A Little Of The Old In And Out



(image via nndb)

In: Walter Russell Mead. If we lived in a better world, an intellect the calibre of Walter Russell Mead would be celebrated and Paris Hilton would be naught else but entirely irrelevant. Unfortunately, not enough people know about his rigorous mind and the subtlety with which he approaches the issue of religion and international relations (How many public intellectuals outside of the impotent Academy even care about the subject of religion in international relations), with emphasis on The history of the West.

Mead's most recent essay Change They Can Believe In, To Make Israel Safe, Give Palestinians Their Due was published last week in Foreign Affairs. It is genius; it is balanced and it brings out the complexity of the region underscoring how many great Men have failed to bring peace to the region and why we should keep trying. From Foreign Affairs, a taste:

"As Kissinger has famously observed, academic politics are so bitter because the stakes are so small. In one sense, this is true of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute as well: little land is involved. The Palestine of the British mandate, today divided into Israel proper and the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank, was the size of New Jersey. In 1919, its total population was estimated at 651,000. Today, the territory counts about 5.4 million Jews and about 5.2 million Arabs. Two diasporas in other parts of the world -- some 7.7 million Jews and 5.2 million Palestinians -- believe that they, too, are entitled to live there."

Mead also spoke yesterday before the New America Foundation. In his talk -- which ran through the points made in his essay -- he made the point of bringing up the failure of the British Empire, which left us with the Palestinian question (and the Pakistan-India/Kashmir crisis btw). Mead also faulted Bill Clinton's overemphasis on dealing with Arafat, whose influence was in decline throughout the 90s. Mead is one of our favorite foreign policy intellectuals and, ironically, he, a student of faith, is the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. Somewhere in the furnaces of Hades, Machiavelli is smiling at the confluence of matters of faith and Realism.



(image via subparspokane)

Out: Obamamania. Did Obama go too far in asking the hyper-ignorant Rick Warren to hold the Bible for him at the Inauguration? The timing -- after churchified African-Americans played such a major role in Prop 8 -- was, at the very least callous to gays. On the day he was elected President, Obama went so far as to mention gays in his victory speech. Michael Musto today asks on his blog with an almost Old Testament Thunder in his voice if that talk was just talk or if Obama represents change with regards to public perceptions of same-sexers:

"Up to now, the press has been shamelessly enraptured with everything Barack Obama says and does--he's been appointed our emblem of change and all our hopes are devotedly pinned on his feisty ass. But under scrutiny, cracks in Barack's armor have already started showing. There were grumblings about some of his Cabinet choices, and one especially wondered how he went from bashing Hillary Clinton when they were bitterly campaigning against each other to deciding she was his top choice for Secretary of State. Much more damagingly, he invited rabidly anti-gay pastor Rick Warren to deliver the inaugural invocation, as we started sensing we had been totally bamboozled by Obama's soothing streams of yay-gay talk."

In: Ted Kennedy, Lion Of The senate. In what will probably be Ted Kennedy's final fight, he is using the skills gained from a lifetime in the United States Senate to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis -- is he not a Pisces? -- that is our broken down Health Care system to bring about massive reform. From Bloomberg:

"Senator Edward M. Kennedy, battling a deadly brain tumor, is pushing ahead on a plan to overhaul the U.S. health-care system, ordering meetings with interest groups and negotiating with colleagues to ready a proposal that Barack Obama can act on after taking office.

"Kennedy, 76, had surgery for his cancer in June, and has since been treated with chemotherapy and radiation. While the type of tumor Kennedy has can sometimes be fatal within 18 months, the Massachusetts Democratic and his staff are pushing ahead in their efforts to secure approval of an idea championed by Kennedy for 46 years: medical insurance for all Americans.

"'This has been the cause of Kennedy’s life, and it’s clear he sees this as a great opportunity,' said Adam Clymer, the author of a Kennedy biography, in a telephone interview. 'There’s a president who wants it and, at this stage, there’s a lot less hostility from the industry' than in the past."

Even, perhaps, more than his magnificent fight from the Senate in the 80s to end South African Apartheid, this is the fight to which Ted Kennedy was born.