Bush hatred and Clinton hatred: two sides of the same coin? I am not a Boomer. That explains why I don't hate Clinton, but I hate W. If this be (fair & balanced) angst, so be it.
Baby Boomer Angst Is Behind the Hatred of President Bush
by
Michael Barone
The level of Bush hatred and Clinton hatred makes many of us uncomfortable, even some of us who have harsh feelings toward one of them.
Why this increased harshness? My explanation: It is a baby boom thing. What we are seeing is a civil war between the two halves of the baby boom, the liberal half that basked in national publicity in the late 1960s and the conservative half that smoldered in resentment for many years until its more recent rise to prominence. The first example of such harshness in national politics came in October 1992 in the vice presidential debate between Dan Quayle and Al Gore, the first two baby boomers to run against each other. This was a rock 'em, sock 'em debate--a sharp contrast with the careful, deferential tone that baby boomer Bill Clinton employed toward GI-generation George H. W. Bush.
Class of '64. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were both born in 1946, the year generally taken as the beginning of the baby boom. They both graduated from high school in 1964, graduates of the class that recorded the peak SAT scores in history; Hillary Rodham Clinton, Gore, and Quayle graduated a year later. When they were in college, these young people were widely hailed as as the most talented young people in history: In 1969 Life magazine gave rapturous coverage of Hillary Rodham Clinton's commencement speech at Wellesley. The liberal boomers thought it was time they took things over; they played key roles in the Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern campaigns in 1972 and the Richard Nixon impeachment process in 1974.
Bill Clinton in 1992 and George W. Bush in 2000 both conducted consensus-minded campaigns, but both soon came to be hated by large numbers of voters. Character played a part. Both men have personal traits that the other half of the baby boom generation loathes: Clinton's smooth articulateness and ethical slipperiness, Bush's mangled syntax and moral certainty. The hatred was ratcheted up in the 2000 Florida controversy, in which both sides for tactical reasons made arguments congruent with their own half of the baby boom's deeply held moral attitudes. The Gore campaign argued, The rules are unfair; change the rules. The Bush campaign argued, It's unfair to change the rules in the middle of the game; enforce the rules. It was inevitable that whichever side lost would deeply resent the result--and hate the winner.
Boomer liberals are liberation-minded on cultural issues and conciliation-minded on foreign policy. Just as they favored propitiating campus rioters by granting many of their demands in the 1960s, so they favor mollifying terrorists by conceding some of theirs, as Bill Clinton tried to do in Northern Ireland and Israel. Boomer conservatives are tradition-minded on cultural issues and confrontation-minded on foreign policy. They smoldered when campus rioters extracted demands from college presidents, and today they favor confronting terrorists militarily, asserting the fight is between good and evil.
Copyright © 2003 U. S. News & World Report
Friday, November 14, 2003
Now I Know Why I Hate W (and Why Others Hate Clinton)!
Reflection On Anti-Semitism
Whenever a student asked (after encountering the term in a textbook), What is anti-Semitism? I would reply: anti-Semitism is when you hate Jews of all kinds: Tomato Jews, Orange Jews, Pineapple Jews, Cranberry Jews, and on and on. Making light of a horrible human phenomenon? Mocking the anti-Semites? Anti-Semitism is as American as applie pie (to paraphrase H. Rap Brown). If this be (fair & balanced) revulsion, so be it.
[x Straits Times]
Name the Person Who Made These Anti-Semitic Remarks
by
Janadas Devan
The former Malaysian prime minister, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, said recently that Jews rule the world by proxy. Opinion polls in Europe show a majority of Europeans feel Israel is a threat to world peace. Anti-Semitic 'hate speech' and 'hate acts' seem more frequent lately. But as Janadas Devan finds out, anti-Semitism has a long, persistent and troubling history.
CONSIDER the following examples of anti-Semitism:
- 'Reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.'
- 'You may as well do anything most hard/ As seek to soften that - than which what's harder? -/ His Jewish heart.'
- 'How I hated marrying a Jew.'
- 'Down in a tall busy street he read a dozen Jewish names on a line of stores... New York - he could not dissociate it now from the slow, upward creep of these people.'
- 'Jew York'. 'Jewnited States.' 'Franklin Delano Jewsfeld.'
Who uttered these statements?
Dr Josef Goebbels? Some Nazi poet? A blond Aryan, expressing regret for marrying a Jew during the Holocaust? A member of the lunatic Ku Klux Klan?
None of the above.
They were made by some of the most prestigious figures in Anglo-American culture:
- T.S. Eliot
- William Shakespeare
- Virginia Woolf (who, of course, married Leonard Woolf, a Jew)
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Ezra Pound.
Similar examples of anti-Semitism can be easily multiplied.
In French literature - Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Maurice Barres.
In English literature - Rudyard Kipling, Hilaire Beloc, G.K. Chesterton.
In American letters - Henry Adams, H.L. Mencken. Among industrialists - Henry Ford.
Among 'All-American heroes' - Charles Lindbergh. Among royalty - King Edward VIII, later the Duke of Windsor.
And on and on, ad infinitum.
But these are only examples of 'hate speech'.
The list of 20th century anti-Semitic 'hate acts' is more gruesome.
The Holocaust, when six million Jews were exterminated by Hitler, was only the final act.
Pogroms during and after the 1917 Russian Revolution resulted in the death of 75,000 Jews.
In Germany, after World War I, Jewish communities in Berlin and Munich were terrorised by anti-Semitic organisations.
After the Munich Soviet was crushed, all foreign-born Jews were expelled from the city.
The Holocaust didn't happen out of the blue; Europe was well-primed for the 'Final Solution'. And it was not the work of only a few decades, but of centuries.
As historian Paul Johnson points out in his History Of The Jews, though the term 'anti-Semitism' was not coined until 1879, anti-Semitism, 'in fact if not in name', undoubtedly existed from 'deep antiquity'
Copyright © 2003 History News Network
How Are Things Going In Iraq?
I wish I knew. If this be (fair & balanced) weariness, so be it!
[x NYTimes]
Op-Chart
By ADRIANA LINS de ALBUQUERQUE, MICHAEL O'HANLON and JELLY ASSOCIATES
How are things really going in Iraq? That's a tricky question. First, it is inherently difficult to measure progress in counterinsurgency warfare and nation-building efforts. Second, reports of the latest violence — including the deaths of more than 50 American and other coalition troops in the first two weeks of November — and the highly partisan debate in Washington dominate the news coverage, overshadowing more in-depth analysis.
This chart, compiled largely using United States government information, tracks a number of trends in Iraq that can help shed light on how the situation is evolving. Of course, this being war, the data is inevitably fluid, subject to constant updating by the government. Nevertheless, what we have is still better than the filtered information usually heard from the true believers of the left and right.
A few main messages emerge. For starters, violence against coalition troops has increased as the occupation has lengthened and, in regard to the all-important objective of winning Iraqi hearts and minds, unemployment rates are still too high. However, most other trends are encouraging — declining crime rates in Baghdad, increasing numbers of Iraqi police officers being trained, and telephone and water services at about 80 percent of pre-war levels. Once one accepts the premise that the United States and its partners are still at war in Iraq, and that the mission there is clearly the most challenging American military operation since the Vietnam War, the most accurate long-term outlook is one of guarded optimism.
Adriana Lins de Albuquerque and Michael O'Hanlon are, respectively, senior research assistant and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Jelly Associates is a graphic design firm in South Norwalk, Conn.
Copyright © 2003 The New York Times Company