Tainted, flawed and the maker of a president
Andrew Sullivan
IF THE Kennedy funeral looked a little like a royal one, we should not have been surprised. Three living former presidents attended the rites. The tributes have been pouring in across the political spectrum. Orrin Hatch, the arch-conservative Utah senator, even composed a little song and sang it on YouTube. Among the memorably awful lyrics: “Just honour him/ Honour him/ And every fear/ Will be a thing of the past.”
The iconography of Kennedy’s passing was laden with memories of the Kennedy past: the death in the famous compound at Hyannisport, the family mass in the little room that overlooks Nantucket Sound, the tour through Boston (across the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway), the burial at Arlington next to his two brothers. It felt like a national day of mourning, rather than a 77-year-old pol’s passing.
This is unusual because Edward Kennedy dies not a martyr as Bobby and Jack did, nor as a war hero, like his oldest brother. He died a mere senator, whose career was so long, as George Will noted, that it comprised more than one-fifth of the entire existence of the US constitution.
It is, perhaps, a young country and it holds tight to its legendary families, even in less than glamorous hands. Kennedy, after all, was a failed presidential candidate, a philanderer and drunk, and his most cherished legislative goal – health insurance for all Americans – remained elusive to his dying days (if closer than ever before).
His passionate left-liberalism (far more orthodox than his brothers’) endured through the conservative era of the last quarter century to the fluid ideological wreckage of today.
But he never rose past the position of majority whip, a post he held for only two years, in part because he was also clearly complicit in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, a woman he left dying in a car he crashed, and whose fate he first ducked rather than reported.
And his memorably vicious attack on Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court remains as much in the minds of Republicans as his stirring 1980 “The dream shall never die” speech at the Democratic convention resonates with Democrats. This is a mixed legacy, if a thoroughly human one.
So why all the fuss? The answer, of course, is dynasty, one of democratic America’s greatest and most endearing self-contradictions. The country that began by throwing off a monarchy more than two centuries ago immediately plunged into a democratic form of dynasticism. The Adams family produced two presidents in short order and, later, the Roosevelts and Bushes managed two as well.
But the Kennedy dynasty was the first in the modern era to combine tradition with glamour. Dynasties summon up images of fusty old clans with large rural estates, servants and coats of arms. That’s certainly how the sprawling Roosevelt clan appeared and how the Bush clan, summering in Kennebunkport under the auspices of a matriarch just as stern as Rose, still come off.
The Kennedys were different. They gave the world a dashing, witty, young president, a charismatic, assassinated attorney-general, the breathless stylishness of Jackie and the vistas of Hyannisport in the summer and children playing under the desk in the Oval Office. If this was a kind of dynasty, it was more in line with Diana Spencer than with Charles Windsor. It was a dynasty forged as much in Hollywood as in the politics of Boston. And when Hollywood dynasty is linked to actual power, its electoral aphrodisiac intensifies.
This is what the Kennedys meant and what this weekend of mourning really pays tribute to. They were and are a deeply flawed triumvirate – Jack, Bobby and Ted – but they managed to harness a sense of history with destiny, wrapped up in a robust liberalism.
Viewed dispassionately, of course, the Kennedy presidency is not exactly a triumph. It began with the disaster of the Bay of Pigs and careened through the Cuban missile crisis, beset all the while with staggering private misbehaviour in the White House, ties to mafia thugs and an ongoing war of nerves with J Edgar Hoover. Bobby Kennedy began his public career as a pursuer of communists in the government and ended it in that remarkable moral transformation of the 1968 campaign.
Ted Kennedy got his Senate seat after a Kennedy stooge kept it warm for him for a few months (until he was old enough), and lived through Chappaquiddick, a broken, alcoholic marriage and the deaths of two nephews.
And yet the Kennedys’ wit and rhetoric and intelligence and obvious passion – seen through the retroactive prism of tragedy – came to the surface and never really disappeared. They managed that great patrician feat – of seeming to be in touch with the common man because of their privilege, rather than despite it.
Ted pushed the boundaries of this. He offended the white working classes of Boston by his support for bussing African-American schoolchildren into white neighbourhoods.
His old nemesis, The Boston Herald’s Howie Carr, put the point well last week: “Whether it was court-ordered bussing in Boston in the 1970s, or the affirmative-action policies that stymied the careers of so many of his family’s traditional voters, Kennedy never grasped the depth of the blue-collar frustration as he veered left. What infuriated them even more was that so many of them had grown up in homes where on one side of the mantel was a faded photo of the martyred JFK, and on the other, the Pope, with a dried-up Palm Sunday frond between them.”
Yes, that sounds familiar. But, no, it wasn’t the whole truth. The Irish and Italian Catholics of Boston felt much closer to Ted than to many others more conservative than he – their former governor, Mitt Romney, for example, or their current one, Deval Patrick. Kennedy’s travails with the bottle and the boobs won them over; his tragedies brought people closer to him; and his long arduous career proved his mettle.
For Ted achieved what neither Bobby nor Jack did: he worked in the legislative branch tirelessly over a long period of time, doing the dull stuff of politics that changes lives.
His office was legendary for its constituent outreach. You can’t go far on Cape Cod, for example, without bumping into one of his projects. A call from Kennedy’s office had more frisson than anyone else’s and more clout.
He also worked across the aisle, helping George W Bush to pass his No Child Left Behind Act to improve school standards, joining with John McCain to forge a humane immigration reform.
He was a senator able to be fiercely ideological and also fiercely pragmatic, able to develop friendships beyond politics – friendships that are the grease that makes the Senate work. He was a master of parliamentary procedures and the helm of a ship of highly skilled staffers.
He was also, of course, a politician. Despite being a proponent of green energy, he single-handedly prevented the construction of a wind farm off Cape Cod because it might obstruct his sea view. In 2004 he fought hard to remove Romney’s right to appoint a temporary senator if John Kerry were to win the presidency. And yet in the week before his death he urged a return to the appointment of a temporary senator – in order to keep a Democratic vote for healthcare reform intact. He could be partisan and hypocritical, as well as bipartisan and principled.
He was also, I can personally attest, the de facto father of the orphaned children of Jack and Bobby. This was no easy role. One of my oldest friends is one of Bobby Kennedy’s sons, Max.
I saw in Max’s life, in his own successful battle against addiction, the guiding hand of his Uncle Teddy.
Ted couldn’t rescue all of them – David Kennedy, Max’s brother, died of a drug overdose. But he understood the disease of alcoholism that coursed through the family, sensed the danger of fatherlessness among his nieces and nephews and his own struggles against addiction fortified the others. And at every tragedy – Michael’s death while skiing, David’s in a lonely hotel room, John F Kennedy Jr’s plane crash – Ted was the rampart of the clan. He was a father figure in many ways.
His final son was Barack Obama. Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama early in the campaign, his virtual anointing of him with the Kennedy mantle, was a pivotal point in the defeat of that other burgeoning dynasty, the Clintons. Obama was moved to tears by the gesture and he isn’t moved too often. And he was touched in part because of the liberalism that Kennedy unfashionably held to: a firm belief that government must be at hand to help the poor, the marginalised or the needy.
Kennedy’s insistence on what he saw as racial justice and his deepest passion, universal healthcare, framed his legacy. There wasn’t a gay rights bill this compulsive heterosexual didn’t champion. Even if you disagreed with him on some issues, as I did, there was nothing subtle or contrived about his liberalism.
It was a big-hearted sort of politics, an expansively righteous sense of duty and, as such, an integral part of what makes Anglo-American politics work. Conservatism needs a Reagan and Thatcher; liberalism needs its Kennedys. Because we all need myth and we all need royalty – even if it is strained through the sieve of democratic rule.
Enoch Powell once remarked that all political careers end in failure. The strange thing about Kennedy is that his own might end posthumously in success. His anointed son Obama and a Democratic Congress will almost certainly pass a bill this autumn that will expand access to healthcare to all Americans. He fought for this for 40 years; and despite extreme resistance, peaking now, it seems clear that the Democrats have the votes to pass universal insurance, paid by government subsidy, for private healthcare.
It will cost $1 trillion (£614 billion) over the next decade, less than the Iraq war, if more than the United States can afford right now. But the passing of Kennedy will doubtless stiffen liberal spines to see it through.
Republicans believe they are doing to Obama what they did to Bill Clinton in 1993 and 1994. But Obama won a clear majority while Clinton got only 43% of the vote; and this time, business needs reform because of soaring costs as much as the needy; and the insurance and drug companies are eager for all those new clients.
Clinton, moreover, failed to get his bill, rendering him bloodied; Obama will not fail to get his. There is a poignancy in this, whatever you think of the details of the bill. And Kennedy’s passing is a clarion call to finish the dream he worked for for so long.
As The New York Times elegantly put it, Kennedy “was a celebrity, sometimes a self-parody, a hearty friend, an implacable foe, a man of large faith and large flaws, a melancholy character who persevered, drank deeply and sang loudly. He was a Kennedy”.
Maybe it’s my Irish blood or my love for some of his family – but even as I recognise that his vision of politics was different from my own, I am glad he lived and lived long.
He was in the end more than a Kennedy. He was a senator. He worked the hard way, in often unglamorous circumstances, mostly in the minority, but he worked.
Some in dynasties rise high and fall far. Others provide the drop-shadow of their siblings’ drama: the prosaic work of legislating that endures even after the dream has died.

Word for Word Saul AlinskyKnow Thine Enemy

By NOAM COHEN NY TIMES
Saul Alinsky, the Chicago activist and writer whose street-smart tactics influenced generations of community organizers, most famously the current president, could not have been more clear about which side he was on. In his 1971 text, “Rules for Radicals,” Mr. Alinsky, who died in 1972, explains his purpose: “What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. ‘The Prince’ was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. ‘Rules for Radicals’ is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”
It is an irony of the current skirmishing about health care that those who could be considered Mr. Alinsky’s sworn enemies — the groups, many industry sponsored, who are trying to shout down Congressional town hall meetings — have taken a page (chapters, really) from his handbook on community organizing. In an article in The Financial Times last week, Dick Armey, the former Republican House majority leader, now an organizer against the Democrats’ proposals on health care, offered his opinion: “What I think of Alinsky is that he was very good at what he did but what he did was not good.”
The disruption of the town hall meetings has many Alinsky trademarks: using spectacle to make up for lack of numbers; targeting an individual to make a large point; and trying to use ridicule to persuade the undecided. Here are excerpts from “Rules for Radicals.”
Mr. Alinsky observes that “any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical”:
One of our greatest revolutionary heroes was Francis Marion of South Carolina, who became immortalized in American history as “the Swamp Fox.” Marion was an outright revolutionary guerrilla. ...Cornwallis and the regular British Army found their plans and operations harried and disorganized by Marion’s guerrilla tactics. Infuriated by the effectiveness of his operations, and incapable of coping with them, the British denounced him as a criminal and charged that he did not engage in warfare “like a gentleman” or “a Christian.”
Don’t worry, Mr. Alinsky advised, if they call you names:
The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a “dangerous enemy.” ... Here again we find that it is power and fear that are essential to the development of faith. This need is met by the establishment’s use of the brand “dangerous,” for in that one word the establishment reveals its fear of the organizer, its fear that he represents a threat to its omnipotence. Now the organizer has his “birth certificate” and can begin.
The first step:
The organizer dedicated to changing the life of a particular community must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression. He must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them, for unless there is controversy people are not concerned enough to act.
Being on TV can be empowering:
A man is living in a slum tenement. He doesn’t know anybody and nobody knows him. He doesn’t care for anyone because no one cares for him. ...When the organizer approaches him part of what begins to be communicated is that through the organization and its power he will get his birth certificate for life, that he will become known, that things will change from the drabness of a life where all that changes is the calendar. This same man, in a demonstration at City Hall, might find himself confronting the mayor and saying, “Mr. Mayor, we have had it up to here and we are not going to take it any more.” Television cameramen put their microphones in front of him and ask, “What is your name, sir?” “John Smith.” Nobody ever asked him what his name was before. ... Suddenly he’s alive!
Make yourself look as big and scary as possible:
For an elementary illustration of tactics, take parts of your face as the point of reference; your eyes, your ears, and your nose. First the eyes; if you have organized a vast, mass-based people’s organization, you can parade it visibly before the enemy and openly show your power. Second the ears; if your organization is small in numbers, then do what Gideon did: conceal the members in the dark but raise a din and clamor that will make the listener believe that your organization numbers many more than it does. Third, the nose; if your organization is too tiny even for noise, stink up the place.
Find a single person to focus your energies on:
It should be borne in mind that the target is always trying to shift responsibility to get out of being the target. There is a constant squirming and moving and strategy — purposeful, and malicious at times, other times just for straight self-survival — on the part of the designated target. The forces of change must keep this in mind and pin that target down securely.
In one of his sharpest passages, Mr. Alinsky tells his readers, living in their “radicalized dream world,” not to ignore the lower-middle class:
They are a fearful people, who feel threatened from all sides: the nightmare of pending retirement and old age with a Social Security decimated by inflation; the shadow of unemployment from a slumping economy, with blacks, already fearsome because the cultures conflict, threatening job competition; the high cost of long-term illness; and finally with mortgages outstanding, they dread the possibility of property devaluation from non-whites moving into the neighborhood. ...Remember that even if you cannot win over the lower middle-class, at least parts of them must be persuaded to where there is at least communication, then to a series of partial agreements and a willingness to abstain from hard opposition as changes takes place.
His final rule is that there is no handbook for life:
I hesitate to spell out specific applications of these tactics. I remember an unfortunate experience with my “Reveille for Radicals,” in which I collected accounts of particular actions and tactics employed in organizing a number of communities. For some time after the book was published I got reports that would-be organizers were using this book as a manual, and whenever they were confronted with a puzzling situation they would retreat into some vestibule or alley and thumb through to find the answer!

NY Times
A Conservative’s Road to Same-Sex Marriage Advocacy

By JO BECKER
Theodore B. Olson’s office is a testament to his iconic status in the conservative legal movement. A framed photograph of Ronald Reagan, the first of two Republican presidents Mr. Olson served, is warmly inscribed with “heartfelt thanks.” Fifty-five white quills commemorate each of his appearances before the Supreme Court, where he most famously argued the 2000 election case that put George W. Bush in the White House. On the bookshelf sits a Defense Department medal honoring his legal defense of Mr. Bush’s counterterrorism policies after Sept. 11.
But in a war room down the hall, where Mr. Olson is preparing for what he believes could be the most important case of his career, the binders stuffed with briefs, case law and notes offer a different take on a man many liberals love to hate. They are filled with arguments Mr. Olson hopes will lead to a Supreme Court decision with the potential to reshape the legal and social landscape along the lines of cases like Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade: the legalization of same-sex marriage nationwide.
Given the traditional battle lines on the issue, Mr. Olson’s decision to file a lawsuit challenging California’s recent ban on same-sex marriage has stirred up stereotype-rattled suspicion on both sides.
“For conservatives who don’t like what I’m doing, it’s, ‘If he just had someone in his family we’d forgive him,’ ” Mr. Olson said. “For liberals it’s such a freakish thing that it’s, ‘He must have someone in his family, otherwise a conservative couldn’t possibly have these views.’ It’s frustrating that people won’t take it on face value.”
While Mr. Olson came to the case by a serendipitous route that began late last year with Rob Reiner, a Hollywood director widely known for his Democratic activism, he said his support of same-sex marriage stemmed from longstanding personal and legal conviction. He sees nothing inconsistent with that stance and his devotion to conservative legal causes: The same antipathy toward government discrimination, he said, inspired him to take up another cause that many on the right applauded — a lengthy campaign to dismantle affirmative action programs.
A hearing in the marriage case, filed on behalf of two gay couples, is scheduled for Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco. Practicing his opening argument recently, Mr. Olson declared that California’s ban is “utterly without justification” and stigmatizes gay men and lesbians as “second-class and unworthy.”
“This case,” he said afterward, “could involve the rights and happiness and equal treatment of millions of people.”
Chuck Cooper, who is representing proponents of California’s ban, argues that such a “radical redefinition of the ancient institution of marriage” would require the court to find a right that does not exist in the Constitution — the very type of judicial activism Mr. Olson has long decried. “I never expected him to take this case, or at least not this side of it,” said Mr. Cooper, a friend of Mr. Olson from the Reagan Justice Department.
The lawsuit comes as societal views on same-sex marriage are rapidly evolving. Six states have now authorized gay couples to marry, and the politics of the issue increasingly defy convention. President Obama, for example, has said he opposes same-sex marriage, while former Vice President Dick Cheney, whose daughter is a lesbian, supports it.
Even so, Mr. Olson’s involvement stands out. As one of the leading Supreme Court advocates of his generation, he commands wide respect in the legal community, and his views carry considerable weight with the justices, according to Steven G. Calabresi, a law professor at Northwestern University and a leader with Mr. Olson in the Federalist Society, a hothouse for conservative legal theory.
“While some will think that this is an unpardonable error and rethink their views on Ted,” Mr. Calabresi said, “I think it will cause others to take a second look at the argument he is making.”
In the gay community, though, conspiracy theories initially abounded that Mr. Olson had taken the case to sabotage it. While many have since come around, fears remain that a loss in the closely divided Supreme Court could deal a setback to the movement.
Opponents have flooded Mr. Olson with accusatory and sometimes hate-filled e-mail. “A disgraceful betrayal of the legal principles you purported to stand for,” read one message. “Homo” read another.
Conservative colleagues are kinder, but many remain bewildered. Former Judge Robert H. Bork, a close friend who has called same-sex marriage a “judicial sin,” said he could not bear to speak to Mr. Olson about the case.
“I don’t want to get into an argument,” Mr. Bork said. “But I’d like to know why.”
Unexpected Ally
Last November, Mr. Reiner and his wife, Michele, invited two prominent Democratic consultants, Chad Griffin and Kristina Schake, to lunch at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Ten days before, voters had passed Proposition 8, an amendment to the California Constitution negating a State Supreme Court decision that had briefly legalized same-sex marriage. Mr. Griffin, who had come out eight years earlier, said he felt like he had been gut-punched.
As the friends commiserated and discussed what to do next, an acquaintance named Kate Moulene stopped by. In a phone conversation later that afternoon, she suggested that Ms. Reiner contact her sister’s former husband, a leading constitutional lawyer. His name was Ted Olson, she said, and “knowing him as I do, I bet he’d be on your side of this.”
“Ted Olson?” Ms. Reiner recalls exclaiming. “Why on earth would I want to talk to him?”
Mr. Olson’s reputation, after all, went far beyond Bush v. Gore. As head of the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department in the Reagan administration, Mr. Olson had been an architect of the president’s drive to ease government regulation and end race-based school busing and affirmative action set-asides in federal contracting. He later provided assistance to those seeking to impeach President Bill Clinton.
As Mr. Bush’s solicitor general, in charge of representing the government before the Supreme Court, Mr. Olson became identified with the administration’s broad interpretation of its wartime power in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, in which his wife, Barbara, a conservative commentator, was killed. (Mr. Olson nonetheless privately counseled that terrorism suspects be given certain basic legal rights, administration officials said, correctly predicting that failure to do so would lead to Supreme Court setbacks.)
Still, Mr. Reiner was intrigued. The tactician in him saw the wisdom of hiring a lawyer who had won 44 of the 55 Supreme Court cases he argued; the director grasped the dramatic impact of such a casting decision. He dispatched Mr. Griffin to consult with experts about the feasibility of a federal court challenge to Proposition 8 and to gauge Mr. Olson’s interest.
“I thought, if someone as conservative as Ted Olson were to get involved in this issue, it would go a long, long way in terms of presenting this in the right kind of light,” Mr. Reiner said.
In fact, Mr. Olson’s history was more complex than Mr. Reiner imagined.
Mr. Olson had become active in the Republican Party as a college and law student in California in the 1960s, long before the rise of the religious right and its focus on social issues. He gravitated toward a particularly Western brand of conservatism that valued small government and maximum individual liberty, becoming one of a few law students at the University of California, Berkeley to support Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential bid.
At the time, the South was riven by racial strife, and during a college debate trip to Texas, Mr. Olson got his first close-up view of blatant discrimination. Lady Booth Olson, a lawyer whom Mr. Olson married in 2006, said he still tears up when telling how a black teammate was turned away from a restaurant in Amarillo. Mr. Olson “tore into the owner,” insisting the team would not eat unless everyone was served, recalled the team’s coach, Paul Winters. “If he sees something that is wrong in his mind, he goes after it,” Mr. Winters said.
Years later, during the Reagan administration, when Mr. Olson was asked if the Justice Department could dismiss a prosecutor for being gay, he wrote that it was “improper to deny employment or to terminate anyone on the basis of sexual conduct.” In 1984, Mr. Olson returned to private practice and was succeeded by Mr. Cooper, his adversary in the marriage case. The switch eliminated “what was seen as a certain libertarian squishiness at the Office of Legal Counsel under Ted,” Mr. Calabresi said.
During the Bush administration, Mr. Olson was consulted on a plan to amend the Constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman. “What were we thinking putting something like that in the Constitution?” he recalls telling the White House.
Around that time, state legislatures were debating alternatives to same-sex marriage like civil unions, but Mr. Olson said he saw them as political half-measures that continued to treat gay men and lesbians as separate and unequal. Over dinner at a Capitol Hill restaurant, he argued that marriage was an essential component of happiness that gay couples had every right to enjoy, recalled David Frum, a conservative author and former Bush speechwriter.
“I was really impressed and struck by how important the issue was to him,” Mr. Frum said. “The majority view at the table was on the other side, but his view was, ‘You have to make peace with this because it is sure to happen, and you will see it in your lifetime.’ ”

Confident Advocate
Mr. Olson signed on to the California case after a meeting at Mr. Reiner’s home last December, telling the group gathered there that he would not “just be some hired gun,” Ms. Schake recalled. In fact, he had already rebuffed a query about defending Proposition 8.
Still, to allay suspicions on the left, he suggested bringing on his adversary in Bush v. Gore, David Boies, whom he had since befriended. Both lawyers agreed to waive part of their fees.
“I thought, why wouldn’t I take this case?” Mr. Olson said. “Because someone at the Federalist Society thinks I’d be making bad law? I wouldn’t be making bad law.”
In Mr. Olson’s analysis, the situation in California presents a favorable set of facts for an equal protection argument. Proposition 8 created three classes: straight couples who could marry, gay men and lesbians who had married in the brief period before the ban, and gay couples who wanted to marry but now could not.
As he began honing the arguments, he sounded out a few confidants, including his wife, Lady.
One of those whose advice he sought was Robert McConnell, a friend from the Reagan Justice Department. Mr. McConnell, a practicing Catholic, said he told Mr. Olson that as a religious matter, he believed that marriage ought to be reserved for two people who can procreate. He said Mr. Olson replied that while he respected his convictions, he considered it a civil-rights issue.
Mr. Olson, who is not a regular churchgoer, began to elaborate on his view that religious beliefs were insufficient legal justification for government to refuse to recognize same-sex marriage, but soon paused. “You don’t agree with me, do you?” Mr. McConnell recalled him saying.
Ms. Olson, a Democrat, said she was thrilled that “on this case we’ll be on the same wavelength.” She said Mr. Olson’s mother, Yvonne, expressed some initial concern that a court decision overturning Proposition 8 would disenfranchise voters, but came around after Mr. Olson explained that voters cannot impose mandates that violate constitutionally protected rights.
In the lawsuit, filed in May, he asserted that Proposition 8 had done just that.
Since then, he and Mr. Cooper have been filing dueling briefs.
The Supreme Court has long recognized marriage between men and women as a right, most notably in a 1967 case overturning bans on interracial marriage. Since sexual orientation, unlike race, is not mentioned in the Constitution, the question is whether that right extends to gay men and lesbians.
The answer, in Mr. Cooper’s view, can be found in a 1970 case, in which the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of a lower court ruling that marriage could be limited to men and women. But Mr. Olson points to two more recent Supreme Court cases.
The first is a 1996 decision in which six of the nine justices, citing equal protection grounds, struck down an amendment to the Colorado Constitution that stripped gay residents of existing civil rights protections. This, Mr. Olson argues, is similar to Proposition 8’s negating the California Supreme Court decision that recognized the rights of gay couples to marry.
The second is the court’s 6-3 decision in Lawrence v. Texas, striking down laws criminalizing sodomy in 2003. Not only did the majority find that Texas had no rational basis to intrude into private sexual behavior protected by the Constitution’s due process clause, it also declared that gay men and lesbians should be free to enter into relationships in their homes and “still retain their dignity.”
Mr. Cooper asserts that Mr. Olson is stretching the scope of the Lawrence decision, pointing out that it dealt with the criminalization of private sexual behavior, not a state’s duty to recognize a marriage. But Mr. Olson notes that no less a conservative than Justice Antonin Scalia argued in a blistering dissent that the majority in Lawrence had indeed opened the door to same-sex marriage.
Given that the Lawrence case established gay sex as a protected right, Mr. Olson argues, the state must demonstrate that it has a rational basis for discriminating against a class of citizens simply for engaging in that behavior.
He dismisses Mr. Cooper’s contention that the California ban is justified by that state’s interest in encouraging relationships that promote procreation and the raising of children by biological parents. If sexual orientation is not a choice — and Mr. Olson argues that it is not — then the ban is not going to encourage his clients to enter into heterosexual, child-producing marriages, he insists. Moreover, he says, California has waived the right to make that argument by recognizing domestic partnerships that bestow most benefits of marriage.
And that is if the state wanted to: Mr. Olson structured the lawsuit so the named defendants are two proponents of same-sex marriage, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Jerry Brown. Both have filed helpful briefs questioning the constitutionality of Proposition 8.
Last month, at a Federalist Society lunch, Mr. Olson delivered his annual roundup of the Supreme Court term. He was greeted warmly, but there was palpable discomfort over the marriage case. Not a single person mentioned it to him, save for an oblique ribbing by David Bossie, whom Mr. Olson is representing in a case involving his scathing documentary about Hillary Rodham Clinton. After pecking Ms. Olson on the cheek, Mr. Bossie told her husband, “I’m not going to kiss you, even though apparently you wouldn’t mind.”
William Bradford Reynolds, another Reagan-era colleague, said later that while Mr. Olson presented a thoughtful case, “He’s taking a more assertive view of how one should interpret the Constitution than you would normally expect Ted to take.”
Mr. Olson is confident. Paul Katami, one of the plaintiffs recruited for the lawsuit, recalled Mr. Olson’s words shortly before it was announced: “He put his arm around me and said, ‘We’re going to plan your wedding in a couple of years — this is going to happen.’ ”

From The London Times
Zhuo Lin: widow of Deng Xiaoping
For the most part China’s Communist leaders conduct their private lives in the same place as their politics: behind high, forbidding walls that make both activities a mystery for all save the party elite and their intimates. Spouses (they are almost always wives in China’s male-dominated leadership) rarely appear with their partners on public occasions; and if their children are in the spotlight, it is usually because they have used their political connections to succeed in business.
The wider world was thus offered but a fleeting glimpse of the life of one of China’s most remarkable “political” wives — Zhuo Lin, widow of the former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, who survived her husband by more than 12 years. For the best part of 60 years Zhuo lived alongside the man who endured the rigours of Communist politics to steer China towards its current status of a global giant whose growing power is felt in almost every area of international life.
Her husband’s place in the great drama of China’s national rejuvenation is assured, despite his part in the military suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Her own role as companion, confidante and counsellor to one of the political giants of the 20th century remains largely a matter of speculation.
Some things are clear. She was born in Xuanwei county in the in southwestern province of Yunnan, the third daughter of Pu Zhongjie, a prosperous meat merchant known as the “Ham King” of Yunnan. Her parents named her Pu Qiongying, and she soon proved a talented and determined young woman, perhaps the result of being brought up in comfortable surroundings and with the support of a father who was committed to the cause of Sun Yat-sen, the republican leader.
Pu excelled at athletics, and in 1931 was selected to represent Yunnan in the All China Games scheduled for Beiping (as Beijing was then known, the capital having moved to Nanjing). She had reached Hong Kong en route to the north when Japanese aggression in Manchuria forced the Games’ postponement. Pu told her parents that she had no intention of returning home and persisted with the journey to Beiping where she enrolled in the city’s No 1 Girls’ School.
Japanese intentions towards China generated an angry nationalism among Chinese students in the 1930s, and when full-scale war began after the Marco Bridge Incident of July 1937, Pu abandoned her plans to study physics at Beijing University and travelled to Yanan, headquarters of Mao Zedong’s Communist movement.
Immersing herself in revolutionary life in this remote, arid region of China, she joined the Communist Party and changed her name to Zhuo, probably to shed her “capitalist past”.
In August 1938 she met Deng, 12 years her senior, twice married and twice divorced. He promptly asked her to become his third wife.
She was not enthusiastic, according to some sources. “I thought I was too young ... and I wanted to marry an intellectual,” she is supposed to have said at the time. Both objections were quickly overcome: the couple were married the same month that they met (Mao attended the ceremony), and then left for the front line, where Deng was political commissar of the 129th division of the Eighth Route Army. It was the start of a peripatetic, tempestuous life for Zhuo, determined by her husband’s political fortunes.
In 1949 they moved to Chongqing, the former wartime capital, where Deng was given the task of bringing the entire south west of the country under firm Communist control. The area included his home province of Sichuan as well as that of Zhuo, Yunnan. The couple by now already had two daughters and a son; a third daughter, Deng Rong, who was to become her father’s private secretary and biographer, was born in 1950, and another son in 1952.
In the same year Mao ordered Deng to Beijing, where he moved rapidly up the political ladder, and the family settled in a comfortable mansion in the secluded compound of Zhongnanhai, once beloved of China’s emperors. Some reports say that Deng told his wife that she should keep a low profile now that he had become a national leader, and she declined jobs in government and party departments.
This did not spare her persecution in the Cultural Revolution, when her husband was branded a “capitalist roader” and subjected to criticism, dismissal and exile to the countryside.
Between 1969 and 1973 Deng and Zhou lived in an infantry school in Jiangxi, and were forced to work in a nearby tractor repair factory. Their oldest son, Deng Pufang, fared worse: he jumped off the roof of a university dormitory in Beijing to escape persecution by Red Guards and has been confined to a wheelchair ever since.
Mao’s ailing health provided an opportunity for the family to return to Beijing and for Deng to resume his political career in a subdued fashion. Yet his attempts to rescue the country’s economy were interrupted by the Gang of Four led by Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, and he was exiled again in 1976, though not for long.
In 1977 he emerged yet again and quickly established himself as China’s paramount leader, ending the excesses of Mao, who had died in 1976, and opening up the country to contact with the outside world and capitalist-style reforms at home.
The ensuing 15 years or so were the “era of Deng Xiaoping”, marked by rapid economic growth, China’s growing global power and the agreements that secured the return of Hong Kong and Macau to Chinese rule. Zhuo kept home for Deng during these years in their courtyard house in the Diananmen district of the city, where they lived with their by now much extended family.
Yet politics still intruded in the Deng household. As student unrest engulfed Beijing in the spring of 1989, the embattled leadership often gathered at Deng’s home to discuss the crisis. Several of his fellow veteran revolutionaries urged Deng to move his family into Zhongnanhai, where they could enjoy greater security. He is said to have stubbornly refused, and the immediate crisis passed with the bloody suppression, on Deng’s own orders, of the protests on the night of June 4. Zhuo’s views on these dramatic events are unknown but they were probably at one with those of her husband.
Occasional photographs of the Deng family appeared during these years, but it was not until his death, in February 1997, that Zhuo and her children were in the spotlight. They featured in the many official obsequies that marked his passing, including the scattering of his ashes across various parts of the country.
In June 1997, in one of her last public appearances, Zhuo travelled to Hong Kong to attend the ceremony marking the transfer of sovereignty from Britain to China. In his speech, Tung Chee-hwa, the territory’s first Chinese Chief Executive, acknowledged her presence in the audience. Her face wreathed in smiles, Zhuo stood to receive the applause of a selected audience appreciative of her husband’s role in making the historic occasion possible.

Zhuo Lin, widow of Deng Xiaoping, was born on April 6, 1916. She died on July 29, 2009, aged 93

NY TIMES Op-Ed Columnist

Mad Men’ Crashes Woodstock’s Birthday

By FRANK RICH
IN our 24/7 mediasphere, this weekend’s misty Woodstock commemorations must share the screen with Americans screaming bloody murder at town hall meetings. It’s a vivid reminder that what most endures from America, 1969, is not the peace-and-love flower-power bacchanal of Woodstock legend but a certain style of political rage. The angry white folk shouting down their congressmen might be — literally in some cases — those angry white students whose protests disrupted campuses before and after the Woodstock interlude of summer vacation ’69.
The most historically resonant television event this weekend, however, may be none of the above. Sunday night is the premiere of the third season of “Mad Men,” the AMC series about a fictional Madison Avenue ad agency in the early 1960s. The first episode is to be simulcast in Times Square after a costume party where fans can parade their retro wardrobes. This promotional event is Woodstock, corporate style, with martinis instead of marijuana, Sinatra instead of Shankar and narrow ties supplanting the tie-dyed.
Woodstock’s 40th anniversary is being celebrated as well — with new books, a new documentary, a new Ang Lee movie and the inevitable remastered DVDs and CDs. But it’s “Mad Men” that has the pulse of our moment. Though the show unfolds in an earlier America than Woodstock, it seems of far more recent vintage, for better and for worse.
As many boomers have noted, Woodstock’s nirvana was a one-of-a-kind, one-weekend wonder anyway, not the utopia of subsequent myth. It wasn’t even meant to be free; in the chaos, the crowds overwhelmed and overran the ticket sellers. That concept of “free” — known to some adults as “theft” — persists today in the downloading of “free” music, which has decimated the recording industry far more effectively than brown acid ever did.
Even in Woodstock’s immediate aftermath, there was no consensus on its meaning. A Times editorial titled “Nightmare in the Catskills” saw “a nightmare of mud and stagnation” and asked rhetorically, “What kind of culture is it that can produce so colossal a mess?” Time magazine, surprisingly, was more sympathetic. “It is an open question,” the writer intoned, “whether some as yet unknown politician could exploit the deep emotions of today’s youth to build a politics of ecstasy.” Actually, both proved wrong. Woodstock was no apocalypse, but neither was it a political turning point. Nixon would be re-elected in 1972, and the only politician with a touch of ecstasy, Robert Kennedy, had already been murdered.
Ten years later, a New Yorker cartoon depicted a Woodstock reunion as a buttoned-down yuppie cocktail party, not a hippie love-in. By then, the ’60s counterculture had been completely commodified. Today a Woodstock couldn’t exist without corporate sponsorship; in fact this weekend’s planned 40th-anniversary concert was canceled for lack of one. Any large-scale youth “community” would be virtual, on Facebook and Twitter, and so might some of the sex. Only pot remains eternal.
That the early ’60s of “Mad Men” seems more contemporary than the late ’60s of Woodstock has little to do with the earlier period’s style or culture in any case (however superior the clothes). The rock giants of Woodstock remain exponentially more popular than Vic Damone and Perry Como, the forgotten crooners heard in “Mad Men.” The repressive racial and sexual order of Sterling Cooper, the show’s fictional ad agency, is also a relic, in part because of the revolutions that accelerated in the Woodstock era. The misogyny, racism and homophobia practiced in the executive suites of “Mad Men” are hardly extinct — and neither are the cigarettes that most of the characters chain-smoke — but they are in various stages of remission.
What makes the show powerful is not nostalgia for an America that few want to bring back — where women were most valued as sex objects or subservient housewives, where blacks were, at best, second-class citizens, and where the hedonistic guzzling of gas and gin went unquestioned. Rather, it’s our identification with an America that, for all its serious differences with our own, shares our growing anxiety about the prospect of cataclysmic change. “Mad Men” is about the dawn of a new era, and we, too, are at such a dawn. And we are uncertain and worried about what comes next.
In his new book “1959: The Year Everything Changed,” Fred Kaplan writes about the forces that were roiling America in the year before “Mad Men” begins. It was in 1959 that Berry Gordy founded Motown, that G. D. Searle applied to the F.D.A. for approval of the birth-control pill, and that Texas Instruments announced the advent of the microchip. The year began with a Soviet technological triumph, the launching of the spacecraft Lunik I, and ended with an embarrassing capitalist fiasco, Ford Motor’s yanking of the ignominious Edsel. Along the way the first two American soldiers were killed in South Vietnam. “By the end of 1959,” Kaplan writes, “all the elements were in place for the upheavals of the subsequent decades.”
The first season of “Mad Men” was set in 1960. This season — and there will be no spoilers here — opens in 1963. That’s the year of Beatlemania’s first sightings, of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s march on Washington and, of course, of gunfire in Dallas. Bruce Handy sums it up in the current Vanity Fair: “As in Hitchcock, the characters are unaware of shocks that the audience knows all too well lie ahead, whether they be the Kennedy assassination and women’s lib or long sideburns and the lasting influence of Doyle Dane Bernbach’s witty, self-deprecating ‘lemon’ ad for Volkswagen.”
What we don’t know is how the characters will be rocked by these changes. But we’re reasonably certain it won’t be pretty. That’s where the drama is, and it’s tense.
In the world of television, “Mad Men” is notorious for drawing great press and modest audiences. This could be the season when the viewers catch up, in part because the show is catching up to the level of anxiety we feel in 2009. In the first two seasons, the series was promoted with the slogan “Where the Truth Lies.” This year, it’s “The World’s Gone Mad.” The ad hyping the season premiere depicts the impeccably dressed Don Draper, the agency executive played by Jon Hamm, sitting in his office calmly smoking a Lucky Strike as floodwater rises to his waist.
To be underwater — well, many Americans know what that’s like right now. But we are also at that 1963-like pivot point of our history, with a new young president unlike any we’ve seen before, and with the promise of a new frontier whose boundaries are a mystery. Something is happening here, as Bob Dylan framed this mood the last time around, but you don’t know what it is. We feel Don Draper’s disorientation as his once rock-solid ’50s America starts to be swept away. We recognize his fear that the world could go mad.
It’s through this prism we might re-examine the raucous town hall eruptions this month. Even if they are inflated by activist organizations and cable-TV overexposure, they still cannot be dismissed entirely as made-for-media phenomena made-to-measure to fill the August news vacuum. Nor are they necessarily about health care. The twisted distortions about “death panels” and federal conspiracies “to pull the plug on grandma” are just too unhinged from the reality of any actual legislation. These bogus fears are psychological proxies for bigger traumas.
“It’s the economy, the facts that millions of people have lost their jobs and millions of others are afraid of losing theirs,” theorizes one heckled senator, Arlen Specter. That’s surely part of it. So is fear of more home foreclosures and credit card bankruptcies. So is fear of China, whose economic ascension stands in stark contrast to the collapse of traditional American industries from automobiles to newspapers. So is fear of Barack Obama, whose political ascension dramatizes the coming demographic order that will relegate whites to the American minority. In our uncharted new frontier, even the most reliable fixture for a half-century of American public life, the Kennedy family, is crumbling.
These anxieties coalesce in various permutations right, left and center. In most cases they don’t surface in the explosions we’re seeing at these town hall meetings but in the kind of quiet desperation that afflicts Don Draper and his cohort in “Mad Men.” But this summer’s explosions are also in keeping with 1963.
The political rage at the young, liberal Kennedy administration in some quarters that year was rabid and ominous. When Adlai Stevenson, then ambassador to the United Nations, spoke in Dallas that October, jeering zealots spat on him and struck him with a picketer’s placard. Stevenson advised Kennedy against traveling there. Dallas rushed to draft a new city ordinance restricting protesters’ movements at lawful assemblies and passed it on Nov. 18. We need not watch “Mad Men” to learn how that turned out.
Oh, to be back in the idyllic summer of 1969, when the biggest sin committed by the rebellious mobs at Woodstock was getting stoned. Something else is happening here in our anxious summer of 2009, when instead of flower-power and free love there are reports of death threats and fanatics packing guns.

Republican Death Trip

By PAUL KRUGMAN NY TIMES
“I am in this race because I don’t want to see us spend the next year re-fighting the Washington battles of the 1990s. I don’t want to pit Blue America against Red America; I want to lead a United States of America.” So declared Barack Obama in November 2007, making the case that Democrats should nominate him, rather than one of his rivals, because he could free the nation from the bitter partisanship of the past.
Some of us were skeptical. A couple of months after Mr. Obama gave that speech, I warned that his vision of a “different kind of politics” was a vain hope, that any Democrat who made it to the White House would face “an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can’t bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false.”
So, how’s it going?
Sure enough, President Obama is now facing the same kind of opposition that President Bill Clinton had to deal with: an enraged right that denies the legitimacy of his presidency, that eagerly seizes on every wild rumor manufactured by the right-wing media complex.
This opposition cannot be appeased. Some pundits claim that Mr. Obama has polarized the country by following too liberal an agenda. But the truth is that the attacks on the president have no relationship to anything he is actually doing or proposing.
Right now, the charge that’s gaining the most traction is the claim that health care reform will create “death panels” (in Sarah Palin’s words) that will shuffle the elderly and others off to an early grave. It’s a complete fabrication, of course. The provision requiring that Medicare pay for voluntary end-of-life counseling was introduced by Senator Johnny Isakson, Republican — yes, Republican — of Georgia, who says that it’s “nuts” to claim that it has anything to do with euthanasia.
And not long ago, some of the most enthusiastic peddlers of the euthanasia smear, including Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, and Mrs. Palin herself, were all for “advance directives” for medical care in the event that you are incapacitated or comatose. That’s exactly what was being proposed — and has now, in the face of all the hysteria, been dropped from the bill.
Yet the smear continues to spread. And as the example of Mr. Gingrich shows, it’s not a fringe phenomenon: Senior G.O.P. figures, including so-called moderates, have endorsed the lie.
Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, is one of these supposed moderates. I’m not sure where his centrist reputation comes from — he did, after all, compare critics of the Bush tax cuts to Hitler. But in any case, his role in the health care debate has been flat-out despicable.
Last week, Mr. Grassley claimed that his colleague Ted Kennedy’s brain tumor wouldn’t have been treated properly in other countries because they prefer to “spend money on people who can contribute more to the economy.” This week, he told an audience that “you have every right to fear,” that we “should not have a government-run plan to decide when to pull the plug on grandma.”
Again, that’s what a supposedly centrist Republican, a member of the Gang of Six trying to devise a bipartisan health plan, sounds like.
So much, then, for Mr. Obama’s dream of moving beyond divisive politics. The truth is that the factors that made politics so ugly in the Clinton years — the paranoia of a significant minority of Americans and the cynical willingness of leading Republicans to cater to that paranoia — are as strong as ever. In fact, the situation may be even worse than it was in the 1990s because the collapse of the Bush administration has left the G.O.P. with no real leaders other than Rush Limbaugh.
The question now is how Mr. Obama will deal with the death of his postpartisan dream.
So far, at least, the Obama administration’s response to the outpouring of hate on the right has had a deer-in-the-headlights quality. It’s as if officials still can’t wrap their minds around the fact that things like this can happen to people who aren’t named Clinton, as if they keep expecting the nonsense to just go away.
What, then, should Mr. Obama do? It would certainly help if he gave clearer and more concise explanations of his health care plan. To be fair, he’s gotten much better at that over the past couple of weeks.
What’s still missing, however, is a sense of passion and outrage — passion for the goal of ensuring that every American gets the health care he or she needs, outrage at the lies and fear-mongering that are being used to block that goal.
So can Mr. Obama, who can be so eloquent when delivering a message of uplift, rise to the challenge of unreasoning, unappeasable opposition? Only time will tell.

From The Sunday London Times
Obama still isn’t president in the south
Denying the leader’s American birth is just another form of racism
Andrew Sullivan
A naive person might believe that Barack Hussein Obama was born, as he has long said he was, in Hawaii to a young American mother and a distant father from Kenya. There are notices in two local papers and the certification of birth is filed in the state of Hawaii’s records.
An independent body — FactCheck.org — part of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, asked to see a copy of the original during last year’s campaign. FactCheck is non-partisan and takes all sorts of politicians’ claims to task. Here’s its take on Obama’s birth certificate: “FactCheck.org staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the original birth certificate. We conclude that it meets all of the requirements from the State Department for proving US citizenship. Claims that the document lacks a raised seal or a signature are false. . . Our conclusion: Obama was born in the USA just as he has always said.”
You may be persuaded. Once I’d seen the short-form certificate online, verified by independent journalists and vouched for by state authorities, I was, too. But staggering numbers of Americans remain sceptical. In fact, a majority of Republican voters — 58% — either do not believe or are unsure that Obama is a natural-born American citizen. That means most Republicans believe Obama is constitutionally illegitimate in the presidency because the constitution reserves it for those born in America. The scepticism is — surprise! — concentrated in the south. In Virginia, a southern state that backed Obama last year, only 53% are sure Obama is legitimately president and 70% of Virginia Republicans either don’t believe he is an American or aren’t sure. A poll last week also found that many Republicans believe this issue has not received enough media attention.
What do they believe? The most common theory is that Obama was born in Kenya while his mother was visiting his father. The Hawaiian birth certificate exists, the sceptics claim, because Hawaii recognises as natural-born citizens those born to American mothers temporarily outside the United States. The only problem with that theory is the certificate would mention that fact and it doesn’t.
So Obama was born where all the evidence says he was: Honolulu. Why would a woman in her last month of pregnancy travel halfway around the world to deliver a child in a developing country and then bring him back home, even though he wouldn’t have had a passport? How would she get him into the United States unless someone at the border was in cahoots? “You couldn’t sell this script in Hollywood,” Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, told reporters last week.
Why does this story stay alive? Some, like me, didn’t understand the Hawaiian intricacies at first: we thought there was a single long-form certificate that could resolve the question. But, as FactCheck notes: “The Hawaii Department of Health’s birth record request form does not give the option to request a photocopy of your long-form birth certificate, but their short form has enough information to be acceptable to the State Department.” So Obama did all he could to make this go away.
Yet the conspiracists have only become more adamant. A slew of radio show hosts have fixated on the question; Lou Dobbs, CNN’s resident crank, broadcast several segments expressing doubt about Obama’s birthplace. Sean Hannity, a Fox News pundit, ran two reports on a soldier who refused to follow orders from Obama because he doubted his eligibility to be president. When Major Stefan Cook’s orders to deploy to Afghanistan were revoked, he and his lawyer took it as an admission on the part of the military that the president is not, in fact, a legitimate citizen by birth.
On cue, as Obama turned 48 last week, a Kenyan birth certificate popped up on the web. It was immediately exposed as a forgery based on a 1959 Australian birth certificate, but the pressure hasn’t let up. Obama’s legitimacy as president has been challenged in five lawsuits, all dismissed.
WorldNetDaily, the far-right website, has run countless editorials, letter-writing campaigns and billboard advertisements on the question. WND is a fringe web publication — but its fringe has, by some estimates, about 2m visitors a month.
Rush Limbaugh, the mega-chat show host, has raised the issue and Michael Savage, the rabid rightist, has said: “We’re getting ready for the communist takeover of America with a non-citizen at the helm.” Other, calmer Republican activists have denounced the so-called “birthers”. The cannier ones have argued that this issue has been drummed up by Democrats to discredit the Good Old Party (and it has). But it’s hard to accept that explains everything.
The bolder rightwingers have condemned the whole thing: radio star Michael Medved has called the birthers “crazy, nutburger, demagogue, money-hungry, exploitative, irresponsible, filthy conservative imposters”. But leading Republican politicians, aware of how powerful the conspiracy theory is among their supporters, have tried to avoid the issue. The Alabama Senator Richard Shelby, for example, told a town hall meeting last February: “Well, his father was Kenyan and they said he was born in Hawaii but I haven’t seen any birth certificate”, even though a resolution on July 27 — issued on the 50th anniversary of Hawaii’s statehood — declared Obama a citizen unanimously (with some Republican abstentions).
This is the silly season. But this silly story seems to me an indication of something more ominous. The demographics tell the basic story: a black man is president and a large majority of white southerners cannot accept that, even in 2009. They grasp conspiracy theories to wish Obama — and the America he represents — away. Since white southerners comprise an increasing proportion of the 22% of Americans who still describe themselves as Republican, the GOP can neither dismiss the crankery nor move past it. The fringe defines what’s left of the Republican centre.
The chilling implication is that a large number of Americans believe the president has no right to be in office and has fraudulently manoeuvred himself there.
I hope the secret service is on alert. If we thought racial panic had ended with Obama’s election, the resilience of this story in key parts of the country is a helpful wake-up call.

The cruelty and degeneracy the future president was subjected to in his youth forged his iron will
by Christopher Hitchens (The Atlantic)
Lincoln’s bicentennial has permitted us to revisit and reconsider every facet of his story and personality, from the Bismarckian big-government colossus so disliked by the traditional right and the isolationists, to the “Great Emancipator” who used to figure on the posters of the American Communist Party, to the reluctant anti-slaver so plausibly caught in Gore Vidal’s finest novel. Absent from much of this consideration has been the unfashionable word destiny: the sense conveyed by Lincoln of a man who was somehow brought forth by the hour itself, as if his entire life had been but a preparation for that moment.
We cannot get this frisson from other great American presidents. Washington, Jefferson, Madison—these were all experienced members of the existing and indeed preexisting governing class. So was Roosevelt. However exaggerated or invented some parts of the Lincoln legend may be, it is nonetheless a fact that he came from the very loam and marrow of the new country, and that—unlike the other men I have mentioned—he cannot possibly be imagined as other than an American.
No review could do complete justice to the magnificent two-volume biography that has been so well-wrought by Michael Burlingame, but one way of paying tribute to it is to say that it introduces the elusive idea of destiny from the very start, and one means of illustrating this is to show how the earlier chapters continually prefigure, or body forth, the more momentous events that are to be dealt with in the later ones.
Before I try to demonstrate that, I would like to call attention to something that Professor Burlingame says in his Author’s Note:
Many educated guesses, informed by over twenty years of research on Lincoln, appear in this biography. Each such guess might well begin with a phrase like “in all probability,” or “it may well be that,” or “it seems likely that.” Such warnings, if inserted into the text, would prove wearisome; readers are encouraged to provide such qualifiers silently whenever the narrative explores Lincoln’s unconscious motivation.
It is agreeable to be informed, when embarking on such a long and demanding work, that one will be treated like a grown-up.
There is, whether intentionally or not, a sort of biblical cadence and flavor to the way in which Burlingame relates the early family history: the grandmother Bathsheba; the father’s older brother Mordecai; and Mary Lincoln’s half sister, who said that “the reason why Thomas Lincoln grew up unlettered was that his brother Mordecai, having all the land in his possession … turned Thomas out of the house when the latter was 12 years; so he went out among his relations.” The story of Jacob and Esau, and of Naboth’s vineyard, was surely known to the person who recounted that.
As for the social background, here is a sentence that conveys a great deal of misery in a very few words. It is Burlingame’s summary of the area in which Sinking Spring farm, Kentucky, young Abraham’s birthplace, was situated. “The neighborhood was thinly settled; the 36-square-mile tax district where the Lincoln farm was located contained 85 taxpayers, 44 slaves, and 392 horses.” Lincoln himself said that his early life could be “condensed into a single sentence” from Gray’s “Elegy”: “The short and simple annals of the poor.” But this would be to euphemize his true boyhood situation, which was much more like that of a serf or a domestic animal than of Gray’s lowly but sturdy peasantry. To read of the unrelenting coarseness and brutality of the boy’s father is lowering to the spirit, as is the shame he felt at his mother’s reputation for unchastity. The wretchedness of these surroundings made Lincoln tell a later acquaintance in Illinois: “I have seen a good deal of the back side of this world.” (Incidentally, one has to imagine this being said with some kind of wink and nudge: Burlingame is not content, as so many historians are, merely to hint at Lincoln’s fondness for broad humor, but furnishes us with some actual examples, which are heavy on the side of scatology and flatulence.)
Lincoln’s own experience of legal bondage and hard usage is very graphically told: not only did his father’s improvidence deprive him of many necessities, but it resulted in his being hired out as a menial to be a hewer of wood and drawer of water for his father’s rough and miserly neighbors. The law as it then stood made children the property of their father, so young Abraham was “hired out” only in the sense of chattel, since he was obliged to turn over his wages. From this, and from the many groans and sighs that are reported of the boy (who still struggled to keep reading, an activity feared and despised by his father, as it was by the owner of Frederick Douglass), we receive a prefiguration of the politician who declared in 1856, “I used to be a slave.” In Lincoln’s unconcealed resentment toward his male parent, we get an additional glimpse of the man who also declared, in 1858, “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.”
Yet the contours and character of the frontier region also fitted Lincoln for compromise: this was the area of the United States where the two systems were beginning their long, cruel attrition. Both as an aspiring congressman and as an ambitious lawyer, Lincoln managed on occasion to keep silent on the slavery issue and even, when appropriately briefed, to act as counsel for a slaveholder. Burlingame gives an intriguing account of the Matson case of 1847, in which, on technical procedural grounds and on the principle of “first come, first served,” Lincoln agreed to represent a man who wanted some of his slaves back. On the other hand, he generally steered clear of fugitive-slave cases, “because of his unwillingness to be a party to a violation of the Fugitive Slave Law, arguing that the way to overcome the difficulty was to repeal the law.” Here again, we can see the legalistic and sometimes pedantic mind that exhausted all the possibilities of compromise before coming up with the tortuous form of words that finally became the Emancipation Proclamation.
In rather the same way, Lincoln sought a deft means of negotiating the shoals of the religious question. Burlingame’s highly diverting early pages show Lincoln being actively satirical in matters of faith, lampooning preachers, staging mock services, and praying to God “to put stockings on the chickens’ feet in winter,” in the words of his stepsister Matilda. Reminiscing about frontier Baptists many years later, he told an acquaintance: “I don’t like to hear cut and dried sermons. No—when I hear a man preach, I like to see him act as if he were fighting bees!”
However, in his 1846 election campaign, Lincoln was cornered by the faithful and forced to deny that he was an “open scoffer at Christianity.” His handbill on the subject is rightly criticized as too lawyerly by Burlingame, who elegantly points out:
In this document Lincoln seemed to make two different claims: that he never believed in infidel doctrines, and that he never publicly espoused them. If the former were true, the latter would be superfluous; if the former were untrue, the latter would be irrelevant.
Several moments in the narrative—the bee-fighting preacher being one such—put me in mind of Mark Twain. The tall tales, the dry wit, the broad-gauge humor, the imminence of farce even in grave enterprises: Lincoln’s inglorious participation in the Black Hawk War has many points of similarity with Twain’s “Private History of a Campaign That Failed.” Lincoln was once invited to referee a cockfight where a bird refused combat. Its enraged owner, one Babb McNabb, flung the creature onto a woodpile, whereat it spread its feathers and crowed mightily. “Yes, you little cuss,” yelled McNabb, “you are great on dress parade, but you ain’t worth a damn in a fight.” Long afterward, confronted with the unmartial ditherings of General George B. McClellan, Lincoln would compare the chief of his army—and subsequent electoral challenger—to McNabb’s pusillanimous rooster.
Mark Twain and Frederick Douglass, too, were persons who could only have been original Americans, sprung from American ground. It is engaging and affecting to read of Lincoln’s lifelong troubles with spelling and pronunciation (he addressed himself to “Mr. Cheerman” in his famous Cooper Union Speech of 1860) and of his frequent appearance with as much as six inches of shin or arm protruding from his ill-made clothes: truly a Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance. Yet despite, or perhaps because of, the extreme harshness of his early life, he was innately opposed to any form of cruelty, and despite his lack of polish and refinement, he almost never stooped to crudity or vulgarity in political speech. Without overdrawing the contrast, Burlingame shows us a Judge Stephen Douglas who was a slave to every kind of anti-Negro demagogy and political mendacity. And Lincoln bested him, admittedly while hedging on the race question, by constantly stressing the need to secure “to each laborer the whole product of his labor.” In more modern terms, we might say that he used the language of class to neutralize racism. (I would say that the account given here of the famous debates surpasses all its predecessors.)
It has lately become fashionable to say that Lincoln was not, or was not “really,” a believer in black-white equality. A thread that runs consistently through Burlingame’s narrative is that of self-education on this question, to the eventual point where Lincoln came as close to an egalitarian position as made almost no difference. Even the infamous discussion about the postwar expatriation of black Americans to “colonies” in Africa or on the American isthmus was conducted, by Burlingame’s account, with very strict regard on Lincoln’s side for the dignity and stature of those whose fate he was discussing. And it goes almost without saying that he had already had every opportunity to see that there was nothing very “superior” about the color white. By the end, Frederick Douglass—who had often criticized him—was able to say that Lincoln was “emphatically the black man’s President.” And Burlingame’s survey of the life and opinions of the “mad racist” John Wilkes Booth makes it equally plain that the white supremacists felt the same way. Still, even this is to understate the universalist intransigence with which Lincoln never conceded an inch of American ground, and with which he quarreled with his generals, including McClellan, for referring to the North as “our soil,” when every state was still, always, and invariably to be considered a part of the Union.
It was once said that the Civil War was the last of the old wars and the first of the new: cavalry and infantry charges gave way to cannon and railways, and sail gave way to steam. It is of great interest to read Lincoln’s meditations on the projected postwar expansion of the United States, with a strong emphasis on mining and manufacturing. He had completely shed the bucolic influence of his early career and was looking in the very last days of his life to renew industry and immigration. Before Gettysburg, people would say “the United States are …” After Gettysburg, they began to say “the United States is …” That they were able to employ the first three words at all was a tribute to the man who did more than anyone to make that hard transition himself, and then to secure it for others, and for posterity.

Op-Ed Columnist NY Times
The Town Hall Mob

By PAUL KRUGMAN
There’s a famous Norman Rockwell painting titled “Freedom of Speech,” depicting an idealized American town meeting. The painting, part of a series illustrating F.D.R.’s “Four Freedoms,” shows an ordinary citizen expressing an unpopular opinion. His neighbors obviously don’t like what he’s saying, but they’re letting him speak his mind.
That’s a far cry from what has been happening at recent town halls, where angry protesters — some of them, with no apparent sense of irony, shouting “This is America!” — have been drowning out, and in some cases threatening, members of Congress trying to talk about health reform.
Some commentators have tried to play down the mob aspect of these scenes, likening the campaign against health reform to the campaign against Social Security privatization back in 2005. But there’s no comparison. I’ve gone through many news reports from 2005, and while anti-privatization activists were sometimes raucous and rude, I can’t find any examples of congressmen shouted down, congressmen hanged in effigy, congressmen surrounded and followed by taunting crowds.
And I can’t find any counterpart to the death threats at least one congressman has received.
So this is something new and ugly. What’s behind it?
Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, has compared the scenes at health care town halls to the “Brooks Brothers riot” in 2000 — the demonstration that disrupted the vote count in Miami and arguably helped send George W. Bush to the White House. Portrayed at the time as local protesters, many of the rioters were actually G.O.P. staffers flown in from Washington.
But Mr. Gibbs is probably only half right. Yes, well-heeled interest groups are helping to organize the town hall mobs. Key organizers include two Astroturf (fake grass-roots) organizations: FreedomWorks, run by the former House majority leader Dick Armey, and a new organization called Conservatives for Patients’ Rights.
The latter group, by the way, is run by Rick Scott, the former head of Columbia/HCA, a for-profit hospital chain. Mr. Scott was forced out of that job amid a fraud investigation; the company eventually pleaded guilty to charges of overbilling state and federal health plans, paying $1.7 billion — yes, that’s “billion” — in fines. You can’t make this stuff up.
But while the organizers are as crass as they come, I haven’t seen any evidence that the people disrupting those town halls are Florida-style rent-a-mobs. For the most part, the protesters appear to be genuinely angry. The question is, what are they angry about?
There was a telling incident at a town hall held by Representative Gene Green, D-Tex. An activist turned to his fellow attendees and asked if they “oppose any form of socialized or government-run health care.” Nearly all did. Then Representative Green asked how many of those present were on Medicare. Almost half raised their hands.
Now, people who don’t know that Medicare is a government program probably aren’t reacting to what President Obama is actually proposing. They may believe some of the disinformation opponents of health care reform are spreading, like the claim that the Obama plan will lead to euthanasia for the elderly. (That particular claim is coming straight from House Republican leaders.) But they’re probably reacting less to what Mr. Obama is doing, or even to what they’ve heard about what he’s doing, than to who he is.
That is, the driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the “birther” movement, which denies Mr. Obama’s citizenship. Senator Dick Durbin has suggested that the birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same; we don’t know how many of the protesters are birthers, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it’s a substantial fraction.
And cynical political operators are exploiting that anxiety to further the economic interests of their backers.
Does this sound familiar? It should: it’s a strategy that has played a central role in American politics ever since Richard Nixon realized that he could advance Republican fortunes by appealing to the racial fears of working-class whites.
Many people hoped that last year’s election would mark the end of the “angry white voter” era in America. Indeed, voters who can be swayed by appeals to cultural and racial fear are a declining share of the electorate.
But right now Mr. Obama’s backers seem to lack all conviction, perhaps because the prosaic reality of his administration isn’t living up to their dreams of transformation. Meanwhile, the angry right is filled with a passionate intensity.
And if Mr. Obama can’t recapture some of the passion of 2008, can’t inspire his supporters to stand up and be heard, health care reform may well fail.

NY TIMES Op-Ed Columnist
Rethinking North Korea, With Sticks

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Now that President Bill Clinton has extricated Laura Ling and Euna Lee from North Korea, the hard work begins.
There are new indications that North Korea may be transferring nuclear weapons technology to Myanmar, the dictatorship also known as Burma, and that it earlier supplied a reactor to Syria. For many years, based on five visits to North Korea and its border areas, I’ve argued for an “engagement” approach toward Pyongyang, but now I’ve reluctantly concluded that we need more sticks.
Burmese defectors have provided detailed accounts of a North Korean reactor, perhaps a mirror of the one provided to Syria, built inside a mountain deep in Myanmar. The reports, first aired in The Sydney Morning Herald this month, come from Desmond Ball, a respected Asia scholar, and Phil Thornton, a journalist with expertise on Myanmar, and there has been other fragmentary intelligence to back them up.
If the defectors’ accounts are true, the reactor “could be capable of being operational and producing a bomb a year, every year, after 2014,” Mr. Ball and Mr. Thornton wrote.
The suspicions may be false, and Iraq is a reminder that defector reports about W.M.D. can be wrong. But partly because the North Korean reactor in Syria (destroyed by Israeli bombing in 2007) caught intelligence agencies by surprise, everyone is taking the latest reports seriously. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed concern about the transfer of nuclear technology from North Korea to Myanmar, without giving details.
All this was eerily foreshadowed by the North Koreans themselves. Michael Green, who ran Asian affairs for a time in the Bush White House, says that in March 2003, a North Korean official — with hands shaking — read out to him and other American officials a warning: We have a nuclear deterrent. If you don’t end your hostile policy, we will demonstrate, expand and transfer it.
“They’ve done all those things,” Mr. Green notes.
At times in the past, there seemed hope for diplomacy aimed at coaxing North Korea into giving up its nuclear program and joining the concert of nations. These days that seems virtually hopeless.
“Formal diplomatic engagement aimed at rolling back their nuclear program has run its course, at least for the time being,” says Mitchell Reiss, a North Korea expert and former senior State Department official who is now at the College of William and Mary. “The facts have changed. You have to change your strategy.”
In the past, Mr. Reiss focused on engagement. Now he advocates “hard containment” — toughened sanctions backed by military force if necessary.
The truth is that North Korea doesn’t want to negotiate away its nuclear materials. It is focused on its own transition, and this year it has declined to accept a visit from the Obama administration’s special envoy, Stephen Bosworth. The North isn’t interested in “six-party talks” on nuclear issues; instead, it seeks talks with the U.S. conditioned on accepting North Korea’s status as a nuclear power — which is unacceptable.
In recent months, North Korea has dismantled some economic reforms and economic cooperation projects with South Korea. Meanwhile, it continues to counterfeit U.S. $100 bills — the highest-quality goods that North Korea manufactures — and its embassies in Pakistan and other countries pay their way by smuggling drugs, liquor and currency. The North has released its American hostages but continues to hold South Koreans. And it’s the most totalitarian state in history: In North Korean homes, I’ve seen the “speaker” on the wall that wakes people up with propaganda each morning. More bizarre, triplets are routinely taken from parents and raised by the state because they are considered auspicious.
There are no good options here, and a grass-roots revolution is almost impossible. North Koreans, even those in China who despise the regime, overwhelmingly agree that most ordinary North Koreans swallow the propaganda. Indeed, Kim Jong-il’s approval rating in his country may well be higher than President Obama’s is in the United States.
Our best bet will be to continue to support negotiations, including a back channel that can focus on substance instead of protocol, as well as economic and cultural exchanges — but backed up by sticks. The Obama administration is now working with allies to reimpose economic and financial sanctions that a few years ago were very successful in squeezing the North Korean regime. China is surprisingly cooperative, even quietly intercepting several shipments of supplies useful for W.M.D. programs.
Where we have intelligence that North Korean ships are transferring nuclear materials or technology to a country like Myanmar or Iran, we should go further and board those vessels. That’s an extreme step, but the nightmare would be if Iran simply decided to save time and buy a nuclear weapon or two from North Korea. We can’t allow that to happen.

A Coup in Iran?
by Reza Aslan Daily Beast
Today, the mess that is post-election Iran becomes Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s problem, and bets are already being placed in Iran on just how long his second term as president will last.
Ahmadinejad’s most immediate challenge will be to name twenty-one cabinet ministers, the three most important of which are the Minister of Defense, the Minister of the Interior (who also oversees the elections), and the Minister of Foreign Affairs. He can also nominate up to ten vice presidents, one of which, the first vice president, will be charged with taking over the presidency should some horrible fate befall Ahmadinejad (God forbid). According to the constitution, the president has two weeks from the day of his inauguration to present his cabinet to the parliament for approval. This will not be an easy task.
If Ahmadinejad continues to lose Khamenei’s protection and support, then there is little that will keep his opponents in parliament from frustrating his every move as president.
Ahmadinejad has always had a turbulent relationship with Iran’s parliament, the Majlis. During his first tenure as president, the parliament rejected half a dozen of his cabinet appointments on the grounds that they were either unqualified or too ideological (read: former members of the Revolutionary Guard) for their positions. The row with the MPs lasted so long that Ahmadinejad was forced to convene his first cabinet meeting with four ministries still to be filled.
In the last year, Ahmadinejad’s relationship with the parliament has gotten worse. His Interior Minister, Ali Kordan, was impeached for lying about his credentials (Kordan falsely claimed to hold a doctorate from Oxford University). His Minister of Industry, Ali Akbar Mehrabian, was arrested and convicted of fraud. Just last week, he fired his Intelligence Minister, Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, after a heated argument broke out between the two men in the middle of a cabinet meeting. His Culture Minister, Mohammd Hossein Saffar Harandi, angrily resigned in protest. In fact, Ahmadinejad has lost so many ministers in his first cabinet that the parliament threatened him with a vote of no confidence.
The controversy over the elections has brought tension between the president and parliament to the surface. Out of three hundred MPS, one hundred and eighty skipped his election celebration. Last week more than two hundred of them signed an open letter demanding that Ahmadinejad “correct his behavior.” This was in response to Ahmadinejad’s deliberately ignoring a directive from the Supreme Leader to sack his nominee for first vice president, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie. After four days of refusing to budge, Ahmadinejad fired Mashaie then immediately rehired him as chief of staff, arguably a more important position, and one that does not need parliamentary approval.
The current speaker of the parliament, Ali Larijani, is a conservative and ally of the Supreme Leader who has not hidden his utter contempt for Ahmadinejad (it should be noted that Ahmadinejad beat Larijani in the 2005 presidential elections, despite the fact that Khamenei had endorsed Larijani). That might explain why Larijani has decided to form an investigative committee to look into accusations of prisoner abuse carried out by Ahmadinejad’s cronies in the Revolutionary Guard during the post-election crackdown. That means that the parliament will be investigating Ahmadinejad at the same time that it is supposed to be approving his cabinet.
Ahmadinejad’s foes in the parliament—of which he has many—will likely try to use their confirmation powers to frustrate his attempts to put his administration together in a timely fashion, in hopes that gridlock will force the Supreme Leader to institute a state of emergency and remove Ahmadinejad from office.
Ahmadinejad’s relationship with the religious establishment is not much better than his relationship with the parliament. His election has been questioned or openly rejected by all but one of the country’s handful of Grand Ayatollahs. Iran’s most respected cleric, the Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, has issued a fatwa calling Ahmadinejad’s administration illegitimate. The influential Assembly of Scholars and Researchers at Qom Seminary released a joint statement demanding new elections. Even one of Ahmadinejad’s most vocal supporters, the hard-line conservative Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, head of the Guardian Council (the electoral body that certified his election victory) has made public comments critical of Ahmadinejad in the last few days.
The news site Tehran Bureau reports that some of the most prominent members of the powerful Assembly of Experts (the generally conservative religious body that chooses the Supreme Leader) boycotted Ahmadinejad’s swearing in ceremony on Monday. Perhaps far more damaging to Ahmadinejad’s credibility among the religious classes is that not a single family member of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni, the Islamic Republic’s founder, showed up to the ceremony. Considering that Ahamdinejad has talked of being visited by Khomeini in his dreams, this was an embarrassing slight that most pious Iranians will not be able to ignore.
Now it appears that even the Supreme Leader is having his troubles with Ahmadinejad. Although both men insist that the rift over Ahmadinejad’s choice for vice president has been healed, close observers of Iranian politics could not help but notice the awkward distance between the two during Ahmadinejad’s swearing-in ceremony (which, by the way, was not broadcast on state-run television for the first time in more than twelve years). When Ahmadinejad leaned forward to kiss the Supreme Leader’s cheeks and hand, as he did he first time he was sworn in, he paused and instead was offered only the leader’s robes.
There’s little chance that Khamenei will turn his back on Ahmadinejad. After his unconditional endorsement of his presidency, their fates are now sealed together. If Ahmadinejad falls, Khamenei is next. Nevertheless, if Ahmadinejad continues to lose Khamenei’s protection and support, then there is little that will keep his opponents in parliament from frustrating his every move as president.
And then there’s the economy. Under Ahmadinejad’s stewardship, Iran’s economy is teetering on the brink of collapse. The annual inflation rate hovers at around 26%. Official unemployment is almost 20% though Iranians will tell you that the number is likely closer to 40%. Iran’s deteriorating oil infrastructure is in such shambles that despite sitting on the world’s second largest supply of oil, the country is forced to import 40% of its gasoline.
Iran is desperate for international investment, which is what Ahmadinejad promised to deliver while campaigning for president (seriously). But it is difficult to imagine the leaders of Europe and North America sitting across the table from a president whose own people believe to be illegitimate. If Ahmadinejad cannot figure out a way to fix Iran’s economic woes, the uprising will become a riot.
Day one of Ahmadinejad’s second term as president is over. Bets anyone?
Reza Aslan, a contributor to The Daily Beast,

fighting words
What Happened to the Suicide Bombers of Jerusalem?
Nasty, fanatical old men, not human emotions, decided who died and when.
By Christopher Hitchens
It is sometimes important to write about the things that are not happening and the dogs that are not barking.
To do so, of course, can provide an easy hostage to fortune, which is why a lot of columnists prefer not to risk it. For all I know, some leering fanatic is preparing to make me look silly even as I write. But I ask anyway: Whatever happened to the suicide bombers of Jerusalem?
It's not that long since the combination of self-immolation and mass murder was a regular event on Israeli soil. Different people drew radically different conclusions from the campaign, which had a nerve-racking effect not just on Israeli Jews but on Israeli Arabs and Druze—who were often among the casualties—and on visiting tourists. It was widely said by liberals, including people as eminent as Tony Blair's wife, Cherie Blair, that the real cause of such a lurid and awful tactic was despair: the reaction of a people under occupation who had no other avenue of expression for their misery and frustration.
Well, surely nobody will be so callous as to say that there is less despair among Palestinians today—especially since the terrible events in the Gaza Strip and the return to power of the Israeli right wing as well as the expansion of Jewish-zealot settler activity. And yet there is no graph on which extra despair can be shown to have eventuated in more suicide. Indeed, if there is any correlation at all, it would seem to be in reverse. How can this be?
Of the various alternative explanations, one would be the success of the wall or "fence" that Israel has built or is building, approximating but not quite conforming to the "green line" of the 1967 frontier. Another would be the ruthless campaign of "targeted assassinations," whereby Israeli agents took out important leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the two organizations most committed to "martyrdom operations." A third might be the temporary truces or cease-fires to which Hamas (but not Islamic Jihad) have from time to time agreed.
But, actually, none of these would explain why the suicide campaign went into remission. Or, at least, they would not explain why it went into remission if the original cause was despair. If despair is your feeling, then nothing can stop you from blowing yourself up against the wall as a last gesture against Israeli colonial architecture. If despair dominates your psyche, then targeted assassinations of others are not going to stop you from donning the shroud and the belt and aiming yourself at paradise, even if only at a roadblock. If despair is what has invaded your mind, why on earth would you care about this or that short-term truce?
Even before the assault died away, there were good reasons to doubt that despair had been the motive or the explanation. For one thing, almost all the suicide attacks were directed at civilians in pre-1967 Israel "proper"—in other words, in the Jewish part of Jerusalem or in towns along the Israeli coastline (in one case, a hotel in Netanya on Passover). It can probably be said with some degree of confidence that nobody blows themselves up for a half-a-loaf compromise solution. These cold-blooded attacks did not just avoid well-defended West Bank settlements or Israeli army bases; they also vividly expressed the demand that all Jews leave Palestine or risk being killed. Despair cannot so easily be channeled so as to underline a strictly political/ideological objective.
Another possible reason for the slump in suicide is that those who were orchestrating it came to find that the tactic was becoming subject to diminishing returns. Despair must have meant a roughly constant stream of potential volunteers, but the immediate needs of Hamas and Islamic Jihad may not have always required the tap of despair to be left turned on. Indeed, there must have been some quite intense private discussions about how to turn it off. Not every despairing person can make, at home, the necessary belts, fuses, and lethal charges. These things require a godfather. And this, in turn, prompts the question: What will be said if or when the tap is ever turned back on? Surely it won't quite do to say that despair must have broken out all over again, though I can easily think of some fools who will be ready to say it.
There were children among the last wave of suicide-murderers, some of whom lost their nerve and surrendered at the last moment. There were also young women, some of whom, it seems, would otherwise have been killed for "honor" reasons and who were offered the relatively painless alternative of a martyr's fate. Nasty, vicious, fanatical old men, not human emotions, were making the decisions and deciding the days and the hours of death. And the hysterical ululating street celebrations when such a mission was successful did not signify despair at all but a creepy form of religious exaltation in which relatives were encouraged to make a feast out of the death of their own children as well as those of other people. To have added the promise of paradise to this pogrom is to have made spiritual and mental sickness complete; to have made it a sexual paradise is obscene into the bargain. (Women martyrs are obviously not offered the same level of bliss and promiscuity by the Quran.)
Meanwhile, the wall still stands and grows, ironically expressing the much more banal and worldly fact that there are two peoples in Palestine and that sooner or later there will be two states as well.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, now out in paperback.
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