Right Wing Nut House

I know, I know. We simply can’t let a Thanksgiving go by without being made to feel simply awful as a result of rapacious white Europeans betraying and eventually murdering Rousseau’s “noble savage” in bunches. This line of thinking leads to a rather interesting conclusion; Europeans should have stayed in Europe, allowing only Asians to emigrate to North and South America.

If European naval technology had been just a little less advanced, we very well could be speaking some Asian tongue today - or perhaps even Polynesian given the enormous skill and intrepidness of their sailors. The last great migration from Asia may have occurred as recently as 6,000 BC according to some exhaustive yet controversial linguistic studies. But if European ship building improvements had lagged by just a couple of hundred years, North America would have been a ripe target for settlement by any number of Asian cultures. Then, it would have been rapacious yellow men who would have gotten tagged with killing the native population.

That’s because it didn’t matter who came, the clash of civilizations was inevitable. Failing to understand our early history in the context of the history of migrating peoples from the time that Homo Sapiens first moved out of Africa is shallow, stupid, and these days, politically motivated. It doesn’t absolve white people of murder nor does it lessen the tragedy of the destruction of native American culture. But thinking in these terms should animate our total understanding of the history of our continent and our country - something the modern day left, whose guilt-ridden diatribes against our ancestors always sounds such a discordant note on this, the most unique of American holidays, deliberately ignores in order to prove their solidarity with the oppressed.

All of that was in the future when the Pilgrims held the first Thanksgiving in the fall of 1621 in recognition of the help given to them by the Cape Cod Indian tribe, the Mashpee Wampanoag. By that time, the Pilgrim’s numbers had been dramatically reduced by disease, losing more than half the number that landed at Plymouth Rock. The Indians had no doubt contributed to the survival of the remainder by showing them how and where to fish as well as introducing them to some native American crops like Maize and beans.

But what we tend to forget about the Pilgrims is that they were not explorers or people inured to hardship. They were country folk from the Midlands of England - most of them were not farmers or possessing the skills necessary to begin a colony. They were simple townsfolk whose separatist ideas about the Church of England landed them in trouble with the authorities - so much so that they were driven out of the country. First to Holland, where their religious views were tolerated but where parents were concerned that the children were losing their essential “Englishness” and pined for the homeland. That’s when William Bradford made a deal with the London Company for a land patent and the crossing was planned.

So here they were, arriving in the waters of the New World in early November, 1620 but not making a landing until nearly a month later. It was then they began to hack a civilization out of the wilderness. Whatever skills they had with the ax or hammer, they were forced to perfect while constructing a few rough hewn buildings over the winter of 1620-21. Only 47 of the original 102 Pilgrims who began the crossing survived to see that first spring.

The Mayflower stuck around until April, 1621, supplying the colonists with whatever food they couldn’t beg, trade for, or steal from the Indians. They were poor hunters, had few firelocks, and were not familiar with the local fauna so were unable to procure food through the gathering of nuts and berries as the native Americans did. The Indians worked diligently to remedy this and by the summer of 1621, the Pilgrims were nearly self-sufficient.

Thanks to Massasoit, Sachem of the Wampanoags who had signed a peace treaty with the Pilgrims earlier in the Spring, the new Americans were able to plant, tend, and harvest their first crop with little trouble. It wasn’t much. A peck of corn meal for each family a week (a peck is 8 dry quarts) during the winter along with some salt fish. They supplemented this with wild fowl they hunted and trapped. All in all, barely enough to survive on. But considering their hardships suffered during the previous year, it seemed bountiful enough that they were able to entertain and feed 90 Wampanoags and the entire colony for a week of feasting.

These were hardy, determined people who put up with difficulties almost all of us today would never survive. We tend to forget that these first Pilgrims made something out of absolutely nothing with just a few tools and the sweat of their brow. And a nice assist from the Wampanoags who had their own selfish reasons for helping. A devastating plague - probably an extremely virulent form of smallpox that the Wampanoags caught from French traders - reduced their numbers dramatically leaving them vulnerable to their enemies, the Narragansett tribe. No doubt Massasoit eyed the Pilgrim flintlocks with more than a little envy.

I realize that many native Americans are not celebrating today. More the pity for them. Recognizing the achievement of the Pilgrims, taken by itself as an admirable effort by people regardless of their color to survive and prosper in a hostile and unfamiliar world, should elicit the praise of all who can appreciate their extraordinary accomplishments. What followed may have been a tragedy. But don’t take it out on the original Pilgrims. They lived in peace with the Indians for 50 years, long after the last Mayflower survivor died.

Perhaps we could leave this tiny corner of American history alone this year by allowing us the pleasure of remembering the Pilgrims for what they were; brave souls who conquered their fears and with an indomitable spirit, created a settlement of Godly men and women who were able to express their religious beliefs freely as an example to all.

There are some cemeteries in my little corner of America that are surprisingly old. I say that because there is so much newness surrounding us here that it’s easy to forget that this part of Illinois was settled before the Civil War. First the fur traders, then the farmers, and finally the merchant and the railroad man began to fill up this part of northern Illinois beginning in the 1820’s.

Some of the best farm acreage on planet earth - thousands of hectares - has been plowed over to make room for gleaming office buildings and cookie cutter strip malls. The rich, black loam that at one time nurtured the growth of food crops that fed middle America now supports the suburbanite’s lawn and rose garden - a trade off for progress that some might find disturbing but which actually defines America in more ways than one.

Much of this growth has taken place in the last decade and a half as the cost of housing skyrocketed in suburbs closer to Chicago. But 30 years ago, this sliver of the Fox River Valley was still mostly farmland with little towns like Algonquin (population at that time around 7,000) dotting the landscape. And along the old country roads that criss cross Algonquin Township, one could occasionally find an old cemetery with perhaps only 2 or 3 dozen graves - probably at one time attached to a now abandoned church.

It amused some of us high school kids to take our dates out onto these dark, lonely roads and wind up pulling in to one of these old cemeteries. We of the more settled suburbs closer to Chicago thought it might literally scare the pants off our female companions. Of course, it never did but we shouldn’t be faulted for our original thinking.

Remembering these cemeteries when I moved out to the area more than a decade ago, I decided to try and find some of those country grave yards we visited in my high school days. It was the insouciance of youth and an unpracticed eye that we didn’t realize what a goldmine of history we were ignoring at the time. We saw the dates on those old headstones - some going back to the 1840’s - and didn’t grasp the significance. Such callow youths we were, indeed.

I discovered in my quest to find the old grave yards that most of them had disappeared, buried under suburban sprawl as the once lonely country roads were now major thoroughfares with subdivisions, shopping centers, stop lights and something that wasn’t around 30 years ago - the police. It made me grateful that in the stupidity of my youth when it was considered macho to drive drunk that the police had better things to do than patrol those dark, forbidding township roads.

After spending most of a lazy summer afternoon trying to find them, I finally happened on exactly what I was looking for. The nameless cemetery was sitting at a crossroads, nestled into a grove of poplar trees. I never found out for sure but the 2 dozen graves must have been maintained by the property owner. It wasn’t exactly overgrown but it wasn’t manicured and clipped as you would find in most private cemeteries. Some of the markers were askew and the graves had been placed haphazardly giving a decidedly casual feeling to the scene.

The markers were weatherbeaten to the point that many of the names were erased by the wind and rain. As historian Bruce Catton pointed out after viewing similar graves as a boy in his own rural neighborhood in Michigan, there is nothing lonelier than a grave with no name. It’s as if the soul itself has been stripped of dignity and humanity, leaving only the rotting, decaying flesh and bones of a corpse with no memory of friends or family to succor the spirit or assuage the grief of separation.

It was the color of the flower arrangement that first caught my eye. A beautiful collection of wildflowers - perhaps picked from a nearby field or family garden - which gave off a cheery glow in an otherwise mournful setting. As I approached the grave, I noted immediately that the name had been completely erased by time and erosion. The only visible writing was the year of birth and death - 1819 -1852 - as well as the phrase “A proud soldier.”

Some nameless Samaritan had placed a beautiful flower arrangement in a forgotten graveyard on a veteran’s grave with no name. Suddenly, I saw the lonely cemetery in an entirely different light. There was an immediate connection made to our past, like rubbing a talisman and seeing history spread out before me.

At the time of his death, this unknown soldier’s father would have been old enough to serve in the War of 1812 while his grandfather could have easily fought in the Revolution. And his sons would probably have been old enough to serve in the Civil War while his grandsons may have participated in the Spanish-American War.

And to make our historical connection complete, the last veteran of that war died in 1992 - a man who could have shaken hands with soldiers serving in Iraq or Afghanistan today.

The respect shown this unknown soldier in an old country grave yard reminds us all that the millions of veterans who have served the United States proudly need to be recognized and applauded for engaging themselves in a cause and effort greater than themselves. The defense of our freedoms - too often taken for granted or forgotten - is worthy of this recognition because they did a job that needed to be done, performing selflessly and when called upon, making the ultimate sacrifice in the cause of liberty.

I’ve often asked, does this make veterans better men than me? I think it makes them more complete men, filling themselves up with something besides the usual trivialities of life that tend to dominate our existence. In this, they go to their graves secure in the knowledge that they have lived a life of a different cut than the rest of us. Richer for their military experience - perhaps in ways that they themselves don’t quite understand - I don’t exactly envy them their service but I respect it enormously.

That old grave yard is gone now, something I discovered a few years ago when I pulled up to the same intersection. A traffic light replaced the four way stop signs and an expensive, gated house now occupies the land. But the memory of that nameless soldier’s marker with the beautiful flower tribute returns every once and a while. It makes me appreciate what I have a little more. And especially on days like today when we honor the memory of our veterans, it connects me to our past in that goose-bumpy sort of way, filling the heart with gratitude that I live in a country that birthed such men as that unknown soldier haunting my thoughts on this Veterans Day.

Ever since George Tenet won the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the award seems to have lost some of its luster. It’s much like the Nobel Peace Prize; once you have given the award to someone who exhibits the exact opposite qualities that should be recognized, all credibility in the prize is lost.

In the case of the mis-named Peace Prize, you can point to several recipients in the last quarter century who have been named champions of peace but were actually murderers and thugs. Yassar Arafat comes immediately to mind. Then there were to enablers of murderous thugs like Kofi Anan and Jimmy Carter. The moral universe inhabited by the Nobel Committee is not the same one you and I live in. They have forever cheapened an award that at one time, was recognized as a singular honor.

The same holds true for the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2004, the “Triumvirate of Failure” that included Tenet, Paul Bremer, and Tommy Franks all won the award. Bremer’s incompetence in Iraq has been well documented as has Frank’s wrong headed insistence on pursuing strategies that helped turn the population of Iraq against us and fire up the insurgency.

But it is Tenet - the most spectacular failure as a DCI in history - who should never have even gotten a whiff of the Medal of Freedom. As DCI, his responsibility was to see that our elected officials had the best intel available in order for them to formulate plans and policies to protect us from foreign threats.;

A glance at Tenet’s record of “surprises” he presented policymakers should make anyone who cares about the Medal of Freedom honorees weep in frustration:

* Failed - African embassy bombings in 1998

* Failed - No clue that Pakistan was ready to conduct nuke test - 1998

* Failed - USS Cole terrorist attack - 2000

* Failed - September 11, 2001

* Failed - Iraq WMD

I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more screwups that are classified. Blunder after blunder can be laid at the feet of this man and yet, George Bush saw fit to elevate Tenet and place him on the same pedestal as Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, Elmo Zumwalt, Gerry Ford, and Irving Kristol. It was the most incomprehensible choice in the history of the award.

This is the burden recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom must carry this year; the realization that the award has forever been cheapened by naming an incompetent and vindictive public servant as a prize winner.

Be that as it may, there are several deserving individuals on this year’s list. Some of them include:

* Oscar Elias Biscet, Cuban human rights activist who is serving a 25 year jail term in Castro’s workers’ paradise for “disorderly conduct and counter-revolutionary activities.”

* Francis S. Collins, director of the Human Genome Project. Collins importance to the project cannot be overstated. He fought long and hard to keep the project out of the hands of for-profit corporations who wanted to patent discoveries made before releasing the information to the scientific community. Collins won out and the spectacular results of his research - sequencing nearly 3 billion base pairs which has resulted in an explosion of knowledge the likes of which has rarely been seen in the history of science - is immediately available to any scientist in the world.

* Benjamin L. Hooks led the NAACP for more than 15 years. One of the only black leaders to endorse Republican presidential candidates, Hooks nevertheless felt GOP Administrations never did enough for the inner city poor or for public education. His self-help message for African Americans was also a cause of friction with many civil rights leaders. He sought to make the NAACP something more than just another Washington lobbying group by educating young blacks about the struggle in the 1950’s and ’60’s for civil rights. In the end, he was less than successful in this effort as the NAACP has since become the most prominent proponent of the “victim culture” in the country.

* Brian Lamb, CEO of C-Span. It can be argued that Lamb’s singular vision of a network that broadcasts what is going on in the people’s house changed our politics forever. It’s not the numbers of people who watch the three C-Span networks that makes Lamb a deserving recipient. It’s the idea that democracy is a participatory form of government and that people must be well informed in order to make decisions on who should lead us. And the fact that C-Span has grown into a forum for not just legislation, but politics, books, film, and culture is a testament to Lamb’s remarkable leadership.

Other recipients of this year’s award can be found here.

The driver of the yellow Mercedes Benz truck in Beirut that awful day 24 years ago knew precisely where to go. According to intelligence reports, two members of what was then the underground terrorist organization known as Hizbullah had mapped the layout of the Marine barracks so that the suicide bomber could carry out his mission to maximum effect. He knew the Marines pulling sentry duty had pocketed their ammo clips thanks to some ridiculous rules of engagement. And he was aware that there were no barriers protecting the structure so that his truck laden with 12,000 pounds of explosives would only have to crash through ordinary wood and plaster in order to be positioned perfectly so that detonation would have catastrophic effects on the building.

The truck had apparently been prepared with the help of Syrians and Iranians in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon where several Revolutionary Guard units had been stationed under Syrian protection. An NSA intercept revealed at a trial that convicted the Islamic Republic of Iran of being behind the attack, stated that a message sent from Iranian intelligence headquarters in Tehran toAli-Akbar Mohtashemi, the Iranian ambassador in Damascus and directed the Iranian ambassador to get in touch with Islamic Amal which has since been identified as the military arm of Hizbullah at the time, and instruct him to “take spectacular action” against the Marines.

When the bomb detonated, it may have been the largest non-nuclear explosion in history up to that time (we used the “Daisy Cutter” in Afghanistan which weighs 15,000 lbs). The entire barracks building was lifted off its foundation and when it came down, it collapsed in a heap of cinder blocks, plaster, and dust. A few seconds after the blast, another suicide truck bomber crashed into the French military headquarters detonating a similar device. All told, 241 Americans lost their lives in the blast. Another 58 French paratroopers died in the other attack that day. It was the worst day for the Marines since the battle of Iwo Jima and the worst day for the US military since the first day of the Tet Offensive in Viet Nam.

While it is not a rock solid certainty that Hizbullah, acting on direct orders from Iran, was behind the attacks, the preponderance of evidence certainly points that way. At the time, Hizbullah was in its initial stages of formation, being trained by Revolutionary Guard units who had infiltrated Lebanon through Syria. At first, Hizbullah was not an independent actor in Lebanon, receiving its orders directly from Khomenei’s Iran. The US had just given Sadaam Hussein more than two billion dollars in aid to fight Iran and the thinking is that Khomenei wanted to get back at the US for our support of Iraq. When US forces pulled out the following February, it was simply gravy from the Iranian point of view.

So for 24 years, we have been in an undeclared war with Hizbullah and, by extension, Iran. Or, at least Iran has been at war with us. We have pretended that no such conflict exists under successive US presidents, Republican and Democratic, liberal and conservative. Occasionally, history intervenes and tries to rouse us out of this stupor but so far, to no avail. In 1984, Hizbullah attacked our embassy, killing 5 Americans. In 1985, TWA flight 847 was hijacked by Hizbullah and a Navy diver was savagely beaten to death. They kidnapped and murdered CIA officer William Buckley and Colonel William Higgins, a Marine serving with the UN at the time. (They were kind enough to forward videos of the murders to our government). They fired on oil tankers in the Persian Gulf. They have operated around the world, killing Jews wherever there’s a soft enough target to hit.

To this day, Hizbullah is beholden to Iran, getting all of its funding and weapons as well as its training through the Revolutionary Guards. They receive an estimated $250 million a year - by far and away the largest recipient of Iranian foreign aid. Their fighters are trained in Iran, indoctrinated in Iran, and are more loyal to the “Islamic Revolution” than they are to Lebanon.

And yet, there are those who are serious when they proclaim they don’t want us to “start” a war with Iran.

This is worse than madness. It is deliberate, self deluded suicide not to recognize Iran as deadly enemy of the United States. Bombing and invading is not the answer, although as the last option available, it may come to that. But we should have absolutely no qualms about attempting to undermine the government of Iran and work for regime change - peacefully if at all possible. But ultimately, the only peaceful solution would be if the Iranian people themselves overthrew the corrupt and messianic mullahs who currently run that country.

It was 24 years ago today that Hizbullah, acting under what is believed to be the direct orders of Iran, made their largest and most successful attack against America. Their masters in Tehran have since been challenging us at every turn, testing our resolve and going so far as to assist our enemies in Iraq. The question now isn’t if a showdown will occur but when.

I don’t know if violence can be avoided. I know we must try to do so because the consequences of war with Iran for the entire world would be profoundly dangerous and destabilizing. But the threat Iran poses is intolerable and must be dealt with - one way or another.

UPDATE 10/25:

Reader Mike emails with a correction:

The “Grand Slam” bomb of WWII, weighing 22,000 lbs and dropped from a British Lancaster bomber, was larger.

And for that matter, accidental ammunition explosions of WWI and WWII, in Halifax N.S., Texas, the Bay Area and IIRC, Eniwetok Atoll, each involved several thousand tons of munitions.

I should have mentioned above that the statement about the barracks bomb being the largest explosion ever up to that time was actually from a quote by the trial judge in the suit against the Iranians.

Obviously, he didn’t know what he was talking about - any more than I did.

Thanks to Mike for the correction.

There has been a lot of criticism directed against conservatives for their seeming heartlessness when it comes to subsidizing health insurance for children in America regardless of whether their parents can afford paying for a private plan or not.

Leaving aside the obvious political framework in which the criticism is given, perhaps it’s time to have a debate about what kind of government we have, what kind we want, and most importantly, what kind of government we need to insure that liberty is not just something our grandchildren read about in history books. This is a debate conservatives should win every time because at bottom, a majority of people will choose freedom over dependence, liberty over the tyranny of the state every time.

The problem is, the left refuses to debate the question of tyranny or dependence and frames the question of what kind of government we should have in emotional terms instead. “Dependency” becomes “compassion.” “Want” becomes “need.” “Personal responsibility” becomes “selfishness.”

If the left were to debate whether their programs actually serve the cause of liberty or dependency, they would lose. It would be a no contest, slam dunk defeat every time. So we don’t debate the nature of government in a free society but instead argue over whether this government program or that one is good for the children, or old people, or any other group du jour the left seeks to ensnare in their dependency trap.

The left doesn’t want to discuss what we lose when government steps in where the citizen is capable of taking care of themselves. They refuse to acknowledge that every step toward establishing a government giving the people what they want rather than what is needed or desirable is a step back from human liberty and into the trough of virtual slavery.

You can hardly blame liberals in the end. It is extremely seductive (not to mention conducive to winning elections) to promise people that government will relieve the citizen of their burdens and make their lives easier. It is also convenient to then tar your opponents as unfeeling, uncaring monsters. Playing Santa Claus while painting the opposition as Scrooge has been part and parcel of the Democratic electoral game plan since the 1960’s.

But little, if any attention is paid to the idea that every time the government shoulders its way forward to assume part of the responsibility for our own well being, our choices about the direction our lives can take are limited in the process. Sometimes a small wrench thrown into the machinery while other times, an impassable roadblock is the result. Our own preferences are subsumed in favor of the ease or convenience the state can supply.

Is it wrong to oppose this creeping servitude offered by the left? After all, not only do the people want programs such as S-CHIP and like the idea of the government taking these decisions off their hands, but it takes a monumental sort of hubris to believe that you know what is best for everyone else with regards to their own personal freedom. And it takes an equal dollop of chutzpah to argue that people should actually wish for the burden of responsibility to fall upon them and their families when government is sitting out there perfectly capable of doing it for them.

Even if the left gets their way and the people are weighted down with the burgeoning largess government offers them, we will still have the Constitution. American will still be here albeit with a people who are a lot less free than their fathers and grandfathers. What we may lose in freedom of action, we will gain in security and ease.

This is the “perfectibility” of society that progressives have been striving for since the turn of the 20th century. The progressive movement itself was founded on the principle that government could be perfected via the application of scientific principles to the problems in society. By turning social scientists into gurus and Shamans, it was believed that America could become a place free from want.

Recall that at the time the Progressive movement was kindled, much of its impetus was supplied by the horrific conditions of the urban poor and the excesses of capitalism on display in the working conditions for labor as well as the power of the corporate trusts who literally owned Congress. Such conditions cried out for reform and progressives began to apply what they considered sound ideas grounded in the science of observation to these inequities.

From Teddy Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter almost every politician had to pay homage to the idea of government’s “perfectibility.” This was the great consensus that held America together through a depression, a world war, and much of the long, twilight struggle against communism. It was based on that most American of beliefs; that all problems have a solution and if we only tinker long enough with it, an answer will be forthcoming.

The father of modern conservatism (although he eschewed the conservative label for himself) Frederic Hayek rejected the notion that “science” could be applied to something so vague and random as human behavior. He believed that complex phenomena where humans interact cannot be scientifically predicted or even explained except in the grossest, most general way. Any attempts to do so was little better than “cooking the books” because social scientists would use the observational data they collected to formulate solutions based on a false understanding of science.

If Hayek was the father of modern conservatism, John F. Kennedy was the mother of “progressive perfectibility” adherents. Kennedy, himself no liberal, nevertheless brought hundreds of social scientists to Washington to address problems from poverty to nuclear policy. It was perfectibility with a vengeance. If anything, his successor gave the newcomers more power and influence. Originally charged with solving the problems associated with poverty, the perfectibility crowd has branched out since the 1960’s to dominate the agencies and departments of government while finding a comfortable home in the Democratic party. In fact, despite a quarter century of conservatives rising to power and prominence, the progressive notion of society’s “perfectibility” is now so firmly ensconced as writ in government that it’s stranglehold on the minds and souls of our politicians will prove very difficult to break.

Society and indeed government are not “perfectible.” There is no such place as Utopia nor would it even be desirable for free men to achieve creating it. Even those who proclaim that their goal is simply to “make things better” bely that notion by proposing solutions that invariably don’t solve anything or just as likely, create more problems needing to be “made better.”

If this sounds like I have an animus toward government, I would say that this is simply untrue. It is very hard to dislike something that should be seen as a utility. You may hate your cell phone every once and a while but it is a distant, impersonal kind of hate and not directed toward anything specific. My beef is with those who would use government to undermine the foundations of personal liberty by expanding its reach to ensnare those in dependency who are perfectly capable to taking care of themselves. The fact that they use government in this way for the purpose of winning votes is equally reprehensible.

And I include so called conservatives in this criticism as well. For ten years, Republicans in Congress pumped the spigot of government to spend their way to re-election. Paying off constituencies be they lobbyists, campaign contributors, or corporate special interests is as bad as anything the left has done. Earmarks have made thousands of American companies dependent on government for their survival - an intolerable excess in a free market society. Reform requires a cleaning of the house on both sides of the debate.

Today, we are far beyond the point where government programs are designed to only help the needy in society and are now busy establishing new parameters of government beneficence for the middle class and even the wealthy. We’ve had corporate welfare for 3 decades now as the government designs tax policies that restrict competition, incentivize production, or simply fill the coffers of some well heeled companies who happen to have connected lobbyists inside the Beltway.

Lost in all of this has been the belief that freedom is preferable to dependency and that walking away from a society based on self-reliant, rational men and women by infantilizing their lives threatens to change the United States into a far different place than that which was bequeathed to us by our fathers and their fathers before them going back to the beginning.

I don’t know what’s funnier. This speech by Daniel Ellsberg given a few days ago at American University or the gushing reaction to the idiocy by some of the netnuts.

Ellsberg you may recall, leaked the Pentagon Papers back in the day when such things were actually taken seriously. While it seems pretty clear that national security was not severely damaged by the publishing of the history of our involvement in Southeast Asia, the docs were considered “classified” and Ellsberg took it upon himself to remove that designation.

Since then, Ellsberg has flitted from one radical conclave to another, apparently making a living basically by being a gadfly. Hardly anyone listens to his off the wall diatribes against American policy and the American government - except like minded fools who see Ellsberg as some kind of hero.

How anyone can take this loony bird seriously after he says something like this is beyond understanding:

If there’s another 9/11 under this regime … it means that they switch on full extent all the apparatus of a police state that has been patiently constructed, largely secretly at first but eventually leaked out and known and accepted by the Democratic people in Congress, by the Republicans and so forth.

Will there be anything left for NSA to increase its surveillance of us? … They may be to the limit of their technical capability now, or they may not. But if they’re not now they will be after another 9/11.

And I would say after the Iranian retaliation to an American attack on Iran, you will then see an increased attack on Iran – an escalation – which will be also accompanied by a total suppression of dissent in this country, including detention camps.

Paranoid blather.

Detention camps? 9/11 trutherism? I know that the Nixon thugs broke into this guy’s psychiatrist’s office. I wonder what they found?

Besides that, Ellsberg evidently does his best thinking while unconscious:

Let me simplify this and not just to be rhetorical: A coup has occurred. I woke up the other day realizing, coming out of sleep, that a coup has occurred. It’s not just a question that a coup lies ahead with the next 9/11. That’s the next coup, that completes the first.

The last five years have seen a steady assault on every fundamental of our Constitution, … what the rest of the world looked at for the last 200 years as a model and experiment to the rest of the world – in checks and balances, limited government, Bill of Rights, individual rights protected from majority infringement by the Congress, an independent judiciary, the possibility of impeachment.

Two coups in less than 8 years? Whatever sleeping pill Ellsberg is taking, gimme some. Those kind of delusions are more entertaining than most of my dreams which usually involve my boss, Editor in Chief of AT Tom Lifson, my cats, and very large bowl of double chocolate fudge ice cream.

This kind of exaggerated, ridiculous, outrageous thinking should get Mr. Ellsberg right back up on top of the radical lefty pyramid. I have no doubt he will be even more in demand now that he’s joined the ranks of the truly unhinged.

For three years I have been writing about this kind of hysterical, over the top, insanely exaggerated rhetoric. Why? Why do liberals feel it necessary to throw reality out the window and paint a picture of the government, of Bush, of Republicans, of the United States in such dark, apocalyptic terms?

I know the far right offers similar rhetoric about the government - even goofier if that’s possible. But most of them are inbred crackers, militia freaks, racist skin heads, and Hitler worshippers. These liberals are supposed to be educated, urbane, rational people. What causes such unhinged rhetoric to spew from their lips on a regular basis?

I am not insensate to some of the excesses of the Administration’s anti-terror efforts. Nor do I trust Bush/Cheney farther than I can throw them when it comes to some civil liberties issues. But I also consider myself educated, urbane, and rational and I don’t see the Constitution being torn up or some kind of evil trend toward unlimited executive authority. Nor do I see anything except the usual corruption that power brings when it comes to the GOP in Congress. These same kind of excesses plagued the Democrats in the latter years of their control of Congress. It is the nature of our system that power will corrupt some people. And whether they have a “D” or an “R” after their name doesn’t matter in the long run.

My working theory on why liberals say the things they do is that when they eventually triumph, they can claim to have saved the country from absolute disaster. It may surprise you to know that this has happened several times in our history. What won’t surprise you is that Democrats have been the ones claiming to rescue the rest of us from tyranny.

The most glaring example was the election of 1800 where Jefferson’s “democratic republicans” swept into power, throwing the Federalists out. Their entire campaign was based on hysteria, exaggerated hyperbolic rhetoric, and predictions of doom; that electing the Federalists would mean that the country would degenerate into a monarchy with a full blown aristocracy plus dominance by Great Britain to boot.

President Adams was livid with Jefferson - especially after newspapers in Jefferson’s corner printed slanderous stories about Adams and his plans to make himself king, closely ally the country with England, and set up his friends as dukes and earls to rule over the populace. The campaign was so bitter that the two founders didn’t speak or communicate for 15 years. When they finally sealed the breach in their friendship, the letters they exchanged the last years of their lives left a remarkable record of the thoughts of two great Americans on life, liberty, and the nature of man.

But this isn’t 1800. And the effect of this kind of rhetorical nonsense not only makes public discourse impossible but truly endangers the republic. The vast majority of Americans don’t believe this idiocy either. All it does is turn them off to politics further as the level of political argument descends further and further into the gutter.

The Democrats may very well sweep the elections next year. But the question is; just what kind of country will they have won? Their contribution to the terrible apathy and disenchantment with government comes at a time when we should be uniting against a common, deadly enemy. Instead, the left will ascend to power and stand atop the hill and survey a charred political wasteland, made worse by their unhinged opposition to the policies of the administration and their end of the world rhetoric directed against the GOP.

There is responsible opposition to your political foes. There is even irresponsible opposition that has long been part of the American political scene. But the opposition shown by the left over the last few years is beyond irresponsible. It is destructive. And for that, they should be royally ashamed of themselves.

I have to confess that I’ve always found Keith Olbermann to be a great entertainer. He has a keen sense of timing and an educated eye for the absurdities in life and politics (and in sports as his stint at the anchor desk of ESPN showed) that makes a lot of what he does funny and even provocative at times.

In short, he is a first class clown, a talented comedian whose shtick is, unfortunately, too narrowly defined for stand-up and too intelligent for a sitcom. But he seems to have found a comfortable niche in the Howard Beal inspired “news as entertainment” field that Bill O’Reilly and other prime time cable hosts have settled into.

The problem is, like O’Reilly, Olbermann thinks he’s a journalist. Just where this notion is advanced on his show, I am unable to determine. Only an idiot would see the blatantly partisan attacks and relentlessly exaggerated rhetoric employed by Olbermann as anything except exactly what they are; an attempt to promote an ideology at the expense of informing the public by using tactics worthy of a Goebbels or TASS in order to discredit opposing viewpoints.

Well, meet an idiot:

In short, what CBS (and all the others) need is a new Ed Murrow. Good news! There’s already one out there on the launchpad who has demonstrated his qualifications. I’m talking about Keith Olbermann of MSNBC. He has the journalistic chops and the mind, heart, instincts and courage.

Olbermann, who anchors a one-hour nightly news show on MSNBC called Countdown With Keith Olbermann, closes his show every night by saying “1,547th [for instance] day since Mission Accomplished in Iraq,” an homage to Ted Koppel’s “Iran Hostage” coverage, which evolved into Koppel’s late-night ABC news show Nightline (the MSNBC show was originally Countdown: Iraq). Then Olbermann throws his crumpled script at the camera, which shatters, a simulated digital effect (something Koppel never did).

These quotes are from a gushing piece on Olbermann by Marvin Kitman in the online edition of The Nation magazine. It isn’t surprising or disturbing that Kitman likes Olbermann. But positing the notion that the Clown Prince of MSNBC is a modern day Murrow?

A tip off to Mr. Kitman’s bona fides as a judge of who is a journalist is found in the above quote where Kitman seriously informs us that Ted Koppel never crumpled his script and threw it at the camera - unlike Olbermann who does it to sign off his show.

Perhaps the reason Koppel never crumpled his script and threw it at the camera was because he was, like, you know, a real journalist and not a poseur. Real journalists don’t do histrionics. Olbermann is the master of the craft.

Kitman also shows a breathtaking stupidity about Murrow, about journalistic standards, and the difference between advocacy and news. In fact, Kitman proves himself to be an ignoramus regarding just about everything he comments on in his article with the possible exception of his references to celebrities. There, I am not competent to judge his perspicacity.

For instance, Kitman demonstrates a shocking ignorance about Edward R. Murrow and his place in broadcast news history. He believes the problem with modern day news presentation is that it tries to be balanced and objective rather than taking a decided point of view in order to advocate a clear ideological position (liberal) as Murrow’s broadcasts did:

So, as a TV critic who has logged millions of hours of viewing to help save one of my three favorite commercial networks, I decided to volunteer my services to the Save CBS Campaign. Here’s what I would do: First, I would dump the Walter Cronkite school of reporting, of which Katie Couric is the latest practitioner. The objective that’s-the-way-it-is style they use at all the network evening news shows is so old, so over. No wonder all the network news programs are falling in the ratings. Katie Couric is just the hardest hit.

What the evening news shows need is less “objectivity” and more analysis. The problem with objective journalism is that it doesn’t exist and never did. Molly Ivins disposed of the objectivity question for all time when she observed in 1993, “The fact is that I am a 49-year-old white female, a college-educated Texan. All of that affects the way I see the world. There’s no way in hell that I’m going to see anything the same way that a 15-year-old black high school dropout does. We all see the world from where we stand. Anybody who’s ever interviewed five eyewitnesses to an automobile accident knows there’s no such thing as objectivity.”

This is the tired, old canard that leftists have used for 40 years; that news written by white males is not “objective” because the journalist has no life experience as a woman or other minority to inform his writing and point of view. Somehow, this is supposed to slight issues and concerns near and dear to the hearts of liberal interest groups.

It is the “journalism as a crusade” school of thought that rejects the idea that news gathering and writing is not art, but craft. Clearly, much of the “craft” aspect of becoming a newsman has been lost today. Everyone wants to be a creative writer rather than a journalist. Newspapers especially encourage this because it makes their product livelier and, I suppose, easier to read. But for an old fuddy-duddy like me who looks in wonder even at wire service copy today and sees jaw dropping examples of blatant bias, I still believe it the job of a news writer to try their best to leave their ideological crusades at the newsroom door.

Not according to Kitman. And he holds up as a shining example of how the news should be reported, none other than the sainted Murrow:

What I’m proposing is nothing new. Before Walter Cronkite became the model “objective” newsman, there was Edward R. Murrow. In the late 1930s Murrow started the tradition of reporting the news and analyzing it, giving his opinion of what it all meant. The Murrow legend was built on his opinionated analyses on the CBS Evening News.

This is true as far as it goes. The fact is, Murrow’s editorials - which usually closed the news broadcast - were clearly labeled as such. Kitman is advocating that the entire news program be given over to editorial analysis:

For those who never saw Murrow’s news show, here’s how it would go: After running through the headlines, he would call on reporters at home and abroad to give reports on the scene. These so-called Murrow’s Boys were real TV journalists, not actors who played them on TV. CBS News in the Murrow years had people we respected because of their expertise, not because they were famous TV names. The foreign correspondents weren’t empty trench coats but real experts like William Shirer, who reported from Berlin on the menace of Hitler in the 1930s. It didn’t matter that Murrow’s Boys were bald like David Schoenbrun, who reported from Paris in the glory days, or older than the 18-49 demographic like Dan Schorr. They were specialists in specific areas.

Then Murrow would do his closing essay, in which he would comment on some hot issue, continually treading dangerous waters: McCarthyism at home, apartheid abroad, J. Edgar Hoover, the atomic bomb, stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction–all of which he opposed. He was pro-union and anti-business. He was a dissident on US foreign policy post-World War II.

The problem here is that Kitman has combined several different Murrow programs over the years in both radio and television in order to make an obscure point; that Murrow’s broadcasts had a definite ideological point of view.

Starting in the late 1930’s, Murrow’s reports from Europe were either special broadcasts (as his famous 1938 round up of European opinion about the Anschluss) or his regular reports from London that were part of H.V. Kaltenborn’s 15 minute news reading at night. Murrow was never an anchor for CBS News as Kitman intimates above. In fact, Murrow’s war reports were so good not because he injected opinion into his pieces but because he was able to write clear, concise summaries of what it was like to be in London during the blitz. Whatever opinions he gave were in the context of the deliberate targeting of civilians by Hitler - hardly courageous or even novel.

After the war, Murrow’s Hear it Now radio program and the TV version See it Now tackled the toughest controversies of the time. But these shows were totally independent of the nightly news program. It is clear by the description above that Kitman doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to Murrow’s duties at CBS. He never started See it Now by reading the headlines. The show was a one issue program. It was the beginning of TV documentaries, something that Murrow would continue to perfect until the early 1960’s when he wrote and broadcast perhaps the most memorable documentary in over the air TV history, Harvest of Shame that profiled the plight of migrant workers.

In short, Kitman’s laughable misunderstanding of what Murrow actually did for CBS News makes his subsequent gushing about Olbermann ridiculous.

And this curious historical revisionism about Murrow is almost unfathomable. It is either deliberate obfuscation of the facts or unbelievable stupidity on the part of Kitman:

“No one can eliminate prejudices–just recognize them,” Murrow said. His approach was so successful that all the other network news hours copied him.

Finally, CBS president William Paley made Ed Murrow shut up–by canceling his shows. In the dark ages after Murrow, the most powerful commentary on network news was the raised eyebrow of David Brinkley after reading a piece of news on NBC. A generation of telegenic and totally uninvolved journalists followed.

Um…no, the other networks “news hours(??)” did not try to copy him (news on TV at the time was 15 minutes). In fact, NBC steered clear of controversy as much as possible. ABC News was a joke at the time, not even considered much of a network at all.

And the fact is, See it Now as a weekly program was not cancelled by Paley but rather the weekly show went dark because it lost its sponsor in 1955, Alcoa Aluminum and was unable to secure another permanent one. This was back in the day when corporations would sponsor individual shows and losing a sponsor meant either getting another one or going dark. See it Now was on the air fitfully as a series of specials until 1958 when according to Murrow’s long time producer Fred Friendly, the broadcaster told Paley he refused to do any more shows because of the network’s habit of giving equal time to Murrow’s targets. (Something Olbermann never does).

Putting aside Kitman’s obvious lack of knowledge of who Murrow was and what he did, the question of whether Murrow was “journalist” or an “analyst” remains unanswered. As a first person witness to history he was very good, a pioneer in radio and we have Murrow to thank for much of the structure found in modern news broadcasts. As an advocate for liberal reforms, he was tireless but his legend sometimes outstrips the facts. His McCarthy broadcast was aired in March of 1954, long after most major Democratic newspapers (and even many Republican ones) came out against the Wisconsin Senator. Murrow came late to the bash McCarthy party and most historians agree the Wisconsin Senator sealed his fate a month prior to Murrow’s See it Now broadcast by sliming World War II hero Ralph Zwicker that brought widespread editorial condemnation as well as denunciations from veterans groups and finally, President Eisenhower himself.

Comparing Olbermann to Murrow then is a monumental stretch - just from the standpoint that Murrow relied on a cold, journalistic recitation of the facts in order to make his points. Olbermann wouldn’t know a “fact” if it came up and bit him on his rear end. This from his first “Special Comment” segment where Olbermann tries to evoke the memory of Murrow:

I accuse you, Mr. Bush, of lying this country into war. I accuse you of fabricating in the minds of your own people a false implied link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. I accuse you of firing the generals who told you that the plans for Iraq were disastrously insufficient…. I accuse you of subverting the Constitution, not in some misguided but sincerely motivated struggle to combat terrorists, but to stifle dissent. I accuse you of fomenting fear among your own people, of creating the very terror you claim to have fought. I accuse you of exploiting that unreasoning fear, the natural fear of your own people who just want to live their lives in peace, as a political tool to slander your critics and libel your opponents. I accuse you of handing part of this Republic over to a Vice President who is without conscience and letting him run roughshod over it….

It would be tiresome to rebut what Olbermann has laid out as his “case” for a Bush resignation. If you believe that Bush “fabricated in the minds of your own people a false implied link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11″ then there is no hope for you. You might as well believe in Santa Claus. I only highlight it to contrast the way Murrow went about savaging McCarthy:

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men— not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.

This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

Murrow could have been referring to Olbermann during most of that analysis.

Olbermann is a clown. An excellent clown but an entertainer nonetheless. It has been said that he is the first on-air blogger in that his rants are reminiscent of much that passes for analysis on the web. Of this, I have no doubt. His exaggeration, his cruel twisting of facts and circumstances, and his outright deliberate obscuring of the truth - 3 Congressional Committees have found Bush did not lie us into war not to mention assigning unproven and unsubstantiated motivations to the President for his actions - are part and parcel of the way many popular right and left blogs operate. But Olbermann as Murrow?

For ten minutes, Olbermann spoke with fierce clarity and surgical precision, drawing a comparison to President Nixon’s resignation. He had obviously done his homework. His recitation of Bush’s crimes concluded with his observation that the President had been “an accessory to the obstruction of justice” in the Libby case. “From Iraq to Scooter Libby,” Olbermann said at the time, “Bush and Cheney have lost Americans’ trust and stabbed this nation in the back. It’s time for them to go.” The highest praise I can give is to say I can imagine Ed Murrow speaking those words.

If Kitman can imagine Murrow saying those words, he’s a fool. Murrow would have marshaled the facts not gone off on ad hoc rants substituting ill formed opinions for clear, concise analysis. The idea that Kitman can’t recognize this only shows him to be an idiot.

Which is why any comparisons between Olbermann and Murrow are found only in the minds of Kitman and Olbermann himself. No serious journalist would entertain such a comparison nor would any serious person period. It is beyond belief that anyone could be so obtuse as to believe that Olbermann was anything except a clever entertainer who knows his audience expertly and panders to their biases and worldview.

Kitman’s vision of a future nightly news broadcast featuring Olbermann-like rants and ravings is pretty frightening. Thankfully, if such a nightmare were to occur, such relentless partisanship would appeal to an even smaller segment of the population than over the air news appeals to now which would cause Mr. Olbermann to retreat ignominiously back to the cable backwater of MSNBC where he belongs.

This article originally appears in The American Thinker

A photograph, partially torn at the corner and suffering from being stuffed into a drawer full of screwdrivers, wrenches, and assorted knick knacks and gewgaws reflected the fluorescent light in the kitchen off its scratched surface making it difficult to identify. Why we call it the “utility drawer” is beyond me. I suppose it’s because anything and everything that doesn’t have its own place eventually ends up being carelessly thrown in there - parts of one’s life that defy categorization or stuff that we can afford to forget about.

The picture is unremarkable. It is a photo of me from 6 years ago standing on a dock, the river over my shoulder. I’m wearing a Chicago White Sox hat pulled low over my eyes, protecting them from the bright sun. It is a picture taken by my friend Patty before a few of us went out for a late afternoon river ride.

The date timestamped on the back was September 9, 2001.

Interesting how photographs pull memories out of your head as a magician pulls rabbits out of a hat. You don’t think about a particular day or experience until something else acts as a catalyst and the memories all come back in a rush. For instance, sometimes when I smell strawberries I think of the lip gloss worn by one of my first girlfriends back in high school. The memories are so powerful, I can almost taste her lips on mine and smell the perfume she used to wear.

That’s one of those memories that cause you to pause and smile, a warm feeling washing over you as the intensity of the recollection brings about an actual physical reaction. And then it’s gone and try as you might, you can’t conjure up that same memory with the same intensity until the next time you are caught unawares and whatever it is that triggers remembrance is set in motion.

So it was with this scratchy, damaged photograph I accidentally pulled out of a kitchen drawer yesterday, September 9, 2007. But the memory of the event that it elicited was fleeting. More to the point, the photograph acted as one part of a memory bracket with my own mind’s eye in the here and now acting as its counterpart. I was looking at my pre-9/11 self and contemplating what I had become in 2007.

The radical coincidence of finding a photograph on the exact same date that it was taken years earlier was serendipitous. Would that everyone could be so lucky. In that late summer of 2001, there was no shadow moving across the land, no premonition of danger, not a clue that less than two days later the America we had gotten so familiar with - omnipotent, invincible, striding confidently toward a fat, happy future - would be brought so low. And all our silly pretensions about being immune to the evils that plague the rest of the planet would come crashing down in a series of searing, unforgettable images, dust and smoke blotting out the sun that just hours before shone so benevolently on a land seemingly oblivious to what evil was capable.

The photograph doesn’t show that we were sleepwalking toward disaster for the previous decade. But the memory of what occupied the attention of the man in picture at that time is as clear as day to me. I was on vacation for the week and was going on a trip on Thursday. My biggest concern about flying at the time was that the cross country flight didn’t allow smoking and I dreaded the thought of having to endure a perpetual nicotine fit for the entire 5 hour flight.

If the man standing in the kitchen contemplating the past could have sent a message to the man standing on the dock in the photograph telling him about 9/11, you can well imagine what the reaction would have been. Disbelief, anger at such thoughts invading the complacency we all felt about our safety, and perhaps confusion - a profound befuddlement that surpassed his capacity to grasp that such things could happen in America or anywhere else for that matter. He would have had no frame of reference that could illuminate the terrible consequences of raw, unreasoning hatred directed against strangers whose only transgressions were in the fevered imaginings of a radical ideology that gave its adherents permission to commit murder in the name of God.

Time is not absolute. Our memories prove that. Reminiscing can bring the past back to us, telescoping time and space so that the smells, the tastes, and the emotions we felt at any given moment can exist in both the present tense and the yesteryear of our thoughts. It is a blessing and a trap that the human mind works in this way, gifting us with faces, events, and feelings from the long ago that bring joy to our hearts but at the same time, entangling us in unwanted skeins of retrospection, recalling all too clearly those times that are best left unremembered - orphan memories that no one wants but can’t escape.

And if those memories can play tricks on us so as to cause us to recall events incorrectly, we rarely recollect false emotions or senses. I know that the man in the photograph and the man in the kitchen are the same person. But the emotional world of 2001 in which the man in the photograph lived did not include the 9/11 attacks or the realization that the slow, inexorable march of time would cover that open wound with a healing scab, lessening the horror but leaving behind an inexpressible sadness at what was lost that day.

We are the same, that man in the photograph and me. But the emotional wall between us that makes any real connection impossible is a direct result of the man in the kitchen having lived through 9/11 and its momentous aftermath. Try as I might, I can’t quite recapture the absolute certainty I felt at that time that nothing in America would ever really change. It’s not so much that I believed we would never be attacked. It’s just that I and most Americans never had the thought enter our heads. It wasn’t unbelievable or unimaginable. It simply didn’t exist in this universe.

That, I suppose is the biggest difference between the man in the photograph and me. And to this day, that difference is coloring our politics, our culture, and refashioning America below the surface into a different place than the country inhabited by the man on the dock. No one knows what that America will look like a decade, two decades from now. The forces of denial and appeasement are strong. But I hope if I pull that photo out years from now, I will still recognize the world in which the man on the dock lived and recall the things he considered important and vital about America.

UPDATE

Michelle Malkin has a terrific round up of 9/11 recollections.

If, as Cicero wrote, “Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things,” then it is safe to say that the farther away our world moves from 9/11, the more our memories of that day should enrich us and keep us from taking actions that will make another equally devastating terrorist attack more likely.

Alas, the old Roman republican never knew a country like America. If he had, he would almost certainly have found an exception to his logic. For us, the past has always been an annoyance that gets in the way of our determined and dedicated march to the future. There is no malice in it, this flight, this mad dash from our history. In some ways, it is necessary for us to forget or ignore what has transpired in order to be free of the consequences the past sometimes imposes on those who would use our collective memory to keep the future at bay, standing in the way of progress in the name of hidebound “tradition” or “custom.”

So it has come for 9/11, a date but 6 years in the past and already seeing the effects of what James Earl Jones in the film Field of Dreams referred to as the erasure of history:

And they’ll walk out to the bleachers; sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. They’ll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they’ll watch the game and it’ll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they’ll have to brush them away from their faces. People will come Ray. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again.

Jones’ character was talking about baseball as a cultural touchstone by which each succeeding generation maintains contact with the past. But even here, that paean to baseball neglects the very real history of the game. Jones himself grew up during a time when members of his race were barred from playing the game. To say that baseball “reminds of us of all that once was good” ignores the fact that even a cursory glance at the historical record would flip those words and posit that baseball, in fact, also reminds us of all that once was bad about America.

It is this kind of schizophrenia - a duality of mind regarding our past - that so angers and fascinates many of us who love American history. We can glory in the words of the Declaration of Independence while realizing the hypocrisy of demanding freedom as we kept three million human beings in bondage ourselves. Similarly, we can marvel at the elegance and simplicity of the Constitution while acknowledging that its words still ring hollow for so many and have for so long.

Although aware of the dichotomies, the Founders gave these little discrepancies scant thought, believing it would be up to future generations to right the wrongs that they had neither the political or moral will to fix themselves. Right or wrong, much of American history is carelessly strewn about our national attic like a bunch of old steamer trunks and hope chests, examined (if at all) not for what the curios inside can teach us about ourselves but rather how their contents can be used in the present to propel us into the future.

And now this battle between the past and future has come for 9/11 as the open wounds of that day scab over and the emotional impact of the event becomes hard for even the vividness of searing memories to arouse in our breasts the same feelings of anger, outrage, and the terrible, aching sadness felt by virtually all Americans. For many of us, what remains is a determination not to forget and a realization that “The Long War” is upon us. For others, remembering 9/11 is an unwelcome intrusion or worse, a political construct to try and revivify feelings of patriotism and the war spirit. To these citizens who cling to the latter - most of whom could fairly be said are on the left - identification of 9/11 with their rabid opposition to the Administration of George Bush and the Iraq War builds an unreasonable resentment about remembering the attacks at all.

This excellent article in the New York Times by N.R. Kleinfield about the battle over how to best remember the history of 9/11 reveals both the pathos and the agony memories of that day engender as well as the desire by many to try and simply wish those memories away:

Each year, murmuring about Sept. 11 fatigue arises, a weariness of reliving a day that everyone wishes had never happened. It began before the first anniversary of the terrorist attack. By now, though, many people feel that the collective commemorations, publicly staged, are excessive and vacant, even annoying.

“I may sound callous, but doesn’t grieving have a shelf life?” said Charlene Correia, 57, a nursing supervisor from Acushnet, Mass. “We’re very sorry and mournful that people died, but there are living people. Let’s wind it down.”

Some people prefer to see things condensed to perhaps a moment of silence that morning and an end to the rituals like the long recitation of the names of the dead at ground zero.

But many others bristle at such talk, especially those who lost relatives on that day.

“The idea of scaling back just seems so offensive to me when you think of the monumental nature of that tragedy,” said Anita LaFond Korsonsky, whose sister Jeanette LaFond-Menichino died in the World Trade Center. “If you’re tired of it, don’t attend it; turn off your TV or leave town. To say six years is enough, it’s not. I don’t know what is enough.”

It isn’t just family members who wish to commemorate 9/11 as solemnly and fully as possible. However, the “moral authority” of those who lost loved ones that tragic day should be respected. They are stand ins for the rest of us who still see 9/11 as a day that changed America in ways that a mere 6 years after the event we are still trying to understand.

Superficially, there is the debate over increased domestic security. Even the wars currently being fought by our military in Iraq and Afghanistan are only surface manifestations of something fundamental that is altering our political and cultural landscape as I write this. In this respect, it doesn’t matter if Hillary Clinton or other Democrats want to take us back to a 9/10 world where the threat of terrorists and those who support and enable them occupies a much smaller space in our national politics.

Whether or not they realize it, the 9/10 Democrats can try all they wish to make 9/11 disappear into the mists of memory by downplaying its significance so that rather than a rallying cry it becomes a day marked by an inexpressible sadness with overtones of guilt that the attacks were actually our fault. They will not succeed because our enemies will not let them.

Sooner or later, our perfect record of preventing another terrorist attack on American soil will bump up against the reality that we can succeed a thousand times in thwarting the designs of those who contemplate mass murder but our enemies need to win only once. And then those memories that we have carefully stored in our national attic will come back in a rush and we will wonder if we shouldn’t have dusted them off every once and a while in order to glean whatever lessons in preparedness we might have missed the first time around.

To be sure, it is human nature to try and push unpleasant memories to the back of our minds lest the pain they cause become a part of our everyday lives. And we shouldn’t blame those who wish that 9/11 be relegated so soon to the status that other days of national tragedy have fallen:

Few Americans give much thought anymore on Dec. 7 that Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941 (the date to live in infamy). Similar subdued attention is paid to other scarring tragedies: the Kennedy assassination (Nov. 22, 1963), Kent State (May 4, 1970), the Oklahoma City bombing (April 19, 1995).

Generations, of course, turn over. Few are alive anymore who can recall June 15, 1904, when 1,021 people died in the burning of the steamer General Slocum, the deadliest New York City disaster until Sept. 11, 2001. Also, the weight of new wrenching events crowds the national memory. Already since Sept. 11, there have been Katrina and Virginia Tech. And people have their own more circumscribed agonies.

A strong argument could be made that none of those other days of tragedy had the raw, emotional impact of 9/11. Perhaps the Kennedy Assassination echoes the surprise of what happened on 9/11. And Pearl Harbor certainly aroused similar feelings of anger and determination.

But 9/11 stands alone as a date that tears at our souls and requires us to re-examine uncomfortable truths. We are at war. Remembering or not remembering 9/11 won’t change that fact nor will denying the reality of that statement make it less true. The reason is simple. It takes two sides to make war. And our enemies will find ways to remind us that our denial is silly, stupid, and self defeating as often and as painfully as we let them.

It may be a different kind of war but war it is and pushing the proximate cause of the conflict into the recesses of our memory because remembering is too painful, or too much a bother, or gives political advantage to one side or another is simply putting off the day of reckoning when those in denial will be forced once again to look 9/11 full in the face and realize the overwhelming truth that America is in danger. And if we are vouchsafed the time to allow the emotional scars of 9/11 to heal, we should also use that time to prepare for the next onslaught while doing everything in our power to prevent it.

Once again, America is steamrolling our history into a flattened state of forgetfulness. This time, it is happening in record time and partly being done so that any political advantage in remembering 9/11 can be neutralized by an opposition that plays upon the emotional weariness of the voters in fighting a war few understand and many wish would just go away. Part of this problem can be laid at the feet of the current Administration who has, at times (not as often as they have been accused), employed the imagery and played upon the emotions that 9/11 brought to the surface; feelings of patriotism and unity that seem somewhat quaint when we look back on them today. Not because they were not genuine but because the opposition has determined that these emotions are inappropriate and not germane to the political realities of today.

Instead, the dominant emotion we should be feeling about 9/11 is outrage. Not at Osama Bin Laden but at George Bush for using 9/11 as an “excuse” to get us embroiled in the morass that is Iraq and to skirt the limits of Constitutional authority in order to protect the homeland from further attacks. This is what the Democrats will run their campaigns on in 2008. It remains to be seen whether they will be successful or not.

Meanwhile, the 6th anniversary of 9/11 approaches and once again we will try and conjure up what it felt like to be alive and an American that day. Whether the exercise in remembrance is useful or not is immaterial to those who lost loved ones on that horrible day. For them, the war to remember 9/11 is irrelevant to their bereavement. They are beyond comforting and need only our understanding. I would hope that both sides in this battle for the degree of poignancy with which we recall September 11, 2001 keeps them in their thoughts and prayers as the history of that day fades into myth and legend, becoming a touchstone for all we hold dear as Americans.

Perhaps it is too much to ask that President Bush just once try to be a little more realistic about what is going on in Iraq and the prospects for that nation becoming what he has defined as “free.” But if he was ever going to soberly address the enormous problems facing the Iraqi people and government - problems that must be addressed before we can claim any kind of “triumph” - he might not have been able to find a friendlier, more receptive audience than yesterday at the VFW Convention in Kansas City.

Bush delivered a well written speech to the supportive group of vets, touching all the familiar bases about 9/11, al-Qaeda, and the need for supporting General Petreaus and our military. But the closest he came to acknowledging the extraordinary challenges facing the Iraqi government was here:

A free Iraq is not going to be perfect. A free Iraq will not make decisions as quickly as the country did under the dictatorship. Many are frustrated by the pace of progress in Baghdad, and I can understand this. As I noted yesterday, the Iraqi government is distributing oil revenues across its provinces despite not having an oil revenue law on its books, that the parliament has passed about 60 pieces of legislation.

Prime Minister Maliki is a good guy, a good man with a difficult job, and I support him. And it’s not up to politicians in Washington, D.C. to say whether he will remain in his position — that is up to the Iraqi people who now live in a democracy, and not a dictatorship. (Applause.) A free Iraq is not going to transform the Middle East overnight. But a free Iraq will be a massive defeat for al Qaeda, it will be an example that provides hope for millions throughout the Middle East, it will be a friend of the United States, and it’s going to be an important ally in the ideological struggle of the 21st century. (Applause.)

There is no “pace of progress” with regards to political reconciliation in Iraq. There is, quite simply, no progress at all. And it might be an arguable point that Iraq is, in any sense of the word, a democracy - not when 15% of the population is frozen out of power sharing and hunted down like animals to be slaughtered.

That latter point is the direct result of Mr. Maliki’s inability (or unwillingness) to do anything about the Shia death squads inhabiting the Interior Ministry of his own government as well as their enablers on the Iraqi police force and in the army. The symbiotic relationship between Mr. Maliki’s government and the thugs, militia men, and criminal gangs that make life in the Capitol and elsewhere a living hell for ordinary Iraqis (while giving him the support he needs to maintain his position) will never be addressed as long as the President of the United States keeps his mouth shut about them.

Not a word in the President’s speech about the British withdrawal from the south which has already precipitated a civil war within a civil war between rival militias for control of that vital area. The hand of Iran is most prominent here and there is little doubt that the mullahs will try their best to back the winner in this conflict thus giving them effective control of nearly one third of the country.

And what of our friends, the Kurds? They recently threw in their lot with the Shias by signing a power sharing agreement that froze the Sunnis out of effective representation in Baghdad. Hailed by Maliki as a triumph, the agreement is a recipe for disaster in that it gives the Sunni insurgents a reason to fight on.

I could go on with the familiar litany of catastrophes waiting to happen, missed opportunities, “beat the heat” vacations by the parliament (which never has a quorum to pass anything anyway), the inexhaustible supply of insurgents and their sympathizers - numbered in the hundreds of thousands by our own military - and the hopelessness of most ordinary Iraqis about the security situation.

Does all of this overshadow the genuine progress being made against al-Qaeda as well as some encouraging news about some of the Sunni tribes switching sides? I think any rational, fair minded person who doesn’t have a partisan agenda would have to agree that despite the relative success of the surge to date, the daunting task to make Iraq “free” and achieve any kind of “victory” remains a pipe dream.

The most controversial part of the President’s speech came when he warned against a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq leading to another “Viet Nam” aftermath. Here, the President is on firmer ground - except if you’re a reporter for the New York Times:

In urging Americans to stay the course in Iraq, Mr. Bush is challenging the historical memory that the pullout from Vietnam had few negative repercussions for the United States and its allies.

The speech was the beginning of an intense White House initiative to shape the debate on Capitol Hill in September, when the president’s troop buildup will undergo a re-evaluation. It came amid rising concerns in Washington over the performance of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq, who has made little progress toward bridging the sectarian divide in his country.

I had to read that amazing passage about our pullout from Viet Nam having “few negative repercussions for the United States and its allies” several times before I could believe it. Is the Times actually trying to argue that there were no “negative repercussions” for Thailand or Cambodia, both of them close US allies at the time? And the fact that the collective security group, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, was destroyed by our pullout from Viet Nam didn’t have repercussions for the United States itself? Or that our pull out didn’t damage our ability to deter the Russians?

Our mad rush out of Viet Nam certainly emboldened the Soviet Union to meddle in Africa by using their flunkie Castro as a proxy in Angola as well as giving direct aid to groups like the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the El Salvador rebels. To say that our pull out didn’t have negative repercussions for the US or many of our allies is insane.

The President spelled out what some of those “negative repercussions” were:

The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution. In Vietnam, former allies of the United States and government workers and intellectuals and businessmen were sent off to prison camps, where tens of thousands perished. Hundreds of thousands more fled the country on rickety boats, many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea.

[snip]

There was another price to our withdrawal from Vietnam, and we can hear it in the words of the enemy we face in today’s struggle — those who came to our soil and killed thousands of citizens on September the 11th, 2001. In an interview with a Pakistani newspaper after the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden declared that “the American people had risen against their government’s war in Vietnam. And they must do the same today.”

I think the New York Times, as most on the left in this country, have failed to come to grips with their abandonment of Southeast Asia to the communists. They have washed their hands of the bloodbath that followed, saying it wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t gone in militarily in the first place. That is pure sophistry. The aftermath of Viet Nam - like the aftermath that will occur in Iraq - would have been manageable if we hadn’t pulled out so precipitously and completely. If we had made it clear to the North that bombing would have resumed the moment they reneged on the treaty and if we had kept a substantial residual force in Viet Nam with the promise that our troops would return if they broke the peace agreement, I doubt very much that Saigon would have fallen.

Now this position was not politically viable at the time. Ford was hamstrung by Congress in protecting the South from the North’s cynical refusal to abide by the Paris accords. The result was catastrophe.

Can we avoid a similar fate in Iraq? No one knows. But this quote from an unarmed official commenting on a much more pessimistic report than the President gave to the vets, highlighting the dire situation we face over the next 9-12 months seems to sum it up for both Democrats and Republicans alike:

The new report also concludes that the American military has had success in recent months in tamping down sectarian violence in the country, according to officials who have read it.

The report, which was intended to help anticipate events over the next 6 to 12 months, is “more dire in its assessments” than the administration has been in its own internal discussions, according to one senior official who has read it. But the report also warns, as Mr. Bush did on Wednesday, that an early withdrawal would lead to more chaos.

“It doesn’t take a policy position,” one official said. “But it leaves you with the sense that what we’ve been doing hasn’t been working, but we can’t let up, or it’ll get worse.”

If that doesn’t sober up both supporters of the war and those who wish a quick exit from Iraq, then nothing will.