Col. John Chivington led 700 members of the Colorado milita in the unprovoked slaughter of 160 Native Americans camped on Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado.

The feat of"warfare" involved the wholesale slaughter of Native Americans, many of them elderly, women and children, who’d been told they would be safe encamped on this spot. Even when the Indians unfurled the American flag and the white flag of surrender, the militia men continued the killing.

"If there were any savages that day, it was not the Indian people," said former Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, R-Colo., a member of the Northern Cheyenne tribe, the Associated Press reported.

On Saturday, Campbell was among those who gathered to dedicate the newly opened Sand Creek Massacre National Historic Site. That is fitting, as Campbell sponsored legislation that led to the official site’s formation.

To steal a laconic phrase from Fouad Ajami, say whatever you will about the American experience in Vietnam, the war was well written. Few wrote it better than David Halberstam in his 1972 masterpiece"The Best and the Brightest."