Right Wing Nut House

It is almost exactly a year since I wrote a post speculating about the “assassination factor” in Obama’s candidacy. And while I may have been one of the first to weigh in on the issue, many since who have written about this potential cataclysm have highlighted aspects of the problem that never occurred to me.

For instance, this New York Times piece raises the question of whether black voters would be so worried about losing Obama that they wouldn’t vote for him:

Not long ago, his advisers worried that some black voters might not support his candidacy out of a fierce desire to protect him. It was a particular concern in South Carolina, but Mr. Obama said he believed the worry was also rooted in “a fear of failure.”

Now that he has won a string of primaries and caucuses in all corners of the country, and built a coalition of black and white voters, failure would seem to be less of an issue. The fears, however, remain.

Having had their hopes raised time and time again only to see them dashed by an assassin’s bullet, black Americans have proven themselves to be resilient enough to embrace Obama while still harboring an unease that the rest of us feel about his safety.

Is that unease justified? Obama himself doesn’t think so:

“I’ve got the best protection in the world,” Mr. Obama, of Illinois, said in an interview, reprising a line he tells supporters who raise the issue with him. “So stop worrying.”

[snip]

“It’s not something that I’m spending time thinking about day to day,” said Mr. Obama, who has been given the Secret Service nickname Renegade, a way for agents to quickly identify him. “I made a decision to get into this race. I think anybody who decides to run for president recognizes that there are some risks involved, just like there are risks in anything.”

The Secret Service is probably one of the top three protection outfits in the world. Their strength is in taking pro-active steps to protect their charges. Their intelligence gathering and threat assessment departments are by far their strongest areas of protection.

It is the “face in the crowd” or the “lone nut with a gun” that could turn an Obama candidacy from a triumph of American society to an unspeakable tragedy. And as the last line of defense, Obama’s personal protection teams are ready to lay down their own lives in defense of his. Agent Tim McCarthy proved that during the attempted assassination on Reagan in 1981 when he stood directly in the line of fire from John Hinkley’s gun, arms akimbo, and then took a bullet in the gut meant for the President. Obama knows this and is satisfied that the Service is doing all that it can.

Just recently in Dallas, there was some concern raised that the Secret Service had experienced a security lapse at an Obama rally when they reportedly failed to search for weapons among attendees. Indeed, reports from the arena where the rally was held (as well as other reports from other venues across the country) indicate that as the time approached for Obama to speak, the huge crowd still waiting out side to get in were allowed into the arena without going through the metal detector.

In a statement, the Secret Service does not deny this but insist that they were sticking with a plan for the candidate’s security:

There were no security lapses at that venue,” said Eric Zahren, a spokesman for the Secret Service in Washington. He added there was “no deviation” from the “comprehensive and layered” security plan, implemented in “very close cooperation with our law enforcement partners.”

Zahren rebutted suggestions by several Dallas police officers at the rally who thought the Secret Service ordered a halt to the time-consuming weapons check because long lines were moving slowly, and many seats remained empty as time neared for Obama to appear.

“It was never a part of the plan at this particular venue to have each and every person in the crowd pass through the Magnetometer,” said Zahren, referring to the device used to detect metal in clothing and bags.

He declined to give the reason for checking people for weapons at the front of the lines and letting those farther back go in without inspection.

“We would not want, by providing those details, to have people trying to derive ways in which they could defeat the security at any particular venue,” Zahren said.

I am not buying this explanation. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the campaign itself put pressure on the Secret Service to get the people moving into these venues. It would not be shocking if this were so simply because there is always this tension between the needs of the candidate/President and the needs of security. The next time Obama works a rope line, watch the 8-10 agents around him and not the candidate. Each is responsible for a particular portion of the crowd while the agents behind him are always prepared to yank him away and cover his body with theirs. If the Secret Service had their druthers, there would be no rope line at all. But the needs of the candidate to press the flesh outweigh the common sense needs of security.

And the reason they may not be checking the last several hundred people is because anyone wanting to take a shot at Obama will probably do so where he is most vulnerable - at the rope line. In order to get that close, an assassin would have to get their early enough to be one of the first one’s in. Someone several hundred feet away, unless they are a world class marksman with a pistol, would have little chance of hitting the candidate.

The Secret Service won’t say this for obvious reasons. But it is one of the tradeoffs made between security and democracy. And it makes the candidate or President that much more open for the plan of an assassin.

But perhaps we worry too much. As I point out in my post from a year ago, what has yet to occur in a likely assassination scenario is the atmosphere of hate that has been the hallmark of past tragedies:

[D]allas seemed to be the capitol city of the unhinged in America at that time. Birchers, Kluxers, radical anti-communists, race baiters, all made Dallas a place that worried many of Kennedy’s close supporters, many of whom strongly urged him not to make the trip at all.

How much of that atmosphere rubbed off on Oswald? According to Ruth Paine, who put up Oswald’s wife Marina following several brutal beatings by her husband, Lee read the News everyday. And Oswald could hardly have been unaware of the Birchers since he took at shot at General Edwin Walker, a notorious extremist just months prior to his killing the President.

But it wasn’t just the Kennedy assassination where we see this hatred explode into violence. Many have pointed to the atmosphere of hate in Memphis when Martin Luther King came to support the garbage workers in their strike for a decent wage and better working conditions. And in 1968, the recent Arab-Israeli conflict and the outrage in the Palestinian community that was felt as a consequence of American support for Israel apparently contributed to the rage of Sirhan Sirhan and his desire to strike back at America by killing Robert Kennedy.

Even John Hinckley, Ronald Reagan’s would be assassin, may have been affected by the unhinged nature of much of the criticism being directed against the President for his budget and tax proposals and most especially for his stated desire to confront the Soviet Union. I distinctly remember commenting to friends at the time that at this rate, Reagan wouldn’t survive; that some nut with a gun would get the idea they were doing the world a favor and kill the President.

So far, Obama’s candidacy has generated a lot of good feelings and none of the unhinged partisanship that marked the Clinton-Bush years. But this could change once the battle is joined during the general election. And it will almost certainly change if Obama is elected president and titanic struggles occur over Iraq, the War on Terror, and national health insurance.

Meanwhile, the candidate himself soldiers on:

That afternoon, Mr. Obama’s motorcade passed Dealey Plaza and the Texas Book Depository building, where the fatal shot was fired at President Kennedy in 1963. Several campaign aides looked out their windows, silently absorbing the scene.

Not so for Mr. Obama, who later said he had not realized he was passing the site. And no one in his car pointed it out.

“I’ve got to admit, that’s not what I was thinking about,” he said. “I was thinking about how I was starting to get a head cold and needed to make sure that I cleared up my nose before I got to the arena.”

If this studied indifference to danger is an act, it’s a good one.

Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s famous painting of Washington crossing the Delaware River.

This is the story of what could be the greatest day of the greatest American who ever lived. It originally appeared in The American Thinker on February 22, 2005 and was the very first article I wrote for that fine publication.

Today is President’s day - a day as my colleague at AT Ari Kaufman points out that “not only do schools go on as scheduled, but so do many state and government offices. This is not surprising in 2008, and many revel in it.”

Indeed, as the very significance of President’s Day fades out of existence, the need to remember our greatest president, George Washington, by recognizing his birthday as a true national holiday becomes even more urgent.

If any American deserves this singular honor, it is Washington. Quite simply, there would not be a United States of America without him. And even if there were, it would certainly be a much different place.

****************************************************

This article originally appeared in The American Thinker.

The year was 1783. While formal hostilities had virtually ceased between the Crown and the American colonies, peace talks continued to drag on in London. The Congress was broke and in serious debt even though the Articles of Confederation, which required individual states to contribute funds to the Congress, had been approved two years earlier.

The Continental Army was restless. Many of its officers hadn’t been paid in months. Promises made by Congress at the time of their enlistment regarding reimbursement for food and clothing, pensions, and a pledge to give the officers half pay for life were either not being honored or were rumored to be withdrawn. Petitions by groups of officers to Congress asking them to redress these and other grievances either went unanswered or were brushed aside.

As a result of these indignities, a cabal of officers headed up by Colonel Walter Stewart and Major John Armstrong, an aide to George Washington’s chief rival Horatio Gates, were making plans to march to Philadelphia at the head of their men to force Congress to deal with their demands. The implication was clear; if Congress would not address their concerns, the men would enforce their will at the point of a bayonet.

The plotters believed that General Washington would be forced by their actions to become a reluctant participant in a military coup against the government. They believed that by presenting a united front composed of the senior officers in the army, Washington would have no choice but to back them.

To that end, they scheduled a meeting on March 10 of all general and field officers. With the invitation to the meeting, a fiery letter was circulated calling on the soldiers not to disarm in peace and, if the war were to continue, to disband and leave the country to the tender mercies of the British Army.

Washington got wind of the meeting and was deeply troubled. He issued a General Order canceling the gathering and instead, called for another meeting on March 15 ” of representatives of all the regiments to decide how to attain the just and important object in view.” The next day, another letter was circulated by the plotters that implied by issuing the General Order, Washington agreed with their position.

With the army teetering on the edge of revolt and the future of the United States as a republic in the balance, Washington stood before the assembled officers and began to speak. He started by saying he sympathized with their plight, that he had written countless letters to Congress reminding them of their responsibilities to the soldiers, and begged the officers not to take any action that would “lessen the dignity and sully the glory you have hitherto maintained.”

At that point, Washington reached into his pocket and withdrew a letter from a Congressman outlining what the government would do to address the soldiers grievances. But something was wrong. Washington started reading the letter but stopped abruptly. Then, with a sense of the moment and flair for the dramatic not equaled until Ronald Reagan became President, Washington slowly reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a pair of spectacles. There were gasps in the room as most of the officers had never seen their beloved General display such a sign of physical weakness in public. As he put the glasses on, Washington said “Gentlemen, you’ll permit me to put on my spectacles, as I have grown not only old but almost blind in the service of my country.”

Witnesses say that the officers almost to a man began to weep. This powerful reminder of the nearly eight years of service together and their shared sacrifices and hardships won the day. The revolt died then and there.

It could be argued that this was the greatest day of the greatest American who ever lived. And the fact that we no longer officially celebrate Washington’s birthday on February 22 as a national holiday is a travesty that makes this and other deeds of George Washington seem like mere footnotes on the pages of history.

In fact, the third Monday in February is still designated as Washington’s Birthday, not “President’s Day” as it has come to be known. As Matthew Spaulding of the Heritage Foundation points out, several times, legislators have introduced legislation to direct all federal government entities to refer to the holiday as George Washington’s Birthday but to no avail. President Bush could issue an executive order to that effect but has failed to do so.

This doesn’t address the issue of celebrating February 22-no matter what day of the week it falls on-as a national holiday. The argument that no other American is so honored just doesn’t hold water. The fact is, there wouldn’t be any other Americans to honor if it weren’t for the character, the purposefulness, and the determination of George Washington.

For long stretches during the Revolution, Washington was the government; the only recognizable entity for people to rally around. Couple that with Washington’s superhuman efforts in molding and shaping the Presidency and then exhibiting the sublime understanding to step down after two terms to cement the foundation of the new republic to the rule of law and not of men, and you have a strong case to make an exception to the rule of honoring individual Americans.

Currently, Martin Luther King is the only individual American who is honored with his own holiday. And the Fourth of July and Veterans Day are the only federal holidays covered under the Monday Holiday Law passed in 1968 that are celebrated on the day of the week regardless of whether or not it falls on a Monday (Thanksgiving’s date changes yearly. Christmas and New Years day may be celebrated on either Friday or Monday depending on what day of the week they fall on in a given year). Designating February 22 as a national holiday to celebrate the life of someone called “the indispensable man” of the American founding by his outstanding biographer James Thomas Flexner would seem to be fitting and proper.

We owe so much to Washington that it seems almost trivial to deny him this singular honor.

Seven of Bugs Moran’s boys lie riddled with bullets in a Clark Street Garage on Valentines Day, 1929.

All my life, I’ve been asked if I am related to Chicago crime boss George “Bugs” Moran, whose outfit was decimated on Valentines Day in 1929. The answer is no, I don’t think so. Moran was and is a very common name in Chicago, a result of an Irish influx in the 1880’s - the same migration that brought my grandfather’s family here from Ireland to escape another in a series of 19th century famines.

Though not related to him, I, like most Chicagoans feel connected to that bloody past if only because part of the legacy of Capone and the crime organizations that operated with impunity in the city was political. The fact is, the gangsters couldn’t operate as freely as they did without having the political clout to intimidate the police, the courts, and ordinary citizens into tolerating their illegal activities.

And it wasn’t just liquor. Gambling, prostitution, loan sharking, and murder for hire were rampant in the city as Capone’s gang literally ran wild in the streets. They routinely murdered those who stood in their way. They paid off police, judges, prosecutors, and most importantly, they had the Mayor himself in their hip pocket.

William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson was a larger than life character who was extremely popular with white, working class voters due to his bombastic style and pugnacious attitude. His first stint as Mayor (1915-23) was marked by the rise of various crime organizations who battled in the streets for control of the lucrative beer and liquor market. He had it in his mind to run for President so he began to collect $3 a month from city workers in order to build a war chest. It is thought that Al Capone was also giving him payoffs although it was never proven. (After his death, two safe deposit boxes were found in his name stuffed with $1.5 million in cash.)

As colorful as Big Bill Thompson was, he was also a civic liability. Here’s an excerpt from a Chicago Tribune editorial following his defeat in 1931:

For Chicago Thompson has meant filth, corruption, obscenity, idiocy and bankruptcy…. He has given the city an international reputation for moronic buffoonery, barbaric crime, triumphant hoodlumism, unchecked graft, and a dejected citizenship. He nearly ruined the property and completely destroyed the pride of the city. He made Chicago a byword for the collapse of American civilization. In his attempt to continue this he excelled himself as a liar and defamer of character

Capone assisted Thompson in his 1927 run to regain the mayoralty largely through intimidating opponents and their supporters. This was crucial to Capone’s plans to make Chicago a wide open city where a man with sybaritic tendencies could get anything he wanted, anytime of day or night. As Capone himself often pointed out, he was just supplying a service that the people wanted.

What the people didn’t want were the constant street battles between various hoodlum outfits. Beginning in the early 1920’s, Capone systematically destroyed these organizations through murder and muscle until in 1929, only Bugs Moran and his Northside Gang stood in his way. Hence, the attempt to wipe Moran and most of his gang out by staging a fake police raid at a Clark Street garage and gunning down 7 Moran associates. Moran himself escaped when he spotted the police cruiser being used by the assassins and never went into the garage.

Moran and his gang survived and the gangster hung on to his slice of the action on the North Side. But Capone’s days were numbered. The feds led by Frank Wilson, an agent for the Bureau of Internal Revenue, hounded Capone on income tax evasion and with the help of Elliot Ness and his Untouchables, wrapped up an ironclad case against the gangster for not paying taxes from 1925-29. Capone’s 11 year sentence finished him as boss. It did not finish his organization.

To this day, the old mob still has its tenterhooks in the city. Every once and a while, a connection surfaces between a politician or a policeman and various elements of the Chicago organization built by Capone. No one is surprised. No one is shocked. It’s the way that the “City That Works” …works.

It is a legacy that Chicagoans forget at their peril.

When I was about 14 years old, I picked up a paperback box set of The Iliad and the Odyssey that one of my siblings had already abandoned. It was the Penguin Classics edition (Fagles translation) that so many of us would come to know in high school or college in the 1960’s and 70’s.

The Iliad mostly bored me, although I loved the character of Patroclus because he reminded me of myself at the time.

But the Odyssey enthralled me. The adventures of Odysseus were exciting, made for a teenager’s imagination. He was a flawed hero, of course. He played around on his wife. He thumbed his nose at the gods. And his hubris got him into trouble more than once - most dramatically when he challenged the might of Poseidon himself by killing his son Polyphemus, the cyclops. This so angered Poseidon that he caused Odysseus to wander many years before he could return to his home in Ithaca.

But of all the adventures and misfortunes to befall Odysseus, the most compelling has to be his journey past the islands where the Sirens sang their songs to bewitch unwary sailors. It was said that mariners went mad upon hearing the achingly beautiful music so of course, Odysseus being Odysseus, he had to tempt fate by finding a way to hear the songs but not come under the Siren’s spell. Circe informed him that if he ordered his men to plug their ears with beeswax while Odysseus tied himself to the mast, giving his men orders not to release him no matter how insistent he became, he might safely traverse the waters near the Siren’s island.

So they sang, in sweet utterance, and the heart within me
desired to listen, and I signaled to my companions to set me
free, nodding with my brows, but they leaned on and rowed hard,
and Perimedes and Eurylochus, rising up, straightway
fastened me with even more lashings and squeezed me tighter.

Odysseus was able to resist the Siren’s call only be being physically restrained by his men. But it appears to some observers that when it comes to Barack Obama’s feel good, cotton candy campaign and its vapid call for “change,” the great mass of his supporters may be better off if the plug their ears with beeswax or lash themselves to a sturdy timber somewhere.

Jack Tapper:

Obama supporter Kathleen Geier writes that she’s “getting increasingly weirded out by some of Obama’s supporters. On listservs I’m on, some people who should know better – hard-bitten, not-so-young cynics, even – are gushing about Barack…

Describing various encounters with Obama supporters, she writes, “Excuse me, but this sounds more like a cult than a political campaign. The language used here is the language of evangelical Christianity – the Obama volunteers speak of ‘coming to Obama’ in the same way born-again Christians talk about ‘coming to Jesus.’…So I say, we should all get a grip, stop all this unseemly mooning over Barack, see him and the political landscape he is a part of in a cooler, clearer, and more realistic light, and get to work.”

Joe Klein, writing at Time, notes “something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism” he sees in Obama’s Super Tuesday speech.

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Obama said. “This time can be different because this campaign for the presidency of the United States of America is different. It’s different not because of me. It’s different because of you.”

Says Klein: “That is not just maddeningly vague but also disingenuous: the campaign is entirely about Obama and his ability to inspire. Rather than focusing on any specific issue or cause — other than an amorphous desire for change — the message is becoming dangerously self-referential. The Obama campaign all too often is about how wonderful the Obama campaign is. “

I too feel the magnetic pull of the man. I have expressed my admiration for Obama on many occasions, complimenting him on his political gifts and that rare ability to inspire hope in people.

But c’mon people. Get a grip. Better yet, take another look at Obama not as a “charismatic” politician but as a potential president of the United States. Charisma don’t cut it when sitting in the Big Chair. All one need do is look at the presidency of that other “change” artist and charisma freak John F. Kennedy.

Kennedy is much more consequential of an historical figure when looking at him retrospectively than he was while in office. His apologists in the academy (and the relentless Kennedy PR machine’s 40 year effort to canonize him) have turned a mediocre presidency into some kind of Golden Age of American politics. This is nuts. Kennedy was not much of a reformer nor was he much of a chief executive. His introduction of the Civil Rights Act came only after the standoff between Wallace at the University of Alabama forced his hand. He opposed the Freedom Riders (even though he assigned Federal Marshalls to protect them) and he had no qualms about J. Edgar Hoover bugging Martin Luther King’s sordid private life.

Kennedy’s “charisma” couldn’t move the Civil Rights Act in Congress one inch. Nor could his “charisma” give him the foreknowledge not to increase our commitment of “advisors” in Viet Nam from Eisenhower’s 800 to an eventual 16,000 with “free fire zones,” napalm, and defoliants. Charisma is a fine attribute for a politician to have in running a campaign. But it doesn’t make a dime’s bit of difference when confronting Congress or the truly evil people in this world that Obama has promised to sit down with. I daresay that President Ahmadinejad would probably be immune to Mr. Obama’s charisma as would Baby Assad in Syria and perhaps even Hugo Chavez although the Venezuelan dictator might be eager to share his insights into how to build a cult of personality here in America.

This hasn’t stopped people - young and old - from comparing Obama to JFK and reveling in their ignorance. Here’s Ian Rock trying to break through the hysteria and ask some pertinent questions of the Obamamaniacs:

I have been listening to many of your reasons for supporting Obama. I have watched a good number of interviews on CNN, MSNBC and YouTube to better understand why you think Obama will be great president in 2008, and I keep hearing things like:

“It’s just the way he lights up a room”

“We haven’t seen a candidate this charismatic since JFK.”

“It’s just hard to be objective with this guy”

Obama fans seem to give you the same general answer. Mostly, it has something to do with this charisma. If you want a good example check out a recent interview George Clooney gave explaining his reason; you get the same JFK personality “thing.”

To me, it’s like you are all voting for Obama because of some unexplainable aura he exudes. Everyone is swooning over this almost mysterious attraction he exudes. “Electric” is another word I have been hearing.

Mr. Rock calls these Obama supporters “groupies” which may be a little unfair. “Disciples” may be more to the point. Make no mistake. There is a religious overlay to the Obama campaign. Not necessarily in direct appeals to God but rather in its portrayal of the candidate as savior of America. And Obama himself uses the cadence and imagrey when speaking that calls to mind the Sunday sermon.

I can see where some liberals might find this “creepy” although I think it more pitiful than dangerous. Eventually, Obama is going to have to start filling out that empty suit he’s been walking around in these past months. Or Hillary (or McCain) will do it for him. Either way, his doe-eyed supporters who look at him as the answer to our civic prayers will no doubt become a little less enamored of their hero once his Dorian Gray facade starts to crumble as a result of media scrutiny and opposition attacks.

Vanity Fair writer and left wing hate monger James Wolcott also raises an eyebrow at the Obama supplicants:

“(p)erhaps it’s my atheism at work but I found myself increasingly wary of and resistant to the salvational fervor of the Obama campaign, the idealistic zeal divorced from any particular policy or cause and chariot-driven by pure euphoria. I can picture President Hillary in the White House dealing with a recalcitrant Republican faction; I can’t picture President Obama in the same role because his summons to history and call to hope seems to transcend legislative maneuvers and horse-trading; his charisma is on a more ethereal plane, and I don’t look to politics for transcendence and self-certification.”

There is no way that Obama can transfer this “idealistic zeal” to any policy prescription or grand idea because once he fills in the blanks of specificity on any issue, he is bound to lose support. The press is just now catching up to the fact that even for a politician, Obama is incredibly vague. This, he must be since getting specific will necessarily destroy Obama’s strength as a candidate; the fact that he can currently be all things to all people -an empty vessel filled with the hopes and dreams of millions.

It will be interesting to watch over the next several months whether Hillary Clinton can fill in some of the blanks deliberately created by Obama and thus peel away some of his less enamored followers. It’s one thing to be an agent of change. It’s quite another thing to get specific about exactly what kind of change you are proposing.

I daresay that not all of today’s Obama supporters will be there at the end once that specificity is given life either by a desperate Clinton or a press grown tired of the platitudes and moralizing of the candidate himself.

I am sick of writing about Mike Huckabee and his desperate, shameless pandering to South Carolinians. I am sick of politics in general. So today I want to write about something a little more uplifting.

Political oratory is not what it once was in America. This is understandable given the advent of television and the lessening attention span of the voter. Back in the day, a good political speech could run 2 hours or more. And in the days before microphones, that meant the orator would have to really belt it out, usually in a sing-song manner so that the diaphragm did most of the work. There was an art and artifice to oratory back then. Audiences came to expect the classical allusions, the histrionic hand waving, the tears, the posing - all tricks of the trade a good orator would have at his beck and call.

How on earth did people sit still for two hours to listen to a speech, you might ask? With the good ones, the people usually begged for more. Most politicians were proud of their ability to deliver a stemwinder of a speech and sway people to vote for them.

This is an outgrowth of the fact that most politicians began their careers as lawyers. In small town America, going to a courtroom was like going to the movies. Court watching was sophisticated entertainment for high born and low born alike.

There are numerous examples of defense attorneys getting a murderer off by giving a closing argument that blatantly appealed to the pity of the jurors or of prosecutors getting a jury to convict an innocent man by raising the jury’s bloodlust.

There were also traveling orators who, for a fee, would deliver appropriate remarks at funerals and holidays like the Fourth of July. Many times, these orators doubled as preachers - another place Americans liked to go to listen to a good speech.

It seems we Americans appreciated a good speech more than just about anything. Think of the Lincoln-Douglas debates where thousands turned out to hear the two men. And, of course, a half a million turned out to hear a Georgia preacher speak of a dream he had for America.

There are a couple of things that all great speeches have in common. 1.) The moment. The exact time in history where the speakers words will resonate. 2.) The backdrop. The place the speech is delivered amplifies its meaning. And 3.) The words. All great speeches are as inspiring when read as they are when delivered orally.

Here following are my personal top 10 political speeches in American history. The idea came from this list filed this morning in the Washington Post. I felt I could do much better.

I doubt whether any of my choices will be controversial although the ranking I give them will spark a healthy debate in the comments, I hope. Just take this little diversion for what it is - a hope that you are as fascinated with our past and the impact of the spoken word as I am.

10. Lincoln’s Second Inaugural

On March 4, 1865 the Civil War was finally winding down. Abraham Lincoln stood on the Capitol steps underneath the recently completed dome - a symbol of the country’s commitment to the Union.

Lincoln delivered one of the shortest but one of the most memorable inaugural addresses of all time. The peroration haunts us to this day:

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether’.

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

Standing 15 feet away from Lincoln was John Wilkes Booth. The two would meet a month later in Ford’s Theater.

9. Patrick Henry “Give me liberty or give me death.”

On March 23, 1775, the British were occupying Boston and had declared martial law throughout the colony. A rabble rousing firebrand member of the House of Burgess named Patrick Henry stood up and, some believe, helped start a war. Others say he gave America a national consciousness that day. What he did was convince some very influential people - George Washington among them - that if the British could take away the rights of New Englanders they could do it to Virginians.

Henry’s bombastic, sneering, inspiring speech was a catalyst for Virgina to support Massachusetts and thus start the country down the road to independence. The peroration from Henry’s speech is what we most remember:

It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, “Peace! Peace!” — but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!

Gives me the chills reading it today.

8. Washington’s Speech before Congress Resigning his Commission

It was an act that stunned the Europeans and caused them to elevate Washington to hero status. A winning general simply resigning and going home? Such a thing had never been done - going all the way back to the Romans.

Washington, ever cognizant of his place in history and knowing full well what his self-abnegation would mean to the history books, nevertheless was quite sincere about going home. On December 23, 1783, he stood before Congress and with trembling hands, delivered a short, graceful speech that assured the strength of civilian rule and democracy in America:

Having now finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theatre of Action; and bidding an Affectionate farewell to this August body under whose orders I have so long acted, I here offer my Commission, and take my leave of all the employments of public life.

7. Franklin Roosevelt’s First Inaugural Address

March 4, 1933 saw the American experiment in ruins. More than 13 million unemployed. Industrial capacity at 50% of what it was pre-stock market crash. Banks closing, soup lines, suicides up - people had lost faith.

Franklin Roosevelt didn’t change things immediately. Indeed, unemployment was still at 10% more than 8 years later on December 7, 1941. But what Roosevelt offered was hope that things were going to get better. And for a people as optimistic as Americans historically are, that’s all that was needed.

Contrasted with the do-nothing Hoover administration, Roosevelt’s activism was a tonic that got America out of the doldrums and blunted much of the impetus for a communist revolution that in 1932 seemed a possibility. Here’s the passage everyone remembers:

So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself–nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and of vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. And I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.

But it is his peroration that inspires:

We do not distrust the future of essential democracy. The people of the United States have not failed. In their need they have registered a mandate that they want direct, vigorous action. They have asked for discipline and direction under leadership. They have made me the present instrument of their wishes. In the spirit of the gift I take it.

In this dedication of a Nation we humbly ask the blessing of God. May He protect each and every one of us. May He guide me in the days to come.

6. Ronald Reagan at Point du Hoc

This speech is consistently ranked in the top 10 of the greatest of the 20th Century. And for good reason. It has all the elements I mentioned above that makes a great speech plus the drama of having the survivors of D-Day present to listen to it.

I challenge anyone - conservative or liberal - to watch this June 6, 1984 speech in its entirety and not get choked with emotion.

The Rangers looked up and saw the enemy soldiers — the edge of the cliffs shooting down at them with machineguns and throwing grenades. And the American Rangers began to climb. They shot rope ladders over the face of these cliffs and began to pull themselves up. When one Ranger fell, another would take his place. When one rope was cut, a Ranger would grab another and begin his climb again. They climbed, shot back, and held their footing. Soon, one by one, the Rangers pulled themselves over the top, and in seizing the firm land at the top of these cliffs, they began to seize back the continent of Europe. Two hundred and twenty-five came here. After 2 days of fighting, only 90 could still bear arms.

Behind me is a memorial that symbolizes the Ranger daggers that were thrust into the top of these cliffs. And before me are the men who put them there.

These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.

Gentlemen, I look at you and I think of the words of Stephen Spender’s poem. You are men who in your “lives fought for life . . . and left the vivid air signed with your honor.”

Video here. MP3 here.

5. Roosevelt Declaration of War Against Japan

In a voice shaking with emotion and indignation, Roosevelt threw down the gauntlet to the Japanese empire:

Yesterday, December 7th, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

The United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific.

Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in the American island of Oahu, the Japanese ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to our Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. And while this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or of armed attack.

Given before a joint session of Congress while men were still trapped below decks in many of the ships bombed at Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt’s peroration drew the loudest and most prolonged standing ovation of his career:

Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger.

With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph — so help us God.

I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7th, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese empire.

Roosevelt’s words awoke the “Sleeping Giant” by putting the war in terms of a crusade against the Japanese.

MP3 here. Note the applause at the beginning of the speech. Unbelievable.

4. William Jennings Bryan “Cross of Gold” Speech

You can draw a straight line from Bryan to John Edwards without deviating an inch. The angry populist wasn’t invented by Bryan but he carried the shtick all the way to the Democratic nomination in July of 1896.

Basically, some crackpot had come up with the idea that the problem of poverty in rural America could be fixed if only we had a lot more money in circulation. The way to do that was to go off the gold standard and make silver a sort of substitute. It was called “bimetalism” and would have set off an inflation panic that would have destroyed the economy.

But why let that stand in the way of personal ambition? Bryan, a relatively unknown ex-Congressman, got up to speak to the issue at the convention and quite simply wowed ‘em. A contemporary description of the reaction among the delegates:

His dramatic speaking style and rhetoric roused the crowd to a frenzy. The response, wrote one reporter, “came like one great burst of artillery.” Men and women screamed and waved their hats and canes. “Some,” wrote another reporter, “like demented things, divested themselves of their coats and flung them high in the air.” The next day the convention nominated Bryan for President on the fifth ballot.

The peroration sounds a helluva lot like Edwards at his angriest:

If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world. Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

Bryan was later humiliated at the Scopes Trial by Clarence Darrow and died a broken bitter old man.

3. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

He was invited as an after thought. The great orator of the time Edward Everett was slated to give the dedication with Lincoln invited to make a “few appropriate remarks.” Originally scheduled for September 23, 1863, Horton said he could hardly do justice to the event with such short notice. The organizers rescheduled for November 19th.

Everett’s two hour oration held the audience spellbound. It was a classic 19th century eulogy with allusions to the Greeks and the Romans, biblical quotes, and flowery language - all given in a booming voice so that all could hear.

Then the President of the United States rose and in his high pitched, tinny, nasally voice, spoke the words that redefined America for all time by greatly expanding the very definition of freedom:

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

No other speech in American history has accomplished so much by saying so little.

2. Kennedy Inaugural

Many historians believe that the January 20, 1961 Kennedy Inaugural address was the best of all time. I agree. The speech is a masterpiece of writing and Kennedy delivered it magnificently.

Beyond that, it was the time the speech was given that gave it such resonance. World War II vets were moving into positions of authority in business, in labor, in politics. The torch was indeed being passed to a new generation. And most Americans believed that the coming years would see a confrontation with the Soviet Union.

But little noticed by many is that the “young people” who flocked to Kennedy’s banner were not baby boomers. That group was too young. Rather it was the “tweeners” who were born between 1935 and 1945 who were too young for World War II and mostly too young for Korea (the Korean war ended in 1953) who supported him. The baby boomers adopted him after his death for the most part.

But Kennedy’s apparent youthfulness - something he cultivated religiously despite his poor health - inspired the entire population. His enthusiasm or “vigor” also was contagious. After the Eisenhower years, it was like the country woke up from a long nap.

The speech was a challenge to the country and to the Soviets. Reading it, one is struck by how bellicose it was - a cold warrior’s dream come true. And its stirring call to sacrifice for the common good - so often misused by Democrats when they call upon the people to help the poor or pay more in taxes - was actually an echo of the kind of sacrifice the country made during World War II.

In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility — I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it. And the glow from that fire can truly light the world.

And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.

My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

Kennedy is referring to the coming confrontation with the Soviets - that he makes quite clear he wishes to avoid but has no illusions about the enemy.

Echoes of this speech are still heard today making it a truly historic speech that deserves its ranking.

Video here.

1. Martin Luther King “I have a dream”

No speech in American history - and few in world history - had the immediate and lasting impact of King’s words on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that 28th day of August, 1963. It electrified both black and white Americans and was the catalyst for passing two extremely important pieces of legislation; the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.

But beyond the practical effects of the speech, the uplifting, spiritual nature of the words as well as King’s thundering delivery made the speech almost biblical in its incantations:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

King had the ability to hold a mirror up to white America so that they were forced to confront their shame. In many respects, he was almost like a biblical prophet. And his words, with their spectacular imagery and inspirational message poured over the listeners like a cool, refreshing rain.

The man, the moment, the backdrop, and the words all came together that August day to deliver what I consider the greatest speech in American history.

Video here.

When I was 24 years old and fresh from the ivory tower world of the university (having been rudely disabused from the idea that I could make a living as an actor), my father sat me down and asked me what I was going to do with my life.

It wasn’t as simple as that, of course. He was quite subtle about it. He drew me out by asking what my interests were, where I saw myself in 10 years, and other questions designed to discover where my passions lay.

Somehow, our discussion turned to politics. It was at that point that he surprised me by recounting almost verbatim a conversation we had a couple of years previously where I had complained about a course on the American revolution I took my senior year. The long forgotten professor took a decidedly deterministic view of that event and I spent a very long semester reading long forgotten Marxist treatises showing how the revolution was actually a counterrevolution by eastern merchants and the plantation class who were eager to see their debts to British bankers disappear - or some such nonsense.

We resolved nothing with that little talk but a few days later, he gave me a book that was to change my life; Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. For him, a New Deal Democrat, it must have pained him to realize one of his offspring had eaten of the forbidden fruit and had skewed to the right in his politics. And the hell of it was, I didn’t even realize my transformation. I had always thought of myself as a liberal - largely as a result of my opposition to the Viet Nam war. But reading Kirk’s seminal work on conservatism, I recognized to my surprise that I had much in common with Mr. Kirk’s view of the state and society.

There followed something of an exploration - from Burke to Buckley to Strauss and Hayek, I delved into many different strains of conservative thought, realizing there were dichotomies but ultimately putting them aside believing some of the internal contradictions of conservatism - order versus liberty, tradition versus change - would eventually sort themselves out sometime in the future.

Well, the future is here and the internal contradictions of conservatism have generated cracks in not only the political coalition that animated an ideology but also the intellectual framework that has defined it for more than half a century.

I took some time in describing my own ideological journey because with conservatism at a crossroads, I am a firm believer in the idea that before you can fix something, you must go back to the beginning and retrace your steps to discover where you went astray. There are two examples in the last quarter century or so that illustrate that thought:

* Reagan’s courting of the religious right in 1980. Reagan’s rhetoric in support of social conservatives never matched his actions in support of their agenda - an example followed by his successor George Bush #41. Not surprisingly, after a decade of lip service to their agenda, the social conservatives became resentful and sought to increase their influence in the Republican party, rightly thinking that only then would their concerns be met.

* Pat Buchanan’s “Culture War” speech at the 1992 Republican convention. One can draw a direct line from Buchanan’s bombast to Mike Huckabee’s rise as a viable presidential candidate without deviating an inch. The rise of the social cons at the state and local level was a consequence of Buchanan’s run against Bush #41 so that by the time George Bush ran in 2000, the process was heavily influenced if not controlled by the religious right.

Herein lie the seeds of conservativism’s current dilemma; the idea that a decent society supports a just moral order coming into direct conflict with the need for simple, human liberty in order to allow for freedom of thought and action.

The various factions representing strains of conservative thought have started to come unglued as a result of this singular dichotomy - as basic to conservatism as breathing is to living. In the past, differences between social cons and other conservative factions were papered over or, more often, simply ignored. But the shock from being slaughtered in the 2006 mid-terms has brought the fractures into bas relief and the fight for the soul of the Republican party and hence, conservatism itself has been joined with a relish many thought impossible just 4 years ago.

Ross Douthat links to a liberal critique of this phenomenon written by Michael Tomasky, editor of the Guardian-America:

But the important question is not how the nominee will position himself next fall. Think, after all, about Bush’s talk of “compassionate conservatism” in 2000 and about how the national press fell for it. The important question is how he will govern should he win. And the generally ignored story of this race so far is that in truth, dramatic ideological change among the Republicans is highly unlikely. Despite Bush’s failures and the discrediting of conservative governance, there is every chance that the next Republican president, should the party’s nominee prevail next year, will be just as conservative as Bush has been—perhaps even more so.

How could this be? The explanation is fairly simple. It has little to do with the out-of-touch politicians and conservative voters Ponnuru and Lowry cite and reflects instead the central hard truth about the components of the Republican Party today. That is, the party is still in the hands of three main interests: neoconservatives; theo-conservatives, i.e., the groups of the religious right; and radical anti-taxers, clustered around such organizations as the Club for Growth and Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform. Each of these groups dominates party policy in its area of interest—the neocons in foreign policy, the theocons in social policy, and the anti-taxers on fiscal and regulatory issues.[2] Each has led the Bush administration to undertake a high-profile failure: the theocons orchestrated the disastrous Terri Schiavo crusade, which put off many moder-ate Americans; the radical anti-taxers pushed for the failed Social Security privatization initiative; and the neocons, of course, wanted to invade Iraq.

Three failures, and there are more like them. And yet, so far as the internal dynamics of the Republican Party are concerned, they have been failures without serious consequence, because there are no strong countervailing Republican forces to present an opposite view or argue a different set of policies and principles.

Tomasky leaves out a few important factions; libertarian conservatives and their cousins, the federalists. Nominally supportive of fiscal conservatives like Norquist and hawks on foreign policy (wary of neocons but equally disdainful of Scowcroft realists), the libertarian conservatives and federalists (recently described as “Leave me the hell alone” conservatives) are bunched on the internet and dominate the conservative blogosphere. They consider themselves the true heirs of the Reagan legacy.

Tomasky’s analysis is pretty shallow and his criticisms, as befitting an editor of The Guardian, are exaggerated (”radical” anti-taxers?), selective (support to invade Iraq was broad based among conservatives), and just plain wrong (”conservative governance” hasn’t been discredited because it hasn’t been tried) except for his denoting correctly the three strains of conservatism that run the the Republican party.

Ross Douthat responding to Tomasky:

It’s true that the current conservative intelligentsia, forged in the crucible of Ronald Reagan’s successes, is heavily invested in keeping the triple alliance intact - hence the Thompson bubble, the anti-Huckabee crusade, and the “rally round Romney” effect. And it’s true, as well, that if the Republican Party recovers its majority in the next election the alliance will be considerably strengthened. But such a recovery is unlikely, and already, in the wake of just a single midterm-election debacle, it’s obvious that the Norquistians and neocons and social conservatives aren’t inevitable allies - that many tax-cutters and foreign-policy hawks, for instance, would happily screw over their Christian-Right allies to nominate Rudy Giuliani; or that many social conservatives don’t give a tinker’s dam what the Club for Growth thinks about Mike Huckabee’s record. (So too with the neocon yearning for a McCain-Lieberman ticket, which would arguably represent a far more radical remaking of the GOP coalition than anything Chuck Hagel has to offer.)

The “movement” institutions, from the think tanks to talk radio, have resisted these fissiparous tendencies, and if Mitt Romney wins the nomination they’ll be able to claim a temporary victory. But if the GOP continues to suffer at the polls, in ‘08 and beyond, the (right-of) center can’t be expected to hold, and the result will be a struggle for power that’s likely to leave the conservative movement changed, considerably, from the way that Tomasky finds it today. Like most such struggles, this civil war is beginning as a battle of the books - Gerson vs. Frum; Sager vs. Sam’s Club, Norquist contra mundum - but it’s likely to end with political trench warfare, and the birth of a very different GOP.

Sing it, brother.

Matthew Yglesias concurs and offers a realistic scenario for the near future:

Alternatively, maybe Romney gets the nomination and Romney gets beaten pretty badly. Then maybe conservatives say he was done in by (a) flip-flopping, (b) anti-Mormon bias, (c) bad political headwinds and decide nothing really needs to be done. Then, the congressional GOP just realizes that the conservative movement is really more comfortable in a quasi-opposition role, sets about using the filibuster and the timidity of the remaining southern Democratic senators to make the country ungovernable, does well in the 2010 midterms, and everything just kind of keeps on keeping on. It could happen. One’s natural desire, as an observer of the political scene, is for something dramatic and interesting to happen. And sometimes something dramatic and interesting does happen. And it really might happen. The signs are there. But then again, it might not.

Yglesias is referring to Dr. Johnson’s dictum of how the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates the mind wonderfully. The very threat of the coalition’s break up before next November will force the factions to seek accommodation - save perhaps the hard liners like Dobson and Richard Viguerie who would most likely sit out the election rather than form a third party.

Kevin Sullivan:

Richard Viguerie–a pioneer in direct mail fundraising–was one of those young activists. He has warned and petitioned against Giuliani’s candidacy, recently telling the Concord Monitor that “he’s wrong on every single social issue,” and under the mayor’s stewardship, “the Republican Party will be unrecognizable.” And it would be, at least as far as the party’s base is concerned. The thought of a socially liberal adulterer, with a weak record on all of the hot button base issues, getting the nomination must startle Republicans like Viguerie.

Viguerie has been grousing for years - going all the way back to Reagan’s presidency - that the party leader was betraying conservative principles. Ironically, what he and Dobson and the rest of the social conservatives have done is make both conservatism and the Republican party unrecognizable from the party and movement that was built in the 1970’s and 80’s that stressed personal responsibility, individual liberty, and that most wonderful of all conservative attributes; prudence.

Reading Russell Kirk’s “10 Conservative Principles” makes us all see how far the social cons have taken the Republican party away from its core conservative beliefs. At the expense of personal freedom, of “variety,” and “restraints upon power and human passion,” the social cons have elevated “a secure moral order” and consecrated themselves to making it their business in enforcing it.

This has led to pushing social issues to the fore of the Republican party’s identity, a monumentally bad idea politically that cost the party in 2006 and will no doubt lead to ruin in 2008 if a candidate like Mike Huckabee is nominated. While the chances are slim of that happening, stranger things have occurred in politics.

But no matter who is nominated and elected in 2008, the fracturing of the conservative movement, already well underway, will remain a huge issue. While I wouldn’t expect a rethinking of basic conservative principle, when the dust settles it is possible that conservatism and the GOP will not be as joined at the hip as they are now - especially given the animus between many mainstream conservatives and the social cons. I laid down some thoughts on what a post-fractured conservative movement might need to think about:

For conservatism to survive and even thrive, a new paradigm must be realized that recognizes we live in a different world than the one inhabited by our ancestors and that many of the old verities we cherished are just no longer relevant to what America has become. For better or worse, the United States is changing – something it has always done and always will do. Without altering most of the core principles of conservatism, it should be possible to change with it, supplying common sense alternatives to liberal panaceas for everything from health care to concerns over climate change.

Obviously, there is no lack of ideas in this regard if you read the policy prescriptions appearing on the pages of Heritage, AEI, Cato, or other places where academics and policy wonks gather to supply these alternatives. But there seems to be a disconnect between the thinkers and the doers – politicians, pundits, and activists. Having read most of the Republican candidates stands on issues, outside of Fred Thompson’s detailed critique of entitlements and his ideas on a muscular kind of federalism, there isn’t much in the way of deep thoughts being generated in this campaign so far. In fact, there appears to be little in the way of original thinking at all; just a rehash or recycling of projects and programs that wouldn’t stand a chance of passage in Congress.

Now I am not saying that conservatives should compromise their principles to gain success in the legislature nor am I saying those principles should be abandoned in order to gain electoral victory. But there is a difference between having a vital conservative movement that shapes and informs government and one that has no relevancy whatsoever to modern America.

Clearly, applying conservative principles to governance should be the goal. And just as clearly, there is no lack of ideas on how to make that happen. The disconnect I speak of above arises from the cage that Republican candidates have been placed in by the various factions of conservatism that makes them slaves to an agenda that is out of date, out of touch, and after 2008, there’s a good chance that it will lead to Republicans being out of luck.

Breaking out of that cage will be difficult unless the party continues to lose at the polls. And part of that breaking free will be making the Reagan legacy a part of history and not a part of contemporary Republican orthodoxy. The world that Reagan helped remake is radically different than the one we inhabit today and yet, GOP candidates insist on invoking his name as if it is a talisman to be stroked and fondled, hoping that the magic will rub off on them. Reagan is gone and so is the world where his ideas resonated so strongly with the voters.

But Reagan’s principles remain with us. Free markets, free nations, and free men is just as powerful a tocsin today as it was a quarter century ago. The challenge is to remake a party and the conservative movement into a vessel by which new ideas about governing a 21st century industrialized democracy can be debated, adopted, and enacted. Without abandoning our core beliefs while redefining or perhaps re-imagining what those beliefs represent as a practical matter, conservatism could recharge itself and define a new relationship between the governed and the government.

But before reform comes the fall. And even if, as Yglesias believes is possible, the party and the movement are able to limp along for a few years with a cobbled together coalition, eventually the piper must be paid and the wages earned. It won’t be a quick or easy process. But it will happen nonetheless. And out of the bitterness and recriminations will emerge a different Republican party, animated by conservative principles and true to a legacy that has as its foundation a belief in individual liberty and personal responsibility.

Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s famous painting of Washington crossing the Delaware River.

This post originally appeared December 25, 2004.

It is perhaps the most parodied image in American history.

In countless advertisements, cartoons, sitcoms, movies, and plays, the image of George Washington (or some comical replacement) standing heroically by the bow of a boat as it navigates the frozen ice floes of the Delaware River has etched itself permanently into the American psyche. More often than not, the image has been used to show a haughtiness on the part of the individual substituting for Washington or to poke fun in an iconic way at America itself.

What the painting and its imitators doesn’t show is how near a thing it was that American independence died that night and how the iron will and gambling nature of one man changed the course of history and virtually assured freedom for the colonies.

Just three days prior to the attack on the Hessian outpost at Trenton, Tom Paine published the first of his “Crisis” articles whose ringing words still tug at the heartstrings of patriots everywhere:

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”

At the time of the crossing, things couldn’t have been worse for the patriot cause. Washington had seen his army continuously thrown back since the previous summer’s ill-advised campaign to meet the British army in New York. Every battle became a humiliating defeat. Every retreat saw his army shrink. From a high of 20,000 at the battle of Brooklyn Heights to its now paltry 4500 ill fed, ill clothed, scarecrows, the Continental army had become something of a joke to their enemies.

New York was lost. New Jersey was mostly occupied with more and more patriots giving an oath of allegiance to King George so that they could buy food for their families. The Congress in Philadelphia had fled to Baltimore where they hoped somehow to carry on a war that seemed all but lost. In effect, George Washington was not only in charge of the military for the young country, he was head of the government as well, acting as something of a military dictator but always careful to inform the Congress of exactly what he was doing.

But George Washington desperately wanted to go on the offensive. Seeing an opportunity with the way the British had spread out their garrisons throughout the New York and New Jersey countryside, Washington decided to take the biggest gamble of his career. An inveterate card player, (Wist was his game of choice) as well as being offensive minded by nature, he knew that his little army was about ready to disintegrate what with enlistments up after the first of the year. In his own mind, he felt he had no other choice but to attack. And attack not just one but two of the more isolated British outposts. He had it in mind to threaten the huge British supply depot at Brunsiwck, New Jersey thus causing General Howe in New York to shorten his lines and relieve the pressure on New Jersey patriots.

The choice of Trenton was based on both geography and necessity. But the attack on Princeton was a strategically brilliant concept. By taking both Trenton and Princeton, Washington would cut off the British Army in New York from their main base of supply in New Brunswick. And such a move would free most of New Jersey from British occupation and rally patriots in that beleaguered state to the cause.

None of this would matter unless Washington could get across the Delaware and attack the overconfident Hessians at Trenton. Using an extraordinarily sophisticated intelligence operation, Washington was able gather enough information about the Hessian defenses at Trenton to make the enormous gamble worth taking. Throughout the war, Washington acted as his own spymaster, developing networks of patriots in and around New York city. The British couldn’t sneeze without Washington knowing about it.

Beginning the crossing at 2:00 pm on Christmas day, Washington’s plan called for three separate columns to descend on Trenton at the same time. But due to an ice storm that came up early that evening, the other two columns never made it to the battlefield. Only the tirelessness of General John Glover’s “Marblehead Regiment” who courageously battled the ice and cold by manning the oars that took Washington’s boats containing 2,500 men, horses, and two precious cannon across the river made the victory possible.

The march from the New Jersey side of the river to Trenton was a nightmare. It was said one could see the progress of the army’s march by following the bloody footprints in the snow; many of the 2,500 men did not have any shoes. Two men died of the cold on the march. And instead of reaching the Hessian encampment while it was still dark, Washington’s threadbare little army didn’t reach Trenton until well after dawn.

Nothing, however, deterred Washington from attacking. After overcoming the sleepy outposts, Washington’s troops entered the town and before the Hessians could get organized, surrounded the enemy, killed Colonel Rall the Hessian commander, and forced the garrisons’s surrender. By noon of the 26th, Washington was back across the Delaware with almost 1000 prisoners and a huge cache of supplies.

A few days later, Washington scored perhaps his most audacious victory at Princeton. Crossing the River again, he confronted General Cornwallis whose 1500 troops had occupied a position between Washington and Trenton. With darkness falling, Washington left 400 men to tend campfires, giving Conrwallis the impression he was staying put while taking the bulk of his army clear around Cornwallis to attack a garrison headquartered at Princeton.

At first, the battle went badly for the Continentals. As the British surged forward and threatened to rout Washington’s army, he spurred his horse forward, rallied his men, and with bullets flying all around him, led the troops to a decisive victory. Then, before Cornwallis could cut off his retreat, he led his force to Morristown where he went into winter quarters.

General Howe in New York was beside himself. He realized that Washington, from his secure position on the heights above Morristown, could swoop down and attack any of his isolated garrisons at will. Accordingly, he pulled back his forces to the immediate vicinity of New York. In the space of 10 days, Washington had defeated two separate British forces, captured tons of desperately needed supplies, rallied the patriots, and levered the British out of New Jersey. No matter what defeats lay in Washington’s future, his reputation and position in American history was secured by his victories at Trenton and Princeton.

Two recent treatments of Trenton are worth mentioning. David Hackett Fisher’s “Washington’s Crossing” a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award and 2005 Pulitzer Prize winner for History is eminently readable and is a treasure trove of tidbits on Washington and the continental army. The book also has some excellent background on Washington’s unconventional but very effective intelligence network.

And then there’s the made-for-cable production called “The Crossing” which stars Jeff Daniels as George Washington. Daniels, who gave an excellent portrayal of Colonel Joshua Chamberlain in Ted Turner’s “Gettysburg” falls a little flat trying to play Washington. While the movie is very watchable, I don’t think there’s an actor living or dead who could do justice to the part of Washington. The iconic image of Washington as father, savior, and ultimately civic saint makes the portrayal of such a gigantic historical figure problematic.

I see from Memorandum that the only people writing about this at the moment are on the left. I sincerely hope that changes because this is a very important story and I would hate to think that a sense of partisanship would intrude on what is a probable violation of the law.

There may be good reason to destroy DVD’s of interrogations. But not when they have probative value in a potential court case nor when they are destroyed to cover up wrong doing by employees of the government:

The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Al Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about the C.I.A’s secret detention program, according to current and former government officials.

The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terror suspects — including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody — to severe interrogation techniques. They were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that tapes documenting controversial interrogation methods could expose agency officials to greater risk of legal jeopardy, several officials said.

The C.I.A. said today that the decision to destroy the tapes had been made “within the C.I.A. itself,” and they were destroyed to protect the safety of undercover officers and because they no longer had intelligence value. The agency was headed at the time by Porter J. Goss. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Goss declined this afternoon to comment on the destruction of the tapes.

This is bad enough. But what makes this a budding scandal for the CIA is that both the 9/11 Commission and attorneys for Zacarias Moussaoui specifically requested such evidence and the CIA denied they had it:

The recordings were not provided to a federal court hearing the case of the terror suspect Zacarias Moussaoui or to the Sept. 11 commission, which had made formal requests to the C.I.A. for transcripts and any other documentary evidence taken from interrogations of agency prisoners.

C.I.A. lawyers told federal prosecutors in 2003 and 2005, who relayed the information to a federal court in the Moussaoui case, that the C.I.A. did not possess recordings of interrogations sought by the judge in the case. It was unclear whether the judge had explicitly sought the videotape depicting the interrogation of Mr. Zubaydah.

Granted the judge may not have asked for the specific tapes nor did the 9/11 Commission request anything specific. But if the CIA is going to hang its hat on that defense, damn them. Their failure to turn over potential exculpatory evidence may open an avenue of appeal for Zacarias Moussaoui to at least grant him a new trial. And they impeded the 9/11 investigation by failing to fully cooperate with the Commission’s requests for information.

It is against American law to torture prisoners - even terrorists. And American law’s definition of torture mirrors that of the definition given by the Geneva Convention. The Geneva Convention prohibits the kind of “severe interrogation techniques” that were used on Zubaydah. It’s not a question of whether waterboarding isn’t really “torture” because our special forces guys go through it as part of their training. Or other “stress techniques” aren’t really torture because they leave no marks or don’t really distress the prisoner. The law is the law and these special interrogation techniques are in violation of the Geneva Convention and hence, American law.

If one plus one still equals two, that would mean that the officials who were concerned that the tapes “could expose agency officials to greater risk of legal jeopardy” and went ahead and destroyed them anyway are up for obstruction charges.

We can argue - and I have in the past on this site - that the Geneva Convention is ridiculously out of date, moldy in its thinking and laughably naive about men at war and the exigencies of the times. And the fact that we and other western countries are the only ones who even make an attempt to conduct ourselves by its rules is patently unfair and revealing of a sickening double standard abroad in the world.

But until and unless it is amended, those officials who authorized the interrogations and who carried them out could be in violation of the law and subject to prosecution. Destroying the tapes therefore is destroying potential evidence in a criminal trial.

I don’t write much about the torture issue anymore because it sickens me to have my friends on the right trying to excuse it and it nauseates me when the left moralizes about it. It is wrong and will come back to haunt us. Not because, as some argue, that it puts our own soldiers in danger. That argument flies in the face of history. We have never fought a war where the enemy we were fighting followed the Geneva Convention. In fact, most of the enemies we have fought have been flagrant violators of human decency in their treatment of prisoners much less paying any attention to the strictures in the GC.

We should not torture because of who we are not because of what the Geneva Convention says, or the left says, or the hypocritical third world moralists say. It is wrong for Americans to do it. And yes, waterboarding is torture. Putting a prisoner in stress positions is torture. Sleep deprivation is torture.

Forget the hysterics from our political opponents and examine the issue not as a partisan but as question of simple human decency. If we Americans have lost that - if we’ve forgotten that we hold ourselves to a higher standard than the brutes we are fighting and their allies in the hypocritical third world, then we will have lost a very important component of what makes us an exceptional nation.

I don’t know if we have the courage to face this issue and bring the violators to some kind of justice. I totally reject the idea of allowing any kind of foreign tribunal to judge Americans for the simple reason I wouldn’t trust them to be fair and objective, anti-Americanism being a dominant ideology in much of the world where the efficacy of such tribunals is acknowledged. And facing the music on torture opens a chasm beneath our feet in that the techniques used on these prisoners were approved at the highest levels of the American government. The idea that these officials will walk away scott free is troubling. But if you put Bush on trial, what does that do as far as limiting the options of his successors? And is it the kind of precedent we really want to set?

I don’t know the answers to those questions. And those on the left, blinded by their unreasoning hatred of this president, are not the ones to judge the best course of action. But there clearly must be some kind of accounting for what has been done in our name. How that plays out will say a lot about us as a nation that purports to stand for the best in humanity and not the worst.

UPDATE

More from the Times here.

And The Blotter is reporting that DCIA Hayden issued a statement to CIA employees before the Times article broke, giving a rather disingenuous reason for the destruction of the tapes:

CIA Director Mike Hayden sent a message to CIA employees today saying “the press has learned” that the CIA videotaped interrogations in 2002 and that the tapes were subsequently destroyed in 2005. The decision to destroy the tapes was made by the CIA, but he says the leaders of the congressional intelligence committees knew about the tapes and the decision to destroy them.

Hayden offers an explanation for why the tapes were destroyed — “no longer of intelligence value and not relevant to any internal, legislative, or judicial inquiries” and offers another defense of the interrogation techniques used by the CIA.

John Sifton, a human rights attorney who is active in cases involving the CIA’s secret prison program, said today that the destruction of the tapes is a scandal.

“This is a major piece of the mosaic of evidence, and now it’s gone,” said Sifton. “They should be ashamed of themselves.”

If the CIA didn’t have a history of stiffing Congressional Committees, judicial proceedings, and special tribunals like the Warren Commission, we might be more inclined to believe General Hayden.

But it is ridiculous for Hayden to say that the decision to destroy them was made in a political vacuum. As the Times article points out, the tapes were destroyed at the height of Congressional interest in the CIA’s interrogation techniques. To then go ahead and destroy a tape that may have been instructive of how the CIA carried out interrogations would seem to infer cover-up rather than some kind of standard operating procedure.

That is, unless you trust what Hayden and others are saying about the subject. And frankly, they lost the right to get the benefit of the doubt long ago.

UPDATE: 12/7:

Jamses Joyner also sees obstruction of justice as a problem for those who ordered the tapes destroyed. He also points out that there was Congressional oversight of a sort in that the Chairmen and Vice Chairs of the House and Senate Intel Committees were informed of the plan to destroy the tapes. (No mention of informing the Speaker and Minority Leader in the House and the Majority/Minority Leader in the Senate which would also be the custom in these cases of limited notification.)

James pretty much takes Hayden at his word as far as why the tapes were destroyed but points out the discrepancies in his explanation. Any way you slice it, someone needs to be held accountable for the tape’s destruction.

I used to think that Pat Buchanan was from the paleo-conservative quadrant of the righty universe . Now I’m not so sure. Buchanan might be a charter member of the “Archeo-conservative” school of thought, where his ideological forebearers pre-date western civilization and his ideas reflect the thinking of intellectual giants like Uther Pendragon and Vortigen - two barbarian Celts who knew what to do with uninvited “foreigners” like Saxons and Picts.

Where paleos are simply bizarre throwbacks to the Robert Taft era of conservatism - isolationist, distrustful of foreigners, big government, and the Democratic party, archeo-conservatives take a right turn at the 1950’s and head straight on back to the 4th century where cities used to build sturdy walls to keep out invaders and the homogeneous nature of society was maintained by simply killing anyone who looked a little different than you or your neighbor.

Of course, Buchanan doesn’t want to kill anyone - I think. But listening to him at times you wonder if in some of his darkest fantasies, he sees himself sort of as a “Shield of God” - Pope Leo holding back Attila the Hun and his barbarian hordes at the Gates of Rome with a bible in one hand and a sword in the other.

He is certainly an extremist. And now we can add “old woman” to his resume thanks to his new book, Day of Reckoning, where he wails that “all is lost” and America is finished:

• Pax Americana, the era of U.S. global dominance, is over. A struggle for global hegemony has begun among the United States, China, a resurgent Russia and radical Islam

• Bush’s invasion of Iraq was a product of hubris and of ideology, a secular religion of “democratism,” to which Bush was converted in the days following 9/11

• Torn asunder by a culture war, America has now begun to break down along class, ethnic and racial lines.

• The greatest threat to U.S. sovereignty and independence is the scheme of a global elite to erase America’s borders and merge the USA, Mexico and Canada into a North American Union.

(This is a small sample of Buchanan’s hysterics. Read the blurb at Amazon for a full frontal assault on common sense.)

Every few years, some fruit and nutcase comes forward and boldly proclaims the end of America as we know it and that it’s time to build the bomb shelter or, more prosaically, brush up on your survivalist skills, all the better to ride out the coming race war. Or maybe he thinks liberals are going to collectively grow a pair and drown the rest of us in porn, atheism, and gay rights parades.

Pax Americana” finished? Our era of global dominance over? That might be news to the mullahs in Iran and a few other leaders who don’t lose any sleep over what Russia or China might do to them if they transgress against the world order but lay awake nights wondering if a pack of F-117’s may be on their way to pay them a little visit. The military councils in these countries do not see America as “finished” or “weak” I can guarantee you. They can bluster all they want but their cold hard calculations of power recognize the fact that even with our hands tied in Iraq, we can bring a shattering force to bear against any nation on earth - without using our still superior nuclear arsenal.

Also, we might want to consider the fact that our $13 trillion economy is still 3 times bigger than our closest rival Japan and larger than the next 4 economies combined. We are the 800 pound economic gorilla in the room whose productivity is the envy of the industrialized world.

How this translates into America becoming a third world nation anytime soon simply boggles my mind. You have to deliberately ignore the facts to reach any conclusion other than America maintains a huge advantage economically and militarily over any other nation on earth.

And the idea that America is being torn apart by a “culture war” is ludicrous. There are the forces of secularization and modernization tussling with the forces of traditionalism and religious fundamentalism. There is nothing new in this battle. Substitute “pornography and secular humanism” for “demon rum and race mixing” and you have a snapshot of America a hundred years ago.

In many ways, I sympathize with the right in this struggle in that the denigration of western values and traditions by the forces of secularism and post-modernism have too much influence in our schools and in the culture. But Buchanan, who was one of the coiners of the term “culture war,” (he certainly popularized it), goes too far in portraying these philistines as evil rather than simply wrong. The former Nixon aide is an expert at demonizing his opponents by ascribing sinister motives to their machinations rather than simple wrongheadedness and stupidity - which is bad enough but hardly a reason to start moaning about the end of everything.

And Bush’s push for “democratism” is nothing new in American history. Indeed, the Wilsonian concept of bringing democracy to the heathen has been the one of the major thrusts of American foreign policy for nearly 100 years. And Iraq isn’t the first place the idea has gotten us into trouble. We’ve survived bigger mistakes and come back stronger than ever.

I will not dignify the conspiracy theory about a “North American Union” on this site. The less said about that kind of paranoid delusion, the better.

But Buchanan’s main thrust of his book is apparently that America is finished:

“America is coming apart, decomposing, and…the likelihood of her survival as one nation…is improbable — and impossible if America continues on her current course,” declares Pat Buchanan. “For we are on a path to national suicide.”

It could very well be that the nation state as a political entity is on its way out. Such predictions have been made since I was in books. But what Buchanan and those like him who only see what divides us totally miss are the powerful forces at work in America that keep us united.

Buchanan is rightly worried about the “invasion” of third worlders (mostly Spanish speaking illegals from Mexico and Central America) who are pouring across a border our government refuses to acknowledge much less defend. And there are some worrying signs that many of these illegals are immune to the siren song of the American dream, that they are perfectly content to remain in their “sanctuaries” and maintain a troubling separateness from the rest of America.

But Buchananites always neglect to note that many millions of legal immigrants become enamored with America and the opportunities she offers new arrivals. Those who bother to go through the painstaking effort to come here legally become citizens at just about the same rate as any other immigrant group in American history. They adopt American customs, mixing them as all immigrants in the past have done, with their own. They embrace the American way of life as enthusiastically as any other ethnic group. They work hard, pay taxes, learn English, start businesses, create wealth, and are a great big plus to our society.

Buchanan wants to stop all immigration - legal and illegal - while erecting a Medieval wall to keep out the riff raff.

Buchanan’s loss of faith in America to assimilate newcomers is not justified by history or the facts. There are many steps the government can take to slow the arrival of illegals and force the ones here already to leave voluntarily. But cutting off legal immigration would be a monumental mistake. It would cutting off our nose to spite our face.

The magic of America has always been its ability to absorb newcomers and immerse them into the American compact; work hard, play by the rules, and chances are you too can enjoy the fruits of what this bountiful society has to offer. Put simply, Buchanan doesn’t trust his own country. And I wish to God he would take his loss of faith and not try to foist his Medieval ideas of “homogeneity” on the rest of us in the process of trying to save us.

Yes we have enormous problems - political, economic, cultural. But to get up on a soapbox and announce that the end is nigh is simple hysteria-mongering. It may sell books to his faithful followers and a few curiosity seekers. But is is hardly a basis for political action by either party. Every one of Buchanan’s concerns can and probably will be dealt with eventually. In the meantime, we muddle along, doing our best, trusting that the future will be better than the present as previous generations of Americans did. The fact that they have always been proved right should count for something.

The United States has survived civil war, several horrible depressions, an invasion, two world wars, 120 million immigrants, not to mention various philanderers, crooks, nincompoops, political hacks, and incompetents who served as president. And now we’re supposed to pay any heed to Pat Buchanan’s warnings of imminent destruction just because he thinks the “culture” is being destroyed along with our “homogeneity?”

Get a grip, Pat.

I never thought I’d witness it in my lifetime. The paranoid left, aided and abetted by universal access to the internet along with an educational system that has stopped teaching young people the mechanics of thinking rationally, has apparently broken through and gone mainstream.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the federal government had warnings about 9/11 but decided to ignore them, a national survey found.

And that’s not the only conspiracy theory with a huge number of true believers in the United States.

The poll found that more than one out of three Americans believe Washington is concealing the truth about UFOs and the Kennedy assassination - and most everyone is sure the rise in gas prices is one vast oil-industry conspiracy.

Sixty-two percent of those polled thought it was “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that federal officials turned a blind eye to specific warnings of the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Only 30 percent said the 9/11 theory was “not likely,” according to the Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll.

While there is certainly enough paranoia on the right about 9/11 and “The New World Order,” black helicopter conspiracies, the driving force behind 9/11 truthers, Kennedy conspiracists, and Area 51 nutcases has been the far left of American politics.

And with the advent of the internet, where their most outrageous conspiracy theories are given the patina of respectability, they have been able to capture the dim witted, the ignorant, and especially the young who have grown up without the benefit of learning how to think critically and rationally about the world around them.

To believe that people in the United States government - specifically Bush and Cheney but anyone for that matter - had advance knowledge of 9/11 and did nothing to prevent it is to believe that there is a monstrous evil abroad in the land - that the President of the United States is as bad as Adolf Hitler, standing by while so many were killed. Variations of that theory have Bush pulling a “Roosevelt” (another, older conspiracy theory) who wanted to get into World War II so he did nothing despite prior knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack. In the expanded theory, Bush wanted to go to war in the Middle East for the oil.

For those with the critical thinking skills of a marmoset, such a formulation makes perfect sense. The only problem is that those who actually think about that idea for more than a few seconds realize the enormous problems for someone actually planning and carrying out such a conspiracy so that it has a chance of success.

Leave aside for a moment the fact that such a conspiracy would involve so many hundreds - perhaps thousands - of people in and out of government that the idea it could be kept secret is idiotic. The number of unknowns in executing such a plan are staggering. To believe in such a conspiracy, one needs to also believe in psychics and soothsayers. That’s because for such a conspiracy to achieve fruition, a series of events - many of which would have been impossible to predict - would have had to occur.

The problem for the truthers is that they are examining 9/11 after it happened so that what appears to be a logical progression of events and actions leading to a specific result is actually a mirage. There are forces and occurrences that no one could have foreseen at work as each step of the con piracy would have taken place thus making such a plan a crapshoot at best.

History does not unfold in nice, neat little vignettes where logic rules and the orderly progression of events can be measured and predicted like a mathematical equation. History is chaos. It is unpredictable because of the human element involved in its revelations. To believe in conspiracy is to suspend belief in reality itself and ignore the impact of randomness on events that is so obviously a huge part of history.

Oswald and Kennedy in Dealy Plaza, Dallas Texas, 44 years ago is so unlikely a happenstance of history that in order to get the two together on that day, in that location, conspiracists have had to extrapolate theories with no facts at hand to buttress them. They guess, they infer, they even just make stuff up. They create an entirely different past for Oswald - one not found in any historical record anywhere. He was CIA, or KGB, or an agent of Cuban intelligence. He was working for the mob, or the FBI, or the Secret Service. He was a patsy or he wasn’t even there.

The point is, they can’t all be right. What is missing is the brutal and boring reality that Oswald was in Dealy Plaza that day because of a random series of coincidences having nothing to do with any conspiracy but having everything to do with the arc of events related to Oswald’s miserable life. Add the random factor of a trip to Texas at exactly that time and that place by Kennedy and you have history in all its confusing, chaotic, glorious best.

An historical anomaly? Not hardly. Consider what happened during a real assassination conspiracy; the murder of the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, the proximate cause for World War I.

The killing of Ferdinand is so impossible, so unlikely as to be beyond belief. And while there really was a conspiracy involving the Serbian separatist group, The Black Hand, the actual circumstances that led to Ferdinand’s death would have been rejected by a Hollywood studio for being just too fantastical.

The conspiracy had several assassins spread out along a motorcade route where Ferdinand and his wife would be taken to the town hall for a formal welcome. The first two assassins lost heart completely and failed to make an attempt. They were armed with bombs and pistols. Further along the route, another assassin made the first attempt on the Archduke’s life, tossing a bomb that bounced off Ferdinand’s car and landed behind it, exploding when a follow-up car passed over it. The bomb injured 20 people and shook up Ferdinand’s party considerably. The would be assassin swallowed a cyanide pill and jumped in the river - neither of which killed him. He was promptly arrested.

Also failing to act despite being armed with bombs and pistols were several other assassins standing nearby including young Gavrilo Princip. The 20 year old would get another chance shortly.

After a tense greeting by the mayor of Sarajevo, Ferdinand announced his desire to go to the hospital and visit those injured in the failed attack. Additional security for the Archduke was discussed but in the end, it was left up to the Serbian police to protect Ferdinand.

Meanwhile, young Princip, probably disappointed at his failure to carry out the plan, made his way to a deli to grab a sandwich. And here is where coincidence and the rule of randomness unite to make history.

Ferdinand’s driver, unaware of the change in destination and unfamiliar with the winding, confusing streets of the city, made a wrong turn down a street near where the bomb blast occurred. By chance, at the end of the street was the very same deli from which Gavrilo Princip was just now emerging with his sandwich. Realizing his mistake, the driver stopped and began to back up. But before he could get very far, Princip jumped on the running board and pumped two shots into the car, hitting Ferdinand and his wife Sophie. Both died within the hour.

Let us examine this from the perspective of a conspiracy theorist. Obviously, the driver is in on the conspiracy. Are we really supposed to believe that he innocently made a wrong turn down the very street that the assassin was waiting? And surely, the Mayor is part of the plot. If his welcoming speech as been 2 minutes shorter or longer, Princip would have not been near the deli and missed his chance.

How about the security personnel for the Archduke? Guilty! They could have added security along the route and failed to do so - a sure sign they were complicit in the assassination. And let’s not forget the Archduke’s own suicidal participation in this plot. After all, would he been killed if he hadn’t insisted on going to the hospital?

Most historians dismiss conspiracy theories out of hand because of these kind of random occurrences that simply cannot be predicted and would in many cases, scuttle the bud of a conspiracy before it had a chance to flower.

This has not stopped the paranoid left from positing the notion of history as conspiracy especially as it relates to 9/11. Part of this is certainly the way the left sees history in a deterministic fashion:

The conspiracy theory is the bastion of shadows and little or no evidence. It explains a famous or known event by appealing to the leftist dictum of “follow the money” or “look who benefits” as if actual evidence is irrelevant and personal ethics are just a farcical way for the rich and powerful to pull the wool over the eyes of everyone else. Whether it is the Kennedy assassination or the 9/11 attacks, conspiracy theories which pop up to counter the “official” tale of events share common characteristics.

As a historian, I come across conspiracy theories all the time. Progressive historians like Charles and Mary Beard made the conspiracy theory view of history a popular vogue for a while. They contended that the founders plotted the constitution as a way of aggrandizing their power and property at the expense of common folk, the evidence being that nearly all of the men at the convention were wealthy property owners and remained so afterwards, or became richer under the new system. Of course, this case is circumstantial at best and ignores the actual debates which occurred at the convention and afterwards on real political and philosophical issues.

Beard’s assertions inspired other historians to go into other historical episodes and see greedy conspiracies. The War of 1812 is a topic I study quite a bit and a topic with a historiography full of conspiracy theories, whether to steal Canada, Indian land, or whatever else, as opposed to the real issues of free trade and sailor’s rights which actually sparked the conflict. The conspiracy theory today is usually a way to cast the darkest aspersions upon the government in general and certain officers of the government in particular.

The mindset that can take an historical event and glean the truth from “who benefits” is absurd on its face. One need only look at the conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11, and the examine the make-up of Congress and Bush’s approval ratings today in order to totally debunk the idea. Democrats in control of government (and likely to increase their majorities and win the White House next year) while George Bush is seen as a failure.

If we are to believe that Bush & Company either allowed 9/11 to happen or actually planned and executed that tragedy, then one must look at the political situation today in order to validate those theories. Are we to believe it was part of the plan that George Bush would sink to historic lows of approval by the American people? Are we to believe that the fall of the Republican party was foreseen by the plotters?

Do these facts mean that the conspiracy is now no longer in operation, that it has been closed down? At what point did the plotters see the end of their machinations? After Saddam’s statue fell? After Bush’s re-election? When the first gush of Iraqi oil was stolen by the government (or their proxies, the oil companies)?

These aren’t idle questions. They are questions that must be answered by the conspiracists in order for them to prove their theories. They can’t, of course. For instance, to believe that the conspiracy was over with the 2004 election raises its own set of problems. For if the President knew there were no WMD’s in Iraq prior to the invasion, you would have to carry that idea to its logical conclusion that Bush wanted to lose the war. Otherwise, our victorious troops would find no WMD and expose the plot or at the very least, risk defeat by the Democrats in 2004 who would make the failure to find WMD an issue in the campaign. Or our defeated troops would never get the chance to search for WMD and the plot would remain intact. Of course, there would be such an outcry over our loss of the war that Bush would be defeated for re-election.

Remember, we are not seeing these events after they happen but rather we are planning to invade Iraq for the oil. How can we be sure Bush won’t get slaughtered in the election for not finding any WMD? As it is, the Democrats came within 100,00 votes in Ohio of winning, which would have destroyed the plot right there.

All it takes to dismiss most conspiracy theories is a little skepticism, a little critical thinking. But the skills necessary to examine conspiracies by applying logic and extrapolating outcomes based on reason and common sense rather than deterministic fantasies has been largely lost thanks public schools ignoring the necessity of teaching comprehension and cognition.

This was due to a widespread belief among educators that students are vessels to be filled with information rather than human beings who must be taught how to value and assess that information. There was also a belief that teachers shouldn’t bully students by imposing a specific worldview.

I sympathize with the argument but reject it from experience. The best teachers I had growing up did not tell me what to think. They taught me how to think. Bad teachers can’t tell the difference. But all it takes is one or two teachers who impart more than knowledge but rather habits of thought you carry with you for a lifetime and give a student the basics of approaching information with a rational and reasoned mind. I fear that the de-emphasis on teaching critical thinking skills prevents most younger people from attacking intellectual problems like conspiracy theories armed with the proper intellectual weapons to cull the truth from the nonsense. Couple that incredulity with the viral nature of the internet and you have a potent combination to spread the disease of ignorance with regard to conspiracies.

From believing in creationism to advancing theories about Area 51 and aliens, it is sometimes beyond belief how dumb people can be. Michelle Malkin has it about right; “The fringe is now mainstream.” And it is frightening to consider the idea that if this is so, what other kind of conspiracy theories can gain traction and eventually cause some real mischief.

The left has done a good job the last 30 years smearing our history, denigrating our accomplishments as a nation, ascribing all sorts of evil to our motivations, and generally highlighting America’s numerous shortcomings. Howard Zinn is an extreme example of this school of leftist thought. This is a one dimensional view of America that fails spectacularly in describing the people and events that have shaped America into the imperfect but basically decent vessel that it is today. But at the bottom of most of the left’s critique of America is the belief that powerful, evil, unseen forces are at work to oppress and rule the American people.

The fact that a majority now subscribe basically to that view should not surprise us. But it should nevertheless chill us to our bone marrow. For out of such paranoia arise dictators and tyrants. And with so many enthralled with conspiracies of one kind or another, it wouldn’t take much to see such a man as a savior on a white horse rather than the harbinger of disaster.