Aglet: Another Name For A Whatjermecallit

November 20, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Book Review, Humor | 1 Comment 

Back in the ’80s, Rich Hall invented Sniglets: Words that should —but don’t— appear in the dictionary. Such as:

ACCORDIONATED (ah kor’ de on ay tid)
adj. Being able to drive and refold a road map at the same time.

CARPERPETUATION (kar’ pur pet u a shun)
n. The act, when vacuuming, of running over a string or a piece of lint at least a dozen times, reaching over and picking it up, examining it, then putting it back down to give the vacuum one more chance.

ELBONICS (el bon’ iks)
n. The actions of two people maneuvering for one armrest in a movie theater. (or on an airplane!)

PUPKUS (pup’ kus)
n. The moist residue left on a window after a dog presses its nose to it.

TELECRASTINATION (tel e kras tin ay’ shun)
n. The act of always letting the phone ring at least twice before you pick it up, even when you’re only six inches away.

Now Danny Danziger and Mark McCrum have written The Thingummy — providing the actual dictionary-based words for the things you always think need a word to describe them. For example:

AGLET: the little plastic or metal tube at the end of your shoelace. Its purpose is to stop the thread of the lace from unravelling, as well as making it easier to feed through the shoe’s eyelets.

BORBORYGMUS (pronounced bor-buh-rig-mus): the name for the rumbling sounds made by the stomach. These are caused by the movement of fluids and gases, as food, acids and digestive juices migrate from the stomach into the upper part of the small intestine. The average body makes two gallons of digestive juices a day.

GLUTEAL CREASE: the place where the lower buttocks meet the upper leg. If those buttocks are particularly comely, they might be described by the adjective callipygian, a word which derives from the Greek for beautiful (kallos) and buttocks (pyge).

INTERROBANG: one of the most eloquent punctuation marks in the English language, combining a question mark, and a bang (printers’ parlance for the exclamation mark). EG: He’s going to appoint Hillary Clinton Secretary of State?!

PHILTRUM: the vertical indentation between the upper lip and nose.

PHLOEM BUNDLES (pronounced flo-em): the stringy bits between the skin and the edible part of a banana.

ULLAGE: the space in a wine bottle not occupied by wine.

It would be a perfect stocking stuffer, and the deteremined can order it from England.  The more patient may wait for the US publication in May.  In the meantime, there’s a whole universe of stocking-sized Sniglets (including Unexplained Sniglets of the Universe) easily available.

Price Slashed On New Inflation Book

November 20, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Book Review, Economic issues | Leave a Comment 

Just in time for our not worrying about inflation anymore — as we (can it be?) pine for our summertime fretting about mounting gas and food prices — comes Robert Samuelson’s not exceptionally well-timed new book. From an “Economist” review:

Milton Friedman was wrong. Inflation is always and everywhere a social phenomenon, not a monetary one. At least, that is how Robert Samuelson sees it. “The Great Inflation and its Aftermath” dwells little on the economics of inflation; the main text does not mention the Federal Reserve until page 31. Instead, it examines the intellectual and political currents that let inflation rise from 1% in the early 1960s to nearly 15% in 1980 and then brought it down again.

The current intellectual and political current: Sheer panic. That works, too.

 

“The Coca Cola of Democracy”

November 14, 2008 by Jonathan C. Movroydis | Filed Under Book Review, Nixon Library | Leave a Comment 

Jon Meacham in the Nixon Foundation’s replica of the White House East Room.

Raised without a father, he succeeded the unpopular son of another New England President, and brought real change by communicating straight to the people, permanently altering the cultural and institutional landscape of America. Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham’s characterization of the seventh President, Andrew Jackson, shares much in common with the incoming 44th President, Barack Obama. Meacham was in Yorba Linda yesterday to talk about his new book, American Lion, Andrew Jackson in the White House.

But in listening to Meacham’s talk, Obama’s and Jackson’s temperament for the White House couldn’t be more dissimilar. For “Old Hickory” as the Tennessean came to be called, people power was passionate and entirely unambiguous. According to Meacham, because Jackson’s whole family died during the American Revolution, “their blood consecrated the country.” The people were ostensibly his Revolutionary family, the realization of an affectionate and intense love for the common; no person and institution were going to get in the way of individual liberty. Accordingly, a Jacksonian democracy meant the extension of suffrage, and an unabashed position of anti-clericalism and opposition to powerful government institutions like the national bank. “He was the first President to see his job as representative of the people.”

“Another reason for writing this book,” Meacham joked, “is if a President tried to assault his own assassin, twice, he has the right to his own book.” “He longed for defiance.” Meacham said. One wanted him on their side, because “if he was preying on you, God help you.” “He preferred dueling rather than talking.” “His greatest regret was that he didn’t shoot Henry Clay or hang John C. Calhoun.”

Meacham also characterized Jackson as a person who always needed to be control. “He imagined his own reality,” recalling a time the President was saved from drowning on a river raft, but re-told the story as if he were the hero. Jackson’s political enemy Henry Clay characterized this propensity for control as despotic and dictatorial; but according to Meacham a careful look at Jackson’s presidency indicates a measured approach of governance. “He had the capacity to occasionally overreach, but he kept in the back of his mind that the people had a right to take a different course.” Ostensibly Jackson created a democracy from a republic, as the “first six presidents were less inclined” to listen to the political common. In short, Meacham described Jackson’s style of governing as “the coca cola of democracy.”

As for historical lessons learned from Jackson’s presidency, for Meacham it is the political principle of always corresponding to the base. Something he believes President-elect Obama understands. “People just don’t show up every four years, there has to be constant communication. People need to feel involved.”

Another lesson from Jackson’s presidency is the understanding of personal fallibility. Jackson was not a perfect man. Meacham argued while he was deeply flawed, an unrepentant slave owner, and cruel to the Native Americans, he like us, had a mixed soul. Jackson allows us “take stock in ourselves” and helps us avoid the simple opinion of self-righteousness. After all, according to Meacham, “one generation’s good is another’s questioned evil,” and “we will become better Americans as we profit not only from the grandeur, but the sadness of the past.”

An Unexpected “Nixonland” Review

November 13, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Book Review, History, National Security, Nixon Administration, Nixon Administration figures, Nixonland Nitpicks, Richard Nixon, Terrorism, U.S. History, Watergate | 6 Comments 

It has now been about a half-year since Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland was published, and some time back I noticed that no review had appeared in The American Spectator, a magazine avidly read by the 37th President and usually not a place where major books about him go unnoticed.

Well, Perlstein’s book is finally discussed in TAS’s November issue, which you’ll have to buy or browse at a store, for it’s not online. The author of the review is none other than Tom Charles Huston - one of the most important figures in Young Americans For Freedom in the mid-1960s, associate counsel at the Nixon White House during the administration’s first two years, and, of course, author of the 1970 “Huston Plan” which presented a comprehensive proposal for coordination of the FBI, CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, and local law enforcement to combat the threat to the United States posed by violent antiwar and anti-government radicals, such as the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground.

This plan was never implemented primarily because of objections from the aging J. Edgar Hoover, who viewed it as a threat to the FBI’s autonomy, and Huston left government service in 1971 to become an attorney in his native Indianapolis, where he has practiced ever since. During the last 37 years he has been prominent in efforts to preserve the Hoosier State’s historical sites, but has not been heard from concerning the years in which he was an up-and-coming figure on the political stage. Possibly as a result of this silence, he has tended to be among the figures most demonized in the vast anti-Nixon literature, especially after 1973 when his “plan” came to public notice during the Senate Watergate hearings.

But it now appears that Huston is ready to come out of the cold, so to speak. Earlier this year I was surprised to find his name among the list of interviewees in James Rosen’s fine biography of John Mitchell, The Strong Man, and even more surprised when Rosen told me that Huston had spoken at considerable length about his White House years, though little from this talk appeared in the finished volume, which focused on the period after Huston left Washington. And, to judge from the TAS review of Nixonland, Huston has much more to say.

The review vigorously pans Perlstein’s book, to such a degree that it makes Conrad Black’s scathing New York Sun notice almost look like a Harriet Klausner five-star puff from Amazon. After listing such descriptions in the book as Strom Thurmond being called a “dirty-neck” and Robert Kennedy referred to as “Senator Love Beads,” Huston remarks: “This sort of language may be pitch-perfect for a duet with Keith Olbermann on Countdown but is hardly appropriate for an allegedly serious work of history.”

“There is a point at which the frequency of factual errors raises the legitimate question of whether the author is a scholar or transcriber,” the reviewer continues, and then cites a half-dozen examples, including several that even escaped Jack Pitney’s watchful eye. Huston also takes issue with Perlstein’s beloved Orthogonians-vs-Franklins dichotomy, noting that the historian uses the terms as “trap doors through which the author conveniently disposes of men and ideas he is unwilling to confront on their own terms.”

Toward the end of the review Huston takes strong exception to Perlstein’s argument that the Nixon years represented a battle between two equally sized, equally bloody-minded factions for the soul of the Republic:

The decade of the 1960s was the most turbulent in America since that which began with John Brown’s Kansas raids and ended at Appomattox Courthouse. There was a lot of anger, a lot of goofiness, and an indecent amount of violence. It commenced on Lyndon Johnson’s watch, during the high tide of liberalism. Richard Nixon didn’t cause it; he inherited it. The deranged landscape of the 1960s was the product of a liberalism untethered from common sense and good judgment, which elicited a reaction that was often ill considered and ill advised but was hardly homicidal. There were, of course, extremists who resorted to violence and haters who, while less lethal, were nonetheless menacing, but these were outriders, not mainstreamers. The very notion that the mass of Americans were prepared to kill each other over their political and cultural differences is more than nonsense; it is a calumny.

One wonders if Huston, when he speaks of an “ill-considered and ill-advised” reaction to rampant New Leftism, is thinking in retrospect about his “plan” which provided, on the assumption that extraconstitutional measures were needed to combat violent radicals, for the opening of mail, wiretaps, and an increased use of campus informants. (It is a little-remembered fact that some of the Libertarian Party’s founders-to-be were among Huston’s closest associates in the YAF, which would suggest that his 1970 proposals were intended to be a response to a wartime crisis and applicable only for the duration such a threat existed.) It may be that, as his professional career winds down, we’ll be hearing more from him in the future. Which is all for the best, since he was among the genuine intellectuals in the Nixon White House and, as his review makes clear, has read extensively and carefully in American history and can take the long view regarding the era in which he played a brief but significant part.

Honey, The New Puppy Chewed My Striped Pants!

November 6, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Book Review, Obama administration, Presidents, The New Nixon | 1 Comment 

In the Wall Street Journal, TNN’s Frank Gannon reviews Stephen Hess’s new book on Presidential transitions and inaugurations:

What do you wear to your Inauguration? Ike and JFK wore a morning coat and striped pants. (The general donned a homburg, and Kennedy sported a top hat.) Jimmy Carter inaugurated the new tradition — a plain business suit. What chapter and verse should the Bible be opened to as you are sworn in? Nixon chose the “swords into ploughshares” passage from Isaiah. Both Kennedy and George W. Bush, perhaps hoping to avoid interpretation, left the Bible closed. As for furnishing the Oval Office, you can be like LBJ and bring your own desk or select from four in the White House inventory: the Theodore Roosevelt, the Wilson, the Resolute (made from the timbers of a 19th-century ship) or the C&O (made in the 1920s for the railroad’s owners).

Too Busy Plotting a Revolution to Make Time for History

November 3, 2008 by Jonathan C. Movroydis | Filed Under Book Review | Leave a Comment 

Jonathan Karl reviews Ira Stoll’s Samuel Adams.

The Corps, And The Corps, And The Corps

October 30, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Book Review, Military, Nixon Library events | 4 Comments 

Vietnam War scholar Bob Sorley, third-generation West Point graduate, brought his copy of the 1952-53 Bugle Notes (indispensable handbook for each class of plebes, or freshmen, at the U.S. Military Academy) to the Nixon Library last week. He was in Yorba Linda to talk about his new book, Honor Bright: History And Origins Of the West Point Honor Code And System. Copies of Honor Bright were on sale. The Bugle Notes were not. Sorley would just as soon give you his right arm. The well-worn volume contains this answer to the question of what advantages an Army career has to offer, which he read out to his audience:

The answer is, paradoxically, practically none; [but,] in another sense, everything that is worthwhile in life. It depends entirely on your viewpoint….If you measure success by things accomplished, by a niche well filled, by the gratification of duty well and faithfully done, if your joy in life finds fulfillment in playing the game for the game’s own sake, of winning the love and respect of the men serving under you…, if you do not count the work, the trouble, the cost to yourself and do not stop to think of where the credit will go, but only of the success of the team, then in the Army you will find contentment.

Bolstering this countercultural vision of community and mission-critical interdependence is West Point’s honor code: “A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.” Cadets violated the code most famously in 1951, when 90 were dismissed (with the personal acquiescence of President Truman) after one revealed the existence of an academic cheating ring designed to help members of the football team, and in 1976, when an instructor read this on a cadet’s computer science paper: “This is not entirely my own work.” Over 150 cadets were involved that time, though many were permitted to return after a redemptive year off. Sorley says the returning cohort did just as well making colonel (an important benchmark in an Army career) as those who weren’t involved in the scandal.

The friendly and phlegmatic scholar choked up just once, and just a little, as he talked about his and Virginia Sorley’s (his wife and a former CIA librarian) friendship with West Point graduate Dawn Halfaker, severely injured while leading troops at Baquba, Iraq in June 2004. Among many other activities, Halfaker is now vice president of the Wounded Warrior Project. Recruited to play basketball at West Point, she had no special calling to military service until she arrived at the academy and got to know her instructors and coaches and her brother and sister cadets. Sorley said she told him later, “I’d found my tribe. These were the people I wanted to be with.”

After Sorley’s talk, the last question was posed by Orange Countian Lee Hobbs, who’d brought his son, Tobin, West Point ‘96, a veteran of service in Bosnia and now a Chapman University law student as well as a major in the Army reserves. Such is the bond in the long grey line that, before the applause had died, Bob Sorley was making his way up the aisle to shake the hands of a fellow cadet and his proud father.

 

The Messiah From Another Planet

October 27, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Book Review, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Faith | Leave a Comment 

Bruce Handy is a “Vanity Fair” editor who recently reviewed some children’s books about the 2008 candidates for the New York Times. Go here if you have iTunes and want to download the Oct. 10 Times Book Review podcast in which Handy talks with Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus about his findings, which are a little creepy when it comes to the books about Sen. Obama:

They really are hagiographic….Some of these books almost present him almost in a kind of a spiritual light, he’s almost kind of a messianic, almost a Jesus-like figure. It actually reminded me a lot of when I was a kid going to Sunday school and the kind of the books we would have about Jesus — very sort of denatured, a sort of nice man who loved children. And that’s almost the presentation of Obama.

Even in the drawings — there’s one, a picture of him kind of praying in front of the Lincoln Memorial in one of the books, kind of taking on the mantle of Martin Luther King.

In one of the other books, there’s this scene of him where he’s got this sort of weird glowing aura. He almost looks like something out of Steven Spielberg’s “ET” or “Close Encounters.” There’s something about these books– I just think with politicians who are always flawed people like we all are, kids are bound to be ultimately let down.

Pre-Order Now For Your 2009 Stocking Stuffing

October 23, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Book Review | Leave a Comment 

Alas, it won’t be available in time for holiday giving this year, but a new book by William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn —Race Course Against White Supremacy— will be published by the Third World Press on 1 June 2009.

The appealing and evocative title alone should guarantee that the book flies off the shelves. The prudent can pre-order now on Amazon.

The book’s thesis —that white supremacy explains everything in American history from the beginning of time until at least 1 June 2009— is so obvious that it only requires 192 pages for the Ayerses to nail it down.

Here’s how Amazon summarizes it:

Product Description

White supremacy and its troubling endurance in American life is debated in these personal essays by two veteran political activists. Arguing that white supremacy has been the dominant political system in the United States since its earliest days—and that it is still very much with us—the discussion points to unexamined bigotry in the criminal justice system, election processes, war policy, and education. The book draws upon the authors’ own confrontations with authorities during the Vietnam era, reasserts their belief that racism and war are interwoven issues, and offers personal stories about their lives today as parents, teachers, and reformers.

And here’s how Amazon describes Professor and Mrs. Ayers:

About the Author

William C. Ayers is a distinguished professor of education and a senior university scholar at the University of Illinois–Chicago. He is the author of To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher and Fugitive Days, a memoir about his life with his wife, Bernardine Dohrn. Bernardine Dohrn is the director of the Children and Family Law Justice Center and a clinical associate professor of law at Northwestern University. She is the coauthor of A Century of Juvenile Justice and Justice in the Making. They live in Chicago.

Recommended Reading

October 17, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Book Review | Leave a Comment 

Here’s a link to an article about the upcoming election by Joan Didion. It’s a short piece with a long provenance; it is brought to you via The Daily Beast (where it is nicely titled “Slouching Toward Washington”), from today’s Salon (where it is given the rather slapdash title “Election by sound bite”), which reprints it from the election issue of The New York Review of Books, where it was printed as part of a series of untitled articles.

It’s offered here as much on the grounds that anything Joan Didion writes ought to be read than for any particular intrinsic merits. In its NYRB context it was intended to present a series of observations rather than make any particular point. And there’s no doubt that it’s a typically stylish collection of apercus.

For at least some months it had been clear that we were living in a different America, one that had moved from feeling rich to feeling poor. Many had seen a mandate for political change. Yet in the end the old notes had been struck, the old language used. The prospect for any given figure had been evaluated, now as before, by his or her “story.” She has “a wonderful story” we had heard about Condoleezza Rice during her 2005 confirmation hearings. “We all admire her story.” “I think she’s formidable,” Senator Biden said about Governor Palin a few weeks ago. “She has a great story. She has a great family.”

Senator Biden himself was said to have “a great story,” the one that revolved around the death of his first wife and child and taking the train from Washington to Wilmington to be with his surviving children. Senator McCain, everyone agreed, had “a great story.” Now as then, the “story” worked to “humanize” the figure under discussion, which is to say to downplay his or her potential for trouble. Condoleezza Rice’s “story,” for example, had come down to her “doing an excellent job as provost of Stanford” (this had kept getting mentioned, as if everyone at Fox News had come straight off the provost beat) and being “an accomplished concert pianist.”

Now as then, the same intractable questions were avoided and in the end successfully evaded. The matter of our continuing engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan and our looming engagements throughout the region had been reduced to bickering over who had or had not exhibited “belief in the surge.” “Belief in the surge” had been equated with the “success” of the surge, and by extension of our entire engagement in Iraq, as if that “success” were a fact rather than a wish. Such doublespeak was rampant. The increasing destabilization of the economy was already clear — an average of 81,000 jobs a month were lost all through the summer — but discussion of how to resolve the bleeding still centered on such familiar favorites as tort reform. This word “reform” kept resurfacing, but the question of who exactly was to be reformed was left to be explored mainly on “The View,” by Barbara Walters.

What Is To Be Done - To Us?

October 16, 2008 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Book Review, Domestic issues, Economic issues, Election 2008, History, Islam, Islam and the West, National Security, Religion, Russia, Terrorism, War on Terror | Leave a Comment 

The final debate between John McCain and Barack Obama was primarily about the economy. That was appropriate and understandable. The big winner was Toledo’s new favorite son, Joe the Plumber – who will now be able to charge a lot more for his pipe-wrench artistry. And he will never again have a problem getting a table at Tony Packos.

It would be wise, however, for all Americans to remember something very important that is being overshadowed by the current cultural obsession. We are all concerned about our money. But the stakes right now are higher than mere dollars and cents.

In other words: It’s not just the economy, stupid.

As the long and hard fought presidential election campaign moves into the final frenetic stretch, there is an important court trial underway across the Atlantic - in Scotland. Two men have been charged with plotting terrorist bombings in Glasgow and London last year.

Two Muslim men - Mohammed Asha is from Jordan and Bilal Abdullaf is from Iraq.

Both are medical doctors.

While Americans worry about the possibility of another Great Depression, it is worth asking if we are in danger of being preoccupied with a Great Distraction at a crucial moment in our history.

Of course, our economic woes are quite real – ominous, in fact. And they cannot and should not be ignored. Not watching the store is what got us into this fix in the first place. But one has the sense that this nation is an increasingly soft target for something worse. And if it ever were to turn out that while we focused like a laser beam on the economy, our enemies decided to exploit our myopia, we could be in a bigger mess than we have ever imagined.

I am not trying to be “gloom and doom” here – just saying that it has probably crossed the mind of an adversary or two that this would be a fitting time to unleash something bad.

Bad, as in “where, oh where are you Jack Bauer?”

It is important for all of us to realize – even if it involves interrupting our current morbid fascination with the Dow and all things monetary – that the greatest strategic threat against our nation is not something that has been, or could be, done by people named Freddie or Fannie. Not even close. Our greatest enemy is, and will be long after the current financial mess is cleaned up, Islamism and its agenda to subdue all who persist in the audacity of being non-Muslim infidels.

In the sixth century B.C., Sun Tzu, in Art of War, said:

So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will fight without danger in battle. If you know only yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or lose. If you know neither yourself, nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself.

He also said: “All warfare is based on deception.”

There is an elephant in the big room under America’s spacious skies. It has to do with the potential for us to eventually see some of the same things happen here that are happening more and more frequently in Europe. I am referring to things like two presumably intelligent, and certainly well educated, doctors in a plot to bomb and kill.

Daniel Pipes is a widely read expert on the threat of radical Islam. He is a director of the Middle East Forum and calculates that, “10 to 15 percent of Muslims worldwide support militant Islam.” Let’s do the math (a fine young man on my staff, who has a graduate degree in theoretical mathematics would remind me here that this is arithmetic, not math – but you get my drift).

Estimates of the global Muslim population range between 1.3 and 1.6 billion – roughly one in five human beings. This means, if Pipes is right (and it is possible his estimates may be on the conservative side) – that there may be between 130 and 240 million people in the world who, in the name of Islam, hate America. These are the people who had a party on that sad September day seven years ago.

By the way, the total combined population of an earlier axis of evil enemies - Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan in September of 1939 - was approximately 194 million. That’s total – as in every man, woman, and child.

How about the statistics right here in the U.S.? Well again, the estimates are all over the place, but it is generally accepted that between three and five million of our neighbors are Muslim. An article in Newsweek last year used the figure eight million. Applying the Pipes formula to here at home, we come up with the potential for anywhere between 300,000 and 1,200,000 people in this country who may be less-than-enamored of the rest of us. Or worse, some may be longing for the day when the fruited plain becomes a Muslim caliphate.

Here is where it gets complicated. We are a nation of people fierce about liberty. We believe in things like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to assemble, to vote, and hold these things to be precious. We have no desire to become a police state, with neighbor turning on, or turning in, neighbor. We do not want to become hysterical and paranoid.

But there are bad people out there. They have guns and bombs and ugly ideas. And they have no problem “blending in” – even spending a long time cultivating a reassuring cover.

Bear in mind that the guys on trial across the pond right now are doctors.

There is a precedent for this, and it is one Americans should study. A few years ago, Margaret Thatcher, who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1979-1990, described an often-overlooked previous pattern for what we are now witnessing.

Writing in 2002, she said:

Perhaps the best parallel is with early communism. Islamic extremism today, like bolshevism in the past, is an armed doctrine. It is an aggressive ideology promoted by fanatical, well-armed devotees. And, like communism, it requires an all-embracing long-term strategy to defeat it.

The Iron Lady nailed it. Though the terms Islamo-fascist and Islamo-nazi are used these days with regularity, perhaps Islamo-bolshevik should become part of our vocabulary. Though Islam and communism as ideologies bear little resemblance to each other, beyond a mutual affinity for subduing and controlling others, they do have much in common methodologically.

It is a mistake to think of terror as the only weapon in the Islamist arsenal. It is a very public one, indeed – and horrifying. But behind the ugliness of terrorism lies a persistent and pernicious pattern of deceit and manipulation. The term taqiyya refers to the practice of deliberate deceit in the service of Islamist goals. The ends justify the means, in other words - lying, fraud, stealing, cheating, all things that most religions commonly consider sins, are perfectly appropriate in the pursuit of jihad.

John J. Dziak, Ph.D., a professor at The Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C., has written extensively on Russian Intelligence. Last year, his article, Islamism and Stratagem, appeared in The Intelligencer: Journal of U.S. Intelligence Studies. He drew parallels between the methods used by current day Islamists, and those used ninety-plus years ago by Lenin and company:

The Bolshevik regime was a conspiracy come to power. The Soviet Union in practice was a seventy-one-year old counterintelligence operation raised to the level of a state system.

Organic to such a counterintelligence system is the widespread practice of provocations, diversion, deception, disinformation, ‘maskirovka’ (military focused deception), penetration, and other active measures of a highly aggressive nature.

He also noted that, “from its earliest history Islam has practiced what westerners label stratagem, deception, dissimulation, concealment, etc., in its dealings with not only the Infidel but with other Muslims, as well.” He identified Islamism as, “the twenty-first century heir to the counterintelligence state traditions of the totalitarian systems of the last century.”

During a recent radio interview, Brigitte Gabriel, author of the new book, They Must Be Stopped: Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam and How We Can Do It, told me, “history reveals very clearly that the apathetic give way to the passionate, and the complacent are subdued by the committed.”

I have written before about the love Islamists have for a spurious document called, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This anti-Semitic tract, though long-ago exposed as a forgery created by the Tsar’s secret police to foster anti-Jewish sentiment in early 20th century Russia, has long been a favorite of demagogues from Adolf Hitler to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The ironic thing is that, though the idea of a vast Jewish conspiracy to control the world has been so clearly proven as false, a group called the Muslim Brotherhood actually did write a plot of their own.

And this document is no forgery.

Brigitte Gabriel devotes an entire chapter to this in her book and it is chilling to read. Discovered in Switzerland just a few weeks after September 11, 2001, “The Project,” as it has come to be known, outlines a century long plan “to dominate the West and establish an Islamic government on earth.”

It is a 14-page “How To” manual about infiltrating a society en route to eventually subjugating it. Among its instructions are such motivational nuggets as:

• Avoiding open alliances with known terrorist organizations and individuals to maintain the appearance of “moderation.”
• Infiltrating and taking over existing Muslim organizations to realign them toward the Muslim Brotherhood’s collective goals.
• Using deception to mask the intended goals of Islamist actions, so long as it doesn’t conflict with Sharia law.
• Involving ideologically committed Muslims in democratically elected institutions on all levels in the West, including government, NGOs, private organizations, and labor unions.
• Instrumentally using existing Western institutions until they can be converted and put into the service of Islam.
• Collecting sufficient funds to indefinitely perpetuate and support jihad around the world.

And so on.

Lenin could not have said it any better in What Is To Be Done.

FDR and the Great Deflation

October 4, 2008 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Book Review, Democratic Party, Domestic issues, Economic issues, History, Money, Political Philosophy, Presidents, Republican Party, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

The period between late 1929 and the beginning of the 1940s is, of course, known as the Great Depression. But in a real sense, it could be called the Great Depressions. There was more than one massive downturn in all things economic during those days of deprivation.

Five years after Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke so eloquently about “fear itself” - and then began to fulfill his promise of “experimentation” (as opposed to an actual plan), things were really no better than the day he took office. His “hundred days” of frenetic legislation gave way to years of false starts and faded hopes.

In early 1938, unemployment was at the 1931 level of 17.4 % and the Dow Industrial Average – at 121 - was still less than half of its 1929 high. The Dow would not actually return to pre-crash levels until Dwight D. Eisenhower was well into his first presidential term.

Amity Shlaes, in her fascinating book – a must read these days – The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, gives us a snapshot of the situation half a decade into the politics, policies, and promises of the New Deal:

The country was now at an odd moment. There was a new sense of permanence about the Depression. Being poor was no longer a passing event – it was beginning to seem like a way of life.

What started as a panic in 1929 soon morphed into something more sinister, deadly, and often overlooked: deflation. As money became scarcer, prices fell. Declining prices, if allowed to continue for long, tend to lead to a dangerous downward spiral of negatives – things like falling profits, closing businesses and factories, shrinking employment and incomes, and increasing defaults on loans by companies and individuals.

Deflation is the monster – the category 5 economic storm – to watch out for and guard against.

Early on during the Great Depression, housing values, though not starting the problem, became a leading indicator of the severity of the crisis. As prices moved down, homeowners found themselves with homes worth less than the mortgage amount. This led to a deflationary meltdown.

Sound familiar?

There are two knee-jerk things that both Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt did that actually ensured that the Depression would have a long run. First, Hoover stifled free trade when he, against the advice of many economists and business leaders, signed a protectionist tariff (Smoot-Hawley) bill. He ignored doomsday warnings that this “would spell economic isolation” and lead to the “most severe depression ever experienced.” Sadly, those warnings came true.

And both Hoover and Roosevelt fought the Depression by raising taxes.

Mr. Hoover gave us the Revenue Act of 1932, which burdened people already having a hard time holding on to homes and making ends meet. With deflation, dollars were worth more, so the government was taking these increasingly rare and more valuable dollars out of the hands of the people, in many cases sealing their financial doom.

Franklin Roosevelt wanted to change society through tax policy. He seldom met a tax he didn’t like. The president clearly cultivated his image as an enemy of the “great accumulation of wealth” and the protector of the “people” from corporations, utilities, and other usual suspects who become convenient rhetorical targets during times of economic crisis and confusion.

As the Great Depression lingered, Americans languished. Washington tended to do the wrong thing at the wrong time. As people watched the president, with a complicit Congress, raise taxes they wondered: “With business so hard, why make it harder?”

Conventional historical wisdom – the legend and lore of days gone by – suggests that Hoover was a “do-nothing” president who fiddled (better: fished) while the country burned. Then came Roosevelt on his white horse – a man of action (like his distant relative who also served as president). He saved the nation – and everyone lived happily ever after until he had to save us again – from the Nazis.

But, as Shlaes points out, the two men actually had much in common:

Hoover and Roosevelt were alike in several regards. Both preferred to control events and people. Both underestimated the strength of the American economy. Both doubted its ability to right itself in a storm. Hoover mistrusted the stock market. Roosevelt mistrusted it more.

Both presidents overestimated the value of government planning.

And both men doctored the economy habitually. Hoover was a constitutionalist and took pains to intervene within the rules – but his interventions were substantial. Roosevelt cared little for constitutional niceties and believed they blocked progress. His remedies were on a greater scale and often inspired by socialist or fascist models abroad.

Deflation impacted the American worker the hardest. In times of even moderate inflation wages increase (along with prices). But during a deflationary cycle, wages either remain the same, or drop, or worse - disappear entirely. It brings to mind one of the more morbid sayings from those days: “The Depression isn’t that bad if you have a job.”

The fact is that the crash of 1929 did not cause the Great Depression – at least, not right away. The precipitating force triggering the cascading crisis that gripped the world back then was deflation, something that Hoover overlooked – and Roosevelt missed completely.

So – why, then, was FDR elected four times? Well, in 1932 he was just plain better at campaigning than President Hoover – and people were upset and wanted change.

In 1940, the storm clouds of war certainly worked in Roosevelt’s favor. And by 1944, the people were not going to vote a sitting president out of office during a time of war (bearing in mind that an overwhelming number of Americans supported the war effort).

1936, though, is an enigma. Amity Shlaes suggests that FDR invented a “new kind of interest-group politics.” Many Americans became part of a movement that “demanded something from government.” Also, the initiatives developed during Roosevelt’s first term increased federal spending. For the first time in our nation’s history the national government spent more than all the states combined.

And 1936 was really the first election year where federally driven entitlements – a persistent challenge ever since – were part of the national experience. Enter the politics of the trough.

In other words, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was successful because he convinced enough people he was trying to do something for them. The record shows that he did not really do all that much, but such facts tend to fall short when countered by a compelling narrative.

“Bold, persistent, experimentation,” that’s what Mr. Roosevelt promised on day one of his presidency. One wonders if anyone could be elected today by saying, in effect, “I will keep making stuff up until something works.” But FDR was actually that good at politics.

As an example of FDR’s experimental economic savvy, one day he announced to his staff that he was considering raising the price of an ounce of gold by twenty-one cents. When someone inquired as to the rational behind that figure the president replied: “because it’s three times seven. It’s a lucky number.”

Imagine what Oliver Stone could do with Franklin D. Roosevelt if he gave it a try.

The Only Thing We Have to Fear is Another Roosevelt

September 30, 2008 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Book Review, Democratic Party, Economic issues, Election 2008, History, Presidents, U.S. History | 2 Comments 

As the recently proposed massive financial bailout plan apparently needs and awaits a rescue itself, we are now witnessing the all-too-familiar practice of political posturing. Lou Grant, the curmudgeon television producer played by Ed Asner, who ruled the newsroom on the old Mary Tyler Moore Show, once remarked that, “leadership is the art of delegating blame.” If that is true, then we have no leadership shortage in Washington these days.

But of course, it is not true. Leadership is about taking ownership, responsibility, and the initiative. This is why leadership and politics make the strangest of bedfellows; there is no natural affinity.

History, though, has shown that politicians can actually get away with saying much without doing much of anything. In fact, smart politicians have practiced this kind of cynical gamesmanship for quite sometime. Even so-called great leaders, those with names that have become synonymous with recovery, healing, and change, were skilled in the art of politically motivated non-commitment.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was master of the method.

When John F. Kennedy was seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960, the path to victory wound through the country roads of West Virginia. It was his first real test – especially about whether or not his Catholicism would be an issue. He went head to head against Hubert Humphrey and he won. Two things brought about that victory: his father’s money and the presence of Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. It was a magic name. The people still saw FDR as a savior, and any connection with the great man was enough to win a vote.

Of course, now we know – we really do – that Mr. Roosevelt really did not do all that much to lastingly solve problems and may, in fact, have prolonged the Great Depression. But stubborn things like facts have always fought uphill battles against myth-driven hero worship.

Real leaders take risks. They understand that they cannot actually claim credit for something that works out, unless they are prepared to accept blame when it doesn’t. Mr. McCain alluded to this in his first debate with Mr. Obama – citing those two notes written by General Eisenhower on the eve of D-Day in 1944. Ike knew a thing or two about stakes.

Politicians, in contrast to authentic leaders, are all about the credit - but tend to head for the hills when there is the possibility of blame. President Kennedy talked in the days after the Bay of Pigs fiasco about how victory has many fathers, while defeat is an orphan. Rare is the politician who can step up and admit a mistake (by the way, Mr. Kennedy’s approval numbers soared after his moment of candor – people actually respond favorably to that kind of transparency).

FDR was the master of keeping his distance from risky situations. And possibly his playbook is being studied today. If so, we may all be in harm’s way.

Franklin Roosevelt beat Herbert Hoover in November of 1932 by nearly 12 million votes. The economy was, of course, the overriding issue. Since October of 1929, the nation (and the world) had increasingly languished in what had always before been called a panic. Hoover thought the word “panic” sent the wrong political message, so he saw to it that the more benign term (so he thought) “depression” would be widely used to describe the situation.

FDR out-campaigned Hoover – he had the moment and the message. He promised that happy days would be in the land again. People voted for that. Understandably.

Much is made of Roosevelt’s first 100 days in the White House, and his frenetic legislative agenda designed to address the crisis and calm the nation’s fears. This period is still seen today as the benchmark for presidential leadership in a crisis.

But often overlooked is what FDR did, or better didn’t do, during the four months between his election in November and the inauguration, which took place back then on March 4th.

In his largely complimentary book, The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, Jonathan Alter concedes that a recovery of sorts, already underway in 1932, was negatively impacted by the election:

“If Roosevelt’s election did not by itself halt recovery, it clearly contributed to a period of drift that worsened a grim economic situation. Uncertainty over what the new president might do shook confidence. The following year, FDR’s agricultural secretary, Henry Wallace, concluded in an economic report that the economy had been recovering slightly in the fall of 1932, but that the ‘long interval’ between the election and the Inauguration ‘proved unsettling to business’ and was an important factor in impending recovery.”

One issue that rocked the already enfeebled economy had to do with the repayment (or lack thereof) of Great War debt to us by Britain and France. Hoover had earlier granted those nations a one-year moratorium, but they had payments due to us by December 15, 1932. Just days after the election, our former and eventual allies announced that they wanted to miss that payment. This news rocked the nation.

Herbert Hoover reached out to Franklin Roosevelt for help. We would call this “bi-partisanship” today. We might even expect it. We might think that politicians – even opponents – could put country first and work the problem.

Hoover and FDR did meet on November 22nd, but it was clear that the president-elect did not want to help his predecessor or, for that matter, the country. The next day, he told reporters, “it’s not my baby.” He basically saw the issue as a problem for Hoover and the lame duck Congress.

Franklin Roosevelt was determined to do nothing to help Herbert Hoover, even if that meant the worsening of the economic crisis. If things got worse, then so be it – he would be more of a hero when he turned it all around. As Alter suggests:

“He understood that the lower Hoover and the country slid, the better he would look upon assuming office. This theatrical and psychological insight was essential to his conjuring act when he finally took the oath.”

There were, in fact, several attempts – always initiated by Hoover – to bring the popular president-elect into processes dealing with the economy. But Roosevelt clearly had no interest in participating.

Even men who would eventually serve FDR with distinction as part of his inner circle were perplexed and disturbed by the president-elect’s passivity and seeming inability to understand the issues. Henry Stimson, who would eventually serve in Roosevelt’s cabinet, was “contemptuous of Roosevelt’s failure to comprehend the subtleties” of dealing with the debt repayment issue.

Tommy “the Cork” Corcoran, who would become a Roosevelt troubleshooter, was “angry and dismayed” about FDR’s unwillingness to partner with Hoover during the crisis, adding, “Roosevelt seemed a villainous fool to me.”

In February, less than a month before he would take the oath of office, Franklin Roosevelt basked in the Caribbean sun during a twelve-day cruise on Vincent Astor’s massive 263-foot yacht (one of the largest in the world). This, while at home, banks were closing in record numbers. The president reached out to the president-elect again and again. Still Roosevelt would not work with Hoover or do anything to help.

Raymond Moley was an original member of Roosevelt’s famed “brain trust.” He also wrote much of the president’s first inaugural address. He later broke with FDR. During correspondence years later with Herbert Hoover, Moley wrote:

“I feel when you [Hoover] asked him [FDR] on February 18th to cooperate in the banking situation that he either did not realize how serious the situation was or that he preferred to have conditions deteriorate and gain for himself the entire credit for the rescue operation.”

The rest is legendary, of course. Franklin Roosevelt told us that we had nothing to fear except “fear itself.” And everyone lived happily ever after.

The problem with that scenario is that the Great Depression did not go away after being attacked by Roosevelt’s alphabet-soup initiatives. In fact, his policies grew the government - as opposed to growing the economy - and undermined business. The truth of the matter is that FDR prolonged the crisis and saw to it that the country would take a long time to turn around.

I think the lesson for us today is that we need to fear those who, in times of crisis, seem to have an aversion to political risk.

Night Of The Gun, Day Of Grace

September 27, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Book Review | Leave a Comment 

David Carr’s The Night Of The Gun: A Reporter Investigates The Darkest Story Of His Life. His Own is a harrowingly self-aware account of addiction and recovery. We may pray that the author’s recovery persists. Carr (who writes about the media for the New York Times business section) describes his relapse three years ago after 14 years of sobriety. If you’re in a praying mood, also offer one for the AA, Al-Anon, and other recovery meetings underway wherever you live. You may not know about or think about them much, but they’re there, in church parish calls, community centers, and school basements, men and women taking care of each other, helping one another to a deeper understanding of themselves and their illness, persevering and getting through the day.

Before writing the book Carr brought the skills of his trade to bear, interviewing friends, ex-lovers, cops and others who knew him as addiction was destroying his life in Philadelphia in the 1980s. He candidly admits that his initial recovery was enabled not just by his own efforts but by the family members and friends who wouldn’t give up on him.

The hardest interviews to read (and probably to conduct) were with his college-age twin daughters, Erin and Meagan, born into what Carr calls the Life and given a further glimpse of it when their father started drinking when they were teenagers. Reading the last 20 pages, dads with daughters will want to have the Kleenex box nearby.

As for the book’s title, Carr had always remember a fight with a druggie friend named David. In the wee hours one morning Carr had gone to his house to confront him and been shocked when he pulled a gun. Interviewing David years later, Carr learned that his memory had protected him all those years. David hadn’t brandished the gun. Carr had.

Memory is a mystery, and so is grace. Near the end, Carr writes,

So I inhabit a life I don’t deserve, but we all walk this earth feeling we are frauds. The trick is to be grateful and hope the caper doesn’t end anytime soon.

David Pietrusza On The 1960 Campaign

September 23, 2008 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Book Review, Election 2008, History, Media, Presidents, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

Here is a link to my conversation yesterday with historian-author, David Pietrusza, on WAVA in Washington, D.C. We talked about his new book, 1960, LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon - The Epic Campaign that Forged Three Presidencies. The interview runs about 38 minutes. To hear it click here.

Radio Interview with Historian-Author David Pietrusza

September 22, 2008 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Book Review, Election 2008, History, Media, Republican Party, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

Of possible interest to TNN readers – I will be interviewing historian-author David Pietrusza about his new book, 1960: LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon, at 5:15 p.m. (eastern) today. I am sitting in as guest host today and tomorrow on the Washington, D.C. drive-time talk show, The Don Kroah Show, on WAVA (105.1 FM & 780 AM local) – which can be heard live via the Internet @ www.wava.com.

Mr. Pietrusza read my piece - A Very Forgettable Vice Presidential Nominee - last week on TNN. I will, of course, plug this wonderful blog.

The interview will also be archived at my site tomorrow morning. - DRS

Coogan’s “The Troubles:” A Review

September 21, 2008 by Joshua Trevino | Filed Under Book Review | Leave a Comment 

One of the curiosities of western Europe’s longest-running armed conflict is how sparse its literature is — and how we must therefore rely on what we have, rather than what we wish to have, when we read about it. The low-grade civil war in Northern Ireland is at an ebb thanks to the peace process of the past fifteen years, but it does continue — as the on-again, off-again nature of the local executive, and the persistence of paramilitary organizations like the Real IRA and the various Loyalist guerrillas demonstrate. The province — call it Ulster or not as you prefer — has dropped off the world’s radar since the bombs and shootings mostly stopped, and the New York Times now runs the occasional piece on what a lovely spot Belfast has become.

This is good news, of course, but observers of the region understand that it is all quite fragile. Among the malign developments of the recent past is the fate of the “mainstream” of Northern Ireland politics in the wake of peace: contrary to hopes and expectations, the moderate (of sorts) Catholic and Protestant parties — the SDLP and the UUP respectively — have been pushed aside by their more historically radical cousins. (Readers may recall that the leaders of those parties shared the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize.) The latest Northern Ireland executive is led by the DUP and Sinn Fein, which is a bit like a cohabitation of Malcolm X and George Wallace. In fairness, it’s not been the catastrophe that one might have reasonably expected — and there is a case to be made that the old hard-line parties have reformed toward the mainstream, rather than the mainstream having gone hard-line. Still, the fact remains that the motive forces in the war on both sides are now in the driver’s seat — or rather, the drivers’ seat.

It is in the light of these outcomes that Tim Pat Coogan’s The Troubles must be read, both to understand how Northern Ireland got here, and to understand how extraordinary it is that Northern Ireland is here at all. The book covers a discrete 30-year period, from 1996 to 1996, and though that may seem inadequate — the Good Friday Agreement that yielded the present peace settlement was signed in 1998 — a late-edition epilogue covers the developments up to just prior to Tony Blair’s ascent to the UK Prime Ministership in 1997. Inasmuch as what exists now is mostly an outcome of pre-1996 events, it remains the best single-volume history of the Irish war in print.

Being the best, though, does not mean that it is as good as it ought to be. Coogan is probably the single most comprehensive author on modern Ireland, with a prolific output that focuses upon the island’s political development in the 20th century. As the son of an IRA man, and a noted journalist throughout the tumult of the past generation, he is uniquely placed to make sense of the interaction of ballot and bullet that drives his country’s society and politics. It is a pity, then, that he brings his massive knowledge and extraordinary access to bear in a manner that veers stylistically from dense, to turgid, to compelling — and back. The major flaw of The Troubles (shared with the other book of his I’ve read, his biography of Michael Collins), is his propensity for taking a rich and tragic subject, and relating it as a journalist would. Perhaps this seems an unfair critique, as Coogan is, after all, a journalist. Nonetheless, in reading The Troubles, one is struck by how badly Coogan needs an editor. Perhaps an editor’s hand was present in the writing; if so, one shudders to think of the state of the original manuscript. Opaque narrative digressions and baffling assumptions of readers’ prior knowledge mar the text, and misspellings — especially of American politicians’ names — jar the eye to distressing degree.

For a purported history, The Troubles is not much of one: roughly one-third of the way through the book, historical narrative is abandoned for a series of subject-specific chapters. (For example, a whole chapter on “The Media War” covers nearly 25 years.) A reader looking for a structure of the progress and regress of the situation in Northern Ireland is left to make sense of it all on his own, correlating the events of one chapter with the situation in another. This is aggravated by Coogan’s practice of referencing his own work, even within the book at hand. Often, the reader is asked to return to a previous chapter, or flip to a forthcoming one, for an explanation of a subject under discussion. The reader yearns for a strong editor who would have put a stop to this, and imposed a narrative flow on what should be the definitive work on its topic.

If nothing else, one walks away from The Troubles certain that Tim Pat Coogan has a grasp of the Northern Irish conundrum that exceeds even its most involved partisans. He has a bias, to be sure — he’s an Irish Catholic, after all — a