The Chutzpah of Newt

Newt Gingrich just blows me away with his arrogance and, how do the Jewish spell it, "chutzpah" (defined as "audacity with no shame").  This glib Republican politician, who has a slick mind and even slicker mouth, is about set to announce for the 2012 Republican Presidential nomination.  His latest book is, if you can believe this, "Rediscovering God in America."

This comes to us from a man, 67, who is now on his third marriage (including one affair going on while he was simultaneously going after Bill Clinton for his dailliance in the White House!).  And now, guess what, he has suddenly found God.  He converted to Catholicism two years ago, at the age of 65. So, according to the New York Times (which article is entitled "On the Stump, Gingrich Puts Focus on Faith") he's going around to Pro-Life rallies and trying to pass himself off as a conservative Catholic (so that, I suppose, they'll vote for him for President) and writing about how much America needs God. 

What a farce.  How convenient it is to have found God at long last at 67 years old, and then use it to further your political ambitions!  Supposing that he sincerely believes these things, now at the ripe old age of 67, why would anyone believe this man, given his past, and reward him with the most powerful political office in the world?  He's obviously counting on the sheer gullibility of the American public, along with the power of the Fox News to 'persuade' the people that here is a politician worth believing.

It boggles the mind. 

I have a suggestion for Newt.  If he thinks that America needs Gods so much, become a priest, become a Catholic missionary, go stand on the street corner and evangelize, start a TV ministry, or whatever else your local priest might suggest.  But, for crying out loud, don't use your newfound religious faith to try and win the Presidency.  That is SO cynical.

L'affaire Assange

Julian Assange is finally going to be extradicted to Sweden from Britain, on charges of sexual something-or-other.  My guess is that those charges will fall apart, once he gets there and goes throught the procedures.  Sweden obviously is not sexually puritanical, though these charges seem based more on feminist thinking, with which Sweden is blest.  Yet, these charges seem somehow trumped up to me and not serious, though I could obviously be wrong in that.

My guess is that it could be very unpopular in Sweden to try and convict someone like Assange, who is seen in much of the world (and I would imagine in Sweden) as a hero for freedom of the press and the free flow of information.

However, I think the threat of extradiction to the United States has passed.  The Middle East crisis has so changed things in terms of foreign policy, that it seems to me that Wikileaks is now 'old news' and the Obama administration will not want to bother with the Assange affair.

Liveable Cities and the British Commonwealth

Toronto: 4th Most Liveable City in the World

I find it interesting that the 'Most Liveable Cities' worldwide survey, by The Economist magazine, was totally dominated by the large British commonwealth nations:  Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.  For some reason, they know how to produce great cities.  (Does this mean that we should have stayed a British colony?  Hmmmmmm.....)

At the very least, perhaps we proud Americans could learn something useful from how our Canadian and Australians cousins run their cities.  Do you think?

By the way, there were a lot of 'Americans' who were on the British side in the Revolutionary War.  A new book on that subject, Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary War, is reviewed here in the New York Review of Books.  Here are a few paragraphs from that article (which unfortunately for most of you is not available in full if you don't have a subscription):

The American Revolution had international consequences that went beyond spreading the ideas of democratic republicanism. Indeed, Jasanoff persuasively contends that “the 1780s stand out as the most eventful single decade in British imperial history up to the 1940s.” What she calls the “spirit of 1783” that emerged out of the peace treaty with America animated the renewed British Empire well into the twentieth century. Ultimately, she says, it had more worldwide significance than the “spirit of 1776.” This “‘spirit of 1783’…provided a model of liberal constitutional empire that stood out as a vital alternative to the democratic republics taking shape [in this period] in the United States, France, and Latin America.”

The events of the 1780s created an enduring framework for the spread of the principles of British centralized hierarchy and liberal humanitarianism to the farthest reaches of the globe. It was Britain that defeated Napoleon and stood for ordered liberalism against the reactionary forces of the Holy Alliance. It was Britain that backed up the Monroe Doctrine and prevented conservative Europe from reconquering the New World. It was Britain that led the world in the abolition of slavery. And it was British ships that scoured the seas and enforced the ban on the international slave trade. According to Jasanoff, the loyalist exiles played an important part in this nineteenth-century expansion of the liberal British Empire, a worldwide expansion that more than compensated for the loss of the North American colonies. It was even an American loyalist, James Mario Matra, who put forward the first serious proposal to colonize Australia.

A Seismic Shift in the Middle East

Fareed Zakaria is one of the best interpreters of world events around, and his CNN show on Sunday mornings, 'GPS: The Global Public Square,' is really the only one worth watching.  Here's an excerpt from his Washington Post column:

We are in the midst of a revolution in the Middle East, one that has unleashed long-suppressed forces that will continue to send shock waves across an arc of countries from Morocco to Iran. We are all looking at each crisis individually as it breaks out. But if we step back we can see that this is really a seismic shift and that it will in time reverberate throughout the region.

For the first time in perhaps a millennium, the Arab people are taking charge of their own affairs. Since the 11th century, after conquests by Mongol, Persian and Turkish armies, Arab lands have been controlled by foreign powers. Most of these lands were ruled by the Ottoman Empire for centuries. By the late 18th century, as Ottoman power waned, the era of European expansion began, and for the next 150 years the Middle East fell under its sway. In the aftermath of World War I, Britain and France carved up the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, creating most of the modern Middle Eastern states.

A Mega-Explanation

The Explanation to a Lot of Our Problems in America....no decent public transportation, cars/suvs that get poor gas mileage, why we're so involved in the Middle East, etc:

Better Than a Bomb: Thank You All You Computer and Internet Geeks!!

Why Middle Eastern dictatorships are crumbling:

Human Nature When Civilization Crumbles

New York Times reporter Sabrina Tavernise writes about the dangers of being a woman reporter:

...women reporters face another set of challenges. We are often harassed in ways that male colleagues are not. This is a hazard of the job that most of us have experienced and few of us talk about.

Last week, CBS News said that its reporter Lara Logan was assaulted by a crowd of men in Cairo. CBS News did not detail the circumstances, but the network’s statement — that she had suffered a “brutal and sustained sexual assault” — said enough. Threatening had turned frightening. The moment when you hold your breath in a crowd did not pass safely for her.

I have worked in a half-dozen countries since the late 1990s, including Lebanon, Gaza in Israel, Pakistan, Turkey and Russia. In none of these places was I dragged off and raped, but I have encountered abuse in many of them. The assaults usually took place in crowds, where I was pinned in place by men.

The risk of something happening is especially high when all the rules have fallen away and society is held together by a sense that anything can happen. This was the case for me in Baghdad in 2003 at the gun market, when a crowd of young men, impoverished and not used to seeing foreigners, first started touching me, and then began ripping at my clothes. A colleague helped me fend them off.

It was a beginner’s mistake. I was wearing pants, baggy and formless, but still looking nothing like any of the women in the area, who all wore abayas, black sheaths completely covering their bodies. That same day I went to an Iraqi clothing shop to stock up on ankle-length jean skirts and shirts that reached to mid-thigh.

Background on Bahrain

Here's some background information on the Bahrain protest from a New York Times article (besides the fact that it's a major base for the US Navy in the Persian Gulf):

The longstanding root of the tension here is the sectarian divide, a Sunni royal family ruling over a Shiite majority. For years, the Shiites have complained of discrimination in housing, employment, education and governance.

That rift makes Bahrain, an archipelago about the size of Fort Worth, a potential regional powder keg. The contest for influence in the Middle East has pitted largely Sunni Saudi Arabia, backed by the United States, against largely Shiite Iran. A critical Saudi ally in that struggle was President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, who was ousted by a popular revolt this month, leaving Egypt’s future leadership and loyalties an open question.

Moreover, Bahrain sits just off Saudi Arabia’s east coast, connected by a bridge to the mainland. On the Saudi side lies Eastern Province, an oil-rich region with a Shiite majority, who have an affinity for their fellow Shiites in Bahrain and no great love for the Saudi leaders.

To the north, Kuwait also has a Sunni monarchy and a restive Shiite population. The big fear among Sunni governments is that Bahrain, once part of Persia, could become another Iran, where the Islamic revolution of 1979 produced a bellicose Shiite theocracy.

But the Shiite protesters here insist their revolt is secular and democratic. When the protests started on Feb. 14, in a so-called Day of Rage modeled after events in Egypt and Tunisia, demonstrators called for a constitutional monarchy, an elected cabinet and a constitution written by the people, as opposed to one imposed by the king.

Bait and Switch

Obama was sold to the Democrats as a bold, transformational kind of leader.  "We're gonna change the way things are done in Washington!"  But that's not what he is.  He's a 'slow and easy' kind of guy, who doesn't want to upset anyone (except maybe those who believed the hype about his being transformational!) Here's David Brooks again:

The president has enormous faith in getting smart people around the table and initiating technocratic reform. But you can’t renegotiate the social contract in private. You have to have public buy-in. You have to spend years out in public educating voters about the size of the problem and what will be required. You have to show voters what a solution looks like.

The New Deal wasn’t passed by a president who led quietly from the back. Neither was the Great Society or the Reagan Revolution. President Obama’s softly, softly approach is a rationalization, not a coherent strategy. It’s the latest version of Obama’s eternal promise: I’ll do it tomorrow.

I remember one of the first things Obama did after winning the election was to meet with a bunch of conservative thinkers like George Will, David Brooks, David Frum, Kathleen Parker (writers who had, if not endorsed him, at least had broken with McCain for picking Sarah Palin) for dinner and conversation. At the time, I thought that was a little weird, but in retrospect, it seems clear what he was doing: reassuring them that he wasn't what the Democrats thought he was, but a 'thinking conservative's' kind of President). 

For those in society who have benefited from the way things have been for the last 30 years (the bankers, the CEOs, the rich) he's perfect.  For the rest of us who wanted someone to change the way things were done, not so much.

So the mantle of leadership has passed to Capitol Hill. While Obama asked for patience yet again, Eric Cantor announced that Republicans will put entitlements on the table. It may be politically risky, but it looks more like leadership to me.

So, David Brooks is disappointed, now that he's decided we need transformational leadership.  George Will and others conservatives have switched over to Mitch Daniels as the calm, cool, but decisive leader they want.  Sounds like Brooks is getting ready to do the same.

To say I'm disappointed is an understatement.  I'm getting bitter over the 'bait and switch' that happened in 2008.

Promises, Promises

Now that David Brooks has come out in criticism of Obama's leadership on the national debt, maybe the President will listen and do something about it (he likes David Brooks, because of his support as a conservative for his candidacy).  In an interview on Charlie Rose, Brooks said that his contacts in the White House indicated that they were focused on 'minutia', not the big picture, and he wondered where the candidate of 'hope and change' had gone.

Jonathan Alter wrote a book about Barack Obama’s first year in office called “The Promise.” That’s a great title because it works on so many levels. For example, over the past four years, Obama’s career has been marked by a constant promise: He has continually said he is on the verge of doing something serious abut the national debt.

He started making the promise back when he was in the Senate. In “The Audacity of Hope,” published in 2006, he expressed alarm at the “mountain of debt” caused by $300 billion annual budget deficits. (They’re now $1.6 trillion.) During the presidential campaign, he pledged to put away childish things and tackle the tough budget issues.

During the transition, he said the time to act on the debt is now. “What we have done is kicked the can down the road,” he told The Washington Post. “We are now at the end of the road and are not in a position to kick it any further.” He said he would start a budget initiative in February 2009.

After the stimulus package passed, he and his aides said it would soon be time to turn to deficit issues. The same promise was made after health care reform. He made the pledge yet again at a press conference this week. Right now is not the time, the president always says, but tomorrow we will get serious.

But tomorrow never comes.