In the most recent round of violent protests that have rocked Greece, a group of aggrieved Communist party members went up onto the Acropolis and hung banners from the massive rock. “Down with Dictatorship” they proclaimed (in English as well as in Greek for the benefit of the western media and/or relevant parties in London and Washington, D.C.).

The message was not particularly subtle: Here, in the birthplace of democracy, Greeks would once again stand up to their oppressors and claim their ancient freedoms. At the very feet of the Parthenon they made their stand, with the ruins of the classical past providing witness.

The juxtaposition between the “birthplace of democracy” and Greece’s current budget woes has been echoed in the media, illustrated with video of Athenians torching Starbucks and Cinnabon. What this analysis fails to recognize is that the contemporary Greeks are rejecting their own heritage as they riot not for freedom, but against it.

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While the recent increase of attention to the ongoing carnage in Syria is a welcome change from the Obama administration’s collective state of denial over the past ten months, signals remain mixed, and our policy is unclear if not non-existent.  This week alone, for example, we got the welcome news that the Pentagon is preparing military options on Syria for the President, but at the same time White House press secretary announced those options will not be exercised.

The waters have been further muddied by the President’s insistence that there is no parity between the situation in Libya last year and what we face now in Syria. In Libya, the threat to civilians and opportunity to topple a vicious dictator were sufficient cause for Mr. Obama to engage the U.S. military, even without a pressing national security interest at stake.  While it can be argued that once the U.S. engaged in Libya it might have been preferable to lead from the front to secure weapons stockpiles and guard against al Qaida encroachment, the fact remains that the world is a better place with Colonel Qaddafi gone, as Mr. Obama routinely reminds us.

Meanwhile, as many as ten times the civilians killed in Libya before NATO’s intervention have died in Syria over the last year.  Bashir Assad is no less cruel and repressive a tyrant than Muammar Qaddafi. The threat of Syria’s unknown stockpiles of WMD falling into bad hands demands our urgent attention.  And, above all, the United States has a clear strategic interest in toppling this vital ally of Iran.

But Syria is somehow different, and not worthy of the same sort of military assistance we offered to the Libyan rebels.

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Like most parents, I have become adept at the rapid fire muting of the satellite radio when shepherding my children around in the car.  Not only are the ads wildly inappropriate, but the news itself is not far behind.  To wit, this morning when they caught a few sentences of Weinergate.

The natural impulse is to shield them from the squalor, to turn off the radio and change the subject.  But this time I thought I owed it to them to try to explain what was going on.  After all, both of them have iPods that take pictures and that can connect to wifi.  They have gmail accounts.  This activity is monitored of course, but would I really be able to catch every single misstep that happened at a sleepover or at camp before it became part of the flotsam and jetsam of the internet?  Looking in the rearview mirror at them on this, their last day of school, they seemed so young–but the hard reality is that Anthony Weiner’s correspondents were not so very much older (that we know), and grew up in this information age in which it is not only commonplace to be in direct cyber-contact with a famous congressman, but also for that contact to become intimate in a very public and permanent way.

Deep breath.

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There seems to be some confusion over why the Israelis should be so hostile to President Obama’s suggestion that the two-state solution be achieved by returning the Jewish state to its 1967 borders. The President’s supporters argue that since these borders were previously acceptable to Israel, they should be acceptable now.  After all, pre-1967 Israel fought to defend those borders and they were on the table in the 2000 peace talks.  Can 45 years make that much of a difference?

It is true that 45 years is not so very long in terms of the territorial integrity of the United States. We might even prefer to return to the 1967 context in which our borders were much less challenging than they are today. But what Mr. Obama seems to fail to understand is that 45 years is a very long time for Israel. While the history of the Israeli people stretches back millennia, lsrael itself has only existed for 63 years. What the President is asking is that more than 70% of that history be erased, beginning with the reasons it was deemed necessary to annex the territories in 1967, and continuing on through the failed diplomatic initiatives, UN humiliations and relentless, deadly terrorist attacks of the past decades (including the last one, as Jeff Emanuel discussed yesterday). While some have considered Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s terse response to this proposal disrespectful of the President, Mr. Netanyahu might have some very real concerns that once three-quarters of Israel’s past has been eradicated, would it be all that outlandish to go all the way to pre-1948? Especially under the leadership of an American president who is asking the Israelis to make this concession on the dubious grounds that hope will overcome hate?

Mr. Obama justified his pre-1967 proposal yesterday by declaring “[t]he dream of a Jewish and democratic state cannot be fulfilled with permanent occupation.” While rhetorically it sounded nice and cleverly recalled Martin Luther King’s iconic speech, the choice of the word “dream” to describe a sovereign state was a curious one. Perhaps for our President Israel is still an abstract phantasm that might or might not exist, but for others it has been a reality for the last 63 years. Israel has the right to all of its history, and all of its territory.

The abrupt arrest of IMF director Dominique Strauss-Kahn on charges of sexual assault against an employee at the New York hotel where he was staying are being treated as shocking in France. This is a “coup de tonnerre,” a bolt from the blue, not to mention a body blow to the socialist party he was to represent in the upcoming elections. Everyone in Paris claims to be amazed, shaken–and doing some soul searching this Monday morning.

Very few, however, are protesting “DSK”‘s innocence. But if the news really came as such a jarring surprise, shouldn’t there be a clamour of disbelief? The shameful fact is that this news was not so much a shock as a long time coming.

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63 years ago, Israel was established, giving the Jewish people their own state. Over the ensuing decades the tiny country has been attacked with everything from sticks and stones in its own sovereign territory to words in the hallowed halls of the United Nations. Through a combination of ceaseless vigilance and sheer faith the people of Israel have persevered in the face of relentless bombardment of hard and soft bigotry–not to mention rockets–and not only persevered but prospered.

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“Inheritance” is a neutral word–it can be bad and good depending on the circumstance. You don’t get to pick what you get any more than you can pick your parents. On the one hand, you have things like photo albums and trusts funds. On the other you have the lasting repercussions of bad behavior, the sins of the father if you will, that can reach down across generations. Most of us inherit a combination of the two from our predecessors, hopefully with more of the former than the

This construct applies to presidents as well. You begin the job basically beholden to your predecessor, who has created the circumstances under which you have to try to do your job. Indeed, your first year is in many ways the political equivalent of adolescence, as you try to break away from the existing model and establish your own identity. This process can be particularly dramatic when you have successive presidents of opposing political parties.

So we have seen President Obama rebel against the Bush administration legacy throughout both his campaign and his first twenty-seven months in office. Calling attention to his inherited burdens, particularly at home but also abroad, has been a constant refrain in Obama’s rhetoric, an inevitable codicil to any policy announcement. To date, these references have been exclusively negative and pejorative, and to be honest many Americans suffering from an extended economic downturn and weary of the lengthy foreign wars have tended to accept these statements at face value.

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The news of Osama bin Laden’s demise has been a long time coming–so long in fact that it has taken some hours to sink in and become real.  A decade can be a long time when you are grieving and angry and needful of closure.  The scenes of jubilation that spread from ballpark to subway to the White House seemed like a movie in the wee hours of this morning, and while others will opine on the details of today’s momentous event, I find myself reflecting on the road that brought us here.

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In the most recent Obama administration shake up, Bob Gates will be leaving the Department of Defense, Leon Pannetta will move from the CIA to DoD, General David Petraeus will move from Afghanistan to the CIA and Ryan Crocker will move from Texas A&M (from whence came Bob Gates) to Afghanistan. As in the previous major changes in the White House staff and the economic team, competent, experienced hands are being replaced by…competent experienced hands. And so as Rahm Emanuel became Bill Daley and Larry Summers became Gene Sperling, we witness another changing of the guard designed to right the course of this haphazardly lurching administration that cannot seem to find its footing either at home or abroad.

The problem is that the root of the issue may not lie with the staff, but rather with the person doing the staffing.

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Speaking at Tufts University on April 8th, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi had one of those marvelous moments of self-revelation in which a usually polished politician speaking casually and without a script among like-minded friends says what everyone is thinking–what everyone knows to be true–in this case what is considered an unquestionable “fact” by their audience. As you can see from the video, there was not a murmur when Pelosi circled around to her punch line that “elections should not matter as much as they do.” She went on to lament that the lack of “shared values” had lead to the unpleasantness of last Friday in Congress with all the shouting and staying up late and worries over who would get to keep their Blackberrys.

The thing is, Pelosi is right. Elections are burdensome things. They are expensive, intrusive and all too frequently unfair. Even when you win, the cycle of fundraising and campaigning distracts from the business at hand.

Elections are particularly burdensome when you lose.

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Earlier today a bomb exploded on a crowded public bus outside the Jerusalem convention center, injuring more than 40 people. As Jennifer Rubin reports via Hareetz, this is the worst terrorist attack in the city in seven years, and given recent terrorist aggression against Israel out of Gaza, particularly disturbing.

The Obama administration response to this atrocity is stunning silence. Rubin also reports that no one has bothered to make contact with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The most recent messages on the State Department home page address World Water Day and Ending Violence Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity.

Gene Simmons is doing a better job of standing with Israel these days than the United States is. It is just pathetic.

With thanks to Cousin Aaron, I bring you the news that Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone, the professional military gadfly and all-around speaker of truth to power, hit a new low yesterday.  At a Congressional Progressive Caucus Peace and Security Task Force briefing, Hastings lit into General David Petraeus, accusing him of employing the “Charlie Sheen strategy:”

General Petraeus is giving us the Charlie Sheen counter-insurgency strategy, which is to give exclusive interviews to every major network, and to keep saying ‘we’re winning’ and hope the public actually agrees with you.

Now Hastings is well-known for his distaste for accomplished, aggressive war fighters so his comparison between a four-star general on his fourth combat tour of the global war on terror and a TV sit-com actor with unfortunate substance abuse and domestic violence issues comes as no surprise.  What is noteworthy is that this outburst came at a Congressional briefing, and that any member of the U.S. House of Representatives sat through it–let alone approved, as Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.)  did, having apparently learned nothing from the “General Betray Us” debacle. 

No one is telling Ms. Woolsey that she needs to support administration policy on Afghanistan, but it would be seemly to keep these slurs against our military out of the halls of Congress–even if the event did take place in a “closet” as she claimed in her prepared remarks (score one for Chairman Issa and the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform for bumping them into it!).  Just out of curiosity, who paid for this “briefing?” Was it a taxpayer-funded closet she found so oppressive?  I think we just might have a candidate for a budget cut.

I have a few sad thoughts to add to this more thorough, magisterial deconstruction of Peggy Noonan’s column today on Donald Rumsfeld’s Known and Unknown.

Through the years I have tried to like Noonan, primarily because there are so few prominent female writers on major editorial pages, and even fewer that are conservatives. Also, as she frequently reminds us, she worked for Ronald Reagan and what is not to like about that?

Unfortunately, today’s column is so far beyond the pale that even these powerful attractions cannot redeem her in my eyes. Noonan goes after Rumsfeld, who she declares devoid of “guts” and “brains,” and his “stupid little” book too (I hope that “little” book didn’t make too big of a hole in her plaster when she threw it at the wall, but I digress). Her main beef is that Rumsfeld failed both to capture Osama Bin Laden and to understand how the American psyche needed his capture after 9/11. Since as she again likes to remind us Noonan was in Manhattan on 9/11, she has claimed the mantle of Everyvictim and knows what all of us need, much more than Rumsfeld who after all was only in the Pentagon that day. We are treated to Noonan’s OBL revenge fantasies, which involve scatological imagery and decapitation, and to her fury that Rumsfeld has not facilitated their satisfaction.

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On December 11, 2005 former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright went on “Meet the Press” to opine that the Iraq war had been a mistake–worse than that it had de-railed the successful pre-war program of sanctions and a no-fly zone, which had contained the paper tiger:

And what we did was to keep Saddam Hussein in a box by using diplomacy, sanctions and force, with bombing in the no-fly zone. It worked. And what is evident from the CIA reports is that it did work. The sanctions worked.

“It worked.”

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Promoted from Diaries – DM

I had a novel experience last Thursday–I had lunch with my boss in our office conference room, not as we have untold numbers of times, but as a blogger hoping to get a question in.

In a way it was a lunch more than four years in the making.

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There are reasons certain controversial pieces of legislation have short sell-by dates.  They can be unusual powers authorized by the legislature in moments of extreme danger, powers that during less turbulent times are not worth impinging on our civil liberties.

Tonight, House Republicans failed to hold the line on one such bill–the Patriot Act.  It needed a two-thirds majority to pass, and it didn’t get it.  I remember, and it does not seem like so long ago, when the Patriot Act was a hill to die on.  Sure the concept was unpopular, but it was worth risking all your political capital because the fight we were engaged in was so important.

It seems times have changed, and the threat is not quite so imminent.  26 Republicans and 177 Democrats have concluded we no longer need to listen in on potential terrorist cell phone conversations or access their financial records.

Here’s hoping they are right.

The Nativity is one of three small predella panels for Gentile’s monumental Adoration of the Magi painted in Renaissance Florence for the wealthy banker Palla Strozzi. While the main panel of the altarpiece is a brilliant, sumptuous and somewhat hectic depiction of the royal procession arriving to adore the child, the smaller predella panel below tells a far more intimate story.

Gentile selects the moment just after Jesus’ birth. This infant, who arrived in the world without struggle or pain, lies naked on the exposed ground but shows no signs of cold or distress. Instead, he returns his mother’s adoring gaze with a most engaging delight. Despite the fact that these two are no ordinary mortals under the most extraordinary of circumstances, it is a remarkably human moment as mother and child make each other’s acquaintance. Joseph sleeps nearby and the shepherds are only learning of the great event some miles away. The heavenly host has not yet arrived on the scene. Only a serving girl, awakened perhaps by the brilliant light emanating from Jesus, intrudes on their happiness.

This small panel shows us the power of this divine light, as all the stars and the moon (originally silver) in the sky pale besides the radiance of Jesus and the angel in the background. They turn the night into day with a radiant, joyful glow that bathes the landscape in warm light. For all its magnificence, the golden trappings of the main panel cannot compete with this simple, profound miracle.

Hallelujah.

So it’s not a great night to be a Phillies fan. The heavily favored club has come off a three-game sweep of the Reds to stumble to the Giants, a team they handled with ease in the regular season. The vaunted aces have faltered and the bats fallen silent. Odds are fourth-string pitcher and well known layabout Joe Blanton will get plastered tonight by the surging Giants. The annointed ones are suddenly the underdogs.

But what if Blanton exercises his God-given right as an American to pursue happiness?

There are certainly no guarantees that Blanton will rise to the challenge and lead his team back into this series. But then again he might–the fat mediocre guy who naps while the hawks are practicing–might just get up there and shock those Giants out of their orange complacency. Or maybe he flubs it and the Phillies go home for good tomorrow night making him the goat of the Philadelphia fans. Or maybe even worse he flubs it and the tall, handsome H20 (Halladay, Hamels and Oswalt if you don’t know) save the series in seven, thus relegating Blanton to the dustheap of Phillies history. But I hope not. I hope Blanton has the night of his life. There have been precious few opportunities for Blanton to be a hero in the past, and if he fails tonight another is unlikely to come his way again. If he can grab hold of this one an ordinary career will have an extraordinary moment, and that’s the promise of the American way.

Here’s hoping an underdog has his day.

I was honored to be asked to be the lay preacher at our church this morning.  Here are my remarks as prepared for delivery.
St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church, Whitemarsh
July 4, 2010

On a sweltering July day eleven score and fourteen years ago, a group of men “mutually pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor” as they declared their freedom from Great Britain.  It happened not so very far from here in downtown Philadelphia, but we should remember that in the eighteenth century Chestnut Hill was a summer community several hours’ journey from the city, and may have seemed somewhat remote that July 4th.  It was hot in Philadelphia, but I’m sure the breezes out here were cooling and the trees provided ample shade—especially with no cars or trucks on Bethlehem Pike.  The view looking out from our hill over the fields of Hope Lodge, then in the process of being sold to William West, must have been bucolic compared to the raucous scene around Independence Hall.  The following year, however, the fallout of this audacious Declaration was brought home to St. Thomas’ as after the British victory at Germantown the redcoats stormed up Church Road to the top of this very hill and the area saw fierce fighting.  The little church that stood on this site was destroyed—its windows blown out and its graveyard desecrated.  These events make this Sunday on the date that precipitated them even more sacred for our congregation.  Since our predecessors thought it was worth dying over the Declaration of Independence, it seems to me an opportune moment to reflect on the great gift we were given all those years ago, and how we can act as good stewards of it today.

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I understand that aspects of the new Arizona immigration law are contraversial. I also understand that as a non-minority I might not fully appreciate how threatening some of the provisions in the law might seem. But it is also a fact that illegal immigration is threatening our national security, and Arizona is on the front line. From where I sit at least Governor Jan Brewer is attempting to do something to rectify the situation, not just turn a blind eye while uttering soothing politically-correct platitudes. You might think that any conversations about developing a coherant national immegration policy should include her–and is it that great a stretch to imagine that the President and the Director of Homeland Security would even look for an oppotunity to discuss and debate the Arizona legislation with Governor Brewer were she to visit Washington, D.C.?

Apparently the answer to that question is no.

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