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Rally For Our View  
No doubt we can now look forward to the many conservative stalwarts revising and extending their complaints at Obama’s grandiose event staging.

History didn’t deter them at the time, but we Americans are an optimistic people.

The Awesome Power Of Social Media® 

 The Washington Post reports another exciting example of our betters communicating with us via the Twitter, fostering new vistas of openness and communication.

The Twit in question is beloved Jordanian Queen Rania, who like Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan types from on high to her million plus  followers.

Unfortunately her husband the King has his own ideas about transparency.

The Post says magic Kingdom is implementing laws regulating Internet speech which include forced labor to punish infractions. This has not prevented the Queen from emitting on such controversial topics as education [for it!] and micro-finance [splendid idea].

Her Huffington Post column is comparatively hard edged, with the Palestinian descended monarch actually flirting with criticising Israel.

Your fascinating future of Social Media beacons!

Nigeria’s President Reverts To Type 

 

Social Times, “Your Social Media Source,” has discovered a new internet hero, the leader of a nation who engages with his public not just at election time, but online.  Meet Goodluck Jonathan, President of Nigeria and Facebook aficionado.

Jonathan is West Africa’s Mohamed Nasheed,  a man we’ve never heard of  doing ostensibly good things in a country we don’t care about, helped by the magic of the Internet.

  The Nigerian President inherited office when his predecessor died, and his version of a listening tour includes writing and reading posts, by someone if not him.  Social Times says “Goodluck Jonathan shows The World How How Politicians Should Use Facebook,” citing his vast following and the fount of commentary unleashed by his musings.

And it’s all for the children:

“Jonathan’s Facebook account is not part of a political campaign or a marketing strategy. It is not simply there so that his government can say they “understand social media and new technology”. He is using Facebook as a tool to engage in a two-way conversation with his citizens, hearing their concerns and raising his own. This increases transparency and accountability, while showing the world that his government is active and concerned about its citizens.“

  Social Times‘s example of Jonathan’s minding the little people is his reversing his own decision barring Nigeria’s soccer team from play after their poor World Cup showing, after the keyboard army mobilized. That FIFA threatened to ban any Nigerian team from any play anywhere apparently didn’t figure in.

  And all the transparency Jonathan has emitted on Facebook hasn’t kept his supporters from silencing critics the old fashioned way, by shutting down their political rallies.

Legends Of The Fall

It’s come to this: after being around for 20 years, the Nixon Library’s best spokesman defending the Nixon “legacy” is creationist fraudster and imaginary civil rights veteran Ben Stein.

The  celebration of 20 proud years is in the spirit of the man, with events featuring such 60s legends as Freddie “The Jew Counter” Malek.

The Library spent most of these years with no actual Nixon presidential documents. It’s been a place of song, myth, and wedding rentals,  staffed by the fervent few who still believe Nixon’s vindication will come, someday.

CultureWares.com celebrates Nixon’s Twenty Years Of Lustration.

Quit Your Stalin   

Americans like to think of D-Day as a splendid battle which, while tough, prefigured our inevitable sweep to victory over Germany. How it came to be  that most of the German army was elsewhere, or where the slave laborers who built the Germans’ “Atlantic Wall” came from are petty distractions.

So it comes as no surprise that Joseph Stalin is becoming unwelcome at a Virginia war memorial, reminding us that we didn’t beat Hitler all by our lonesome.

   Bedford Virginia’s National D-Day Memorial is a vast crop circle of memorials,

with hideous arches,

and landing beach recreations.

And statues.  There is an Eisenhower statue in its own “Tuscon folly” , but somehow it’s not controversial that the father of Reyonlds Wrap gets to slap his name on the garden.

Among busts of famed war leaders Stalin makes the cut, and the planners have mumbled something about the Russians fighting over yonder contributing to the D-Day victory.

To the world’s outrage.

Skunk At The Picnic 

The creators are making an effort, possibly unique in American public recollection of the war, at remembering the Soviet people’s epic sacrifice in defeating fascism.  No doubt Stalin was guilty of many crimes, but he’s hardly the only problem with the proposed memorial if we are going to get fussy.

Perhaps the trouble stems from the monument’s defference to “great man” history

  Why is Harry Truman there?  He wasn’t even Vice President at the time of the landing