Week of March 24, 2008

The Democratic primary is starting to look like World War I. The origins of the dispute are forgotten. Pennsylvania is the Somme. No chance, though, that the Clintons, who lead the imperial armies, will consent to paying reparations at the Treaty of Denver.

The most striking resemblance to the Great War has been the campaign-worker body-count. They're strewn all over the battlefield. Geraldine Ferraro (killed for bringing up if Obama weren't black), Samantha Power (Hillary's a"monster"), the intrepid if foolhardy Rev. Wright (multiple offenses), James Hagee (Catholics as the"anti-Christ"), Bill Cunningham ("Barack Hussein Obama"), Bill Sheehan (for bringing up Obama's drug use). All gone. Anyone working for or in support of a political campaign these days is entering a free-fire zone.

Some say the high casualty rate in the campaigns is the result of indiscriminate political correctness. Campus speech codes were put in place to monitor people who said the"wrong thing" about favored groups, often categorized as holding"minority status" by dint of race, gender or sexual preference. Now the Democratic campaigns are using the toxic PC gas on each other.

But something more powerful seems to be in the air. The Samantha Power incident was a case study in the campaigns' current habit of leaving the wounded for dead.

We Americans are so naïve. Every time one of our respected public officials is revealed to be a man who played around, we are shocked and dismayed. The higher the office the more amazement and disbelief.

Not you, of course, I mean the average idealist in the street. It's a sure sign the country is going to the dogs. The accelerated moral degeneracy was made even clearer in the revelations about the two latest governors of New York this past week.

The problem dates back to the founding of the country.

We were always taught that George Washington was a god, the most virtuous moral man who ever lived, a paragon of rectitude. He was always portrayed as not a man of flesh and blood but a saint made of marble. The sanctity of his office made it inconceivable he would do anything disgusting, expect possibly when he was with the founding mother of the country.

Everybody knows that George Washington was first in war first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen. In researching my book, The Making of the President 1789, I discovered that he was also first with the ladies. I found at least nine women who could have said in all honesty George Washington slept here.

The Mideast peace process was a religious commitment of mine. I had been to the Mideast as governor, and I felt that up until I took over that there had not been an effort for a comprehensive peace proposal, although Nixon and Kissinger had ended the 1973 war with cease-fires.

This [Samuel D. Kassow's book, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive] may well be the most important book about history that anyone will ever read. It is also a very important book of history, telling the story of an extraordinary research project in the Warsaw Ghetto between 1940 and 1943. As a tale about why doing history matters, Samuel D. Kassow's book has few equals in our collective record. Marc Bloch, arrested by Klaus Barbie's henchmen and executed in 1944, has become the martyrsaint of modern history, and his book The Historian's Craft, left incomplete and published posthumously, has emerged as our time's classic work on the meaning of doing history. Now, with the publication of Who Will Write Our History?, Marc Bloch will have to share his great and dark honor with Emanuel Ringelblum. Like Bloch, Ringelblum is a hero of history and a hero of historiography.