For This I Got Out Of The Tub?  

Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s brother is suspected of opium smuggling ties, corruption is rife, and the war is being lost.  Who can win the struggle against Talaban and Al Qaeda?

Why not a former boy Stalinist?   

Who better to combat the unacknowledged spawn of the Reagan Era than the Reds we hoped they would beat!

Step forward  Muhammad Hanif Atmar, newly nominated for Interior Minister.

Atmar spent the 80s with the late unloved Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan, serving with the deeply sinister secret police, the Khad. He’s been Education Minister and held other posts in Karzai’s government, with his past neatly erased.

His experience in the siege of Jalalabad should serve him in good stead against the current threat.

Where To Turn?  

Museum Makeover!

Nigeria’s Comeback Kid, former military dictator and elected president Olusegun Obasanjo continues scheming to gussy up his Presidential Library.

His efforts to scam a major cultural archive away from Nigeria’s Osun State have now attracted a lawsuit fronted by Nobel Laurette Wole Soyinka.

Obasanjo’s place opened earlier this year, but he’s now bringing in the godfather of presidential librarying, Ralph Appelbaum Associates, for a re-do.

The Applebaumers have done all the greats, from the Holocaust Museum to Bill Clinton. But what may serve them best with the Obasanjo account is Applebaum’s work on the “Deng Xiaoping Former Residence Conservation Area.”

Here the dark presidential arts are mobilized to cutesy up Mao’s successor, the father of China’s lurch into capitalism with fascist characteristics. The museum promises to

“vividly and roundly represent the glorious and legendary life of Deng Xiaoping and revive the true history before visitors by reproducing one important historical event after another.“

Climaxing in something called “Howdy, Xiaoping!”

And the inevitable touchstone, some old car loosely associated with the deceased.

Invisible Men

Thanks to civilwarmemory for pointing to a recent post by John David Hoptak, a writer and Park Ranger at the Antietam National Battlefield.

Hoptak’s Antietam presentations on the battle and the contemporaneous drafting of the Emancipation Proclamation have stirred a vicious reaction from many Park visitors, unwilling to hear a discussion of Lincoln, slavery, or any of the real stakes in the Civil War.

“If we should not celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation, if Lincoln should be criticized for not freeing all the slaves with this revolutionary document, then why should we celebrate and laud the Declaration of Independence? the Constitution? the Founders?…There was a sizable portion of the population that wasn’t declared free to pursue their lives, their liberty, and happiness. Such criticism is almost always met with outrage. . . some of those most outraged by such criticism of the Founders are among those that declare Lincoln to be “the greatest murderer” in U.S. history and that the Emancipation Proclamation should not be celebrated.”

Civilwarmemory comments:

“What I find so disturbing is the apparent number of Civil War enthusiasts who are unable to view emancipation from the perspective of the thousands of slaves who helped force the issue on the Union high command and eventually Lincoln himself by running away from their owners and aiding the efforts of the U.S. army in myriad ways. It’s as if emancipation began and ended with Lincoln…I’ve interviewed a number of Park Service personnel on this issue. For some it is simply enough to assume a perspective that has soldiers on both sides falling from the sky to butcher one another with little or no attention as to why. All that is left to do is explain how they did it. Even a cursory glance at our national memory of the war reveals a continued concentration on values that white Americans initially latched onto at the turn of the twentieth century as part of a movement towards reunion and reconciliation.”

A New Republic blog post on efforts to glide past the South’s stakes in the war sums up:

“The way of life they fought to preserve was not a set of morally neutral hillbilly customs, like playing the banjo and making apple butter; it was a way of life that specifically did include black slavery.“

Innocent Abroad

So?

His response wasn’t quite that Cheneyesque, but would-be George W. Bush Library benefactor Steve Payne concedes nothing. He claims remarks are taken out of context, says his request of confidentiality was violated, and tells some more whoppers.

“I have been a victim of a confidence game sponsored by the paper. The paper and its employees, not content with merely reporting news, have instead opted to manufacture the news in this worst-case example of “Gotcha Journalism”.”

Payne’s statement claims that hidden donations to the Bush Library were the furthest thing from his mind, and that he expected the worthy gentlemen with whom he was dealing to be above board in thought and deed.

“I was also very clear… in this conversation and in subsequent e-mails that any donations would need to be completely transparent and open to public scrutiny.”

The transparency extends to a Payne email dump which accompanied his statement., in which he suggests the Library cash could be hidden:

“The donation will be done publicly and must be in the form of a check or wire and will be done publicly in Akayev’s name unless he wants to be anonymous for some reason?”

Aiming High

The Times of London has a Bush Pioneer on tape offering access to administration officials, possibly including Bush, for a fee of $600,000 to $750,000, a third of which would be directed to the Bush Library.

Lobbyist Stephen Payne says it can be done.

“The exact budget I will come up with, but it will be somewhere between $600,000 and $750,000, with about a third of it going directly to the Bush library”

The paper approached Payne pretending to represent former Kyrgyzstan strongman Askar Akayev, ousted in a 2005 popular revolt. Akayev is hanging about Moscow these days, and The Times claimed he longed to return to power. The laying on of hands in Washington was to be the anointment

Akayev, Shown Here In Happier Times

How does Stephen Payne work his wonders for democracy?

The Times has Payne in a remarkable string of photos with such luminaries as Rice, Cheney, Putin, Musharraf and more, best in show being Payne and Bush clearing brush together in Crawford.

Freedom’s Undergrowths