Deck Chairs in the Oval Office Wednesday, Sep 15 2010 

History and Politics victorgold 11:01 am

With a White House staff shake-up looming, the metaphor of the month is that all it adds up to is re-arranging the deck chairs aboard the Titanic.  Will it make any difference if Rahm Emanuel leaves to run for Mayor of Chicago?  If Robert Gibbs quits the press podium after two years of trading barbs with Fox News?

None at all.  Did it make any difference when George W. switched from Andy Card to…  I forget who.  A president — any president — gets the advisors he deserves;  that is, the advice he wants to hear.  The only chief executive I’ve ever heard of who tolerated negative vibes was Thomas E. Dewey who, after presenting an idea to his staff, insisted they point out its flaws.  Probably the reason he never made it from the Governor’s mansion in Albany to the White House.

 

What Did Hegel Know? Wednesday, Sep 15 2010 

History , victorgold 11:01 am

From the Washington Post, 9/10/10 :  “After nearly nine years of nation-building in Afghanistan, experts said, the U. S.  faces mounting evidence that it has helped assemble one of the most corrupt governments in the world.”

Speaking of advice that presidents fail to heed, consider:  Britain failed to win a war in Afghanistan, then the Russians repeated that mistake. Hegel advised that history repeated once is tragedy,  twice a farce.  But what did Hegel know?  He hadn’t read General Petraeus’ book on counter-insurgency.

 

Understatement of the Century Tuesday, Aug 10 2010 

History victorgold 3:05 pm

Sixty-five years ago this week: “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”

– Emperor Hirohito, breaking the bad news to his people

 

Tale of Two Kerrys Monday, Aug 2 2010 

History and Politics , victorgold 10:21 am

That rumble we’re hearing — some would call it a surge — is the sound of a growing anti-war movement in search of a leader. Michael Steele? I doubt it.  Give the RNC chairman credit for speaking out, but it’s hard to see him filling that role. (Besides, he’s been muzzled by Sarah and her grizzly offspring on the Republican National Committee.)

Who then? Logic would tell us a natural leader would spring from a wartime veteran who experienced first-hand the bitter lesson learned the last time American lives were lost in a tribal war in which “winning the hearts and minds of the people” was the primary rule of engagement.

Someone, say, with the passion of the young Vietnam veteran who appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April, 1971, to decry the callous passivity of the country’s political leaders in sustaining a war in which “men charged up hills because a General said a hill had to be taken and after losing one or two platoons they marched away, only to see the hill retaken by the enemy.”

Yet the fighting and dying went on, said young John Kerry, because “we couldn’t retreat and …it didn’t matter how many American bodies were lost to  prove that point.”

“We found,” testified the impassioned Kerry, “that most of the people on whose behalf American troops were fighting and dying practiced the art of survival by siding with whatever military force was present at a particular time”;  and that “all too often, Americans were dying . . . from want of support from their allies.”

Sound familiar? The same words could be applied to what’s going in Afghanistan today.  (July registered the largest number of American deaths  in the Afghan-Pakistan war since its beginning nearly a decade ago.)

But there’s still more to hear from young John Kerry:  How, he asked those Senate elders in April, 1971, how could they “ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

Fast-forward four decades to the same John Kerry, the subject of a Washington Post feature the day after the Afghan WikiLeaks papers were published. In flattering detail the Post describes Kerry as being passionate  about an issue he’s devoted full time to for the past year. Is the issue young Americans dying overseas “for a mistake”?  Guess again. It’s . . . climate change!

Not that Kerry, now himself chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has nothing to say about the Afghanistan war. In a separate story on the WikiLeaks papers he’s quoted as saying, “These documents may very well underscore the stakes and make the calibrations needed to get the policy right more urgent.”

To repeat that passionate statement: “These documents may very well underscore the stakes” . . .  Oh, what the hell.  What else should we expect from the man who famously said that he was “for that bill before I was against it”?

 

Speaking of the Year of the Republican Woman… Thursday, Jul 15 2010 

History and Politics victorgold 7:28 am

It was 46 years ago this month that  the  then-reigning queen of  GOP conservatives delivered a seconding speech to Barry Goldwater’s nomination for president.  To measure the downward  trajectory of Republican conservatism  since that time, all we have to do is compare the woman who fills that role  today to Barry’s seconder,  Clare Boothe  Luce — congresswoman (Conn.), playwright (“The Women”), editor (Vanity Fair), ambassador to Italy.  A woman best described by her biographer as “brilliant, idealistic, tough as a Marine sergeant but almost quixotically kind to unfortunates;  the complexities of her character are as numerous as the facets of her career.”

Any difference between that and the reigning queen of Republican conservativism, 2010?   You  betcha!

 

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