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Jonah Goldberg posts part of an open letter to Obama sent from a group of Central and Eastern European leaders. Follow the link for the full letter.
From, among others, Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel. Here’s the open:
We have written this letter because, as Central and Eastern European (CEE) intellectuals and former policymakers, we care deeply about the future of the transatlantic relationship as well as the future quality of relations between the United States and the countries of our region. We write in our personal capacity as individuals who are friends and allies of the United States as well as committed Europeans.
Our nations are deeply indebted to the United States. Many of us know firsthand how important your support for our freedom and independence was during the dark Cold War years. U.S. engagement and support was essential for the success of our democratic transitions after the Iron Curtain fell twenty years ago. Without Washington’s vision and leadership, it is doubtful that we would be in NATO and even the EU today.
We have worked to reciprocate and make this relationship a two-way street. We are Atlanticist voices within NATO and the EU. Our nations have been engaged alongside the United States in the Balkans, Iraq, and today in Afghanistan. While our contribution may at times seem modest compared to your own, it is significant when measured as a percentage of our population and GDP. Having benefited from your support for liberal democracy and liberal values in the past, we have been among your strongest supporters when it comes to promoting democracy and human rights around the world.
Twenty years after the end of the Cold War, however, we see that Central and Eastern European countries are no longer at the heart of American foreign policy. As the new Obama Administration sets its foreign-policy priorities, our region is one part of the world that Americans have largely stopped worrying about. Indeed, at times we have the impression that U.S. policy was so successful that many American officials have now concluded that our region is fixed once and for all and that they could “check the box” and move on to other more pressing strategic issues. Relations have been so close that many on both sides assume that the region’s transatlantic orientation, as well as its stability and prosperity, would last forever.
That view is premature….
Debra J. Saunders fills us in on the CIA scandal that wasn’t.
…The news hooks: CIA Director Leon Panetta killed the program last month after he told Senate and House Intelligence committees about the program.
And: Congress allegedly did not know about the nonoperational operation because, according to unnamed sources, former Veep Dick Cheney told the agency not to disclose the program to Congress.
The part of the story that undermined the story: The covert program “never became fully operational, involving planning and some training that took place off and on from 2001 until this year.”
In plain English that means: Nothing happened – there never were any Jason Bournes – and no one informed the intelligence committees about it. …
…Some unnamed sources say Cheney told the CIA not to tell Congress about the nonoperational operation; other sources claimed Cheney was not involved. Cheney isn’t talking. My guess: If Cheney told the CIA to cork it, someone at the CIA’s Langley headquarters would have leaked the whole story years ago. After all, the Bush years were replete with unnamed sources leaking classified intelligence on Iraq, wiretapping and efforts to squeeze al Qaeda’s finances. …
Tom Raum in WaPo, reports on the Obama administration’s delayed budget update.
The White House is being forced to acknowledge the wide gap between its once-upbeat predictions about the economy and today’s bleak landscape.
The administration’s annual midsummer budget update is sure to show higher deficits and unemployment and slower growth than projected in President Barack Obama’s budget in February and update in May, and that could complicate his efforts to get his signature health care and global-warming proposals through Congress.
The release of the update – usually scheduled for mid-July – has been put off until the middle of next month, giving rise to speculation the White House is delaying the bad news at least until Congress leaves town Aug. 7 on its summer recess.
The administration is pressing for votes before then on its $1 trillion health care initiative, which lawmakers are arguing over how to finance.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs on Monday blamed the delay entirely on the “transition from one administration to the next” and not from any attempt to deceive Congress. …
We have some interesting commentary on the moon landing. Tom Wolfe is first.
…NASA entered into the greatest crash program of all time, Apollo. It launched five lunar missions in one year, December 1968 to November 1969. With Apollo 11, we finally won the great race, landing a man on the Moon before the end of this decade and returning him safely to Earth.
Everybody, including Congress, was caught up in the adrenal rush of it all. But then, on the morning after, congressmen began to wonder about something that hadn’t dawned on them since Kennedy’s oration. What was this single combat stuff — they didn’t use the actual term — really all about? It had been a battle for morale at home and image abroad. Fine, O.K., we won, but it had no tactical military meaning whatsoever. And it had cost a fortune, $150 billion or so. And this business of sending a man to Mars and whatnot? Just more of the same, when you got right down to it. How laudable … how far-seeing … but why don’t we just do a Scarlett O’Hara and think about it tomorrow?
And that NASA budget! Now there was some prime pork you could really sink your teeth into! And they don’t need it anymore! Game’s over, NASA won, congratulations. Who couldn’t use some of that juicy meat to make the people happy? It had an ambrosial aroma … made you think of re-election ….
Charles Krauthammer is up next.
Michael Crichton once wrote that if you told a physicist in 1899 that within a hundred years humankind would, among other wonders (nukes, commercial airlines), “travel to the moon, and then lose interest . . . the physicist would almost certainly pronounce you mad.” In 2000, I quoted these lines expressing Crichton’s incredulity at America’s abandonment of the moon. It is now 2009 and the moon recedes ever further.
This week marks the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. We say we will return in 2020. But that promise was made by a previous president, and this president has defined himself as the antimatter to George Bush. Moreover, for all of Barack Obama’s Kennedyesque qualities, he has expressed none of Kennedy’s enthusiasm for human space exploration.
So with the Apollo moon program long gone, and with Constellation, its supposed successor, still little more than a hope, we remain in retreat from space. Astonishing. After countless millennia of gazing and dreaming, we finally got off the ground at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Within 66 years, a nanosecond in human history, we’d landed on the moon. Then five more landings, 10 more moonwalkers and, in the decades since, nothing. …
Bret Stephens gives two examples of the character of our astronauts.
…But the really essential ingredient is personal modesty, if not in private than certainly in public. “One day you’re just Gene Cernan, young naval aviator, whatever,” recalls the commander of Apollo 17 in the documentary, “In the Shadow of the Moon.” “And the next day you’re an American hero. Literally. And you have done nothing.”
Mr. Cernan is the last man to have walked on the moon. Nobody can accuse him of lacking for courage. He is simply expressing the very human bewilderment of a sentient person caught in the blandishments of modern celebrity culture. Does America make men like Gene Cernan anymore?
Then again, Mr. Cernan is positively boastful compared to Mr. Armstrong. …
Back on June 21, we started with Roger Simon’s three-part series on the death of the NY Times. Part two, centered on Walter Duranty, is here today.
At the end of Act 1, I promised to discuss what many consider the most egregious case of prevarication on the pages of the New York Times –the misreporting of Joseph Stalin’s forced starvation of millions of Ukrainian peasants by the NYT’s Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty.
Some say that policy of Stalin’s was equal in horror and death count to the Holocaust itself. And yet Duranty papered it over in the Times, reporting after a visit to the area that while there were some scattered shortages, a true famine – forced or otherwise – did not exist. After all, as Duranty so often explained, “You had to break a few eggs to make an omelet.”
This was 1932. The Gulag Archipelago – the infamous forced labor camps of the Soviet Union so thoroughly exposed by Alexander Solzhenitsyn – had already been in existence since 1918. A “few eggs” indeed. …
Jack Dunphy, the pseudonym of an LAPD officer, posts part of an essay from Van Jones. Jones wrote this about the 1992 L.A. riots. Van Jones is Obama’s new “Special Advisor for Green Jobs”.
…Our rallying cry was for justice; our demand was that the System be changed!
Yes, the Great Revolutionary Moment had at long last come. And the time, clearly, was ours!
So we stole stuff.
Y’know, stole stuff. Radios, tennis shoes. Well, not everybody, of course.
The vast majority (me included) just marched around and chanted slogans. But some set trash cans on fire. And smashed in car windows. And some kids stoned a few passing cars pretty good.
And stole stuff, like I said. …