Month: July 2008

The posthumous embrace is pretty gob-smacking. Mark Levin calls him a defender of "abused minorities" and a "conservative great." And here is the president:

Throughout his long public career, Senator Jesse Helms was a tireless advocate for the people of North Carolina, a stalwart defender of limited government and free enterprise, a fearless defender of a culture of life, and an unwavering champion of those struggling for liberty.  Under his leadership, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was a powerful force for freedom.  And today, from Central America to Central Europe and beyond, people remember:  in the dark days when the forces of tyranny seemed on the rise, Jesse Helms took their side.

Jesse Helms was a kind, decent, and humble man and a passionate defender of what he called “the Miracle of America.” So it is fitting that this great patriot left us on the Fourth of July.  He was once asked if he had any ambitions beyond the United States Senate.  He replied: “The only thing I am running for is the Kingdom of Heaven.”  Today, Jesse Helms has finished the race, and we pray he finds comfort in the arms of the loving God he strove to serve throughout his life.

There was nothing decent about the policy record of Jesse Helms.

"A totally crazy Saturday-morning thought: Wouldn’t George W. Bush make an awesome high-school government teacher? Wouldn’t it be something if his post-presidential life would up being that kind of post-service service? How’s that for a model? Who needs Harvard visiting chairs and high-end lectures? How about Crawford High? (Or wherever?) Reach out and touch the young before they are jaded, or break them of the cynicism pop culture and possibly their parents have passed down to them. Whatever you think of President Bush, he’s a likable guy in love with his country with some history and experience to share," – Kathryn-Jean Lopez, NRO.

From the archives, Cullen Murphy’s tongue-in-cheek article on getting dictators to step down:

Now Boston University is experimenting with a new approach—the Lloyd G. Balfour African Presidents in Residence Program. The idea, simply put, is that democratically elected African leaders might not be so prone to overstay their welcome as chief executives (or to keep meddling in local politics after leaving office) if they had a well-endowed university sinecure in the United States to look forward to.[…]

Harvard could very well get to Robert Mugabe before Boston University, and with a better offer. Harvard spent much of the 1990s secretly buying up parcels of land in Boston, through a front company, in order to facilitate the university’s expansion in the twenty-first century—a subterfuge that sparked outrage among city leaders and community activists. In recent years Mugabe has made a specialty of land expropriation in the face of local opposition; what is more, he has done so in broad daylight. Harvard’s new president, Lawrence Summers, might even learn a thing or two from Mugabe.

The Tate apes Jean-Luc Godard:

Jacob Sullum comments on the new World Health Organization study:

..one thing that’s clear is the point made by the WHO researchers: Drug use "is not simply related to drug policy." If tinkering with drug policy (within the context of prohibition) has an impact, it is hard to discern, and it’s small compared to the influence of culture and economics.

Rare vintage footage. I’m pretty firm about always respecting the dead. But since he spent his life doing all he could to make my gay brothers and sisters marginalized, hated and dead, it is hard to feel what a Christian should. And since he was personally responsible for removing my chance to become an American, and his legacy of hatred toward those struggling with HIV is still alive, forgive me for finding forgiveness hard. But may he rest in the peace he so wanted to deny so many others – because they were different from him.

A video from Bob Kaplan:

Bob’s related essay is here.

Packer analyzes Hitch’s self-waterboarding:

His greatest weakness as a writer is his need to put himself at the center of attention, to win every argument, to walk away from every encounter in prose, as in life, having gotten the better of someone else. And yet the same impulse is essential to his ambition and power as an essayist. Hitchens is working, consciously, I think, in the tradition of the English essay, descended from Johnson, Lamb, Hazlitt, and Orwell, in which ideas are the flower of direct experience and everything depends on the strong presence of the “I.”

Hitchens’s limitation in this form is his inability, maybe unwillingness, to make literature out of the most interesting kind of argument which happens with oneself. When his book on Orwell came out, I wrote that this is the deepest difference between Hitchens and his hero (who’s also mine).

For example, last year he wrote a much-praised column in Vanity Fair about a soldier who joined the military in part because Hitchens’s writings inspired him to, and who was subsequently killed in Iraq. When the awful news reached Hitchens, he experienced an understandable and even terrifying shock that led him to contact the soldier’s family and, eventually, join them at a memorial ceremony. This piece had all the makings—the situation, the language, the implications—of a great essay. And it’s a good one—but Hitchens kept turning away from the darker trail of thought and feeling the original shock might have led him down. Instead, he sidetracked himself by invoking Yeats, invoking Shakespeare, invoking, of course, Orwell, as if the story was too painful not to be distanced through literary allusion.

N’Gai Croal discusses user-generated content:

Whether these 21st-century worker bees can be said to be having fun (is it really entertaining to update a Wikipedia entry?), there’s no question that their moonlighting has value even if they’re not being compensated. A YouTube spokesperson informed us that 10 hours of video are uploaded to the service every minute, which she says is the equivalent of 57,000 full-length movies every week. The comedy site FunnyOrDie may have broken into the national consciousness with Will Ferrell’s hilarious video "The Landlord," but it’s the cumulative efforts of all the John Q. Comics that will determine the start-up’s future prospects. We asked FunnyOrDie CEO Dick Glover to calculate what his site’s estimated 10,000 hours of video would cost if professionally produced; at the "inexpensive" industry rate of $400,000 per half hour, it comes out to $8 billion.

76-year-old Traute Grier who experienced the Berlin airlift in 1948/49 wears littles US flags in here hair near the new US embassy in Berlin on July 4, 2008, on the day the building will officially be inaugurated by former US president George Bush during a ceremony also attended by German Chancellor Angela Merkel. By Michael Gottschalk/AFP/Getty.