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David Warren has more thoughts on Russia.
It is years since I hauled out my favourite Josef Stalin quote. Time to carry it up from the basement, dust it off, and put it back on display. “Nuclear weapons are only a problem for people with bad nerves.” That the quote may be apocryphal, does not disturb me. So many of the best quotes are apocryphal, and only a puritan could wish to eliminate them from the quotation books on that account alone. One need only put the asterisk on it, the way the artist’s colourmen do on rose madder, or the Homeric scholars on passages where they suspect interpolation.
But why do I quote it, apparently with approval? It is not from any fondness for the late Soviet tyrant and mass-murderer, let me assure the gentle reader. Nor should he assume, as some readers have in the past, that I favour the casual and reckless use of weapons of mass destruction. For as a more careful meditation upon that quote will establish, not even Stalin was that crazy.
The point is that nuclear weapons, and everything else in that genre, have the power to scare people. And once they are frightened, they will do stupid things. It is important, therefore, to keep one’s nerve; and the paradox in quoting Stalin to make the point, is that one must keep one’s nerve especially in facing down tyrants like him. …
Jeff Jacoby says Iraq hindsight is not always 20/20.
… The prevailing wisdom 18 months or so ago was that invading Iraq had been, in retrospect, a disastrous blunder. It had led to appalling sectarian fratricide and an ever-climbing body count. Iraqi democracy was deemed a naive pipe dream. Worst of all, it was said, the fighting in Iraq wasn’t advancing the global struggle against Islamist terrorism; by rallying a new generation of jihadists, it was actually impeding it. Opponents of the war clamored loudly for pulling the plug – even if that meant, as The New York Times acknowledged in a bring-the-troops-home-now editorial last July, “that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave.”
But what if we had known then what we know now?
We know now that the overhauled counterinsurgency strategy devised by General David Petraeus – the “surge” – would prove spectacularly successful, driving Al Qaeda in Iraq from its strongholds, and killing thousands of its fighters, supporters, and leaders.
We know now that US losses in Iraq would plummet to the lowest levels of the war, with just five Americans killed in combat in July 2008, compared with 66 fatalities in the same month a year ago – and with 137 in November 2004. …
Dick Morris says if the Clintons can roll Obama, he won’t be able to stand up to Putin.
Last week raised important questions about whether Barack Obama is strong enough to be president. On the domestic political front, he showed incredible weakness in dealing with the Clintons, while on foreign and defense questions, he betrayed a lack of strength and resolve in standing up to Russia’s invasion of Georgia.
This two-dimensional portrait of weakness underscores fears that Obama might, indeed, be a latter-day Jimmy Carter.
Consider first the domestic and political. Bill and Hillary Clinton have no leverage over Obama. Hillary can’t win the nomination. She doesn’t control any committees. If she or her supporters tried to disrupt the convention or demonstrate outside, she would pay a huge price among the party faithful. If Obama lost – after Hillary made a fuss at the convention – they would blame her for all eternity (just like Democrats blame Ted Kennedy for Carter’s defeat).
But, without having any leverage or a decent hand to play, the Clintons bluffed Obama into amazing concessions. …
Bill Kristol liked what he saw at Saddleback.
While normal people were out having fun Saturday night, I was home in front of the TV. But I wasn’t enjoying the Olympics. Your diligent columnist was dutifully watching Barack Obama and John McCain answer the Rev. Rick Warren’s questions at Saddleback Church. Virtue is sometimes rewarded. The event was worth watching — and for me yielded three conclusions.
First, Rick Warren should moderate one of the fall presidential debates.
Warren’s queries were simple but probing. He was fair to both candidates, his manner was relaxed but serious, and he neither went for “gotcha” questions nor pulled his punches. And his procedure of asking virtually identical questions to each candidate during his turn on stage paid off. It allowed us to see the two giving revealingly different answers to the same question.
So, I say, with all due respect to Jim Lehrer, Tom Brokaw and Bob Schieffer — the somewhat nondiverse group selected by the debates commission as the three presidential debate moderators — one of them should step aside for Warren.
Second, it was McCain’s night. …
Michael Gerson too.
It is now clear why Barack Obama has refused John McCain’s offer of joint town hall appearances during the fall campaign. McCain is obviously better at them.
Pastor Rick Warren’s Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency — two hours on Saturday night evenly divided between the relaxed, tieless candidates — was expected to be a sideshow. McCain and Obama would make their specialized appeals to evangelicals as if they were an interest group such as organized labor or the National Rifle Association. Evangelicals would demonstrate, in turn, that they are not rubes and know-nothings. And Americans would turn en masse to watch the Olympics.
What took place instead under Warren’s precise and revealing questioning was the most important event so far of the 2008 campaign — a performance every voter should seek out on the Internet and watch. …
Power Line and Corner posts on the race.
David Brooks on the education of John McCain.
On Tuesdays, Senate Republicans hold a weekly policy lunch. The party leaders often hand out a Message of the Week that the senators are supposed to repeat at every opportunity. Sometimes there will be a pollster offering data that supposedly demonstrates the brilliance of the message and why it will lead to political nirvana.
John McCain generally spends the lunches at a table with a gang of fellow ne’er-do-wells. He cracks jokes, razzes the speaker and generally ridicules the whole proceeding. Then he takes the paper with the Message of the Week back to his office. He tosses it on the desk of some staffer with a sarcastic comment like: “Here’s your message. Learn it. Love it. Live it.”
This sort of behavior has been part of McCain’s long-running rebellion against the stupidity of modern partisanship. In a thousand ways, he has tried to preserve some sense of self-respect in a sea of pandering pomposity. He’s done it through self-mockery, by talking endlessly about his own embarrassing lapses and by keeping up a running patter on the absurdity all around. He’s done it by breaking frequently from his own party to cut serious deals with people like Ted Kennedy and Russ Feingold. He’s done it with his own frantic and freewheeling style, which was unpredictable, untamed and, at some level, unprofessional.
When McCain and his team set out to win the presidency in 2008, they hoped to run a campaign with this sort of spirit. McCain would venture forth on the back of his bus, going places other Republicans don’t go, saying things politicians don’t say, offering the country the vision of a different kind of politics — free of circus antics — in which serious people sacrifice for serious things.
It hasn’t turned out that way. …
Live Science on how cooking strengthened the human brain.
… In most animals, the gut needs a lot of energy to grind out nourishment from food sources. But cooking, by breaking down fibers and making nutrients more readily available, is a way of processing food outside the body. Eating (mostly) cooked meals would have lessened the energy needs of our digestion systems, Khaitovich explained, thereby freeing up calories for our brains.
Instead of growing even larger (which would have made birth even more problematic), the human brain most likely used the additional calories to grease the wheels of its internal functioning.
Today, humans have relatively small digestive systems and burn 20-25 percent of their calories running their brains. For comparison, other vertebrate brains use as little as 2 percent of the animal’s caloric intake.
Does this mean renewing our subscriptions to Bon Appetit will make our brains more efficient? No, but we probably should avoid diving into the raw food movement. Devoted followers end up, said Khaitovich, “with very severe health problems.” …
Strong humor section with a News Biscuit piece on BBC camera crews who gave beer to meerkats.