RUTHFULLY YOURS

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter argued at the Reagan Defense Forum on Saturday that Russia and China pose a “potentially more damaging” threat than terrorist groups like ISIS because of “their size and capabilities.”

“Russia appears intent to play spoiler by flouting these principles and the international community. Meanwhile, China is a rising power, and growing more ambitious in its objectives and capabilities,” Carter said. “Of course, neither Russia nor China can overturn that order, given its resilience and staying power. But both present different challenges for it.”

He reminded the Reagan Library audience that his recent trip to Asia was his third as Defense secretary.

Carter stressed that “in the face of Russia’s provocations and China’s rise, we must embrace innovative approaches to protect the United States and strengthen that international order.”

Russia, he said, “violated sovereignty” of Ukraine and Georgia and is “actively trying to intimidate the Baltic states,” while “throwing gasoline on an already dangerous fire” in Syria.

So, this is what we have come to in the Bill O’Reilly KillingIcons series. First, a book that entertainingly hypothesizes an assassination out of thin gruel (Killing Patton) and now a book about a failed assassination attempt (Killing Reagan). Except very little about O’Reilly’s most recent book is even about the assassination attempt on President Reagan—unless you want to count the character assassination by O’Reilly and his (actual) writer, Martin Dugard. It’s little more than the latest attempt by Bill O’Reilly to gain mainstream acceptance.

Not long ago, I wrote that comparing Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump was the biggest insult imaginable to Reagan’s legacy. Not any more. This garbage far surpasses it, in no small part because the big breaking news that O’Reilly claims justifies his rush job on this sloppy, poorly constructed book was already discussed—and mostly discarded—in 1988.

That’s right, Bill, the 1980s called and they want their breaking news back.

The big breaking news (in Bill O’Reilly’s mind) is an internal investigation conducted by then chief of staff Howard Baker into the condition of White House operations in the wake of the Iran-Contra affair. Baker asked his longtime staffers James Cannon and Thomas Griscom to give him an assessment of the situation.

“It is only when the Western chancelleries break out of their delusional bubble and acknowledge the Manichean and irreconcilable nature of the challenge posed by their Islamist adversaries that their policies will stand the slightest chance of success.”

Efraim Karsh, professor emeritus at King’s College London and currently professor of political studies at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, has written a tour de force on the follies of great-power Middle East policies over the past century, down to the disastrous misconceptions and blunders of President Barack Obama.

The Tail Wags the Dog [1] begins with some myth-busting about the Sykes-Picot agreement, now ritually denounced as a British-French imperialist grab of the Middle East from which its current woes originate. Actually, Karsh demonstrates from the historical record, Britain and France sought to construct a unified Arab empire that would replace the Ottoman Empire. Instead they were outmaneuvered by local actors—namely Sharif Hussein of Mecca and his sons, Faisal and Abdullah—into forging what are now Jordan, Syria, and Iraq, of which the latter two (at least) were undoubtedly problematic entities from the start.

Readers who remember Mel Brooks‘ hilarious routines as the Two Thousand Year Old Man — the quintessential old Jewish codger who has seen it all, knows it all, and is going to tell you all about it — will have no trouble enjoying “People!,” veteran journalist Sol Sanders‘ rambling, far-reaching and often moving memoir. While not two thousand years old, Mr. Sanders is pushing 90 … and has he got a tale to tell.

Although it ranges around the globe, his story is a uniquely American one, and of a special kind: that of small-town Southern Jewry. As a Jewish friend of mine from New York once remarked, “What you’ve got to understand about Southern Jews is that they’re very Jewish, but they’re also very Southern.” Such is Sol. Raised by immigrant parents in a small community in rural North Carolina where his parents, the only Jews in town, ran a successful variety store, young Sol’s love of woods, streams, farm animals and local characters was sometimes overshadowed by a sense of otherness, of apartness from his surroundings and those populating it. This gives his early reminiscences both an authentic feel and a critical objectivity that might otherwise have been lacking. Perhaps it is this same ability to absorb and appreciate the world around him while viewing it with an outsider’s eye that made Sol Sanders a born journalist long before he knew anything about the profession. It is also possible that his homosexuality, which he discusses candidly but, mercifully, not at excessive length or in morbid detail, enabled him to understand and empathize with people, places and situations very different from himself over a long, globe-trotting career in Europe, Asia and Latin America for major publications including the Christian Science Monitor, U.S. News & World Report, Business Week and The Washington Times, among others.

I attended a showing of a documentary on November 9,1988 hosted by Ronald Lauder, who announced that Cardinal O’Connor could not attend because he was ill with high fever. Immediately after the screening, a frail and febrile Cardinal O’Connor surprised everyone and walked to the lectern. Holding a Torah to his breast, in a slightly tremulous voice he said a prayer for the souls of the victims ending with the words “never again.” rsk
http://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/07/nyregion/interfaith-events-marking-kristallnacht.html

A week of solemn events commemorating the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht got under way yesterday with John Cardinal O’Connor announcing that all 410 churches in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York would ring their bells Wednesday night to mark the event, the beginning of the Nazi Holocaust.

Speaking at St. Patrick’s Cathedral to 4,000 people, including a delegation of Jewish leaders, the Cardinal also said he would light a memorial candle in the window of his residence on Madison Avenue that night. He urged New Yorkers of all faiths to do the same.

”The horribly destructive flames of Kristallnacht can, by the grace of God, be converted into flames of worship, reverence and prayer for the human spirit,” he said. Hebrew Bible Displayed
Cardinal O’Connor delivered his homily holding a Hebrew Bible, which he called ”the Torah, the law written by the finger of God.” It was this book that the Nazis wanted to destroy, he said, ”so that with diabolical ingenuity, they could replace it with their own laws and thus replace God.”

As he spoke, the Cardinal, his voice breaking with emotion, clutched the Hebrew Bible to his chest and sometimes waved it in the air.

In his homily and in a column this week in Catholic New York, the Cardinal said he ”had no patience” with those who ask, ”Why do the Jews keep remembering the Holocaust?”
”To say to the Jews, ‘Forget the Holocaust,’ ” he wrote in his column, ”is to say to Christians, ‘Forget the Crucifixion.’ There is a sacramentality about the Holocaust for Jews all around the world. It constitutes a mystery, by definition beyond their understanding – and ours.”

That was his first mistake. And Bill O’Reilly was about to make him pay for it with a dressing down rarely if ever seen between two conservative superstars on a major prime time news show.

The clash began with George Will’s evisceration of O’Reilly’s new book, Killing Reagan. O’Reilly documented how Reagan’s health was much worse than most knew. So bad, that staffers prepared a memo instructing Reagan’s chief of staff, Howard Baker, what to do if it was discovered the President was no longer able to carry out his duties.

Will did not like that on two counts. One, it was untrue. Two, it was unkind. Will’s attack began with the Washington Post headline: “Bill O’Reilly Slanders Ronald Reagan.”

The rest of the review was reminiscent of Mary McGrory quote of Lillian Hellman: “Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.”

A few one liners should capture Will’s unusually pugilistic approach:

“Unsubstantiated assertions.”

“Fiction (refuted by minute-by-minute records in the Reagan Library.)

“Pretense of scholarship.”

Along with a billion or so other people, actor Antonio Banderas watched live in 2010 as 33 Chilean miners were miraculously pulled from a hole in the ground, after 69 days trapped 2,300 feet below the surface.

“I was watching the television and said, ‘Somebody’s gonna make a movie out of this,’” he recalls. Five years later he’s starring in it, playing a miner named Mario Sepulveda. “The 33” opens on Nov. 13.

The mine collapse became a media sensation almost the instant it became a catastrophe. It wasn’t exactly the circus that Billy Wilder depicted in “Ace in the Hole” (1951), in which an opportunistic reporter played by Kirk Douglas turns a poor sap trapped in a cave into a scoop and tourist attraction. But world-wide media flocked to Chile, especially 17 days into the ordeal when rescuers drilled a narrow hole, and miners sent up a handwritten note saying “Estamos bien.” (“We’re OK”). While engineers worked to drill a wider hole to get the miners out, the trapped workers got media offers via the mail they were receiving via a small tube.

“Mario had a film offer while down there. Some of them were getting offers to do gigs, to do interviews with Japanese television or go to Spain for a talk show,” says Héctor Tobar, a Los Angeles journalist who wrote the authorized book, “Deep Dark Down: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free.”

The scariest great poem in the English language was written by a young genius of limitless potential who turned into an opium addict, was besotted by German metaphysical philosophy, and was plagued by ill health and a loveless marriage. Though he considered himself a slothful failure, Samuel Taylor Coleridge left us a portfolio of astounding poems that includes not only “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” but “Kubla Khan” (which he characteristically denigrated as a mere “fragment”). He also produced a prose masterpiece (“Biographia Literaria”), invented the conversation poem (“This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”), and was present at the creation of a major literary movement.
One of Gustave Doré’s celebrated engravings illustrating the poem. ENLARGE
One of Gustave Doré’s celebrated engravings illustrating the poem. Photo: Art Resource

With William Wordsworth, Coleridge was co-author of “Lyrical Ballads” (1798), the book that launched the Romantic revolution in English poetry. The first and longest poem in the book—one of only four by Coleridge (his collaborator had 20)—is the immortal “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

Donald Trump is just one symptom of today’s cultural pathology of self-validating vehemence with blustery certitudes substituting for evidence. Another is the fact that the book atop the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list is a tissue of unsubstantiated assertions. Because of its vast readership, Killing Reagan: The Violent Assault That Changed a Presidency by Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly and his collaborator Martin Dugard will distort public understanding of Ronald Reagan’s presidency more than hostile but conscientious scholars could.

Styling himself an “investigative historian,” O’Reilly purports to have discovered amazing facts that have escaped the notice of real historians. The book’s intimated hypothesis is that the trauma of the March 1981 assassination attempt somehow triggered in Reagan a mental decline, perhaps accelerating the Alzheimer’s disease that would not be diagnosed until 13 years later. The book says Reagan was often addled to the point of incompetence, causing senior advisers to contemplate using the Constitution’s 25th Amendment to remove him from office. Well.

Reagan was shot on the 70th day of his presidency. In the next 2,853 days he produced an economic boom and the Cold War’s endgame. Among O’Reilly’s “explanations” for Reagan’s supposed combination of creativity and befuddlement are: He was brave; “on his bad days, he couldn’t work” but on good days “he was brilliant”; Nancy Reagan was in charge; it was “almost miraculous.”

When Reagan’s unsatisfactory chief of staff Don Regan was replaced by Howard Baker, a Baker aide wrote a memo that included slanderous assessments of the president from some disgruntled Regan staffers. This memo, later regretted by its author, became, O’Reilly says, the “centerpiece” of his book. On this flimsy reed he leans the fiction (refuted by minute-by-minutes records in the Reagan Library) that, in O’Reilly’s words, “a lot of days” Reagan never left the White House’s second floor where he watched “soap operas all day long.”

The thought that most frequently pops into my head when I read diatribes by militant atheists is “Why won’t you read a book?”

Of course, put thus, the thought is implausible. The militant atheists who get interviewed in newspapers presumably have read books. Christopher Hitchens had certainly read a lot of books. But there are good books and there are bad books, and then there are necessary books. And, clearly, they haven’t read any of the books that should, in a cultured society, be presumed necessary for participation in public debate.

Take the theoretical physicist and public speaker Lawrence Krauss. Krauss is, in a way, a perfect example, because he doesn’t even pretend to be a philosopher — unlike, say, Daniel Dennett or Richard Dawkins. Krauss recently received the 2015 Humanist of the Year award and delivered himself of a speech attacking religion; before that, he wrote a piece for The New Yorker that went viral, calling on scientists to attack religion.

Krauss’s belief — and it is a belief — is that religion and science are competing ways of explaining the world. Religion is based on dogma, and science is based on doubt, and those two are, at the end of the day, incompatible. One must win. I’ll let you guess which side Krauss is on.