Week of June 25, 2007

Paris Hilton read aloud her prison writings as if she had spent a lifetime on Robben Island, and that was surely the highlight of this heiress-actress’s first television interview since her release from jail.

[A] VOA article contains the depressing statistic that in recent polls, Turks named the United States as th number one threat to their well-being, after the terrorist group, the PKK: ' In a recent opinion poll measuring what people in Turkey perceive as the country's biggest threat, the United States was first and Iraqi Kurds were second. Leyla Tausanoglu, a political columnist for the independent Cumhuriyet newspaper, says many Turks are skeptical of American plans because of the Iraq war, and are now suspicious of U.S. ties with Iraqi Kurdish leaders.'

Many Turks reason that the US is the military power in Iraq, and if 5,000 PKK guerrillas have safe harbor in Iraqi Kurdistan, it must mean that the US supports the PKK. (In fact, it is on the State Department list of terrorist organizations).

Before W. got into the White House and ruined the world, 56% of Turks had a favorable view of the United States and the country was a firm NATO ally. Last I knew, the favorability rating had fallen to 12%, largely because Turks are afraid Bush's misadventure in Iraq will blow back on them. Now they think the US is a greater threat to them than the major terrorist organization that has menaced them for the past 30 years! It would be like the English public saying the US is a greater threat than the Irish Republican Army, or the French public saying the US is a greater threat than the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (Groupe Islamique Armé).

You just want to weep and tear your hair out at the results of these polls around the world on what people think of the United States. It is as though they have concluded we are madmen bent on messing up their lives. And, well, we did put W. in power at least once. It is like a 4-year-old with ADD having the power to order the Pentagon to do things.

My father had been reared a Republican, but he switched parties to vote for Roosevelt and never switched back. His memory of being abandoned by society and big business never left him and, for all his paternal kindness and humorousness, communicated itself to me, along with his preference for the political party that offered “the forgotten man” the better break. Roosevelt made such people feel less alone. The impression of recovery—the impression that a President was bending the old rules and, drawing upon his own courage and flamboyance in adversity and illness, stirring things up on behalf of the down-and-out—mattered more than any miscalculations in the moot mathematics of economics. Business, of which Shlaes is so solicitous, is basically merciless, geared to maximize profit. Government is ultimately a human transaction, and Roosevelt put a cheerful, defiant, caring face on government at a time when faith in democracy was ebbing throughout the Western world. For this inspirational feat he is the twentieth century’s greatest President, to rank with Lincoln and Washington as symbolic figures for a nation to live by.

Iraqis used to love fried river fish, but are afraid to eat anything caught in the Tigris nowadays, since there are so many dead bodies floating in the river.

I call history with a big H the history we get in school, with wars and dates,” he said. “It makes people’s eyes glaze over. But there’s another history, with a little h, that gets people really excited. People want to know whether their grandfather fought in the Civil War or World War II, they have a box of letters or a uniform connected to some important event. I don’t care who you are, every family has a story that connects them to history with a big H.

Interesting"Fact" of the Day: According to Glenn Reynolds, if the Vice President were impeached in the House of Representatives, Cheney would apparently preside over his own trial in the Senate because the Constitution provides that the VP is replaced by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court as the Senate's presiding officer only in an impeachment trial of the President. The VP apparently floats somewhere beyond the Constitution, above the"unitary executive" and beyond legislative oversight.

I do not understand the defeatism implicit in this Doom thread. The first rule of battle (and politics is war, with the same need for morale and a sense that one's side will advance the public welfare more effectively than that of the opposition) is assessing one's strength and the other side's weakness.

If conservatives and libertarians on this list do not see grave flaws in the bureaucratic collectivism, primitivism, and cultural decline brought about by decades of anticapitalist"progressive" and left-wing populist rule (for instance in urban ghettoes, in the schools, in the media), then all you are left with is the abortion issue and a stance toward immigration that sounds nativist, whether or not that is the motivation in all cases. I would expect that a list such as this would be able to tote up the successes of capitalist democracy (with its incentive to investment through lower taxes), the advancement of science and technology, and the protection of intellectual and cultural pluralism, which no longer exists in much of the media and in our educational system.

But most important would be a realistic assessment of threats from the fundamentalist Islamists and their anti-American allies. The isolationism that is now resurgent in both left and right-wing circles is no longer viable, if it ever was. Societies that are unable to gauge accurately real threats to survival are doomed. If the Republican party refuses to adapt to present realities and fight for the party's positive achievements, then the lack of insight and resolve will be to blame, not some pattern discerned in past elections. History does not repeat itself, but the fight to the death between pre-modern and modern societies is ongoing and inevitable.

I have now been through the first 150 pages of the documents in the C.I.A. Family Jewels archive. They are largely a disappointment.