Week of April 13, 2009

It's official: Obama creates more czars than the Romanovs: 'With [the] naming of Border Czar Alan Bersin, the Obama administration has by any reasonable reckoning passed the Romanov Dynasty in the production of czars. The Romanovs ruled Russia from 1613 with the ascension of Michael I through the abdication of Czar Nicholas II in 1917. During that time, they produced 18 czars. ... In addition to Bersin, we have energy czar Carol Browner, urban czar Adolfo Carrion, Jr., infotech czar Vivek Kundra, faith-based czar Joshua DuBois, health reform czar Nancy-Ann DeParle, new TARP czar Herb Allison, stimulus accountability czar Earl Devaney, non-proliferation czar Gary Samore, terrorism czar John Brennan, regulatory czar Cass Sunstein, drug czar Gil Kerlikowske, and Guantanamo closure czar Daniel Fried. We also have a host of special envoys that fall in the czar category including AfPak special envoy Richard Holbrooke, Mideast peace envoy George Mitchell, special advisor for the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia Dennis Ross, Sudan special envoy J. Scott Gration and climate special envoy Todd Stern. That's 18.

The University of Rochester never asked me to make an invidious distinction between the public and the professional, but taught history as a form of criticism. If that sounds amateurish, as if critics are less serious than bibliomaniacs, then consider a short list of distinguished students and graduates from the Rochester history department and marvel at the blend of scholarly erudition and public commitment animating their work: Chris Lehmann, Kevin Mattson, Christopher Phelps, Rochelle Gurstein, Casey Nelson Blake, Cathy Tumber, Russell Jacoby. Has any small history department in recent memory made a comparable contribution?

I've put in my professional time -- editing a column for the American Historical Association's newsletter and publishing refereed articles in Intellectual History Review and Left History, where I have a 40-page, 100-footnote article forthcoming that would arouse any tenure committee, were I to make it that far. As things stand, I see no special reason to worry. Are there any tenure-track jobs left to lose?

In the cold war, an age of great powers, grand bargains and reasonably solid client states, there were ample opportunities for that — whether in arms control with the Soviet Union or peacemaking between our respective client states around the globe. But this is increasingly an age of pirates, failed states, nonstate actors and nation-building — the stuff of snipers, drones and generals, not diplomats.

Tap-dancing Nazis ready to take Berlin by storm



According to the FBI Biased Motivated crimes in the U.S. for 2007 by religion a total of 1477 such bias crimes were committed, of that 1010 were committed against Jews, 65 against Catholics, 59 against Protestants, and 133 against Muslims.  Jews were targeted almost 10 times more than Muslims.

Imagine if Roosevelt in 1942 had said to Stalin, sorry, Joe, we don’t like your Communist ideology so we’re not going to accept your help in crushing the Nazis. I know you’re powerful, but we don’t deal with evil.

That’s a rough equivalent on the stupidity scale of what Bush achieved by consigning Iran’s theocracy to the axis of evil and failing to probe how the country might have helped in two wars and the wider Middle East when the conciliatory Mohammad Khatami was president.