Week of Jan. 8, 2007

Typically the victor writes the history. The problem with the civil war was that nobody won, and you still can’t write its history because we are still not at peace.

Other than librarians, it's hard to imagine a less rambunctious group than historians. Yet, one of the world's premier historians ended up in jail during last week's American Historical Association convention in downtown Atlanta.

George W. Bush has an urge to surge.  Like every junkie, he asks for just one more fix:  let him inject just 21,000 more troops and that will win the war.

Been there.  Done that.  In 1965, Tom Paxton sang,

  Lyndon Johnson told the nation
  Have no fear of escalation.
  I am trying everyone to please.
  Though it isn't really war, 
  We're sending 50,000 more
  To help save Vietnam from the Vietnamese.

Four decades later, Bush is asking us to save Iraq from the Iraqis. 

There's always a problem with giving a junkie another fix.  It can only make things worse. 

The Black Holocaust: After hundreds of thousands of black Muslim corpses, is the genocide at last over?

"I told him, it's gonna be awful silly if I have to take you to jail for jaywalking," said [Atlanta Policeman Kevin] Leonpacher, a native of Niceville, Fla."I used an excessive amount of discretion.

We don’t want to become an archaeological theme park, a Disney World of moai. If we are going to keep on restoring moai there has to be a good reason to do so.