Jeremayakovka

True Whit Day

April 1st is True Whit Day, a day to remember so as not to be made a fool of by history.

Waiting For Good Ol' Republican Verse

Elizabeth Alexander's "Praise Song for the Day" is a perfect specimen of ... bureaucratic verse, comments Adam Kirsch in The New Republic:

The poem's argument was as hard to remember as its language; it dissolved at once into the circumambient solemnity. Alexander has reminded us of what Angelou's, Williams's, and even Robert Frost's inauguration poems already proved: that the poet's place is not on the platform but in the crowd, that she should speak not for the people but to them.

Somewhat like the president's only occasionally exalted, often middling, prose....

Black Democrat Warns Against Unrealistic Expectations

How did this slip under the radar?

In many ways his candidacy kind of exacerbates [the Black community's] problems rather than solves them.
- Dr. Ricky L. Jones, author of What's Wrong With Obamamania?, interviewed earlier this year

An Old Friend's Election Night Thoughts

Last week an old friend sent around a message which describes his experience of watching Barack Obama win the presidential election. It's a special message which offers a unique perspective on this historical moment. It's open-hearted, of course, and also authoritative. Whatever political differences we may have (cordial, spirited, or both) are set aside during this great moment in our nation's history.

The thing is, when we were very young teenagers, I don't remember Adam and I talking politics much. Mostly we showed up for classes, diligently handed in homework, and played lots of hallway handball. Our respective reflections on what this election brings to bear arrived in different ways, at different times.

With Adam's permission, I am posting portions of his message here.

* * *

Dear friends and family,

I have been, and remain, overwhelmed by this election. A special thanks to those who joined us at our home that night, and many more who joined us by phone or in spirit....

[W]hen CNN put up the enormous picture of him with "Barack Obama projected winner and 44th President of the United States!" All of a sudden, it hit me: we have a black President and First Family!! Colleen found her soprano range, and our guests erupted in the loudest most raucous celebration we've ever had.

This made me think about my grandfather, elected into a segregated Capitol cafeteria with Congressmen who refused to sit next to him and supposed colleagues who insisted on sabotaging him. I thought of my grandmother, refused a concert at Constitution Hall, and then slammed by the IRS for telling off the House Un-American Activities Committee. (Her biography is now on Amazon, and an article in today's Washington Post mentions this experience: -- see page 2 "Fifty years later...")

I thought about the experience of my parents, a mixed-race couple in the late 60s and early 70s who faced many challenges with the support of some great friends. (They married in DC less than two years after the Supreme Court's ruling in the Loving case struck down Virginia's law against interracial marriage.) It's so comforting to think that when people see a similar couple today, they'll think of the parents of our new President.

I thought about the Adam Clayton Powell Academy which I visited in south side Chicago last week as Principal for a Day. Though located in a dangerous neighborhood (the cab driver who took me there told me I should fear for my safety in that area), most of the school was absolutely jubilant on the eve of the election of a President of the United States who is one of their own in several ways. However, one second grade class kept asking questions like "Why do black people and white people hate each other?" "Why do people shoot each other?" I wonder, what must they be thinking now, after seeing the election and the celebrations which followed?

I thought of the 13-year-old Haitian boy named Marc who joined my tutoring group in a Dorchester school seventeen years ago because a friend dragged him in. The atmosphere of violence was so pervasive back then, he asked me, "Why should I work hard and study in school, when I don't even know if I'm going to be around in six months?" I was so completely shocked, I don't even remember my reply. His story has a happy ending: he kept coming (saying he felt "addicted to this program -- I don't really like it, but I keep coming back"), and the attention and tutoring sent his attitude and grades rocketing upward. Most important, he started to think about the years ahead instead of merely days and weeks.

How many young boys like him, and for that matter how many young girls, will start off at a much better place when thinking about their future because of this election? This thought brought tears to my eyes....

It truly is a great time, for the nation, and for the world.

With love,
Adam

.

Reliably Conservative Pundit "Gets" Obama's Deep Appeal To Blacks; Harlem Reunites; Bush Speechwriter Hails "My President"

There is more than one prize on which to fix our eyes.

Chicagoan Rick Moran, author of the Right Wing Nuthouse blog, attended the Grant Park Election Night Party and saw up close the unsprung emotions Obama's victory brought to many black people who also attended:

I suppose I got caught up in the emotion of the night due almost exclusively to the genuine and copious tears of black Americans. The ones I spoke to and interviewed were nearly speechless with joy. With a start, I realized something that had escaped me all these long months of writing and thinking about this race. For many African-Americans, this election was a spiritual event, something that transcended the corporeal and brought to mind ancestral yearnings and desires for freedom.

For perhaps many blacks, Obama is the word made flesh -- the redemption of the promise in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal." The small sample of blacks I interviewed all spoke of the shattering of barriers, the hope that an Obama presidency would translate into a more just society, and the belief that for them personally, their lives would never be the same.

This is a very good thing. It's a very good thing for any white man to notice, and in particular for this one to notice. The longtime Chicagoan apparently hasn't spent much time on the South Side. (That's not an accusation, just an observation.) More importantly, he's a conservative. And conservatives need to be curious about the victorious opposition - out of respect for their humanity as well as for fine-tuning our strategy.

There are piles of reasons to hold President-elect Obama's feet to the fire. To name three: his shady online fundraising, his (or rather, the MSM's and certain institutions') refusal to make all sorts of personal records public, and the highly questionable meaning of his being welcomed into office by some of America's sworn enemies. Those are questions of character and leadership. The fact of his election, however, is another matter altogether.

* * *

* UPDATES *

Rick reads Rahm

Harlem-based writer Sekou says 125th Street "was like standing in the midst of a massive family reunion as all of them found out that they had hit the lottery at the same time."

Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson provides historical context independent of the leftwing, Democratic Party narrative (which typically omits Republican ("The Party of Lincoln") advances for blacks): This presidency in particular should be a source of pride even for those who do not share its priorities. An African-American will take the oath of office blocks from where slaves were once housed in pens and sold for profit. He will sleep in a house built in part by slave labor, near the room where Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation with firm hand. He will host dinners where Teddy Roosevelt in 1901 entertained the first African-American to be a formal dinner guest in the White House; command a military that was not officially integrated until 1948. Every event, every act, will complete a cycle of history. It will be the most dramatic possible demonstration that the promise of America – so long deferred – is not a lie. I suspect I will have many substantive criticisms of the new administration, beginning soon enough. Today I have only one message for Barack Obama, who will be our president, my president: Hail to the chief..

"The United States of Audacity"

Fox News Captures The Significance Of Obama's Election

.
I can't think of another country in the world where you would have a significant minority that was once so maligned and so oppressed finally have one of its sons rise to this level. This is - you know, I don't care how you feel about him politically - on some level you have to say, "This is America at its grandest." The potential, the possibility - and what it says for our children, black and white - the image of Barack Obama and those little girls in the Rose Garden in these years to come I think is just stunning.
Agreed, Juan. Agreed.

"Now reality must intervene."
Agreed there, too, Jacob.

John McCain - America's Fifth Lost Man

I don't think about John McCain, because he's part of the old world, the dead America.
- The rapper Nas, “Q&A Nas,” Rolling Stone, July 10-24, 2008.
 

A post at Gay Patriot yesterday speculated that the mainstream media has largely accepted Obama's life-narrative and worldviews because they figure this is their shot to be a part of history. Certainly that's been the heady message which Obama's supporters have internalized. They're so sure of it, they can't imagine anything else coming close. My comment to that post said as much.

That said, it's been a GOP truism that Obama can't be beaten on image, and instead can be beaten only on issues, facts, character. Obama is an extreme liberal (not "post-partisan"); Obama is a ruthless and tainted, Chicago-bred machine pol (not an "idealist"); Obama not only enjoys the enthusiastic support of most of the world's "Jamal the Plumbers," he enjoys (and occasionally cultivates) support from the anti-American, anti-liberal, and anti-Zionist demagogues who rule them (hence, he lacks " judgment"). All of the above are objectively true, and have been amply demonstrated - by conservative bloggers generally, of course, rather than by the mainstream media.

But what if John McCain's presidential bid were just as historic as Barack Obama's? Shouldn't anyone coming so far to gain a major party nomination deserve to be esteemed on that merit alone? What if John McCain - the life-narrative of John McCain - were upheld, admired, revered even (as his Democratic endorser, Lynn Forester de Rothschild declared on CNN)? What if John McCain's life were already historic? What if a John McCain presidency fit squarely in a great and already-established American historic tradition, one which should be apparent to all Americans?

The lost story of this presidential election is that John McCain's life and potential presidency already are historic. Sadly, however, what makes them so are not on the tip of people's tongues. They should be. Our media and cultural powerbrokers hardly see this as worthy of mention, let alone worthy of inquiry, admiration, and cause for pause and reflection. These people are not even capable of conceiving of McCain's virtues, I venture. (When his age is mentioned it's as a liability exclusively, not as a source of wisdom and moderation.) So few of today's cultural powerbrokers - including his opponent - have ever risked anything close to what John McCain risked (and lost) to earn them. Risked not just for his country, but for another, far-off country. For them to conceive of John McCain's virtues, and then to inform the public of them would be highly inconvenient. It would get in the way of their being a part of the election of Barack Obama.

* * *

It wasn't always that way, and it doesn't have to be that way.

Curiously, the following excerpts from a Thomas Wolfe short story, "The Four Lost Men," shed light on this situation. The story appears (in its abridged version) in the collection From Death to Morning. (Click here for discussion of the original, long version.) Set in June 1917, shortly after the US had entered WWI, Wolfe contrasts his 16 year-old sensitivities to his aged father's undying esteem for post-bellum Republican presidents - all of whom were veterans of the American Civil War. Wolfe's special power in this tale is to imagine these men's minds, not as elder statesmen, but as young wartime leaders passionately enamored with life and death, with duty and nation, with hope and wonder and agony and loss.

The lessons, concerns, and even obsessions which Wolfe visits are as timely today as they are undying - just like the historic life of John McCain. Here's just one excerpt. Please click through and read them all in sequence.

[My father] spoke then with familiar memory of the lost Americans – the strange, lost, time-far, dead Americans, the remote, voiceless, and bewhiskered faces of the great Americans, who were more lost to me than [ancient] Egypt ... – and whom he had seen, heard, known, found familiar in the full pulse, and passion, and proud glory of his youth: ... the proud, vacant, time-strange, and bewhiskered visages of [post-bellum Republican presidents] Garfield, Arthur, Harrison, and Hayes.

The first vote I ever cast for president,” my father [said] ... “I cast in 1872, in Baltimore, for that great man – that brave and noble soldier – U. S. Grant! And I have voted for every Republican nominee ever since.... [In 1893] the Democrats were in and we had soup kitchens. And, you can mark my words,” he howled, “you'll have them again before these next four years are over – ... before that fearful, that awful, that cruel, inhuman and bloodthirsty Monster [i.e., President Woodrow Wilson] who kept us out of war [from 1914 until 1917],” my father jeered derisively, “is done with you – for hell, ruin, misery, and damnation commence every time the Democrats get in. You can rest assured of that!” he said shortly, cleared his throat, wet his thumb, lunged forward violently and spat again.

* * *

The Thrilla From Wasilla, Chidin' Biden, Couldn't Steal The Show

If she'd been preparing for this debate for the past 18 months like the other three competitors, I'm sure Palin would have been not just passable, but formidable. Biden looks ready for the job on Day One without worries, she looks like she'd need a learning curve. She zinged Biden on his differences with Obama, but he also showed that in the past month he's worked at conforming his record and his person to Obama.

There was one moment when Palin could have rolled out her vision of the country and of governance - when asked how, if circumstances made her president, she would differentiate her administration from her predecessor's. Had she thought deeply about these matters, she would have turned a page for the  GOP - and the nation - by initiating an all-important dialogue about where this country needs to go, and where she, uniquely, can take it. She would have guaranteed national attention for herself now, through '12, and even later. It was a great moment, but she didn't make it her moment. A Bible-believing, prairie-fire populist - and moreover, one ready to refine the Bush Doctrine - would be champing at the bit to make history, not waiting for history to come around to her (again). Should McCain and she go down to defeat, she'll likely to go down in history as a respectable regional reformer.

Should McCain and Palin regain momentum and ultimately take this election - which tonight's performance keeps on the radar - the learning curve will continue in fullest force. For the moment, we can all breathe easy again and put the focus back on McCain and Obama where it belongs.

No knockout - Biden by unanimous decision. Narrowly.

* * *

More thoughts:

She carried herself with stellar poise considering that, since declaring for national office, Democrats obtained and disclosed her social security number and home phone number [Update: her ph# is listed] and hacked into her personal email. Says one recap, she "has bark and bite."

How many times did he lie? The Mendacity of Joe B..

And what's with the winking into the camera? Once, yeah all right, but twice? Is this a GOP chick-pol's version of "swagger"? Yeah, that really assures me she's got what it takes - to talk herself out of a speeding ticket. Sure it jazzes me when conservative pols project strong gender differentiation, but I hope she doesn't make that her signature gesture. On the other hand, she shamed Ivy-trained and Beltway-bred feminists (as if they’re capable of shame) by landing several blows (often, if not always), digging in her heels when she couldn’t (and with a smile), and - something Hillary would have been loathe to do had she represented the Dems in this debate - standing by her man.

Wasilla Remembers Sarah

* Welcome, Conservative Grapevine and Little Green Football readers! *

Yesterday evening I had a remarkable encounter with a man here in California (let's call him “Hank”) who had been a resident of Wasilla, Alaska during the years when Sarah Palin served as city councilwoman and then mayor. He and I chatted for half an hour, completely off the cuff. More than most mainstream media stories about her life and career, Hank's memories, impressions, and opinions – of Wasilla as much, actually, as of Sarah Palin – are indeed a breath of fresh air. They lend credence to the persona that the McCain-Palin campaign is projecting: a frontier, hockey mom with “a servant's heart.”

First, Hank said that most Americans will find it difficult to understand many particulars of Alaska small-town life. Wasilla is small by head count, but it's spread over a wide area with many miles between it and the nearest cities. Yes, it has “sprawl,” but growth merely peppers (not plasters) its way toward adjacent boroughs. (“Boroughs”: the category for unincorporated land outside the city proper.) Out there neighbors often live at a distance from each other, but these individuals also learn to make do with each other -- and especially with nature -- out of non-negotiable need, not choice.

Hank never mentioned “environmentalism” or “hunting,” but instead spoke of “game management.” Area game (or, if you prefer, wildlife) seems to coexist with the citizenry in a pragmatic, managed equilibrium. Certain technology, he said, tracks the number of moose or fish that pass through certain areas. The environs can only support so many number of this or that animal, so often it's a good (and prudent) thing that hunters and fishers are issued more licenses, and get out and bring in big catches. Never forget that many Alaskans count on outdoor kills for basic sustenance. This includes roadkill – when a big animal goes down on a road or highway, a local church will receive a call and then send out members to haul and properly strip the carcass. This has to do with sustenance and community service, not with sport and spoils. Teddy Roosevelt would be proud.

This also has to do, as Hank described it, with a “pay-as-you-go” way of life. Since there are few state taxes, Alaska government remains small and usually in the background, even if services are scarcer and more expensive. For example, the state university is relatively expensive as state universities go, but that's because only students pay in to it. More bureaucratized states like California and New York fund their state universities by taxing the entire populace. Hank also wanted me to note that there's a fair amount of home schooling in Alaska. (I have to add, the tenor of these remarks reminded me of an old Dinesh D'Souza anecdote: Ronald Reagan, back in the 80s, received D'Souza as a guest at the White House. Reagan pointed out the window to a large structure, not too far off. “You see that building?” he asked. “Yes.” “That's the Department of Education. Do you know what they do over there? “No,” D'Souza acknowledged, "I don't." “Neither do I,” Reagan declared.)

Back in Wasilla, during Palin's time in office an effort took hold to incorporate his outlying borough, but Hank was wary because he knew that the city wouldn't be able right away to keep up roads and provide fire department services as he'd been used to. It was a trade-off, but one brokered in open (if close) quarters. Just as former Alaska senator, Democrat Mike Gravel recently said, Hank said he didn't always agree with her decisions, but he tended to respect them. He said she always carried herself confidently, as when she had Wasilla's chief of police replaced.

In this and other ways, Hank said, he formed over the years strong, up-close impressions of Sarah (whom he always referred to as “Sarah”). As Sarah gave birth to new children, the town paper ran items about them. She and her husband gave them funny, marvelous names – “Piper,” he explained, is named after the piper cub airplane (a fixture in long-distance Alaskan transportation). Sarah typically attended Wasilla's high school's graduation ceremonies, including his own child's graduation. Her mayor's office was “a shack.” When years later she put a former governor's plane on eBay, he said it didn't surprise him one bit. Did Hank watch her recent vice-presidential nomination acceptance speech? “It was 100% her,” he said, without hesitation nor undue emphasis.

Now that I think about it, I didn't even ask Hank whether he's registered to vote with any party, nor whether he is planning to vote for McCain-Palin in November. It doesn't much matter, since his opinions and input regarding Sarah Palin are based mostly on her no-nonsense fulfillment of two non-partisan offices. What a world of difference this is from the dozens, even hundreds of liberal journalists and Democratic operatives who – like Kremlin commissars dispatched to quell defiant Soviet republics – have descended upon Alaska to try to destroy, by any means necessary, the hard-earned, hard-nosed reputation of America's most popular vice-presidential nominee, the woman who will forever be remembered by her former municipal constituents as “Sarah.”

.

Share

Live-Blogging McCain's Acceptance Speech

Per C-Span's broadcast:

7:05 PM - The crowd bops and hops to the Stray Cats, chomping, bustling, waiting...

7:08  - The biographical slide show is underway. Crowd hushes.

7:10 - The slide show is low on politics, high on character. His grandfather's and father's extraordinary Naval records ... McCain's early record, dating back to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and earlier (Who hears about this in the MSM? Where? When? If it were up to the MSM, lives like McCain's would permanently cast down the MSM memory hole.)

7:12 - More slide show, connects POW years to his release, entrance into politics. Almost seamlessly. It's as if he's lived three lives, not just one.

7:16 - Enter the candidate. Cool and measured. The previous heavyweights on previous days revved up and worked the crowd - Romney, Giuliani, Palin. McCain is on even keel throughout. Note the yellow necktie - bright, optimistic, a little flair. Silverhaired goldenboy.

7:22 - A warrior bearing olive branches: acknowledges Obama's achievement ... welcomes to work with all patriotic Americans.

7:25 - Crowd chants USA! USA!  - pent-up emotions overflowing.... McCain doesn't blink, doesn't get sidetracked, doesn't let it go to his head.

7:28 - Graciously thanks convention for welcoming Sarah Palin yesterday - second big applause line.  McCain the gentleman-statesman: Palin his "partner" to govern ... he wants to "introduce" her to Washington.... This is how one generation passes a torch to another. Barack Obama couldn't have gotten as practical a blessing from Ted Kennedy or Robert Byrd.

7:32 - Populism, populism, populism.  Smaller government.

7:38 - He names names: hard-working, ordinary individual Americans. Nothing fancy, but that's the point. Including "the family of Matthew Stanley of Wolfboro, New Hampshire, who died serving our country in Iraq. I wear his bracelet and think of him every day."

7:42 - "Education is the civil rights issue of this Century." A talking point he made verbatim at his Saddleback appearance. If the MSM were committed, objectively, to the well-being of historically deprived communities - not simply to the Obama star-narrative - there'd be news profiles, investigative reports on this. It would be front and center.

7:48 - Energy here at home.

7:51 - Democrats, read his lips: "I hate war. It is terrible beyond imagination."

7:54 - The understatement of his life: "Long ago, something unusual happened to me that taught me the most valuable lesson of my life. I was blessed by misfortune."

7:59 - The run-up to the peroration. This stuff is too good to make up: "I fell in love with my country when I was a prisoner in someone else's."

* * *

My feed got choppy, so here's the rest, cribbed from Yid With Lid. It was over the top, McCain didn't ramp it up, the crowd simply ran with it. It's all about...  humble greatness:

I fell in love with my country when I was a prisoner in someone else's. I loved it not just for the many comforts of life here. I loved it for its decency; for its faith in the wisdom, justice and goodness of its people. I loved it because it was not just a place, but an idea, a cause worth fighting for. I was never the same again. I wasn't my own man anymore. I was my country's.

I'm not running for president because I think I'm blessed with such personal greatness that history has anointed me to save our country in its hour of need. My country saved me. My country saved me, and I cannot forget it. And I will fight for her for as long as I draw breath, so help me God.

If you find faults with our country, make it a better one. If you're disappointed with the mistakes of government, join its ranks and work to correct them. Enlist in our Armed Forces. Become a teacher. Enter the ministry. Run for public office. Feed a hungry child. Teach an illiterate adult to read. Comfort the afflicted. Defend the rights of the oppressed. Our country will be the better, and you will be the happier. Because nothing brings greater happiness in life than to serve a cause greater than yourself.

I'm going to fight for my cause every day as your President. I'm going to fight to make sure every American has every reason to thank God, as I thank Him: that I'm an American, a proud citizen of the greatest country on earth, and with hard work, strong faith and a little courage, great things are always within our reach. Fight with me. Fight with me.

Fight for what's right for our country.

Fight for the ideals and character of a free people.

Fight for our children's future.

Fight for justice and opportunity for all.

Stand up to defend our country from its enemies.

Stand up for each other; for beautiful, blessed, bountiful America.

Stand up, stand up, stand up and fight. Nothing is inevitable here. We're Americans, and we never give up. We never quit. We never hide from history. We make history.

Thank you, and God Bless you.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, Infidel Crusader in Europe

As you can read below, political convenience rendered certain aspects of General Eisenhower's Orders of the Day for June 6, 1944 problematic. For example, that Soviet forces were "brothers-in-arms" and that the defeat of the Reich would guarantee a "free world." (Freer, yes, but hardly free.)

Unmistakable, however, is the Christian imagery of the Crusades in which Ike placed this unprecedented military campaign:
.

Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force!

You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.

Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely.

But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!

I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty, and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory!

Good Luck! And let us all beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.

.
No doubt the Prophet was "humiliated" and "insulted" by this awesome military campaign to liberate Europe from Nazi tyranny. One shudders to think how he feels about efforts to root out Muslim colonization of Europe today....

Warrior Whitman

In war [the poet] is the most deadly force of the war.
-- Walt Whitman

More Midcentury Virile Thinking - Romain Gary

This time, from Frenchman Romain Gary who in 1970 published a splendid, sardonic memoir about racism in America, White Dog (Chien Blanc). In the late 1960s he was married to American-born film star Jean Seberg and the two were living in the Hollywood Hills. She pursued her acting career while he served as French Consul in Los Angeles. Gary shows Seberg becoming radicalized and manipulated by the emerging Black Power movement (caught up in what later became known as "radical chic"), whereas he serves as a jaded witness to America's and Jean's upheavals.

In one of several instructive passages, Gary cuts to the quick about Islam's appeal to black militants -- how it provides, almost literally, a fantastic cover for their antisemitism, their racism, and their anti-intellectualism:

I find the idea of an antisemitic black very seductive. I'm inclined to observe that the blacks "need" Jews like everybody else does.

This antisemitism is due partly to the comedy of Arabism and Islamism which extremist blacks play out in search of a spiritual elsewhere. Ninety-nine point nine percent are completely unaware that that the Arab conquerors were their ancestors' unremitting slaughterers, destroyers of tradition and the true African religion which was animist. They don't know that the Arabs converted blacks to Islam by the power of the sword in the same name and at the same time that they transformed the least resilient into eunuchs and sold their human goods to Portuguese, British, or American slave traders...

It would be unfair and unworthy to bear a grudge against today's Arabs and to cause them grief for the crimes of their ancestors, which at the time weren't crimes. Nothing is more far-fetched than to want to judge past centuries through today's eyes. But to go from there to seeing in Islam the incarnation of the soul of Africa means covering quite a few light years. When Malcolm X writes about white people, "How could I love the man who raped my mother, killed my father, and reduced my ancestors to slavery?" that nevertheless is exactly what he did when he threw himself into the arms of the Prophet...

Like W.E.B. DuBois, Barack Obama Is Either A Genius Or A Fool

For those of us who oppose Senator Obama for president, his candidacy is a curious -- and absolutely necessary -- study. The very reasons why enthusiasts welcome and worship him are why the rest of us are wary and worried: opposition to maintaining the Iraq front against Islamic terror ... a resume reeking of Rules for Radicals Saul Alinsky (by whose tactics Obama seeks to reframe issues in terms of community "empowerment") ... and that "breath of fresh air" facade, behind which we skeptics sense, blowin' in Obama's wind, storms of soft jihad.

What to do?

Classical liberals and committed conservatives alike must plot Illinois's ambitious junior senator on a moral grid in the way he so richly deserves. This moral grid is formed by two axes, "Hope and Hype" and "Humility and Hubris," strains of which already reveal themselves. For my part, I've made sure to read his two memoirs, the aw-shucks Audacity of Hope and the unevenly introspective Dreams From My Father. Next I read Shelby Steele's A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win. Recently I picked up David Mendell's Obama: From Promise to Power. Elegaic and informative, it is chock full of first-hand anecdotes (including access to all of Obama's men, and his woman) and offers occasional glimpses of his shortcomings and vulnerabilities.

Now on my plate is to discern just whose cloth Obama cuts himself from, including which swaths and what size. African-American history is the best place to start, I figure, since that's his primary identity. I've started with legendary NAACP-founder and Communist propagandist, W.E.B. DuBois. Like Obama, DuBois was partly of white ancestry but never shied from identifying with African-American community. Like Obama, DuBois completed (with distinction) graduate work at Harvard, which gained him immediate notoreity. Like Obama, DuBois was an educator as well as a political organizer.

Also like Obama -- such is the case his opponents seek to compile -- DuBois lent his name and his mind to the propagation of America's reigning sworn enemy. In DuBois's time that was Soviet Communism, and in ours imperial Islamic jihad. Leaving a finer comparison and contrast of the two men for another day (e.g., DuBois entered the political fray during the Jim Crow era, when lynching was rampant; Obama has done so in the post-Civil Rights era, when black-on-black crime is rampant), here's a brief excerpt of a notable passage from DuBois's Autobiography (aptly subtitled, "A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life..."). One of DuBois's reflections on turning 25, or something like it, has no doubt been thought by you know who:

I rejoice as a strong man to win a race, and I am strong -- is it egotism -- is it assurance -- or is it the silent call of the world spirit that makes me feel that I am royal and that beneath my sceptre a world of kings shall bow. The hot dark blood of a black forefather is beating at my heart, and I know that I am either a genius or a fool.

Did I say that Barack Obama is either a genius or a fool? What I meant to say -- to prudently, shrewdly not misunderestimate him -- is that Barack Obama may be both a genius and a fool.

For Flag Day, "The Defense of Fort McHenry"

Thanks to Laurie for pointing out the complete source of the national anthem. More background from Eugene Volokh.

The Defense of Fort McHenry
by Francis Scott Key

Oh, say can you see, by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, now conceals, now discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines on the stream:
'Tis the star-spangled banner! O long may it wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wiped out their foul footstep's pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war's desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heaven-rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, for our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: "In God is our trust."
And the star-spangled banner forever shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Thinking Like A Communist Thinking Like A Nazi To Catch A Thief Called History

I've realized that everything in this world is geared to destroying mankind, to destroying me, among others. Everything: even the faith I once had. The Party, the triumphant revolution, I used to believe in all that. Deep down I still believe in it, but only as one believes in a dream after waking... I am on my own. I have the right to want to live, even through the decline of Europe.

Some notes here from my recent read of Victor Serge's Unforgiving Years, a pressing meditation about European Communists on the run in WWII even more from Stalin than from Hitler.

True to the concerns of this itinerant Communist's other written works -- humming with a force vitale that ranges from the polemical to the historical to the poetic, taken together they comprise some of the 20th Century's most "committed" literature -- the energies at stake in this novel are political and, above all, psychological. From page one unsettled characters are on the run and remain so for five years (1940-45), in four countries, on two continents, and through 340 pages. They juggle aliases and addresses while beset by trenchant reassessments -- sometimes shared, often private -- of the state of the Class Struggle In A Time Of War.

Come to think of it, a tantalizing twist on Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon would be had Serge managed to compress his tale into one continuous narrative rather than four successive ones. The novel could then be titled (more intensely, likely, and certainly with more economy) Unforgiving Hours. As it stands, the narrative offers two sections whose major machinations unfold amid real warfare, but where battle is but the backdrop -- the mise en abîme of Leningrad under Wehrmact seige, and later the fin de Reich leveling of the city of Altstadt before its American liberation.

Serge's primary purpose is not martial, but civil. For a ruthless agitator, he stares with considerable sympathy into the fragile frontiers of everyday minds overrun by extraordinary, totalitarian ideologies. One passage especially near the end of the Altstadt section struck me. Here an elderly Nazi school instructor speaks his mind to an American journalist:

"A very great people the Americans ... The United States is presently the foremost industrial power in the world, and superior at waging war ... On the other hand, there is a certain lack of social cohesion and spiritual tradition..."
"You think so?"
"Beyond a doubt.... You will realize that in fifty years."
"Phew, we got time to turn around then."
(p. 263)

In these lines is the crux of the "culture war" we came to by the 1990s -- stoked by the "adversary culture" (which Norman Podhoretz elaborated in The Bloody Crossroads), then superseded by the "counterculture" -- which rages and festers today. These lines are also, let it be noted, nearly identical to those which "The Philospher of Islamic Terror," Sayyed Qutb, drew in the sand during his nearly identical years in America. Yet note as well the journalist's reflexive, rolling-up-our-sleeves, can-do attitude. Only in America can history be -- or, to a European, seem, at least in part -- neither pathetic nor heroic.

So much of 20th Century European history is unpardonable, yet so much of 21st Century American history remains unfinished.

Happy Birthday, Whittaker Chambers

** Update (04/10) ** New site! WhittakerChambers.org

For all the tricks Fate played on you -- you who labored so hard to take leave of trickery --  it's no surprise you were born on April Fool's Day.

Last year's commemorative post, "True Whit."

William F. Buckley, Jr. vs. Gore Vidal: "It Is Really Unprofitable To Talk About Camelot, Since We Don't Live In Camelot, But In The Good Old U. S. A."

The late William F. Buckley, Jr. weighs in on the 1968 presidential election, along with Gore Vidal.

Buckley: [The next president of the United States] shouldn't be too naive. For instance, when the president of the Soviet Union informs him that the Communists desire world peace, the next president would ideally tell him to cut the horse feathers. He shouldn't crave the idolatry of world opinion. For instance, when criticized by the United Nations for taking a position he feels he needs to take in the best interests of his country, he should feel free quite ostentatiously to turn off the national earphone.
.

Note Vidal, with calumnious alarm -- expectorated drippings whence waft a whiff of the nauseous mal de vivre Jean-Paul Sartre cooked up -- referring to the American Empire and to the race war, intoning that the 37th president of the United States could very well be the last president. Picture yourself in the 1960s. Militantly touting its cult of "social change," the Left has taken to the streets, it conspires and boasts of revolution, its most ruthless individuals (a Communist and a Palestinian) assassinate, first, a president, then a major presidential candidate -- and that "malevolent fantasist" Vidal suggests that fascism  is just around the corner. ("Malevolent fantasist," a phrase borrowed from Roger Kimball's farewell to Buckley.)

It may have been. Yet let us recall, Gentle Reader, that whatever be the hard, sometimes bitter (and, yes, sometimes bloody) costs of preserving the political order, upheavals threatening that order come typically from the Left, sometimes with popular approval. During the Roman Republic's shaky final decades Caesar decided early on that the Populares, not the Optimates, party would best translate his indecipherable genius into real power. In a later era Bonaparte and Hitler each enjoyed, for dreadful seasons, enormous popularity when they provided order where the institutions that had guaranteed order had collapsed. Truly there is more to be said on the subject -- yet Vidal, for his seemingly moderate erudition and insight, agitates more than penetrates the subject. His final phrases identify a generalized, troubled sentiment (a queasiness, if not a nausea) but they do not indicate an issuance from that sentiment. "Law and Order" is strong medicine, mind you, strong for good reason and to good ends.
.

In this second video Vidal (below), an American blue-blood just as much as Buckley, tosses out more dour, veiled threats, perceiving himself no doubt as some kind of tribune, some kind of messenger: Very soon the poor, black and white in alliance with the young, are going to challenge the old order, and if Nixon does not respond with intelligence and with compassion, then there will be such revolution in these United States as has never been before.... Not all of the police and national guards combined will be able to withstand the eruption of those without hope or means of redress save through violence.

 

Happy Presidents' Day - "War, Pestilence, Famine"

Experience proves that the man who obstructs a war in which his nation is engaged, whether right or wrong, occupies no enviable place in life or history. Better for him, individually, to advocate "war, pestilence, and famine" than to act as obstructionist to a war already begun. The history of the defeated rebel will be honorable hereafter, compared with that of the Northern man who aided him by conspiring against his government while protected by it. The most favorable posthumous history the stay- at-home traitor can hope for is -- oblivion.

-- from the Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant
(18th president of the United States)

La Bandera De "¡Viva Obama!" Sea Lo Mismo Que El Asesinato De La Democracia

* Update *

Welcome Seraphic and Atlas readers!

(Everyone, please don't let your alarm and disgust at this "Chebama" image interfere with the longer, harder work of parsing Obama's own words and deeds. Exhibit A: Stephen Hayes. -JMK)

.
Watch for these and other anti-American signs in Obama's campaign. Larwyn emails: You think if Mitt had a Hitler poster in one of his campaign offices it wouldn't be FRONT PAGE.  How about just a POPE poster? (Photo from Obama campaign office in Houston, found at Don Surber's site.)

Let's point out that Ernesto's evil ideology killed 100 million human beings while Hitler's evil ideology killed maybe a quarter of that. At every step of the way card-carrying liberal elites were fascinated by Ernesto's evil ideology. They were captivated by it and sometimes even directly adhered to it. Recall also that Ernesto's evil ideology was the final hope and ambition of the assassin of Democrat John Kennedy -- Kennedy, in whose image Obama's is being burnished. But Alas! both the irony and criminality are lost on today's Democrats.

Had Oswald somehow lived to see Ernesto emerge in world affairs, he would have been slamming his tin cup against his cell's steel bars to celebrate El Comandante's "exploits," first before the bloodied execution walls of Cuba, then amid the humid heights of the Bolivian jungle.

(Photo from Political Party Poop.)

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Meanwhile, from "Obama's Politics of Collective Redemption" at the American Thinker:

Consider these numbers on  recent Google searches using only Obama's name plus one other word:

* Obama + messianic  75,200
* Obama + savior  226,000
* Obama + prophet  312,000
* Obama + Christ 504,000
* Obama + change 4,540,000

During One of American Conservatism's - And The Republican Party's - Dimmest Hours, A Very Long View

Longtime conservatives will remember how by the mid-1970s their worldview's influence had become diminished. The order of the day included: a winnable war sabotaged by domestic radicalism... Republican presidents who pushed for big-government solutions at home and coexistence with the West's totalitarian enemies... and a rejuvenated and radicalized Democratic Party.

Some observations from that time about "the big picture":

Are the retreat and the decline of the West, then, and the weakening of the Western will, so far gone by now as to be irreversible? Certainly there are few signs of reversal, or of individuals, movements, or ideologies that might inspire a reversal. If modern liberalism is the ideology of Western decline and suicide, no ideology or doctrine of Western revival is visible.... The prelude to the Western decline was the Bolshevik revolution. The main action began with World War II, from which issued the division of Europe and the collapse of the Western dominated world structure. As the drama has relentlessly unfolded over that past generation, the brief ascendancy of the United States begins to appear as no more than an incidental subplot.

It is not that liberalism, with its innate historical masochism, is flourishing. On a global scale, the liberal hope for the universalization of the representative democratic governmental form with which liberalism is most naturally correlated, has proved a fantasy.... But a renewed conservative movement, incorporating beliefs and a program consonant with the epoch's issues, challenges, and perils, and able to rally a mass following, has not taken form and is not in sight: a Ronald Reagan might conceivably be elected president, but will not lead a resurgence of the West. The movements outside of the broad liberal-conservative spectrum that exhibit vigor and purpose aim at the destruction, not the renaissance of Western society.

-- James Burnham
from the Afterword to the Second Edition (1975) of The Suicide of the West

* * *

The cycles of American presidential elections have almost as little impact on the trend of Western civilization as the Earth's revolutions do on its orbits around the sun. As the Earth's revolutions are a result, not a cause, of its orbit, so it is tempting to think (not without some reason) that American presidential elections are the mere side effects of an entire civilization's downward trend. Post facto but pre mortem, as it were. Hence, emanating from both parties in 2008 the misty mantra of  "change"....

That's why thinking in terms of Romney vs. McCain or Hillary vs. Obama (and certainly McCain vs. Hillary) is, to some degree, incidental to the big picture. Also incidental is the Republican tendency to claim to identify who most resembles Ronald Reagan, a useful calculation, perhaps, but an ultimately futile task. Reagan's presidency defined his era truly, but the flesh and blood Reagan was, like all men, a man of his time. Only legends are for all time.

Western complacency during the aggressive ascent of Islamofascism showed during the administrations that succeeded his that Reagan did not divert darker currents that ran more deeply through his era. Like a river's relentless stream that beats on, then around, then past a squat rock lodged in that river's bed, the enervation of Western culture and values and amour-propre beat upon those individuals who, rock hard, upheld them, then and now.

Romney or McCain ... Hillary or Obama ... Democrat or Republican ... we are in for a very long, very hard haul. Thankfully, Burnham's message about the West's suicide came in the form of a book, not a note.

* * *

Meanwhile, a dispirited (and dispiriting) counterculture was knock-knock-knockin' on Heaven' s door.

And Hollywood warped "God Bless America" from uplifting hymn into a damp, dismal dirge (watch to the end).

"Bush Is One Cool Customer"

I neither love him, nor hate him -- but I do insist to his visceral, knee-jerk critics that he's more intelligent, more civil, and more moral than they'll ever realize, let alone acknowledge. Yes, his popularity is low -- for varying reasons, depending on whom (and how) you ask -- but not as low as that of the Democratic-run Congress.

So here's a little breather in the never-ending brouhaha between those who still carry water for Bush and those who toss buckets of slime at him every chance they get. When in the market for the next person who best personifies presidential qualities, don't ignore the ones this two-term Republican has brought to the table. (Found at Bookworm Room.)

What's In A Color, Anyway?

Today happens to be the federal holiday made in the name of a great American, a prophet of both progress and conservatism, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Two items in honor:

and

"MLK was a Zionist" and

"Clarence Thomas is not a sellout"
.

Wretched Gentile Becomes Righteous Gentile

In Claude Lelouch's version of Les Miserables (1995) Jean-Paul Belmondo (best-known as the young romantic thief in Breathless) plays an aging truck driver who tries to save a Jewish family during WWII.

Hugo's masterpiece is palpable and oceanic. It significantly affected Whittaker Chambers compelling him to seek out the Communist Party to try to do right in the world (which he confesses early on in Witness).

In contrast to the truck-driving desperados of Le Salaire de la peur (The Wages of Fear), it could also be titled Le Salaire de l'espoir (The Wages of Hope).

So what that the following video is French-only -- What are you, deaf? -- Let the mellow chanson roll over you....

And of course it's a little sentimental and lusty -- it riffs off of these posts

Yay for the righteous Yanks!

To The Shores of Tripoli - And The Strait of Hormuz

.
For the Navy and Coast Guard craft and crews patrolling dangerous waters in that part of the world, in light of these attempted provocations a remembrance of old-time valor. More on US Navy hero Stephen Decatur.

Solzhenitsyn For A New Year's Sermon

To usher in the New Year, anti-Communist Titan Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1979 Harvard Commencement Address. Some excerpts:

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days. The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society. Of course, there are many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life.

Political and intellectual bureaucrats show depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in theoretical reflections to explain how realistic, reasonable, as well as intellectually and even morally worn it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice. And decline in courage is ironically emphasized by occasional explosions of anger and inflexibility on the part of the same bureaucrats when dealing with weak governments and with countries not supported by anyone, or with currents which cannot offer any resistance. But they get tongue-tied and paralyzed when they deal with powerful governments and threatening forces, with aggressors and international terrorists. Should one point out that from ancient times declining courage has been considered the beginning of the end?

* * *

I have spent all my life under a Communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale than the legal one is not quite worthy of man either. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses. And it will be simply impossible to stand through the trials of this threatening century with only the support of a legalistic structure.

* * *

The defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a whole defenseless against certain individuals. It is time, in the West, to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

* * *

The press too, of course, enjoys the widest freedom. (I shall be using the word press to include all media.) But what sort of use does it make of this freedom? Here again, the main concern is not to infringe the letter of the law. There is no true moral responsibility for deformation or disproportion. What sort of responsibility does a journalist or a newspaper have to his readers, or to his history -- or to history? If they have misled public opinion or the government by inaccurate information or wrong conclusions, do we know of any cases of public recognition and rectification of such mistakes by the same journalist or the same newspaper? It hardly ever happens because it would damage sales. A nation may be the victim of such a mistake, but the journalist usually always gets away with it. One may -- One may safely assume that he will start writing the opposite with renewed self-assurance.

Because instant and credible information has to be given, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors, and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none -- and none of them will ever be rectified; they will stay on in the readers' memories. How many hasty, immature, superficial, and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, without any verification. The press -- The press can both simulate public opinion and miseducate it. Thus, we may see terrorists described as heroes, or secret matters  pertaining to one's nation's defense publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: "Everyone is entitled to know everything." But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era. People also have the right not to know and it's a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls [stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk.] A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information.

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. Such as it is, however, the press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislative power, the executive, and the judiciary. And one would then like to ask: By what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible?

* * *

But should someone ask me whether I would indicate the West such as it is today as a model to my country, frankly I would have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society in its present state as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through intense suffering our country has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive. Even those characteristics of your life which I have just mentioned are extremely saddening.

A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger -- 60 years for our people and 30 years for the people of Eastern Europe. During that time we have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience. Life's complexity and mortal weight have produced stronger, deeper, and more interesting characters than those generally [produced] by standardized Western well-being....

After the suffering of many years of violence and oppression, the human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today's mass living habits, introduced by the revolting invasion of publicity, by TV stupor, and by intolerable music. There are meaningful warnings which history gives a threatened or perishing society. Such are, for instance, the decadence of art, or a lack of great statesmen.

* * *

The American Intelligentsia lost its nerve and as a consequence thereof danger has come much closer to the United States. But there is no awareness of this. Your shortsighted politicians who signed the hasty Vietnam capitulation seemingly gave America a carefree breathing pause; however, a hundredfold Vietnam now looms over you. That small Vietnam had been a warning and an occasion to mobilize the nation's courage. But if a full-fledged America suffered a real defeat from a small communist half-country, how can the West hope to stand firm in the future?

* * *

Western thinking has become conservative: the world situation should stay as it is at any cost; there should be no changes. This debilitating dream of a status quo is the symptom of a society which has come to the end of its development. But one must be blind in order not to see that oceans no longer belong to the West, while land under its domination keeps shrinking. The two so-called world wars (they were by far not on a world scale, not yet) have meant internal self-destruction of the small, progressive West which has thus prepared its own end. The next war (which does not have to be an atomic one and I do not believe it will) may well bury Western civilization forever.

Facing such a danger, with such splendid historical values in your past, at such a high level of realization of freedom and of devotion to freedom, how is it possible to lose to such an extent the will to defend oneself?

* * *

Read the whole thing along with a full-length audio clip of the speech.
.

Show Us -- Not Your Tits, Hillary -- Show Us Your Blood!

(Update 12/31) Sen. Clinton, a candidate for the leadership of the free world, apparently doesn't know the first thing about the country referred to by some as "the most dangerous place on earth."

* * *

Benazir Bhutto becomes an unwilling (including far from perfect) martyr for representative democracy, and is it just me who thinks Ms. Rodham Clinton is out of tune with the day the Muslim music died?

If she had the right stuff, if she were a great leader waiting for History and not just a politician waiting for opportunity, Ms. Rodham Clinton would be making the Speech Of Her Life about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and Muslim jihad, about the sanctity of the democratic process and women's eligibility for politics, about the savagery of the mortal enemies of freedoms we habitually take for granted, and about the shining moral, political, military compass that the United States of America is (or should be) to the entire world. She'd be making the Speech Of Her Life and the whole world would be watching. Instead of frigid heiress to the highest office she'd be an avenging Amazonian androgyne -- Jack Kennedy, Maggie Thatcher, and Athena rolled into one -- if Ms. Rodham Clinton had the right stuff.

But she doesn't, so she's not.

Instead she's calling for "an international, independent investigation" into the assassination. Yes, let's investigate al-Qaeda. That'll teach 'em! The leading Democratic presidential contender is a one-worlder machine pol who once a decade will wow a women's conference in an imperial capital, but ... chug upriver into the heart of History's darkness?

Not on your life -- and not on Benazir Bhutto's death.

In the wake of Bhutto's assassination every hour that passes without a great intervention by the woman being sold to the American electorate as a genius, as a compassionate heart, as a champion of children and the disadvantaged, etc. etc. is another reason why "Hillary" is indeed a brand name, is another reason why she's a cranky, overeducated, cuckolded White Hausfrau and not a majestic statesman.

On behalf of all prospective voters, I gotta say, Show us -- not your tits, Hillary -- show us your blood!

That's what Benazir did.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.
.

Show us what you're made of, old gal. At this arresting moment in world history, we have a right to demand of The Woman Who Would Be Potent POTUS Over Us, What the hell flows through your veins? and What are you willing to do to prove it's for real?

While she's miscalculating an answer, waiting for a cooked up cue during a cardboard Q&A, I'm gonna cue up a little Tina ...

.
... then a little T & A.

.
Aside: Found at Andy Cooper's weblog, intellectual boytoy Reza Aslan speculates that the U.S. removal of Saddam Hussein -- and Ms. Rodham Clinton's initial support for it -- led to Bhutto's assassination. Says who? Says Obama's people, says Aslan.

Related: Brando via Coppolla & Milius via Conrad, "Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared." (scroll down)

Lisa Schriffen @ NRO on the USSR's long shadow over, MSM's "deathwatch" in the subcontinent.

The most pitched and informative takes on Bhutto, Paki politics rounded up by Pamela and Fausta.

Shelby Steele On White Guilt, The Obama Phenomenon

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

Teach, brother!

.
Steele's ...Why Obama Can't Win -- the book; the interview
 

Who Remembered Pearl Harbor This Year?

Anita Bryant, for one. Here's a swell, down home benefit she put on last summer for remaining survivors of the USS Oklahoma (sunk Dec. 7, 1941). I blogged about it previously here.

Deb Schlussel recaps the MSM's "nary a peep" lack of commemoration.

* * *

To be victorious in the long run you need a tradition of fighting, you need myths and martyrs' haloes -- otherwise national character will fall into decay.

-- Edward Kuznetsov, 23 September 1971
(from inside a Soviet prison)

September 11th Is A Date Which Will Live In Infamy

Partisan liberals are gearing up for their "stop Rudy" campaign. I can feel it.

Here are some choppily edited video clips, found at Dana Goldstein's blog (who found it at Talking Points Memo), of Rudy Giuliani's frequent invocations of September 11th during interviews, debates, and campaign appearances. Dana calls this a tick (as in, a nervous tick), whereas I would say it's a tack -- a strategy to remind Americans of his own leadership, certainly, and by extension of the leadership of many other Americans on that awful and awe-inspiring day.

.

.
People who take issue with a leading presidential candidate, one who oversaw the most intense locus of that day's crisis -- oversaw it more directly than either the president or vice president -- should have to answer the following:

"September 11th is a date which will live in infamy."
Do you agree , or disagree, with that statement? (Yes or No.)

.
If recalling September 11th really is distasteful to the good folks at TPM, I guess I could placate them by trying to convince Giuliani to invoke some other date. Say ... February 26th? That day in 1993, on the watch of then-President Bill Clinton and then-Mayor David Dinkins (both Democrats), saw the first attempt by Islamic terrorists to blow up the World Trade Center. The savages' spectacular plan included the intended release of cyanide gas into the tower's ventilation systems -- plus the wishful thinking that the tower's collapse would bring down its twin. So one good that conceivably could come out of a ticky-tacky discussion of whether to invoke or to not invoke September 11th would be to connect it back to February 26th.

February 26th turned out, as a matter of luck, not to be catastrophic -- loss of life and property were minimal -- though it was a precursor to September 11th. For Khalil Sheik Mohammed, an uncle and adviser of one of the plotters, went on to become the chief coordinator of the September 11th attacks. The lessons KSM learned from February 26th were: Never send a fanatical homicide bomber to do a fanatical suicide bomber's job and America might send in spooks and prosecutors, but she won't send in the Marines. What was for the civilized world, at the end of the day on February 26th, effectively a reprieve from catastrophic terror should in hindsight have been a clarion call. Whereas for Islamic fanatics it was a casting call.

Something often omitted from remembrances of September 11th is that, like February 26th, only strokes of fate and luck made that day somewhat less catastrophic than it otherwise would have been. The desperate courage and determined outrage of a few dozen passengers successfully (if tragically) diverted United Flight 93, which had been piloted (targeted) at the Capitol or the White House. That many WTC employees hadn't yet arrived to work when the first planes struck (and that many who had also had time to evacuate) drastically reduced the number of human casualties on that day.

All this is to acknowledge (and perhaps the Talking Points Memo crowd will find common ground with me here) that Giuliani's leadership should not be permitted to eclipse the near unimaginable bravery and stoicism of the many thousands gone on September 11th. Where we diverge is that I believe Giuliani is within his rights -- moreso, his duties -- to invoke our national memory of it. Actually I welcome the kind and gentle, but firm manner by which he speaks for all of us -- he exhibits a fundamental remembrance and pride, plus the littlest hint of grief and a whiff of defiance. And of grapeshot.

I have to wonder, what would partisan liberals prefer Rudy Giuliani do than revive memories of September 11th? Do they wish that he discuss Ms. Rodham Clinton's unreliable mentions of her daughter Chelsea's whereabouts in lower Manhattan on that morning? If that is the case, there may yet be an occasion for Giuliani to do so.

"Because The Beautiful Non-Violent Anarchist Revolution Needs A New York Chapter"

Earlier this year the anarcho-pacifist Living Theatre, led by its surviving founder Judith Malina and current co-director Hanon Reznikov, celebrated its 60th anniversary. Here's a public reading of a poem Reznikov wrote for the occasion (hardly a poem, more like some well-spun "free association"...) which he and Malina recited at a dingy basement gathering.

.
Almost 20 years ago on 3rd & C in the East Village, in a cabaret-style, black box basement storefront, I caught the Living's exuberant production of Else Lasker-Schüler's anti-Nazi allegorical play I and I. It was a night to remember. A high school friend, back from his first semester at Harvard, sporting first-growth sideburns and smoking Marlboro reds, joined me again in our native Manhattan. I'd bused in from Berkeley (3 days nonstop by Greyhound), having recently bought a $99 black motorcycle jacket and sticking to a still-pending "not guilty" plea for a minor charge incurred some weeks previously for civil disobedience. For two untested liberal New York Jewish teenagers to whom anti-Nazism was still the lone inherited pose of anti-fascism, I and I was, or seemed, just what die Frau des Doktors ordered.

The Living had decided to stage Lasker-Schüler's work -- a refashioning of Goethe's Faust as a condemnation of the acquiescence to Nazism --  as a musical. The musicality (choral more than instrumental) drove the play's points home that much more deeply. One reviewer quipped that Mephistophiles, played by a black actor, looked like Rick James in dreads and drag. Calling to mind Lasker-Schüler's ultimate years as a destitute German-Jewish refugee in Mandate Palestine, Malina (whose parents had fled Germany in the 1930s, little Judith in tow) played the small but by no means minor part of a withered, old, homeless woman. Barrel-chested and tight-fisted, under a single spotlight she belted out a sotto voce exhortation that put the rest of us more supply formed types to shame. (And, this more supply shaped type, to wonder....) Like a beggar's blessing or a mute's moan, it was a fitting theatrical gesture for the reigning grande dame of American anarchism. Since that time no cultural production I've taken in, other than The Living's I and I, has instilled such visceral resistance against the indifference, lassitude, resignation -- and betrayal -- which fascism starkly and in a way seductively imposes. Alas! If only I knew then what I know now about Islamofascism. If only all of us knew then. If only all of us knew now.

The Living Theatre is that most rare of anarchist groupuscules: people who (on their good days) love life more than they hate "the System." While the Left -- both long before and ever since that mesmerizing production of I and I -- has done so much more to discredit than to honor itself, I, me & myself confess an undying, wide-eyed admiration for much of what The Living has undertaken -- that is, envisioned -- during its exceptionally long run. To be sure their "program" (to the extent they have one) is unworkable and in hindsight politically suicidal. They picketed, for example, to spare the lives of condemned, guilty Soviet-American spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and they were for nuclear disarmament from the get-go. Yet it would be disingenuous to act as if I don't know that their je ne sais quoi is a permanent gesture of earthy and even primal exhilaration delivered with bullish derring-do. With that The Living Theatre embraces the world, all of it -- the good & the bad, the beautiful & the ugly -- in an embrace as wide as it is firm. And also loose. To this day The Living Theatre remains, somehow like (and somewhere between) both desire and disease -- infectious.

Long live the spirit -- if not the letter -- of The Living Theatre!

Further reading:
* The Living Theatre's web site.
* Judith Malina's Diaries: 1947-57 and The Enormous Despair.
* About Else Lasker-Schüler.

Related (indirectly): "Arrividerci, Fallaci, Fare Thee Well"

When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Bork

Jonah Goldberg serves up salient recollections of the demagogic obstruction of one of the most qualified men, of any philosophical stripe, from taking his rightful place on the Supreme Court -- Judge Robert Bork:

[Senate Judiciary Comittee member Ted] Kennedy’s assault rallied left-wing interest groups to the anti-Bork banner for an unprecedented assault on a man liberal Supreme Court Justice Warren Berger dubbed the most qualified nominee he’d seen in his professional lifetime. As Gary McDowell noted recently in the Wall Street Journal, that time span included the careers of Benjamin Cardozo, Hugo Black and Felix Frankfurter.

* * *
His supreme jurisprudence may have been thwarted, but his cultural influence can still be felt. JMK highly recommends Robert Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline.

Truth and English

Peter Brimelow: You've mentioned what you see as the institutional prerequisites for capitalism. Do you think there might be cultural prerequisites, too?
Milton Friedman: Oh, yes. For example, truthfulness.... It's a curious fact that capitalism developed and has really only come to fruition in the English-speaking world. It hasn't made the same progress even in Europe--certainly not in France, for instance.
-- from "An Interview with Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman," Forbes, December 12, 1988
(quoted in Ann Coulter's High Crimes and Misdemeanors, p. 112).
,
George Orwell: [Written English] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.
-- from "Politics and the English Language"
.

Michael Savage: "The Orthodox Jews Understand What A Gun Is"

Let this put the lie to the slander that Michael Savage is a "self-hating Jew."

.

Bring It On! - The Milblogs, That Is

* Update (09/20) *
Milblogger Sgt. Eddie Jeffers - KIA September 19, 2007

In a piece of pure good news, President Bush met for an hour this past weekend with several top military bloggers in the Roosevelt Room of the White House.

.
Says WaPo, "President Reaches Out to a Friendly Circle in New Media." In what is (thus far) our generation's defining military effort it only makes sense that those with the most direct experience, expertise, and contacts in military operations and affairs have assigned themselves the mission of getting the stories and getting them right. "Friendly circle," I suspect, doesn't begin to describe this group. For one thing, I'm sure they didn't have time for many pleasantries or politesse.

In these times ferociously antagonistic liberal blowhards like MSNBC's Keith Olbermann pontificate, generalize, exaggerate, and slander for a living while these dedicated men are providing a great public service. With nary a dime to show for their efforts, they cast through the blogosphere some of the sacred honor that is the spiritual glue binding our armed forces together. It's a sacred honor that should bind all the branches to the people, and vice versa.

IX-XI

What had been special ground is now sacred ground.
The line in the sand cut -- not drawn.
By force -- not by choice.

I'm off to a freeway overpass to wave my oversize American flag above rush-hour traffic for a few hours. When you hear horns honking out of the west, you'll know where they're coming from.

* Update 10:20 AM * Back from the overpass, was out there for two hours. A continuous breeze kept Old Glory flapping pretty much non-stop. Truckers and contractors -- i.e., our builders, movers, doers -- they're the greatest, the most generous and unrepressed when it comes to honking and waving. Lots of waves, some thumbs up, some #1's. One lady took her hands off the steering wheel to applaud.

Word of caution: one guy gave me finger and shouted some thing about Bin Laden. The jihad has landed....

* * *

Print and read this at the dinner table tonight: If it is hard for Americans to forget September 11, it seems just as hard for Americans to remember that terrible Tuesday.

Here's my less summary, more reflective report from last year. (Note the animated comments.)

Gerard Van Der Leun reposts his across-the-harbor recollections of September 11, 2001 at American Digest.

Got a 9/11 story to tell? What are you doing to get your counterjihad on? Email me or leave it in the comments.

..
..
.
The last pic is from Spiritual Oasis whose  Bill Williams volunteered as a chaplain in the aftermath. See his uplifting post, "From Ground Zero."

Trust Freedom - By One Righteous Gentile - Or, The Beginnings of a Rebuttal to Osama Bin Laden's Latest Jihad Video

Every once in a while the unabashedly Christian James Baxter leaves a long comment on the blog. This one is worth reprinting as its own post. I find it a stirring rebuttal to yesterday's OBL "convert, surrender, or die" video. Explicitly, it's about fighting for freedom; implicitly, it's a point in favor of the retaliatory "nuke Mecca" position....:

Every September, I recall that is more than half a century (62 years) since I landed at Nagasaki with the 2nd Marine Division in the original occupation of Japan following World War II. This time every year, I have watched and listened to the light-hearted "peaceniks" and their light-headed symbolism-without-substance of ringing bells, flying pigeons, floating candles, and sonorous chanting and I recall again that "Peace is not a cause - it is an effect."

In July, 1945, my fellow 8th RCT Marines [I was a BARman] and I returned to Saipan following the successful conclusion of the Battle of Okinawa. We were issued new equipment and replacements joined each outfit in preparation for our coming amphibious assault on the home islands of Japan.

B-29 bombing had leveled the major cities of Japan, including Kobe, Osaka, Nagoya, Yokohama, Yokosuka, and Tokyo.

We were informed we would land three Marine divisions and six Army divisions, perhaps abreast, with large reserves following us in. It was estimated that it would cost half a million casualties to subdue the Japanese homeland.

In August, the A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima but the Japanese government refused to surrender. Three days later a second A-bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. The Imperial Japanese government finally surrendered.

Following the 1941 sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, a Japanese admiral said, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant..." Indeed, they had. Not surprisingly, the atomic bomb was produced by a free people functioning in a free environment. Not surprisingly because the creative process is a natural human choice-making process and inventiveness occurs most readily where choice-making opportunities abound. America!

Tamper with a giant, indeed! Tyrants, beware: Free men are nature's pit bulls of Liberty! The Japanese learned the hard way what tyrants of any generation should know: Never start a war with a free people - you never know what they may invent!

As a newly assigned member of a U.S. Marine intelligence section, I had a unique opportunity to visit many major cities of Japan, including Tokyo and Hiroshima, within weeks of their destruction. For a full year I observed the beaches, weapons, and troops we would have assaulted had the A-bombs not been dropped. Yes, it would have been very destructive for all, but especially for the people of Japan.

When we landed in Japan, for what came to be the finest and most humane occupation of a defeated enemy in recorded history, it was with great appreciation, thanksgiving, and praise for the atomic bomb team, including the aircrew of the Enola Gay. A half million American homes had been spared the Gold Star flag, including, I'm sure, my own.

Whenever I hear the apologists expressing guilt and shame for A-bombing and ending the war Japan had started (they ignore the cause-effect relation between Pearl Harbor and Nagasaki), I have noted that neither the effete critics nor the puff-adder politicians are among us in the assault landing-craft or the stinking rice paddies of their suggested alternative, "conventional" warfare. Stammering reluctance is obvious and continuous, but they do love to pontificate about the Rights that others, and the Bomb, have bought and preserved for them.

The vanities of ignorance and camouflaged cowardice abound as license for the assertion of virtuous "rights" purchased by the blood of others - those others who have borne the burden and physical expense of Rights whining apologists so casually and self-righteously claim.

At best, these fakers manifest a profound and cryptic ignorance of causal relations, myopic perception, and dull I.Q. At worst, there is a word and description in The Constitution defining those who love the enemy more than they love their own countrymen and their own posterity. Every Yankee Doodle Dandy knows what that word is.

In 1945, America was the only nation in the world with the Bomb and it behaved responsibly and respectfully. It remained so until two among us betrayed it to the Kremlin. Still, this American weapon system has been the prime deterrent to earth's latest model world- tyranny: Seventy years of Soviet collectivist definition, coercion, and domination of individual human beings.

The message is this: Trust Freedom. Remember, tyrants never learn. The restriction of Freedom is the limitation of human choice, and choice is the fulcrum-point of the creative process in human affairs. As earth's choicemaker, it is our human identity on nature's beautiful blue planet and the natural premise of man's free institutions, environments, and respectful relations with one another. Made in the image of our Creator, free men choose, create, and progress - or die.

Free men should not fear the moon-god-crowd oppressor nor choose any of his ways. Recall with a confident Job and a victorious David, "Know ye not that you are in league with the stones of the field?"

Semper Fidelis
Jim Baxter
Sgt. USMC 
WW II and Korean War

Job 5:23  Proverbs 3:31  I Samuel 17:40
http://www.choicemaker.net/

Where Have You Gone, Anita Bryant?

* Updated *

A day without Anita Bryant is like a day without sunshine.

Anita Bryant is like Rodney Dangerfield -- she don't get no respect. Not in elite cultural circles, that is, and not even on the internet. Her myspace page seems to be the only unabashedly affectionate web page out there. If you read it you'll learn that she toured overseas with Bob Hope to perform for American troops, sung "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" at the Super Bowl, recorded several pop albums, and wrote several books. All this while being pretty, articulate, and charming -- not at all by being sleazy or profane or by parading some gyrating sexual suggestiveness.

Yet because Ms. Bryant uncompromisingly and successfully took a public stance, consistent with her Christian beliefs, against gay rights legislation she found herself the target of death threats, assault, career-ending boycotts, and wholesale vilification. [* Update * Note, e.g., the film short, "The Assassination of Anita Bryant," (1976) (whose director died of AIDS in 1992).] Like Ann Coulter, she said it as she saw it and did not back down -- the result was almost complete banishment from the entertainment industry and an almost insurmountable reputation as a purveyor of "hate."

Note the video, below (found at her myspace page). It's made entirely from footage taken this past July in Ms. Bryant's native state of Oklahoma, at a commemorative benefit for victims and survivors of the battleship named after it, the USS Oklahoma. (The Oklahoma was sunk by the Japanese in Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941; 429 servicemen died; no memorial has yet been established for it, or them.) Note about 2 minutes into the clip the pledge Bryant steadfastly makes and the song she proudly performs. If you don't, Gentle Reader, no one else will. The scene is too old-fashioned -- too simple, too kind-hearted, too regional, and too patriotic -- to draw attention, even grudging attention, from the MSM or any major cultural institution.
.

.

In the 60s Simon & Garfunkel rode the the folk-pop wave, packaging baby boomer "angst" by singing Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you. After watching Anita Bryant sing for USS Oklahoma vets and survivors, you'll wonder Where have you gone, Anita Bryant....? But don't ask her; Ms. Bryant doesn't have to answer for anything.  She never left America. America -- or rather, left-wing America -- left her.

.
Further: Buried on page 9 of Google hits for "Anita Bryant" is Anita Bryant Ministries International, located in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

Previous: "I Believe You, Anita!" "A Pie For A Pie Makes Whole World Blind, Deaf, Dumb"

Related: A "gay patriot" and an "ex-gay journalist" walk into a bar.....

Chuck Yeager Endorses Duncan Hunter for President

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

From the desk of Gen. Chuck Yeager:

To my Fellow Americans,

Congressman Duncan Hunter is the best candidate for President of the United States of America - he has integrity, tenacity, courage, and diplomacy.  He is intelligent and thoughtful, does his research and acts on it.  He is the only candidate who has the best of Ronald Reagan's character and politics

I have known Congressman Duncan Hunter for over 35 years.  Duncan Hunter has served his country not only in Congress, but also in the Army. In Vietnam, he served in one of the most dangerous outfits - the 173rd Airborne Brigade and the 75th Army Rangers, on advance recce teams of three on patrol from their unit, at night.

Duncan Hunter is the former and very effective Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and I am proud to be the Honorary Chair of the Congressman Duncan Hunter for President Committee.
.        

.
.
.
* * *

General Chuck Yeager, the first human being to break the sound barrier.
.

.

Newt on Gwot

Must see video of Gingrich's remarks at the National Press Club. H/T Mick.

Intellectual Punk Speaks Up For Subject of Hillary Rodham's Thesis

* Update (08/21) * Michelle Malkin plugs Diana West's The Death of the Grown-Up

Regarding Hillary's thesis Nick Masesso, who wrote the deservedly obscure Walking the Midway In Purgatory (an incoherent, intellectually violent reminiscence of growing up in the 1960s), emails:

.
We all started with Saul Alinsky. He and men like Studs Terkle [sic] taught us how to organize. Without them we'd have had no labor movement, no Teamsters and thus no middle class, ergo no america [sic]. Groking Saul doesent [sic] mean anything. There is only what we do.

.

.
There is only what we do is a line Nick borrows from Aristotle on the formation of character, on excellence as habit. Yes, there is only what we do. Here There is only what we do is the amorality of those who have never given up on letting "the 60s" be their excuse for mediocrity perpetrated in the name of "protest" or "art" or "radicalism." For mediocrity can be a habit, moral equivalency can be a habit, evil can be a habit. In Nick's grubby hands the phrase becomes Nothing works so anything goes. It's what he had in mind last September when he equated me waving an American flag with shouting "Allahu akbar." That's neither a reasoning nor a reckoning with history or one's own life. It's a failure to reason and a failure to reckon (which may be my main complaint with the Clintons.)

Does Nick include Hillary Rodham in his pronoun We? Was she, is she, a "sister in struggle"? A struggle against what? and for what? Hillary Rodham was clearly fascinated American radicalism. The story of the rest of her career is the story of how, exactly, she has reasoned and reckoned with her fascination -- in her case, to what extent her manipulation of American radicalism has been her means to political power.

There is always more than There is only what we do.

Victor Hanson Fisks Every Single Word Of NY Times Editorial Demanding Immediate US Withdrawal From Iraq

.Every single word.
.(H/T Seraphic Secret)

Before Joseph McCarthy, There Was Robert Stripling

We never won the Cold War as decisively as we should have.
-- blogger "Fjordman," posted at Gates of Vienna

.
Before there was Joseph McCarthy there was Robert Stripling.

The chapter whose excerpts appear at the end of this post is found in Robert Stripling's The Red Plot Against America. The Red Plot was published in 1949, but has long been forgotten due to the liberal memory hole that dictates our popular recollections of that era. Having served ten years as Chief Investigator of the bipartisan House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), Stripling provided a substantive primer on the precise nature of the Communist threat against the United States of America -- specifically, the threat from within the United States of America. The Red Plot narrates HUAC's meticulous work -- names and dates, details and wranglings  -- which had been underway since 1938 and in which Stripling had been a prime mover.

With America touched by the same totalitarian trends that had been blowing through Europe since the 1920s, HUAC was the premier governmental body to wage what I suggest we  regard as the "culture war" of what (perhaps too hastily) has since been lauded as "the Greatest Generation." More to the point, HUAC was the scene of that generation's most charged political theater. Congress had created the Committee in the 1930s to publicly gather information on, primarily, American Nazis, Klansmen, and other homegrown fascists. Only later, as Communism's wide scope and insidious nature became apparent, did HUAC set out to expose the vast leftwing conspiracy of its American operations, a conspiracy propagated by both card-carrying members and fellow-traveling sympathizers. (Above: Robert Stripling and HUAC member Richard Nixon examine subpoenaed documents)

Then -- as now -- moments of battlefield sacrifice and triumph could not, by themselves, efface grave civilizational uncertainties. On one hand, in 1946 Winston Churchill had delivered his Iron Curtain speech demarcating the line between the free and Communist worlds. Beginning in the summer of 1948 Whittaker Chambers had delivered ("more or less by chance," as Stripling relates) damning testimony about the Communist cell that had operated within successive Roosevelt Administrations and even in the newly-formed United Nations. On the other hand, that same fall breakaway Democrat Henry Wallace's presidential campaign with the "Progressive Party," which fronted for the American Communist Party, had received over 1.1 million votes (more than half, not surprisingly, coming from New York and California). Similar to today's neoconservative priorities -- of overhauling post-Cold War American attitudes to one-time geopolitical partners such as Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the Palestinian Authority, and the Saudi royal family -- Stripling sensed, during his own era of unsettling realignments, a gap in our discourse vis-a-vis Communism. And he raced to fill it.

Note well that when The Red Plot was being written, the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, was still just a blip on the national radar. Goaded, perhaps, by the force of Stripling's argument -- which voiced frustration at the many obstacles placed in HUAC's way, including those from the Roosevelt White House -- McCarthy went on the offensive in the year following the book's publication, delivering his famous "Enemies Within" speech in February 1950.

Yet The Red Plot Against America contains nothing that is "McCarthyite" and everything that is "Striplingite." It is a substantive rendering in plain, everyday English of the hard, often thankless, often vilified investigation into the American social fabric when European civilization was collapsing for the second time in 30 years. This work was undertaken -- transparently and vigorously -- by a small group of freedom-loving Americans in Washington, DC in order to preserve the integrity, viability, and endurance of the land Lincoln described as "the last best hope of Earth."

Similarities to today's fight against Islamist infiltration and subversion of the West, a fight waged in large part on the Internet -- and just a portion of the Internet at that -- will, or should, be self-evident. (If not, then click through the links in the "Top Shelf Reads" category in the right column, including the brave, trail-blazing online work of Cinnamon Stillwell, Debbie Schlussel, Pamela Atlas and more.) A revival of HUAC in our time, in spirit and perhaps also in form, should be on the table. It's a matter of hard-nosed common sense and good governance. My principal concern, frankly, would be not for the mission of such a federal committee, but for the mettle of the members selected (or who would offer) to serve on it.

Lifetime conservatives (of which I'm not) typically trumpet America's Cold War victory against the Soviet Union, a victory won despite decades of liberal opposition. Such conservatives have bragging rights, I guess. Thus Ann Coulter can pose for a photo at Senator McCarthy's grave and suggest, as she did at CPAC 2007, that student Republicans form "Joe McCarthy clubs" on college campuses. But bragging rights bring with them even bigger responsibilities. During our post-Cold War era there are many parallels to be observed and lessons to be learned from the "culture war" that was underway before the Cold War had even begun.
.

From "Conclusions," Chapter 13 of The Red Plot Against America
[emphases and links added to suggest comparisons with contemporary issues]:

In this concluding article of my series I'd like to get a few things off my chest, things I could not say while working for the House Un-American Activities Committee.

I don't regret any of the years I spent with the Committee, though the work was neither easy nor rewarding. It was work that somebody had to do, and from its seed has sprung two tremendous Government programs, the $17,000,000 [1949 dollars] inquiry into the loyalty of Government employees and, directly or indirectly, the multi-billion dollar Marshall Plan....

But the House Committee, pioneers and forerunners in this work, at a meager fraction of the cost of subsequent development, has never known a period when it was not under attack. Vilification from Communists is understandable, for the Committee wields a tremendous weapon against them: exposure. Criticism from honest liberals has hurt the Committee much more. I know the morale of my own staff reached an all-time low when, after we unearthed the "pumpkin papers" which conclusively corroborated the spy-ring testimony of Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, President Truman repeated his charge that it was all a red herring.

Yet Mr. Truman emphasized in his vigorous Inaugural Address the very differences between Communism and Democracy which the Committee had been revealing -- through the lips of willing or reluctant witnesses -- for more than ten years. Labor leaders who condemned us a decade ago for suggesting that their unions were being contaminated by Communism have since reluctantly conceded that we were correct.

President Roosevelt made at least two determined efforts to wipe out the Committee. Failing, for the simple reason the people want the Committee, he demanded of Martin Dies that the Committee thereafter confine its inquiries to Fascist activities. Committee members who tended to regard Communism with the same cold eye as they regarded Nazism were signaled out for especial scorn by pet columnists and commentators. The Committee was forbidden to reveal, six months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the scope of Japanese subversion in Hawaii and on the Pacific Coast. It is unimportant but relevant that I, after being instrumental in exposing the fact that Joe Lash and other pro-Communist youth leaders were enjoying White House hospitality, was "railroaded" into the Army. I quote the word "railroaded" because it is not mine. It was said by two Army colonels in discussing with me the curious phases of my induction.

The legend has grown and has been carefully nurtured by clandestine and well-meaning interests, that the Committee has ignored Fascism to concentrate on Communism. That is a lie, as our records will prove. As the one more familiar with those records than anyone else, I know there are still many Fascists and fellow scum in the country, ready to pollute the American bloodstream. All they lack is a Fuehrer. Martin Dies fought the Ku Klux Klan in the face of six-shooters. My father campaigned against the Klan when it meant that he must face political ruin in his district and danger to himself and his family.

The Nazis lack a Fuehrer and a purpose. The Communists have both, and combine the fanaticism of Hitler's followers with remarkable guile. They are irrevocably charged with fighting almost every ideal which made this country great. In event of a war with Russia they will be infinitely more destructive saboteurs than were the comparatively clumsy Nazi subersives.

It is not easy to fight Communism. Communism, contrary to a popular phrase, IS something new under the sun. Its members and champions, many of them misguided liberals, can infiltrate, contaminate and dominate almost any field -- including the pulpit, though Communism is by rule a Godless calling. Graduates of Russian training schools are the world's leading authorities in the practices of disorder. It is incontrovertible that every key point, strategically, in the United States has been studied faithfully against the day when peaceful-looking American Reds will be called upon to come into the open and fight for Mother Russia. We have shown through testimony that they are past masters at working within the warp and woof of the United States Constitution. We have seen Henry Wallace, their befuddled sympathizer, come within a heartbeat of the Presidency [the Soviet dupe and "spiritual window-shopper" had served as vice president up until three months before FDR's death]. We know from the testimony of ex-Communists Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley that many Communists and distinguished followers have risen high in Government circles.

We further know that between January 1, 1947 and December 16, 1948, 151 State Department people were removed from the Federal payroll, 91 of whose cases were classified as "of acute significance." And that is only one department. Coincidentally or not, it was State Department policy which abandoned China's 400,000,000 humans to the advances of Russian-controlled Chinese Red armies, and it is the considered opinion of men like Gens. Claire Lee Chennault [commander of the Flying Tigers, which included the author of God Is My Co-Pilot] and Patrick J. Hurley that we may one day be confronted by many of these millions, armed and thoroughly indoctrinated [one word: Korea]. Coincidentally or not, it was the State Department -- admittedly contaminated at that time -- which sold Poland, another ally, down the river.

One of the chief criticisms directed at the House Committee is that we have smeared the reputations of good citizens. As I said earlier, I am not the official apologist of the Committee. It has made its mistakes. But whenever I hear anyone use the word "smear" in connection with the Committee's efforts I must ask him to name those persons we have smeared (of the hundreds of witnesses we have heard and the thousands of names introduced).

The name of Dr. Edward U. Condon, director of the National Bureau of Standards, usually is brought up. Beyond his name there is usually silence. As I have pointed out, I made an effort to have Condon called as a witness in answer to his request. That he wasn't called, however, is comprehensible. This friend of many pro-Communists, who was not cleared by the Atomic Energy Commission to share A-bomb secrets at the time he was in charge of the Bureau's atomic scientists, was not heard because the Committee could not obtain from the White House the letter which J. Edgar Hoover had written suggesting that Condon was a poor security risk. I hope the Committee eventually gets that letter. I hope it hears Condon.

If Americans believed all they have read in anti-Committee papers they must believe we used rubber hoses to extract testimony. The Committee is not a judicial body and never will be by law. It cannot operate under the rules of evidence, cannot issue indictments, cannot hand down verdicts. It was established solely to hear witnesses and, from their testimony, to recommend legislation.

The Committee absorbed considerable punishment during its investigation of Communism in Hollywood, where the ideology has taken such a foothold that there are figures to prove that Party collections from members and their followers amount to $32,000 a week [1949 dollars]. It was held in many quarters that we had no right to ask witnesses whether they were Communists. It was said that a man's politics are his own business, as indeed they are.

But we were not asking for information on a political affiliation. We simply asked these people, by asking them if they were Communists, whether they were members of a conspiracy determined to overthrow this form of Government. The fact that ten of them refused to answer on constitutional grounds, knowing, perhaps, that the Committee was in possession of 33 Communist Party cards of Hollywood celebrities, is, I will continue to believe, most significant.

It is equally significant that ten of the 40-odd witnesses we questioned in the Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers case stood on their constitutional tights, and that in his own testimony Hiss made 198 uses of the phrase "to the best of my recollection" or its qualifying counterparts.

The Committee hears, by and large, a type of witness completely foreign to other Congressional committees in search of information. More often than not it is faced with subversives and fellow travelers who are superbly well trained and well advised in the incitement of public sentiment. The reactions of some members to their type of testimony have been provoked very artfully.

What the Committee has revealed over the last ten years is hard for many Americans to believe. The average citizen cannot comprehend that one of the top officials of the super-important Board of Economic Warfare was a gamboling nudist whose literary output had to be confined to the pornographic division of the Library of Congress; that his successor was a kind of male strip-teaser dancer; that pressure enough was put on respectable authorities to cause the shipment out of this country of more than 1,300 pounds of uranium products at the time we were attempting to develop the A-bomb; that the chief Russian spy in the A-bomb espionage ring was impervious to arrest....

Ten years ago Joe Curran, of the Maritime Union, denounced the Committee vitriolically when we tried to bring out that his union was saturated by Communism. In 1946 he had to fight for his life against he Communists he had nurtured. We have seen the same things happen in many unions. But when one of our first witnesses warned against that peril, [HUAC member Martin] Dies was called to the White House and castigated by President Roosevelt for picking on the CIO on the eve of an election.

Leon Josephson, one of the few witnesses we've had who was prosecuted by the Justice Department and imprisoned for the contempt he displayed for Congress, once said to an American consular officer, "I consider the orders of the Central Committee of the Communist Party above the laws of the United States, and I would do anything short of murder to carry them out." Many others the Committee has heard might have been as frank.

The Committee, as constituted, is not equipped to deal with Communism. Communism has brought into being new techniques and tactics never envisioned by the founders of our Government. It may well be necessary to streamline even our judicial processes if we are going to cope with the menace. Gerhart Eisler's case is pertinent. He functioned for 20 years in this country, carrying out some of the most treasonable acts imaginable. The most closely organized group ever to appear on the American scene was at his command. He traveled back and forth to the U.S.S.R. on false passports; defied Congress. Yet he is still out of jail, and travels extensively over this country making speeches under the auspices of various front organizations whose leaders are dedicated to the destruction of this Government. [He would flee the U.S. clandestinely in 1950.]

Committee investigators were long encouraged by the White House to exterminate Nazis by exposing them, which we did to a great extent. But when two of our men raided Communist headquarters in Philadelphia and seized records of great concern to the interests of the people, they were arrested on the orders of a Federal judge and the Committee was ordered to return the files.

The F.B.I., if left alone, could clear up Communism in this country. I'd trust my life and the lives of my family in the hands of the F.B.I., if no political considerations were involved. It should be an independent bureau. Instead, it is hitched to the Department of Justice whose top men, politically appointed, are sometimes guided by political considerations. As extensive as are the files of the House Committee (files consulted by 20,000 accredited Government agents in the last decade) the F.B.I. files are of much greater magnitude. J. Edgar Hoover's men could round up at least 25,000 potential Communist saboteurs in short order, if war broke out with Russia. Some F.B.I. men, however, have discovered that their most comprehensive investigations of Communist subversives have been ignored when recommendations were urged for their prosecution. We know, for these men have come to us for support, and so have Civil Service Commission investigators, State Department men and others -- their morales cracked by frustration....

Personally, I seem to have committed the crime of attempting to expose people who seek to destroy our way of life. It is a job for which I was hired by chosen representatives of the people of the United States; a job to which I attended to the best of my ability. It is not a very good job, really, for the simple reason that it is now unfashionable, if that is the word, to be primarily interested in America and the preservation of its liberties. Apparently it is bad taste to expose the fact that Government documents of great importance are being stolen; that a President demanded the admission to this country of Mrs. Earl Browder [Earl Browder: socialist anti-draft agitator during World War I; Communist Party candidate for president of the United States, 1936 and 1940; imprisoned for passport violations, 1939; sentence commuted by FDR, 1942; died, 1973], over the protests of the State Department, because he did not want to be embarrassed by Joe Stalin's questions; that a number of Government officials, by their admission or refusal to answer, have been mixed up with a gang of cold-blooded subversives; that choice military secrets, including A-bomb data, have been passed on to the leaders of a country which since V-E day has overrun Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Albania and most of China.

* * *
.
FTR, like almost every single book that has been decisive in my political maturation, no one and nothing in our contemporary American experience pointed me to The Red Plot Against America -- not one friend (many of whom are former friends), not one relative, not one teacher or college professor, nothing in popular or intellectual culture nor in the MSM -- nothing except my own disillusionment with leftwing politics, and my consequential efforts to come to terms with their legacy.

Narcissism in Power - The Clinton Inaugural

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.
For he that soweth to the flesh shall reap corruption;
but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.
(Galatians 6:8)
-- Bible verse selected and sworn upon by William Jefferson Clinton
for his inauguration as 42nd president of the United States
.

A consequence for all who pursue (or merely acquiesce in the pursuit of) social agendas set by radicals is the demolition of a strict sense of personal moral responsibility. Those convinced of the righteousness of morality and faith rightly mistrust such people. For with such people morality is relative and religion, inevitably, a ruse.

During that inauguration the profession of civic religion was also a ruse projecting, in the name of personal faith, a man's ill-acknowledged, personal folly. Political theater staging a solemn, sacred ceremony, its proportions were nevertheless narcissistic. Even Manchurian. The gesture of political theater was a proper public profession. The actual deeds: careless confession and pithy projection.

* * *

What comes across as the most important source of Clinton's uniqueness as president is the nearly unbelievable degree of his essential unfitness to be president -- his profound immaturity, his pathological selfishness, his cynicism, above all his relentless corruption.
- Michael Kelly, Washington Post

Islam, Like Communism, Incompatible With Democracy

Robert Spencer, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam, continues to make the case that Islam is at war with infidels, has been at war with infidels, and will always be at war with infidels. Today he cites 20th Century (C.E.) Iraqi historian Khalid Madduri:

The state which is regarded as the instrument for universalizing a certain religion must perforce be an ever expanding state. The Islamic state, whose principal function was to put God’s law into practice, sought to establish Islam as the dominant reigning ideology over the entire world. It refused to recognize the coexistence of non-Muslim communities, except perhaps as subordinate entities, because by its very nature a universal state tolerates the existence of no other state than itself. Although it was not a consciously formulated policy, Muhammad’s early successors, after Islam became supreme in Arabia, were determined to embark on a ceaseless war of conquest in the name of Islam. The jihad was therefore employed as an instrument for both the universalization of religion and the establishment of an imperial world state.
.
The 20th Century's Cold War was a prelude, a warm-up, a sparring match in preparation for this counterjihad.

Jeffersonian Thought For Independence Day

* Update * Freedom Isn't Free -- the "dead, rich, white men" who signed the Declaration of Independence were principled, brave, honorable men, as the enormous sacrifices many of them made during the American Revolution attest.
.

I tolerate with the utmost latitude the right of others to differ from me in opinion without imputing to them criminality.... Both of our political parties, at least the honest part of them, agree conscientiously in the same object—the public good; but they differ essentially in what they deem the means of promoting that good.... Which is right, time and experience will prove.
-- Thomas Jefferson, found (precise source unattributed) here

Don't know about you, Gentle Reader, but I can't "do" July 4th without remembering September 11. For a personal flag-waving story, here's my post from last September 11.

Here's video of a brief interview of Christopher Hitchens by Pajamas Media's Richard Miniter about Thomas Jefferson's importance to America -- in his day and in ours.

Dennis Prager: "America Needs a Fourth of July Seder"

National memory dies without national ritual. And without a national memory, a nation dies. That is the secret at the heart of the Jewish people's survival that the American people must learn if they are to survive....

Dennis's entire piece available here.

The 1950 Nobel Prize Ceremonies - It Just Doesn't Get Any More Pompous Than These Circumstances

Had Ingmar Bergman never made it as a director, he might have ended up making rent through cheesy side work like what you see in the video (below). Solemn, self-important, and self-satisfied as only the face of Old Europe peeking out from behind its (soon to be post)modernist, excessively secular mask could ever be, here's a Swedish newsreel of the penguin-suited, stuffed-shirted ceremonies that bestowed the Nobel Prizes of 1950. Note the massive formal banquet in the 9th and final minute. I don't know about you, Gentle Reader, but given the nearness in time of the Nazi era, I must confess a Riefenstahlesque frisson at the sight of those rows of uniformed diners. A lonely thought, perhaps, but one in which I trust I'm not alone....
.

.

Our boy Bill accepts his prize at 6:45. Rumor has it the down home romancier got deep into his cups before making one of the most exhortatory Nobel acceptance speeches ever. Hell, I would too were I being recognized for a lifetime of tackling the great reducing topics of adultery, incest, and lynching ... of broken promises and prison breaks ... of living with the dead and of surviving living ... all enmeshed in a regional American context, glossed with tsunamic linguistic force gleaned from the Judeo-Christian tradition. O Bill, you were our man at the 1950 awards ceremonies: a Marshall Plan of the mind from Mississippi....
.

It's hard to watch this short and not start to grasp what Ingmar Bergman had to get away from in order to get to in, say, his first feature, Ode to Joy (1950, left), about the drama behind a classical musician's struggle to rediscover meaning after enormous personal tragedy -- or somewhat later in Through a Glass Darkly (1961, right), with its play-within-a-play and novelist/father-daughter & novelist/father-son subplots. Like certain European writers of that  burgeoning decade (think Albert Camus and Kateb Yacine) Bergman may well have been shouldering, in cinema, the import of Faulkner on the European mind. Of necessity, this would have entailed sidestepping the phenomenon of Faulkner....
.

I don't hate the Nobel Prize! I don't hate it! I don't hate it! I don't....
.

Liberalism Delenda Est

* Updated and Expanded * (Jump into the Comments section, folks!)

[This post is a follow-up to "When In Sparta Do As A Spartan"; if you like this, you might love that.]

In the comments to the previous post a reader asks what I mean by "destroy an idea." As if there is something untrustworthy or dangerous about refuting -- beyond riposte and beyond reproach, where possible -- an idea. "Destroy an idea" has nothing to do with censoring thought or speech, but everything to do, whether in private discussion or public debate, with exercising thought and speech competently and morally.

For example, in an email a different reader told me he'd attended a lecture on the Roosevelt Administration's policy of not allowing mass immigration of Jews into the United States before World War II. This can be an anxious subject, of course, especially if you have or had (as I did) European Jewish kin who were slaughtered in World War II. He didn't pick my brain, but it turns out the subject is one I've thought about, sometimes been disturbed about, over the years.

The best single source on it I know of is David Wyman's The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945. I came across it when I was a very young adult trying to draw conclusions about the United States' general worth or reliability. The "conclusions" I drew then led to anxiety and mistrust toward American power and American purpose. Stuck inside this Jewish refugee issue, I'd refused to weigh more complex and obvious factors: namely, America's subsequent support for the State of Israel. Instead of free thinking I'd settled for fear and trembling. The first is the essence of a confident and truly liberal education; the second, a temperamental foundation of the postmodern mindset. Before too long fear and trembling led precipitously to taking intellectual refuge in the very desperate hope of revolutionary commitment. I went to the extreme Left. Some, disturbed by the very same issues, go to the extreme Right, like former Meir Kahane devotee, the Israeli journalist and New Republic Editor Yossi Klein Halevi. (Today, like me, he is closer to the center.) A minor detail at the time, but one not lost on me, is that one of the lifetime Jewish communist cultists who influenced me was also familiar with Wyman's book. (Similar to the Russian Bolshevik movement, very many of the American communists I knew were Jewish, a fact from which we constantly drew righteous solace for our otherwise stubborn and self-selecting self-righteousness.) As a result, I felt confirmed in my mistrust of America and more confident in the political direction she provided. This may sound trivial, but when you're 20, as I was -- and in the absence of more fully formed, discriminating values -- such a detail can be pivotal.

Back to the reader who'd attended a recent lecture on the subject. He didn't offer me any details of its content nor his reactions to it nor whether there had been a Q&A session. But I do know that the reader is a lifelong Democrat who thinks rather favorably of  Howard Dean. (Howard Dean, who in public has sported a Palestinian keffiyeh and who during his presidential campaign met and was photographed (all smiles) with one of the most prominent politicians of my former Marxist group.) So I felt adequately informed and obligated to set out not just to destroy, but to pre-emptively destroy, any America-doubting anxiety the lecture might have either instilled in or elicited from this reader. This is what I wrote:

Here are the essential points on the subject I would impart to anyone: In a time of widespread antisemitism around the world (including in America), it was a heartbreaking and tragic historical episode. BUT -- had Western European powers, the Soviet Union, and America braved Hitler's rise to power --had they braved it and denied it instead of enabled it [*] -- there would never have been a mass exodus of refugees to worry about. Assimilated liberal Jews were, in fact, among the appeasers (such as Leonard Woolf, Virginia's husband). So the moral and political onus is widespread and by no means merely a stain on the reputation of the Roosevelt Administration(s). Further, the three generations since World War II have seen the most far-reaching social, economic, and political (and military) gains ever for American and Israeli Jewry. G-d bless America! and G-d curse the appeasers of evil!

A severe, lazy, and fatal flaw of contemporary liberal culture (including scholarship) is to revisit those tragic historical episodes in a way that generates pseudo-intellectual fodder for those who TODAY despise American values and American power and who TODAY appease America's and Israel's GENOCIDAL enemies (witness, Pelosi's headscarved, near-treasonous trip to Syria). It allows them to believe that because American institutions in the past were less than providential (in an almost Biblical sense) that they do not deserve our proud, fierce, and abiding loyalty. That lady in New York harbor is the Statue of Liberty, not the Statue of Exodus or of Utopia. Had I attended that lecture I would have lit into the speaker or any commenters who would not have made that point clear. Why? Because for its continuous complicity in the last century's most monstrous historical crimes, modern liberals have conceded whatever moral high ground they possibly ever had.

Liberalism delenda est ("Liberalism must be destroyed"). It's what the Romans said -- and did -- about Carthage.

.
[*]: The simplistic, Marxism-derived version of the rivalry between Germany's Nazis and Communist Parties is that Germany's industrial classes cynically, aloofly, and deludedly preferred Nazi ascent in order to purge the nation of "those rabble-rousing (but nonetheless promising)" Communists and thus -- in an archaically conservative sense that would appeal to old money -- restore order. This now is almost conventional American cultural wisdom, as a single line of dialogue in Bob Fosse's "dystopian", (allegedly) anti-escapist Cabaret conveys quite economically (it's Max speaking from his limousine).

That history is more complex. While Communists ended up being among the Nazis' first political victims (among the very first concentration camp inmates, tagged with a red triangle, etc.), the German Communist Party -- under orders from Moscow -- for a time actually allied with the Nazi Party. This is merely the subterfuge routinely practiced by every totalitarian political movement -- the agenda behind the agenda, etc. -- whether Nazi or Communist, Hezbollah or Hamas, or even Democratic. (Fans of The Manchurian Candidate, take note!) See, e.g., the entries here on the Nazi-Communist alliance in Germany's 1931 elections.

* * *
.
Here is what I mean by "destroy an idea" or, as I wrote yesterday:

Destroy not their persons, of course, but their ideas and their justifications for their ideas. Destroy utterly their concepts and let the people -- if they can, if they have the will -- build new ideas and justifications from their dusty intellectual rubble. But first those ideas and justifications really must be pounded into rubble.

True Whit

Today, April 1st, is the birthday of Whittaker Chambers, a man who deserves to be commemorated -- and studied -- as nothing less than the spiritual father of modern American conservatism.

.
.

Chambers's confessional autobiography Witness is a modern classic and should be required reading in college level American history cirricula, as well as in courses on the history of Christianity in America. The title derives, first, from him being the federal government's most authoritative witness during Congress's investigations of Communist spies and sympathizers within the federal government during and after World War II. These investigations, conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), were meticulous, overdue, and -- as a republic's exercise in the preservation of the integrity of its highest institutions -- above all honorable. As a result, one of HUAC's members, the young Congressman Richard Nixon (R-CA), was catapulted into the nati0nal spotlight, going on twice to land the vice-presidential nomination of the Republican Party's victorious national tickets of 1952 and 1956. (Click here for a short list of some of America's unsung HUAC heroes.)
.

The most wrangling (and partisan) consequence of HUAC's anti-Communist investigations was the Alger Hiss perjury trials of 1948-50. In these Chambers's testimony was pitted repeatedly against that of his former Communist Party "comrade" Alger Hiss. With degrees from Johns Hopkins and Harvard, Hiss enjoyed a stellar, if behind the scenes, career in government. Since the 1930s he had held several high-ranking posts within the State Department and after World War II was a founder of The United Nations. At first it seemed that Chambers, a college dropout and self-confessed political subversive, couldn't hold a candle to the career public servant. Yet Hiss's eventual conviction in a court of law -- on charges of perjury, not treason (and therefore subject to a risibly soft sentence) -- vindicated Chambers's HUAC testimony. The court of public opinion, on the other hand, would remain sharply divided for decades, with Hiss being hailed as a hero for the rest of his life, and even afterwards, by nearly all liberals and leftists. Post-Soviet archival discoveries of the 1990s prove beyond considerable doubt that Hiss had spied for the Soviet Union and against the United States of America.
.

It should be noted that Nixon facilitated Chambers's HUAC testimony years before the Army-McCarthy hearings. Therefore the two should not be confused. The latter (often referred to as "a witch hunt") were conducted in the Senate at the strenuous behest of Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI). They both of course shared important traits, but were and remain separate investigations. Their differences, in fact, were not lost on Chambers who, after publishing the account of his life, his HUAC testimony, and the Hiss trials in Witness, confided privately to William F. Buckley that he sensed McCarthy's theatrical tactics would, on balance, hurt the American anti-Communist movement. Above all, what the House and Senate investigative committees shared was to soldier on in the face of what was probably the most orchestrated obstruction and obfuscation ever brought to bear against the pursuit -- by the elected officials of a representative democracy -- of the unvarnished truth concerning native agents and abettors hard at work in the service of that democracy's sworn, mortal enemy. The obfuscation continues to this day: in the media, academia, professional letters, and popular culture.
.

Alger Hiss had been an advisor to President Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference of early 1945. Whatever else it accomplished, Yalta is notorious for being where the liberal democratic West ceded influence over Eastern Europe to Communist tyranny. Yet during this time, as the American-Soviet alliance was drawing to a close, Chambers had become America's truest and highest-placed anti-Communist journalist. With a resume that included having written for and edited the Communist Party USA's leading journal New Masses, Chambers in 1939 had been brought on to the editorial board of Time magazine. There he quickly and habitually found himself at odds with a staff that was largely conciliatory towards the Soviet Union. Haunted by his past but undaunted by his present, he toiled to a tune he'd heard from a German ex-Communist: Hit them hard! This he did. Chambers emphatically lamented the Yalta Conference in his penetrating, prophetic essay, "Ghosts on the Roof." "Ghosts" broke the mould for editorial commentary when it appeared in Time's March 5, 1945 issue. In haunting tones it posited that the undead ghosts of Russia's assassinated Romanovs had gathered at Yalta to note, with wry brooding from beyond unmarked graves, the achievement by Soviet power of the fallen dynasty's own, long-coveted ambitions -- imperial domination over as broad a swath of humanity as possible.

.
Decades later, when Harvard historian Richard Pipes set out (in his hefty study of the first years of Communist state power) to shift the public's understanding of those years from one of a popular revolution to one of a coup d'etat, he was granting, if only indirectly, an academic imprimatur to Chambers's long under-appreciated -- indeed, often scorned -- voice in the wilderness.
.