Month: August 2007

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Iraq and Vietnam – last week President Bush argued that we should stay in Iraq to avoid what he called “the tragedy of Vietnam.” The president said “one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens, whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘re-education camps’ and ‘killing fields,.’” NYU history prof. MARILYN YOUNG will comment – she’s co-editor of the new book Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam: Or, How Not to Learn From the Past.

Plus: ALBERTO GONZALES IS QUITTING – to spend more time spying on his family. “Domestic surveillance begins at home,” the A.G. said (according to Andy Borowitz). JOHN NICHOLS of The Nation says we still need to investigate the firings of eight US attorneys, who were “seen by the administration as insufficiently political in their investigations and prosecutions.”

Also: The Democrats’ argument about strategy for 2008: MATT BAI of the New York Times Magazine followed four progressive groups opposed to “Clintonism” – MoveOn, the bloggers led by DailyKos.com, the Howard Dean movement, and the billionaires’ group that includes George Soros. Matt’s new book is The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics.

More stuff to read: my review of Matt Bai in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 12.
my new piece at TheNation.com, “Iraq: ‘Worst Day Since Vietnam’ for Hawaii.”

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Sometimes numbers can tell a story in ways nothing else can. TOM ENGELHARDT added up some key numbers at TomDispatch.com: Number of American troops stationed in Iraq: 162,000, an all-time high. Estimated monthly cost of the Iraq War: $10 billion/month. Number of Iraqis estimated to have fled their country: 2 million. Estimated number of Iraqi deaths from the invasion of 2003 through June 2007: Just over one million. Tom’s new book is Mission Unaccomplished, where he interviews American iconoclasts and dissenters.

Plus: The presidential races: “Democrats Say Leaving Iraq May Take Years” (New York Times) — JOHN NICHOLS of The Nation explains what’s going on with Hillary, Barak Obama and John Edwards; also, why that weekend Iowa Republican straw poll matters.

Also: Tomorrow is the 30th anniversary of Elvis’s death in Memphis in 1976. PETER GURALNICK will take up the question of “cultural theft” — did Elvis rip off black music? We’ll listen to Arthur Big Boy Crudup’s “That’s All Right Mama” and Little Junior Parker’s “Mystery Train” and compare them to Elvis’s. Peter is the author of the definitive bio Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley; his-op-ed, “How did Elvis get turned into a racist?“, ran in the New York Times on Saturday.

More stuff to read: my piece in the LA Times Book Review about The Argument, Matt Bai’s book about progressive Democrats.

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Can Democrats win in places they abandoned to the Republicans decades ago? BOB MOSER reports from “Bible-thumping, economically slumping” Wilkes County, North Carolina – and the news is good. Bob wrote the “Purple America” cover story in the new issue of The Nation, and his reports on politics in the red states will be running in the magazine through the campaign year.

Also: Opportunities in Abstinence Training: BARBARA EHRENREICH says “unlike any of the rest of the coaching industry–career coaching, life coaching, sales training, etc.–this form of training is generously subsidized by the federal government, and has been since President Clinton signed the welfare reform bill of 1996, which provided abstinence training for impoverished women (though not, alas, for him.)”  Barbara’s latest book is Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy.

Plus: JULIAN BOND on SNCC, the sixties, and civil rights: his essay, “The Movement We Helped Make,” appears in the book Long Time Gone: Sixties America Then and Now, edited by Alexander Bloom. (originally broadcast July 31, 2001).

More stuff to read: my Q&A with Holocaust historian Saul Friedlander
Your Minnesota Moment at TheNation.com, “Al Franken’s Rising Fortunes”