Week of May 28, 2007

Why will negotiations with Syria, as advocated by so many in the United States including many members of Congress, produce nothing positive?

The problem is not so much"talking" to Syria, in a manner equivalent to having a cup of coffee with someone of the opposite gender. The real issue is that the West is looking for a long-term meaningful relationship with the possibility of compatability or even marriage. But Syria is already married to Iran, a sugar daddy too well-heeled to give up. Besides, it wouldn't be long before Bashar was asking to borrow the keys to Lebanon, getting the car all dented up, and refusing to return it.

I read in The Note that The Washington Post's Dana Milbank plumbs the book's depths to find clues to Gore's political ambitions. Campaign treatise it's not, Milbank writes:"Imagine the Iowa hog farmer cracking open 'Assault on Reason,' and meeting Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Paine, John Kenneth Galbraith, Walter Lippmann, Johannes Gutenberg, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Jefferson and Marshall McLuhan -- all before finishing the introduction."

I don't know a lot of Iowa farmers, true, but I think it amazingly insulting that Milbank thinks those names are above their collective heads. But anything to mock Gore, even the fact that he treats people with sufficient respect to expect them to understand the arguments of their country's founders and intellectual heroes.

Shiraz Dossa may not be a Holocaust denier, but he does rewrite history in the same spirit. Defending his participation at the controversial conference in Tehran, he says no one knew in advance that Holocaust deniers would be in attendance. Who did he think would be speaking on the topic"Gas Chambers: Denial or Confirmation?"

President George Washington's rented home in Philadelphia, briefly the nation's capital, had been, by the early 20th century, replaced by a public restroom. That doubtless would have cheered many Americans during the period that opens this new book from presidential historian Michael Beschloss.

Guinness will never add a category in the book of world records for anything like"Worst Person With the Best Reputation." Not because it's not interesting, but because there's one obvious winner for all time. That winner, far and away, is Che Guevara.

A caption on June 8, 1944 … misspelled the given name of the first officer seated at the left side of the table. He was Col. Girard B. Troland of New London, Conn.—not Gerand. The error was called to the attention of the editors by his grandson yesterday.

Yet another boring chapter of History---------Yawn. Why is History so boring? The main problem what I see, it is not History itself. The study of History can be made interesting and full of fun but the only requirement is a good instructor.

When people bicker over immigration, it’s often not long before the topic turns to My Family Came Here Legally. People whose roots go to Ellis Island or deeper like to say that. It fills their family trees with hard-working people who were poor but played by the rules, who got with the American program. It draws a bright line between upstanding Americans and those shadowy illegal workers hiding one big secret and who knows how many others.

It’s that line — that moral chasm between Us and Them, and between an idealized history and the muddled present — that informs the worst parts of the Senate immigration bill.

Though the war’s godfathers saw themselves as ridding the world of another Hitler, their legacy includes a humanitarian catastrophe that will need its own Raoul Wallenbergs and Oskar Schindlers if lives are to be saved.

It isn't amazing that 72 percent of Americans disapprove of Bush's handling of Iraq.

What is amazing is that 23 percent approve. (Are these the horror movie fans in the Republican base?)