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Last week Pickerhead kept hoping Robert Conquest would write something on Solzhenitsyn. It finally appeared Friday in the WSJ. Conquest includes an excerpt from a poem Solzhenitsyn asked him to translate. The poem mentions Studebakers, Dodges, and Chevrolets. These are references to some of the 400,000 trucks our country send to the Soviets during the war. The Studebaker was the third edition of the 2 1/2 ton 6 wheel drive GMC truck produced during the war. GM couldn’t build enough, so International had a version, and then Studebaker built the ones that were most common in the Soviet Union. Red Army soldiers loved the truck. When they wished to say a woman was well built, they would say, “she was built like a Studebaker.”
Those of us who had long been concerned to expose and resist Stalinism, in the West as in the USSR, learned much from Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I met him in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1974, soon after he was expelled from the Soviet Union — the result of his novel, “The Gulag Archipelago,” being published in Paris. He was personally pleasant; I have a photograph of the two of us, he holding a Russian edition of my book, “The Great Terror,” with evident approbation. He asked if I would translate a “little” poem of his. Of course I agreed.
The little poem, “Prussian Nights,” turned out to be 2,000 lines! …
Anne Applebaum on the war in Georgia.
For the best possible illustration of why Islamic terrorism may one day be considered the least of our problems, look no farther than the BBC’s split-screen coverage of yesterday’s Olympic opening ceremonies. On one side, fireworks sparkled, and thousands of exotically dressed Chinese dancers bent their bodies into the shape of doves, the cosmos and more. On the other side, gray Russian tanks were shown rolling into South Ossetia, a rebel province of Georgia. The effect was striking: Two of the world’s rising powers were strutting their stuff.
The difference, of course, is that one event has been rehearsed for years, while the other, if not a total surprise, was not actually scheduled to take place this week. That, too, is significant: The Chinese challenge to Western power has been a long time coming, and it is in a certain sense predictable. As a rule, the Chinese do not make sudden moves and do not try to provoke crises.
Russia, by contrast, is an unpredictable power, which makes responding to Moscow more difficult. …
WSJ Editors too.
… Western leaders should have seen this coming. Russia has baited the hot-tempered Georgian leader with trade and travel embargoes as well as saber-rattling. Georgia has had to tolerate a few thousand Russian troops on its soil — only Moscow recognizes the self-declared independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. And in April, Russia downed a Georgian drone over Abkhaz — that is, Georgian — air space. Russia in recent years has also granted citizenship to the separatists. That looks like premeditation now: Russian President Dmitry Medvedev pledged yesterday to “protect the lives and dignity of Russian citizens, no matter where they are located.”
Perhaps Mr. Saakashvili finally snapped and acted first here, as the Kremlin insists. If so, it was a huge mistake, as he has picked a fight with a much larger opponent and damaged his country’s chances of joining NATO. The West may support Georgia’s territorial integrity, but no one wants war with Russia.
Now it’s up to NATO and especially the U.S. to persuade both sides to stand down. President Bush discussed the hostilities with Mr. Putin yesterday in Beijing, where they are attending the Olympics. The prime minister needs to hear that using Ossetia as a pretext for imperialism will have consequences for Russia’s relationship with the West.
George Will’s column on the last 100 years of race in our country has a welcome and appropriate note of optimism.
The Economist writes on another bellwether state. This time Colorado.
IN ONE episode of “South Park”, a potty-mouthed cartoon set in Colorado, a film festival comes to town. At first the locals are delighted. The visitors boost the economy and the films, which feature gay cowboys eating pudding, are better than expected. But the festival turns out to be a dastardly scheme, devised by Californians, to ruin pretty mountain towns and turn them into versions of Los Angeles. The natives must fight back.
This is pretty much how Coloradoans view their state. Not so long ago, the natives will tell you, it was a beautiful place filled with hardy individualists—“a leave-me-alone kind of state”, according to Jon Caldara of the conservative Independence Institute. It was also solidly Republican. Since the 1960s Colorado has voted for a Democratic president only once, in 1992, when Ross Perot and George Bush senior split the Republican vote. Then the Californians and other newcomers arrived, sprinkling their monstrous houses over the hills and upending the state’s politics.
These days Colorado’s Democrats are on a roll. Since 2004 they have taken control of the governor’s office, both chambers of the legislature and two congressional seats. John Hickenlooper, Denver’s Democratic mayor, is enormously popular across the state. In the caucuses on February 5th more people came out for Barack Obama, who carried the state, than for all the Republican candidates put together. …
Roger Simon picks the best political ad of the season, so far.
Kathryn Jean Lopez captures the essence of a Noonan column.
And Maureen Dowd captures the essence of John Edwards.
… The creepiest part of his creepy confession was when he stressed to Woodruff that he cheated on Elizabeth in 2006 when her cancer was in remission. His infidelity was oncologically correct.
So narcissist walks into a New York bar and meets a legendarily wacky former Gotham party girl — whose ’80s exploits were chronicled in a novel by her former boyfriend Jay McInerney because the behavior of her and her friends “intrigued and appalled me.” When you appall Jay McInerney, you know you’re in trouble.
The president manqué gives Rielle Hunter, formerly Lisa Druck, more than $114,000 to shoot vain little videos for his Web site (even though she’s a neophyte), one of which is scored with the song “True Reflections” about the Narcissus pool, which goes: “When you look into a mirror, do you like what’s looking at you? Now that you’ve seen your true reflections, what on earth are you gonna do?”
He has an affair with Hunter, while he’s honing his speech on the imperative to “live in a moral, honest, just America.” A married former aide says he’s the father when she gets pregnant, even though she’s telling people Edwards is the dad. And one of his campaign donors pays off Hunter to get her resettled with the baby out of North Carolina.
But the Breck Girl wants a gold star for the fact that he sent his marriage into remission when his wife was in remission. That’s special. …
Martin Peretz notes a new tactic by the fascist left.
Richmond Times-Dispatch on race in the race.
… Rightly or wrongly and largely unspoken, race is a deep-running factor in American culture — infusing much that it should not but does. Barack Obama is the first African-American with a genuine prospect of becoming president of an electorate that is 11 percent black and 77 percent white. Because of that percentage discrepancy, Obama’s chances of winning depend greatly on the extent to which — in commentator Juan Williams’ words — he can “assure undecided white voters that he shares their [conservative social] values and is worthy of their trust.”
SO HOW seemingly odd that Obama should inject race into the campaign. Possibly he did it to build a force field around himself to deflect every criticism of every kind.
During the primaries, he blasted Bill Clinton for allegedly making race an issue in the Carolinas — implying Clinton was doing it to gin up white turnout for Hillary. Obama also perceived subtle racial undertones in John McCain’s first general-election ad — i.e., its description of McCain as “the American president Americans have been waiting for.”
In late June, Obama began mentioning his race (as he frequently had) in combination with dark implications that McCain would deploy race against Obama (as McCain never has): They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. “He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”
Finally on July 31, in Springfield, Mo., Obama dealt down and dirty:
“Nobody really thinks that Bush or McCain have a real answer for the challenges we face. So what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know — he’s not patriotic enough. He’s got a funny name. You know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills. You know. He’s risky. That’s essentially the argument they’re making.” …
Drudge reports on Pelosi’s book’s flop.