history, historiography, politics, current events
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
The Self-Appointed President
Milbank wrote:
"Barack Obama has long been his party's presumptive nominee. Now he's becoming its presumptuous nominee."
"Fresh from his presidential-style world tour, during which foreign leaders and American generals lined up to show him affection, Obama settled down to some presidential-style business in Washington yesterday. He ordered up a teleconference with the (current president's) Treasury secretary, granted an audience to the Pakistani prime minister and had his staff arrange for the chairman of the Federal Reserve to give him a briefing. Then, he went up to Capitol Hill to be adored by House Democrats in a presidential-style pep rally."
"Along the way, he traveled in a bubble more insulating than the actual president's. Traffic was shut down for him as he zoomed about town in a long, presidential-style motorcade, while the public and most of the press were kept in the dark about his activities, which included a fundraiser at the Mayflower where donors paid $10,000 or more to have photos taken with him..."
As he marches toward Inauguration Day (Election Day is but a milestone on that path), Obama's biggest challenger may not be Republican John McCain but rather his own hubris."
"Some say the supremely confident Obama -- nearly 100 days from the election, he pronounces that "the odds of us winning are very good" -- has become a president-in-waiting. But in truth, he doesn't need to wait: He has already amassed the trappings of the office, without those pesky decisions."
Monday, July 28, 2008
Barney Fife's Take on the Emancipation Proclamation
Once again I have that great blog Civil War Memory to thank for yet another entertaining and interesting video.
Andrew J. Bacevich on the "Good War"
"For historians, World War II revisionism is likely to remain a tough sell. The process of enshrining the conflict of 1939-45 as the “Good War” has now advanced to the point of being all but irreversible. The war’s canonical lessons, especially those relating to the perils of appeasement, have permanently etched themselves in our collective consciousness.
"The problem with this orthodox interpretation is not that it’s wrong but that it is inadequate. The reflexive tendency to see every antagonist as another Hitler (or Stalin) and every sensitive diplomatic encounter as a potential Munich (or Yalta) has produced an approach to statecraft that is excessively militarized, needlessly inflexible, and insufficiently imaginative. The remedy is not to engage in a vain effort to change the way Americans remember World War II, however, but to restore that conflict to its proper context."
"Ripped out of context, the war, especially the struggle against Nazi Germany, has become a parable. Whatever their value as a source of moral instruction, parables offer less help when it comes to understanding international politics. Parables simplify—and to simplify the past is necessarily to distort it."
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Penn & Teller take on PETA
PETA is one of the organization that I just plain hate. So, you can imagine the excitement I felt when I found out that Penn & Teller took on PETA on their show Bullshit.
Student of the Civil War, R.I.P.
The short life of my other blog has come to an end. I have decided to consolidate my blogs into one because this makes my blogging more manageable. All the posts from Student of the Civil War have been moved to Publius.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Lincoln's Legacy
"Following his untimely death on August 1, 2007, Phillip Shaw Paludan left his own legacy as editor in this slim but thought-provoking volume that contains four new essays depicting major problems confronted by the sixteenth president. Along with the editor, three other distinguished Lincoln scholars – William Lee Miller, Mark E. Neely, Jr., and Mark Summers – portray Abraham Lincoln and how he contended with questions of politics, law, constitutionalism, patronage, and democracy. They represent an outstanding assessment of Lincoln’s virtues as president."
"The essays examine the conflicted democratic leader ahead of those being led. But isn’t a democratic leader also supposed to be a follower – obeying the will of the people? We desire strong leaders and justly fear them. We desire wide-spread democracy and justly worry about the consequences. After all, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, yet is credited with preserving the Constitution."
"This oxymoron is clearly seen in Lincoln’s 1838 Lyceum speech in which the future president condemned mob violence and racial lynching but also considered the tension between a constitutional order and ambitious individuals who seek to transcend its restrictions. Such challenges, Lincoln wrote, aspire to greatness, and seem to come “from the family of the lion or the tribe of the eagle.” How does a democratic order contain such ambition? And how can such ambition find satisfaction in democratic statesmanship?"
"These essays demonstrate that this is not an incidental tension in democratic political life but may be the essential one, defining democracy’s risk and responsibilities. Powerful political leadership almost always contains within itself a challenge to democracy. It asserts prerogatives. It takes liberties. It even emerges most clearly at times when the democratic order itself is under threat as with Abraham Lincoln, or Winston Churchill, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt."
Monday, July 21, 2008
Another View of Sword's Courage
In an earlier post I reviewed Wiley Sword's Courage Under Fire, in which I was critical of the book. So, I thought I would post excerpts form a review that gives another view of the book. John E. Fairweather, reviewing the book for Civil War Book Review, wrote:
"What is courage? What does it mean to be brave? Is courage something concrete that one can identify, or is it that simple? Is it driven by goals and to what extent does courage affect people’s everyday lives? Ask anyone what courage means, and they could probably give a definition, but ask for an example, and the differences of opinion are sure to generate debate."
"In his new book, Courage Under Fire, Wiley Sword takes on these questions. With excerpts from letters and documented events, Sword shows the courage and the suffering of people caught in the maelstrom of the Civil War in a very real sense. A Pulitzer Prize nominee and winner of the Fletcher Pratt award for his book Embrace an Angry Wind (1994), Sword has put names and faces to the word “courage,” showing that the definition of the word can be as varied as the people who define it."
"If hindsight is 20/20 then foresight should be considered legally blind. Much like a court case, it is important for all involved to see the entire body of evidence before passing judgment. When ordered to attack a heavily defended Confederate position, Lieutenant Colonel Frank Curtiss of the 127th Illinois Infantry refused. Curtiss, a battle hardened veteran, believed that the attack, scheduled to take place across open terrain near Atlanta, Georgia, on August 3, 1864, was foolhardy and refused to allow his men to become cannon fodder for the enemy. Curtiss was subsequently removed from his command, and the attack went on without him. Major Thomas Taylor, of the 47th Ohio Volunteer Infantry did take part in the attack, which resulted in a Union victory although the unit took heavy causalities during the fighting. As one might suspect, he was outraged at the conduct of his superior officer, and hoped that Curtiss would be arrested and charged with desertion under fire. Based on this situation, does it take more courage to challenge authority, or to accept the dangers and try against all odds to succeed?"
Saturday, July 19, 2008
The Good War....or the Not So Good War: Part II
McConnell then attempted to make the connection between America's victory in WWII and the current war in Iraq (which McConnell opposes). He wrote: "The current Iraq morass is in part an outgrowth of the strategy the United States adopted without discussion at the end of the Cold War—that of seeking unilateral global hegemony. Making the United States stronger militarily in every part of the world than any regional power was deemed vital to American security. The neoconservatives were explicit in advocating this, but mainstream liberals hardly objected. Virtually the entire bipartisan Washington establishment now considers it normal that the United States spends as much militarily as the rest of the world combined." This is just bad historical thinking. It is just plain foolish to the plant the seeds of the current war in the outcome of WWII. By this logic one could argue that if it weren't for the crusades than 9/11 would not have happened. This is preposterous! It was not the victory over Nazi Germany that created the current state of affairs in the world. To claim so would be to ignore the decades of the Cold War and the developments that took place during that era.
America's attempt to assert hegemony over other peoples through military force pre-dates 1945. One needs only to look to America's dealings with Latin America to see that the US asserted power over other peoples through use of its military might, which was stronger than any force that any Latin American state could muster to counter America's thrust. (Here's a list of instances in which the US used its military might to dominate other peoples: the Northwest Indian War, 1790s; the Creek War, 1813-1814; Black Hawk War, 1832; the Mexican-American War, 1846; conquest of the Plains Indians, 1840s/50s-1890; Spanish-American War, 1898; occupation of Cuba, 1898-1902, annexation of Puerto Rico, 1898; invasion and occupation of the Philippines, 1898-1946; annexation of Hawaii, 1898; the invasion and occupation of Haiti, 1915-1934.) As you can see, America's use of military powers to assert hegemony was not a result of WWII.
McConnell eventually concluded that the US, as a result of WWII, is now in a position similar to that of pre-1914 Germany. He concludes: "Future historians will ponder the attitudes of the contemporary American establishment, leading a country armed to the gills, desperate to convince itself that it faces existential threats from minor powers, its spirit at once fearful and bullying. We might pray that analogies to Wilhelmine Germany never fit too well." McConnell, though he doesn't come out and say, is making an America First argument that even Charles Lindbergh would have been proud to make. I don't think that McConnell makes any valid points and his argument rests on a view of history that is so tainted by his current political views that is would seem laughable to many serious historians.
Was World War II the Good War?
As a student of history I don't think we should be concerning ourselves with arguing about any historical event in terms of whether it was good or not. (Though I have strayed from this personal rule from time to time and have cast moral judgements on the past.) As someone who is interested in military/diplomatic history I am looking forward to reading what an historian like Andrew J. Bacevich has to say about the war's legacies. The debate may also leave readers with certain insights as to how particular groups remember the past. I am looking forward to reading the featured articles and will post much more on this topic as I finish reading the entire debate.
America's Tradition of Political Smears
"For a nation that wants to cast itself in such noble terms, its presidential politicking has always been nasty, particularly nasty in some cases."
"So far, the slights and offenses tossed at Obama seem mild by comparison."
"After all, no one has claimed yet that our wives will be transformed into whores and our children put into servitude or murdered and our belief in God so shaken that our very nation would be in jeopardy."
"That's what Thomas Jefferson's enemies claimed would happen were he to become president, observed Paul Boller Jr. in his great book "Presidential Campaigns.""
""The Bible cast into a bonfire," warned Timothy Dwight, the Congregationalist clergyman president of Yale. "Our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution; soberly dishonored; speciously polluted; the outcast of delicacy and virtue.""...
"One might bemoan the nasty nature of modern commentary, the hyperbole of the blogosphere, the meanness of cable TV rhetoric and who knows what else in a land where not wearing a flag lapel pin can get as much attention as the lack of health-care benefits."
"You want nasty politics?"
"Drop in on the Founding Fathers. Between what those guys had to say about one another, and what their partisans had to say, one could construct an encyclopedia of slanders."
Can Historians Use Fiction to Argue About the Past?
"My new book is not a conventional history book. It combines solid history with fiction. Having studied and taught about the Black Death for more than thirty years I wanted to find a new way of adding to our knowledge and understanding of this massively important but very well-worked historical event. I therefore decided to try to write an intimate history of the tumultuous years of the mid-fourteenth century seen through the eyes of those who lived and died in the ferociously lethal epidemic. It was to be a history from the inside, with the hindsight, overviews, judgments and perspectives of the twenty-first century historian banished from the text."
"But I soon found it impossible to reconstruct in a deep and satisfying manner the experiences of ordinary people in the tumultuous years between 1345 and 1351 by using surviving sources in the conventional manner. For even the very best of the local records, including those of the Suffolk village of Walsham-le-Willows that provide the foundations of this study, reveal frustratingly little in a direct fashion about what was heard, thought, believed or done by ordinary villagers and their priests. The fourteenth century has left no diaries, reminiscences or correspondence, and precious few sustained commentaries. In fact, there is scarcely any truly personal information about the mass of men and women who lived at the time, for they were illiterate and their rulers and betters were not concerned to write much about them. Surviving records reveal instead the motives and priorities of the lords who commissioned them and the clerks and administrators who compiled them, by concentrating on such largely impersonal matters as legal disputes, community regulations, landholdings, the exercise of seignorial authority and the extraction of seigniorial payments."
Hatcher wrote that he realized that there just wasn't anything in any archives that would let him tell the story he wanted to tell. He came to the conclusion that "if this hidden story is to be told it cannot be by using orthodox historical methods." He continued:
"This does not mean that historians should leave its telling entirely to novelists, dramatists and filmmakers. Acceptable historical methods frequently proceed from the known to the unknown, and historians commonly draw heavily on the facts in order to tackle issues and answer questions beyond where the facts take them. I have tried to do just this, but in a decidedly more explicit and adventurous fashion. The central part of this book is constructed in the form of a narrative written by a contemporary a few years after the Black Death, and it therefore contains speculation as well as specifics, fiction as well as fact. Indeed, it more closely resembles docudrama or creative nonfiction than traditional history, and it contains dialogue. But, as far as possible, the recreations are based on what is known to have happened, and the attitudes and ideas expressed by the characters are derived from what contemporary sources would lead us to expect. Even the language the characters use, though modernized, is drawn heavily, and frequently directly, from fourteenth-century sources, as the endnotes testify."...
"My motives were those of a historian: to teach the truth about the period in so far as we understand it, and to reveal the lost history of the Black Death, rather than to invent it or simply tell a good story. I do not know whether many of the events in this book took place in Walsham and its region in the way they are described. But I believe they are likely to have done so in a broadly similar fashion in many places throughout England. Nevertheless, much of the book remains an invention, a wide-ranging speculation on what might have taken place rather than a much more constrained account of what we know did take place."
"I was encouraged in my writing by a number of supportive colleagues, friends and experts in this field, who found the format that I had chosen threw welcome light on some important themes very poorly illuminated by surviving sources. Recreating and playing out scenes from the time of the Black Death in which the documents we have were compiled and used, and where the beliefs, arguments and sentiments we read about were expressed, debated and questioned, can lead to the reinforcement or the questioning of our assumptions. At the least, I hope that this book may serve as an accessible means of entering into an unfamiliar distant world during a period of unprecedented crisis."
I think that Hatcher's approach to his subject could open a new door for historians who want to bring fresh insights to their areas of specialization. Integrating fiction into serious historical scholarship could be a way in which academic historians may be able to broaden their readership and bring the reading public good historical scholarship. (Quality historical studies are something that are not usually found on the shelves of Barnes & Noble.) I'm looking forward to reading Hatcher's book.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Great Scene!!!
This is one of my favorite movie scenes. Though there are some inaccuracies, it is great to hear names of historians like Gordon S. Wood and James Lemon in a major film.
What is a Neocon?...Who is a Neocon?
As someone who has spent the last five years on university campuses I have heard just about every neocon slur in the book. With each one I heard it became much more obvious that my professors and classmates had no idea what the term neocon means, but where just using it to express their righteous rage against President Bush and his cabinet. This came as no surprise because most professors take no time to understand what neocons or other conservatives stand for or what they have argued. These professors were already trapped inside their ideological boxes and refused to think outside of the box. (sorry for using that over used phrase) Over the past few years the term has been carelessly thrown around by the media, academe, and ordinary Americans. Some have used the term as a way to vent their antisemitic feelings and thoughts. Others have used it in the same way that my professors have; as a way to express their anger at Bush. Yet, nobody has really taken the time to understand what the term means.
Historian Victor Davis Hanson, who has been labelled an 'evil' neocon, has written about the neocon slur. He wrote:
"Much of my correspondence centers on “neocon,” as in Buchanan’s wrong label “neocon court historian.” I’ve written no biography of any administration official, much less been subsidized or asked to do any particular writing to further an administration goal. I have been to the White House only on 3-4 occasions, always accompanied by a larger group of historians of widely differing views."
"Neocon means “new conservative” and I suppose refers to those of the once hard left who, largely in distrust of the Soviet Union and disillusionment with Great Society programs, moved right, most prominently during the Reagan era. Buchanan himself worked with them in the Reagan White House, and I would imagine supported their tough, correct stance on rollback, and the questioning of 1960s entitlements."
"The word became a pejorative slur with gusto in 2003 with the lead-up to Iraq. Perhaps some essays by neo-cons questioning the motives and patriotism (wrongly I think) of paleo-cons accentuated the falling out. But the big break came in 2004-6 with the insurgency in Iraq, when neocon became de facto synonymous with “Jew” and there were overt efforts to tie Kristol, Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith and others to a sort of covert cabal that had forced us to go to war for Israel — this despite the fact that Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld and Rice were neither Jews nor neocons nor malleable dupes. That Francis Fukuyama, James Woolsey, or Bill Bennet were neocons seemed likewise to have had little effect on the Israel “amen corner” thesis."
Hanson went on to outline his personal poltical history:
"I have always detested communism, and have never been a hard-left, disillusioned Trotskyite, but rather a conservative Democrat. In the past, my only real political jousting had been in two areas, academia in which Who Killed Homer?” questioned postmodernism and contemporary leftwing academic theory, and in books on farming such as The Land Was Everything and Letters to an American Farmer, which were defenses of the agrarian tradition and won no support from either corporate agriculture or new-age organic growers who did not like the conservative rural ethos expressed. Much of my speaking in the 1990s was to small audiences of farmers, who were being squeezed by corporate subsidized agriculture and yet were not new-age, organic leftists. Mexifornia reflects that conservative worry about the effects of unchecked illegal immigration — at a time when many or most neo-cons were Wall-Street Journal open-borderites."
"I thought the 1998 letter to Clinton asking for regime change and an attack on Saddam was wrong, but, after 9/11, came to the conclusion, like 75% of Americans, that there would never be peace in the region, nor a chance to rollback Islamic radicalism with Saddam’s terrorist-sponsoring regime in power. The 12 years of no-fly-zones, embargo, oil-for-food, and U.N. sanctions were not only weakening and losing support, but playing into the hands of our enemies."
Hanson concluded by summing up his position on the war in Iraq. After all, the neocon slur came into common usage as a way to voice anger over the Iraq war. His conclusion:
"I disagreed with many of the decisions made about the Iraq war, and voiced them several times in print during the last few years — especially the concentration on WMD rather than on all 23 Congressional writs to go to war, the pull-back from Fallujah, the fiery “bring ‘em on” rhetoric that sometimes was not followed up by equally aggressive action, the mysterious sudden retirement of Tommy Franks as soon as the insurgency started, the inability to find generals who believed they could win the peace, and a number of other issues."...
"But unlike some other critics, I never thought such lapses were either fatal to our cause, or by any standard unusual in military history. I took issue with those who had supported the war, and then suddenly abandoned it, and with the thinking that a brilliant three-week campaign reflected their views, while a botched occupation could only have belonged to others. Rather, I assumed that the U.S. military would always find a way to win, that the victory would be of enormous importance, and that while observers should point out perceived mistakes in operations, it was easy to do so from the rear and such criticism should never reach a level to cause a loss of morale either here or abroad, especially while soldiers were in the field of fire."
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Philadelphia Soul Win Conference Championship....Will Play San Jose in the Arenabowl!!!
James I. Robertson on the Leagcies of the Civil War
I came across this video on the blog Civil War Memory.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Historian John Y. Simon Passes Away at 75
"John Simon, professor of history and executive director of the Ulysses S. Grant Association, died Tuesday morning, university spokesman Rod Sievers confirmed."
""John Simon was a giant of a man," said Jonathon Bean, a history professor who has known Simon since 1995. "He was one of the great public intellectuals SIU had, and by that I mean he was popular with students on campus and audiences worldwide.""
"Simon, 75, worked at the university for the past 44 years. He was the editor of 28 published volumes of "The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant." He taught courses on the American Civil War, Reconstruction and Illinois history."
"He won numerous awards for his work on Civil War history, writing more than a hundred articles, essays and book chapters during his career."
Friday, July 11, 2008
Here's More On Buchanan's Churchill
Jeet Heer, of the Guardian, recently reviewed Buchanan's book on Churchill's unnecessary war with Hitler. Heer wrote:
"Churchill, Buchanan contends, was a disaster for western civilisation. Instead of fighting Hitler, Britain should have followed a policy of "dual containment" keeping out of Europe to let Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia fight among themselves. This policy would have allowed Britain to maintain its empire for generations to come, rather than become a shrivelled post-war welfare state at the margins of the European Union. In sum, Buchanan's Churchill is an epic failure."
"It's easy to dismiss Buchanan as a crank. His alternative history scenario is built on the type of half-baked speculations that make scholars wary of counterfactual history: What if Napoleon hadn't attacked Russia? What if Abraham Lincoln had allowed the South to secede? What if Superman had been a Nazi? These are questions for an undergraduate bull session or a pub argument, not serious scholarship."
"Laughable as a historian, Buchanan is interesting as an ideological symptom. Buchanan's thinking on this is hardly a personal eccentricity and reflects the larger worldview of the anti-communist right, both in the distant past and the present. If you listen to Bush and Cheney, Churchill worship seems like an inherit part of conservatism. But the fact is that both in the past and the present, many right-wingers have hated Churchill. Buchanan is both a throwback to an earlier conservatism and perhaps the harbinger of coming trends." ...
"Buchanan grew up in an isolationist household, where Charles Lindberg was regarded as a hero for trying to keep America out of the second world war. As Buchanan recalled in his 1988 autobiography Right From the Beginning, his father agreed with the popular late 1930s American adage "Let Hitler and Stalin fight it out". This sentiment still undergirds Buchanan's thinking about the second world war."
"The dividing line between Churchill and his conservative critics was Nazism and anti-communism. Churchill thought that Nazism was a greater evil than communism. His critics feared communism more, so much that they were willing to tolerate a Nazi-dominated Europe. But Buchanan isn't just channelling long-dead isolationists. His new book also builds on the work of recent scholars, many of them British conservatives, who take a dim view of Churchill, seeing the roots of Britain's post-war diminishment in his failed leadership."
"As historian John Lukacs, a confirmed Churchill devotee, noted in his 1999 book Five Days in London, the 1980s and 1990s saw the emergence of a school of revisionist historians that included Maurice Cowling, David Reynolds, Sheila Lawlor and John Charmley. Although their works had different approaches and arguments, Lukacs saw them as united by a common theme: "that Churchill had no plan in May 1940 except to keep fighting, hoping that something might turn up (Micawber-like), though he hardly knew what and that Churchill's obsessive hatred of Hitler may have blinded him, for had he accepted an accommodation with Hitler by 1941 at the latest, the Empire might have been saved.""
"Although Buchanan is sometimes dismissed as an Anglophobe, he's essentially popularising the works of these revisionist British scholars (most of who are conservative Thatcherites). In effect, Buchanan's book fuses together two mutually contradictory strands of nationalist history. On the one hand, Buchanan frequently evokes the themes of traditional American isolationism, an Anglophobic tradition that argues that England suckered the United States into the two world wars. But on other occasions Buchanan rehearses the themes of English right-wing historians, an often anti-American tradition that contends that Churchill's attachment to the "special relationship" with the United States led to a radical decrease in British power. Of course, both these intellectual traditions are flawed, but Buchanan's attempt to combine the two together makes for a very incoherent brew."
"The British revisionist school Buchanan relies on is often remarkably feckless. John Charmley, for example, wrote that defeating Nazism was "a great achievement, but it buttered no parsnips". The moral problems of leaving Europe at the mercy of Hitler are obvious. But there is another weakness in this type of revisionism that is less often noticed. It's absurd to think that the life of the British Empire could have been extended more than a decade or two. By the 1930s, you already had a full-fledged nationalist movement in India and embryonic stirrings throughout the empire. It's inconceivable that Britain could have held on as a global power for much longer than it in the real world. In a nutshell: the second world war was caused in part by Britain's weakness; the war was not the cause of Britain's weakness."
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Anti-Thomas Jefferson Political Ad
Each election cycle I hear many people grumble about the uncivil nature of American politics today. Politics in this country has always been dirty, but today it's much less vicious than it had been. Here's an anti-Jefferson TV ad, which uses an actual attack that was leveled at Jefferson during the 1800 campaign.
Obama and Iraq = Nixon and Vietnam
"Richard Nixon came to office with a rumored secret plan to end the war in Vietnam. Maybe Barack Obama's plan to end the war in Iraq is going to wind up being a secret, too."
"The presumptive Democratic nominee set off media firecrackers last week by hinting at further refinements to his strategy for withdrawal. Previous strategies include his January 2007 call for a complete withdrawal by March 2008, followed by his March 2008 call for a complete withdrawal by July 2010, or 16 months after he takes office."
"Now Mr. Obama tells us that the 16-month timeline is contingent on (1) "[making] sure that our troops are safe and that Iraq is stable" (my emphasis), and (2) the opinion of "the commanders on the ground." Also in question is the size of the "residual force" that the Illinois senator envisions for Iraq after the bulk of U.S. forces is withdrawn. Will it be an embassy guard, plus some military advisers and special-ops forces? Or, as suggested in a March paper by Colin H. Kahl, who runs Mr. Obama's working group on Iraq, an "overwatch force" of between 60,000 and 80,000 soldiers?"
Stephens makes some valid points about Obama's approach to Iraq and he provides futher evidence of Obama back-tracking on policies that he once ademently advocated on the campaign trail. Stephens concluded with an interesting parting shot. He wrote:
"The delightful irony, of course, is that Mr. Obama's prospective task in Iraq has been made infinitely easier by the success of President Bush's surge, the very policy he derided only a year ago. How seriously this calls his judgment into question – "judgment" being the key quality on which he sold his candidacy to the Democratic Party – will be for voters to decide in November. But it does suggest he's lucky, an attribute any president would wish for. Poor Richard Nixon, most of all."
Monday, July 7, 2008
The Legacy of George W. Bush
1. "Defined the contemporary era as an "age of terror" with an open-ended "global war" as the necessary, indeed the only logical, response;"
2. "Promulgated and implemented a doctrine of preventive war, thereby creating a far more permissive rationale for employing armed force;"
3. "Affirmed - despite the catastrophe of Sept. 11, 2001 - that the primary role of the Department of Defense is not defense, but power projection;"
4. "Removed constraints on military spending so that once more, as Ronald Reagan used to declare, "defense is not a budget item";"
5. "Enhanced the prerogatives of the imperial presidency on all matters pertaining to national security, effectively eviscerating the system of checks and balances;"
6. "Preserved and even expanded the national security state, despite the manifest shortcomings of institutions such as the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff;"
7. Preempted any inclination to question the wisdom of the post-Cold War foreign policy consensus, founded on expectations of a sole superpower exercising "global leadership";"
8."Completed the shift of US strategic priorities away from Europe and toward the Greater Middle East, the defense of Israel having now supplanted the defense of Berlin as the cause to which presidents and would-be presidents ritually declare their fealty."
This is interesting, but I think (I know) that Bacevich has an ax to grind. He does, however, make some good points, but will Bush's legacy be entirely negative? Though just about every American today will say yes, we just can't know at this point in time.
More on Obama's Shifting Policies
Dennis Byrne of the Chicago Tribune has written on Obama's decision not to accept public financing for his campaign. This recent decision made by Obama came after months of the Senator promising to accept public funds. Byrne wrote:
"David Plouffe, manager of Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign, keeps sending me e-mails asking me to cough up money because the presumptive Democratic nominee's fundraising is, supposedly, as pure as the driven snow. Somehow, my name got on Obama's list of prospective suckers, and for months I've read this song and dance about how he has freed himself from the tentacles of special interests."
"This is baloney."
"Consider Plouffe's money pitch that followed Obama's recent decision not to accept publicly funded campaign money, which means Obama can spend way more than the $84.1 million campaign spending cap—which, by the way, is something the senator promised never to do."
"Said Plouffe: "Opting out of public matching funds was an extremely difficult decision and frankly we are at a disadvantage when it comes to raising money. Unlike [ Sen.] John McCain [the presumptive Republican presidential nominee], this campaign has never accepted donations from Washington lobbyists or special-interest PACs [political action committees] . . . While McCain has built his fundraising strategy around high-dollar donors giving huge checks to the [Republican National Committee], you are creating a new model for publicly financed campaigns.""
"First, Plouffe is being—I'll be charitable—disingenuous when he says that "we are at a disadvantage" in the money game. "Strategists for both parties," reports Bloomberg News service, "say Obama probably will outpace McCain by more than $100 million for the presidential campaign." Obama can spend whatever he will raise; he has already raised more than $266 million, most just for the primaries. The non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics said this is the first time since the Nixon-McGovern race that the two major presidential candidates will compete on an uneven playing field."
"Second, the Obama campaign is shading the truth when it implies that all the money comes from small contributions of $5, $10 or $20. The Center estimated that 55 percent of the hundreds of millions raised has come from big donors—those giving more than $200."
"Third, Plouffe is flat wrong when he says this campaign has never accepted money from lobbyists or special-interest political action committees. The Center reported that Obama had raised $115,163 from "lobbyists" as of March 20. Obama now says they are "former" lobbyists, so they don't fall under his ban on lobbyist donations."
I'm almost completely sick of hearing about "change we can believe in" coming from a man who is displaying the trademark characteristics of the old politics that he pretends to scorn so much.
Sunday, July 6, 2008
The Change that Obama is Bringing
Since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, Barack Obama has changed his mind on many key issues that he has been campaigning on for the past year. Gerard Baker of The Times of London reported on all the changes of heart that Obama has recently made. Baker wrote:
"Change, it turns out, wasn't all that it was cracked up to be. Having campaigned for the past year as the agent of transformation, the man who would lead an historic shift in America's political direction, Barack Obama is discovering that there is quite a lot he likes about the way things are."
"Since securing the Democratic nomination a few weeks ago, the only change coming from the Illinois senator has been in what he seems to stand for. Last month he dropped his opposition to a Bill before Congress that would give telecoms companies immunity from prosecution for carrying out illegal wiretaps on potential terrorist suspects."
"He told a cheering crowd of Israel's supporters of his fervent commitment to the security of the Jewish state and added, for good measure, that an “undivided” Jerusalem should be the nation's capital. He said that he likes free trade after all, and that his primary campaign pledge to dismantle the North American Free Trade Agreement was a case of “overheated rhetoric”."
"Last week he expressed support for a Supreme Court decision that struck down a ban on handguns and opposition to another that outlawed the death penalty for rape of a child."
"This week he promised to expand President Bush's faith-based organisations initiative, a programme that channels funds to religious groups so that they can deliver social welfare services, which the Left regards as a heinous blurring of Church-State separation."
"If next week he named Dick Cheney as his running-mate and revealed that he spends his spare time drilling for oil in wildlife habitats, the only surprise would be that it took him so long."...
"A whimper of pain has gone up from the base. Those who really believed in the Audacity of Hope now fear a Timidity of Despair. Thousands of Obama supporters have signed a petition on his website begging him to reconsider his position on the illegal wiretaps - a seemingly minor campaign issue, but one that carries great talismanic symbolism for civil libertarians."
Baker comes to the "surprising" conclusion that Obama's change in what he stands for is part a brillant plan. That's a little too optimistic. As one of the few people in this country who has not caught hope fever, I believe that Obama is realizing that his catchy phrases of "hope" and "change that we can believe in" (whatever that means) will not carry him into the White House. He is also realizing that some of the ridiculous positions that he stood behind for so long are too far to the left even for an electorate that is overwhelming sick of the current Republican administration.
Saturday, July 5, 2008
A Presidential Candidate We Deserve
"Some weeks ago the Economist (June 7th-13th) had on its cover a picture of John McCain and Barack Obama, accompanying the story entitlted “America at its best.” But as July 4th approaches, most folks I know are, au contraire, dumbfounded that these two men are the best we can do for Presidential candidates in a nation of 300 million: in one corner, a naïf with fewer than 2 years in the U.S. Senate and dangerously liberal views; in the other, a cantankerous Abe Simpson clone who’s hated by probably half of his own party (when my six-year-old son told me recently that McCain was going to win because “he scares Bin Ladin,” I replied “Son, sometimes he scares me”). What we need is someone who combines the charisma, global savvy and intellect of Obama with the tenacity, think-outside-the-box experience and ability to take a beating—literally—of McCain. There’s only one man I can think of who fits that bill."
"Dr. Henry Jones, Junior. The guy who’s named after his dog."
"How does Indy stack up against BHO? Well, he’s no less charismatic, appealing to the same college demographic as does the Democratic candidate—although Dr. Jones’s appeal would seem to be most effective in smaller venues, such as classrooms, where co-eds have been known to express their ardour for their favorite archaeology professor on their own eyelids. And whereas Obama’s cosmopolitanism is impressive—Kenyan father, grammar school in Indonesia, high school in Hawaii—Indy’s is no less so—Scottish father, travels as a youth in Europe and the Ottoman Empire, then of course his sojourns as an archaeologist all over the world, from Peru to Egypt to India. Finally, while Obama may have a Harvard JD, Jones has a University of Chicago Ph.D.—that’s at least a tie. And while Dr. Jones has no political experience per se, his years of maneuvering academic politics no doubt honed his political skills, such that by the end of his last adventure obtaining the crystal skull he had been named an associate dean at his college. Indy is no liberal, either: he has been a noted supporter of Republican Presidents (“I Like Ike” is one of his catchphrases), and his distaste for Communism is famous, such that he has been known to refuse to shake hands with Soviet military officers and in fact even once told one to “drop dead, Comrade.”"
"As for how Indiana Jones would stack up against John McCain….well, it’s hard to top McCain’s surviving 5 ½ years in a tiger cage in Vietnam. But not only has Jones come out on top in fist-, sword- and pistol-fights with Nazis, Thugees and Commies, he’s survived poisonous snakes, ancient booby traps, loincloth-clad Indians, runaway mining cars and even a nuclear bomb blast. McCain also has nothing on Dr. Jones when it comes to unconventional thinking and crossing the aisle: the former may have worked with Democrats, but the latter has worked with Arabs, African merchant captains, Chinese youth, Indian village leaders and his own estranged family members to outwit—as well as outslug—all the aformentioned villains. As for taking a beating and keeping on ticking: Indy has taken punches, and returned the favor, from bald Nazi muscleheads and Soviet spetsnaz, that would have killed your average pencil-neck academic quicker than a bad book review or even denial of tenure."
Guelzo on Lincoln Haters
"Pick any major figure in American conservative thought since 1945, and you will generally find the attitude toward Abraham Lincoln to be surprisingly ambivalent. Take Willmoore Kendall, one of the sainted names of modern conservatism, as an example: according to Kendall, Lincoln used the Declaration of Independence to demolish the Constitution in the name of promoting equality. "What Lincoln did...was to falsify the facts of history," he argued, "and to do so in a way that precisely confuses our self-understanding as a people." Or take Gottfried Dietze, a libertarian, who saw Lincoln's appeal to the Declaration as a pretense which allowed him to demote the Constitution to a mere piece of framery, so that Lincoln would be free to pursue dictatorial glory as president. Lincoln, he said, was "a democratic Machiavellian whose latent desire to achieve immortality broke forth at the first opportunity offered by...the Civil War." Or if not lusting after glory exactly, allows Dietze, Lincoln used the pursuit of equality as an excuse for granting himself "unprecedented and virtually dictatorial powers as president," and tore down the restraints of the Constitution so that he could satisfy a kind of political Oedipus complex."
"A good deal of this ambivalence stems from the long history of agrarian resistance to modern industrial capitalism, a resistance whose apostles have at various times included Thomas Jefferson, John Taylor of Caroline, John C. Calhoun, William Jennings Bryan, Allan Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and now Wendell Berry. From their pens has arisen the mythopoetic chant of the land, the land, and the land, as though loam and offal possessed moral qualities. Given that Lincoln got off the land as soon as he turned 21, became a lawyer (those menacing enforcers of contracts and mortgages), and made war upon a Confederacy whose principal product was the most valuable agricultural commodity in the 19th century—one can understand why anyone with visions of rural piety floating through his head probably has little reason to admire Lincoln."
"A more violent reason for this dislike grows out of the near-sighted conclusion that because the Confederacy justified its secession from the federal system on the ground of state rights, Lincoln must necessarily have represented an agent of centralized "big government," and therefore a camel's nose that every good conservative needs to whack the moment it pokes through the political tent flaps. And it is true that, under Lincoln's administration, the volume of federal spending and congressional micro-management increased in a way that would not be seen again until World War I. But this is an accusation which rarely takes into account the utterly unprecedented demands of a four-year civil war, or the fact that, once the war ended in 1865, swollen federal bureaucracy quickly shrank back to its pre-1861 dimensions. (The military force used to administer Reconstruction, often offered as an additional count against the over-mighty federal government in Lincoln's era, never amounted to more than 17,000 men.) Southerners might have claimed to be conservative for trying to conserve state rights (although Alexander Stephens, the vice-president of the Confederacy, thought that the Confederate Constitution was an innovation, "the first, in the history of the world," and a step beyond the "sandy foundation" of the old Constitution because it incorporated the "great, philosophical, and moral truth" of black racial inferiority.) But Lincoln was also struggling to be a conservative by preserving the Union from self-destruction; and that, in turn, was key to preserving popular government in the face of what had become a profoundly reactionary political age. What was being tested by "this great civil war" was not merely the constitutional technicalities of federalism, but the entire project of "any nation so conceived and so dedicated." Was democracy doomed to incessant rounds of self-destruction? Were people really born to be ridden by those born booted and spurred? All the evidence from 1804 onwards said yes; only the American democracy said no, and now this democracy was teetering on the brink, too."
"But underlying both of these criticisms of Lincoln is a more inexplicable factor—namely, the failure of conservatives, even after half a century, to reconcile themselves to the civil rights movement. Lincoln may have been dead for four-score-and-seven years when Brown v. Board of Education (1954) inaugurated the "second Reconstruction," but many conservatives who were dubious about the second Reconstruction's use of federal power—especially federal judicial power—as the principal lever for bringing down Jim Crow could hardly help suspecting that the template for federal intervention in the 1950s had been copied from Lincoln's in the "first Reconstruction." I think this view of the relationship between the "first" and "second" Reconstructions pays insufficient attention to the distinctive ways in which the latter was shaped by Progressivism, while the former was a campaign to introduce free-market and free-labor capitalism into a society built around racial caste. And it is true that there were many things wrong with the civil rights movement—its dismissal of the rule of law as a white man's invention, the domino effect of racial egalitarianism toward egalitarian absurdity, the invention of victimhood and identity politics. But it was right about one very big thing, and that was the vicious and deliberate way in which white Southerners trampled the sacredness of American citizenship into the mud, while whites everywhere else turned a conveniently blind eye. Civis romanus est brought down Gaius Verres; civis americanus est ought to have protected Emmett Till, James Meredith, and Medgar Evers, but it didn't. Any conservative who wonders why blacks' perceived self-interest veers so often in the direction of power rather than law has only to consult the many ways in which, for a century after the Civil War, the "rule of law" was used as an excuse for the routine subornation of natural rights and civil justice."
Friday, July 4, 2008
Confronting a Horrendous Family History
I posted this on my other blog, Student of the Civil War.
Elly DeWolfe Hale has confronted her family's tragic past. She is a descendant of the infamous DeWolfe family, which made a fortune in the slave trade. A recent article reported:
"Here in Seattle, Elly DeWolfe Hale was far removed from her early American ancestors, a wealthy, illustrious family whose legacy still colors life in Bristol, R.I."
"Then came a letter that unmasked a shameful secret:"
"Hale's storied forebears, the DeWolfs, weren't just distillers and merchants, they were human traffickers who built their fortune on the slave trade. In fact, as Hale and other relatives were to discover, the DeWolfs were the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history."
" Over three generations -- even after the trade was outlawed in 1808 -- the DeWolfs shipped 10,000 Africans to the Americas to sell as slaves or conscript as labor for their sugar plantations in Cuba. About a half-million of the slaves' descendants are alive today."
"Suddenly, Hale, who had grown up in Reno, Nev., and thought of herself as a modern, progressive child of the West, felt the national stain of slavery lapping at her heels."
""We are connected to the past and the future in ways we don't realize," she mused last week, still visibly moved by her struggle to reconcile the consequences of her family history."
Historic Confederate Flag Purchased by North Carolina Museum of History
The regimental flag that belonged to the regiment whose soldiers accidentally shot and mortally wounded General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson was recently purchased by the North Carloina Museum of History. North Carolina's News and Observer reported:
"A woolen flag with cotton stars flew the night Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson caught a bullet in the arm -- a quiet witness to one of history's great accidents."
"You can see it inside a case on the third floor of the N.C. Museum of History, hanging over a Confederate ammunition chest recovered from a Johnston County farm: the flag carried by the regiment that inadvertently shot the man who was arguably the South's No. 2 general."
"The museum just bought the flag for a price Curator of Military History Tom Belton would describe only as a bargain."
"Any price would be puny for such a find, he said, calling the flag one of the greatest acquisitions in his 30-year career. No matter what you feel for the rebel soldiers who carried it -- pride, disdain, boredom -- the flag can light the imagination."
""It's the flag that was flying over the regiment that mortally wounded Stonewall Jackson," said Tom Walsh, the New Jersey professor who sold it. "It opens up all sorts of what-ifs.""
Thursday, July 3, 2008
George Washington's Boyhood Home Found
"On a bluff overlooking the Rappahannock River, 50 miles south of the capital city that bears his name, archaeologists have unearthed a site that provides what they call the most detailed view into George Washington's formative years: his childhood home and, likely, the objects of his youth."
"There are marbles and wig curlers, utensils and dinnerware. A pipe, blackened inside, carries a Masonic crest and dates to when he joined the Fredericksburg Masonic Lodge."
"The announcement of the long-sought discovery came yesterday, after seven years of digging and several disappointments."
""What's so great about this dig is that when people talk about Washington, they always talk about his adult life," said David Muraca, director of archaeology for the George Washington Foundation, which owns the Ferry Farm property, where the discovery was made. "So this will expand the knowledge about his early years.""
George Washington as a boy and the mythical cherry tree.
Roll Call to Destiny
"Brent Nosworthy wrote Roll Call to Destiny after the success of his volume The Bloody Crucible of Courage: Fighting Methods and Combat Experience of the Civil War (2005). It was while writing that massive tome that the author realized the potential for looking in depth at small unit actions during the American Civil War. For this work, "small units" are defined as "a group that fights as a monolithic entity and thus undergoes similar experiences, rather than a formally defined level of military organization or size of the fighting force" (p. 3). This broad definition of a small unit allows Nosworthy to look at everything from a single section of artillery to a division of troops as a single experience-sharing entity."
"By looking at a single unit, such as the Second Minnesota Volunteer Infantry at Missionary Ridge, Chattanooga, or the Seventh South Carolina Cavalry at the Battle of Darbytown Road, Petersburg, the author helps individualize the events of the war. By moving away from commanding generals and actions of whole armies, Nosworthy offers a much fuller picture of personal actions, both heroic and cowardly, of individuals. More important, we are able to see how the actions of just a few can affect a much larger whole. The work includes a number of small unit actions involving fighting, ranging from the Virginia Peninsula all the way out to Fort Hindman in Arkansas. In each case, the analysis is of just a small piece of the engagement, with an overview of the greater battle to help keep the analyzed portion in context."
"Beyond this, however, Nosworthy has done something quite original; he not only examines individual units within a larger action, but also analyzes tactical situations facing men on the ground and how they were able or not able to adapt to those situations. Going back to our previously mentioned units for example, the Second Minnesota Volunteer Infantry was deployed as skirmishers during the Union assault on Missionary Ridge. After gaining its initial objective of the Confederate works at the base of the ridge, the regiment found itself under an intense bombardment from Confederate artillery above. "Artillery in the heights above now focused its attention on the rifle pits and rained canister on the Union soldiers below" (p. 247). Thus, it was decided by the men on the spot to push forward and up the ridge face. The regiment's skirmish formation greatly reduced the effectiveness of Confederate artillery and musket fire. This, on top of the increasingly difficult angle of fire being forced on the Confederate defenders, allowed the Second Minnesota to lead a successful penetration of the Confederate Army of the Tennessee. This attack, along with the flanking movements elsewhere, led to the collapse of Confederate General Braxton Bragg's siege of Chattanooga."
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
A Victory for Free Speech in Canada...Sort Of
The Canadian Human Rights Commission has decided to dismiss the charges brought against Mark Steyn and the magazine Maclean's. This is a victory for free speech, but it may turn out to be a pyrrhic victory. Speech can never truely be free in a society in which 'human rights' commisions (which are no more than thought police) are allowed to exist.
Maclean's website has posted a blurb about the dismissal. It stated:
"Maclean's magazine is pleased that the Canadian Human Rights Commission has dismissed the complaint brought against it by the Canadian Islamic Congress. The decision is in keeping with our long-standing position that the article in question, "The Future Belongs to Islam," an excerpt from Mark Steyn's best-selling book America Alone, was a worthy piece of commentary on important geopolitical issues, entirely within the bounds of normal journalistic practice."
"Though gratified by the decision, Maclean's continues to assert that no human rights commission, whether at the federal or provincial level, has the mandate or the expertise to monitor, inquire into, or assess the editorial decisions of the nation's media. And we continue to have grave concerns about a system of complaint and adjudication that allows a media outlet to be pursued in multiple jurisdictions on the same complaint, brought by the same complainants, subjecting it to costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars, to say nothing of the inconvenience. We enthusiastically support those parliamentarians who are calling for legislative review of the commissions with regard to speech issues."