Jonah Goldberg:

Margaret Sanger, whose American Birth Control League became Planned Parenthood, was the founding mother of the birth-control movement. She is today considered a liberal saint, a founder of modern feminism, and one of the leading lights of the Progressive pantheon. Gloria Feldt of Planned Parenthood proclaims, “I stand by Margaret Sanger’s side,” leading “the organization that carries on Sanger’s legacy.” Planned Parenthood’s first black president, Faye Wattleton — Ms. magazine’s “Woman of the Year” in 1989 — said that she was “proud” to be “walking in the footsteps of Margaret Sanger.” Planned Parenthood gives out annual Maggie Awards to individuals and organizations who advance Sanger’s cause. Recipients are a Who’s Who of liberal icons, from the novelist John Irving to the producers of NBC’s West Wing.

What Sanger’s liberal admirers are eager to downplay is that she was a thoroughgoing racist who subscribed completely to the views of E. A. Ross and other “raceologists.” Indeed, she made many of them seem tame.

Sanger was born into a poor family of eleven children in Corning, New York, in 1879. In 1902 she received her degree as a registered nurse. In 1911 she moved to New York City, where she fell in with the transatlantic bohemian avant-garde of the burgeoning fascist moment. “Our living-room,” she wrote in her autobiography, “became a gathering place where liberals, anarchists, Socialists and I.W.W.’s could meet.” A member of the Women’s Committee of the New York Socialist Party, she participated in all the usual protests and demonstrations. In 1912 she started writing what amounted to a sex-advice column for the New York Call, dubbed “What Every Girl Should Know.” The overriding theme of her columns was the importance of contraception.

A disciple of the anarchist Emma Goldman — another eugenicist — Sanger became the nation’s first “birth control martyr” when she was arrested for handing out condoms in 1917. In order to escape a subsequent arrest for violating obscenity laws, she went to England, where she fell under the thrall of Havelock Ellis, a sex theorist and ardent advocate of forced sterilization. She also had an affair with H. G. Wells, the self-avowed champion of “liberal fascism.” Her marriage fell apart early, and one of her children — whom she admitted to neglecting — died of pneumonia at age four. Indeed, she always acknowledged that she wasn’t right for family life, admitting she was not a “fit person for love or home or children or anything which needs attention or consideration.”

Under the banner of “reproductive freedom,” Sanger subscribed to nearly all of the eugenic views discussed above. She sought to ban reproduction of the unfit and regulate reproduction for everybody else. She scoffed at the soft approach of the “positive” eugenicists, deriding it as mere “cradle competition” between the fit and the unfit. “More children from the fit, less from the unfit — that is the chief issue of birth control,” she frankly wrote in her 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization. (The book featured an introduction by Wells, in which he proclaimed, “We want fewer and better children…and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict on us.” Two civilizations were at war: that of progress and that which sought a world “swamped by an indiscriminate torrent of progeny.”

A fair-minded person cannot read Sanger’s books, articles, and pamphlets today without finding similarities not only to Nazi eugenics but to the dark dystopias of the feminist imagination found in such allegories as Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale.

Read it all.

Goldberg doesn’t go into the support that Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the reaper and founder of International Harvester, indirectly provided to Sanger. McCormick’s son Stanley was a nutcase (schizo sex maniac) who married Katherine Dexter, the first female graduate of MIT with a science degree.

Dexter became a major figure in the women’s suffrage movement and funded the development of the first oral birth control pill.  Stanley spent the rest of his life living in Riven Rock, an estate in Montecito, California — basically an asylum for one.

Another twist is that Stanley’s brother, Harold McCormick left his wife, Edith Rockefeller (daughter of J.D. Rockefeller) for one Ganna Walska, a mediocre European opera singer with a talent for marrying wealthy men. She married six times and got wealthier as she wed.

In 1941, she retired to Montecito, not far from her onetime brother-in-law, where she bought 37-acres as a planned retreat for Tibetan monks. But it was wartime and monks couldn’t get visas, so she turned it into a tropical garden. It is now open for tours and has a collection of rare cycads.

Author Michael Dobbs writes in the Washington Post that the version of the Cuban missile crisis that JFK and his spinmeisters spun was not quite so heroic. At the same time, JFK’s background in the military and his understanding of history made him the right man for the moment.

…it’s easy to draw the wrong lessons from the missile crisis. The history of those 13 terrifying days when the world stood at the nuclear precipice has become encrusted in mythology and riddled with basic errors of fact.

To use the 1962 showdown as a guide to handling modern-day crises, we must separate history from political spin. Kennedy and his aides had an obvious interest in stressing the president’s cool resolve under fire. Camelot’s court historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., has described the way JFK “dazzled the world” through a “combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve, and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated.” Kennedy’s defense secretary, Robert S. McNamara, declared that “there is no longer such a thing as strategy; there is only crisis management.”

In fact, crisis management is an art, not a science. I have spent thousands of hours over the past three years assembling a minute-by-minute chronology of the crisis, combing through archives and interviewing American, Soviet and Cuban participants. I was startled to discover that the debates inside the White House (secretly tape-recorded by JFK) were often out of sync with events in the rest of the world. Much of what Kennedy thought he knew about Soviet actions and motivations during the crisis rested on flawed intelligence reports and assumptions. Far from being an example of “matchlessly calibrated” diplomacy, the Cuban missile crisis is better understood as a prime illustration of the limits of crisis management — and the importance of the ever-present screw-up factor in world affairs.

Lest anyone think that faulty intelligence started with the Bush administration, let me say that I uncovered numerous examples of bad information flowing into and out of the Kennedy White House — beginning with the celebrated “eyeball to eyeball” episode on Oct. 24, 1962, when JFK was led to believe that Soviet freighters transporting missiles toward Cuba had reached the U.S. blockade line around the island and turned around at the last moment.

Declassified U.S. and Soviet records show that the Soviet ships were 500 miles from the closest U.S. warship at the moment when then-secretary of state Dean Rusk famously declared, “We were eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked.” The incident never happened, at least as depicted by Kennedy aides, Harvard professors and Hollywood moviemakers. Khrushchev had ordered his ships to return to the Soviet Union more than 24 hours earlier.

JFK was, like any president, at the mercy of his intelligence services. Some of the things Kennedy didn’t know during the crisis:

• an American U2 spy plane had wandered into Soviet airspace, aggravating tensions
• there were 43,000 heavily armed Soviet troops in Cuba, not 6,000-8000 technicians as they thought
• the CIA had photographs showing where the nuclear warheads were stored, but misinterpreted what they saw

From the New York Times op-ed:

Senator Obama defended his position by again enlisting Kennedy’s legacy: “If George Bush and John McCain have a problem with direct diplomacy led by the president of the United States, then they can explain why they have a problem with John F. Kennedy, because that’s what he did with Khrushchev.”

But Kennedy’s one presidential meeting with Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier, suggests that there are legitimate reasons to fear negotiating with one’s adversaries. Although Kennedy was keenly aware of some of the risks of such meetings — his Harvard thesis was titled “Appeasement at Munich” — he embarked on a summit meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna in June 1961, a move that would be recorded as one of the more self-destructive American actions of the cold war, and one that contributed to the most dangerous crisis of the nuclear age.

Senior American statesmen like George Kennan advised Kennedy not to rush into a high-level meeting, arguing that Khrushchev had engaged in anti-American propaganda and that the issues at hand could as well be addressed by lower-level diplomats. Kennedy’s own secretary of state, Dean Rusk, had argued much the same in a Foreign Affairs article the previous year: “Is it wise to gamble so heavily? Are not these two men who should be kept apart until others have found a sure meeting ground of accommodation between them?”

But Kennedy went ahead, and for two days he was pummeled by the Soviet leader. Despite his eloquence, Kennedy was no match as a sparring partner, and offered only token resistance as Khrushchev lectured him on the hypocrisy of American foreign policy, cautioned America against supporting “old, moribund, reactionary regimes” and asserted that the United States, which had valiantly risen against the British, now stood “against other peoples following its suit.” Khrushchev used the opportunity of a face-to-face meeting to warn Kennedy that his country could not be intimidated and that it was “very unwise” for the United States to surround the Soviet Union with military bases.

Nikita punk’d him:

Kennedy’s aides convinced the press at the time that behind closed doors the president was performing well, but American diplomats in attendance, including the ambassador to the Soviet Union, later said they were shocked that Kennedy had taken so much abuse. Paul Nitze, the assistant secretary of defense, said the meeting was “just a disaster.” Khrushchev’s aide, after the first day, said the American president seemed “very inexperienced, even immature.” Khrushchev agreed, noting that the youthful Kennedy was “too intelligent and too weak.” The Soviet leader left Vienna elated — and with a very low opinion of the leader of the free world.

Kennedy’s assessment of his own performance was no less severe. Only a few minutes after parting with Khrushchev, Kennedy, a World War II veteran, told James Reston of The New York Times that the summit meeting had been the “roughest thing in my life.” Kennedy went on: “He just beat the hell out of me. I’ve got a terrible problem if he thinks I’m inexperienced and have no guts. Until we remove those ideas we won’t get anywhere with him.”

A little more than two months later, Khrushchev gave the go-ahead to begin erecting what would become the Berlin Wall. Kennedy had resigned himself to it, telling his aides in private that “a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.” The following spring, Khrushchev made plans to “throw a hedgehog at Uncle Sam’s pants”: nuclear missiles in Cuba. And while there were many factors that led to the missile crisis, it is no exaggeration to say that the impression Khrushchev formed at Vienna — of Kennedy as ineffective — was among them.

If Barack Obama wants to follow in Kennedy’s footsteps, he should heed the lesson that Kennedy learned in his first year in office: sometimes there is good reason to fear to negotiate.

Divers in France have found the oldest known bust of Roman dictator Julius Caesar at the bottom of the River Rhone, officials have said.

The marble bust was found near Arles, which was founded by Caesar.

France’s culture ministry said the bust was from 46BC, the date of the southern town’s foundation.

The ministry described the bust - which shows a lined face and a balding head - as typical of realist portraits of the Republican era.

Republicans have always been realists.

It’s time to stop judging Obama by the color of his skin and start judging him by the thinness of his skin.

Whew, the petulance of that man when challenged about his judgment! Any suggestion that he’s wrong is labeled a divisive attack. And a lie. And old style politics….blah blah blah.

Well, well.

To buttress his position of meeting with our enemies, Obama cited JFK meeting with Khrushchev when we were on the brink of nuclear war.

Wrong. The Cuban missile crisis came 15 months after the two leaders had first met.

In their meeting, Khrushchev sized up JFK as a weak pretty boy who could be pushed around. Thus he installed missiles in Cuba, gambling that JFK would do nothing. That’s what the perception of weakness gets you: trouble. On this Obama is both ignorant and naive.

Khrushchev was evil, but rational. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not rational.

Give me a black president. Give me a white president. Just don’t give me a green president.

Here’s a feast: Christopher Hitchens, Kay Hymotitz, Stefan Kanfer, Guy Sorman, Harry Stein and Sol Stern contribute thoughts on the zeitgeist of 40 years ago.

Uncommon Knowledge completes its five-part interview with Tom Wolfe, who is optimistic about another eight “American centuries.” He also reminds viewers that the chattering class consider Dwight Eisenhower to be stupid because he was inarticulate.

VIDEO HERE

“We want nothing of a world in which the certainty of not dying from hunger comes in exchange for the risk of dying from boredom.” — a slogan from France’s 1968 riots

The year 1968 epitomized the Chinese curse: “May you live in interesting times.” Interesting they were, in the extreme.

In the United States, we had the murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and race riots that set cities ablaze. We had hippies getting their skulls cracked outside the Democrat nominating convention, a campaign made interesting when LBJ opted not to run for reelection (he had health and Vietnam issues). We had a naval ship, the USS Pueblo, captured by North Korea.

In Czechoslovakia, citizens rose up against the Soviets in what’s now called the Prague Spring. After a brief period of optimism, the Evil Empire sent in tanks and crushed the movement.

But France in May 1968 was most extreme. Nearly two thirds of its citizens went out on a general strike. The military moved into cities and universities trying to restore order. Things got so tense, Charles DeGaulle decamped temporarily at an Air Force base in Germany.

The revolt failed, but had long term impacts. As the Wikipedia entry says:

In France, it is considered to be the watershed moment that saw the replacement of conservative morality (religion, patriotism, respect for authority) with the liberal morality (equality, sexual liberation, human rights) that dominates French society today. Although this replacement did not take place solely in this one month, the term mai 68 is used to refer to the shift in values, especially when referring to its most idealistic aspects.

Today, when I hear talking heads and political candidates whine about the supposedly tough times we’re living in, I have to laugh. Forty years ago revolution was in the air. Things were strange. Authority was being questioned. But for all that, it was nothing compared to my parents who endured the Great Depression and World War II.

The AP takes a skeptical look at Hillary Clinton’s claims of vast foreign policy experience as first lady.

Clinton also took a keen interest in foreign policy, traveling to more than 80 countries, with her husband and alone, to promote U.S. policy and the cause of women and children.

But Clinton is taking credit for accomplishing more than some of those who were active in foreign policy during the Clinton years recall.

The article goes on to examine Hillary’s various claims to fame. Here’s the doozy, which even the AP let slip by.

SERBIA: “I urged him to bomb.”

Clinton doesn’t bring this one up now, but in a 1999 interview published in Talk magazine, the first lady was quoted as saying that she had urged her husband to recommend a NATO bombing campaign on Serb targets to halt ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.

According to the story, Clinton called the president on March 21, 1999, from her travels in North Africa. “I urged him to bomb,” she was quoted as saying. “You cannot let this go on at the end of a century that has seen the major holocaust of our time. What do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life?” NATO airstrikes began March 24.

First, the threat to civilians in the region was overhyped. Yet no one accuses the Clintons of “cherry picking” intelligence.

But how can Hillary refer to the civil war massacres in the Balkan as the major holocaust of her time when 800,000 Rwandans were macheted to death just five years prior?

The Clintons conveniently forgot that Bill was “the first black president” and looked the other way as 8,000 people a day bled to death for 100 consecutive days.

Now apparently, that deed doesn’t even merit being remembered by Hillary. 

UPDATE:

Obsidian Wings debunks claims Hillary argued for Rwandan intervention. Such a lie is grotesque and easily refuted. Bill Clinton always claimed the US didn’t understand the gravity of the situation.

So: Clinton didn’t mention that she advocated military intervention in Rwanda in her memoirs. Neither did Madeleine Albright. Neither, as far as I can tell, did anyone else. Military intervention was not considered as an option, “never even debated”, which means that any advocacy she did engage in must have been pretty ineffective.

But it’s worse than that. The Clinton administration did not simply fail to intervene militarily in Rwanda. It took a number of steps that made it easier for genocide to be committed. Not taking these steps would have been much, much easier than sending actual troops to Rwanda. They would have made a real difference. And yet the Clinton administration failed to take them.

What Clinton did was worse than inaction, he actually made things worse.

So, to sum up: the US didn’t just fail to intervene in Rwanda. Our government urged the withdrawal of the UN peacekeeping forces that were on the ground protecting Rwandans, for no better reason than to keep the Belgians from looking like cowards. It refused to jam the radio station that was passing on instructions for genocide. It blocked further efforts to reinforce the peacekeeping forces there. It also failed to do any of the much smaller things that might have shown that our government was not wholly indifferent to the people of Rwanda who were, at that time, being hacked to death with machetes.

It’s worth bearing this background in mind when you hear Hillary Clinton claim that she advocated military intervention in Rwanda. If you don’t, you might think: well, it’s perfectly comprehensible that she might have argued for military intervention but failed to convince her husband. After all, military intervention in another country is a big deal, not to be undertaken lightly. And it’s easy to imagine Hillary Clinton being in favor of it, and her husband reluctantly concluding that it just wasn’t something he could do.

It’s a lot harder to imagine that while Hillary Clinton was advocating military intervention, she not only failed to convince her husband to send troops, but also failed to convince him, for instance, not to advocate the withdrawal of most of the UN peacekeepers, or that he really ought to order the Pentagon to jam Radio Milles Collines. If she was doing her best behind the scenes, and failed to accomplish even this — if, despite her best efforts, she couldn’t persuade her husband not to advocate withdrawing UN peacekeepers just to provide cover for the Belgians — then we really need to ask how effective an advocate she really is, especially since no one except her husband, in full campaign mode, seems to remember her efforts at all.

 Terry Teachout:

Why are so many Americans unaware that Joseph Stalin was as brutal, systematic and effective a killer as Adolf Hitler? One reason is because so much of the Old Left looked the other way at Stalin’s nefarious activities, and was unwilling later on to admit that it had done so.

Another is that the Soviet Union remained a closed society long after the killing stopped, making it vastly more difficult for interested Westerners to study the Great Terror in the way that the Holocaust became a subject of detailed historical inquiry. As a result, we know far more about the individual innocents who died in the Holocaust than about those who were murdered at Stalin’s command.

But Stalin meant well, didn’t he?

Will this situation continue? Now that the Old Left is dying out, it has become somewhat more acceptable for American academics to study the Great Terror and report on it in a straightforward way, which doubtless explains the publication of The Voices of the Dead: Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s (Yale, 295 pp., $30), a new book by Hiroaki Kuromiya, a professor of history at Indiana University.

For the past several years, Kuromiya has been examining the files of the secret police in Kiev, which in the 30’s was the Soviet Union’s third-largest city. (Now it is part of the independent state of Ukraine, whose rulers are more willing than their opposite numbers in Moscow to let outsiders study what Stalin wrought.) Like all bureaucrats, the killers of Kiev kept detailed records of their activities, right down to the late-night death warrants that were signed minutes before their prisoners were hustled out of their cells, shot in the nape of the neck and dumped into mass graves.

No question that the Holocaust is the most media covered genocide of the 20th century.

The only English language film I know of about the Turkish slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians is Ararat, a great movie.

Cambodia? The Killing Fields.

Rwanda’s 1994 genocide resulted in Hotel Rwanda, which whitewashed the cowardice of Bill Clinton and the fecklessness of Kofi Annan.

The starvation of an estimated 2 million North Koreans by their “dear leader?” No news from the Hermit Kingdom on that. Just don’t call them evil.

Victor Davis Hanson: 

2007 reminded us that our easy way of life comes at a price, and that there are consequences and trade-offs in almost everything we do. Let’s go down the list.

Illegal Immigration

President Bush’s comprehensive immigration bill collapsed this summer, following public outrage from the middle and poorer classes of both parties. These Americans reminded their politicians that first they want their southern border closed to illegal immigration — and discussion of anything else second.

They are not racists, nativists or protectionists — much less “anti-immigrant.” Instead, a substantial number of Americans — from all backgrounds — simply believe that once illegal immigration ceases, the problem becomes manageable.

Employers will have to hire our own poor and unemployed, and thus raise wages. Mexico will have to deal with its own problems rather than blaming the U.S. Tribalists and ethnic provocateurs will have to relearn that integration and the melting pot aren’t going away. Immigrants crossing from the south will have to wait in line like everyone else and arrive legally.

The Housing Crisis

Housing prices tanked in 2007. Millions of home mortgages by this past spring were behind or in default. The media rushed to blame government and lenders — as if poor buyers had a gun to their heads when they bet that housing would continually appreciate.

Yet most Americans who buy homes judiciously, and pay their mortgages promptly, were probably more philosophical than outraged. Homes had become way overpriced. Anyone who rushed out to borrow heavily to buy in such an overheated market was intent on recklessly profiting by quick resale — or hopelessly naive.

Food Is Not Cheap

Farm prices soared. For 40 years, Americans had become used to the idea that their food would stay cheap, and farmers were invisible or irrelevant. Now we are learning that farmland and irrigation water are finite resources, while the world population continues to rise. Before we can solve global warming, convert to ethanol or restore ancestral rivers, we first have to eat — and thus make sure there is enough land and water to produce food.

Oil

Oil reached $98 a barrel by November. Conservatives thought that the market alone might easily correct the problem. Yet they are starting to see in the meantime that petrol-rich, anti-American dictatorships, flush with American cash, won’t be so patient with us.

Liberals tend to claim we won’t have to find and burn far more of our own oil and coal, or build nuclear plants. But they are learning that for now that would only make Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez, Vladimir Putin and the House of Saud even happier.

Iran

The recent National Intelligence Estimate told us that Iran ceased efforts to acquire nuclear weapons in 2003. The news was as unexpected as it was widely distrusted. What’s clear, at least for now, are the effects of the report: Hawks’ ideas of pre-emptively bombing Iran are fortunately off the table. But, unfortunately, so are serious economic and diplomatic efforts to persuade the Iranians to stop. This flawed report will come back to haunt us.

Iraq

In recent months, we’ve seen a reduction of violence in Iraq as Sunni tribal insurgents joined U.S. troops in hunting down al-Qaida terrorists. These insurgents’ turnabout may have been influenced by the U.S. troop surge, a change in the American military’s tactics, worry over the Shiite-dominated government, confidence in an oil-fed prosperity or a growing awareness of the savage nihilism of al-Qaida.

The fact that insurgents approached us for help after being defeated or demoralized suggests the present truce could evolve into a peace in ways no one had foreseen.

Read it all.

Like most people, I learned history in discreet chunks: world history, American history, economic history etc. The overlaps are often overlooked.

While reading David McCullough’s biography of John Adams, it dawned on me that, while Adams and Thomas Jefferson were living in France, Mozart was at the peak of his career. They might have seen him.

Abigail Adams, who had never seen a play performed (Boston had no theaters at the time) until she arrived in Paris to join her husband, was thrilled by the opera and theater scene.

Of course, not all entertainment was high-brow. She, like many of the uppercrust, went to see such curiosities as “the learned pig.” She was so impressed, she insisted Jefferson go see the pig, which he did.

Actor, magician and historian Ricky Jay (you’ve seen him in David Mamet’s movies) wrote the wonderful Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women. The pig’s repertoire:

…consisted of spelling names, solving problems in arithmetic, telling time and even pointing out words of flashcards –correctly selecting those thought of by the audience.

It’s heartening to be reminded that even people who got their faces carved on Mount Rushmore were human.

Civil War enthusiasts this weekend will get a rare glimpse at what a handful of scholars are calling the most significant find of its kind in generations: a pair of stereoscopic photos, purportedly of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg before he delivered his famous address.

Photos of Lincoln are incredibly rare; only about 130 exist. Until now, there was only one known photo of the 16th president at Gettysburg — sitting in a crowd of dignitaries on Nov. 19, 1863, just after delivering the legendary speech.

Photo here.

…as early as the 1930s, shortly after the first commercially available camera was introduced, Stalin had his enemies “air-brushed” out of photographs. With the advent of high-resolution digital cameras, powerful personal computers and sophisticated photo-editing software, the manipulation of digital images is becoming more common. Here, I have collected some examples of digital tampering in the media, politics, and the law.

That’s Lincoln’s head on John Calhoun’s torso.

Jack Kelly:

This month marks the 230th anniversary of the event which, more than any other, is responsible for the independence of the United States of America.

What history calls the battle of Saratoga was really two battles which resulted in the surrender of British Gen. John Burgoyne and his army on Oct. 17, 1777.

Gen. Burgoyne led an army of 9,000 troops in an assault from Canada upon Albany. The Hudson River was then the great highway of America. If the British controlled both ends of it, they could cut off New England from the rest of the colonies, and strangle the infant nation in its crib.

The victory at Saratoga did more than thwart this design. The French were so impressed by it they declared war on Britain. Without French help, the Revolution could not have been won.

The French, in effect, helped midwife democracy at the point of a gun.

The victory at Saratoga was won chiefly through the strategic insight, tactical brilliance, reckless courage and inspirational leadership of one man. There is a statue “honoring” this hero on the field at Bemis Heights, site of the second battle of Saratoga. It is the likeness of a left leg, with no inscription.

That’s because the man, after George Washington, most responsible for winning America’s independence was Benedict Arnold, who is more (in)famous for other things.

Benedict Arnold was the best soldier on either side in the American Revolution (and, of course, on both sides). He was a terrific admiral, too. The year before Saratoga, he had thwarted a British invasion from Canada at the naval battle of Valcour Island. Arnold not only devised the naval strategy for the fight on Lake Champlain, and bravely and expertly fought the battle, he built the fleet, too.

Why did Arnold turn coat?

He was treated badly by Congress. He was concerned about the alliance with the French (which, ironically, was the result of his victory at Saratoga). He was beguiled by the beautiful Tory he married, Peggy Shippen. But the excuses are unsatisfying. There was something missing in this otherwise great man.

In fact, Arnold covered up the incompetence of his superior, Gen. Horatio Gates. Gates was a darling of Congress, who was almost given George Washington’s job when the going got tough.

Arnold got the shaft.

Here we go again: there’s another book about Sacco-Vanzetti that gets it wrong.

In his vivid, smoothly written narrative of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, Bruce Watson concedes that Sacco, a skilled shoe worker, and Vanzetti, a bookish fish peddler, may have been “legally complicit” in the 1919 bomb conspiracy. They were “gentle dreamers whose dream included armed rebellion.” But Mr. Watson does his best (without quite succeeding) to overcome his nagging doubts and persuade himself that both men were innocent in the April 1920 Braintree murders.

By now, any author should know that even their lawyer conceded their guilt. Upton Sinclair knew, but kept his mouth shut.

But the biggest omission in any telling of the Sacco-Vanzetti case is leaving out the manipulations of Stalin, who used the case to stain America’s reputation (our good example reflected badly on his police state).

That new books and new documentaries perpetuate Stalin’s propaganda is a sad commentary.

Victor Davis Hanson:

If Gen. David Petraeus can’t stabilize Iraq by autumn — or if Americans decide to pull out of Iraq before he gets a fair chance — expect far worse chaos eventually to follow. We will see ethnic cleansing, mass murder of Iraqi reformers, Kurdistan threatened, emerging Turkish-, Iranian-, and Wahhabi-controlled rump states, and al Qaeda emboldened as American military prestige is ruined.

And then what new American Middle East policy would arise from the ashes of Iraq?

Past presidents and statesmen as diverse as Madeleine Albright, James Baker, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Brent Scowcroft have weighed in with various remedies to our supposed blunders in the Middle East since September 11.

Apparently, Americans are supposed to forget these supposedly brilliant strategists’ dismal records of dealing with Middle East terrorism, Islamic radicalism and murderous dictators. However, their three decades of bipartisan failure helped bring us to the present post-9/11 world.

Read it all.

James Taranto:

Barack Obama’s latest pronouncement on Iraq should have shocked the conscience. In an interview with the Associated Press last week, the freshman Illinois senator and Democratic presidential candidate opined that even preventing genocide is not a sufficient reason to keep American troops in Iraq.

“Well, look, if that’s the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now–where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife–which we haven’t done,” Mr. Obama told the AP. “We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven’t done. Those of us who care about Darfur don’t think it would be a good idea.”

Mr. Obama is engaging in sophistry. By his logic, if America lacks the capacity to intervene everywhere there is ethnic killing, it has no obligation to intervene anywhere–and perhaps an obligation to intervene nowhere. His reasoning elevates consistency into the cardinal virtue, making the perfect the enemy of the good.

Further, he elides the distinction between an act of omission (refraining from intervention in Congo and Darfur) and an act of commission (withdrawing from Iraq). The implication is that although the U.S. has had a military presence in Iraq since 1991, the fate of Iraqis is not America’s problem.

And what about Vietnam after we left?

In his June 1971 debate with fellow swift boat veteran John O’Neill on “The Dick Cavett Show,” the 27-year-old Mr. Kerry said, “There’s absolutely no guarantee that there would be a bloodbath. . . . One has to, obviously, conjecture on this. However, I think the arguments clearly indicate that there probably wouldn’t be. . . . There is no interest on the part of the North Vietnamese to try to massacre the people once people have agreed to withdraw.” Mr. Kerry acknowledged that “there would be certain political assassinations,” but said they would number only “four or five thousand.”

Here is what did happen:

According to a 2001 investigation by the Orange County Register, Hanoi’s communist regime imprisoned a million Vietnamese without charge in “re-education” camps, where an estimated 165,000 perished. “Thousands were abused or tortured: their hands and legs shackled in painful positions for months, their skin slashed by bamboo canes studded with thorns, their veins injected with poisonous chemicals, their spirits broken with stories about relatives being killed,” the Register reported.Laos and Cambodia also fell to communists in 1975. Time magazine reported in 1978 that some 40,000 Laotians had been imprisoned in re-education camps: “The regime’s figures do not include 12,000 unfortunates who have been packed off to Phong Saly. There, no pretense at re-education is made. As one high Pathet Lao official told Australian journalist John Everingham, who himself spent eight days in a Lao prison last year, ‘No one ever returns.’ ” The postwar horrors of Vietnam and Laos paled next to the “killing fields” of Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge undertook an especially vicious revolution. During that regime’s 3 1/2-year rule, at least a million Cambodians, and perhaps as many as two million, died from starvation, disease, overwork or murder. The Vietnamese invaders who toppled the Khmer Rouge in 1979 were liberators, albeit only by comparison.In the aftermath of America’s withdrawal from Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of refugees fled Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. According to the U.N. High Commissioner on Refugees, between 1975 and 1995 more than 1.4 million Indochinese escaped, nearly 800,000 of them by boat. This does not include “boat people” who died at sea, 10% of the total by some estimates.

From time to time I am reminded of bizarre things that have happened in my lifetime. This usually happens when talking to my kids. The curious thing is that when these events happened, they didn’t seem so odd.

For example, consider the bizarre story of a Georgia cracker named Lester Maddox who owned a restaurant called the Pickrick Cafeteria. A staunch segregationist, Maddox refused to honor the 1964 Civil Rights Act and stood his ground with a pick handle to ward off any blacks who might try to integrate his establishment. Maddox lost that fight, sold his restaurant and ran for governor. He won.

Not only did he become governmenr, he mellowed and appointed more blacks to government positions than any of his predecessors.

But that pales in comparison of the bombing of a Philadelphia house in 1985 by the police. The city’s first black mayor had dropped a bomb from a helicopter on a black neighborhood.

PHILADELPHIA, May 13-A state police helicopter this evening dropped a bomb on a house occupied by an armed group after a 24-hour siege involving gun battles. A 90 -minute shootout this morning came after a week of growing tension between the city and the group, known as Move. Residents in the western Philadelphia neighborhood had complained about the group for years. The only known survivors from within the house were a woman and a child. The fire spread to 50 to 60 other houses in the neighborhood, said the Fire Commissioner, William Richmond. He declared the fire under control about 11:40 P.M.

Aimed to Hit Bunker

The Police Commissioner, Gregore Sambor, said tonight that it was was his decision to drop the charge, a square package of explosives designed to destroy a bunker atop the house and drop it through to the second floor. He said the charge succeeded in eliminating the threat from the roof, but touched off the fire. Steve Harmon. a resident of the area, said: “Drop’n a bomb on it residential area? I never in my life heard of that. It’s like Vietnam.”

Read the full story for the why’s and wherefores. For a slideshow of photos from the event, click here.

In high school we were taught about the so-called Red Scare in the US between 1918 and 1921. It was a time of great upheaval and social change: a just completed world war, a flu epidemic that killed 20-40 million, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, socialist and communist movements in the US, labor strikes, coming alcohol prohibition, female suffrage, and suppression of civil liberties (for real, not the whining we hear today).

The US had absorbed millions of immigrants in recent decades, some of whom were anarchists. Two of them were Sacco and Vanzetti. When the Italian immigrants were convicted of murder and executed in Massachusetts, many on the left claimed their conviction was an act of political supression.

It was presented to us in high school as a stain upon our history.

On the 50th anniversary of their execution, then-Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis proclaimed, “any disgrace should be forever removed from their names.”

Dukakis was joining a distinguised list of Sacco Vanzetti defenders: Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Bertrand Russell, John Dos Passos, Katherine Ann Porter, Upton Sinclair, George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. Allen Ginsberg, Joan Baez, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger wrotes verses about them. Of late, the band Rage Against the Machine featured them in a video.

Upton Sinclair, whose muckraking book The Jungle lead to the creation of the FDA, wrote a novel about Sacco and Vanzetti called Boston that claimed they were railroaded. Now, we learn that Sinclair had been told by the mens’ lawyers that the two were indeed guilty.

Yes, Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty. From a story in the December 24 LA Times:

Ordinarily, Paul Hegness wouldn’t have looked twice at Lot 217 as he strolled through an Irvine auction warehouse, preferring first-edition books and artwork to the box stuffed with old papers and holiday cards.

But then, he wouldn’t have stumbled upon a confession from one of America’s great authors. Inside the box, an envelope postmarked Sept. 12, 1929, caught his eye. It was addressed to John Beardsley, Esq., of Los Angeles. The return address read, “Upton Sinclair, Long Beach.”

“I stood there for 15 minutes reading it over and over again,” Hegness said of the letter by the author of “The Jungle,” the groundbreaking 1906 book that exposed unsanitary conditions at slaughterhouses.

The last paragraph got the Newport Beach attorney’s attention. “This letter is for yourself alone,” it read. “Stick it away in your safe, and some time in the far distant future the world may know the real truth about the matter. I am here trying to make plain my own part in the story.”

The story was “Boston,” Sinclair’s 1920s novelized condemnation of the trial and execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants accused of killing two men in the robbery of a Massachusetts shoe factory.

Prosecutors characterized the anarchists as ruthless killers who had used the money to bankroll antigovernment bombings and deserved to die. Sinclair thought the pair were innocent and being railroaded because of their political views.

Soon Sinclair would learn something that filled him with doubt. During his research for “Boston,” Sinclair met with Fred Moore, the men’s attorney, in a Denver motel room. Moore “sent me into a panic,” Sinclair wrote in the typed letter that Hegness found at the auction a decade ago.

“Alone in a hotel room with Fred, I begged him to tell me the full truth,” Sinclair wrote. ” … He then told me that the men were guilty, and he told me in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them.”

So what did Sinclair — the crusader for truth — do with this knowledge? He suppressed it.

“I faced the most difficult ethical problem of my life at that point,” he wrote to his attorney. “I had come to Boston with the announcement that I was going to write the truth about the case.”

Other letters tucked away in the Indiana archive illuminate why one of America’s most strident truth tellers kept his reservations to himself.

“My wife is absolutely certain that if I tell what I believe, I will be called a traitor to the movement and may not live to finish the book,” Sinclair wrote Robert Minor, a confidant at the Socialist Daily Worker in New York, in 1927.

“Of course,” he added, “the next big case may be a frame-up, and my telling the truth about the Sacco-Vanzetti case will make things harder for the victims.”

He also worried that revealing what he had been told would cost him readers. “It is much better copy as a naïve defense of Sacco and Vanzetti because this is what all my foreign readers expect, and they are 90% of my public,” he wrote to Minor.

Sinclair perpetuated a lie that continues to be believed to this day.

Which brings to mind another supposed case of injustice, cop-killer Abu-Jamal Mumia. As noted in FrontPageMag:

N THE SPRING OF 1994, I was strolling down Philadelphia’s legendary South Street. I noticed a poster in a storefront window, reminiscent of those seen in Moscow, Beijing, and Hanoi that informed passersby the latest news.

“Free Mumia,” read the headline. The sign concerned efforts by the Uhuru Democratic Party, the local successor to the Black Panthers, to release the convicted murderer of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner from death row. Abu-Jamal killed Faulkner back in 1981, and a jury found him guilty only one year later. In the intervening seventeen years, however, left-wing supporters have waged a tireless campaign to exonerate their man. In April, thousands marched in Philadelphia to demand his freedom. Speakers at the rally included Ramsey Clark and Ossie Davis.

They are but two of the many celebrities on the Mumia bandwagon. Whoopi Goldberg, Ed Asner, Peter Coyote, Mike Farrell, punk-rock band Rage Against the Machine, and many others are also on board. The group is so eclectic that it’s difficult to see what it is that unites them around this particular murderer.

Read it all. History surely does repeat itself.