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Memories Are Made of This

John Edwards isn’t buying it.
“I can promise you this: this president will never use Ronald Reagan as an example for change.”

“Bush was stress-free, akin to being on an exotic vacation, and it was good seeing him unperturbed given that Americans witness his frequent anger and confusion in the tense Washington environment.”

GULF NEWS

Legacy Building

“In no way should our initiative be seen as a personality cult.”

It’s always reassuring when Russian politicians begin their pitch that way.

Vlad Putin fans are pulling themselves together, bereft at his looming departure from the Russian Presidency, if not from power. The answer for keeping a polish on his ever shining star? A western import classic, the Presidential Library. If the bill passes, and it’s larded up with Putin allies, Putin, Yeltsin, and their successors will get state funded visitor centers of grandeur to commemorate their fab-ness.

As sponsor Mikhail Starshinov told Reuters, “State leaders are immortalised in one form or another in many civilised countries.”

“a small field of usefulness*”

Who’s Firemens Field’s friend?

The question is posed by dueling Oyster Bay Long Island web sites.

www.savefiremensfield.org was formed by opponents of a proposed Teddy Roosevelt Museum to be located on Firemens Field near the town center. A mischievous proponent of the project then launched www.savefiremansfield.org, apparently to snare the unwary.

The Theodore Roosevelt Association wants to build the museum, and claims no relationship with either site. But the pro-museum site uses a TR photo with the Association’s permission on it’s banner:

What was Roosevelt saying and to whom in this endlessly quoted “Man In The Arena” speech?

Roosevelt’s speech was in part a mash note to the French from America, “the only two republics among the great powers of the world.” Roosevelt swooned for France, how “the lesson her whole history teaches, that a high artistic and literary development is compatible with notable leadership narms and statecraft*.”

The French were certainly up to their necks in the “rough work of the world*” as they stumbled into a century of slaughter and surrender at home, and then massacre and withdrawal from their colonies.

The speech and most of Roosevelt’s public persona today are a relic, a fetish for nostalgists pining for the days of manly, unapologetic imperialism over the lesser races. And some spectacularly wordy tough talk.

*Who’s the Man?

Ronnie Goes to Russia?

“Spengler” sees disaster ahead:

“Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong in American policy, but not as wrong as it will go now. As in 1980, a lame-duck administration will confront economic and strategic reverses. But it is worse than 1980, for no Ronald Reagan is waiting in the wings to set things right. “

And sends forth the call for the smack of firm government:

“Vladimir Putin, the most talented political leader of our time: what might he have done at the helm of the world’s only superpower, instead of salvaging the hulk of the defeated Soviet Empire? Why not give him the chance? Watching the last round of American political debates, it occurred to me that it’s time to think out of the box…Putin will finish his second term of office as Russian president early in 2008, just when the next American president takes office. There is plenty of time to naturalize him as an American citizenand amend the constitution to permit a foreign-born president. The alternative is to elect another incarnation of the political type that got America into trouble in the first place. “