Two Wars But No Sacrifices At Home

WORLD WAR TWO RATIONING REALIA

Back in the hoary days of my youth, the concept of sacrifice was deeply intertwined with the concept of war, and it was very much a double-edged sword: That is to say that the sacrifices made by men and women in uniform would be matched by sacrifices at home.

That certainly was the case with the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and the two world wars, and the latter included strict rationing of everything from gasoline to aluminum to sugar and nylon stockings.

But a funny thing happened in the post-9/11 world of warfare. Although the U.S. faced arguably the greatest threat since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, we weren't asked to match the sacrifices of the troops in Afghanistan and then Iraq by doing with less at home.

In fact, President Bush avoided any mention of sacrifice except in the most oblique terms, and defying the laws of economics pushed through a massive tax cut for the wealthy. No less blood was spent on the battlefield, but the modest budget surplus that he inherited soon mushroomed into an enormous deficit.

The inherent unfairness of expecting troops to sacrifice but not civilians is driven home by the fact that fewer than 1 percent of the population is in uniform absent a draft that supplied many of the troops in Korea and Vietnam.

Interestingly -- or perhaps inevitably -- President Obama used the word "sacrifice" only twice in his prime-time speech on the war in Afghanistan at West Point last week:

"Since the days of Franklin Roosevelt, and the service and sacrifice of our grandparents and great-grandparents, our country has borne a special burden in global affairs."

And:

"In the end, our security and leadership does not come solely from the strength of our arms . . . [but] from the men and women in uniform who are part of an unbroken line of sacrifice that has made government of the people, by the people, and for the people a reality on this Earth."

Bush's aversion to sacrifice at home was driven by the political necessity of keeping Americans as far away from the realities of an immoral and profoundly botched war, hence a policies such as prohibiting photographs of flag-draped coffins being carried off of transport planes at Dover Air Force Base.

Obama isn't averse to the concept of sacrifice. Indeed, he has invoked it often in making the case for his agenda even if it wasn't uttered at West Point except in the context of the troops.

But the American people are averse to the concept.

Perhaps the president has realized that because his predecessor sold them a bill of goods for an unnecessary war and rendered a necessary war unwinnable by starving it of boots and resources, it's a little late in the day to ask them to sacrifice, especially when so many are out of work, foreclosed and are living the American Dream Deferred.

Cartoon du Jour

Ben Sargent/Universal Press Syndicate

Kiki (ca. 1863-2009)

MORE HERE.

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

I THINK I'M A DREAMER
By Ben Goossens

Guantánamo Meets Lord Of The Flies

The effluvia of lies from the Bush Torture Regime (some of which have been repeated on Barack Obama's watch) spewed forth with such regularity that they eventually became so much background noise. But the story of the simultaneous deaths of three Guantánamo Bay detainees on the night of June 9-10 2006 in one of the most patrolled and monitored prisons anywhere is bizarre to say the least.

What we were told at the time was that the three detainees had somehow managed to commit suicide at the same time on Alpha Block at Camp Delta in what the Pentagon termed an example of "asymmetrical warfare."

What we now know thanks to the summary (pdf file) of an investigation by the Center for Policy & Research at Seton Hall University Law School is that:

* The prisoners had been on Alpha Block less than 72 hours and were separated by other occupied cells.

* The prisoners somehow had been hanging for two hours with rigor mortis when they were discovered.

* Each of their bodies were found to have a rag stuffed deep down their throats.

* Each of the three somehow braided a noose by tearing up his sheets and/or clothing, made a mannequin of himself so it would appear to the guards he was asleep in his cell, hung sheets to block vision into the cell, tied his feet together, tied his hands together, hung the noose from the metal mesh of the cell wall and/or ceiling, climbed up on to the sink, put the noose around his neck and released his weight to result in death by strangulation, hanged until dead and completely unnoticed by guards.

Meanwhile, in the service of a cover-up, Seton Hall found that there is no explanation as to why:

* Alpha Block guards were suspected of making false statements or failing to obey direct orders.

* The guards were ordered not to provide sworn statements about what happened.

* The government seemed to be unable to determine which guards were on duty that night.

* The guards who brought the bodies to medics did not tell them what had happened to cause the deaths and why the medics never asked how the deaths had occurred.

Words again fail, but this thought does occur: What is the Pentagon covering up? And this one, as well: Some of the Camp Delta detainees were and are very bad people, but the Rule of Law is not an adjustable wrench where rights and responsibilities diminish with a defendant's alleged badness.

To underline that, note that the investigative report is the eleventh in a series on Guantánamo by the Seton Hall Law, including one establishing that over 80 percent of the prisoners were captured not by Americans on the battlefield but by Pakistanis and Afghans, often in exchange for bounty payments.

Cartoon du Jour

Tom Toles/Universal Press Syndicate
(2007)

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

HOLDING BUDDHA (Ayutthaya, Thailand -- 2000)
By Rolfe Horn
Hat tip to Woods' Lot

Book Review: Elijah Wald's 'How The Beatles Destroyed Rock 'N' Roll' (Sort Of)

It came to town, a new kind of rhythm/Spread around, sort of set you sizzlin'/Now I'm all through with symphony/Oh, rock it for me . . . /It's true that once upon a time, the opera was the thing/But today the rage is rhythm and rhyme/So won't you satisfy my soul with that rock and roll!

-- ELLA FITZGERALD (1937)

While the provocative thesis of How The Beatles Destroyed Rock 'N' Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music is obvious from its title, fans of the Fab Four will be relieved to known that author Elijah Wald does not make that claim in apocalyptic terms, but rather as a statement of fact in his fascinating chronicle of how one genre superseded another -- ever building on what came before and laying the groundwork for what came next -- in the incredibly rich tapestry of 20th century American music.

Like Wald, I knew that the musical world had changed forever when I put on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band for the first time and snuggled up with my summer love of 1967 on her parents' rec room couch. (Boy was it ever not make-out music!)

What I didn't know then but have learned since because of a voracious appetite for music and books about music, is that just as the Beatles knocked rock 'n' roll heroes like Chuck Berry and James Brown off their pedestals, those stars had delivered a similar coup de grace to balladeers, balladeers to Dixieland, Dixieland to swing, and so on and so forth all the way back to the dawn of the 20th century when ragtime was ascendant.

Wald recounts that history in an iconoclastic and spare 254-pages (plus copious footnotes) with a depth, wit and contrariness that would send many music critics -- virtually all white, male and stodgy beyond their years, as he accurately notes -- howling for the exits. In fact, reviews of How the Beatles have been decidedly mixed with some critics complaining that Wald's entire approach is disingenuous.

How wrong those critics are because Wald argues convincingly that while the Beatles' ambitious later work, including Sgt. Pepper, was hailed as revolutionary it helped turn rock into art music for white people, leaving Berry, Brown and their rowdy, mostly black peers in a sort of oldies purgatory from which they never escaped:

"If early rock was already the sound of the past, then what interest could we possibly have in the popular styles that preceded it?" writes Wald. "The idea that we might have tossed a Glenn Miller record on the turntable was ridiculous: That music was already thirty years old! So it feels very odd to me when I ask my twelve-year-old nephew what he and his friends dance to at parties and the first band he names is the Beatles. He also listens to the Black Eyed Peas and other present-day groups, of course. But kids, at parties, are putting on forty-year-old records! Much as I love a lot of older music, I find that incomprehensibly strange. After all, if kids in the 1960s had been dancing to the most popular band of forty years earlier, they would have been dancing to . . . Paul Whiteman."

One of the biggest kicks of How the Beatles is the way it twisted and stretched my musical brain.

I happen to have listened to Whiteman, a hugely popular big band leader for three decades beginning in the 1920s, who did or did not play real jazz according to one's bias, because George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," which Whiteman had commissioned, was part of a box set that I bought with paper route money in the late 1950s when I was in my early teens.

Wald points out that Whiteman was a much bigger star than Louis Armstrong, who most definitely played real jazz, but is disparaged today as being "commercial" by purists although he was dubbed as the "King of Jazz" in his heyday.

Wald discards terms like "jazz" and "rock" that tend to lock listeners and critics into musical straitjackets, while discrediting the notion that the progression from ragtime to rock to rap occurred in a straight line.

Wald:

"If one accepts that continuum, then the Whiteman orchestra and the Beatles played very similar roles; not as innovators but as rearguard holding actions, attempting to maintain older, European standards as the streamlining force of rhythm rolled over them. Within the small world of music nuts, there have always been some who regard the Beatles in just this way. . . . By the time the Beatles hit, still playing the rhythms of Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins, that style was already archaic and their contributions were to resegregate the pop charts by distracting white kids from the innovations of the soul masters, to diffuse rock's energy with effetely sentimental ballads like "Yesterday" -- paving the way for Simon and Garfunkel, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Elton John, and Billy Joel -- and then to drape it in a robe of arty mystification, opening the way for the Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, Yes, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. In other words, rather than being a high point of rock, the Beatles destroyed rock 'n' roll, turning it from a vibrant black (or integrated) dance music into a vehicle for white pap and pretension."

Provocative, but hard to argue with because Wald backs up his assertions with copious research. Oh, and he happens to be a pretty good musician in his own right.

Wald also wades into the socioeconomic trends that underpinned musical trends. This includes factoids such as that while the U.S. population grew at a robust 43 percent from 1910 to 1940, the number of professional musicians, singers and music teachers fell by 7 percent. This was because of Prohibition and a bunch of technological trends over the course of the century that included the player piano, studio recording breakthroughs, radio, sound motion pictures, the jukebox, LPs, downloading, burning and file sharing, and, of course, television, notably the Beatles appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964, which is the most famous performance by a band in history.

But notes Wald:

"[I]t was the last time that a live performance changed the course of American music, and when [the Beatles] became a purely recording group, they pointed the way toward a future in which there need be no unifying styles, as bands can play what they like in the privacy of the studio, and we can choose which to listen to in the privacy of our clubs, our homes, or finally, our heads. Whether that was liberating or limiting is a matter of opinion and perception, but the whole idea of popular music had changed."

Wald is not a lamenter, but he shares my concern over the shrinking number of live music venues, which is where many a musician toiled four or five hours a night six or seven nights a week in getting the education necessary to become accomplished, let alone great. As it is, I know far too many young musicians who can't be bothered with learning the fundamentals of music, let alone going on the road.

At the end of the day, Wald is not likely to change many minds. After all, those music nuts are hard to crack. But How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'N' Roll certainly opened mine.

PHOTOGRAPHS (From top to bottom): Chuck Berry, James Brown, Glenn Miller, Black-Eyed Peas, Paul Whiteman, George Gershwin, Louis Armstrong, Carl Perkins, American Bandstand (1960), Simon and Garfunkel, Velvet Underground with Nico, The Beatles and Ed Sullivan.

The Story Of A Most Unlikely Hit Record

One of the many interesting stories in Elijah Wald's How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'N' Roll concerns an improbable runaway hit called "Pistol Packin' Mama."

In normal times, the song by Al Dexter, a Texas-born, Los Angeles-based honky-tonk singer would have sunk like a stone, but when it was released early in 1943 it was in the midst of a ban on new recordings because of a battle between the major musical copyright groups and a war-induced shortage of the shellac used in vinyl records. Add to that a huge population shift with the mobilization of millions of men and women into the armed forces and millions more from rural areas to cities with wartime industries.

The fight between ASCAP and BMI provided new opportunities for non-mainstream artists like Dexter to reach audiences thirsty for hillbilly and cowboy music (later known as country and western) and "Pistol Packin' Mama" was being played on jukeboxes from coast to coast when the recording ban was lifted in June 1943.

By early 1944, versions of "PPM" (as it was known in the music trade press) sung by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters were outselling Dexter's even in places like Forth Worth.

Nevertheless, Your Hit Parade, which supposedly showcased each week's 10 most popular songs, refused to include "PPM" until the publisher took the producers to court.

Wald picks up the story:

"Life magazine speculated that the censorship order might have come from either the show's notoriously conservative sponsor . . . or from Frank Sinatra, the program's reigning star. Sinatra was notoriously contemptuous of hillbilly music, but if he was the motivating force in this case, the punishment fit the crime: After "PPM" was added to the Hit Parade lineup in October 1943, he had to sing it on fourteen subsequent episodes."

'Lock It, Sock It & Put It In Your Pocket'

The swing craze in the 1940s fundamentally reshaped white America's relationship to black music and swing musicians of both colors were seen as part of a single movement. As Elijah Wald writes in How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll, there was both more and less to this than it would seem at first glance:

"This inspired a generation of white fans to think of themselves as members of a sort of insider's club, taking Harlem fashions as their guide not only for music and dance but for clothing, language, and attitude. The war years saw the ranks of aspiring hepcats spread beyond the confines of the jazz world. On radio and in films, it became common to hear established stars like George Burns and Gracie Allen trying out phrases like "Gimme some skin, Jack. Lock it, sock it, and put it in your pocket" . . .

"The war created further mixing, and with it some further complications. A lot of people found themselves meeting members of another race at close quarters for the first time in army camps and wartime industrial jobs, and in some cases their minds were broadened by the experience. But the idea of black men being armed and sent abroad to shoot at white men -- not to mention possibly sleeping with white women -- brought extreme reactions from racists."

An Index To Selected Book Reviews

'THE GAMBLE: GENERAL DAVID PETRAEUS AND THE AMERICAN MILITARY ADVENTURE IN IRAQ, 2006-2008 (6/8/09) The story of how the U.S. was able to step back from the precipice in Iraq because of the Surge, a radically different strategy that succeeded militarily because of a solitary general who was able to convince the White House and Pentagon that business as usual would inevitably lead to defeat. LINK.

'A PEACE TO END ALL PEACE' (6/1/09) When Barack Obama set out on a trip to the Muslim Middle East he visited a region whose borders were carved up by the World War I victors with no thought given to ethnic, religious or historic concerns -- a nonsensical crazy quilt of national borders that resemble those today and continues to have global consequences. LINK.

'UP FROM HISTORY: THE LIFE OF BOOKER T. WASHINGTON': (5/11/09) A welcome corrective for a man whose legacy the changing attitudes about civil rights have distorted. Washington's efforts to sustain black morale at the nadir of their post-Emancipation struggle has to be counted among the most heroic efforts in American history. LINK.

'HITLER'S EMPIRE': HE WAS GOOD AT WAR BUT LOUSY AT GOVERNING (4/13/09) Those detail-obsessed Nazis gave little thought to governance, let alone a long-term vision for their immense empire. LINK.

THE MAN WHO UNLOCKED THE MYSTERIES OF CHINA'S MIDDLE KINGDOM (10/12/08) Chinese claims that they were responsible for hundreds of mankind's most familiar inventions -- including explosives, printing, the compass, hydraulics, ceramics, suspension bridges and even toilet paper -- were long viewed with skepticism by Westerners who were smugly certain that these ancient people were incapable of such advanced innovations. That was until Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham came along. LINK.

'THE OPEN ROAD: THE GLOBAL JOURNEY OF THE FOURTEENTH DALAI LAMA' (9/17/08) Tibet is a land rich not just in history, but also in irony. "The Roof of the World" holds a special place in the popular imagination because of the movie Shangri-La and other gauzy Hollywood treatments, as well as one individual, the Dalai Lama. But those celluloid depictions are fawningly unrealistic, while the Dalai Lama is typically reduced to a caricature. LINK.

'TWILIGHT AT MONTICELLO' & JEFFERSON'S PARADOXICAL VIEWS ON SLAVERY' (6/27/08) Befitting the life of the great man himself, his Monticello seems much larger on the inside. It also is full of hidden passageways, secret chambers and other surprises. Indeed, if you like your dead presidents simple, then Jefferson is not your man. LINK.

PYNCHON'S 'MASON & DIXON,' AN 18th CENTURY MUSING ON ALL THINGS (5/18/08) A pun-filled send up on the clockwork-like machinations of and metaphysical musings on the universe disguised as an 18th century novel. Or at least I think it is. LINK.

A BAKER'S DOZEN: BEST BOOKS ON VIETNAM (5/3/08) Must reads for any serious student of the Vietnam War, ranging from a Bernard Fall classic published on the eve of the disastrous American build-up to the definitive Pentagon history of the war to a book on the secret bombing campaign in Cambodia to three fictional accounts. LINK.

OLIVER SACKS' 'MUSICOPHILIA' (3/30/08) It is a testament to the complexity of the brain that despite decades of research we still have relatively little understanding of why many of us enjoy music so deeply. LINK.

'LEGACY OF ASHES' (1/11/08) Although it may not be the best metaphor, if the Central Intelligence Agency had been a baseball team over the last 60 years, its record would be something like 5 wins and 95 loses in big games. Yes, the CIA has been that bad. LINK.

Bittersweet Photograph du Jour

Cookie, mascot of 1st Battalion, 17th Infantry Regiment,
rides in a backpack at Combat Outpost Jeleran in Afghanistan.

Photograph by Air Force Tech Sgt. Francisco V. Govea II

Abraham Lincoln's Metamorphosis From Frontiersman To The Great Emancipator

(ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN JANUARY 2009)

When I used to go into the homes of African-Americans as a newspaper reporter there were two constants: I was there because something bad had happened and the images of three famous Americans would be on the living room walls. They were John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln.

I was reminded of this as I read several pieces in the run-up to the inauguration of the first African-American president that flogged Lincoln for his unequalitarian views throughout much of his political career.

The problem with cherry picking what this great man said and wrote about blacks before becoming president is that it obscures a much larger point: Lincoln's capacity for changing his mind was extraordinary and given the choice between keeping the Union together or freeing the slaves, he did not hesitate to issue the Emancipation Proclamation.

* * * * *

Lincoln's metamorphosis from a frontiersman who always opposed slavery but like most white Americans felt that blacks were unequal into the Great Emancipator was, the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass noted, as complex as the man himself.

He met very few blacks during his youth, liked black-faced minstrel shows, told "darkie" jokes, used the word "nigger," including several references in his early political speeches, and counted Douglass as his only black friend.

Lincoln ascended to national prominence in large part because of the seven debates that this former Whig and newly minted Republican had with Senator Steven Douglas, the Illinois Democrat.

The primary theme of the debates was slavery, especially the lightning-rod issue of its expansion into the territories as the U.S. grew. Douglas was the sponsor of the Kansas-Nebraska Act that repealed the Missouri Compromise's ban on slavery in those territories and replaced it with the doctrine of popular sovereignty, meaning that people in a territory could decide for themselves whether to allow slavery.

While not suggesting that blacks were equal to whites, Lincoln argued that popular sovereignty would nationalize and perpetuate slavery and spoke out strongly against the Supreme Court's infamous Dred Scott decision in 1857, which found that slaves like Scott (left) could not sue for their freedom in federal court because slaves, as well as all people of African ancestry, were not U.S. citizens.

Douglas countered that Lincoln was an abolitionist, citing as proof Lincoln's "House Divided" speech earlier in 1858 when he accepted the Republican nomination.

Lincoln denied that he was for abolition, although he certainly was, but as the debates went on he softened his language to an extent, explaining:

"I am not, nor have I ever been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races . . . I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything. I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. My understanding is that I can just let her alone."

While Lincoln would go on to lose to Douglas, the "House Divided" speech created a lasting image of the danger of disunion because of the inherent conflict between slave and free states and rallied Republicans in the North.

Lincoln acknowledged in the run-up to the 1860 presidential election that while he backed emancipation, he -- like Thomas Jefferson before him -- had no idea how that would happen, and admitted that colonization of slaves in Panama and African countries, which he had once avidly supported, was impractical. (It also was profoundly racist in that the result would have been an all-white America, although it is unlikely that Lincoln would have viewed it in those terms.)

Once elected, Lincoln declared in his first inaugural address that he had no legal authority to interfere with slavery and in fact the Constitution prevented him from doing so. Even after the Southern states seceded in 1861, Lincoln maintained that the federal government did not possess the constitutional power to end slavery in states where it already existed. In a familiar refrain from the Bush years, Lincoln declared that only he had war powers. He made it clear that the North was fighting the Civil War to preserve the Union and prohibited his generals from freeing slaves even if captured.

But over the summer of 1862 an early draft of the Emancipation Proclamation was being circulated to Lincoln's Cabinet and in August of that year he made clear his own shift in thinking in a letter responding to an editorial in Republican Party founder Horace Greeley's New York Tribune in which the goal of preserving the Union remained paramount:

"I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be 'the Union as it was.' If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not have the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. . . . If I could save the union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that."

On January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. It declared that all slaves would be permanently freed in all areas of the Confederacy that had not already returned to federal control by that time, although that did not include border states.

Lincoln's efforts to promote black suffrage were less decisive. Early in his brief second term, he gave a speech supporting a form of limited suffrage to what he described as more "intelligent" blacks and those who had served in the Union Army and performed other special services to the nation.

Would Lincoln have moved more aggressively had he not been assassinated?

Some historians, with historian Lerone Bennett taking the lead in Forced Into Glory, argue that Lincoln's views on blacks and slavery have been whitewashed.

But Bennett, who is African-American, is best at cherrypicking -- including the gem that Lincoln's hand shook when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, an indication that he really didn't want to do so. Where Bennett fails is being able to see Lincoln's life as a metamorphosis, let alone appreciate that once he changed his mind he typically did so rapidly and decisively.

Had Lincoln lived, he probably would have worked hard for black suffrage. As it is, blacks were given the right to vote with ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, although many Southern states countered with draconian voter qualification laws that effectively denied them the vote for another 80 years, while blacks have only begun to be able to break through housing, employment and other barriers in recent years.

All that so noted and as forward thinking as he became, Abraham Lincoln would have been shocked at the election of an African-American, and while Barack Obama has said that the 16th president is one of his heroes, Lincoln may have had difficulty returning the compliment.

Lincoln's Fate Was Not Sealed

LINCOLN LAMPOONED FOR HOLDING "MISCEGENATION BALL"

43rd of 45 excerpts from Lincoln by David Herbert Donald:

The New York Herald announced that publication of the President's "To Whom It May Concern" letter "sealed Lincoln's fate in the coming Presidential campaign." By making abolition as much a war aim as Union, the President gave new strength to the Democratic party, preparing for its national convention in Chicago at the end of August [1864]. Opposition leaders declared the letter proved Lincoln did not really want to end the war "even if an honorable peace were within his grasp." "All he has a right to require of the South is submission to the Constitution," Democratic editors announced. They were sure that "the people of the loyal states will teach him, they will not supply men and treasure to prosecute a war in the interest of the black race."

The President's letter also undermined support in his own party. . . . On August 5 this disaffection with Lincoln exploded with the publication of a protest by [Benjamin] Wade (above) and Henry Winter Davis (below) against Lincoln's "grave Executive usurpation" in pocket-vetoing their reconstruction bill. The congressmen found the President's public message explaining the reasons for his action even more offensive than the veto. "A more studied outrage on the legislative authority of the people has never been perpetuated," they fumed. . . .

Publication of the Wade-Davis "Manifesto," as it was generally called, produced a short-lived political commotion. Democrats, of course, enjoyed the spectacle of prominent congressional leaders attacking the presidential nominee of their own party, and they congratulated "the country that two Republicans have been found willing at last to resent the encroachments of the executive on the authority of Congress. The New York Herald, always glad to jab at the administration, called it an acknowledgment that Lincoln was "an egregious failure" who ought "to retire from the position to which, in an evil hour, he was exalted." But the rhetoric of the proclamation was so excessive and the accusations against Lincoln so extreme that the charges backfired. Most Republican papers criticized Wade and Davis more severely than they did the President.

An Index To Abraham Lincoln Posts

Abraham Lincoln was the greatest American president because none faced such enormous challenges, none grew more in office and none reinvented the United States to the extent that he did. All of that and the fact that 2009 is the bicentenary of his birth is reason enough to publish posts each Sunday on the great man.

Series highlights:

YES, OBAMA LOVES LINCOLN, BUT . . . (11/22) Barack Obama has made no secret of his admiration for Lincoln. Yet it is a surprise that the Republican punditocracy is using less lofty accomplishments of the patron saint of their party to tar the president. LINK

THE COLLECTED WISDOM (11/15) The first entry is boyish doggerel, while the second is the last thing that Lincoln wrote. In between are 4,450 pages of virtually everything else that he wrote. LINK

THE SPYMASTER & THE REBEL RAMS (11/8) While the tide began to turn against the Confederacy after the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, it was a forgotten foreign-policy coup engineered by the Lincoln administration that arguably sealed an eventual Union victory. LINK

'AND THE GREAT STAR EARLY DROPP'D' (11/1) The great poet Walt Whitman's admiration for Lincoln bordered on a fixation. LINK

THE COMPLEXITIES OF MRS. LINCOLN (10/25) History has not been particularly kind to Mary Todd Lincoln and it's not difficult to understand why. LINK

CAPITULATING ON BLACK ENLISTMENTS (10/18) Lincoln had vowed to never use African-Americans in the Union Army, but that finally changed in advance of the Emancipation Proclamation LINK

HE MADE THE TRAINS RUN ON TIME (10/11) Lincoln was a superb railroad lawyer before he became a superb president, so it should come as no surprise that the American rail network grew during his four years in office not despite the Civil War but because of it. LINK

BRILLIANT, HUMANE & RUTHLESS (10/4) More recent authors have disputed Lincoln's brilliance as commander in chief. Military affairs expert Eliot A. Cohen says that they're wrong. LINK

THE WAR WITHIN THE CIVIL WAR (9/27) Lincoln knew virtually nothing about Native American affairs, an ignorance driven by the commonly held view that the U.S. government should disenfranchise Indians of their land because they were barbarians. LINK

'HIS AMBITION WAS AN ENGINE THAT KNEW NO REST' (9/20) Historian Richard Shenkman debunks several Lincoln myths. LINK

HOLLYWOOD'S OBSESSION WITH LINCOLN'S LOVES (9/13) The great man -- and his loves -- have been played by an eclectic range of actors and actresses over the last century. LINK.

THE MONITOR-MERRIMACK SHOWDOWN (8/30) The battle between the ironclads settled nothing but did change navies forever. LINK

'STAND BY OUR DUTY' (8/23) Lincoln's Cooper Union speech was probably his finest. Yes, greater than the Gettysburg Address. LINK

WAS HE DISHONEST ABE? (8/9) Historian-economist Thomas DiLorenzo says that scholars criticize Lincoln at their own risk, but there is plenty of bad about the man along with the good. LINK

THE TRENT AFFAIR (8/2) In 1861, Lincoln had little to do with foreign affairs. This myopia was to exacerbate a crisis early in his presidency that could have transformed the war into an international conflict. LINK

COMPLEX & IMPERFECT (7/26) Historian Edna Medford argues that we do better for Lincoln and for the nation -- and for understanding of the Civil War -- if we view him in all of his complexity. LINK

THE BOOK THAT CHANGED LINCOLN & AMERICA (7/19) Uncle Tom's Cabin shook the U.S. like an earthquake when it was published in 1852. LINK

SLAVE COLONIES (7/12) Lincoln believed that he found a way to deal with the problems caused by slavery in sending blacks back to Africa to colonize Liberia, but hee was wrong. LINK

A TRUE GENIUS (6/28) Historian Shelby Foote says that there has never been a president who functioned like Lincoln did, and despite having no executive experience, he was a miracle at it. LINK

INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE (6/21) Historian Harold Holzer leads an intimate walk-through of the very different presidential mansion of Lincoln's time. LINK

EVEN LINCOLN NEEDED A GOOD EDITOR (6/14) Guest blogger Michael Reynolds imagines how the Gettysburg Address might have turned out had the president had a good editor. LINK

MOST HANDS-ON COMMANDER IN CHIEF (6/7) The outcome of the Civil War in all likelihood would have been different had Lincoln not cajoled, taken over for and in some cases dismissed the generals who lacked his vision and courage. LINK

A SKIMPIER RESUME WOULD BE HARD TO FIND (5/31) David Herbert Donald, the recently deceased Lincoln biographer, writes that an inexperienced chief executive can cause the country immense heartbreak, but that with time and good common sense can grow into greatness. LINK

NOW ALIEN TO THE REPUBLICAN PARTY (5/11) Pete Abel writes in a two-part guest blog that while there are a few common traits between Lincoln and today's GOP, the differences are far more substantial. PART 1, PART 2

THE ASSASSINATION (4/22, 4/29, 5/4) It is rather amazing that so little is known about basic aspects of the assassination of John F. Kennedy while there is virtually no aspect of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln a century earlier that remains a mystery. PART 1, PART 2, PART 3

THE STRANGE BUT TRUE STORY OF THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS (4/5) It took fewer than three minutes to deliver the famous speech, but it was an afterthought on the day it was given and remained so into the next century. LINK

HOW VALID THE COMPARISONS? (3/29) With the nomination and election of Barack Obama, the comparisons to Abraham Lincoln have come fast, thick and furious. But do they hold up? LINK

A PATENTLY CLEVER PRESIDENT (3/22) That Lincoln was the only president to get a U.S. patent is not surprising when you consider that he was an inveterate tinkerer and had a lifelong fascination with mechanical things. LINK

A PRESIDENTIAL SCHOLAR ON LINCOLN (3/15) A wide-ranging interview with James Hilty on Lincoln's greatness, frailties and innate conservatism. LINK

A BUMPY RIDE TO HIS REWARD (3/8) There was a controversy over a photograph taken of Lincoln's open coffin, an attempt to steal his corpse and his body was exhumed an extraordinary 17 times. LINK

WAS THE GREAT EMANCIPATOR GAY? (3/1) No revisionist history of a famous person would be complete without a book on whether they were gay, or if they were gay whether they were bisexual, or if they . . . LINK

PRESIDENTIAL POWER GRABS (2/22) The infringements by Lincoln on civil liberties arguably were greater than during any period in American history, including the last eight years. LINK

EARLY ASSASSINATION PLOT (2/15) A March 1861 assassination plot was never carried out, but Lincoln's response to it sullied a carefully cultivated image of dignified courage. LINK

OH HE OF LITTLE FAITH (2/8) Beyond Lincoln's opposition to slavery there was no aspect of him more controversial than his spiritual bona fides. LINK

THE BOHEMIAN BRIGADE COMES THROUGH (2/1) Modern journalism can trace its roots to the Civil War, which because of the telegraph and steam locomotive was the first instant-news war, something of which Lincoln was very much aware. LINK

LINCOLN ON BLACKS & SLAVERY (1/25) His metamorphosis from a frontiersman who always opposed slavery but like most white Americans felt that blacks were unequal into the Great Emancipator was as complex as the man himself. LINK

LINCOLN'S CAUTION (1/18) Guest blogger Robert Stein writes that Barack Obama can learn much from the 16th president, who perhaps even more than wisdom and moral strength needed a highly developed political sense of the possible. LINK

THE FIRST TECHNOLOGY PRESIDENT (1/11) Arriving in Washington at the dawn of the age of the telegraph, Lincoln embraced this new technology of instantaneous communication with a passion and used it not just to communicate with his generals in the field during the Civil War, but to bend them to his will. LINK

LINCOLN LINCOLN BO BINCOLN (1/4) A substantial Lincoln mythology had taken hold in the American imagination even before his assassination in 1865. This canon of broad brush strokes and tall tales gave Lincoln his historic due but overlooked or willfully ignored the myriad complexities of our greatest president. LINK

Zoot Allures! Only 11,000 Jobs Lost

JOB SEEKERS WAIT IN LINE IN PHILADELPHIA

For the first time since the Bush Recession began nearly two years ago, there is promising news: A mere 11,000 jobs were lost in November, down significantly from the wholesale hemorrhaging of the last several months, with the unemployment rate now at 10 percent, down from 10.2 percent in October.

Meanwhile, the government also significantly revised its September and October job loss estimates. September’s data was adjusted to show a loss of 139,000 jobs instead of 219,000, and in October 111,000 jobs were lost, instead of 190,000. Even allowing for the November loss, the revisions added 148,000 people to the list of those employed in the United States in November.

The pace of job loss has been declining since it peaked in January, but the November number was surprising since economists had been expecting a turning point in the late spring or summer. The last time that the economy added jobs was in December 2007.

This early Christmas present could not come at a more opportune time for President Obama, who who was in Allentown, Pennsylvania as part of a series of visits to areas hit hard by the recession when the White House released the new numbers.

The numbers were indeed encouraging inasmuch that there were gains in the average workweek and temporary workers hired. But 15.4 million Americans still remain unemployed, leading one economist to compare the situation to a patient sitting up and taking a breath after having collapsed with a heart attack.

Photograph by Matt Rourke/The Associated Press

Cartoon du Jour

Ted Rall/Universal Press Syndicate

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

RURAL MOMENTS
By Rui Pires

How Low Can Bush Regime Thugs Go?

You can add a new appellation to Dick Cheney's name. In addition to dictator wannabe, dungeon master, serial liar and chicken hawk there is traitor. That is a powerfully negative descriptor, but after the former vice president's antics this week that shoe more than fits.

Cheney, should you have missed it (I wish I had and resisted the temptation to blog on it for two whole days) took to the airways earlier on the day of President Obama's Afghanistan speech at West Point and later to accuse him of giving comfort and aid to the Taliban and Al Qaeda by deliberating long and hard about how to salvage an all-but-hopeless situation dumped in his lap by he and George Bush. Cheney also jumped in Obama's spit for devising an exit strategy contingent on the Kabul regime playing some serious hardball. That in the former veep's view will only encourage more Afghanis to side with the Taliban and AQ.

Then there is former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, who seems to have forgotten that the American troop level in Afghanistan was a miserly 37,000 at the beginning of 2008 and that the Bush administration rejected a request from Army General David McKiernan, who then led American forces in Afghanistan, for 20,000 addition troops but was rebuffed because of Iraq.

"We didn’t have them because they were pushed to Iraq. That was the priority of the president," is how Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff put it in responding to a question from a House subcommittee.

Then there is John McCain, who bought the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld claim hook, line and stinker that Iraq was the center for the war on terrorism, not Afghanistan, and didn't call for more troops there until nearly a year after Obama. Which of course makes his own bloviating about an exit strategy schedule . . . uh, laughable.

Then there is Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state during Bush's first term who unhelpfully (for the Bushies) now says that the president and his war cabinet (you know, Uncles Dick and Don and so on) never formally considered whether to invade Iraq. They just sort of did it.

Cartoon du Jour

Tom Toles/Universal Press Syndicate

Obama Channels His Inner Eisenhower

Conspicuous in their absence from Barack Obama's speech on Afghanistan this week was any direct mention of Democratic presidential lions like Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S Truman and John F. Kennedy.

But Obama did reference a Republican presidential stalwart, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and therein lies a beautifully told tale by my friend Robert Stein about one of the toughest decisions that Ike ever had to make not in war or the Oval Office, but in retirement.

PETA Jumps The Shark Yet Again

Is there any organization this side of the Tea Baggers that is more batshit crazy than PETA? And any that makes such an absolute fool of its self with such numbing regularity?

Case at hand is this advert featuring Joanne Krupa in the altogether hovering over a pack of widdle doggies and kitties that we can only presume she is protecting with that ginormous crucifix.

Which raises a question: Would she reveal her naughty parts if she had to bash some meat eater with it?

Memo To Fritz: 'That's It!'

Well, there may be hope yet for that automobile company of which I and my fellow American taxpayers own a majority stake. I'm speaking, of course, of General Motors, which is making good on its vow to shake up its hidebound corporate culture by axing CEO Fritz Henderson, who was a GM lifer.

You gotta feel a little sorry for Fritz since he only had nine months to prove himself and that's not nearly enuf time. But the ax surely fell because of his refusal to bring in outsiders and merely name a new executive time consisting of other lifers.

Uh, Jenny Really Didn't Break The Mold

I praised Jenny Sanford to the high heavens a while back for breaking the mold as a spouse whose prominent politician husband cheated on her by maintaining the high road.

Well, I spoke to soon, because the besmirched spouse of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford is doing the Fully Monty these days by capitalizing on her notoriety with a book deal about her hubbo's affair, a personal website, a Baba Wawa interview as one of the "10 Most Fascinating People of 2009" and an obligatory Facebook page.

Eric Woolfson (1945-2009)

MORE HERE.

Beautiful Photograph du Jour

HOT WOK -- A RUSTED FLASH IN THE PAN
By Colmar Wocke