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Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag: A History, gives her Solzhenitsyn send-off.
… In the week of his death, though, what stands out is not who Solzhenitsyn was but what he wrote. It is very easy, in a world where news is instant and photographs travel as quickly as they are taken, to forget how powerful, still, are written words. And Solzhenitsyn was, in the end, a writer: A man who gathered facts, sorted through them, tested them against his own experience, composed them into paragraphs and chapters. It was not his personality but his language that forced people to think more deeply about their values, their assumptions, their societies. It was not his television appearances that affected history but his words.
His manuscripts were read and pondered in silence, and the thought he put into them provoked his readers to think, too. In the end, his books mattered not because he was famous or notorious but because millions of Soviet citizens recognized themselves in his work: They read his books because they already knew that they were true.
James Lileks says after reading Gulag;
… I could never quite understand the people who viewed the US and the USSR as moral equals, or regarded our history as not only indelibly stained but uniquely so. Reading Solzhenitsyn makes it difficult to take seriously the people in this culture who insist that Dissent has been squelched. Brother, you have no idea.
Today’s Mark Steyn piece on Reagan came from July 2001 in The Spectator, UK .
… But, of course, it is not necessary for Friedman’s metaphor to make sense, as all the smart people who read The New York Times already agree with him. Missile defence has been a joke ever since it was cooked up a generation ago by President Reagan, the noted B-movie cowboy moron, and instantly dismissed as Star Wars, a comic-book fantasy. Then, as now, the smart set lined up to pour scorn on the presidential clod: according to JFK/LBJ national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, renowned Kremlinologist George F. Kennan, veteran arms control negotiator Gerald Smith, former defence secretary Robert S. McNamara, and a zillion others of one mind, Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative was an ‘act of folly’, a ‘dream’ that ‘cannot be achieved’. Worse, the whole scam was a ‘telling commentary on his presidential style’, according to Philip Geyelin in The Washington Post in 1984:
Reagan had no proposal worked out when he first floated the idea almost casually in a speech devoted to other, known quantities in his military program. He had only a fatuous, personal vision of a nuclear-free world.
Just as President Kennedy had no proposal worked out – only a fatuous personal vision of putting a man on the moon within the decade. …
John Fund adds his personal note to Bob Novak’s health news. John also writes on Pelosi’s interview with Stephanopoulos this past Sunday. A link to that interview is provided below. And, a great cartoon from Lisa Benson.
… On Sunday, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos became exasperated by Ms. Pelosi’s refusal to stray from her rote talking points. Several times he asked variations of the same question: “Why won’t you permit a straight up or down vote?”
“We have a debate every single day on this subject,” she coolly replied. “What you saw in the Congress this week was the war dance of the handmaidens of the oil companies.”
Mr. Stephanopoulos didn’t give up. “But why not allow votes on all that? When you came in as Speaker you promised in your commitment book ‘A New Direction for America’ — let me show our viewers — you said that ‘Bills should generally come to the floor under a procedure that allows open, full, fair debate consisting of full amendment process that grants the Minority the right to offer its alternatives.’ If they want to offer a drilling proposal, why can’t they have a vote?” …
The Economist starts a series on the bellwether states. First up – Ohio.
BARACK OBAMA is doing everything he can to make it look as if the election is a mere formality, and adoring media types are keen to play along. Yet the latest USA Today-Gallup poll puts John McCain four points ahead, while the RealClearPolitics average of polls gives Mr Obama a meagre two-and-a-half-point lead. Optimistic Republicans recall that Michael Dukakis was 17 points ahead of George Bush senior in the summer of 1988, and still lost. So there is plenty of evidence to suggest that this election, like the previous two, could boil down to a tight race settled by close results in a handful of “swing” states.
Ohio is the quintessential battleground state. Bill Clinton won it by some of the narrowest of his margins for any big state—just two points in 1992 and six in 1996. In 2004 George Bush won Ohio, with its precious 20 of the 270 electoral college votes needed to secure the presidency, by a mere 118,600 votes. Had 60,000 Ohioans gone the other way, John Kerry would have been president.
Ohio is also a bellwether. It has voted for the winning candidate in all 11 presidential elections since 1960. In doing so, it has deviated from the national vote shares by only a couple of points. In 2004 it matched the national average exactly. …
Power Line posts on Obama.
For some time I have been trying to make the case that Barack Obama doesn’t know much about anything except how to win friends and influence people, and that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. See, for example, the columns “The Kennedy-Khrushchev conference for dummies” and “Anti-terror oops.” In short, Obama is a BS artist. He is an extraordinary specimen, perhaps approaching the great American type of confidence man explored in literature by Herman Melville, Mark Twain, William Faulkner and Ralph Ellison.
In “Emperor Obama’s new clothes,” James Lewis invokes Hans Christian Andersen to explore the same phenomenon. Lewis does a good job with “one little example.” He writes:
On May 19 Senator Obama proclaimed Iran to be just “a tiny country.” That’s a tiny country with seventy million people, half of it covered with mountains that you can tunnel under for your nuclear hidey holes. A half-million men in the army plus the fanatical martyrs of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, a domestic terror apparatus to keep the people down, a growing nuclear and missile program, enough oil to finance it all, a strategic position at the head and the tiny choke-point of the Persian Gulf, a long, long imperial tradition, and an Islamofascist suicide ideology, thanks to Jimmy Carter’s good friend Ayatollah Khomeini. The regime of this tiny country had a habit of sending hundreds of young boys to blow up mine fields with their bodies, wearing green plastic “Keys to Paradise” around their necks. It controls the “Shiite Crescent” from Lebanon to the Gulf using its powerful alliance with Syria and Hezb’allah, supplied by our good friends the Russians and Chinese. The regime has a habit of blowing up American soldiers in Iraq with state-of-the-art shaped-charge explosives. Iran has performed high-altitude missile tests that could only be used to set off a nuclear EMP explosion, designed to cripple any modern nation by zapping its electrical and communication grids. It’s just a “tiny threat,” said Obama — until his staff told him that wasn’t quite right, and he quickly changed his tune. …
Steve Malanga on the red ink in anti-business states.
… Of the approximately $48 billion in accumulated budget shortfalls that the 29 states with projected deficits are facing, $33 billion, or two-thirds of the gap, is concentrated in those five states considered by corporate executives to be the least friendly to business. Meanwhile, among the five states ranked as having the best business environment, Texas and North Carolina have no projected budget gaps, and Georgia, Tennessee and Florida are facing shortfalls amounting to about $4.1 billion, or less than one-tenth of the states’ total.
An idealist would assume that those stark numbers would jump out at legislators in the most anti-business states and prompt a bracing re-evaluation of their spending, tax and regulatory regimes, as Paterson advocates. But no such luck. Paterson’s former colleagues in the state legislature are lobbying for a new tax on millionaires, while across the country California’s legislators have called for boosting the state’s top tax rate from 9.3 percent to 11 percent. Since many firms, especially small ones, are organized corporately in such a way that they pay taxes on profits at their owners’ personal income tax rate, any increase in the top rate of income taxes will hit small firms hard, to say nothing of the impact on the personal taxes of executives at big firms. …
Thoughtful Robert Samuelson column on our affinity neighborhoods.
People prefer to be with people like themselves. For all the celebration of “diversity,” it’s sameness that dominates. Most people favor friendships with those who have similar backgrounds, interests and values. It makes for more shared experiences, easier conversations and more comfortable silences. Despite many exceptions, the urge is nearly universal. It’s human nature.
Perhaps America’s greatest glory is to rise above this self-absorption. People with many different heritages and beliefs have blended into a cohesive society. At some point, most people subordinate their own firmly held convictions and loyalties to the larger nation. This is more than patriotism; it’s the identity of “being an American.” But it is in constant tension with the differences that divide Americans.
The latest manifestation of this is what Bill Bishop calls “the Big Sort.” By that, he means that Americans have increasingly “clustered in communities of sameness, among people with similar ways of life, beliefs, and, in the end, politics.” Republican fundamentalists congregate with other Republican fundamentalists. Liberal Democrats herd with other liberal Democrats. Environmentalists decamp to Portland, Ore. Child-centered Republican families move to the exurbs of Dallas and Minneapolis. …
Op-Ed in The Australian says it’s been a tough year for the globalony folks.
IT has been a tough year for the high priests of global warming in the US. First, NASA had to correct its earlier claim that the hottest year on record in the contiguous US had been 1998, which seemed to prove that global warming was on the march. It was actually 1934. Then it turned out the world’s oceans have been growing steadily cooler, not hotter, since 2003. Meanwhile, the winter of 2007 was the coldest in the US in decades, after Al Gore warned us that we were about to see the end of winter as we know it.
In a May issue of Nature, evidence about falling global temperatures forced German climatologists to conclude that the transformation of our planet into a permanent sauna is taking a decade-long hiatus, at least. Then this month came former greenhouse gas alarmist David Evans’s article in The Australian, stating that since 1999 evidence has been accumulating that man-made carbon emissions can’t be the cause of global warming. By now that evidence, Evans said, has become pretty conclusive.
Yet believers in man-made global warming demand more and more money to combat climate change and still more drastic changes in our economic output and lifestyle.
The reason is that precisely that they are believers, not scientists. No amount of empirical evidence will overturn what has become not a scientific theory but a form of religion. …