Hero Week

He's faced down and fired CEOs. He solving international negotiations right and left. He's listening and explaining our now reality to the world. He's making a big bet, and it's the best bet to make right now.

In his own words:



And even after a week like that, he turns around and he's got this.

Holocaust

This afternoon I visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which documents the Nazi genocide of the European Jewish population, along with some important documentation of the same treatment of homosexuals, the physically and mentally handicapped, some Slavic peoples (Russian, Polish), Roma (gypsies), Jenovah's Witnesses, Communists and other political dissidents.

The experience is, I believe for almost all who visit, a very emotional one, as it certainly was for me. The self-guided tour starts on the fourth floor and winds down to the first, in a building designed to replicate the look and feel of the concentration camp crematoriums. It begins with Hitler's assumption of power in 1933 (the party never received more than roughly 1/3 of the German electorate vote), with anti-Jewish action happening extremely quickly, the new Chancellor and his party consolidating power in "shock doctrine" fashion must more quickly than anyone imagined. The feeling moving through the fourth floor is somewhat claustrophobic, as the exhibits are mounted facing each other across a relatively narrow hall.

Without going into great detail, the generally feeling welling up inside of me was one of mounting, righteous anger, but as the history progresses down a floor and into the ghettoizing, internment, enslavement, and both mass and mechanized execution of innocent Jewish men, women and children, the anger gives way to horror. The museum wisely puts walls between the visitors and the most disturbing video exhibits so that only adults can look over them -- nightmarish Nazi "medical" experiments and the most graphic concentration camp liberation footage -- but you pass chillingly through a cattle car and Auschwitz barracks along the way.

The stuff that get my tear ducts going is always when, in the face of personal danger, someone who might just as easily look the other way or participate in the evil reaches out to help, and the latter portion of the museum devoted to such heroes as an oppositional Protestant church in the South of France that saved kids, the great people of Denmark who hid Jews in coastal towns and smuggled them to Sweden, the great but doomed Raoul Wallenberg, the brave Sophie and brother Hans Scholl, among a documented (and still added to) list of those who worked against the Nazi genocide, it had the same effect on me.

By the time we get to the liberation and Nuremberg Trials it's all a bit late, not quite enough relief and certainly not enough justice, considering all the declined trials and commuted sentences thanks to both German and American governmental bureaus. A section near the end on the child victims serves as a reminder that the young and old (and pregnant) were taken away and killed right off the cattle cars at most camps. Pure hell on earth.

As a Jew I get into a bit of mental role-playing whenever delving into Holocaust history, imagining if I would have grabbed my family and left at the first sign of trouble, or the second, of the tenth. The problem is that as the 1930's progressed, no matter your means, there was less and less opportunity to go anywhere. You had to pay increasing fees to the Nazi government to get out, you had less and less means as your business was restricted and then confiscated, and worst of all you had a dwindling (to zero) number of places to go. A big shame in our U.S. history is that our State Department was Anti-Semitic -- we didn't even allow our designated quota of Europeans into the country during some of these years. The "ship of fools" boat from Germany tried many ports including Havana and Miami, only to be turned back (more horror). And you would have needed to get far away, as Hitler took over the neighboring countries, none being safe.

My conclusion upon leaving this essential museum is two-fold.

For one, I believe America has taken a huge step towards avoiding a similar situation here with the election of Barack Obama as President. It is by no means a guarantee of backsliding, especially if we get hit with the kind of economic depression that powered such a development of inherent racism in Germany at the Nazi takeover, but it certainly speaks greatly of our nation's values as enshrined in our Constitution, especially after an unsettling consolidation of single party power from which we've just emerged.

The other notion is that we need more museums like this, for other holocausts, like the Turkish genocide against Armenians that Hitler uses to justify his belief that the world would ignore and forget whatever Germany did to the Jews, like the Serbian genocidal program of the 1990's, and the current genocide in Sudan.

The one that's still going on, as I write this.

Road Crew

For those of you who have either read Cormac McCarthy's The Road or who are fans of HBO's The Wire, this post is for you.

There's an article in today's New York Times about the production of a Weinstein brothers-backed feature film based on the novel. It stars the great Viggo Mortensen in the lead and features name actors like Charlize Theron and Robert Duvall in relatively small roles. They seem to have found some young phenom as the boy, the son of Mortensen's character, the two of them wandering on a quest to reach the ocean in the horrific and barren post-nuclear future created so searingly by McCarthy. And the Bros made the great decision to hire John Hillcoat as director, who's previous work was the terrific Australian Western penned by Nick Cave, The Proposition.

What makes this article a special treat for fans of the David Simon/HBO show is the appearance of Michael Kenneth Williams, a.k.a. Omar, in the article and the movie. Williams plays "The Thief" and will end up naked in the picture. Per the article, he seems to have added a little improv on set and gotten kudos from the youngest actor as well as Mortensen.

Will anyone go see a bleak movie (no matter how gussied up) based on one of the bleakest books of all time?

Swimming in a sea of summer superhero/fantasy pictures, I can't wait.

Liars

This was always Bush's fatal flaw, the whole Administration's.

They lie. It's how they're built. Every time George W. Bush moves his lips, a lie slips out.

A new assessment by American intelligence agencies released Monday concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains frozen, contradicting a judgment two years ago that Tehran was working relentlessly toward building a nuclear bomb.

And they keep circulating the liars back through, even the foolish ones.

Nearly three years after Paul Wolfowitz resigned as deputy Defense secretary and six months after his stormy departure as president of the World Bank—amid allegations that he improperly awarded a raise to his girlfriend—he's in line to return to public service. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has offered Wolfowitz, a prime architect of the Iraq War, a position as chairman of the International Security Advisory Board, a prestigious State Department panel, according to two department sources who declined to be identified discussing personnel matters.

It's all on video here with MSN's Countdown, including Bush three months ago escalating rhetoric to WWIII. When he must have known of this report.

What is left of Bush/Cheney's previously shattered credibility? Not even the shards? It'll come clear that they've known this for at least a year. Maybe Cheney or John Bolton will try to start the war anyway, just fire something into Iran. Are these suckers whipped, or instead ready to push the button if only to justify their position. Self-fulfilling prophecy.

I'm guessing that this came out because of Poppy's mole, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. So if the Democratic sweep in 2006 did anything, it got rid of Donald Rumsfeld and maybe saved the Republican.

As Josh Marshall so correctly summarizes:

But it shows us once again, for anyone who needed showing, that everything this administration says on national security matters should be considered presumptively not only false, but actually the opposite of what is in fact true, until clear evidence to the contrary becomes available. They're big liars. And actually being serious about the country's security means doing everything possible to limit the amount of damage they can do over the next fourteen months while they still control the US military and the rest of the nation's foreign policy apparatus.

If only the bigger the lie, the bigger the damnation.

But come January 20, 2008, watch Junior skate.

Cheney's Latest Trick

Josh Marshall has the goods on this new phony Republican "grassroots" organization run by Bush/Cheney aides and funded by GOP millionaires. Beware "Freedom Watch":

First, both articles note that Freedom's Watch is made up of Bush-Cheney big-money givers and former staffers at the White House. But the AP makes explicit what the list of personnel makes clear: These aren't people close to "Bush" or "the White House". It's more specific than that: The activists and givers are people close to Dick Cheney.

Second, as the NYT explains, coming off the Petraeus press-rollout, Freedom's Watch's next press campaign is for confrontation (i.e., war) with Iran.

Your conservative media is trying to equate Freedom Watch with MoveOn, only MoveOn isn't made up of Party hacks and henchmen assigned by their megamaniacal leader to destabilize The World, and it's funded by hundreds of thousands of citizen contributions.

So be on the lookout for this dangerous new Cheney organization and maybe we can still stop the next war.

We'll still be #1.