Hard to see this as anything else. Yeah, she may still run for president in 2012 but, if anything, this makes her an even longer shot. I hate to say this — and I know it will rile some — but I see this as a retreat. She is, to be blunt about it, running away from the savaging she is receiving in the press and from liberals. It’s not exactly cowardice because the press targeted her kids and husband too - something new and despicably low in American politics. But it suggests an inconstancy that presidential candidates shouldn’t have.

She may be doing it for her family now. But if she then shows up in Iowa and New Hampshire asking people for their vote, what are people to think? It’s only going to get worse if she runs in 2012 and people will rightly wonder if she can stand the gaffe. Such doubts will keep the mega money men in the GOP from kicking in. This is not an insurmountable obstacle but it sure makes it harder in those early states for a breakthrough.

If she began her campaign in the fall, she would be eating Romney and Huckafool’s dust. Romney especially has been locking up key personalities in early states and creating a national organization. He has been visible and effective as a spokesman outside of government against Obama’s heavy handed interference in the economy. In short, he is in very good shape. Huckaloser is far behind but has a national TV show on Fox and is effectively presenting himself as Mr. Populist alternative to Romney’s establishmentarianism.

This leaves Palin in an very bad situation. If she had remained as governor, she would have had no chance as Chris Cillizza pointed out a few months ago.

Being from Alaska is a HUGE hurdle for Palin’s national ambitions from a logistical point of view. Alaska is four hours behind east coast time and takes the better part of a day to travel to or from. That means that Palin, if she is committed to running for reelection, can’t simply pop into Iowa or New Hampshire for the day — she needs to take at least two days away from Alaska (a fact her Democratic opponents are sure to take note of) to do the sort of soil-tilling in these early primary and caucus states that is absolutely necessary for a presidential candidate. If she announces some time soon that she will not be running for a second term, she will not only be more free to travel to key states between now and 2010 but will be able to devote full time to campaigning in the critical year between January 2011 and January 2012.

The logistics alone present enormous challenges for even a sitting governor from Alaska. Hence, the clean break that could be followed by a very low key effort to build a national team for a run in 2012. At least, that appears to be her intent. Here’s Michelle Malkin with some excerpts from her press conference that seems to point to some undefined effort to advance her pet issues of energy and national security:

Palin: “I love my job. I love Alaska. It hurts to make this choice. But I’m doing what’s best for Alaska.” Tears in her eyes.

Says she will be able “to effect change from the outside.” America needs protectors of individual rights now more than ever. Promises to always be there for Alaska. Wants to work not just for Alaska, for the rest of the country. Taking a fight for Alaska in a new direction. Quotes MacArthur: “We are not retreating, just advancing in a different direction.”

Lt Gov. Sean Parnell says he receives announcement with a “heavy heart.” Thanks Sarah for inspiring so many.

More from press conference: After touting Alaska’s accomplishments, Palin laments “politics of personal destruction.” Notes attacks. $500,000 in legal bills. “Life is about choices. I choose a path of fruitfulness and productivity. Life is too short to compromise time and resources…I will work very hard for others…I will support others…”
***

Chuck Heath, Palin’s brother, on FNC talking about incessant attacks. Very emotional. “It’s weighed on her a long time.” Couldn’t effectively govern when having to defend herself against attacks.

I have been following politics very closely for 30 years and a decade before that as a fan and the only thing comparable to the rabid, frothing, hateful, exaggerated, off the wall kind of media attacks against Palin I have seen was toward the end of the Nixon administration. And we have never, ever in American political history seen attacks on a politician’s children as we have seen with press and media savagery directed against Palin’s kids. (Spouses are fair game - to a point.) These people are incapable of feeling shame because in order to experience that emotion, one must possess a soul and a conscience.

Jim Geraghty had the best explanation for this extravagant, unprecedented hatred directed against Palin:

Hugh suggested it tied to the contrast between her lifestyle and her critics: “She is the embodiment of the anti-choice, the opposite of every choice that lefty elites have ever made — as to going back home instead of moving to the west coast, having children, having a child with Down’s, staying married to one man the whole time, choosing rural or suburban over urban and living a generally conservative lifestyle, working with her hands . . . That everything she is is the antithesis of everything that liberal urban elites are, so it’s not just enough to say, ‘I disagree with you,’; she has to be repudiated and crushed.”

And now, I would submit a slight refining of that idea, that the seeming happiness of Palin’s life is a 24-7 irritant because it challenges the way some liberals see the world.

Liberals believe that their ideas, philosophy, worldview, and policies liberate believers, and that the conservative equivalents limit people. Liberals see themselves as rejecting outdated beliefs and obsolete ideas, overturning established orders, and discarding traditions established by superstitious and ignorant forebears who weren’t as enlightened as we are. Conservatives, in their minds, are runaway cultural superegos, always wagging their fingers about individual responsibility, dismissing excuses, reminding people that they can’t always do what they want because of the consequences to themselves and to others.

Conservatism, they suspect, will leave you in a marriage that doesn’t satisfy you, burden you with children you don’t want, repress your passions, and trap you in a empty, boring, and unfulfilled life, with no hand of government able to help.

In toto, that may be a little too pat. But I think the gist of the argument rings true. It isn’t enough for liberals and the media to oppose Palin. It isn’t enough to attack her. She must be destroyed, left emotionally drained and gagging at the obscenity of the attacks on her children because she is a danger to their one dimensional, shallow view of conservatives and Christians.

Geraghty also believes this move by Palin makes any success in 2012 a long shot:

Not finishing her first term will provide a major, major, major obstacle to any presidential bid. I thought a 2012 campaign would be a mistake; from today’s comments, it’s not clear whether Palin is still interested in that option.

But the moment she expresses an interest in a presidential bid, every rival, Republican and Democrat, will uncork the ready-made zinger: “If elected, would she serve the full four years, or quit sometime in the third year again?”

But as noted, Palin is 45. Life will go on, after this upcoming presidential election, and the next. People thought Richard Nixon was through after the 1960 election. When Ronald Reagan failed to dislodge President Ford in 1976, people thought he had blown his best chance at the presidency. People thought Bill Clinton destroyed his political future with an endlessly long-winded speech at the 1988 Democratic National Convention.

If Palin decides to seek the presidency at the age that Hillary Clinton was when she ran in the 2008 cycle, she will be running in… 2024. That’s a half a generation, and several political lifetimes, away.

Perhaps by then, both conservatives and liberals will have stopped talking about how gorgeous she is.

UPDATE

Allah quotes Geraghty and Ace who believe this is a career ender.

Update: Says Ace, “It’s over. You can’t resign from a governorship and then run for higher office.” I agree. Placing your ambition over your commitment to the state looks shady, especially for someone who won’t have a single full term as governor under her belt for the primaries.

Ordinarily, I would agree with that sentiment. Except, we live in wondrously strange times in American politics and I’m not sure that many of the old verities still hold true. Allah rightly dismisses the Obama comparison Palinites could use to defend her as far as serving time in an important office. But there is the possibility that by the time 2012 rolls around, American politics will be upside down with government at all levels being in such bad odor that running as an “experienced” candidate may be the kiss of death.

Who knows?

Savior, messiah, redeemer - conservatives use these epithets to describe President Obama in a derogatory manner (liberals occasionally get carried away and are serious about those terms when they use them.) More often, I and others on the right use the terms to poke gentle fun at liberals who are quite enamored with our president and his policies.

But looking at Obama’s foreign policy, it is hard not to wonder if this is indeed, how the president sees himself and his role as the planet’s most popular leader.

Let me be clear. Obama does not have a God complex nor does he wish to set himself up as some kind of spiritual guide. In fact, if he does indeed see his role as a redeemer of America, it would be perfectly in keeping with our history and in line with at least one school of thought among historians who see the United States as a pivot around which most of the evils of this world revolve.

Redemption has always been a powerful spiritual and religious theme in America going back to the Puritans who believed that America itself was the word made flesh - a place to redeem mankind from all of its evils. The Great Awakening swept the colonies with a fervent revivalism that sought to redeem the people and the country from having strayed from the true path.

Our unique social movements from abolitionism to temperance, to women’s rights, and especially progressive politics — all sought to employ redemptive imagery and themes to move society in the direction they believed was necessary to save us from spiritual and moral decline.

Nor is there anything new in a president wishing to be a redeemer. Ronald Reagan’s biographer Edmund Morris believed that one could explain The Gipper’s passionate desire to bring conservative principles to government while taking on the Soviet Union by examining his youthful incarnation as lifeguard along the Rock River in Illinois. Morris saw this part of Reagan’s life as a defining moment - a personae RR adopted because of the adulation and recognition he received for having saved so many lives. The experience gave him a life mission and set him off on the road to the presidency.

We could do worse than have a president who looks at America and wishes to redeem her — to force her to come to grips with a sometimes checkered past, while putting in place policies that attempt to right past wrongs.

The problem with Obama, is that we have done worse because we have a president who has crafted policies that subsume American interests to those of other nations and supra-national bodies like the OAS and UN, done in the name of this redemption (i.e., the “restoration” of respect for the US in the world and what Obama sees as the necessary rhetorical nods to past “errors”), but without any apparent understanding of America’s role as the world’s sole superpower and traditional defender of freedom.

Many on the left (and some on the right) see nothing wrong with abandoning America’s superpower status. They believe that the temptation of “empire” has caused problems both at home and abroad by threatening civil liberties at home, human rights abroad, and has saddled us with a tendency to force our will on other nations in order to prevail in international relations.

I sympathize with some of this line of thinking but realistically, we can hardly be anything else. I reject the term “empire” to describe our commitments overseas or our actions relating to thuggish states like Venezuela, Iran, and Syria. There are some very bad actors in this world and to give them the benefit of the doubt by acknowledging that their critique of America’s policies past and present have any validity is to make conflict a likelihood.

Here is where Obama’s high minded, redemptive foreign policy crashes on the shoals of reality and where trying to exercise “moral authority” by granting friend and foe alike the same legitimacy in their complaints about our past bad behavior is so dangerous. For example, accepting the mullahs version of history about the Mossedegh coup will not assuage the Iranian government’s virulent and paranoid anti-Americanism. Two American presidents have already apologized for it and yet, the mullahs still insist that this 50 year old event is the proximate cause for Iran’s suffering.

Obama’s redemptive approach does not allow for the aggrieved party being wrong - about anything. Because of our past actions, any old lie, half truth, or outright exaggeration they wish to use is legitimized because the president has validated some of their grievances. “Give an inch and they take a mile” has been the reaction in unfriendly capitols to Obama’s carefully crafted rhetoric to date.

The same holds true in his reaction to the Honduran ousting of Zeyala where past US misdeeds in Latin America give Chavez, Castro, and their acolytes a ready made hammer to pound on the US because of our support of the banana republic dictators and clumsy interventions over the years. The problem is, their critiques - that Obama is ostensibly using not to support the restoration of democracy in Honduras - are laughably one dimensional and mostly without merit. But the president’s childlike belief that if he agrees with these thugs enough, they will agree to talk about substantive issues of mutual concern, may actually be making it harder in the long term to come to an agreement that would be favorable to US interests.

If we saw any softening at all in these government’s reactions to Obama’s attempt to redeem us in the eyes of the world, I might be inclined to praise the president’s courage and foresight. But the world has never worked the way the president is wishing it would and he is placing US interests in danger as a result.

In essence, if Obama wishes his redemptive approach to foreign policy to be a success, he must, by definition, abandon at least some US interests to achieve it. Perhaps an argument can be made that compromising our interests in the name of reaching a settlement with some of these thuggish regimes is a net plus. I don’t agree for the simple reason that by subsuming our own interests, we place friends and allies in danger. There is usually a reason for identifying American interests as important beyond the Chomsky school of thought that it is purely economic determinism that drives our foreign policy. Moral considerations as well as our traditional support for a stable world order play a much larger role in identifying American interests.

But Obama, who promised us “smart power” and “soft power” is giving us “no power.” In situations like Iran and Honduras, we are paralyzed - beholden to the president’s vision of redeeming America in the eyes of the world even if it means (perhaps especially if it means) ignoring our own interests.

This is a recipe for disaster. When a real crisis hits and the world, as it always does, looks to America, Obama will have boxed himself in and limited his options by insisting on America acting as any other nation even if doing so makes the situation worse. I am not a psychologist so I will not speculate if Obama is afraid of power or is ideologically inclined not to use it. But there will come a time when Obama will be forced to assert American power and risk the disapprobation of the world or watch as a vital interest of the US is threatened.

That public virtue, which among the ancients was denominated patriotism, is derived from a strong sense of our own interest in the preservation and prosperity of the free government of which we are members. Edward Gibbon:

Much has been written about Governor Mark Sanford’s extramarital affair and I won’t add to it here except to say that his transgression against his marriage got me to thinking about public and private virtue.

The world has changed since America’s founding and the idea that we couldn’t be free without a civic minded citizenry that embraced public virtues and held their leaders to standards of public behavior that insured they were acting in the interests of the people and not selfishly. Back then, modesty, simplicity, probity, prudence, and self-abnegation were pre-requisites for political office. The model of a good republican was George Washington whose impossible adherence to these and other virtues made him an object of near worship to the generation who fought the revolution and wrote the Constitution.

But Washington was hardly perfect, although he tried to be while keeping one eye on history and the other on his “reputation.” He tended his public virtue as a gardener lovingly tends beloved roses, taking extreme, almost obsessive care that his public actions reflected the carefully crafted public image he had worked so hard to create. (This obsessiveness led him to destroy much of his personal correspondence with his wife before his death lest history find him a hypocrite.)

It would be grossly unfair to compare today’s politicians with Washington. But the public virtues he nurtured are as important to the idea of maintaining a republican government today as they were then.

Where have they gone?

It is not a modern phenomenon, this loss of public virtue in our political leaders. The degrading of public morals has been a long, slow, slide rather than a precipitous fall. But today, very few public servants actually “serve” the public, preferring to dust off their public virtues every two, four, or six years and parade them before the people around election time, as if the true nature of their cynical misappropriation of the public trust never happened.

We have seen greed, avarice, a lust for power and influence beyond reason, and the greatest sin of all - enriching oneself at the expense of the people - become more and more common. Congress votes itself more perks, more ways to separate themselves from their constituents until we get Barbara Boxer sternly informing a general testifying before her committee to address her by her “title” - senator - and not “ma’am” as the general was referring to her. The fact that a public servant would even consider the idea that she had been given a title says much about the attitude of our political leaders toward public virtue and civic-mindedness.

Sanford did not transgress against any public virtues by playing around on his wife. But how much separation is there really between public and private morality? Heather McDonald doesn’t think there is much of a connection at all:

For I otherwise don’t believe that there is a close connection between public and private virtue. New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was an execrable father and husband but a transformative mayor, who understood as a gut matter some fundamental principles about the public realm and the responsibilities of citizens towards each other. Not all our Founding Fathers were paragons of fidelity. Bill Clinton’s ability to nudge the Democratic agenda towards a modest repudiation of the welfare state was untouched by his irrelevant womanizing. Sanford’s initial stance on the stimulus package was a valuable one, and it is amusing to see the media left seize on his marital transgressions to discredit it yet again.

[...]

Sanford did make his private life a matter of public concern, however, by his self-involved failure to secure the chain of command during his disappearance.

I would disagree with McDonald on the basis of private virtue — keeping sacred one’s promise to be faithful - as being reflective of and relevant to a politician’s basic trustworthiness. Clinton’s private peccadilloes directly led to his public transgression of lying to a grand jury. Whether that was impeachable is still being debated. But he was disbarred because of it and suffered the ignominy of having the House vote out articles of impeachment.

As far as Giuliani, right or wrong, he lost votes because of his messy personal life. Voters made the connection between public and private virtue even if McDonald doesn’t believe they should. And I suspect voters in South Carolina are making that same connection today.

If a politician swindles his business partner in the private sector, should we ignore that because of the public virtues he touts during his election campaign? People will draw their own conclusions and vote accordingly.

I would argue that not only has private virtue been undermined by our materialistic, hedonistic society but that public virtue has suffered the same fate. The cynicism is incredible. Nobody believes politicians act in the public interest anymore and why should they? They don’t. They don’t even pretend anymore. William Jefferson’s $90,000 in a freezer and Duke Cunningham’s written list of amounts it would take to buy his earmark are symptomatic of an attitude on the part of our politicians that is rending the fabric of our republic and destroying the idea of free, representative government.

Benjamin Franklin said, “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”

We get the government we deserve. And not demanding our politicians adhere to simple, republican virtues in their public life may have already ruined the dreams of the Founders beyond repair.

I don’t get it. What earthly good is it doing, raising the issues surrounding the candidacy of Sarah Palin for Vice President among the “professionals” who ran John McCain’s horribly mismanaged campaign?

I put pros in quotes because this latest dust-up is all about the gigantic egos of the principles in this scrum - a quite unprofessional attitude that helps no one except the opposition . And also because the McCain campaign will go down as one of the worst managed campaigns in history, rivaling Michael Dukakis’s nightmare of a run and the quixotically inept campaign of George McGovern.

But it is mostly ego driving Bill Kristol, Schmidt, Scheunamann, and the rest of the losers who refuse to stand up and say “I blew it.” Admittedly, such an admission is hard to make when one’s reputation, and hence, livelihood, is based on success at the polls. But you don’t have to be a brilliant strategist to see that the McCain campaign was poorly managed - slow to respond to the day-to-day jousting with the Obama team, not to mention a questionable overall strategy, curious ad buys, poor decisions on staffing state offices, and a host of other missteps that doomed McCain almost from the start.

And that’s not even mentioning Sarah Palin. Readers of this site know that when she was chosen, I was jubilant, believing it was a real game changer. But subsequently, it became painfully obvious that not only wasn’t she ready for the national stage, but the way the McCain camp was “handling” the Alaska governor guaranteed that her inexperience would remain an issue for the entire campaign.

Stacy McCain refuses to come out and say Palin wasn’t ready, but in her defense, he blames everyone else for Palin’s own missteps:

Palin would have been solid gold in any impromptu encounter with reporters on the campaign trail. Putting her into one-on-one interviews with the network anchors — eager to draw blood with “gotcha” questions — was a stupid blunder on the part of the campaign.

To schedule those interviews, and then to arrange sessions to “prepare” her for them, was to imply that she was incapable of handling the interviews without the “expert” assistance of the Team Maverick brain trust which, of course, had committed her to these interviews in the first place.

Am I the only one who sees that the problem with how Palin was “handled” had nothing to do with Palin and everything to do with the handlers? She is being made the scapegoat for the failures of others.

Stacy knows full well that running on a national ticket is not a game for the inexperienced. It is absolutely true that Palin was “mismanaged.” But the Couric interview showed that no amount of managing or coaching would have helped. She was as green as grass and Couric bored in as any experienced interviewer would have. Is Stacy saying that it is Couric’s fault that she asked questions that just about any experienced politician would have been able to finesse but that Palin couldn’t handle?

Palin was indeed, inexperienced and not ready for the Big Show. There is nothing wrong with her innate intelligence. She’s no dummy and has shown that when’s she’s well briefed, she can more than hold her own in debate.

But it takes more than brains to demonstrate readiness for national office and more than a good briefing to have a handle on issues. Palin wasn’t only inexperienced in dealing with the national press. Her biggest lack of experience came from not having immersed herself in the nuance and details of policy, personalities, and politics - a failing that she will no doubt correct if she is going to run in 2012. Such immersion gives depth to a politician’s personae and authority to their words.

Palin will do better if she runs again. But she won’t be able to lose the “diva” label unless Kristol, Schmidt, et al stop talking about the campaign as if it were all about them. Their incompetence elected Barack Obama and gave us the dumbest, densest Vice President in history (Funny no one does a hit piece on the horribly gaffe prone Joe Biden and his friends in the credit card industry who have made him a wealthy man.) And yet, here they are, snarling, sniping, and acting like 12 year old little girls at a slumber party who break off into little cliques dishing dirt on someone across the room:

“Steve Schmidt has a congenital aversion to the truth,” Scheunemann said. “On two separate and distinct occasions, he speculated about about Governor Palin having post-partum depression, and on the second he threatened that if more negative publicity about the handling of Governor Palin emerged that he would leak his speculation [about post-partum depression] to the press. It was like meeting Tony Soprano.”

Schmidt said Scheunemann’s charges were “categorically untrue.”

“It is inappropriate for me to discuss personnel issues from the campaign,” Schmidt continued. “But suffice it to say Randy is saying these things not because they’re true but because he wants to damage my reputation because of consequences he faced for actions he took.”

Schmidt is alluding, without saying so directly, to the stories that emerged after the campaign that Scheunemann had been fired.

Scheunemann said Schmidt did try to fire him but added: “I’ve got a pay stub through November 15th.”

The questions about Scheunemann being terminated are central to the larger battle about who was trashing Palin, something that quickly came to the surface in the back and forth between Schmidt and Kristol on Tuesday.

All of this came about as a result of an article in Vanity Fair about Palin that is so bad, much of it has to be a lie, or at least an exaggeration. No human being I know is as bad as the portrait painted of Palin in that article. No one could achieve the success she has in her career if she was truly as monstrous as the person described.

But beyond the description of Palin, one wonders why now? Why a hit piece more than 3 years before the election?

Two reasons come to mind: 1) Palin is such a polarizing figure that anything written about her sells copy; and 2) There is a growing recognition among liberal elites that Obama is heading for a one term presidency unless they can destroy each and every Republican challenger who emerges.

It’s no accident that the name “Carter” is being whispered more and more around Washington to describe Obama. Stimulus isn’t working, debt is skyrocketing, people may like Obama but support for his policies is tanking, largely due to the realization of how much his programs are going to cost us.

Republicans are liked even less but individual politicians are ranked much higher. Trying to destroy Palin, Romney, Huckabee, and anyone else who may emerge in the coming months could be the only way Obama gets a second term.

Why Kristol and Schmidt think the Democrats need a hand in that process is a mystery.

You won’t want to miss tonight’s Rick Moran Show, one of the most popular conservative talk shows on Blog Talk Radio.

Tonight, I welcome Latin American specialists Fausta Wertz of RealClearWorld and Val Prieto of Babalu Blog to talk about the Honduran military impeachment.

The show will air from 7:00 - 8:00 PM Central time. You can access the live stream here. A podcast will be available for streaming or download shortly after the end of the broadcast.

Click on the stream below and join in on what one wag called a “Wayne’s World for adults.”

The Chat Room will open around 15 minutes before the show opens,

Also, if you’d like to call in and put your two cents in, you can dial (718) 664-9764.

Not even our own State Department is calling what occurred in Honduras over the weekend a “coup.” What’s more, Hillary Clinton’s refusal to brand the military’s legal ouster of President Zeyala a coup puts her seemingly at odds with the Obama White House.

Once again, our Keystone Kops foreign policy makes us look ridiculous when the president brands the action “illegal” while the State Department rejects that term “coup.”

Mary Beth Sheridan of the Washington Post:

President Obama said yesterday that the military ouster of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was illegal and could set a “terrible precedent,” but Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the United States government was holding off on formally branding it a coup, which would trigger a cutoff of millions of dollars in aid to the impoverished Central American country.

Clinton’s statement appeared to reflect the U.S. government’s caution amid fast-moving events in Honduras, where Zelaya was detained and expelled by the military on Sunday. The United States has joined other countries throughout the hemisphere in condemning the coup. But leaders face a difficult task in trying to restore Zelaya to office in a nation where the National Congress, military and Supreme Court have accused him of attempting a power grab through a special referendum.

Peter Hakim, president of the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, said the situation presented a dilemma for the United States and other countries. Zelaya is “fighting with all the institutions in the country,” Hakim said. “He’s in no condition really to govern. At the same time, to stand by and allow him to be pushed out by the military reverses a course of 20 years.”

As facts begin to emerge about what Zeyala was up to, it becomes crystal clear why the military, the Congress, and the Supreme Court all felt the necessity to act. Fausta Wertz has been doing a fantastic job of translating Latin American press accounts and brings us information on the reasons for the military action:

Here is more information on Mel Zelaya’s move:

• Zelaya couldn’t get the ballots printed in Honduras since the referendum had been pronounced illegal by the country’s Supreme Court AND the electoral board. Therefore, the government couldn’t print them. No private printer was willing to break the law, either. So Zelaya had the ballots printed in Venezuela and flown in.
• The Supreme Court instructed the military (who would be the ones doing the job) NOT to distribute the ballots to the polling stations.
• Zelaya then
  

  led thousands of supporters to recover the material from an air force warehouse before it could be confiscated.

  His supporters broke into the military installation where the ballots were kept.

• Zelaya’s supporters started distributing the ballots at 15,000 voting stations across the country. This act placed him in outright defiance of the law, the Constitution, and the Supreme Court.
• When the armed forces refused to distribute the ballots, Zelaya fired the chief of the armed forces, Gen. Romeo Vásquez, and the defense minister, the head of the army and the air force resigned in protest. The country’s Supreme Court voted unanimously that Vásquez be reinstated.
• Tuesday last week the Honduran Congress, led by members of his own party, passed a law preventing the holding of referendums or plebiscites 180 days before or after general elections.
• The Honduran Congress, led by members of his own party, named a commission to investigate Zelaya. The Commission found (my translation: If you quote it, please credit me and link to this post)
  

  Zelaya acted against the mandates of legal and electoral laws, the Public Ministry, the National Congress, the Attorney General, and other institutions of the State, which had declared the poll illegal

• On Thursday (h/t GoV) the Attorney General requested that Congress impeach Zelaya
• The position of the Honduran Congress, the Supreme Court, and the attorney general is that the Constitution is to be strictly adhered to.

This is the story not being told by the White House, the State Department, most of the mainstream press, and liberal blogs who have their panties in a twist and are close to apoplexy because Obama isn’t sending in the Marines to restore the Chavez stooge to power.

Roberto Lovato at the Huffington Post manages to write almost 1,000 words without once referring to any of the illegal, extra-constitutional actions taken by Zelaya and instead, refers to “street demonstrations” that Fausta reports is being led by Nicarauguan and Venezuelan bully boys. And in a burst of surrealism worthy of Salvadore Dali, Lovato compares these staged street demonstration by foreign thugs with the demonstrators in Iran:

Viewed from a distance, the streets of Honduras look, smell and sound like those of Iran: expressions of popular anger - burning vehicles, large marches and calls for justice in a non-English language - aimed at a constitutional violation of the people’s will (the coup took place on the eve of a poll of voters asking if the President’s term should be extended); protests repressed by a small, but powerful elite backed by military force; those holding power trying to cut off communications in and out of the country.

These and other similarities between the political situation in Iran and the situation in Honduras, where military and economic and political elites ousted democratically-elected President Manuel Zelaya in a military coup condemned around the world, are obvious.

But when viewed from the closer physical (Miami is just 800 miles from Honduras) and historical proximity of the United States, the differences between Iran and Honduras are marked and clear in important ways: the M-16’s pointing at this very moment at the thousands of peaceful protesters are paid for with U.S. tax dollars and still carry a “Made in America” label; the military airplane in which they kidnapped and exiled President Zelaya was purchased with the hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid the Honduran government has been the benefactor of since the Cold War military build-up that began in 1980’s;

That’s quite an original spin. Zeyala “kidnapped?” Late word is that he resigned and asked for safe passage out of the country. This was granted and he was flown to Costa Rica. Don’t even bother with the laughable comparison with Iran. Those demonstrators in Honduras are not being shot down in cold blood, axed to death, or even beaten within an inch of their lives.

And the dark hints that the US is to blame because we supplied M-16’s to a friendly government is beyond ludicrous. It’s loony. Perhaps if Lovato made even a small attempt to explain Zeyala’s illegal actions, he might have a smidgen of credibility. But in true leftist fashion, he leaves out the facts to spin his anti-American diatribe.

Once more, with feeling: Zeyala was removed by the military who were acting under the orders of the Supreme Court. Zeyala’s own party in Congress has now helped impeach him. Zeyala’s extra-constitutional actions threatened Honduran independence and the rule of law.

What’s so hard to understand about that? What’s “illegal” about it? A leftist stooge of Chavez has been removed. This is an event that should be cheered by an American president. Instead, Obama subsumes American interests to curry favor with leftists in Latin America and Europe.

It won’t work. They despise us anyway, no matter what Obama does. The more he apologizes and sides with them in international disputes, the more they hold him and the US in contempt.

If Obama is seeking to make the world like us, the only way that will happen is if we completely disarm, withdraw our troops from Iraq and Afghanistan (and elsewhere), and agree to abide by whatever the UN says we should do in any international crisis.

As Dirty Harry said; ‘That’s a high price to pay for being stylish.”

Does the fact that the coup is in the interests of the United States even matter to our president?

One less Chavez stooge - a designation that everyone agrees is correct and was the proximate cause of the coup to begin with - is very much in the interests of the United States in Central America. And yet here’s our president, hopping on the international politically correct bandwagon to condemn it.

Obama does not see the clown Chavez as a threat despite his attempts to meddle in Colombian politics by supporting narco terrorists to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in aid. Nor does Chavez exporting his “revolution” to other countries where his influence is magnified and where his stooges try to emulate his anti-democratic policies seem to bother  our commander in chief. And I guess the fact that the Lebanese terrorist group Hezb’allah setting up training camps in Venezuela has no connection to the geopolitical alliance between Chavez, Syria’s Assad, and the Ayatollah’s in Iran.

In fact, after swearing off “interferring” in Iran where demonstrators were getting shot, beaten, and axed to death, our clueless Chief Hypocrite worked frantically behind the scenes to save Honduran President Zelaya’s job, thus interferring on the wrong side while making himself out a liar on Iran.

Paul Kiernan, Jose de Cordoba, and Jay Solomon of the Wall Street Journal report on the attempt by the White House to save Chavez’s stooge:

The Obama administration and members of the Organization of American States had worked for weeks to try to avert any moves to overthrow President Zelaya, said senior U.S. officials. Washington’s ambassador to Honduras, Hugo Llorens, sought to facilitate a dialogue between the president’s office, the Honduran parliament and the military.

The efforts accelerated over the weekend, as Washington grew increasingly alarmed. “The players decided, in the end, not to listen to our message,” said one U.S. official involved in the diplomacy. On Sunday, the U.S. embassy here tried repeatedly to contact the Honduran military directly, but was rebuffed. Washington called the removal of President Zelaya a coup and said it wouldn’t recognize any other leader.

The U.S. stand was unpopular with Honduran deputies. One congressman, Toribio Aguilera, got prolonged applause from his colleagues when he urged the U.S. ambassador to reconsider. Mr. Aguilera said the U.S. didn’t understand the danger that Mr. Zelaya and his friendships with Mr. Chavez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro posed.

Retired Honduran Gen. Daniel López Carballo justified the move against the president, telling CNN that if the military hadn’t acted, Mr. Chávez would eventually be running Honduras by proxy. It was a common view Sunday. “An official who was subverting legality and had violated the Constitution was removed,” wrote Mariela Colindres, a 21-year-old Honduran who is studying at Indiana University, in an email. “Everything was done legally and this does not imply a rupture in the constitutional order.”

First of all, it should be pointed out at the outset that the Honduran military has already handed power back to the civilian authorities - an almost unprecedented action in these banana republic coup d’etats. The Honduran legislature named Roberto Micheletti, the nation’s Congressional leader and member of Zelaya’s own political party to replace the ousted Chavezista - another almost unprecedented act.

Further, the military was acting under the orders of the Honduran Supreme Court although they apparently exceeded their authority by whisking him away to Venezuela. And finally, it was Zelaya’s actions in violating the constitution, ignoring a ruling by the Supreme Court that any referendum be put on would be illegal, and the universal belief in Congress, the military, and much of the populace that eventually, he would little more than a stand in for Chavez if he was allowed to carry out his illegal referendum that sealed Zelaya’s fate.

And yet our president, acting contrary to American interests, chose the route of least resistance and condemned what many Hondurans believe was a restoration of constitutional order. The president will find himself in familiar territory with this condemnation - Castro, Ortega, and other Latin American leftist thugs also condemned the coup. Maybe someone could look it up but when was the last time we were on the same side with Cuba on any international issue?

Way to go Barry. Like, we should listen to the Castros when they complain about democratic procedure not being followed?

This was always the biggest risk in electing Barack Obama president with his mushy headed belief that we must subsume American interests to those of the rest of the world so that we could be popular again. That he would fail to stand up for American interests when the chips were down should not surprise us. He said as much during the campaign and he is simply carrying through with that promise.

What will he do if Chavez decides to use the military he has purchased from Russia and China with his oil money to invade Honduras and re-install his stooge Zelaya? How could we possibly intervene when the president has gone on recrord agreeing with Chavez that what happened was “illegal?”

Chavez has proven in the past to be more bluster than anything but he is so unpredictable, such action would not be impossible.

Then what, Mr. President? When Honduran democrats are crying for help, will you dismiss them as you have dismissed the protestors in Iran? It would seem Obama would have little choice now that he has sided with the enemies of democracy in the region.

The world Obama is creating - one with a supine and pliant America who bows to the wishes of every thug, every dictator who struts across the stage, threatening their neighbors or their own people - is a more dangerous world, a less free world, and a world where our traditional advocacy for stability and democracy is lost amidst the pious platitutdes of this starry-eyed leftist ideologue.

What happened in Honduras is a good thing for America and for the Honduran people. Given Obama’s rhetoric during the presidential campaign, it should come as no suprise that he refuses to recognize this and instead, curtsies to Hugo Chavez and other thugs in the region whose policies are inimicable to US interests.

This blog post originally appears in The American Thinker.

USA forwards Jozy Altidore and Charlie Davies celebrate Altidore’s goal against Spain on Wednesday. The shocking victory over the world’s #1 team propelled the US side into the finals of the Confederation Cup - a warm-up for next summer’s World Cup - in South Africa.

I know I am going against the grain by being a soccer fan in America. But I really can’t help myself. Perhaps it’s because I’m a baseball fan that I appreciate the patience demonstrated by good teams, or the delicious feeling of watching the build up on offense, the teamwork on defense, and the great individual skills on display.

Alas, the American game rarely rises to the level found in much of Europe, South America, and other soccer crazy meccas where people live, eat, drink, and die with their national teams success or failure. But for 93 glorious minutes on Wednesday, it did.

The USA national team played the mighty Spaniards with their 35 match unbeaten streak in a Confederation Cup semi-final match this past Wednesday, and with a combination of making the most of their chances, good defense, and a large dollop of simple, dumb, luck, our boys pulled off the biggest upset in world soccer since we beat the Columbians at the World Cup in 1994. The 2-0 victory pushed the Americans into the finals against otherworldly Brazil - a team we lost to early in the tournament by the lopsided, embarrassing score of 3-0.

Expect a similar result today. The skill level, teamwork, and experience of the Brazilians is just awesome and anyone with even a passing familiarity with the game knows the US doesn’t have a prayer.

Of course, they said the same thing before America’s game with Spain. But playing the green and yellow and defeating them would take another miracle courtesy of the Soccer Gods. And everyone knows the Gods are all ex-Brazil greats, deified by their fanatical supporters while still on earth.

I’ve heard the arguments why the “World’s Game” has never caught on here and I’m sure you can recite them along with me. But here’s a clueless fellow who ascribes our lack of enthusiasm for soccer as a result of our basic political beliefs:

Watching the game, one could not have been happier for a team that has not really performed all that well in recent years or, for that matter, in the first few games of this tournament. Indeed, in the first two games, the U.S. was hammered by Italy and Brazil and only got into the semifinal match by beating Egypt and the fluke of a very arcane scoring system that soccer uses to break ties among teams. And even in this game, a neutral observer would have said that Spanish players clearly outplayed the Americans, outshooting the U.S. squad by a margin of 20 shots on goal. As the U.S. goalkeeper and star of the game Tim Howard noted afterwards, “Sometimes football is a funny thing.”

Well, yes, it is. As someone who didn’t play soccer growing up, but had a dad who did and whose own kids played as well, I can say unquestionably that it is the sport in which the team that dominates loses more often than any other major sport I know of. Or, to put it more bluntly, the team that deserves to win doesn’t. For some soccer-loving friends, this is perfectly okay. Indeed, they will argue that it’s a healthy, conservative reminder of how justice does not always prevail in life.

Well, hooey on that. And, thankfully, Americans are not buying it. In spite of the fact that one can drive by an open field on Saturdays and usually see it filled with young boys and girls playing soccer, the game’s popularity has not moved anywhere toward being a major sport here in the United States. It’s grown for sure but not close to where folks once expected it to be given the number of youth that have played the game over the past two decades.

For sure, there may be a number of reasons that is the case but my suspicion is that the so-called “beautiful game” is not so beautiful to American sensibilities. We like, as good small “d” democrats, our underdogs for sure but we also still expect folks in the end to get their just desert. And, in sports, that means excellence should prevail. Of course, the fact that is often not the case when it comes to soccer may be precisely the reason the sport is so popular in the countries of Latin America and Europe.

Gary Schmitt of AEI is a clueless git. First of all, that “arcane” scoring system which allowed the US to advance is a series of tie breakers (just like the NFL), although the criteria in this case was total number of goals (USA had 4 to Italy’s 3). How much less bizarre is it for an NFL team who goes 9-7 and wins their division to make the playoffs while a couple of 10-6 teams miss the postseason because their division winner had a better record? “Excellence” being rewarded? Phooey!

The only thing “arcane” about Schmitt is his reasoning.

Then there’s the utter malarkey that many teams that dominate the game stats wise or just have the better of the play usually lose. Again, let’s look at the NFL and notice that on any given Sunday, there are several teams who are out gained on offense, outplayed on defense, but catch a few lucky breaks and win the game. It is obvious Schmitt is not a sports fan if he thinks that such happenstances are uncommon.

As in football, the team with a lead in soccer will play it safe, usually dropping a couple of players back from midfield in order to prevent the other team from organizing an effective offense. This will invariably lead to the team that is behind having much the better of the play. Also, the leading team will push forward fewer players on the counterattack. The result is exactly as Schmitt describes but the reason is not because of any particular flaw in the game as much as it is a deliberate choice by the team that is ahead. Of course Spain took 20 more shots on goal. They were behind for almost the entire game. How many NFL teams have we seen build up a big lead in the first half and basically coast the rest of the way? His criticism is nonsense to anyone who knows anything about sports.

But that’s the problem in America. I think in order to love the game, you must be familiar with at least some of its nuances and strategies. There is a method to much of the madness the casual fan might see on the field and what looks like a lot of running around is actually a purposeful offense — probing for weakness, switching the play from one side of the field to the other to exploit an advantage, the give and go, and the teamwork involved in knowing where your teammates are on the field all the time are all practiced repeatedly by good teams in order to break down a defense and create a chance to score.

Defense is the loveliest of dances - a synchronized ballet where defenders react to where the ball is on the field and move almost in unison to block the assault. If you’ve only watched the game on TV, you can be forgiven for not being able to see much of this. And if you’ve only watched American soccer - the MSL variety - you don’t see much of it anyway. The American club league is an inferior product which helps explains to the Schmitt’s of the world why soccer hasn’t caught on here.

Legendary English football writer Steven Wells (who just died last week) saw the ugliness of what he terms “soccerphobes” in this Guardian piece from January of this year:

Meet radio show host Jim Rome. Jim - a short man with a Village People biker moustache - is the pope of soccerphobia. “My son is not playing soccer, ” promises Jim. “I will hand him ice skates and a shimmering sequinned blouse before I hand him a soccer ball.” Jim’s soccerphobia is part of a grand tradition of crassly xenophobic, casually homophobic, tediously sexist and smugly pig-ignorant soccer-bashing in mainstream American sports journalism. As Sport Illustrated’s soccer-friendly Alexander Wolff put it: “There isn’t a US daily without a ’soccer stinks’ beat guy”.

“Their mania is in direct proportion to their insecurity,” laughs Miguel Almeida, a New York-based soccer writer. “Hence its intensity. And the phenomenon pops up every time the World Cup rolls around, its reappearance as certain as swarming locusts.”

Not all soccer-haters are cliché-recycling hacks. Meet (right-wing) intellectual think-tanker Stephen Moore. “I am convinced,” writes Stephen, “that the ordeal of soccer teaches our kids all the wrong lessons in life. Soccer is the Marxist concept of the labour theory of value applied to sports - which may explain why socialist nations dominate the World Cup.”

Now before you dismiss Mr Moore as an isolated and irrelevant know-nothing right-wing bollock-talker, have a listen to his fellow Washington conservative, Mr John Derbyshire: “The very inconclusiveness of soccer is, I suspect, what has made it the pet sport of the repulsive [left-wing] bobos.”

OK, but two soccer-hating American gobshites do not a sinister right-wing conspiracy make. So here’s Jay Nordlingerm who claims soccer is “a project of the left, the athletic equivalent of vegetarianism”. This bile is echoed in the letters pages of America’s newspapers: “Soccer’s slow strangulation of real sports like football needed to be stopped,” rages a reader of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. “High school football programs around the country have nearly succumbed to the foreign-sports terrorism known as soccer … Young minds and bodies are being wasted by continuing the slide into the soccer abyss.”

Schmitt isn’t that bad but it begs the question; is there a political element to people’s hate of soccer?

If there is, I don’t feel it. I enjoy the game as a sports fan. Hell, I even enjoyed watching the Afghan national game Buzkashi. And that’s because there are certain universal elements to sports and competition that make watching soccer or baseball, or any other game where athletes perform and teams compete to win such a joy. “The human drama of athletic competition” was part of the opening of the old ABC Wide World of Sports that featured every kind of game under the sun including Irish hurling, Australian rules football, and something as tame as curling.

I don’t see politics or underlying political truths in games and those who do are trying too hard. The loons who wail about football or hockey being too violent or teaching our kids the wrong life lessons are no different. Concentrate on the stellar athletes - the human body in motion is enormously pleasing to watch when it is done by those born with the grace and strength to play the game - any game - at the highest level. The desire to win, the sacrifices for the team; it is the same in any game and says more about our basic humanity than it does about any silly political generality made up by partisans who wish to score points against their enemies.

Not everyone likes football. More do not like soccer. But if you are ambivalent about the game, tune in to this afternoon’s USA-Brazil match. The Americans might get creamed. But if you want an idea of what soccer is really all about, watch the play of the Brazilians.

You just might discover what many Americans and most of the rest of the world, like about the game.

Not speak ill of the dead, you say?

You can speak ill of the dead if they have done “ill” while they were alive. And there isn’t anything much more “ill” than molesting a kid.

To those who claim Michael Jackson was exonerated of the crime of sexual molestation of a minor, I would ask a simple question; would you allow your teen or pre teen son to spend a night at Jackson’s home unchaperoned?

I thought so.

Perhaps if you are eager to bestow such an honor on your son, you too wish to use your child for a gigantic payday as apparently some parents over the years did with their children, allowing them to stay with Jackson and being paid to keep quiet about abuse.

As for Jackson’s impact on the world, it says something truly awful about us that so many people would become rabid fans of this man of little talent. As a child with “The Jackson Five,” Michael had a nice little voice and was very cute shaking his hips like an adult (The sexualization of children Michael’s age when he performed with his brothers is another article entirely.). But as an adult, Jackson’s voice - OK for pop but no great shakes for any other milieu - was thin as a reed with an annoying false vibrato and a squeaky “hiccup” that supposedly drove female fans nuts.

His “dancing” was unique but repetitive. And I find it incredible that some would actually compare him to people with genuine talent like Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire. It goes without saying that neither of those two giants had to grab their crotch on stage to excite their fans.

Gregiry Hines was a superior dancer. Just about any Motown artist of the 60’s and 70’s was a superior singer. Michael Jackson, the total entertainment package, was a good showman but hardly an earth shattering talent. The outpouring of tributes to him today is a fascinating exercise in wishful - perhaps delusional thinking. Proclaiming anyone “King of Pop” and waxing lyrical about how his talent impacted the music world is a misnomer. It wasn’t Jackson’s “talent” that affected future pop artists but rather his “style” - a completely different kettle of fish altogether. It certainly was original but worthy of the kind of encomiums we are reading and hearing today? Not hardly.

In short, he was not a “no-talent” but rather a performer of limited gifts who, through savvy marketing, a recognition of trends (such as producing music videos that went far beyond concert performances that was standard fare for most MTV selections), and an eccentric personality, hit the world of pop music at exactly the right moment in history.

A comparison to Elvis Presley is useful here. Presely was also a performer of limited ability but hit America at exactly the right time in history when his shockingly unique style (and having Tom Parker, a man ahead of his time, managing his career), brought unusual success. Elvis was also a great showman and his later career was sustained by his aging female fans who never tired of watching him grind out the old favorites on a Las Vegas stage.

Perhaps it is the nature of pop music today to elevate these performers to heights undreamed of by real talents like Sinatra, Garland, Sammy Davis, Jr., and others whose pop stylings will last forever - even beyond the lifetimes of their fans. I say this not out of spite because I genuinely enjoyed Thriller, Billie Jean, and Beat It as well as other pop music of the day. Although limited in their artistic success, performers like Jackson reflected their times perfectly as all good pop music does. But does this mean that we should elevate Jackson to an artistic pedestal. Not hardly.

I sympathize with many in Jackson’s family today. Losing  a brother or a son is always a tragedy. But I don’t sympathize with Jackson’s rabid fans. Losing oneself in the doings of someone who is deliberately manipulating your emotions is a form of narcissm. I suppose like most, I will mourn Jackson’s passing as I have many icons of my youth who have left us. Farrah Fawcett, who also died yesterday, elicits the same yearning in my heart to return to what in my misty memory were simpler times when responsibilities were few and I had the optimism and confidence that the whole world was before me for the taking.

I really wish the media weren’t making such a big deal of Jackson’s death. Other, more vital stories like Iran, health care, and the continuing power grabs of the Obama administration are given short shrift. But covering Jackson means a big audience so one can hardly fault the media for trying to cash in. They’d be crazy not to milk the story for all its worth.

In 100 years, will historians be amazed at the popularity of people like Jackson? Hopefully by then, we will have outgrown our compulsion to place these people on a mountaintop and all but worship their every move.

I take a break today from the depressing nature of our domestic politics and the mayhem in Iran to remember one of my favorite historical figures, George Armstrong Custer.

Custer lost his life 133 years ago today in what the Lakota Indians refer to as “The Battle of Greasy Grass Creek” and many of the rest of us remember as “The Battle of Little Big Horn.” He died as he had lived. All of his personality traits that make him such a compelling, maddening, likable, villainous, enigma-like figure in our history books were on display that day.

Custer is one of my favorites not because of his goodness or greatness but because he is one of the most fascinating personalities I have met in my exploration of American history. For every one of his virtues - and there are many - there is a corresponding trait that negates any admiration we might have for him. I can’t think of any other historical figure in my experience where this is true.

Certainly Franklin and Jefferson had many faults, both living life as hypocrites to some extent. Some giants in our history books were quite unattractive human beings despite their accomplishments. But nowhere will you find such a riotous mix of admirable and disreputable attributes being displayed by a single human being than you will if you get to know George Custer.

His Civil War record as a cavalry officer is considered brilliant. He developed extremely aggressive tactics that turned his troopers into shock troops that probed the enemy lines with razor sharp effectiveness and then, unleashed them in wild charges that usually broke and scattered his foes. General Phil Sheridan trusted him implicitly and used Custer’s command to great effect in the Valley Campaign of 1864 that eventually destroyed Confederate General Jubal Early’s threatening attacks on Washington, D.C.

At the same time, Custer was considered rash, insubordinate, uncaring of the lives of his men, a martinet who demanded spit and polish, and an officer who held most of his fellow commanders in contempt. He eagerly took to heart General Grant’s orders to Sheridan that the Shenandoah Valley, that was supplying Lee’s army at Petersburg, be denuded of food and fodder “so that crows flying over it for the balance of the season will have to carry their provender with them.”

Not surprisingly, Custer engendered a schizophrenic reaction in the men under his command. Many worshiped him. Several would have killed him if given the chance. Playing a role in his demise 133 years ago today was the disdain felt by some of his officers in the Seventh Cavalry. Although his two underlings, Captains Reno and Benteen, could probably hear the running battle in which Custer was engaged just north of the Indian village and where he and 210 of his command lost their lives, there was apparently no discussion about coming to his assistance. (There was some testimony at Reno’s Court of Inquiry in 1879 that he was drunk during the battle, a not uncommon occurrence in the cavalry among officers. Reno was cleared of the charges but pointedly, the Board refused to offer any praise for his conduct.)

Perhaps the ugliest part of Custer was his disdain, even hate for the Indians. Both played a role in his death as he suicidally underestimated the fighting qualities of his foe while proving in previous skirmishes his eagerness to kill as many Native Americans - men, women children, old folks - as he could. Like Little Big Horn, there are still historical arguments raging about his attack on the village of the Cheyenne chief Black Kettle on the Washita River in 1868 (who the Cheyenne claim was flying an American flag as a signal that he wanted peace.) Custer reported killing more than 100 warriors while the Cheyenne themselves claim many of the dead were women and children. The question of the battle being a “massacre” is also controversial as Custer took several dozen women and children prisoner and he claims the women that were killed took up weapons against his men.

(Note: Unlike Little Big Horn, no archeological excavations are possible in this battle because no one is sure of its exact location. Hence, one must grant equal legitimacy to the account given by both sides - especially given the accuracy of oral histories of the Lakota and Cheyenne about LBH.)

In short, Custer brought out the exact same feelings of admiration and disgust then that we who study him today experience from reading about him in biographies and other histories. And it is hard at this distance to judge him in terms of his morality. He was a man of his times, an army officer who had on more than one occasion witnessed the gruesome ways in which troopers were disfigured post mortem by the Indians - a fate that befell him and his men following their deaths at Little Big Horn. At the same time, his racist attitudes toward Native Americans - friend and foe - pegged him as as much of an Indian hater as his patron and commanding officer Phil Sheridan (”The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.”).

But trying to paint Custer as a genocidal maniac is nonsense. Disdainful, yes. Paternalistic and condescending, believing the Indians were better off out of the way, uncaring of their culture and community - all of this is true. But like most Americans of the 19th century, he actually gave little thought to the ultimate fate of Native Americans beyond a date in some distant future where they would be just like any other American - Christianized farmers at peace with the White man; separate but equal. This was also the view of most of the “good White men” who sought to make the reservations to which they were herding Indians into laboratories to turn these hunter-gatherer societies into agricultural communities.

From afar, we can fault them for their callous disregard of Native American culture. And surely, if the number of Whites who really did wish to see all Indians dead was small, there was a much greater number who wished to commit a cultural genocide just as ruinous to the Indian as if they had all been killed. To my mind, this is the real tragedy in this Clash of Cultures - a tragedy that has played out hundreds, perhaps thousands of times in human history when, as Jared Diamond points out, a culture with superior organization, more lethal germs, and a more advanced technology met up with hunter-gatherer societies. The result was never pretty and always ended up the way our own clash with Native American culture eventually played out.

No excuses for Custer then, but perhaps an explanation - a context that is usually missing from the one-dimensional portrayals (good and bad) that dot our public libraries. The number of myths about Custer’s dark motivations are now as many as myths about his image as a hero on horseback.There is no evidence Custer was angling for the presidency (he could barely speak two sentences in public without fleeing the stage in terror). There are some indications that after this campaign he was going to retire with his beloved wife Libby and move to Philadelphia.

It is not true he hoped to strike it rich in the Black Hills, although he used the expedition for his personal aggrandizement. Nor, as my brother Jim points out in the comments (#4) to this post I did a few years ago about the Battle of Little Big Horn itself, was Custer disobeying General Terry’s orders by attacking the Indian village nor was his plan of attack “reckless” or unrealistic, although as previously mentioned, he wildly underestimated both the number of warriors he would be facing as well as their fighting capabilities when confronted with protecting their women and children.

The battle itself is the most written about military event in American history, surpassing even the Battle of Gettysburg. And more biographies have been written of Custer than all but a handful of Americans. Perhaps our fascination with Custer rests on a combination of our romanticized image of the Indian coupled with the equally facile way in which we immortalize the US cavalry during this period in American history. Rouseau’s noble savage and the heroic manner in which we believe the west was “opened” to white settlement are an incendiary mix that causes Custer to explode in our imaginations as the perfect embodiment of American civilization; moving mountains, carving trails out of the wasteland, hacking a civilization out of the wilderness. These are powerful images and when you place Custer in that idealized portrait, he becomes larger than life.

Custer is us - as we are today and as we used to be. The good, the bad, the whole smash of American traits that makes our history so fascinating. They will be writing about him, the battle that claimed his life, and the people he sought to displace long after the rest of us have passed on.