Bill Kristol: "Only girlie men need apply..."

President George W. Bush can't afford to fold on Bolton without becoming, in the analytic of George F. Will, an instant "lame duck." Kristol expands on the political significance of the Bolton fight in The Weekly Standard:

But it is ridiculous to spend time dealing with these charges. Indeed, I suspect even the anti-Bush Doctrine Republican senators on the Foreign Relations Committee will ultimately be too embarrassed to hang a "No" vote on such flimsy scaffolding.

And do the Democrats--the party of Richard Holbrooke and Madeleine Albright--really want to have as a new standard for exclusion from high office whether an official has ever lost his or her temper? For future government jobs, perhaps the Democrats should add to the job description: Only girlie men need apply.

But to dismiss the assault on Bolton as farcical and inconsequential is to miss its real meaning, and its impact if successful. True, if Bolton is not confirmed, another Bush-doctrine believer will be nominated for U.N. ambassador, and, under Condoleezza Rice's direction, the Bush foreign-policy caravan will move on.

But that's not all this fight is about. Bolton's accusers want to send the message that it's okay, perhaps, to agree with a conservative president's policies--but it's a career-ender if you take on the bureaucracy or the establishment aggressively on behalf of the president.

Internet Haganah

Today's Washington Post had a cover story on Aaron Weisbrud, the blogger who tracks down pro-terrorist websites.

Weisburd, 41, a half-Irish, half-Jewish New Yorker, said that like other Americans he was deeply affected by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He wanted to enlist in the military, but his age and health issues made that impossible.

Then, about a year later, he saw a news story about a Web site that showed what appeared to be a kindergarten class in the Gaza Strip acting out terrorist attacks. He was outraged and went to his computer to do some research, eventually discovering the name of the company hosting the site. He e-mailed the owner of the Web-hosting company at 6 a.m. By 8 a.m. the site was down.

From that success, the former philosophy major from George Washington University set up "Internet Haganah,"-- the latter word in Hebrew means "defense" and was the name of the underground Jewish militia in British-controlled Palestine from 1920 to 1948. The site, dedicated to fighting back against Islamic terrorist sites, has more than 30,000 unique visitors each month.

On another morning that same week in early April, Weisburd called up an e-mail informing him that someone on a Yahoo bulletin board was soliciting donations to go on a "jihad" somewhere. Within a few minutes, Weisburd is able to find three of the messages and trace their origin -- from cable modems at someone's home and at a New England school district. He hit the forward button and sent the information off to a law enforcement contact.

For some reason, Post editors didn't seem to want to put a link to the site in their story's lede, so, here's a link to Internet Haganah (http://haganah.org.il/haganah/).

Still More Pathetic Bolton Charges

From The Sydney Morning Herald:

In her letter, Ms Finney said she was a lawyer-adviser working on policies when Mr Bolton called her into his office in late 1982 or early 1983. She wrote that he asked her to persuade delegates from other countries to vote with the US to weaken World Health Organisation restrictions on marketing of formula in the developing world.

She said she refused because improper use of the formula can be deadly. Mr Bolton then 'shouted that Nestle [one of the biggest producers of formula] was an important company and that he was giving me a direct order from President Reagan'.

'He yelled that if I didn't obey him, he would fire me,' she wrote. 'I said I could not live with myself if even one baby died because of something I did ... He screamed that I was fired.'

The State Department would not comment. But on Friday, a spokesman said once the allegations were explored, it would lead to the 'inescapable conclusion that Mr Bolton would be an excellent ambassador'.

Guess what? Once again, Bolton didn't fire her because he couldn't fire her. All he did was move her to another office...

We really will need a full set of hearings to decide this question. Fairness to Bolton and Bush means the nominee must have a chance to face his accusers publicly.

Art of Afghanistan in Washington, DC

Now on display at the Freer Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, a show of Afghan treasures from the Timurid dynasty. The show got a rave review from Paul Richard in today's Washington Post. Exhibits include artifacts from Iran and Uzbekistan, as well as Afghanistan. The collection will be on display until August.

My Dream Seder

Reality meets the dream in Cousin Lucy's Spoon's story of this year's Passover celebration in Israel.

China's Role in Crushing the 1956 Hungarian Revolt

An interesting analysis of Chinese accounts of the 1956 Hungarian revolt has been posted on Far Outliers. It is based on Chinese sources, and reveals that Krushchev had been quite ambivalent about the 1956 Hungarian revolt. At one point, he was willing to let Hungary go. Only after consulting the Chinese, and reportedly at their urging, did Moscow send tanks into Budapest to preserve Russia's grip on Eastern Europe. The article sort of puts Tienamien Square into historical perspective.

Vladimir Vladimirovich on the New Pope and Condi Rice

The Moscow Times runs a pretty funny satire of the Putin lifestyle from Vladimir Vladomirovich.ru. Today it is all about Putin's reaction to Condi Rice's visit and the election of a new Pope.

Is This The Future of the Movie Business?

Roger L. Simon's link to JibJab's comedy Matzah short led me to explore the Atom Films website, which seems to have a selection ranging from porno to drama to comedy for downloading. And I wondered, is this the future? What Blogging has done for news and idea junkies, what Napster and iTunes have done to the music business seems almost here for visual communication. I think I understand all the excitement about the Grokster case. The long-awaited merger of the PC and TV may be closer than we think.

BTW, there is a link to the P2P lobby's website (yes, Virginia, there is a P2P lobby...) here at P2P United.

Pioneer Publisher Donald E. Herdeck Remembered

Matt Schudel published this interesting obituary of Washington, DC publisher Donald E. Herdeck, founder of Three Continents Press, in today's Washington Post:

Donald E. Herdeck, 80, whose small Washington publishing house brought worldwide attention to dozens of Third World writers, including two winners of the Nobel Prize for literature, died April 20 of congestive heart failure at his home in Pueblo, Colo.

A onetime State Department diplomat, Dr. Herdeck was on the faculty of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service when he decided that the easiest way to obtain the books he wanted to teach in his classes would be to publish them himself. He launched Three Continents Press in 1973 and found his greatest acclaim 15 years later when one of his authors, Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, was awarded the Nobel Prize.
Donald Herdeck's Three Continents Press published the works of two Nobel Prize winners.

Despite scant critical attention and little commercial demand, Dr. Herdeck had published Mahfouz's works in small editions since the 1970s. But the Nobel proved to be a mixed blessing for Three Continents, which had just one employee beside Dr. Herdeck.

The entire stock of Mahfouz's novels, translated into English from Arabic, sold out in one day, and it took weeks to reprint them. Dr. Herdeck received a call at home from an angry bookseller, who scolded him for being "a terrible businessman."

He recounted the conversation to The Washington Post's David Streitfeld: " 'Here you have this wonderful Nobel Prize winner, this wonderful author, and you don't have copies of his books! What's wrong with you?'

"Herdeck responded with something like this: 'And where have you been for the last 12 years, when we had thousands of these books sitting in our warehouse and they sold only in trickles? What was wrong with you?''"

Mark Steyn on John Bolton

This column too good to pass up (thanks to LittleGreenFootballs for the link):

The weak bromides touted by the Dems in lieu of a policy -- a legalistic approach to the war on terror, greater deference to the U.N. and America's ''friends'' -- were defeated at the polls. Since then, they've been further discredited: The failure of terrorist prosecutions in Europe underlines how disastrous John Kerry's serve-'em-with-subpoenas approach would be; the sewer of the Oil-for-Food scandal and the attempts by Kofi Annan to castrate the investigation into it demonstrate yet again that there is no problem in the world today that can't be made worse by letting the U.N. have a hand in solving it; and America's ''friends'' -- by which Kerry meant not allies like Britain and Australia but the likes of France and Canada -- turn out to be some of the countries most implicated in the corruption of U.N. ''humanitarianism.''

Republican voters understand this. Why don't Republican senators? The rap against John Bolton is that he gets annoyed with do-nothing bureaucrats. If that's enough to disqualify you from government service, then 70 percent of citizens who've visited the DMV in John Kerry's Massachusetts are ineligible. Sinking Bolton means handing a huge psychological victory to a federal bureaucracy that so spectacularly failed America on 9/11 and to a U.N. bureaucracy eager for any distraction from its own mess. The Democrats' interest in derailing Bush foreign policy is crude but understandable. But why would even the wimpiest Republican ''moderate'' want to help them out? Who needs capuchin monkeys in the Senate when GOP squishes are so eager to tap-dance for Democrat organ grinders?

Russian for Americans

The Russian Dilettante has a pretty interesting explanation of differences between American and Russian mentalities. The same word can have different meanings, which may be an obstacle to better Russo-American understanding, as seen during Secretary of State Rice's recent visit:

Confusion over words

American media are good at parrotting key words to the whole world but bad at exporting concepts. Part of the problem is linguistic and cultural flippancy. Two words spelled almost the same in two languages do not have to have the same meaning in both. When ideology-peddlers ignore this well-known fact, absurdity ensues.

Take "individualism." To its Anglospheric proponents, it means taking responsibility for one's actions and well-being. To many Russians, the word embodies a different worldview: "I want it all for myself. I don't give a sh*t about you guys." In Russia, Dillinger would be called an individualist but Bill Gates' one-word description would more likely be smart, risk-taking, enterprising, lucky. He might as well turn out an "individualist," but not necessarily.

"Collectivism" to many American freedom-preachers is being told what to do by a group one happens to belong to. Often enough in Russia, it means team spirit, helping one's friends, pulling resources to achieve a common goal.

To be properly understood in Russia, one has to use "responsibility" to convey the notion of individualism, and I can't think of a good word to describe the "bad" variety of collectivism. For its totalitarian extremes, the first thing that comes to mind is what the good old Vladimir Zhirinovsky (yes, the one who seems an ultrachauvinistic clown) said when he announced his support for Yeltsin in 1996: "Communists got into every Soviet citizen's bed."

Remembering the Armenian Massacres

The Guardian's editorial today is called "Forgotten holocaust".

Bush Must Push Bolton Through

So say the The Editors of National Review:

This offers an opportunity for Bolton defenders to try to get the debate back where it belongs, on the substantive merits of his nomination rather than the sideshow disputes over whether he has occasionally spoken sharply to people and the 11-year-old off-the-wall allegation of abuse by the founder of the Dallas chapter of ?Mothers Opposing Bush.? Bolton has been nominated not to ?serve? the United Nations, as liberals have it, but to serve the president of the United States and the goals of his foreign policy there. He is such a superb choice partly because there is as little chance of him being captured by the U.N. bureaucracy as there was of him being captured by the State Department bureaucracy. We would expect and hope that at the end of Bolton's tenure at the U.N. he will have earned just as much enmity from recalcitrant bureaucrats at Turtle Bay as he did at Foggy Bottom.

This was at the root of Bolton's dispute with Powell. Since he has no strong philosophical moorings himself, Powell quickly became the servant of the permanent State Department establishment, for whom Bush's post-9/11 reorienting of U.S. foreign policy was discomfiting at best. Bolton was not just a believer in Bush's foreign policy, but regarded it as his professional duty to represent it in a building where he knew it wouldn't make him popular. Yes, this occasionally meant clashes with bureaucratic underlings. This was sometimes necessary ? it is President Bush's appointees who are supposed to be setting the direction of the U.S. government, not bureaucrats with their own agendas. But it mostly meant that Bolton was routinely disagreeing with Powell and Armitage, who are now bent on exacting their revenge in a campaign marked by Powell's trademark underhanded style.

Sharon's Pesach Interview

From Haaretz , this interview with the Israeli Prime Minister: "Sharon likes to talk about the Bible, about the Jewish connection to the Land of Israel, about the connection to the land and to working the land. But it's hard not to get the impression that religion and tradition are foreign to him. That he feels no attachment to the spiritual, faith- inspired side of the settlement movement. 'I'm not a religious person, but I'm a Jew,' he says. 'I didn't grow up in a religious family. I grew up in a non-religious family. My grandfather, whom I don't remember, was traditional, but not Orthodox.'

"Do you fast on Yom Kippur? Eat matza on Passover? 'I fast every Yom Kippur. In the shape I'm in, it's not that hard, and on Passover I eat only matza.'

"This Passover, Sharon is seeking conciliation with the settlers and talking about healing the rifts in the nation. He is trying to distance himself from his statement in the interview he gave NBC, in which he said that the atmosphere in Israel is like 'the eve of civil war.' When we asked him about it, he gave an embarrassed laugh. 'I'm making every effort to make the disengagement process as peaceful as possible, and even though it is a very, very painful thing, and very, very difficult, I'm trying hard to see that things are done through consent.' His readiness to consider postponing the evacuation until after Tisha B'Av - a decision he says is not yet final - and to support the Gush Katif settlers' request to move en masse to Nitzanim derives, he says, from his desire to preserve inner unity 'on the day after.' There are many other national missions to be accomplished, says Sharon. 'I'm very concerned about what will come afterwards. We must settle in the Galilee, in the Negev and in the Jerusalem area. There will be security problems, too. We won't be able to sit around and rest on our laurels.'
Sharon praises the settlers - 'In the last generation, they have been the leading group in settling the land, in pioneering and volunteerism, and in security,' he says, adding that their feeling of rejection 'won't serve Israel's objectives.' He rejects the argument that the disengagement only proves that the vast settlement project in the territories was a waste. 'The statements that are coming from the left, that it was all for nothing, and that our economic situation and the losses suffered are a result of the settlement enterprise, and also what you hear from settler leaders who talk about total destruction and the ruin of Zionism - they're doing this, of course, in order to heighten opposition, but I say to them that this is a very grave thing because the objectives and missions have not ended"

President Bush's Passover message

Jewish News Weekly of Northern California has this message from President Bush:

I send greetings to those observing Passover, beginning at sundown on April 23. This celebration marks the historic Exodus of the Israelites from Pharaoh's oppression more than 3,000 years ago. During Passover, Jews around the world gather with family and friends to share the story of God's deliverance of the Israelites from slavery to freedom. Through songs and prayers, they remember the blessings and mercy of a just and loving God. By passing this story from generation to generation, they teach the triumph of faith over tyranny and celebrate God's promise of freedom.

The lesson of this story is timeless and reminds us that even in the face of struggle, hope endures. As we work to bring hope to the oppressed, we recall the words of the Psalmist, which are read at the seder meal:

'This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.'

Laura and I send our best wishes for a joyous Passover.

Powell v. Bolton: Round 1

Today's Washington Post reveals the man behind the curtain in John Bolton's difficult confirmation saga to be former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Now that he's been "outed," perhaps it is time for Powell to come forward and tell the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in a public hearing what he told certain Senators in off-the-record briefings, in order to give Bolton a chance to respond? Bolton might want to line up some heavy-hitters on his side, like George Schulz and Henry Kissinger, as well as the current Secretary of State, to respond to Powell's charges.

Such a public debate on higher-level questions as the role of the US in the UN, sparked by the Bolton nomination battle, might be a very good thing, and be the silver lining to the pathetic cloud of accusations piling up against Bolton.

Far Left Merger with Far Right: The Soros-Norquist Alliance

Bull Moose says the George Soros - Grover Norquist relationship bears watching: "...seriously, this lefty conspiracy is now infiltrating the Central Committee of the Right Wing Conspiracy - the Wednesday Grover Norquist meeting..."

Ecuador Upheaval A Defeat for Democracy

Miami Herald editors think the latest change of government south of the border isn't exactly a "Rose Revolution":

Now, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has called for a restoration of order. Fine, but where was U.S. diplomacy when the Gutierrez government began making a mockery of democracy months ago? It's hard to see how the chaos in Ecuador promotes the Bush administration's goal of furthering democracy around the globe. The democratic charter of the Organization of American States is tailor-made to aid countries in trouble like Ecuador, but with the secretary-general's seat vacant and U.S. leadership missing, the OAS predictably failed to respond. There are no winners amid this wreckage except foes of democracy like Fidel Castro, who was quick to boast that Mr. Gutierrez lost out because he was ''too close to the empire,'' his epithet for the United States. He must be chortling with glee as he watches the chaos in Ecuador and takes note of the weakening commitment to democracy in one of the most volatile regions of the hemisphere.

Is Russia Doing OK?

Nicholas Gvosdev thinks Andrei Shliefer's new book makes the case that Russia is moving in the right direction, the economy is on track, and that liberalization is moving forward. He says there are larger cultural issues that prevent people from realizing how well off they really are, and refers to the American controvery over outsourcing as a parallel.

In one sense, Gvosdev is right. Russia is obviously richer than it has ever been before. And I agree with this statement: "I think a strong case might be made for Russia's economic troubles having stemmed in large part from values and worldview -- precisely the types of stimuli to which politicians respond."

But am I convinced that Russia is on the right track? Not unless Putin lets Khodorkovsky go...

Condoleeza Rice Analyzes Vladimir Putin

From an interview with Fox News, she had this to say about her meeting with the Russian president:

QUESTION: You met yesterday with President Putin. Have your perceptions of him, what kind of man he is, what kind of leader he is, how committed to democracy he is, at all changed over time?

SECRETARY RICE: I believe that this is a strong leader for Russia. He is someone who cares deeply about his country. He's actually quite easy to talk to. He is willing to talk about difficult subjects and does it without being defensive. And he is someone who obviously wants his country to succeed. We haven't always agreed about the future course of Russia, but there is no doubt that this man is a patriot, he cares deeply about his people, deeply about his country, and I think is trying to do his best to take Russia into a better future.

QUESTION: What percentage of Russian nuclear materials does the United States consider to be securely under lock and key?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, I'm not able to go into numbers here. Let's just say that we have worked hard since the collapse of the Soviet Union to secure as much Russian nuclear material as possible. We --

QUESTION: Is even 50 percent?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, James, I;m not going to go into numbers. I will say that we have been working as hard as possible and as quickly as possible and accelerated the timeline in the Energy Department programs to secure nuclear materials, not just in Russia but in general in the space that was created by the former Soviet Union. We have very active programs to do that. And we and the Russians have been working on this problem, but I don;t want to go into specific numbers.

QUESTION: So you can't even assure me that even half of the nuclear arsenal of that country is under lock and key?

SECRETARY RICE: James, I’m not going to get into numbers. I don’t think that people should believe that we have a huge problem with a lack of security of nuclear material. We do have concerns that in the post-Soviet period and up till now that are being met through the programs that we have for trying to secure those materials.

One interesting cross-cultural note. It seems that Rice's visit to Moscow may have produced a different reaction among Russians than among Americans. For example, last night my Russian teacher criticized Rice for going on the air with Echo Moscow radio without a translator. He thought it was bad that she made mistakes. Where my attitude, as an American, was that it was good that she was trying to speak Russian. We say, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." But, in Russia, mistakes have often been fatal...