Week of May 18, 2009

Obama says he doesn't want to re-litigate the last 8 years. That is frankly disingenuous. The last 8 years was never litigated. And crimes were committed. If they are not addressed, they will become norms, not crimes.

Obama is caught between two powerful forces and two conflicting ideas [with regard to the torture debate].

Republicans want to change the subject from their own party's failures and distract from the progress Obama and Democrats in Congress are making on health care and cap-and-trade legislation. Their slogan might be: Bring on the past!

Many Democrats, in the meantime, are eager to hold the Bush administration accountable for its policies on torture and all manner of other things. They are also uneasy -- in fact, many are deeply unhappy -- with a series of Obama decisions that accepted some Bush approaches, notably barring the release of torture photographs and continuing to use military commissions to try certain terror suspects. The complementary slogan from these Democrats might be: You can't escape the past!

I don't understand why, in 2008 as we are all taught to be tolerant, people cannot be tolerant of me as a white Southern man and my right to fly a Confederate flag. The Confederate flag is not a symbol of racism to me. It is only a symbol of my Southern heritage that I am proud of.

Berlin | Can Germans laugh at Hitler? This country is so earnest sometimes that even the arrival, finally, of Mel Brooks’s slapstick musical adaptation of his cult classic film “The Producers” has provoked newspapers here to rehash the eternal question.

Just as Reagan drove down taxes while increasing military spending and then used the resulting deficit to stymie liberal spending plans, Obama is increasing spending and the deficit to force tax increases.

Why did the predictions of a pandemic turn out to be so exaggerated? Some people blame an overheated media, but it would have been difficult to ignore major international health organizations and governments when they were warning of catastrophe. I think there is a broader mistake in the way we look at the world. Once we see a problem, we can describe it in great detail, extrapolating all its possible consequences. But we can rarely anticipate the human response to that crisis....

Every time one of these viruses is detected, writers and officials bring up the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918 in which millions of people died. Indeed, during the last pandemic scare, in 2005, President George W. Bush claimed that he had been reading a history of the Spanish flu to help him understand how to respond. But the world we live in today looks nothing like 1918. Public health-care systems are far better and more widespread than anything that existed during the First World War. Even Mexico, a developing country, has a first-rate public-health system—far better than anything Britain or France had in the early 20th century.