Featured Articles — January 26, 2009

January 26, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Featured Articles | Leave a Comment 

Interesting Takes From Home And Abroad:

Will Obama Save Liberalism? By William Kristol
Since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, conservatives of various sorts, and conservatisms of various stripes, have generally been in the ascendancy.

Moderating the terror war By Steve Chapman
Moderation is often an overrated virtue. You wouldn’t want a moderately skilled surgeon, moderately reliable brakes or a moderately faithful spouse. But at times, moderation means something sensible: finding ways to accommodate the legitimate concerns of two opposing groups.

Obama And Guantanamo By Andrew J. Puglia Levy
“I’d like to close Guantanamo. … [W]e are a nation of laws. Eventually, these people will have trials and they will have counsel and they will be represented in a court of law.” So said not President Obama, but then-President Bush back in 2006.

Nationalization Gets a New, Serious Look By David Sanger
Only five days into the Obama presidency, members of the new administration and Democratic leaders in Congress are already dancing around one of the most politically delicate questions about the financial bailout: Is the president prepared to nationalize a huge swath of the nation’s banking system?

Obama’s Vietnam? By Juan Cole
Friday’s airstrikes are evidence Obama will take the hard line he promised in Pakistan and Afghanistan. But he should remember what happened to another president who inherited a war.

Geithner Is Exactly Wrong on China Trade By Bret Swanson
Treasury Secretary-designate Tim Geithner’s charge that China “manipulates” its currency proves only one thing. Three decades after Deng Xiaoping’s capitalist rise, America’s misunderstanding of China remains a key source of our own crisis and socialist tilt.

Calling China’s Bluff By Gregory Chin & Eric Helleiner
When U.S. President Barack Obama’s choice for Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, talked tough on China’s exchange rate policy during his confirmation hearing, Wall Street traders got the shivers. Geithner accused the country of currency manipulation, sparking concerns that Chinese authorities might react by scaling back their investments in U.S. Treasurys. The fears, which drove down the price of Treasury debt slightly, are certainly understandable. Last fall, China took over Japan’s position as the largest foreign holder of U.S. government debt. Is the country’s new creditor status transforming China into a major world financial power?

We owe it to President Obama to co-operate By Clive Crook
Hard questions confront Barack Obama wherever he looks. To make things worse, as soon as the new president and his team have designed what they think is good policy, they have to sit and watch Congress take it apart. In most aspects of domestic governance, Mr Obama’s reward for victory in the campaign is not power – not commensurate to his heroic exertions, at any rate – but the right to negotiate with legislators. He must have wondered more than once this past week whether he was wise to want the job.

The Iranian reaction By Sadegh Zibakalam
It does not require a great deal of imagination to guess the Iranian Islamic regime’s reaction to the war on Gaza. The Iranian state-run media as well as the more independent newspapers reported graphically the extent of Palestinian suffering as a result of heavy Israeli bombardment.

Recruited For Jihad? By Dan Ephron & Mark Hosenball
About 20 young Somali-American men in Minneapolis have recently vanished.

The charities are guilty, not the BBC By Andrew Roberts
The Corporation is right not to run the Gaza appeal. Oxfam and others are clearly anti-Israel.

President Obama vs. Senator Kennedy By Jim Geraghty
We’ll know within a month how sincere Pres. Barack Obama and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar really were in their promise to harness the wind to help meet the country’s energy needs: Sen. Ted Kennedy has de facto veto power over projects in his home state, and he’s trying to stop an initiative called Cape Wind.

Drug Gangs Have Mexico on the Ropes By Mary Anastasia O’Grady
A murder in the Mexican state of Chihuahua last week horrified even hardened crime stoppers. Police Commander Martin Castro’s head was severed and left in an ice cooler in front of the police station in the town of Praxedis with a calling card from the Sinoloa drug cartel.

A Man for All Seasons By John B. Judis
When the economy goes south, one name invariably surfaces on the lips of pundits and economists: John Maynard Keynes. That is because the twentieth century’s greatest economist is generally associated with the idea that markets require government intervention in order to function properly. During boom times, when the market seems to be working, no one has any use for Keynes’s skepticism toward unrestrained capitalism.

Unjust Assault On Bush’s Wartime Legacy

January 25, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Islam and the West, Terrorism | Leave a Comment 

Joby Warrick of The Washington Post writes that the mere inauguration of President Obama, absent of a unique war strategy, is sending al-Qaeda into a spiral of defeat, getting under the terrorist group’s number two leader Ayman al-Zawahiri’s skin for allegedly attaining a more favorable reception from the Muslim world, something that the more polarizing (and symbol for terror recruiting) President Bush wasn’t able to do:

The torrent of hateful words is part of what terrorism experts now believe is a deliberate, even desperate, propaganda campaign against a president who appears to have gotten under al-Qaeda’s skin. The departure of George W. Bush deprived al-Qaeda of a polarizing American leader who reliably drove recruits and donations to the terrorist group.

With Obama, al-Qaeda faces an entirely new challenge, experts say: a U.S. president who campaigned to end the Iraq war and to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and who polls show is well liked throughout the Muslim world.

Whether the pro-Obama sentiment will last remains to be seen. On Friday, the new administration signaled that it intends to continue at least one of Bush’s controversial counterterrorism policies: allowing CIA missile strikes on alleged terrorist hideouts in Pakistan’s autonomous tribal region.

But for now, the change in Washington appears to have rattled al-Qaeda’s leaders, some of whom are scrambling to convince the faithful that Obama and Bush are essentially the same.

“They’re highly uncertain about what they’re getting in this new adversary,” said Paul Pillar, a former CIA counterterrorism official who lectures on national security at Georgetown University. “For al-Qaeda, as a matter of image and tone, George W. Bush had been a near-perfect foil.”

But in April 2008, Mr. al-Zawahiri released a video that mocked President Bush and General Petraeus for their efforts to pacify Iraq, also evidently an act of desperation since at the time al-Qaeda had been dealt a devastating blow as a result of Bush’s decision to deploy an additional 20,000 troops.

Anbar Province, the most violent of the organization’s strongholds in Iraq had already seen a sharp reduction in violence in 2007, the culmination of the decision to surge and the creation of an anti-insurgent party made up of local sheiks inspiring an increase in police and military recruitment and a decline in attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces. These events had a ripple effect through the rest of the fledgling country, a wholesale rejection of AQI’s commitment to violence, and a national determination to defeat the terror group.

al-Qaeda’s morale turned for the worst when Osama Bin Laden’s mentor Salman al-Oadah sent his protégé an open letter in September 2007, condemning him for the use of violence:

“How many innocent children, elderly people, and women have been killed in the name of Al Qaeda?” asked al-Oadah in a letter on his Web site, Islamtoday.com, and in comments on an Arabic television station.

“How many people have been forced to flee their homes, and how much blood has been shed in the name of Al Qaeda?”

“Are you happy to meet Allah with this heavy burden on your shoulders?” al-Oadah asks bin Laden. “It is a weighty burden indeed – at least hundreds of thousands of innocent people, if not millions [displaced and killed]. And it is all because of the ‘crimes’ perpetrated against civilians by bin Laden’s Al Qaeda on 9/11.”

It is worth noting that Mr. al-Oadah,  a “respected religious authority,” earlier refrained from attacking bin-Laden directly for his role in the attacks of 9/11. His decision to turn on his protégé is significant, denoting a public relations defeat for bin Laden’s movement considering that according to The International Herald Tribune, they were both critical of the Saudi government’s relationship with the United States, especially with the Kingdom’s permission to station troops during the first Gulf War.

For his part, Ayman al-Zawahiri also suffered his own rebuke from a respective mentor. According to The New Yorker’s Lawrence Wright Sayyed Imam, an early founder of Islamic Jihad and al-Qaeda, not only condemned his group’s needless bloodshed on 9/11 and in the London and Madrid bombings, but questioned and effectively undermined al-Zawahiri’s and other’s authority to wage war on the West:

“You cannot decide who is a Muslim or who is an unbeliever or who should be killed based on the color of his skin or hair or the language he speaks or because he wears Western fashion,” Fadl writes. “These are not proper indications for who is a Muslim and who is not.” As for foreigners who are non-Muslims, they may have been invited into the country for work, which is a kind of treaty. What’s more, there are many Muslims living in foreign lands considered inimical to Islam, and yet those Muslims are treated fairly; therefore, Muslims should reciprocate in their own countries. To Muslims living in non-Islamic countries, Fadl sternly writes, “I say it is not honorable to reside with people—even if they were nonbelievers and not part of a treaty, if they gave you permission to enter their homes and live with them, and if they gave you security for yourself and your money, and if they gave you the opportunity to work or study, or they granted you political asylum with a decent life and other acts of kindness—and then betray them, through killing and destruction. This was not in the manners and practices of the Prophet.”

Imam’s manifesto prompted al-Zawahiri to write a desperate 215 page rebuttal that defended and encouraged violence, a hopeless message considering that President Bush was committed to securing Muslim populations from al-Zawahiri’s wrath.

“Two Planes, Two Worlds”

January 25, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under New Reviews, Terrorism | 1 Comment 

This post by Andrew Sullivan is beautiful:

It’s funny but even during the mayhem of Inauguration week, the image of that A320 being landed safely on the Hudson kept coming back to me. And when I read that its remains had ended up floating not far from Ground Zero, I couldn’t help but marvel at the historical and civilizational symmetry of it all.

Over seven years ago, a group of religious extremists seized control of an aircraft in that same airspace, men who had very little flying experience and a philosophy of maximizing the deaths of innocent civilians on the ground. They did all they could to murder as many as they could in order to secure the maximum reward for themselves in heaven and in worldly renown.

Seven years later, two pilots who have since remained remarkably distant from media attention, were in a similar cockpit in the same crowded area and their over-riding concern was to prevent any civilian casualties at all. That’s why they even avoided small airports which might have led to a crash into inhabited neighborhoods. With enormous expertise, gained by rigorous training in a civilized society, they managed to land safely on the river and save everyone both on board and on the ground.

It seems to me that dignity and training and expertise and humaneness are the values of our society at its best. All of them are self-evidently superior to the values of vainglory, amateurism, impulsiveness and cruelty that bedevil our enemies. If these are the grounds on which we fight this war – and they are ours to choose – then we will win. And we will deserve to.

The Soundtrack Of Our Lives

January 25, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Soundtrack Of Our Lives | Leave a Comment 

Every Sunday, The Soundtrack of Our Lives looks back at some of the music that was popular, and the performers who were influential, around the time Richard Nixon was elected President in 1968.

This week’s Soundtrack considers “Universal Soldier” and “American Woman” — two songs written and performed by Canadian artists, that reflected different stages of the development of the anti-war sentiment that increasingly dominated the mid and late ’60s.

But first, consider two videos, separated by only two years, that convey some of the great changes America experienced during the decade.  Both show young college age concert audiences — one in 1964, the other in 1966.  Ignore the obvious differences in lyrical content and consider the clothes, the haircuts, and the general attitudes of these two student audiences when the camera briefly pans them.  It’s like examining the same scene before and after an earthquake has rumbled through.

Here are the Brothers Four in concert at UCLA in 1964.  These four Phi Gamma Delta fraternity brothers from the University of Washington (class of ‘59) were in the forefront of the folk revival.  Their song is Ian Tyson’s “Four Strong Winds.”

For us geezers this video will bring back some fond memories, while the young uns will find it hard to believe that this is what people actually considered having a good time back in the day.  (Don’t bail out before the sing-along encore.)

And here, from 1966, is Donovan singing Buffy Sainte Marie’s “Universal Soldier”:

 

UNIVERSAL SOLDIER (BUFFY SAINTE-MARIE)

Buffy Sainte-Marie was born on a Piapot Reserve in Saskatchewan; she is a Cree Indian.  Orphaned as an infant, she was adopted and raised in Maine and Massachusetts.  Although she was already writing poetry and songs and performing in local coffeehouses, she graduated magna cum laude from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (class of ‘62) before heading to Greenwich Village.

She was impressive almost to the point of being daunting: Strikingly and exotically beautiful, possessed of a riveting vibrato, highly intelligent, fiercely uncompromising, and already able to write a song about her addiction to the codeine prescribed for a recurring throat infection.  And, unlike most of folk’s first first ladies, she wrote most of the songs she sang.

All of this comes through loud and clear in “Little Wheel Spin And Spin”:

Her first album —It’s My Way!— was released in 1964 on the Vanguard label, the ne plus ultra in folk cred.

It was a striking debut.  Unlike the standard fare of Childe ballads, Malvina Reynolds protests, and Appalachian laments, Sainte-Marie  was writing real time about incest, genocide, and addiction.  One critic called It’s My Way! the most scathing topical folk album ever made.   Billboard named her Newcomer of the Year.  Its tracks included  one of her signature songs, “Now That The Buffalo’s Gone,” as well as “Codine,” and “Universal Soldier.”

He’s five feet two and he’s six feet four
He fights with missiles and with spears
He’s all of 31 and he’s only 17
He’s been a soldier for a thousand years

He’s a Catholic, a Hindu, an atheist, a Jain,
a Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew
and he knows he shouldn’t kill
and he knows he always will
kill you for me my friend and me for you

And he’s fighting for Canada,
he’s fighting for France,
he’s fighting for the USA,
and he’s fighting for the Russians
and he’s fighting for Japan,
and he thinks we’ll put an end to war this way

And he’s fighting for Democracy
and fighting for the Reds
He says it’s for the peace of all
He’s the one who must decide
who’s to live and who’s to die
and he never sees the writing on the walls

But without him how would Hitler have
condemned them at Dachau
Without him Caesar would have stood alone
He’s the one who gives his body
as a weapon to a war
and without him all this killing can’t go on

He’s the universal soldier and he
really is to blame
His orders come from far away no more
They come from him, and you, and me
and brothers can’t you see
this is not the way we put an end to war.

Two years later, Tom Brokaw, working for NBC news in Southern California, had a similar experience.  He went to the naval hospital in Oakland looking for one of his closest friends, a Marine pilot who had been badly burned.  He recounts what he saw in Boom!, his history of the 1960s.

He had already moved on, but the wards were full of other young men who had been badly burned or injured in Vietnam.

“Migod,” I thought, “no one even knows about this place.” I did a story on the new techniques of treating burn injuries, but it got lost amid the more colorful exotica that people were interested in from the Bay Area in those days — like the be-ins at Golden Gate Park, the drug and free-love culture in Haight-Ashbury, and the concerts featuring the Jefferson Airplane or Janis Joplin that Bill Graham was promoting at the Fillmore West.

At this still early point, while anti-war sentiment was growing, it was still a year away from reaching critical mass.  In 1966 it was mostly confined to campuses and coffeehouses.

While It’s My Way! and its immediate followup —1965’s Many A Mile— were tearing up the folk charts, Donovan’s recording of “Universal Soldier” entered Billboard’s Hot 100, peaking at Number 53.    Although his and Sainte-Marie’s recordings are the ones that are remembered today, Glen Campbell’s cluelessly upbeat country version topped them both by reaching Number 45.

The executives at Capitol can’t have been best pleased when Campbell —presumably after having given the lyrics a second look— went on the record in Variety saying that people who burned their draft cards should be hung.  ”If you don’t have enough guts to fight for your country,” he said, “you’re not a man.”  He averred that if he recorded any more protest songs they would be of the “red-blooded American variety.”

In 1966, Jan Berry —of the Ur surf group Jan and Dean— beat Campbell to the gun, so to speak, with “The Universal Coward,” a heavy handed (in fact ham fisted) parody of “Universal Soldier.”  Dean Torrence divorced himself from the project, so it was released as a Jan solo.  Sadly and ironically, it was among the last things he recorded before his accident (he crashed his Corvette into a parked truck not far from the “Dead Man’s Curve” on Sunset Boulevard that he and Dean had sung about) left him brain damaged and paralyzed.

Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Many A Mile ballad “Until It’s Time For You To Go,” was covered by artists ranging from Nancy Sinatra to Barbra Streisand, Willie Nelson to Elvis Presley, and Francoise Hardy to Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra.

In 1983 she won the Academy Award for Best Song for  ”Up Where We Belong,”  from the film An Officer and a Gentleman. The single by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes spent three weeks at Number One in the summer of 1982 and won the Best Record Grammy.

“Universal Soldier” continues to pack a punch.  Here’s a recent performance at a British folk club by the American/British folk singer Julie Felix.

 

AMERICAN WOMAN (RANDY BACHMAN, BURTON CUMMINGS, JIM KALE, GARRY PETERSON) performed by THE GUESS WHO

The Guess Who started out in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in the early 1960s as Chad Allan & the Expressions.  When they recorded “Shakin’ All Over” in 1965, the record label —hoping to add some novelty and interest because the band was already fairly well known— identified them only as “Guess Who?”.

Later that year the eponymous Chad split and Burton Cummings became the lead vocalist.  Along with guitarist Randy Bachman, they took the formerly conventional pop band into more of a jazz-blues direction.  The next albums were credited both to Guess Who? and Chad Allan and the Expressions; but by mid-1966 they were known only as “The Guess Who?” (the question mark was jettisoned after 1968).

In 1969 they broke into the American Billboard Top Ten with their characteristic composition “These Eyes.”

And in 1970, with “American Woman,” they became the first Canadian band to have an American Number One hit.

Randy Bachman has described the song’s genesis:

We were playing in a curling rink in Kitchener, Ontario (Canada), and I broke a string. I was up there alone, tuning up my E an B strings on an old Les Paul. I started playing that riff and in the audience, heads started turning. The band got up, and I said, ‘Keep playing this, I don’t want to forget it.’ When Burton had run out of solos, I yelled out, ‘Sing something!’ So out of the blue Burton just screamed, ‘American Woman, stay away from me!’ That was the song, the riff and Burton yelling that line over and over. Later, he added other lines like ‘I don’t need your war machine, you ghetto scenes.’ Before America knew it, it was a #1 record and it was a protest song.

There has been controversy about the degree to which the song was intended to be anti-war (and/or anti-American) as well as whether, or how much, Americans understood what was going on in the lyrics.  Bachman has said that the American Woman in question was the Statue of Liberty.  But co-composer bassist Jim Kale undercut the notion of purposeful protest:

The popular misconception was that it was a chauvinistic tune, which was anything but the case. The fact was, we came from a very strait-laced, conservative, laid-back country, and all of a sudden, there we were in Chicago, Detroit, New York — all these horrendously large places with their big city problems. After that one particularly grinding tour, it was just a real treat to go home and see the girls we had grown up with. Also, the war was going on, and that was terribly unpopular. We didn’t have a draft system in Canada, and we were grateful for that. A lot of people called it anti-American, but it wasn’t really. We weren’t anti-anything. John Lennon once said that the meanings of all songs come after they are recorded. Someone else has to interpret them.

Whatever its meaning or intention, the finished product debuted —with great success— at the 1969 Seattle Pop Festival.  It was released as a single and became the title of the group’s next album.

American woman, stay away from me
American woman, mama let me be
Don’t come hangin’ around my door
I don’t wanna see your face no more
I got more important things to do
Than spend my time growin’ old with you,
Now woman, I said stay away,
American woman, listen what I say.

American woman, get away from me
American woman, mama let me be
Don’t come knockin’ around my door
Don’t wanna see your shadow no more
Coloured lights can hypnotize
Sparkle someone else’s eyes
Now woman, I said get away
American woman, listen what I say.

American woman, I said get away
American woman, listen what I say
Don’t come hangin’ around my door
Don’t wanna see your face no more
I don’t need your war machines
I don’t need your ghetto scenes
Coloured lights can hypnotize
Sparkle someone else’s eyes
Now woman, get away from me
American woman, mama let me be.

The song has been skillfully deconstructed by Dog3000 on the interesting website Unsung:

The album version of the song “American Woman” begins with an acoustic delta blues shuffle (quite reminiscient of the first section of Zep’s “Bring It On Home”) with Burton scatting bout dat ‘Merican woman, she gonna mess yo mind, before those funky clipped rhythm guitars start chiming on THAT RIFF (which is a variation on “Whole Lotta Love” by the way.) With mind-expanding lead guitar lines & a tabla accenting the beat this is a “blacklight special” fer shur (which is why it was so perfect for that scene in American Beauty where middle age delinquent Kevin Spacey’s driving around smoking dope — I wasn’t even alive when this song came out, but it takes me right back to those days!) And of course the lyrics (delivered with one of the classic sneering vocal performances of all time) are a dig at their big fat neighbor to the south: “colored lights can hypnotize / sparkle in someone else’s eyes . . . I don’t need your war machines / I don’t need your ghetto scenes” That the single shot straight to #1 in the USA probably says a lot about the turbulent mood of those times.

In the summer of 1970, when “American Woman” was at the height of its popularity, Prince Charles and his sister Princess Anne paid their first visits to the USA. Their trip was semi-official (they were the guests of the Tricia Nixon and Julie and David Eisenhower rather than the President and First Lady).   Among other activities they attended a Senators baseball game, and a barbecue at Camp David.  RN welcomed them to the White House, and  judged that the young Prince —just graduated from Cambridge and only recently invested by his mother as Prince of Wales— was “a nice fellow.”

In what has to be one of the hippest ever White House bookings, The Guess Who performed in the East Room after the formal dinner tendered the royal guests.  ”American Woman,” which had been Number One through most of May, was still high on the charts; and the fact that the band was Canadian was icing on the cake.

July 1970: Tricia Nixon and Prince Charles descend the Grand Staircase to meet the dinner guests.  The photo was taken by Stan Wyman for Life magazine.

Unfortunately, PN has received a bad —and bum— rap for banning “American Woman” from the band’s East Room set list.  Given the song’s lyrics, its unsuitability for the occasion and the Room isn’t hard to figure out.  Someone from the First Lady’s office may have made the request, but the idea that PN has been specifically fingered as the culprit  —both widely on the web and in Martin C. Strong’s important The Great Rock Discography— isn’t fair and doesn’t reflect an understanding of the way things work.  Considering that the song’s B-side hit “No Sugar Tonight” flew under the lyrical content radar, I would say that, in terms of censorship, the glass was at least half full.

Featured Articles — January 25, 2009

January 25, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Featured Articles | Leave a Comment 

Interesting Takes From Home And Abroad:

West Wing on steroids in Obama W.H. By Jonathan Martin
President Barack Obama is taking far-reaching steps to centralize decision-making inside the White House, surrounding himself with influential counselors, overseas envoys and policy “czars” that shift power from traditional Cabinet posts.

This Is No Time to Panic By John Stossel
Politicians are in agreement: Government must spend, spend, spend to solve the economic “crisis.” The words “economic crisis” are accepted as fact. Why? Why is America in “crisis”? Treasury secretary Hank Paulson wrote in the New York Times, “We are going through a financial crisis more severe and unpredictable than any in our lifetimes.” Is he right? Okay, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 5,700 points, but bubbles have to pop. In the summer of ‘82, the Dow was at 776. At 8,228, as of this writing, stocks have risen 1,047 percent in 25 years. America is still way ahead of the game.

Obama’s short-lived honeymoon By Doyle McManus
Since his election, Barack Obama has called for members of Congress in both parties to abandon the partisanship that has shaped their successful careers and join him in a post-cynical crusade to reform American government.

Grand, Yes. Bargain, No. By George F. Will
Days before becoming responsible, in the eyes of a public fixated on the presidency, for almost everything, Barack Obama vowed to convene a “fiscal responsibility summit.” It will consider the economy’s long-term problems, one of which is the growing cost of entitlements in an aging nation that is caught in the tightening grip of an iron law of welfare states: Graying means paying.

A Revolution in Spirit By Benjamin R. Barber
As America, recession mired, enters the hope-inspired age of Barack Obama, a silent but fateful struggle for the soul of capitalism is being waged. Can the market system finally be made to serve us? Or will we continue to serve it? George W. Bush argued that the crisis is “not a failure of the free-market system, and the answer is not to try to reinvent that system.” But while it is going too far to declare that capitalism is dead, George Soros is right when he says that “there is something fundamentally wrong” with the market theory that stands behind the global economy, a “defect” that is “inherent in the system.”

Roe and Doe, 36 years on By Jeff Jacoby
A NEW antiabortion TV ad appeared last week, just in time for the inauguration of a president whose support for abortion rights is unqualified. The ad shows the ultrasound image of a fetus in the womb.

When Gitmo Was (Relatively) Good By Karen J. Greenberg
In his first week in office, President Obama signed an executive order that would shut down the notorious U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, within a year. But as the United States moves to end this shameful episode, it’s worth reflecting on the untold story of the very beginnings of Guantanamo.

How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas By Andrew Higgins
Surveying the wreckage of a neighbor’s bungalow hit by a Palestinian rocket, retired Israeli official Avner Cohen traces the missile’s trajectory back to an “enormous, stupid mistake” made 30 years ago.

Sarkozy Carries Banner of the West By Dominique Moisi
From the Caucasus in August 2008 to the Middle East in January 2009, is France under President Nicolas Sarkozy attempting to incarnate what might be called “the West by default,” making maximum use of the window of opportunity opened by America’s presidential transition?

A little more on the Chinese censorship of Obama’s speech By James Fallows
Maybe it’s the jet lag. Maybe it’s the culture shock of being back in DC for the first time in a year. Maybe it’s my inborn crabbiness. Whatever the source, I find myself more more incredulous with each passing hour that Chinese media authorities could have thought it as necessary or smart to censor live coverage of an event being watched intently in every other corner of the world: the inaugural address of America’s first black president and current champion orator.

The Laws of War Have Served Us Well By David Rivkin & Lee Casey
This week, President Barack Obama signed an executive order to close the terrorist detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay within the year. It was a symbolic repudiation of the Bush administration’s policies, but Gitmo is not the crucial issue. The real question is whether Mr. Obama will uphold the legal architecture necessary to continue the war against al Qaeda and its jihadist allies.

A Day To Remember

January 24, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Bush Administration, Congress, Election 2008, First Ladies, George W. Bush, News media, Obama administration, Obama family, Presidents, TV News Personalities, U.S. History, White House | 2 Comments 

I have lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, since November 1997, and so have been within a twenty-minute subway ride to downtown Washington for the last three Presidential inaugurations. But I didn’t go downtown for either the 2001 or 2005 swearing-in. I was not quite up to braving the crowds, and since I was not invited to witness the event from indoors, I also was not keen on dealing with winter weather for hours.

But this year was different. Thanks to my wife Rene, we were invited to attend the inauguration as guests of a Treasury Department employee, and so, at 6 am, we awoke, met our host and some other guests, proceeded to Silver Spring’s Metro station (already phenomenally crowded at 7 am) and managed to catch a train to downtown.

We emerged at Metro Center, got breakfast, then walked to the Treasury Department’s annex, east of Lafayette Square. After going down an underground corridor, we emerged in the oldest part of the Treasury Building, constructed in the 1830s.

We then went to the Andrew Johnson Suite, got some coffee, sat down, and watched the televised proceedings for a while. This group of rooms is where the seventeenth President conducted the business of the nation from the hour that Abraham Lincoln died on April 15, 1865, until Mary Todd Lincoln moved out of the White House six weeks later.

It was here that Johnson met with his Cabinet, oversaw the concluding stages of the Civil War (such as Johnston’s surrender to Sherman), and read and listened to reports about the manhunt for John Wilkes Booth and the capture of his fellow conspirators. (I thought about this on Wednesday night when I watched a History Channel show on the search for Booth.  These shows are so much more exciting to watch when you’ve been in one or another of the locations being described and depicted.)

After a while, one of the other guests called me to the window, and I watched the limousine carrying the 43rd and 44th Presidents come down the street between Treasury and the White House’s East Wing on its way to the Capitol. That was a powerful moment.

But not quite as powerful as witnessing the swearing-in ceremony itself, with the stirring music of Aretha Franklin and John Williams (as performed by a quartet including Itzhak Perlman and Yo Yo Ma), and President Obama taking the oath of office — even a somewhat botched version that enabled my fellow Indiana native, Chief Justice John Roberts, to become the first man in history to swear in a President twice for the same term.

I watched the swearing-in on a big-screen TV set up in a hallway where nearly every President from Martin Van Buren to the present has walked sometime during his time in office. The sense of history in the making was palpable.

After another hour or so in the Treasury Building, our host told us we were to come outside and sit in the bleachers at the south end of Lafayette Square, almost directly across from the White House. So we braved the cold and proceeded to those seats. In front of us, Al Roker spoke to NBC viewers. A voice came on over the PA speakers set up on Pennsylvania Avenue. It was Charlie Brotman, who has provided commentary to the spectators at every inaugural parade since Eisenhower’s second term began in 1957.

After a wait that wasn’t especially long but seemed an eternity thanks to the cold and my decision not to wear jeans, the police motorcycles came down the street, followed by bands representing the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, and Coast Guard, and, finally, President and Mrs. Obama and Vice President and Mrs. Biden. We all reached for our cameras. It was as thrilling a moment as I can remember having. Then we went back to the land of crabcakes and orioles and watched the rest of the parade in the comfortable warmth of the Tastee Diner.

I was going to call this “A Week To Remember” and cover some of the other events since Sunday, but the one that comes to mind just now – Caroline Kennedy’s bizarre withdrawal from consideration for the U.S. Senate seat formerly occupied by Secretary of State Clinton – seems a bit anticlimactic after the moments I just recounted. I’ll just note that Time’s “Swampland” blog put up a very interesting timeline of how the Kennedy withdrawal went down. It clearly came as a shock to much of her family and several of them seem to have attempted to get her to change her mind at the last moment, with no luck. And then there was the embarrassing attempt by her “people” to spin the withdrawal as having happened because of Sen. Ted Kennedy’s health, which evidently annoyed him considerably.  This definitely has not been one of Camelot’s more shining moments, though perhaps it was just brief enough to be overlooked when the time comes for another Kennedy to seek office.

No Room For Error

January 24, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under National Security, Obama administration | 1 Comment 

Ben Smith at The Politico is reporting that President Obama’s legal team will give him very narrow boundaries in terms of national security policy:

“They have alarmingly narrow views of executive power,” said a former Bush aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Others said the key would be how Obama’s lawyers handle concrete questions and decisions.

“It’s important for OLC to remember that it’s not a professorial office: there are real lives at stake, there are real liberties at stake,” said Douglas Kmiec, who headed the office under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and who supported Obama and praised the Johnsen pick.

The OLC lawyers are only a few among the erstwhile opposition figures now entering the administration. Neal Katyal, who successfully argued a key Supreme Court case on the rights of Guantanamo Bay detainees, will be principal deputy solicitor general. David Kris, who was an internal and then external critic of warrantless wiretapping, will head the Obama Justice Department’s national security division. And David Iglesias, the former U.S. attorney for New Mexico whose firing drew bipartisan condemnation and helped bring down an attorney general, has been called up as a top military terror prosecutor.

The Office of Legal Counsel, though, occupies a unique position. Historically, it guards its independence, despite being located wholly in the executive branch. In the Bush years, though, it articulated the rationale for some of his most controversial policies, justifying interrogation practices like waterboarding and supporting the president’s defiance of a range of congressional actions. In a famous 2002 memo, an OLC deputy assistant attorney general, John Yoo, argued for unprecedented presidential power and an extremely narrow definition of torture.

Alinsky’s Rules?

January 24, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Barack Obama, Congress, News media | Leave a Comment 

Radio talk show star Rush Limbaugh believes that he is being targeted by President Obama to separate Republican politicians from their voters:

There are two things going on here. One prong of the Great Unifier’s plan is to isolate elected Republicans from their voters and supporters by making the argument about me and not about his plan. He is hoping that these Republicans will also publicly denounce me and thus marginalize me. And who knows? Are ideological and philosophical ties enough to keep the GOP loyal to their voters? Meanwhile, the effort to foist all blame for this mess on the private sector continues unabated when most of the blame for this current debacle can be laid at the feet of the Congress and a couple of former presidents. And there is a strategic reason for this.

Secondly, here is a combo quote from the meeting:

“If we don’t get this done we (the Democrats) could lose seats and I could lose re-election. But we can’t let people like Rush Limbaugh stall this. That’s how things don’t get done in this town.”

To make the argument about me instead of his plan makes sense from his perspective. Obama’s plan would buy votes for the Democrat Party, in the same way FDR’s New Deal established majority power for 50 years of Democrat rule, and it would also simultaneously seriously damage any hope of future tax cuts. It would allow a majority of American voters to guarantee no taxes for themselves going forward. It would burden the private sector and put the public sector in permanent and firm control of the economy. Put simply, I believe his stimulus is aimed at re-establishing “eternal” power for the Democrat Party rather than stimulating the economy because anyone with a brain knows this is NOT how you stimulate the economy. If I can be made to serve as a distraction, then there is that much less time debating the merits of this TRILLION dollar debacle.

Obama was angry that Merrill Lynch used $1.2 million of TARP money to remodel an executive suite. Excuse me, but didn’t Merrill have to hire a decorator and contractor? Didn’t they have to buy the new furnishings? What’s the difference in that and Merrill loaning that money to a decorator, contractor and goods supplier to remodel Warren Buffet’s office? Either way, stimulus in the private sector occurs. Are we really at the point where the bad PR of Merrill getting a redecorated office in the process is reason to smear them? How much money will the Obamas spend redecorating the White House residence? Whose money will be spent? I have no problem with the Obamas redoing the place. It is tradition. 600 private jets flown by rich Democrats flew into the Inauguration. That’s fine but the auto execs using theirs is a crime? In both instances, the people on those jets arrived in Washington wanting something from Washington, not just good will.

If I can be made to serve as a distraction, then there is that much less time debating the merits of the trillion dollar debacle.

One more thing, Byron. Your publication and website have documented Obama’s ties to the teachings of Saul Alinksy while he was community organizing in Chicago. Here is Rule 13 of Alinksy’s Rules for Radicals:

“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

RN Always Talked About The Altered Dominant

January 24, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Frost/Nixon, Music, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Composer Wes Flinn assesses composer Richard Nixon:

The tune is pretty straightforward, with a late-Romantic-cum-Tin-Pan-Alley harmonic structure. He likes the altered dominant (V7 becomes V+7, usually via a chromatic passing tone in the melody), and the phrase structure is regular – from what I heard, four-bar phrases are the order of the day.

The Proof Is In The Sausage

January 24, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under American Politics, Congress, Democratic Party, New Reviews | Leave a Comment 

The New York Times has two big stories about the state’s new senator this morning. One is about how Gov. David Patterson muffed the selection process. The other is about its most excellent outcome, his choice of Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand, a feisty, intelligent, Mandarin-speaking centrist Democrat with Presidential ambitions who fits so perfectly with the Zeitgeist that it’s hard to imagine Patterson considered anyone else. If she’d move to California, I’d vote for her.

Obviously, he did consider someone else, because he had to, namely Caroline Kennedy. The Times suggests he has suffered political damage as a result of the Senate derby. From this distance, it’s hard to see why. Sure, it wasn’t pretty, but politics usually isn’t. The governor deserves props for keeping someone out of the Senate who wasn’t qualified and who seems to have thought (along with many of her media and political boosters) that she could gain the office by pedigree.

Amid the Times’s Saturday-morning sneers (what’s really eating ‘em, anyway?) is that Gillibrand has the support of the NRA and only votes for gay rights 80% of the time. Political insiders predict that when she no longer has to worry about what her relatively conservative rural upstate district thinks, she’ll abandon her interesting mix of positions and become a decent, unimaginative, lockstep liberal just like Caroline Kennedy. We’ll see. Says one of the downstate pols who think Gillibrand isn’t liberal enough, yet:

“If we have royalty, it’s the Kennedys,” said Assemblyman Peter M. Rivera, a Bronx Democrat and chairman of the Assembly’s Puerto Rican/Hispanic Task Force. “The way she was treated, the backbiting and the attacks, it was insulting,” he said….

But we don’t have royalty. We have politics. We have backbiting, attacks, and insults, and that’s just the way we like it.

We Have This Going For Us, Which Is Nice

January 24, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under American Politics, Presidents, Richard Nixon | 1 Comment 

Gov. Blagojevich:

“I like to see myself more as a Teddy Roosevelt kind of Republican than Richard Nixon.”

TNN Weekly Weekend Reward

January 24, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Weekly Weekend Reward | Leave a Comment 

Although his heyday was some decades ago, Glen Campbell has continued recording and touring over the years. Now, at 72, he has returned to to Capitol, the label of his glory days, to release his seventieth-something album: Meet Glen Campbell — a nicely modest title for a Grammy-winning artist who has sold more than 45 million records and had 27 songs in Billboard’s Top Ten.

For those who remember him from back in the day, that distinctively sweetly weathered voice will bring back many memories.  For the young uns, it’s an invitation to meet to a Living National Treasure.

I was alerted to this record by Mike Doughty’s (formerly of Sonic Youth and now of  Mike Doughty)  blog: 

I heard Glen Campbell’s version of the Foo Fighters’ “Times Like These” on Joe Belock’s WFMU show. It sounded so assured, so classic, that I immediately assumed that the Foos had covered Glen’s tune, not the other way around, and I had just never been aware of it. (“Times Like These,” in fact, had gone in one ear and out the other when I’ve heard it previously, but, like a great cover version should do, I realized what a great tune it was)

The album, Meet Glenn Campbell, has apparently been out for a while, and has a Green Day cover and a Paul Westerberg cover, and a couple Tom Petty tunes–it would sound cringeworthy to me, had I not actually heard the record, which is fantastic. Big string arrangements, and the guy’s voice is just fantastic.

But I guess it hasn’t made much noise. (Unless it’s playing on country radio? I don’t know) I wonder if these kind of records will get made much anymore–huge-sounding, expensive-sounding records by an artist without a recent string of hits.

In addition to the several excellent country/pop covers (Jackson Browne, U2), Meet Glen Campbell includes some ostensibly surprising choices, such as the Velvet Underground’s “Jesus,” Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life”), and the Foo Fighters‘ “Times Like These.”  

When President Bush used “Times Like These” without permission during his 2004 re-election campaign, the band became activated and campaigned for John Kerry.  (It’s not exactly clear what strategy the campaign was pursuing —or what message it intended to send— with lyrics like “I am a little divided, do I stay or run away, and leave it all behind?”)

I am a one way motorway
I’m the road that drives away
then follows you back home
I am a street light shining
I’m a wild light blinding bright
burning off alone

it’s times like these you learn to live again
it’s times like these you give and give again
it’s times like these you learn to love again
it’s times like these time and time again

I am a new day rising
I’m a brand new sky
to hang the stars upon tonight
I am a little divided
do I stay or run away
and leave it all behind?

The Foo Fighters are a Seattle-based band led by Washington, D.C. native Dave Grohl; the band shares writing credits for their songs.  Here’s their  original version of “Times Like These” from their 2003 album One by One.  And here’s an impressive acoustic version by the primus inter pares Fooster, Dave Grohl:

Another Foo Fighters song that produced a haunting acoustic version was “Everlong,” from the 1997 album The Colour and the Shape.   They played the song on The Late Show in 1997, and were invited back to play it again on 21 February 2000, David Letterman’s first show back after open heart surgery. He called them “my favorite band playing my favorite song.”  Here’s the original; and here’s the acoustic:

 

DSPQ

January 24, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Double Standard Paranoia Quotient | Leave a Comment 

Yesterday’s 18-5 vote in the Senate Finance Committee moving Timothy Geithner’s Treasury nomination  to the full Senate has been a foregone conclusion (like the Senate confirmation on Monday) despite the revelation that Mr. Geithner didn’t pay some of his income taxes for several years.  (He also had a problem about the legal status of his housekeeper, but that soon slipped below the radar as focus concentrated solely on the tax issues.)

Maureen Dowd addressed the offense to simple common sense:

How does a guy on the fast track to be Treasury secretary fail to pay $43,200 worth of federal taxes, or forget to check on the immigration status of a house cleaner — the same sort of upstairs-downstairs slipup that has tripped up other top-drawer prospects on their way to top jobs here? Americans expect the man who’s in charge of the I.R.S. to pay his own taxes.

And The Wall Street Journal raised the disturbing prospect that someone might have been betting on not getting caught until the statute of limitations had run:

As to why Mr. Geithner didn’t pay all his back taxes after the 2006 audit, an Obama aide said the nominee was advised by his accountant that he had no further liability. Senate Finance Committee aides said they were concerned that either Mr. Geithner or his accountant had used the IRS’s statute of limitations to avoid further back-tax payments at the time of the audit. “Some might say it was a character moment,” said one Republican aide.

Now we have the AP report —carried in today’s The New York Times— that accepts Mr. Geithner’s word “mistakes” and substitutes it for “failure”: 

The Senate Finance Committee on Thursday cleared the nomination of Timothy Geithner as treasury secretary despite unhappiness over his mistakes in paying his taxes.

Geithner paid the back taxes plus interest for the years 2003 and 2004 after being audited by the Internal Revenue Service.  But he did not pay taxes he owed for 2001 and 2002, even though he had made the same mistakes for those years, until shortly before he was nominated by Obama last November to be treasury secretary.

And just now on NPR the news summary at the top of the hour reported that Mr. Geithner had been confirmed “despite his delay in paying his taxes.”

At this rate he’ll end up being owed money.

Featured Articles — January 24, 2009

January 24, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Featured Articles | Leave a Comment 

Interesting Takes From Home And Abroad:

Fear Hath No Shelf-Life: Our Torture Dilemma By Robert Kaplan
The torture debate is critical not only because it gets us to the core of our values, but because the danger to American cities is not from tanks and armies, but from individuals and their intentions. Saving thousands of American lives may come down to the gifts of a talented interrogator and the tools at his or her disposal.

The Obama-Kennedy Question By Michael Barone
Last Tuesday, for the 22nd time in 220 years, Americans saw the peaceful post-election transfer of power from one political party to another. In our great outdoor national ceremony, scheduled for some reason on a day that is as likely as any other to be the coldest of the year, Barack Obama took the oath as our 44thth president and spoke to the nation for 19 minutes in a speech that was far more somber than the mood of the crowd of 2 million on the Mall.

Let 1,000 Republican Flowers Bloom By William Kristol
The ceremonies, unity, and patriotism of Inauguration week were nice. The bloviating, fawning, and gushing from celebrities and the media were a bit much. It’s not surprising that we are beginning to hear expressions of frustration from the Republican grass roots, and exhortations to action: “Why can’t the Republican congressional leadership get its act together? Where’s the coherent message? What’s the strategy? Why the disunity? Who’s going to lead us out of the wilderness?”

Iran Is the Terrorist ‘Mother Regime’ By Bret Stephens
It’s Sunday morning, and I’ve been trying for days to get an interview with former — and, if his poll numbers hold up through the Feb. 10 election, soon-to-be — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But it’s a political season, and there’s a war on, and my calls aren’t being returned. With nothing better to do, I go downstairs to the hotel gym for a jog.

America’s next step By Mikhail Gorbachev
Support for President Barack Obama among Americans, including many who did not vote for him, is unprecedented. Globally, too, there has been deep interest in the election and widespread hope for change in U.S. policy. Practically everyone the world over now wishes Obama success.

Teacher on a World Stage By Jim Hoagland
The world’s leadership club has welcomed President Barack Obama with a mixture of hope and wariness. It’s been a while since members of this club have had to deal with an American leader who may be more popular with their publics than they are.

A Free Pass for the Indispensable Man By Jonah Goldberg
During the hothouse days of the presidential campaign, Joe Wurzelbacher became famous because he got Barack Obama to confess that he likes to spread the wealth around. Better known as Joe the Plumber, the Toledo, Ohio, laborer became the target of bottomless venom and scorn because he seemed like an obstacle to Obama’s coronation.

Obama, West Can Help Gaza by Passing Up Hamas By Natan Sharansky
With the end of full-scale fighting in Gaza, all eyes will turn to rebuilding. We can and should expect that the U.S., Europe, Israel and the Arab states will, not too long from now, start pouring billions of dollars into construction, investment in business, education, energy and other projects in the Gaza Strip.

Missteps in a Majestic Week By Colbert King
I close this first week of the Barack Obama presidency with a few churlish thoughts that, perhaps, I should keep to myself but won’t. I’m in the autumn years of life, beyond the point of worrying about my life when I grow up.

Is It Possible To Be Even-Handed?

January 23, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Israel and Palestinians | Leave a Comment 

Is it possible for George Mitchell to be even-handed between Israel and Gaza’s extremist government. Peter Wehner explains Obama’s Mid-East policy:

However, I find this “even-handedness” debate incredibly trite. For starters, what would “even-handedness” even look like? At the moment, it would presumably be the happy medium between the demands of Hamas and those of the current Israeli government. Does such a thing even exist? Is it possible to find a “fair” compromise between an Islamist group that rejects Israel’s very existence and a democratic state that has supported a two-state solution for nearly two decades? Indeed, there is simply no way to please both sides sufficiently (if at all), and therefore no way that both sides could possibly come to view Mitchell’s mission as “even-handed.” Remember: the ultimate arbiters of whether or not a Middle East peace mission is “even-handed” are not the Abe Foxmans or Matthew Yglesiases of the world, but the Israelis and Palestinians themselves.

Second, concerns regarding an “even-handed” approach completely ignore America’s foremost objective in the Middle East — namely, promoting stability, both to counter Iranian-inspired radicalism and as a mechanism for ensuring the free-flow of oil. In turn, the debate regarding “even-handedness” overlooks the simple fact that — even if it were hypothetically possible to compromise between Israeli and Palestinian positions — the U.S. would be unwilling to tolerate any downgrade in Israeli strength, and therefore unable to approach Israeli and Palestinian security demands even-handedly. Support for a regionally dominant Israel has been a central component of American security policy in the Levant for decades, and deserves much of the credit for the absence of Arab-Israeli interstate warfare since 1973. For this reason, it is hard to imagine Mitchell believing that U.S. policy in the Levant could somehow be recast around promoting Israeli-Palestinian parity, or that Israel could make security concessions in the name of “fairness” without undermining precious regional stability.

Dumb And Dumber

January 23, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Barack Obama, Entertainment, Internet | 3 Comments 

The various viral videos that enlivened the recent campaign had at least the charm of originality and sincerity.  But the latest post-election edition —the ”Presidential Pledge”— is a monstrosity of smug self-satisfaction and grandiose cluelessness.  

The brainchild of Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, in cahoots with MySpace, it features a number of celebrities, sub-celebrities, and sub-sub-celebrities who are really pleased with themselves as they pledge to be considerate people and conscientious citizens — pledges that, for some reason, they were either unable or unwilling (or uninterested) to make before Barack Obama became President.  

The 4-plus minute video is directed by Ms. Moore and produced by Mr. Kutcher’s company Katalyst Films.  It was to be presented to the President Elect in the days before his Inauguration.  They discussed it with Oprah Winfrey on her first show broadcast from Washington.  Whether or not that handover actually occurred is unrecorded.  

The pledges range from underwhelming to megalomanical.  Thus the multi-millionaire P. Diddy pledges to turn off the lights when he leaves a room, while the whatever-happened-to-him actor Michael Krause pledges “to make sure that senior citizens have access to healthcare.”

Co-foundress Demi Moore makes three pledges: (a) to smile more, (b) to free one million people from slavery in the next five years, and  (c) to be “a servant to our President.”   

Her husband, Ashton Kutcher, who has starred in Dude, Where’s My Car?  and created the MTV show Punk’d, will presumably be renouncing his career in order to keep his pledge “to always represent my country with pride, dignity, and honesty.”

Eva Mendes, who made news last year by entering rehab and announcing that she didn’t want to start a family because “there are just so many things I want to do” pledges “to volunteer more of my time to help children battling serious illnesses”   Director Joel Schumacher undertakes “To never give anyone the finger while I’m driving.”   Jason Bateman’s pledge involves his alimentary canal.

Amidst the pledges to help find cures for autism and mental disease and extend stem cell research, Cameron Diaz pledges to start smiling at her neighbors.

I could go on, but it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.  They’re all so serious, so well-intentioned, and so gosh darned smug.

Of course, it’s easy to be snarky, and if the video actually inspires anyone to go to www.usaservice.org and sign up  for volunteer work, some good could result.

In the five days that the “Presidential Pledge” video has been on MySpace, it has received more than a million hits.  It is also posted in various incarnations on YouTube.

For Time magazine’s links to the Top 10 Viral Videos of 2008, go here.

Crocker: Be Careful

January 23, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Iraq War | Leave a Comment 

Outgoing U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker want substance over symbolism concerning Iraq policy:

The ambassador said a withdrawal that was too swift could have a chilling effect, making Iraqis less willing to make political compromises and focus on institutional development. He added, however, that Mr. Obama has emphasized a responsible withdrawal. Mr. Crocker said he didn’t think the new administration would make the mistake of pulling out U.S. combat forces before the time is appropriate.

“Anything can happen [in Iraq],” Mr. Crocker told reporters. “That’s why my mantra has been that things are still fragile and still reversible.”

Mr. Crocker said there has been remarkable progress in Iraq, with violence at its lowest level in years. Iraqi security forces have taken on more responsibility and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has shown courage in implementing a military crackdown on militia members of his own Shiite sect, Mr. Crocker said.

The Rise & Fall Of The White House Intellectual

January 23, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Culture, Nixon Administration figures, Obama administration, Political Philosophy, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, White House | 1 Comment 

Ben Alpers of Oklahoma University put up a quite interesting blogpost this week tracing the roughly fifteen-year heyday of the “White House intellectual.”

President Kennedy began the tradition by bringing in acclaimed historian (and walking definition of savoir-faire) Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to chronicle the mighty doings to come. (In this respect, there was a parallel between Schlesinger’s function and that of Theodore Roosevelt’s biographer Edmund Morris when he was given access to President Reagan throughout the 1980s for his authorized biography (which proved a bizarre disappointment in most quarters when it finally appeared in 1999).

Schlesinger was there for all of the Thousand Days, and made that the title of his Pulitzer-winning account of the Kennedy Administration later. When Lyndon Johnson came to the Oval Office after the terrible day in Dallas, Schlesinger wanted to leave, but Johnson persuaded him to stay for a while.

But the historian left in January 1964 and LBJ replaced him with Eric Goldman, the author of Rendezvous With Destiny. After two years of increasing disillusionment with Johnson, Goldman left to write the remarkable study The Tragedy Of Lyndon Johnson. Goldman was replaced by another historian, John P. Roche, who had worked as a Capitol Hill speechwriter and thus had better firsthand knowledge of the nitty-gritty of politics than his predecessor. He left in 1968 to write a newspaper column.

When President Nixon came in, the nebulous “White House intellectual” post went unfilled for a time. Ralph De Toledano, RN’s first biographer and a mainstay of conservative journalism, hoped to occupy it, but was not called on to do so.

But gradually, through 1969, Daniel P. Moynihan, who had been associated with the group around Commentary (still a liberal journal in those days) and who had worked in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, gradually assumed such a role in the Nixon White House, regularly discussing books with the President and helping to keep him abreast of what academics thought of his policies. (This was also done by Dr. Henry Kissinger whenever there was time to spare from the making of foreign and national-security policy.)

It should be emphasized, however, that Moynihan had a much greater hands-on role in the development of policy in the White House, especially where domestic affairs were concerned, than was the case with Schlesinger, Goldman or Roche.

In 1971 Moynihan left the Administration. By that time foreign affairs were almost completely dominating Kissinger’s time. And so the informal position of in-house intellectual was dormant for a time, except to the degree that Pat Buchanan, TNN’s own Frank Gannon, Ray Price, and (up to 1973) William Safire could fill it in the course of their work.

When Gerald Ford succeeded Nixon in 1974, his chief of staff Donald Rumsfeld urged him to revive the position, and so Robert Goldwin, the former dean of St. John’s College in Annapolis, came to the White House.  Among other things he organized meetings between leading thinkers, social scientists, and educators with White House staffers and, occasionally, with the President.  After future Vice President Dick Cheney replaced Rumsfeld as chief of staff, he continued to work closely with Goldwin.

(The enthusiasm of Rumsfeld and Cheney for maintaining the White House’s ties to the intellectual community is somewhat ironic, since, a quarter-century later, both men would have easily topped the list of those most hated by much of the liberal intelligentsia and in academia, which is now probably more left-leaning than it has ever been.)

When Jimmy Carter became president in 1977, no real effort was made to continue Goldwin’s work.  With the Reagan presidency came Edmund Morris, but, as noted, his job was to be a biographer, not to comment on or influence policy.   George H.W. Bush had few dyed-in-the-wool intellectuals on his staff (Christopher Buckley, in Bush’s vice-presidential years, probably came closest) and Clinton more or less functioned as his own in-house intellectual; Sidney Blumenthal would have been the closest thing to one in that Administration, but functioned more as a cheerleader and spinmeister a la Joe Conason than as a careful observer.

It appears likely that President Obama, like Clinton, will be his own White House intellectual, at least in the opening stages of his Administration.  Thomas Frank, as one commenter at Alpers’s post notes, might have been a candidate, having long resided in Hyde Park not far from the then-state senator, but the controversy that ensued when Obama paraphrased Frank’s argument in the book What’s The Matter With Kansas? would have scotched that.   Yesterday Forbes produced a list of America’s 25 top liberal intellectuals.  Blogger Matt Yglesias, #16 on it, might just be the guy who’d be a good fit for this nebulous assignment at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

44/1

January 23, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Art, Barack Obama, Presidents | Leave a Comment 

Here’s The New Yorker’s Inauguration Commemorative Cover.   The painting is titled —aptly and cleverly— “The First.”  The artist is Drew Friedman, whose White House Watch illustrations enlivened The New Republic during last year’s campaign.

It may not be too late to sign up (free) for the special limited edition poster.

Vain Thain’s Pane

January 23, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under economy | Leave a Comment 

“The Economist” on the departing Merrill Lynch chief:

[John] Thain reportedly ordered $1.2m to be spent on his suite last year, of which $87,784 went on a rug, $68,179 on a 19th-century credenza, $28,091 on curtains, $18,468 on a George IV chair and $35,115 on a commode, presumably not the type used for night-time relief. The interior designer was not the only beneficiary of Mr Thain’s largesse: his driver picked up $230,000 for a year’s work.

And the New York Times:

Last summer, fuming over another grim quarter for the firm, [Thain] halted a meeting with his chief financial officer and hurled a chair against the wall, shattering a nearby glass panel, according to people briefed on the meeting.

We know just how you feel, John!

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