zenpundit.com

TESTING…TESTING….

Errr…people with different browsers…is this thing working ?

Exclaimable.com is the source for this tool. Below, I try my hand at a self-portrait with their art function.

Rembrandt appears to be in no danger from me, but the palette tool is cool. Mrs. Zenpundit suggests can substitute some kind of drawing pad pen for the mouse and gain finer line control. There are other things that the crafty types like Critt, Sean, Younghusband and Dan might want to investigate.

Thanks to Howard Rheingold for alerting me to this tool via group email.

KRISTALLNACHT

Adrienne Redd was kind enough to remind me the other day that today and Thursday represented the 68th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Nazi’s ” Night of Broken Glass” where Stormtroopers, SS men and frenzied mobs vandalized Jewish-owned businesses, burned synagogues, beat and murdered German Jews. The blogosphere has been relatively quiet on this topic. No doubt in part due to the intense focus on the aftermath of the election but in part, I believe, that we are slowing starting to forget.

Despite recitations of “Never Again”, the effort at memorials such as the National Holocaust Museum and Yad Vashem, the tireless witness of figures like Elie Wiesel or successful forays into global culture with such films as Schindler’s List and The Pianist, imminence of the Holocaust is fading in the public mind. Every year there are fewer survivors, every year more of the “Greatest Generation” that liberated the camps and brought home tales of unspeakable horror, pass away. Soon, the aged voices that strain with moral authority and remembered pain, voices that prick our conscience and discomfort our leaders, will be gone.

What then ? In the advent of the greatest industrialized mass-murder scheme in history, one carried out by the most modern of nation-states with the cooperation of hundreds of thousands and passive acquiescence of millions more, Hitler is reputed to have asked his nervous henchmen” And who today remembers the Armenians ?”. Who indeed ?

When Pol Pot, the lunatic Maoist, turned Cambodia into a vast charnel house with his autogenocide, only the Israeli representative at the UN called the international community to account on behalf of millions of innocent victims. When the Kurds were gassed by Saddam, we looked away. When Slobodan Milosevic butchered 200,000 Muslims and Hutu death squads were hacking nearly a million Tutsis to death, the genteel Secretary of State Warren Christopher contented himself with lawyerly instructions to State Department officials to draw ever finer semantic distinctions to avoid using the word “genocide” in public. Today in Dar Fur, the policy of the West follows in the tradition of calmly waiting for democide to wind down as the perpetrators start to run short of victims, before contemplating some form of action.

Only in Kosovo, has America acted in time to prevent slaughter on a grand scale as the Genocide Convention obligates the international community. Our sole companion in this lonely club of leading by example is that paragon of human rights, Communist Vietnam – which toppled the Khmer Rouge only because Cambodia as a Chinese satellite was a security risk to Hanoi. All this reticence and dolorous inaction with the example of the Holocaust fresh and looming by historical standards.

What will happen when it ceases to loom ? Will the twenty-first century be a better one than the twentieth ?

THE GATEKEEPER WHO PUSHED FOR GATES

In my view, was Secretary of State Condi Rice, whose warm working relationship with Robert Gates goes back to the days of Bush I, when both were key deputies to National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft. Assuming confirmation, the two will work in tandem, not in opposition, on Iraq and they will eventually dominate the foreign policy process in the last two years the way Cheney and Rumsfeld did in the first.

Dr. Barnett today had a take that attributed the nomination of Robert Gates to the rising grey eminence of former SecState/SecTreasury/WH Chief of Staff, James A. Baker III:

“Consensus growing that Rumsfeld had to go to clear way for Baker’s solution set to fly.

But make no mistake, we now have caretakers (and not the real players) in both the Building and Foggy Bottom”

I don’t disagree here with Tom so much that I am pointing out that Baker’s newfound premiership rests on the sand of George W. Bush’s desperation. Gates and Rice will have the bureaucracies, levers of power that will endure even when Bush’s gratitude to his father’s mentor/alter ego does not.

Baker’s best move is to strike hard and fast, effect some substantive policy changes while everyone is casting about for a life preserver, and then get the hell out of town with his dealmaker reputation intact. Sticking around will only mean twisting in the winds of shifting political fortune.

ADDENDUM:

Veteran journalist Robert Novak posts the first ” hit piece” on Gates – full of a fair amount of misinformation. Gates the anti-Soviet hardliner at Bill Casey’s CIA was a “liberal” ? WTF ????

DANG…MAYBE I SHOULD POST ON POLITICS MORE OFTEN

Thank you to RealClearPolitics, Done with Mirrors, The Small Wars Council and Interact for the links.

A TIPPING POINT OR A TURNING POINT?

Not only has the field changed with the 2006 election but so have the choices. The question for everyone is whether this watershed rebuke by the electorate represents a tipping point toward disaster a turning point for something better?

President George W. Bush has to face the fact that he has not only been sharply reprimanded by the voters, as often happens to the Chief Executive in midterm elections ,but he has squandered the lease on power the GOP had in controlling all three branches of government. Never has a party worked so long for such power, used it for so little lasting effect and lost it as quickly as have the Republicans.

How the Bush administration acts over the course of the next two years will weigh heavily in 2008 to determine whether the voters who deseted the GOP wil return to the fold. While I genuinely admire Rumsfeld and feel his accomplishments as SecDef are being ignored by those who once were heaping accolades on him not long ago, his position was untenable as of this morning. Even the Congressional Republicans disliked him and if someone had to go, Rummy was highest profile stand-in to atone for the president’s mistakes. His departure – and the Democrats own weak position despite being flushed with victory -buys the administration a breathing space to reconsider their political strategies and style from top to bottom.

On the opposite side, the Democrats are to be congratulated for running a smart race in a technical sense and for avoiding their usual ideological self-destruction. The Democratic leadership talked moderate, walked moderate and ran moderates in GOP-leaning states instead of sacrificial lambs hailing from the lunatic fringe of liberalism. James Webb is literally a very conservative” Reagan Democrat” who, frankly, I am more comfortable with politically than his socially conservative Republican opponent. Two years ago, if somebody told us that Democrats would elect a James Webb, Rush Limbaugh would have been doing backflips.

If Pelosi and the Democrats listen to folks like Rahm Emanuel for the next two years and formulate a coherent and honest strategy on Islamist terrorism that actually involves fighting Islamist terrorists rather than patting down Scandinavian grandmothers at airports, they will be well-positioned for 2008. If the elderly liberal bulls, like Waxman, Kennedy, Leahy, Dingell and Conyers, who soon will be easing themselves into chairmanships, drive the agenda and wave ” bloody shirt” leftist issues to the ecstatic ululations of the Moveon.org/DailyKos wingnut base, then 2009 will see the inauguration of President McCain.