history, historiography, politics, current events

Sunday, November 30, 2008

A People's History of Sports?

Dave Zirin's new book, A People's History of in the United States, looks very interesting. Zirin recently wrote about this book for the History News Network:

"There are those who insist that sports and politics don't belong in the same sentence, the same zip code, or the same universe."

"They mouth platitudes about how these two worlds must be hermetically sealed from one another, lest the dirty world of politics infect the sanctity of the playing field. Before the 2008 Olympics, International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge said that "political factors" must be kept away from Beijing."

"USA basketball Mike Krzyzewski chimed in, "None of these athletes (has) a responsibility to be political. They have the responsibility to represent their country." The chief of the Canadian Olympic Committee, Dick Pound, also thundered to the Canada's Olympians, "If it is so tough for you that you can't bear not to say anything, then stay at home.""

"This is rank stupidity and stunning hypocricy. It's a lie. People can say all they want that sports and politics have nothing to do with one another, but as the saying goes, "you don't have to believe in gravity to fall out of an airplane.""

full article.

Sunday, November 23, 2008

New C-SPAN Book on Lincoln

From the website:

"To mark the February 2009 bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln's birth, C-SPAN's CEO Brian Lamb and co-president Susan Swain have opened the network's archives to create Abraham Lincoln. This book is an effort to chronicle the life and legacy of America's 16th president through the eyes of 56 of the country's leading Lincoln historians, journalists, and writers."

"Fascinating, little-known anecdotes about the president are brought to light in richly detailed essays drawn from C-SPAN interviews. Extras include 16 pages of color photos and four maps that detail where Abraham Lincoln lived, the location of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln's Inaugural journey to Washington and the path his funeral train took when returning him to Springfield. A timeline of Abraham Lincoln's life, brief biographies of the 56 contributing authors, and Lincoln's most famous speeches are also included."

website.


Friday, November 21, 2008

The Myth of Lincoln's "Team of Rivals"

Matthew Pinsker wrote this for the LA Times:

"People love Doris Kearns Goodwin's book on the Lincoln presidency, "Team of Rivals." More important, for this moment in American history, Barack Obama loves it. The book is certainly fun to read, but its claim that Abraham Lincoln revealed his "political genius" through the management of his wartime Cabinet deserves a harder look, especially now that it seems to be offering a template for the new administration."

""Lincoln basically pulled in all the people who had been running against him into his Cabinet," is the way Obama has summarized Goodwin's thesis, adding, "Whatever personal feelings there were, the issue was how can we get this country through this time of crisis.""

"That's true enough, but the problem is, it didn't work that well for Lincoln. There were painful trade-offs with the "team of rivals" approach that are never fully addressed in the book, or by others that offer happy-sounding descriptions of the Lincoln presidency."

"Lincoln's decision to embrace former rivals, for instance, inevitably meant ignoring old friends -- a development they took badly. "We made Abe and, by God, we can unmake him," complained Chicago Tribune Managing Editor Joseph Medill in 1861. Especially during 1861 and 1862, the first two years of Lincoln's initially troubled administration, friends growled over his ingratitude as former rivals continued to play out their old political feuds."

Full article.

Sunday, November 9, 2008

Taking a break....will be back soon.

I apologize to the few readers of this blog about the light posting lately. I am taking a break for a week or so to finish writing my masters's thesis. I will start posting again shortly.

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Change We Can Count On

We must take an honest look at the reasons for Republican losses in the House, Senate, and Presidency. No flourish no dishonesty, no rhetoric, an honest, soul searching look at the state of the Party.

Is it true that the Republican brand is declining? Is it true that to succeeded, conservatism must be re-imagined, recreated, and reorganized? Is it true that this Democratic victory is a philosophical shift?

Republicanism is not in decline, its just momentarily unpopular do to Bush’s un-conservative policies and widespread unpopularity. Conservatism does not need to be remained—it is a timeless universal truth and traditional. This is not a philosophical shift, but a backlash. The whims of the demos, vacillating through campaign promise after campaign promise.

If conservatisms is not dying, as libs are so glad to say, what the hell is going on? Simply put:

The Right had pandered to special interest groups and the Left for too long; hurting its core principles, its moral base, and strength in the name of “bipartisan cooperation” and “working across the isle.” It is time to cut the shit!

Democrats talk a high and mighty game—bipartisan as they would like you to believe—but do they cross isles to transform their opinions. Is the Liberal-Conservative dialogue an actual dialogue, or a Liberal monologue in a Conservative tragedy? When have liberals ever crossed the isle to:

• Limit the availability and frequency of abortion
• Cut the national debt and reign in spending
• Cut pork barrel spending, line item expenditures, and fluff
• Taken an active role in ending corruption
• Minimized the size of government, the services offered
• Equalized taxation
• Promoted the growth of business
• Limited and redefined immigration

Don’t rack your brain too hard. The answer is obviously: NEVER! So I have to say one thing:

F***k them!

We will not apologize for being the “racist, bigoted, sexist, religious cooks”—WHICH WE ARE NOT! We will stop pandering to the Liberals who despite out best efforts to appear amiable and affable STILL HATE US! We will embrace and reiterate our core principals:

• Small government
• Less regulation (He that governs least, governs best)
• Economic growth
• Rugged individualism
• Socially conscious decisions
• Strict and original interpretation of the Constitution
• Less taxes
• Less services
• More local involvement
• More individual rights
• Stronger military

The angry Left succeeded in pandering to American voters. But it will be the angry Right that reclaims the nation with conservative values.

WE ARE NOT A WELFARE STATE! WE ARE NOT HELPLESS! AMERICA IS THE GREATEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD! WE ARE UNIQUE AND EXCEPTIONAL!

*Welcome to Dissent*

Yes We Can--A New Role

Having surveyed the damage done to Republicanism—both last night and over the past five years—a role in dissent seems the likely place for me, and if I may speak counterpart, and this blog. Having voted and subsequently lost, it is not my prerogative to make the next four to eight years miserable for the ruling party. If this was a coalition government, in parliamentary style, I can only predict that after four scathing yeas of opposition, a vote of no confidence would be cast and the tide of this new Liberal wave would be broken.

However, this is America, and we have no such luck. However, my initial message is to take heart. As opposition leaders and the dissenting minority, we are following in the footsteps of great men from as far back as 4000 BC. Here are just a few famous dissenters:

  • Moses against Pharaoh
  • Brutus against Caesar
  • Savonarola against Catholicism
  • Galileo against Catholicism
  • Martin Luther against Catholicism
  • Lord Bolingbroke against Walpole
  • The Founding Fathers against England
  • Jefferson against Adams
  • Calhoun against Clay
  • Radical Republicans against Johnson
  • Disraeli against Gladstone
  • Roosevelt against Wilson
  • Berkley against FDR
  • Churchill against Chamberlin (Post-WWI)
  • Churchill against Chamberlin (Post-WWII)
  • Goldwater against the Christian Right
  • The Christian Right against everything

And the list goes on…

So we join the ranks of dissent!

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

"Standing Athwart History, Yelling Stop."

I have decided to kick off Publius's life as a voice dissent with a statement from one of the original Conservative/Libertarian dissidents. This was William F. Buckley's statement from the first issue of National Review from November 19, 1955. Buckley wrote:

"There is, we like to think, solid reason for rejoicing. Prodigious efforts, by many people, are responsible for NATIONAL REVIEW. But since it will be the policy of this magazine to reject the hypodermic approach to world affairs, we may as well start out at once, and admit that the joy is not unconfined."

"Let's face it: Unlike Vienna, it seems altogether possible that did NATIONAL REVIEW not exist, no one would have invented it. The launching of a conservative weekly journal of opinion in a country widely assumed to be a bastion of conservatism at first glance looks like a work of supererogation, rather like publishing a royalist weekly within the walls of Buckingham Palace. It is not that, of course; if NATIONAL REVIEW is superfluous, it is so for very different reasons: It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it."

"NATIONAL REVIEW is out of place, in the sense that the United Nations and the League of Women Voters and the New York Times and Henry Steele Commager are in place. It is out of place because, in its maturity, literate America rejected conservatism in favor of radical social experimentation. Instead of covetously consolidating its premises, the United States seems tormented by its tradition of fixed postulates having to do with the meaning of existence, with the relationship of the state to the individual, of the individual to his neighbor, so clearly enunciated in the enabling documents of our Republic."

""I happen to prefer champagne to ditchwater," said the benign old wrecker of the ordered society, Oliver Wendell Holmes, "but there is no reason to suppose that the cosmos does." We have come around to Mr. Holmes' view, so much that we feel gentlemanly doubts when asserting the superiority of capitalism to socialism, of republicanism to centralism, of champagne to ditchwater — of anything to anything. (How curious that one of the doubts one is not permitted is whether, at the margin, Mr. Holmes was a useful citizen!) The inroads that relativism has made on the American soul are not so easily evident. One must recently have lived on or close to a college campus to have a vivid intimation of what has happened. It is there that we see how a number of energetic social innovators, plugging their grand designs, succeeded over the years in capturing the liberal intellectual imagination. And since ideas rule the world, the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply walked in and started to run things."

"Run just about everything. There never was an age of conformity quite like this one, or a camaraderie quite like the Liberals'. Drop a little itching powder in Jimmy Wechsler's bath and before he has scratched himself for the third time, Arthur Schlesinger will have denounced you in a dozen books and speeches, Archibald MacLeish will have written ten heroic cantos about our age of terror, Harper's will have published them, and everyone in sight will have been nominated for a Freedom Award. Conservatives in this country — at least those who have not made their peace with the New Deal, and there is a serious question of whether there are others — are non-licensed nonconformists; and this is a dangerous business in a Liberal world, as every editor of this magazine can readily show by pointing to his scars. Radical conservatives in this country have an interesting time of it, for when they are not being suppressed or mutilated by Liberals, they are being ignored or humiliated by a great many of those of the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality of never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity."

"There are, thank Heaven, the exceptions. There are those of generous impulse and a sincere desire to encourage a responsible dissent from the Liberal orthodoxy. And there are those who recognize that when all is said and done, the market place depends for a license to operate freely on the men who issue licenses — on the politicians. They recognize, therefore, that efficient getting and spending is itself impossible except in an atmosphere that encourages efficient getting and spending. And back of all political institutions there are moral and philosophical concepts, implicit or defined. Our political economy and our high-energy industry run on large, general principles, on ideas — not by day-to-day guess work, expedients and improvisations. Ideas have to go into exchange to become or remain operative; and the medium of such exchange is the printed word. A vigorous and incorruptible journal of conservative opinion is — dare we say it? — as necessary to better living as Chemistry."

"We begin publishing, then, with a considerable stock of experience with the irresponsible Right, and a despair of the intransigence of the Liberals, who run this country; and all this in a world dominated by the jubilant single-mindedness of the practicing Communist, with his inside track to History. All this would not appear to augur well for NATIONAL REVIEW. Yet we start with a considerable — and considered — optimism."

"After all, we crashed through. More than one hundred and twenty investors made this magazine possible, and over fifty men and women of small means invested less than one thousand dollars apiece in it. Two men and one woman, all three with overwhelming personal and public commitments, worked round the clock to make publication possible. A score of professional writers pledged their devoted attention to its needs, and hundreds of thoughtful men and women gave evidence that the appearance of such a journal as we have in mind would profoundly affect their lives."

"Our own views, as expressed in a memorandum drafted a year ago, and directed to our investors, are set forth in an adjacent column. We have nothing to offer but the best that is in us. That, a thousand Liberals who read this sentiment will say with relief, is clearly not enough! It isn't enough. But it is at this point that we steal the march. For we offer, besides ourselves, a position that has not grown old under the weight of a gigantic, parasitic bureaucracy, a position untempered by the doctoral dissertations of a generation of Ph.D's in social architecture, unattenuated by a thousand vulgar promises to a thousand different pressure groups, uncorroded by a cynical contempt for human freedom. And that, ladies and gentlemen, leaves us just about the hottest thing in town."