A fascinating book about a fascinating public figure and Vice Presidency, Angler nonetheless suffers from some real and glaring weaknesses. I would not be as hard on the book as Christopher Willcox is, but the use of questionable statistics, anonymous sources whose quotes cannot, of course, be verified and one-sidedness concerning the discussion of various foreign policy and national security issues does raise concerns. I have discussed in the past that I disagree with a number of elements in the Cheneyesque worldview, but much of Angler appears to be a condemnation of the deftness and adroitness with which that worldview is implemented in policy form while evincing a wistfulness that no one opposite Dick Cheney's place in the partisan divide has shown the ability to muster a similar degree of bureaucratic cleverness, policy wonkishness, deep experience and general intellectual brilliance (Gellman, to his credit, is very open in his admiration of Cheney's intellectual skills and notes Alan Greenspan's belief that along with Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon, Cheney is the smartest person that Greenspan has had the opportunity to meet and that unlike Clinton and Nixon, Cheney has the unique capacity to turn strategic goals into operational plans) to push for the implementation of a contemporary liberal policy agenda.

All of this having been written, I encourage people to read Angler so that they will have at least a recounting of one side's view of the Cheney legacy. The Vice President appears to indicate that he will write a book once he leaves office and when that happens, I imagine that we will have a powerful presentation of the another view of that legacy.

I continue to plow through Proust, hoping that I will finish his magnum opus before I die of old age (really, the writing is fascinating but it is also immensely laden with imagery and meaning and one is obliged to take one's time in order to make sure that justice is done to the storytelling effort). In Sodom and Gomorrah, the narrator is brought face to face with homosexual activity (a development that ought, of course, to be considered in light of Proust's own homosexuality) and the narrator's jealousy concerning the activities of Albertine comes to the fore. It also represents the narrator's decision to retreat from the social life he previously engaged in, a life filled with parties and gatherings with the Guermantes and returns to Balbec, where his relationship with Albertine is furthered. As Swann was conflicted in his decision on whether to marry Odette, the narrator faces a tortured decision on whether he should pursue his relationship with Albertine further given what he suspects about her fidelity.

As with his previous books in the series, Proust demonstrates himself to be a master of literary imagery, the seemingly random but deeply meaningful directions our memory takes us and character development; Proust's characters are marvels to behold since he has a genius for making them leap out of the page for us to consider them in . . . well . . . at times, I am fooled into believing that Proust's characters are actual people--so effective is he at drawing out their personalities. As banal as much of the actual storyline is, the discussions on the larger nature of that storyline are profound.

And as challenging as Proust is to plow through, the profundity he brings to his writing makes it all worthwhile.

Jane Mayer's jeremiad against the interrogation policies pursued by the Bush Administration is worthwhile reading if only because it reveals certain facts that may have been unknown to the reader previously--including the fact that the policy of "rendition" for captured terrorist suspects actually began under the Clinton Administration. Certainly in discussing the activities of the Bush Administration, Mayer works to lay out important issues for debate and consideration. As it is wrong to think that anyone on any side of the partisan divide has gotten the War on Terror completely and entirely correct, many of Mayer's points are exceedingly well put and worth considering as policies are refined and re-examined.

At the same time, the book is not without flaws, some of which were brought to light in this review (subscription required) by Clifford May. The following excerpt is a long one, but it is worthwhile to quote it:

. . . Throughout, in the manner of a prosecuting attorney, [Mayer] declines to engage with opposing facts or counterarguments. This gives The Dark Side its peculiarly hermetic quality: Mayer is not only preaching to the choir but conducting it and singing all of the solo parts at the same time.

The Dark Side opens with John Quincy Adams's famous admonition to Americans not to go "abroad in search of monsters to destroy"--an apposite quotation, perhaps, were it not for the revelation on September 11 that the terrorist threat to the United States was not a fantasy, as Adams's words suggest. Nor did we go in search of these particular monsters. On that day the monsters came to us, their arrival having been preceded by an escalating series of attacks on Americans over the years: Beirut in 1983, the World Trade Center in 1993, Khobar Towers in 1996, U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, to name just a few.

For Mayer, it is axiomatic that the aftermath of September 11, and what it revealed about the flaws in the American security apparatus that made the jihadist attack possible, did not necessitate any new framework for thinking about the protection of the United States from a new form of foreign aggression. She is outraged that Bush and Cheney would even presume to ask their legal advisers to study the latitude available to them in fighting the terrorists--to determine which practices would be permissible and which would fall into a gray area requiring new laws and policies.

Instead, these advisers are presented here in monochrome--all black. David Addington, Cheney's legal counsel, is "a loner" with "rigidly conservative views" who "seemed to revel in being anonymous and abstemious," so indifferent to the opinions of right-thinking people that, according to a colleague, he "didn't care about advancement in the Washington world." Another administration attorney, deputy White House counsel Timothy Flanigan, is a "Mormon and anti-abortion activist" who was "involved in the politically divisive legal investigation of Bill Clinton's sex life." John Yoo, who ran the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice, is said by unnamed critics to have "fictionaliz[ed] the founding history of the country." (How he did so is not explained.)

By contrast, the administration's critics are portrayed without blemish. Alberto Mora, a Navy lawyer who charged wrongdoing at Guantanamo, is "a courtly and engaging man, with neatly trimmed silver hair, warm brown eyes, and the ability to both listen well and to lead." Michael Ratner, a Columbia University law professor who represented a number of Guantanamo detainees, is "a graying pillar of America's left-wing legal bar."

Even John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban who was picked up by U.S. military in Afghanistan, is portrayed as a man who won friends among the Taliban for his skill at "cooking macaroni." To his misfortune, Lindh "came to the region to study Arabic," but "got caught up in a religious cause." Mayer seems unaware that the closest Arabic-speaking area to Afghanistan is many hundreds of miles to the West. Could Lindh have been in Afghanistan for other reasons?

I am not unsympathetic to arguments that the Bush Administration has engaged in legal overreach in situations where minimalism would have served it better. Still, May has a point in highlighting the one-sidedness of Mayer's critique.

That having been written, one of the most valuable of Mayer's observations is that the FBI has experienced a tremendous amount of success in being able to successfully interrogate prisoners while at the same time keeping interrogations well away from the danger zone of Geneva Convention violations. Perhaps one of Mayer's most important contributions to the refinement of interrogation policies is her ability to highlight the success of FBI interrogation techniques and the commensurate need to more broadly practice them; a need that should likely be coupled with greater funding, more interagency cooperation between the FBI and the CIA (I can dream, can't I?) and even an effort to teach FBI interrogation methods to members of the military.

And of course, to be fair to Jane Mayer, she has likely hit on an issue with a continuing need for coverage and discussion. Given the possibility that the incoming Obama Administration may find it desirable to engage in preventive detention for various inmates at Guantanamo Bay once--if--the base is finally closed, Mayer may indeed find it necessary to write a sequel to The Dark Side.

Whether she does so, or whether preventive detention policies under the Obama Administration receive the same degree of condemnation and disgust from certain quarters that the Bush Administration's interrogation and detention procedures received will probably tell us a great deal about the degree to which the debate over interrogation and detention policies is, or ever has been an honest one.

Now that we are heading into the Age of Obama and associated Keynesian stimulus packages that are designed to fulfill the policy wishes of big-government Democrats give our economy a jump start, it is, more than ever, worth paying attention to Amity Shlaes's The Forgotten Man, which has become even more relevant than when it was first published.

I suppose that I could go ahead and tell you what the thesis of The Forgotten Man is, but I see that George Will has covered the matter succinctly:

In "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression," Amity Shlaes of the Council on Foreign Relations and Bloomberg News argues that government policies, beyond the Federal Reserve's tight money, deepened and prolonged the Depression. The policies included encouraging strong unions and higher wages than lagging productivity justified, on the theory that workers' spending would be stimulative. Instead, corporate profits -- prerequisites for job-creating investments -- were excessively drained into labor expenses that left many workers priced out of the market.

In a 2004 paper, Harold L. Cole of the University of California at Los Angeles and Lee E. Ohanian of UCLA and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis argued that the Depression would have ended in 1936, rather than in 1943, were it not for policies that magnified the power of labor and encouraged the cartelization of industries. These policies expressed the New Deal premise that the Depression was caused by excessive competition that first reduced prices and wages and then reduced employment and consumer demand. In a forthcoming paper, Ohanian argues that "much of the depth of the Depression" is explained by Hoover's policy -- a precursor of the New Deal mentality -- of pressuring businesses to keep nominal wages fixed.

Furthermore, Hoover's 1932 increase in the top income tax rate, from 25 percent to 63 percent, was unhelpful. And FDR's hyperkinetic New Deal created uncertainties that paralyzed private-sector decision making. Which sounds familiar.

Bear Stearns? Broker a merger. Lehman Brothers? Death sentence. The $700 billion is for cleaning up toxic assets? Maybe not. Writes Russell Roberts of George Mason University:

"By acting without rhyme or reason, politicians have destroyed the rules of the game. There is no reason to invest, no reason to take risk, no reason to be prudent, no reason to look for buyers if your firm is failing. Everything is up in the air and as a result, the only prudent policy is to wait and see what the government will do next. The frenetic efforts of FDR had the same impact: Net investment was negative through much of the 1930s."

As Will demonstrates, Shlaes's arguments have been verified and validated by history (the Cole/Ohanian paper referenced by Will can be accessed via this post). Especially valuable from the standpoint of the reader is Shlaes's discussion of key moments in New Deal policymaking and the jurisprudence attendant to it, including the Schechter Poultry Case. And of course, Shlaes has been singularly effective in discussing the outlines of her thesis in various interviews and op-eds. In this piece for the Wall Street Journal, published this past September, Shlaes reminds us just how little new there is under the sun:

Police short sales and block them, says Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox. Fire the SEC chairman, says John McCain. Investigate those short sellers, say state attorneys general. Hold hearings to grill Wall Streeters says Nancy Pelosi. "Fire the whole Trickle-Down, On-Your-Own, Look-the-Other-Way crowd" says Barack Obama, and "get rid of this whole do-nothing approach to our economic problems." The Democratic presidential candidate wants public affirmation of his argument that the whole free-market philosophy of economics has been wrong.

Some of this talk carries an implicit suggestion: Do what I say or we will have another Great Depression. And no wonder: This September feels a lot like autumn 1929.

But there's an important fallacy here. The stock market crash of October 1929 and the Great Depression were not the same thing. What made the depression great was not magnitude but duration -- the fact that unemployment was still 20% 10 years later. In the 1930s, policies like the ones described above did not speed recovery; they impeded it.

Not long after the market crashed to 199 from its 381 high at the end of the summer of 1929, President Herbert Hoover turned on short sellers. Like our SEC, he demanded a curb on short sales. "Bear raids" or "bear parties" were to be stopped; the blame for the crash all belonged to "certain gentlemen."

Then, as now, there was a lengthy discourse on the difference between "normal" short sales and "naked" ones. New York Stock Exchange President Richard Whitney argued that curtailing such sales postponed unavoidable pain -- or even made it greater.

It was wrong, he said, to vilify shorts. "Such a contract to deliver something in the future which a person does not own is common to many types of business," Whitney carefully spelled out in layman's language. "When a builder contracts to build a skyscraper he is literally short of every bit of material." Yet the anti-short and anti-Street mood grew. In a spirit every bit as zealous as Sen. McCain, lawmakers assigned attorney Ferdinand Pecora to lead a commission hunting for wrongdoing on Wall Street.

The ban on short-selling worked about as well back in the day of the Great Depression as it has worked in recent times, of course. And of course, the following is very familiar to us, isn't it?

In 1933 there was a moment when the U.S. really did seem poised for recovery -- the moment of Franklin Roosevelt's inauguration. Confronting the banking crisis, President Roosevelt did what President Bush, Congress and the Treasury are likely to do in coming days: create a mechanism to sort out banks and their holdings, to separate good assets from bad.

Such an office can shorten a crisis -- the Resolution Trust Corporation, created to deal with the 1980s Savings and Loan debacle did. There was nothing necessarily partisan about the process. Hoover's Treasury secretary, Ogden Mills, and Roosevelt's new Treasury secretary, William Woodin, sat together at the task, just as Republicans and Democrats presumably will now. The establishment of the SEC in 1934 likewise set the country up for recovery.

But like today's politicians, Roosevelt also used the downturn as a weapon to trash markets generally. The New Dealers even used the same mocking phrases Mr. Obama does today. The rich might think that wealth trickled down, Roosevelt's speechwriter Sam Rosenman would later note, but "Roosevelt believed that prosperity did not 'trickle' that way."

Read the whole thing, and you will find that the New Dealers' anti-wealth campaign ended disastrously for themselves and for the nation--so much so that they were forced to abandon their utopian domestic policy dreams and turn their attentions instead ot foreign affairs. In the meantime, the New Dealers engaged in policy persecutions and legal prosecutions designed to target and attack advocates for the free market for nothing more than having the temerity to disagree with the New Dealers. The targets of the New Dealers proved to be in the right, of course, but try telling that to the New New Dealers who want to replicate the entire calamitous experiment all over again.

As Shlaes herself puts it in this interview with Nick Gillespie:

One of the important things about the existing argument is that it's all about Keynesianism, about whether government spending can cure the economy when it's ill. Scholars have overlooked the cost of uncertainty in an economy, what we would now call the "unknown unknowns." Both the Hoover and Roo­sevelt administrations (but especially the Roosevelt administration) were so unpredictable. That hurt the economy very much, and when I went back and saw the extent I was astounded. Uncertainty is a factor that I thought needed to be explored. There were lots of people who said, "I will not invest 'til I know what's going to happen."

During the Depression, you heard the phrase "bold, persistent experimentation" all the time. We've been taught that was good. Somebody had to do something, was what we learned. But what I saw was this enormous cost, especially during the second half of the 1930s.

There's a second thing too. I look at the government's action using the lens of public choice theory. Very simply, public choice says that government is no better or worse than a business, it's a competitor. Sometimes I use a crustacean image; The government is like a lobster. It will eat anything, it wants to survive, it will compete with anything, and it can be a cannibal. When you look back at the '30s using the public choice lens, what you discover is the extent to which the Depression wasn't about a virtuous government and bad business people. Rather, it was about people in office competing with the private sector for power. Much of the struggle described in the book literally inhered in the power business: utilities. There's something about power that attracts strong people. And of course the government wins and the private sector loses in the form of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which was created in 1933.

I do not know how many people in high policymaking circles are reading or have read Amity Shlaes book. I certainly doubt that anyone in the incoming Obama Administration has read it. But they should read it. And if they refuse to, we should read it for the purpose of ensuring that we are an informed, engaged and active citizenry--one that can speak out when old policy mistakes are repackaged and the effort is made to sell them to us anew.

It was only a matter of time before someone decided to write a book on Bill Clinton's post-Presidential career and Carol Felsenthal went ahead and did just that. The book is a good one, though in certain sections, it wanders and meanders. Various chapters appear to be hijacked from their original subject (see, for example, the chapter "Clinton Opens His Library In A Downpour" which actually devotes very little time to Bill Clinton and the opening of his Presidential library). But the book is full of information on Clinton's post-Presidential career and it lays out each step of that career in a manner guaranteed to interest and engage the attentions of political junkies like yours truly.

Felsenthal does a very good job of capturing both the immense political gifts that Bill Clinton possesses and the ways in which he has allowed those gifts to go to waste--in addition to discussing in significant detail many of the allegations concerning Clinton's business and personal life that were laid bare in Todd Purdum's article on Clinton's life after the Presidency. She discusses at length Clinton's efforts to make the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) a potent and positive force--both for policy transformations around the world and for the resuscitation of Bill Clinton's legacy. She traces how the dynamic in the Clinton family has continued to change and evolve. She covered the nomination contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama deep into 2008 and while she ended her book before Hillary Clinton finally fell on her sword, Felsenthal's recounting would be sufficient to make it clear to someone from Mars without any knowledge of the resolution of the nomination contest that Hillary Clinton's campaign was in trouble and would likely not get out of it. And she sheds a lot of light on the creation of the unexpected friendship between Clinton and George Bush the Elder, as well as Clinton's relationship with the current President Bush.

This is a fairly quick and breezy read. But a good one nonetheless and for people who like to keep up with current events in general--and especially for people who want to read any good politically related book they can get their hands on--Clinton in Exile is recommended.

The Audacity of Hope is nowhere near as good a book as Dreams From My Father was--in large part because it is written much less in Barack Obama's voice and much more in the voice of the ghostwriter Obama employed, a sharp contrast to Obama's first book. But the other part stems from the fact that Obama portrayed this latter book as offering "a new kind of politics" and then allowed the book to lapse into Democratic cant.

That he did so does not come as much of a surprise; Obama warns us at the very beginning of his book that he won't try to hide the fact that he is a Democrat. Fair enough and he shouldn't. But it would be a whole lot easier to respect the book if Obama came out and said that he was going to write something akin to an answer to Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative; a clear, blatant, (dare I write it?) partisan call to arms. Instead, Obama tells us that he will try to transcend politics while remaining true to his Democratic roots. He pulls off the second goal just fine but the first one? Not so much.

Naturally, given the fact that I am located to Obama's right on the political spectrum, I disagree with a whole host of his arguments and prescriptions. But there are other things that annoy as well. When it comes to the matter of Constitutional interpretation, Obama poses the argument as one between adherents of the "Living Constitution" method of interpretation and adherents of "strict constructionism" with Justice Scalia as the patron saint of the latter school. Only problem is that Justice Scalia is not a strict constructionist. He is an originalist and an adherent of the original public meaning school of jurisprudence. You would expect a former Constitutional Law lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School to know that. Scalia, in fact, has been dismissive of strict constructionism, stating that he is "not a strict constructionist, and no-one ought to be" and that strict constructionism is "a degraded form of textualism that brings the whole philosophy into disrepute." As part of his argument, Obama states that the "original understanding" (here, we see that Obama is confusing strict constructionism--which he said is the school of jurisprudence that Scalia belongs to--with the doctrine of original intent, which is closer to the school to which Scalia belongs, but still no cigar) of the Fourteenth Amendment would allow for sex discrimination and possibly racial segregation. To which I respond with "huh?" Consider the relevant language of the Fourteenth Amendment:

Section. 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Original public meaning jurisprudence can be used to point out that "citizens" are the subject of the Fourteenth Amendment and that the commonly accepted meaning of the word "citizens" at the time of the enactment of the Amendment is not restricted by either racial or gender classifications. Thus, if African-Americans and women are considered "citizens" of the United States--and they were and are--then there is nothing in the doctrine of original public meaning jurisprudence that would prevent the rights ensured under the Fourteenth Amendment to be extended to African-Americans and/or women. As racial segregation and sexual discrimination certainly "abridge[d] the privileges or immunities" of African-American and female citizens of the United States in a whole host of ways and circumstances, original public meaning jurisprudence is a help, not a hindrance to the realization of rights under the Amendment.

And of course, there are mistakes that are just silly. Obama tells us that we could not hope to discern the Founders "original intentions" since "the intentions of Jefferson were never those of Hamilton." First of all, again, Obama uses the terms "original intent" and "strict construction" interchangeably, even though they mean entirely different things (again, this is really weird for a supposedly acclaimed Constitutional Law lecturer from the University of Chicago Law School). Secondly, to the extent that original intent is considered a valid school of interpretation, the success or validity of original intent jurisprudence is not dependent on unanimity amongst the Founders in terms of their thinking on Constitutional issues. And finally, let's get our history straight. Jefferson's thinking on the Constitution matters not a whit because Jefferson was never a Framer of the Constitution. When the Constitution was being drawn up, Jefferson was out of the country, serving as America's Ambassador to France. He had nothing to do with the construction of the Constitution.

When it comes to a discussion of foreign policy, Obama gives credit on a few fronts to the work done by Ronald Reagan, but he also criticizes policies like the invasion of "tiny, hapless Grenada." The degree of Cuban involvement in Grenada concerned Obama not a whit and he makes no mention of it in his book. We get the traditional accusations that the Bush Administration "shaded" intelligence on Iraq, even though the bipartisan Silberman-Robb Commission found otherwise. Obama criticizes the Bush Administration for having sought a vote in Congress to authorize the use of force in Iraq, forgetting that Congressional Democrats demanded this very step. And so it goes.

The book is just a disappointment. I suppose that if you take Obama's side in the Presidential race, you will like The Audacity of Hope better than I did. But even so, can't you just listen to the speeches for free? They are pretty much the same thing, after all.

An excellent review of what appears to be a highly interesting book. And yes, the portion of The Iliad detailing with loving care Hektor's adoration of his son is one of the most moving portions in literature of any kind. Indeed, it deserves excerpting from the review. First, Fagles:

In the same breath, shining Hector reached down
for his son--but the boy recoiled,
cringing against his nurse's full breast,
screaming out at the sight of his own father,
terrified by the flashing bronze, the horsehair crest,
the great ridge of the helmet nodding, bristling terror--
so it struck his eyes. And his loving father laughed,
his mother laughed as well, and glorious Hector,
quickly lifting the helmet from his head,
set it down on the ground, fiery in the sunlight,
and raising his son he kissed him, tossed him in his arms,
lifting a prayer to Zeus and the other deathless gods:
"Zeus, all you immortals! Grant this boy, my son,
may be like me, first in glory among the Trojans,
strong and brave like me, and rule all Troy in power
and one day let them say, `He is a better man than his father!'--
...So Hector prayed
and placed his son in the arms of his loving wife.
Andromache pressed the child to her scented breast,
smiling through her tears.

And now Pope:

Thus having spoke, th' illustrious chief of Troy
Stretched his fond arms to clasp the lovely boy.
The babe clung crying to his nurse's breast,
Scared at the dazzling helm, the nodding crest.
With secret pleasure each fond parent smiled,
And Hector hasted to relieve his child,
The glitt'ring terrors from his brow unbound,
And placed the beaming helmet on the ground.
Then kissed the child, and lifting high in air,
Thus to the Gods preferred a father's prayer.
"O thou! whose glory fills th' etherial throne,
And all ye deathless pow'rs! protect my son!
Grant him, like me, to purchase just renown,
To guard the Trojans, to defend the crown,
Against his country's foes the war to wage,
And rise the Hector of the future age!
So when triumphant from successful toils,
Of heroes slain he bears the reeking spoils,
While host may hail him with deserved acclaim,
And say, `This chief transcends his father's fame':
...He spoke, and fondly gazing on her charms,
Restored the pleasing burden to her arms
Soft on her fragrant breast the babe she laid,
Hushed to repose, and with a smile surveyed.
The trouble pleasure soon chastised by Fear,
She mingled with the smile a tender tear.

Kind of makes that whole "Fagles or Pope" debate silly, doesn't it? One should naturally read and appreciate both translations for the contributions that they make to the study of literature--not to mention sheer human pleasure.

Now that Barack Obama is the presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee, I figured that it made sense for me to read the book that launched him on the literary scene. Overall, I have to write that I am very impressed. By all accounts, this book was Obama's own and he did a very good job telling the story of his life. His voice is developed, his narrative is compelling and his ability to observe and recount is formidable indeed.

I suppose that I should note as well two of the problems I had with the book. The first has to do with the way in which he tells the story of his maternal grandmother, who Obama calls "Toot." Recall the following from Obama's now-famous speech on race when the Jeremiah Wright controversy broke:

I can no more disown [Reverend Wright] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother -- a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

From this passage, I thought that Toot was going to be portrayed as a woman of quite antediluvian views on race. But when I read the book, I found that the only potentially objectionable thing she did was to express fear a day after having apparently been somewhat aggressively panhandled by a black man on the bus she took to and from work. This isn't the most enlightened behavior around; merely because a person of one particular race decides to be less-than-pleasant on one particular day, it does not mean that such less-than-pleasant behavior can be attributed to all people of that race. But Obama's speech made it seem as if Toot was guilty of far, far worse and when I read the book, my reaction to Obama's description of his grandmother's offending attitude was to be underwhelmed. Again, her Pavlovian reaction in the wake of being aggressively panhandled was not enlightened, but neither was it the "cringe" inducing pattern of behavior that Obama described it as in his speech. And indeed, Obama was unfair to his grandmother in his speech, since many a time in his book, he describes her enlightened attitudes on race, recounting, for example, the stories of her willingness to stand up to bigots and their ugly words and deeds when Toot and Obama's maternal grandfather lived in Texas.

Obama also needs to be taken to task regarding his discussion of his community activism days. As this New York Times story points out:

In a stirring scene from his memoir, Mr. Obama describes an organizing success at Altgeld Gardens, a badly neglected housing project.

Mr. Obama wrote that one day an Altgeld parent handed him a newspaper advertisement soliciting bids to remove asbestos from Altgeld's management office.

Mr. Obama recounted that he helped arrange a bus trip to the housing authority headquarters where residents had demanded a meeting with the executive director and a pledge that residential units would be tested for asbestos. As television cameras rolled, the residents were promised testing and a meeting.

"I changed as a result of that bus trip, in a fundamental way," Mr. Obama wrote. It was the kind of action that "hints at what might be possible and therefore spurs you on."

What Mr. Obama does not mention in his book is that residents of the nearby Ida B. Wells housing project, and some at Altgeld itself, had already been challenging the housing authority on asbestos. A local newspaper had also taken up the issue.

So there is some glory-hogging in the book. And Obama should be called out for it, as it does misrepresent his activism record and misleads voters to the extent that they rely on Obama's activism record as a way to predict his potential Presidential performance.

All of this having been written, it is incumbent to stress that anyone who can write a compelling biography of his life up to his early to mid 30s is a formidable figure. Most people are not able to do this, of course--either because their lives are not interesting enough by the time they hit their early to mid 30s to justify a biography, or because they are not good enough at story-telling, or both. Obama has the storyteller's touch and has led a unique and interesting--if especially introspective--life. He has shown the ability to weave a powerful narrative in telling the story of that life.

There is nothing to suggest that he won't be able to weave a powerful narrative in telling the story of why he ought to be elected President, and anyone who does not fully appreciate that fact underestimates Obama at his/her peril.

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. . . . That which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.

--John Milton. Be sure to take the time to read this excellent article on the man.

That's my last duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive.  I call
That piece a wonder, now: Frà Pandolf's hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will't please you sit and look at her?  I said
"Frà Pandolf" by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus.  Sir, 'twas not
Her husband's presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess' cheek: perhaps
Frà Pandolf chanced to say "Her mantle laps
Over my lady's wrist too much," or "Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half-flush that dies along her throat": such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart--how shall I say?--too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, 'twas all one!  My favor at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace--all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least.  She thanked men--good! but thanked
Somehow--I know not how--as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody's gift.  Who'd stoop to blame
This sort of trifling?  Even had you skill
In speech--which I have not--to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, "Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
Or there exceed the mark"--and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,
--E'en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop.  Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile?  This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together.  There she stands
As if alive.  Will't please you rise?  We'll meet
The company below, then.  I repeat,
The Count your master's known munificence
Is ample warrant that no just pretense
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
Though his fair daughter's self as I avowed
At starting, is my object.  Nay, we'll go
Together down, sir.  Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!

--Robert Browning, My Last Duchess.

If there was any justice, Douglas Feith's book would get a great deal more attention from the press than would Scott McClellan's opportunistic tell-all. Unlike McClellan, who confines himself to reciting the words and arguments of others and who does not present any kind of original or interesting analysis, Feith presents genuine scholarship, an interesting and original argument concerning 9/11, American actions in Afghanistan and Iraq and the general war on terror and a valuable behind-the-scenes look at the way in which foreign policy, defense and national security policy was made during the course of the Bush Administration.

Feith's main critique of Administration policy when it comes to Iraq revolves around his argument that the Administration should have handed over power to the Iraqis far earlier than it actually did. The reason it failed to--according to Feith--was that the State Department and Paul Bremer were concerned that the Iraqis were not up to the task of handling things and needed a Coalition Provisional Authority to manage a period of transition Feith believes went on far too long. Additionally, Feith faults the State Department and the CIA for a hostile attitude towards "external" Iraqi leaders, including Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress. Feith's opinion of Chalabi is far kinder than that held by conventional wisdom and he points out, interestingly, that when Chalabi was sidelined after the ouster of Saddam Hussein's regime, the American opposition towards "externals" went by the wayside as well. Feith finds this opposition to have been bizarre--independent of any opinion of Chalabi specifically--since the United States relied on externals to head up the Afghan government after the fall of the Taliban and since externals occupied a number of high offices once the CPA was dissolved and power was handed over to the Iraqi people.

Feith additionally points out that the Pentagon was engaged in efforts to point out in advance all of the things that could possibly go wrong with the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime and the subsequent reconstruction period in Iraq. These efforts manifested themselves most notably in the "parade of horribles" memo drawn up at the direction of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to lay out all of the potential pitfalls associated with the execution and aftermath of Operational Iraqi Freedom. Feith does not shrink from describing and decrying problems, errors and blunders associated with the American reconstruction effort, but he still makes a potent and powerful case backing the decision to remove Saddam Hussein. He reminds readers that the belief that Saddam possessed WMD's was universally accepted from the Clinton Administration on and helpfully cites quotes from Democrats stating in stark and unmistakable terms their belief--independent, in many cases, of any intelligence analysis from the Bush Administration--that Saddam possessed WMD's. In addition, Feith points to the Duelfer Report and the work of David Kay and his inspectors, who pointed out that while WMD's could not be found in post-Saddam Iraq, the capacity to regenerate a WMD program was entirely in existence and that a terrible chance would have been taken if Saddam were left in power with a weakening sanctions regime doing next to nothing to restrain any of his malevolent intentions. Feith argues that in the wake of 9/11, ensuring punishment for the perpetrators of the attack was less important than actually preventing a future attack and given Saddam's past acts of aggression, plus what was discovered concerning Saddam's WMD program by Kay and Duelfer, if the decision was made to leave Saddam in power, a future attack would have rightfully brought opprobrium upon the Bush Administration as those very Democrats who in the past sounded the alarm concerning Saddam's behavior would have savaged the Administration for not having taken their warnings seriously. (Rightfully so, though again, it should be noted that many of those same Democrats are currently effectively attacking the Administration for having agreed with their past alarm-raising comments concerning Saddam. Oh, the irony.)

Feith is also quite right to point out that the Administration has failed, from a public relations standpoint, to fight back against charges that it lied the nation into war. The recent Senate Intelligence Committee "findings" failed to uncover any such effort, as did the bipartisan Silberman-Robb Commission. For whatever reason, however, the Bush Administration failed to aggressively defend itself with the findings of the Silberman-Robb Commission or the Kay and Duelfer reports and it did not strike back against its critics by pointing out what Silberman-Robb, Kay or Duelfer said about Iraq's capacity to restart its WMD-related activities or the pre-war intelligence consensus on Iraq's WMD program that was accepted by Republicans and Democrats alike since the Clinton Administration. This public relations failure on the part of the Bush Administration has had and will continue to have massively deleterious consequences and will harm efforts aimed at accurate policymaking in the future as the "Bush Lied!" meme itself continues to mislead in largely unabated fashion.

It should be noted that I have a significant disagreement with Feith concerning his critique of "realists." First of all, I will note anew that "realism" is an international relations theory that seeks to explain past and present nation-state behavior, and to predict future nation-state behavior. It is not a set of policy prescriptions. As such, the real argument is between Feith and practitioners of realpolitik, which is a set of policy prescriptions.

Feith argues that the practitioners of realpolitik have it wrong when they say that American interests are unaffected when other countries have "totalitarian governments and hostile philosophies." This, I think, is a misreading of realpolitik. It is certainly possible for American interests to be harmed by "hostile philosophies" but only if those philosophies are in line with the interests of the nation-state that holds them. This is not always the case; Feith cites the liberation of the former Warsaw Pact countries and their embrace of a close working relationship and friendship with the United States and its Western allies as proof that a change in government can bring with it a change in nation-state interests. But it is also possible to state that the former Warsaw Pact countries always had an interest in cooperating with the United States and its Western allies and that the only reason they couldn't was because they were effectively subordinated to Soviet control through a pervasive exercise of Soviet command and power concerning the governmental and decision-making apparatuses of those countries. Feith is right to praise democratization--even as he points out that democratization was never an overriding principle to go to war in the first place; the overriding principle was to remove the threat that Saddam posed--but he neglects the fact that democratization serves realpolitik goals. Democratization encourages transparency. Transparency allows other nation-states to calculate more accurately what a democratic nation-state is up to. This naturally reduces the commission of disastrous mistakes and blunders that oftentimes arise because of failed attempts to calculate the interests and intentions of opaque authoritarian or totalitarian states.

As is now well known, Feith has set up a website for his book that gives massive--and largely unprecedented--public access to the documents on which he relied and which he used to write his book. This alone is a valuable contribution to public scholarship. Additionally, as mentioned before, Feith is giving all proceeds from the book to charitable organizations dedicated towards assisting veterans and their families. (Note: I was a participant on a conference call with Douglas Feith in which he talked about his book and the arguments he made.)

Feith's book is a useful and important tool with which to examine American policy in the aftermath of September 11th. One will not agree with everything that Feith wrote. But War and Decision is an important work with which to grapple and a serious study of the post-9/11 world of American policymaking cannot take place successfully without it.

And to celebrate, I would point you to this, but alas, it isn't online.

So instead, I refer you to this classic.

An appreciation that is well worth reading. I should remind longtime readers that Epstein wrote a review of Norman Podhoretz's book Ex-Friends which you can find here. In turn, I wrote a review of Epstein's review, which can be found here.

This is a favorable review of Naomi Klein's latest thing-resembling-a-book. If the author of the review had read this or this or this or this or this or this or this or this, then the review may not have been so favorable.

Or, at least, that is how one would hope an apparent member of the "reality-based community" would behave.

Tell me, O tell, what kind of thing is Wit,
   Thou who Master art of it.
For the First Matter loves variety less;
Less women love 't, either in love or dress.
   A thousand different shapes it bears,
   Comely in thousand shapes appears.
Yonder we saw it plain; and here 'tis now,
Like spirits in a place, we know not how.

London, that vents of false ware so much store,
   In no ware deceives us more.
For men, led by the colour and the shape,
Like Zeuxis' birds, fly to the painted grape;
   Some things do through our judgment pass
   As through a multiplying glass,
And sometimes, if the object be too far,
We take a falling meteor for a star.

Hence 'tis a Wit, that greatest word of fame,
   Grows such a common name;
And wits by our creation they become
Just so as tit'lar bishops made at Rome.
   'Tis not a tale, 'tis not a jest
   Admired with laughter at a feast,
Nor florid talk which can that title gain;
The proofs of Wit forever must remain.

'Tis not to force some lifeless verses meet
   With their five gouty feet.
All everywhere, like man's, must be the soul,
And reason the inferior powers control.
   Such were the numbers which could call
   The stones into the Theban wall.
Such miracles are ceased, and now we see
No towns or houses raised by poetry.

Yet 'tis not to adorn and gild each part;
   That shows more cost than art.
Jewels at nose and lips but ill appear;
Rather than all things Wit, let none be there.
   Several lights will not be seen,
   If there be nothing else between.
Men doubt because they stand so thick i' th' sky
If those be stars which paint the galaxy.

'Tis not when two like words make up one noise,
   Jests for Dutch men and English boys,
In which who finds out Wit, the same may see
In an'grams and acrostics, poetry.
   Much less can that have any place
   At which a Virgin hides her face.
Such dross the fire must purge away; 'tis just
The author blush there where the reader must.

'Tis not such lines as almost crack the stage
   When Bajazet begins to rage;
Nor a tall met'phor in the bombast way,
Nor the dry chips of short-lunged Seneca.
   Nor upon all things to obtrude
   And force some odd similitude.
What is it then, which like the power divine
We only can by negatives define?

In a true piece of Wit all things must be,
   Yet all things there agree,
As in the ark, joined without force or strife,
All creatures dwelt: all creatures that had life;
   Or as the primitive forms of all
   (If we compare great things with small)
Which without discord or confusion lie
In that strange mirror of the Deity.

But love, that moulds one man up out of two,
   Makes me forget and injure you.
I took you for my self, sure, when I thought
That you in anything were to be taught.
   Correct my error with thy pen,
   And if any ask me then
What thing right Wit and height of genius is,
I'll only show your lines, and say, `Tis this.

--Abraham Cowley, Ode: Of Wit.

Who speaks for the body? We do.
Every eminence named, each fossa,
eloquent structures of shining bones
as if standing undone on a hill above Urbino,
artists making bright lines in bright sun,
bright language as the bones resurface
after an interim of flesh. Ribs, phalanges,
wings of the sphenoid, shapes named
for what they resemble, scapula a spade.
And how we look lovingly seeing a body
that does not clatter apart, that articulates
without ligaments, that presents in October
poignant reminders begging at our doors.

--Allan Peterson, Reminders.

The Guermantes Way is the third volume of the Modern Library's six-volume edition of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time series. It relates the narrator's involvement in the salons of the highest echelons of Parisian society and discusses to great and fascinating length the nature of the personalities present in the salons--most notably that of the Duchesse de Guermantes, who the narrator was in love with until his mother disabused him of the silly notion that to loiter outside in hopes of catching the eye of the Duchesse was to make her love him eventually. While the interplay at the salons makes up the guts of the book, the story revolves in large part around the Dreyfus Affair and the divisions the debate between the Dreyfusards and the Anti-Dreyfusards created in Parisian society.

Much of the tendentiousness inherent in the play-by-play of the interactions between the royalty and aristocracy with whom the narrator spends his time is likely best excused as a way to convey to the reader the narrator's own disenchantment with the Guermantes and the high society he worked so hard to become a part of. The insensitivity and callousness of the salons are made clear in the Guermantes' reaction to Swann's revelation that he is dying and therefore cannot join the Guermantes on a journey they ask him to attend. Without a shred of sensitivity, the Guermantes announce that they simply do not believe that Swann is dying and that they will take up the matter with him after attending a party (a party that M. de Guermantes is eager to attend instead of standing vigil at the side of a dying friend). The narrator's examination of Parisian society is almost clinical and scientific in its scope, but as always, Proust is able to inject astonishing descriptive powers to his prose, and he makes clear that like Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky, Proust can best be understood as a philosopher and psychologist. More than a writer, he is a natural examiner of the human condition and as with his previous volumes, The Guermantes Way oftentimes prompts nods of recognition from the reader in response to a particular passage or observation. So long as the reader is personally addressed in this manner, he or she will continue to remain engaged in the story and it is testament to Proust's skill and power that he is able to ensure the reader's engagement concerning a subject matter--the ins and outs of Parisian high society--whose tendentiousness will, in the hands of a lesser writer, utterly turn the reader off and cause him or her to give up on the writing altogether.

But most by Numbers judge a Poet's song;
And smooth or rough, with them, is right or wrong:
In the bright Muse tho' thousand charms conspire,
Her voice is all these tuneful fools admire;
Who haunt Parnassus but to please their ear,
Not mend their minds; as some to church repair,
Not for the doctrine but the music there.
These equal syllables alone require,
Tho' oft the ear the open vowels tire;
While expletives their feeble aid do join;
And ten low words oft creep in one dull line:
While they ring round the same unvary'd chimes,
With sure returns of still expected rhymes;
Where'er you find "the cooling western breeze,"
In the next line it "whispers through the trees"
If crystal streams "with pleasing murmurs creep"
The reader's threaten'd (not in vain) with "sleep":
Then, at the last and only couplet fraught
With some unmeaning thing they call a thought,
A needless Alexandrine ends the song
That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along.

--Alexander Pope, "But most by numbers" from Essay on Criticism.

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leafs a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

--Robert Frost, Nothing Gold Can Stay.

When I consider how my light is spent,
   Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
   And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
   My true account, lest He returning chide;
   "Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?"
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need
   Either man's work or His own gifts. Who best
   Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at His bidding speed,
   And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
   They also serve who only stand and wait."

--John Milton, When I Consider How My Light Is Spent.