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We open with good news. David Warren is back.
‘Write each column as if it were your last. And sooner or later it will be,” an editor once explained. I recall this sage advice, upon returning to my day job, after annual leave. And with my first deadline falling smack on my 55th birthday. (That is, yesterday. If you haven’t sent a card, it is already too late.) Five weeks of staying as far from the news as I could contrive to get. Some of this time spent fighting curiosity.
But most of it caring for ancient parents, now shifted to a nursing home from their need for constant medical supervision. This is a common experience among baby boomers, as my much younger, current editor explains: no call for “empathy” there. And my many contemporaries, whose parents are neither dead nor disowned, may well have learned that no empathy is appropriate. For the experience, though painful, is full of reward.
Indeed, this is among the forgotten truths of what I call, for shorthand, “post-modernity” – aka “the mall culture” or “the age of abortion” – that all human reward is founded in pain. That all true joy is founded in duty; and freedom in duty, too. That, in the words of my priest, “Principles are something you pay for, not something you collect on.”
And let me add, since we are dealing in old saws this morning, that one cannot begin to appreciate the glory and beauty and preciousness of a human life, until one has grasped how tenuous and transient it is. …
More good news. Global warming is not back. Chris Booker in the Telegraph, UK has the fun details.
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Weekly Standard with the story of the latest scandal from UN “peacekeepers.” You’ll be pleased to learn, though, the Indians and Paks have been able to make common cause in this outrage.
IT IS HARD TO BELIEVE the United Nations’ reputation as an international peacekeeping organization could sink any lower, but it just has. The BBC’s flagship investigative news program, Panorama, revealed this week that the UN’s biggest peacekeeping mission, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), has been blighted by yet another scandal. The 18-month BBC study into the conduct of the 17,000 strong, $1.1 billion a year operation (known as MONUC) found that UN troops have been involved in arming militia groups and smuggling gold and ivory. This revelation comes just three years after it emerged that UN peacekeepers had perpetrated the widespread abuse of refugees in the war-torn country.
The allegations are hugely embarrassing for the United Nations, and involve peacekeeping contingents from two of the UN’s biggest contributing nations. According to the BBC investigation, Indian peacekeepers (who make up a quarter of the MONUC mission) “had direct dealings with the militia responsible for the Rwandan genocide” in eastern Congo. The BBC states that “the Indians traded gold, bought drugs from the militias and flew a UN helicopter into the Virunga National park, where they exchanged ammunition for ivory.” The BBC also reports that Pakistani peacekeepers, the second largest group in MONUC, “were involved in the illegal trade in gold with the FNI militia, providing them with weapons to guard the perimeter of the mines” in the eastern town of Mongbwalu. …
Newsweek’s Evan Thomas notes the left’s growing regard for Reagan.
The outcome of this November’s election may hinge on a single question: which presidential candidate will prevail among the “Reagan Democrats”? Those traditionally Democratic voters made history—and a place in the political lexicon—in 1980 when they bolted their party’s disarrayed ranks to swing the polls in Ronald Reagan’s favor. Until recently, however, few liberal-leaning historians took a respectful look at the Reagan phenomenon. That’s finally changing, with the publication of Sean Wilentz’s new “The Age of Reagan,” even as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama—and John McCain—seek the support of that crucial bloc. NEWSWEEK’s Evan Thomas moderated a conversation about the Gipper between Wilentz, a professed liberal, and NEWSWEEK’s George F. Will, a longtime Reagan admirer.
THOMAS: Sean, why have you taken a look at Reagan, and have other historians started to take another look at Reagan?
WILENTZ: It’s interesting. It’s no secret that intellectuals, generally being liberals, didn’t think much of Ronald Reagan at the time. Unlike Roosevelt, who got covered right away—as soon as he died there were books out about [him]—it took people a long time to catch up with Ronald Reagan. But I think that now they can no longer ignore him. His impact on the world and country, whether you like it or not, was so important that to ignore him is to ignore an entirety of American politics.THOMAS: And why did it take so long?
WILENTZ: People had to overcome their own passions, their own dislikes. Some people had to grow up. Some people, it was a matter of all their ideas ripening. Ronald Reagan was difficult to read. His own official biographer couldn’t make head or tail out of Ronald Reagan, and he had more access than most. Look, he was a conservative in a conservative age. This is not, normally, what is the stuff of heroic history. It just doesn’t fit the mold in the way that Andrew Jackson or Abraham Lincoln does. It’s just different. …
Shorts from National Review.
Larry Kudlow says when it comes to the economy, W knows.
President George W. Bush may turn out to be the top economic forecaster in the country.
About a month ago he told reporters, “We’re not in a recession, we’re in a slowdown.” At a White House news conference a few weeks later, despite the fact that reporters pressed him to use the “R” word, Mr. Bush refused. And on Friday, after the most recent jobs report — which produced a much-smaller-than-expected decline in corporate payrolls, a huge 362,000 increase in the more entrepreneurial household survey (the best gain in five months), and a historically low 5 percent unemployment rate (4.95 percent, to be precise) — the president told reporters: “This economy is going to come on. I’m confident it will.”
We’re in the midst of the most widely predicted and heralded recession in history. Problem is, so far it’s a non-recession recession. Score one for President Bush. In an election year, it could be a big one.
First-quarter GDP growth came in at 0.6 percent. It wasn’t the widely predicted decline, and economists expect that number to be revised up. GDP growth for the fourth quarter of 2007 was also up slightly, while the prior two quarters averaged over 4 percent growth.
My pal Jimmy Pethokoukis quotes Stanford professor Robert Hall, who heads the recession-dating committee at the National Bureau of Economic Research: “It seems unlikely that we would ever declare a peak-date when real GDP continued to rise.”
Interesting — isn’t it? — just how durable and resilient our low-tax, free-market, capitalist economy truly is. Hit by soaring food and energy prices, a bad housing downturn, and a Wall Street credit crunch, the economy continues to expand, albeit slowly. …
Bloomberg News says MIT prof has figured out why China has been able to grow so fast. Maybe.
Humor section starts with a post from the New Editor. Seems Bill Clinton was lying about his record. Bill lie? Who knew?