News from Harper's Magazine
Last updated on HXM DATE
Writing at the Washington Post, Kathleen Parker offers some frank insights about Glenn Beck: . . .
Writing at the New York Review of Books blog page, Princeton professor Perry Link enumerates the seven deadly secrets that China’s octogenarians want to keep from the public at all cost. It makes an excellent list of potential dissertation topics for students of Chinese history and politics: . . .
As a young lawyer, Obama represented a whistleblower; as a presidential candidate, he pledged to “strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government.” But as president, Obama has unleashed the most aggressive assault on whistleblowers Washington has ever seen—surpassing even George W. Bush. The latest example comes in a remarkable prosecution of Steven Kim, a well-known scholar of North Korea’s nuclear program. . . .
Two thousand seven hundred twenty-two days after U.S. troops crossed the Kuwaiti border into Iraq, U.S. combat operations there officially ended. Vice President Joseph Biden arrived to usher in ''Operation New Dawn,“ during which the nearly 50,000 American troops remaining in the country will still be available for combat missions when requested by Iraqi forces. Al Qaeda in Iraq claimed responsibility for coordinated attacks in 13 towns and cities that killed at least 56 people, many of them members of the Iraqi police and security forces, calling the assaults ”the wings of victory sweeping again over a new day." New York Times Seattle Times New York Times General Ray Odierno, the outgoing U.S. commander in Iraq, said that the formation of a new government there could still be months away. “If we get the government formed, I think we’re okay,” Odierno said. “If we don’t, I don’t know.” New York Times A gunman killed six people and wounded 14 in the Slovak capital of Bratislava. New York Times Five soldiers in Afghanistan were charged with forming a “kill team” to summarily execute random Afghan civilians, a college student recently returned from a month spent filming Marines in Afghanistan slashed a Muslim cab driver in New York, and General David Petraeus revealed that he is “an Enya guy.” Raw Story New York Daily News Fox News . . .
In a typically wry observation about revolutionaries, Joseph Conrad warns the observer not to be so attached to the romantic incendiaries, the “narrow-minded fanatics” who capture the headlines when the revolution breaks. The real test is who comes to power when the dust settles and order is reestablished, when “hopes [are] grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured—that is the definition of revolutionary success.” Conrad would not be surprised by the latest developments in the Kyrgyz Republic, where a revolution broke out in early April, and the unrelenting struggle for power continues. . . .
From the Dallas Morning News: . . .
There is another sky, Ever serene and fair, And there is another sunshine, Though it be darkness there; Never mind faded forests, Austin, Never mind silent fields - Here is a little forest, Whose leaf is ever green; Here is a brighter garden, Where not a frost has been; In its unfading flowers I hear the bright bee hum: Prithee, my brother, Into my garden come! . . .
Toute race, tout art a son hypocrisie. Le monde se nourrit d’un peu de vérité et de beaucoup de mensonge. L’esprit humain est débile; il s’accommode mal de la vérité pure; il faut que sa religion, sa morale, sa politique, ses poètes, ses artistes, la lui présentent enveloppée de mensonges. Ces mensonges s’accommodent à l’esprit de chaque race; ils varient de l’une à l’autre: ce sont eux qui rendent si difficile aux peuples de se comprendre, et qui leur rendent si facile de se mépriser mutuellement. La vérité est la même chez tous; mais chaque peuple a son mensonge, qu’il nomme son idéalisme; tout être l’y respire, de sa naissance à sa mort; c’est devenu pour lui une condition de vie; il n’y a que quelques génies qui peuvent s’en dégager, à la suite de crises héroïques, où ils se trouvent seuls, dans le libre univers de leur pensée. . . .
It was the most expensive barbecue in all history, writes Berlin’s Tageszeitung today about a fete arranged by German Chancellor Angela Merkel for George W. Bush and his entourage in 2006. . . .
Today’s Washington Post offers a follow-up to yesterday’s Times story about the senior Afghan national security official who is the target of a U.S. driven anti-corruption probe while being on the CIA’s payroll. It discloses that the CIA’s payroll covers Afghan government figures pretty extensively: . . .
The current issue of The National Interest contains Ahmed Rashid’s exhaustive and provocative essay on the current state of affairs in Pakistan. It’s a must-read for anyone trying to come to grips with American foreign policy in the “Af-Pak theater.” Rashid starts with Pakistan’s basket-case military, long viewed by Washington’s foreign policy elite as the glue that holds the country together: . . .
In another significant piece datelined Kabul, Dexter Filkins and Mark Mazzetti reveal that the man in the eye of the storm of an Afghan-American corruption scandal, Mohammed Zia Salehi—the chief of administration for Afghanistan’s National Security Council—is on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency: . . .
As Wonkette reported earlier today, Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota has formed her very own Leadership Political Action Committee, the slush fund of choice for the modern politician. . . .
Nelson Hernandez (among others) took issue with my “clever analysis of President Obama’s excellent chances of re-election.” Hernandez made a number of good points, though he made several comments (for example, Obama has “an insatiable desire to promote socialism”) that make it hard to take him seriously. But here’s an edited version of his email, to which I’ll reply below: . . .
A few short months ago the media was filled with narratives about 2010 being the “Year of the Insurgent,” a storyline that was always overblown. That’s not because the public is happy with congress, but because a well-funded incumbent is awfully hard to knock off. Even in 2006, when Democrats made huge gains in the House, 94 percent of incumbents won reelection. That’s not to say incumbents aren’t going to lose a few races (and it looks like the Democrats will drop quite a few seats this fall), just that it generally takes extraordinary circumstances, given the corrupted rules of American politics, for challengers to win a significant number of races in any given year. . . .
From Stephen Bright, in the Fulton County Daily Report: . . .
With the kind permission of C.H. Beck Verlag, former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, and Columbia University historian Fritz Stern, we present here the third in a series of excerpts from the bestselling book Unser Jahrhundert—Ein Gespräch, in an original English translation. . . .
David Broder of the Washington Post has long had his head so far up Washington’s ass that he is incapable of understanding that there are opinions in America beyond the ten Beltway insiders he gets his talking points from. (An affliction from which much of the D.C. press corps suffers, though generally not in as advanced a state as Broder’s.) In his latest column, he attacks writer John Judis for having opinions that Broder deems out of the mainstream — meaning anything to the left of, say, Senator Blanche Lincoln. Specifically, he endorses Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs’s recent criticism of “the professional left,” or those who are “prematurely finding fault with President Obama” for his failure to pursue reforms favored by liberal groups. . . .
With the Democrats looking to receive a solid (and well-deserved) drubbing in the mid-term elections, there’s much talk in the press about whether Barack Obama will be a one-term president. In a Sunday column, Dan Balz of the Washington Post wrote: “Throughout this long year, President Obama’s advisers have sometimes looked to Ronald Reagan for comparison and inspiration. If the Gipper could survive a deep recession, low approval ratings and an adverse midterm election in his first two years and win reelection handily two years later, then Obama could easily do the same, they reason.” . . .
Perhaps you understood that the Anti-Defamation League exists to promote tolerance. According to its website, the ADL “fights anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry in the U.S. and abroad through information, education, legislation, and advocacy.” Its mission statement, adopted in 1913 in the anxious months following the scapegoating of Leo Frank, states that “its ultimate purpose is to secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike and to put an end forever to unjust and unfair discrimination against and ridicule of any sect or body of citizens.” The ADL has had a long and noble history of championing justice and equality before the law in America. But it’s becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile the ADL’s lofty goals and proud history with the conduct of its long-serving national director, Abe Foxman. Echoing the language used by opponents of the Civil Rights movement in the early sixties, he recently spoke against the proposal to establish an Islamic cultural center at 51 Park Row, on the site of a Burlington Coat factory. Survivors of the events of 9/11, Foxman argued, are entitled “to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted.” So Foxman placed himself—and the ADL—firmly on the side of bigotry and intolerance. . . .
The developers of the proposed Islamic community center near Ground Zero--whose project continues to lack a lobbyist, engineer, architect, blueprint, and, according to their most recent disclosure, $99,981,745 of the $100 million they intend to raise--did not agree to meet with Governor David Paterson, who hopes to persuade them to build somewhere else. Bloomberg NYO Politico As Israel prepared for the drilling of the large gas reserves discovered last year off its northern coast, the parliament of Lebanon voted to outline the country's maritime borders. EarthTimes NYT Iran celebrated the opening of its first nuclear power plant, and President Obama invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to the United States for peace talks. “When they reach an impasse, and they will, the expectation will be that the president has to come in and fix these things,” said Middle East scholar Aaron David Miller. “Does he really understand what he’s getting himself into?” NYT USA Today One in five Americans believed Obama to be Muslim. Pew A Thai appellate court ordered the extradition of alleged weapons-trafficker, money-launderer, and sanction-flouter Viktor Bout to the United States, and the security firm formerly known as Blackwater paid the U.S. government $42 million to avoid criminal charges over hundreds of export violations. WP WSJ NYT Thirty-three Chilean miners who had been trapped underground for more than two weeks turned out to be alive, though engineers said they won’t be rescued for at least four months. Telegraph The body of a registered Japanese centenarian was found in her son’s backpack. BBC . . .
In 2008, Barry Nolan, then the host of a Boston-area cable television show, criticized the New England Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for its decision to grant the 2008 Governor’s Award to Bill O’Reilly, the controversial Fox News talk-show host. Nolan went to the awards dinner to hand out fliers of quotations culled from O’Reilly’s sexual harassment lawsuit, quotations which Nolan felt would demonstrate why O’Reilly was not worthy of the award. When the award ceremony began, Nolan and his son quietly left—indeed, they were hardly the only people in the audience to do so. Within forty-eight hours, Nolan learned that his employer, Comcast, was firing him. . . .
This weekend, the controversies surrounding WikiLeaks took another strange turn. Late on Friday, the Swedish newspaper Expressen disclosed that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was the subject of an arrest warrant arising out of charges by two female witnesses that he had raped them within a three-day period. The late-hours special duty prosecutor, Maria Häljebo Kjellstrand, issued an arrest warrant for Assange, who quickly protested his innocence and charged that the claims against him were a “dirty trick.” Within twenty-four hours, Swedish prosecutors did a near complete about-face. After finishing a preliminary examination of the claims, chief prosecutor Eva Finné, to whom the case was handed off, concluded that the evidence did not justify an arrest warrant, and canceled the one issued by Ms. Kjellstrand. “I do not believe there is any reason to suspect that he has committed rape,” Ms. Finné told London’s Daily Telegraph. She noted that the file would remain open under a downgraded charge of sexuellt ofredande, or unwanted sexual contact, a far less serious offense. One of the women behind the charges gave an interview to the Swedish paper Aftonbladet on Sunday, backpedaling furiously. She stated that she was surprised to learn that the accusations were treated as a rape charge and denied that there had been any encounter with Assange involving violence or force. She suggested that the controversy had to do with Assange’s failure to use a condom during intercourse. In the meantime, Sweden’s Justice Ombudsman was demanding a formal investigation into how the accusations came to be sensationalized by the press on the basis of an improperly issued arrest warrant. . . .
Outside, as my host accompanied me along the Falls Road, I witnessed a principal cause of those hard faces. While we discussed “the troubles,” a British Army armored vehicle rumbled by us, braked abruptly, and disgorged red-bereted members of the elite Parachute Regiment. . . .
