Thursday, July 19, 2012
Sunday, July 1, 2012
One of My Favorite Lines in Literature
In the loveliest town of all, where the houses were white and high and the elm trees were green and higher than the houses, where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge, where the lawns ended in orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top toward the wonderful wide sky, in this loveliest of all towns Stuart stopped to get a drink of sarsaparilla.
E.B. White
Friday, June 29, 2012
Why I Love P.G. Wodehouse and E.B. White
P. G. Wodehouse said, 'I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn … '
- I have always felt that the first duty of a writer was to ascend - to make flights, carrying others along if you can manage it. To do this takes courage, even a certain conceit. ~ E.B. White
- No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence or whose attitude is patronizing. ~ E. B. White
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
Saturday, June 2, 2012
Egypt Between a Rock and a Hard Place
I'm Neal Conan in Washington. In another dramatic turn in Egypt, the first free democratic presidential election in the nation's history set up a run-off vote next month between two divisive candidates: Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood and Ahmed Shafik the last prime minister under former President Hosni Mubarak. Between them, the two top candidates received just under 50 percent of the vote.
But ultimately the trends and the polls were pretty much on the money, which is the Brotherhood ultimately, their candidate will do better than the polls were showing, but they will do considerably worse than they did in the parliamentary election because the trends were showing the public was really angry with them on several scores.
Seventy-one percent of our polls showed that - 71 percent of the Egyptians polled said that they made a mistake by fielding their own candidate after saying that they wouldn't do so. And the role of religion and politics, while it's important, was not in any of the polls showing up as a primary reason for voting, which is, you know, which is the way it turned out. But the biggest surprise to me and to, I think, everybody else, and I'm here with some prominent Egyptians here in the conference room mulling this over this morning, really is the good showing of the Nasserist Arab nationalist, secularist candidate Sabahy who almost pulled it off being top two. He's number three.
And the remarkable thing is that he did well in particularly Islamist strongholds, especially in Alexandria where he himself was surprised. He said, I didn't know I had so much support there. So that really was the big surprise and I think it kind of leads us into this thing of not labeling people Islamist, non-Islamist, just thinking that that is going to be the only or the principle dimension of the way they're going to behave. It's all about issues. That's what we've seen.
only 46 percent of Egyptians voted
He got people who were related to the security scheme, the families of security establishment members and he certainly did well among the Copts. We knew that he would do well. He was, you know, really catering them directly, at one point, even promising that he was going to put forth a Christian woman as a vice presidential candidate. And I think in the next round, he will probably do better even among women who may be disaffected by the Muslim Brotherhood.
So it's going to be a lot of lobbying, a lot of coalition building in the next two weeks in ways that Egypt has never seen. The liberals will be a critical force here..
A lot of what drives vote share is mobilization. And the Muslim Brotherhood was able to go out there and mobilize its voters. The thing about Ahmed Shafik, which nobody is really saying, is that he was able to use the apparatus of the state, not just the old national democratic party, but the old security apparatus that knows which families to buy off and which villages. And that really worked on his behalf in sort of mobilizing voters for him, particularly in rural areas where we thought the Muslim Brotherhood would dominate.
So anybody who takes over in Egypt in the coming period knows that the military is going to have a vast scope of power, and that is generally how it is in many places that are coming out of military dictatorship. Indonesia is a good example of this. But with time, the military's powers generally we expect to get clipped way, chipped away at, until it's no longer a dominant force.
CONAN: Turkey might be an interesting comparison, Steven Cook.
COOK: You just took the words right out of my mouth. Turkey...
MASOUD: Exactly.
COOK: ...is the paradigmatic example of this kind of thing. The Turkish military broadly perceived to be all-powerful and dominant in the Turkish political system has, over the course of the last decade, been reduced in important ways to the extent that the Turkish general staff does not have the ability to drive and influence political events in the way that it once did.
Sunday, May 27, 2012
"A Long..Habit"
A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.
My List:
Hate for Gays
Zoos with apes
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Howard Zinn and the Terrorist
tarek mehanna howard zinn
Inspired by an unlikely source
But Fundamentalist Islam was more than a phase. The transformation happened in 2000, during Tarek’s senior year in high school. And it was sparked by an unlikely source: Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of The United States. His anthropology teacher assigned the book. Zinn’s radical take on U.S. history inspired Tarek to learn more about his faith. “Because before that, we were kids, we didn’t think about the world,” says Tamer. “And neither of us had given much thought to our identity as Muslims here in America.” Soon, Tarek grew his beard and began hanging out with a close-knit group of devout Muslim men.
Tamer Mehanna in front of his brother Tarek's bookshelf. (Credit: Michael May)
Tarek lived with his parents in a plush suburban home until he was taken into custody two years ago.
http://www.latitudenews.com/story/tarek-mehanna-suburban-teenager-accused-terrorist/
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Howard Zinn
** A People's History is bad history
Zinn reduces the past to a Manichean fable and makes no serious attempt to address the biggest question a leftist can ask about U.S. history: why have most Americans accepted the legitimacy of the capitalist republic in which they live?
His failure is grounded in a premise better suited to a conspiracy-monger's Web site than to a work of scholarship.
According to Zinn, "99 percent" of Americans share a "commonality" that is profoundly at odds with the interests of their rulers. And knowledge of that awesome fact is "exactly what the governments of the United States, and the wealthy elite allied to them-from the Founding Fathers to now-have tried their best to prevent."
His Civil War was another elaborate confidence game. Soldiers who fought to preserve the Union got duped by "an aura of moral crusade" against slavery that "worked effectively to dim class resentments against the rich and powerful, and turn much of the anger against 'the enemy.'"
THIS IS HISTORY as cynicism.
Zinn omits the real choices our left ancestors faced and the true pathos, and drama, of their decisions.
In fact, most Populists cheered Bryan and voted for him because he shared their enemies and their vision of a producers' republic.
Unlike Zinn, they grasped the dilemma of third parties in the American electoral system, which Richard Hofstadter likened to honeybees, "once they have stung, they die."
And to bewail the fact that liberal Democrats saw an advantage to supporting rights for unions and minorities is a stunning feat of historical naiveté.
Short of revolution, a strategic alliance with one element of "the Establishment" is the only way social movements ever make lasting changes in law and public policy.
Zinn's conception of American elites is akin to the medieval church's image of the Devil. For him, a governing class is motivated solely by its appetite for riches and power-and by its fear of losing them. Numerous historians may regard George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton as astute, if seriously flawed, men who erected a structure for the new nation that has endured for over two centuries. But Zinn curtly dismisses them as "leaders of the new aristocracy" and regards the nation-state itself as a cunning device to lull ordinary folks with "the fanfare of patriotism and unity."
=
For Zinn, ordinary Americans seem to live only to fight the rich and haughty and, inevitably, to be fooled by them.
They are like bobble-head dolls in work-shirts and overalls-ever sanguine about fighting the powers-that-be, always about to fall on their earnest faces.
Zinn takes no notice of immigrants who built businesses and churches and craft unions, of women who backed both suffrage and temperance on maternalist grounds, of black Americans who merged the community-building gospel of Booker T. Washington and the militancy of W.E.B. Du Bois, or of wage-earners who took pleasure in the new cars and new houses those awful long-term contracts enabled them to buy.
But Zinn cares only about winners and losers in a class conflict most Americans didn't even know they were fighting.
Like most propagandists, he measures individuals according to his own rigid standard of how they should have thought and acted.
** Thus, he depicts John Brown as an unblemished martyr but sees Lincoln as nothing more than a cautious politician who left slavery alone as long as possible. To explain why the latter's election in 1860 convinced most slaveowners to back secession, Zinn falls back on the old saw, beloved by economic determinists, that the Civil War was "not a clash of peoples…but of elites," Southern planters vs. Northern industrialists. Pity the slaves and their abolitionist allies; in their ignorance, they viewed it as a war of liberation and wept when Lincoln was murdered.
THE FACT THAT his text barely mentions either conservatism or Christianity is telling. The former is nothing but an excuse to grind the poor ("conservatism" itself doesn't even appear in the index), while religion gets a brief mention during Anne Hutchinson's rebellion against the Puritan fathers and then vanishes from the next 370 years of history.
**Given his approach to history, Zinn's angry pages about the global reach of U.S. power are about as surprising as his support for Ralph Nader in 2000. Of course, President William McKinley decided to go to war with Spain at "the urging of the business community." Zinn ignores the scholarly verdict that most Americans from all classes and races backed the cause of "Cuba Libre"-but not the later decisions to vassalize the Caribbean island and colonize the Philippines.
***Of course, as an imperial bully, the United States had no right, in World War II, "to step forward as a defender of helpless countries."
Zinn thins the meaning of the biggest war in history down to its meanest components: profits for military industries, racism toward the Japanese, and the senseless destruction of enemy cities-from Dresden to Hiroshima.
His chapter on that conflict does ring with a special passion; Zinn served as a bombardier in the European theater and the experience made him a lifelong pacifist.
But the idea that Franklin Roosevelt and his aides were motivated both by realpolitik and by an abhorrence of fascism seems not to occur to him.
=
The latest edition of the book includes a few paragraphs about the attacks of September 11, and they demonstrate how poorly Zinn's view of the past equips him to analyze the present.
***"It was an unprecedented assault against enormous symbols of American wealth and power," he writes.
The nineteen hijackers "were willing to die in order to deliver a deadly blow against what they clearly saw as their enemy, a superpower that had thought itself invulnerable." Zinn then quickly moves on to condemn the United States for killing innocent people in Afghanistan.
Is this an example of how to express the "commonality" of the great majority of U.S. citizens, who believed that the gruesome strike against America's evil empire was aimed at them? Zinn's flat, dualistic view of how U.S. power has been used throughout history omits what is obvious to the most casual observer: al-Qaeda's religious fanaticism and the potential danger it poses to anyone that Osama bin Laden and his disciples deem an enemy of Islam.
*****Surely one can hate imperialism without ignoring the odiousness of killers who mouth the same sentiment.
Perhaps the greatest flaw of his book is that Zinn encourages readers to view so formidable a force as just a pack of lying bullies.
He refuses to acknowledge that when they speak about their ideals, those who hold national power usually mean what they say. If FDR lied to Americans about the threat posed by Japanese-Americans during World War II, why should anyone believe his prattle about the Four Freedoms?
*****This cynical myopia afflicts an alarming number of people on the left today.
The gloom of defeat tends to obscure the landscape of real politics, which has always witnessed a clash of ideologies as well as interests, persuasion as well as buy-offs and sellouts. Zinn fiercely details the outrages committed by America's rulers at home and abroad. But he makes no serious attempt to examine why these rulers kept getting elected, or how economic and social reform improved the lives of millions even if they sapped whatever mass appetite existed for radical change.
In contrast, Howard Zinn is an evangelist of little imagination for whom history is one long chain of stark moral dualities. His fatalistic vision can only keep the left just where it is: on the margins of American political life.
Michael Kazin's latest book, co-authored with Maurice Isserman, is America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s.
Zinn reduces the past to a Manichean fable and makes no serious attempt to address the biggest question a leftist can ask about U.S. history: why have most Americans accepted the legitimacy of the capitalist republic in which they live?
His failure is grounded in a premise better suited to a conspiracy-monger's Web site than to a work of scholarship.
According to Zinn, "99 percent" of Americans share a "commonality" that is profoundly at odds with the interests of their rulers. And knowledge of that awesome fact is "exactly what the governments of the United States, and the wealthy elite allied to them-from the Founding Fathers to now-have tried their best to prevent."
His Civil War was another elaborate confidence game. Soldiers who fought to preserve the Union got duped by "an aura of moral crusade" against slavery that "worked effectively to dim class resentments against the rich and powerful, and turn much of the anger against 'the enemy.'"
THIS IS HISTORY as cynicism.
Zinn omits the real choices our left ancestors faced and the true pathos, and drama, of their decisions.
In fact, most Populists cheered Bryan and voted for him because he shared their enemies and their vision of a producers' republic.
Unlike Zinn, they grasped the dilemma of third parties in the American electoral system, which Richard Hofstadter likened to honeybees, "once they have stung, they die."
And to bewail the fact that liberal Democrats saw an advantage to supporting rights for unions and minorities is a stunning feat of historical naiveté.
Short of revolution, a strategic alliance with one element of "the Establishment" is the only way social movements ever make lasting changes in law and public policy.
Zinn's conception of American elites is akin to the medieval church's image of the Devil. For him, a governing class is motivated solely by its appetite for riches and power-and by its fear of losing them. Numerous historians may regard George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton as astute, if seriously flawed, men who erected a structure for the new nation that has endured for over two centuries. But Zinn curtly dismisses them as "leaders of the new aristocracy" and regards the nation-state itself as a cunning device to lull ordinary folks with "the fanfare of patriotism and unity."
=
For Zinn, ordinary Americans seem to live only to fight the rich and haughty and, inevitably, to be fooled by them.
They are like bobble-head dolls in work-shirts and overalls-ever sanguine about fighting the powers-that-be, always about to fall on their earnest faces.
Zinn takes no notice of immigrants who built businesses and churches and craft unions, of women who backed both suffrage and temperance on maternalist grounds, of black Americans who merged the community-building gospel of Booker T. Washington and the militancy of W.E.B. Du Bois, or of wage-earners who took pleasure in the new cars and new houses those awful long-term contracts enabled them to buy.
But Zinn cares only about winners and losers in a class conflict most Americans didn't even know they were fighting.
Like most propagandists, he measures individuals according to his own rigid standard of how they should have thought and acted.
** Thus, he depicts John Brown as an unblemished martyr but sees Lincoln as nothing more than a cautious politician who left slavery alone as long as possible. To explain why the latter's election in 1860 convinced most slaveowners to back secession, Zinn falls back on the old saw, beloved by economic determinists, that the Civil War was "not a clash of peoples…but of elites," Southern planters vs. Northern industrialists. Pity the slaves and their abolitionist allies; in their ignorance, they viewed it as a war of liberation and wept when Lincoln was murdered.
THE FACT THAT his text barely mentions either conservatism or Christianity is telling. The former is nothing but an excuse to grind the poor ("conservatism" itself doesn't even appear in the index), while religion gets a brief mention during Anne Hutchinson's rebellion against the Puritan fathers and then vanishes from the next 370 years of history.
**Given his approach to history, Zinn's angry pages about the global reach of U.S. power are about as surprising as his support for Ralph Nader in 2000. Of course, President William McKinley decided to go to war with Spain at "the urging of the business community." Zinn ignores the scholarly verdict that most Americans from all classes and races backed the cause of "Cuba Libre"-but not the later decisions to vassalize the Caribbean island and colonize the Philippines.
***Of course, as an imperial bully, the United States had no right, in World War II, "to step forward as a defender of helpless countries."
Zinn thins the meaning of the biggest war in history down to its meanest components: profits for military industries, racism toward the Japanese, and the senseless destruction of enemy cities-from Dresden to Hiroshima.
His chapter on that conflict does ring with a special passion; Zinn served as a bombardier in the European theater and the experience made him a lifelong pacifist.
But the idea that Franklin Roosevelt and his aides were motivated both by realpolitik and by an abhorrence of fascism seems not to occur to him.
=
The latest edition of the book includes a few paragraphs about the attacks of September 11, and they demonstrate how poorly Zinn's view of the past equips him to analyze the present.
***"It was an unprecedented assault against enormous symbols of American wealth and power," he writes.
The nineteen hijackers "were willing to die in order to deliver a deadly blow against what they clearly saw as their enemy, a superpower that had thought itself invulnerable." Zinn then quickly moves on to condemn the United States for killing innocent people in Afghanistan.
Is this an example of how to express the "commonality" of the great majority of U.S. citizens, who believed that the gruesome strike against America's evil empire was aimed at them? Zinn's flat, dualistic view of how U.S. power has been used throughout history omits what is obvious to the most casual observer: al-Qaeda's religious fanaticism and the potential danger it poses to anyone that Osama bin Laden and his disciples deem an enemy of Islam.
*****Surely one can hate imperialism without ignoring the odiousness of killers who mouth the same sentiment.
Perhaps the greatest flaw of his book is that Zinn encourages readers to view so formidable a force as just a pack of lying bullies.
He refuses to acknowledge that when they speak about their ideals, those who hold national power usually mean what they say. If FDR lied to Americans about the threat posed by Japanese-Americans during World War II, why should anyone believe his prattle about the Four Freedoms?
*****This cynical myopia afflicts an alarming number of people on the left today.
The gloom of defeat tends to obscure the landscape of real politics, which has always witnessed a clash of ideologies as well as interests, persuasion as well as buy-offs and sellouts. Zinn fiercely details the outrages committed by America's rulers at home and abroad. But he makes no serious attempt to examine why these rulers kept getting elected, or how economic and social reform improved the lives of millions even if they sapped whatever mass appetite existed for radical change.
In contrast, Howard Zinn is an evangelist of little imagination for whom history is one long chain of stark moral dualities. His fatalistic vision can only keep the left just where it is: on the margins of American political life.
Michael Kazin's latest book, co-authored with Maurice Isserman, is America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s.
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Pearl
Just bought one of these on Ebay. $50.00 slightly used, but in mint condition. I'm very excited.
Did Obama Really End the Iraq War?
By MAX BOOT WSJ
The popular explanation is that the Iraqis refused to provide legal immunity for U.S. troops if they are accused of breaking Iraq's laws. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki himself said: "When the Americans asked for immunity, the Iraqi side answered that it was not possible. The discussions over the number of trainers and the place of training stopped. Now that the issue of immunity was decided and that no immunity to be given, the withdrawal has started."
But Mr. Maliki and other Iraqi political figures expressed exactly the same reservations about immunity in 2008 during the negotiation of the last Status of Forces Agreement. Indeed those concerns were more acute at the time because there were so many more U.S. personnel in Iraq—nearly 150,000, compared with fewer than 50,000 today. So why was it possible for the Bush administration to reach a deal with the Iraqis but not for the Obama administration?
Quite simply it was a matter of will: President Bush really wanted to get a deal done, whereas Mr. Obama did not. Mr. Bush spoke weekly with Mr. Maliki by video teleconference. Mr. Obama had not spoken with Mr. Maliki for months before calling him in late October to announce the end of negotiations. Mr. Obama and his senior aides did not even bother to meet with Iraqi officials at the United Nations General Assembly in September.
The administration didn't even open talks on renewing the Status of Forces Agreement until this summer, a few months before U.S. troops would have to start shuttering their remaining bases to pull out by Dec. 31. The previous agreement, in 2008, took a year to negotiate.
Associated Press
A U.S. Army soldier stands by military armored vehicles ready to be shipped out of Iraq at a staging yard at Camp Victory that is set to close in Baghdad.
The recent negotiations were jinxed from the start by the insistence of State Department and Pentagon lawyers that any immunity provisions be ratified by the Iraqi parliament—something that the U.S. hadn't insisted on in 2008 and that would be almost impossible to get today. In many other countries, including throughout the Arab world, U.S. personnel operate under a Memorandum of Understanding that doesn't require parliamentary ratification. Why not in Iraq? Mr. Obama could have chosen to override the lawyers' excessive demands, but he didn't.
He also undercut his own negotiating team by regularly bragging—in political speeches delivered while talks were ongoing—of his plans to "end" the "war in Iraq." Even more damaging was his August decision to commit only 3,000 to 5,000 troops to a possible mission in Iraq post-2011. This was far below the number judged necessary by our military commanders. They had asked for nearly 20,000 personnel to carry out counterterrorist operations, support American diplomats, and provide training and support to the Iraqi security forces. That figure was whittled down by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to 10,000, which they judged to be the absolute minimum needed.
The Iraqis knew about these estimates: U.S. military commanders had communicated them directly to Iraqi leaders. Prime Minister Maliki was said (by those who had talked to him) to privately support such a troop commitment, and almost all Iraqi political leaders—representing every major faction except for the rabidly anti-American Sadrists—assented on Aug. 2 to opening negotiations on that basis.
When the White House then said it would consent to no more than 5,000 troops—a number that may not even have been able to adequately defend itself, much less carry out other missions—the Iraqis understandably figured that the U.S. wasn't serious about a continued commitment. Iraqi political leaders may have been willing to risk a domestic backlash to support a substantial commitment of 10,000 or more troops. They were not willing to stick their necks out for such a puny force. Hence the breakdown of talks.
======
Marc Lynch in Foreign Policy
======
Marc Lynch in Foreign Policy
On December 15, 2011, U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced the formal end of America's military presence in Iraq. The withdrawal came after the inability to reach agreement on a revised Status of Forces Agreement which would have allowed a limited number of troops to remain under legal conditions acceptable to the Pentagon. While the vast majority of Iraqis and Americans supported the departure of America's military presence, some supporters of a long-term U.S. military presence warned of disaster. Some, like Senator John McCain and the Romney campaign, continue to fume that we no longer occupy Iraq and complain that Obama has lost what Bush gained. But in fact, the American departure has hardly mattered at all -- and that's a good thing.
This isn't to say that Iraq has emerged as a peaceful, democratic paradise or an enthusiastic pro-American ally. Hardly. That was never in the cards, after the disastrous invasion and bungled occupation led to a horrific civil war and a near-failed state. Iraq today remains a violent, poorly institutionalized place with deep societal fissures and unresolved political tensions. But little has happened in the months since the U.S. withdrawal which differs significantly from what had been happening while the U.S. remained. The negative trends are the same ones which plagued Iraqdespite the presence of U.S. troops in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011. The U.S. presencecontributed to some of those problems, helped deal with some, and failed to resolve others. But it had always struggled to convert its military presence into political leverage, and by 2011 it had become almost completely irrelevant.
The real story of America's withdrawal from Iraq is how little impact it has really had on either Iraq or the region. There are even signs that the withdrawal has helped to nudge Iraqis onto the right path, though not as quickly or directly as I might have hoped. This month's death toll was the lowest on record since the 2003 invasion, while Iraqi oil exports are at their highest level since 1980. Baghdad successfully hosted an Arab Summit meeting, which may have done little for Syria but did go further to bring Iraq back into the Arab fold than anything since 2003. Maliki's jousting with his domestic foes and efforts to balance Iraq's ties with Tehran with improved Arab relations are what needs to happen for Iraq to regain a semblance of normality. It isn't pretty, and probably won't be any time soon, but there's absolutely no reason to believe that it would look any better with American troops still encamped in the country. Thus far, Obama's risky but smart gamble to end the U.S. military presence in Iraq is paying off.
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