The U.S. Constitution is Not Democratic—and Why That’s a Good Thing

Kevin R. C. Gutzman | Taki's Top Drawer | February 21, 2008
Sanford Levinson, Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (And How We the People Can Correct It). Oxford University Press, 2006.
Sanford Levinson is very upset. As he sees it, the United States Constitution fails to uphold the principles of the American nation, and something needs to be done about it. Our Undemocratic Constitution is his case for a national referendum on calling a new constitutional convention to revise the Constitution to bring it into the 21st century.

What are the principles the national Constitution is supposed to further? They include those of the Preamble, asserts Levinson. Insofar as it does not conduce to the achievement of “a more perfect union,” say, “promote the general welfare,” or “secure the blessings of liberty,” then, the Constitution needs to be changed.

Those are not the only principles Levinson identifies as fundamental. Also fundamental are equality and democracy. Levinson knows that these are fundamental, and the Constitution does not serve them, so it needs to be amended to allow them to be followed, too.

Levinson points to several provisions of the Constitution as contrary to principles such as equality and democracy. He is especially exercised about the structure of the U.S. Senate and of the Electoral College, each of which skews outcomes in favor of less populous states. This is undemocratic, says Levinson, and cannot be tolerated.

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Benazir Bhutto's 'Reconciliation': Islam, Democracy, and the West



By Michiko Kakutani | International Herald Tribune | Published: February 19, 2008

328 pages. $27.95. HarperCollins.

Benazir Bhutto called her 1989 autobiography "Daughter of Destiny," and when she was assassinated in December at 54, she became the fourth member of her immediate family to die violently against the backdrop of Pakistani intrigue and politics: her father, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was hanged in 1979 on charges of having ordered the murder of a minor political opponent; her younger brother, Shahnawaz, mysteriously died of poisoning in 1985; and her other brother, Murtaza, was gunned down outside his home in 1996.

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Kamila Shamsie | The Guardian | Saturday February 16, 2008

336pp, Simon & Schuster, £17.99

There can be few experiences more disquieting than that of reading the opening pages of Benazir Bhutto's Reconciliation, with its description of her homecoming on October 18 2007 - the jubilation followed by carnage. The details of the suicide attack are horrific enough within their own context, but when read as precursor to the attack that killed Bhutto 10 weeks later they acquire an even more chilling resonance. There is the sense of reading two texts: the first might well have been published during the early months of Bhutto's premiership, its words a yardstick against which we would measure the effectiveness of her government; the second stands as the final testament of an extraordinary woman whose death added urgency to the already-urgent arguments of the book.

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Timothy Snyder on the Forgotten Holocaust

“I felt a strong desire to sprinkle my head, my whole self, with ashes, to be nothing, to be changed into dust.”
-- Ida Belozovskaya, quoted in “The Unknown Black Book”

Though she survived the Holocaust, Ida Belozovskaya was not invoking the crematoriums of Auschwitz. In the Kiev of September 1941 that she was describing in one of the interviews published in “The Unknown Black Book,” the Germans were killing the Jews, but without the help of gas chambers. These had not yet been invented, but the Holocaust was under way. What she was trying to describe was the fear and shame of hiding in a city where 30,000 Jews could be shot in a single day, where her father had just been seized on the street. Her references jar the ones we have come to know, but her experience is just as representative, and important, as that of Jews who lived through Auschwitz. Half of the Jews who died in the Holocaust were killed by bullets rather than by gas, in death pits rather than in death camps. Some 2.2 million Soviet Jews were killed by shooting; 350,000 more were asphyxiated in mobile gas vans. Compare this to the 1.1 million deaths at Auschwitz, or the approximately 800,000 deaths at Treblinka. Even had the death camps never existed, this eastern Holocaust would have to be regarded as the most horrible of atrocities. Yet we have all but forgotten it.

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Jon Stewart takes on the ‘uncensored’ history of the 9/11 Commission

Mike Aivaz and Michael Roston | therawstory | Published: Tuesday February 12, 2008



Jon Stewart hosted the New York Times' Philip Shenon on Monday night to discuss his new book, The Commission: An Uncensored history of the 9/11 Commission. The author described White House obstructionism in the course of the officially-mandated Sept. 11 investigation.

"It is remarkable the efforts that the Bush White House went through to try to prevent the 9/11 Commission from getting the information it needed," Shenon told Stewart. "The person who was most responsible for that tension was former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales who was then the White House Counsel."

"Well he's really matured since then, I don't know if you've seen some of his work recently," Stewart joked in response.

Stewart also asked Shenon about Commission executive director Philip Zelikow and his relationship with Karl Rove. According to the author, "alarms" went off for the staff when they heard about multiple phone calls Rove had made to Zelikow.

"Then Zelikow calls in his secretary and apparently tells her to stop keeping phone logs of his conversations with the White House," Shenon explained.

"I'm sure it's all innocent stuff," Stewart quipped.

Reached by the Associated Press, Zelikow provided a 131-page statement with information he said was provided for the book. In it, Zelikow acknowledges talking to Rove and Rice during the course of the commission's work despite a general pledge he made not to. But he said the conversations never dealt with politics.

A video clip from Monday night's episode of Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is presented below:



Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power



Review
America’s leaders have gone from hubris to waking fantasy, according to this caustic critique of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. Kaplan (The Wizards of Armageddon) argues that the Cold War’s end and 9/11 persuaded President Bush and his advisers to unilaterally impose America’s political will on the world, while remaining blind to the military and diplomatic fiascoes that followed. Rumsfeld’s "Revolution in Military Affairs," a doctrine touting supposedly omnipotent mobile forces and high-tech smart weapons, convinced Pentagon officials that Iraq could be pacified without a large force or a reconstruction plan. Bush abandoned Clinton’s diplomatic rapprochement with North Korea, then stood by as Kim Jong-Il built nuclear weapons. And imbued with a "mix of neo-conservatism and evangelism" that was peddled most flamboyantly by Israeli ideologue Natan Sharansky, Bush backed clumsy pro democracy initiatives that backfired by bringing anti-American and sectarian groups to power in the Middle East. Eschewing Kaplan’s favored approach of fostering international security through alliances and consensus building, Bush assumed that "by virtue of American power, saying something was tantamount to making it so." The particulars of Kaplan’s indictment aren’t new, but his detailed, illuminating (if occasionally disjointed) accounts of the evolution of the Bush administration’s strategic doctrines add up to a cogent brief for soft realism over truculent idealism. (Feb.) (Publishers Weekly, November 12, 2007)

Book Description
America's power is in decline, its foreign policy adrift, its allies alienated, its soldiers trapped in a war that even generals regard as unwinnable. What has happened these past eight years is well-known. Why it happened continues to puzzle. In Daydream Believers, celebrated Slate columnist Fred Kaplan combines in-depth reporting and razor-sharp analysis to explain just how George W. Bush and his aides got so far off track -- and why much of the nation followed.

For eight years, Kaplan reminds us, the White House -- and many of the nation's podiums and opinion pages -- rang out with appealing but deluded claims: that we live in a time like no other and that, therefore, the lessons of history no longer apply; that new technology has transformed warfare; that the world's peoples will be set free, if only America topples their dictators; and that those who dispute such promises do so for partisan reasons. They thought they were visionaries, but they only had visions. And they believed in their daydreams.

"In his Slate chronicles through the Iraq War years, Fred Kaplan consistently outshone other analysts with his explanations of what was going wrong and why. In this engrossing and completely new work, he tells the story of the little-known theorists who have shaped much of the world's recent history. For me this book was full of revelations."--James Fallows, National Correspondent, The Atlantic Monthly

"This is the inside history of our time, told with precision and confidence by an author who knows where the secrets are kept -- and also that the most powerful and dangerous weapon in Washington, D.C., is a new idea." --Thomas E. Ricks, author of Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq and Making the Corps

The greatest story never told: Winston Churchill and the crash of 1929



There is an amazing book titled, The Greatest Story Never Told: Winston Churchill and the Crash of 1929 by Pat Riott, which is a real eye opener. In light of all the talk about the dollar and the fact that America's economy is in hock to foreign countries, our "strong economy" and other popular sound bites, I thought this would be a good time to let you know about this excellent little book.

The Greatest Story lays out the events of October 1929 in a simple fashion in this thoroughly documented work. The big cigar puffer, Winston Churchill, is a great hero to many Americans. Was he, really? I think people will find out differently after they read this well researched work. Sadly, most Americans won't because they would rather willfully believe lies than have their comfort zone disturbed and because Americans have become intellectually lazy and just want to be entertained by the TV, drugs, booze, porn and "leisure activities." In the meantime, they are jeopardizing everything they have ever worked for by placing their blind trust in their elected public officials in Washington, DC who have proven themselves to be crooks, cowards, liars and the worst of scoundrels.

The majority of comfort zone Americans think the "Crash of '29" was some sort of anomaly that can't happen again. They think that because some "safeguards" have been put in place by the NYSE, a big crash can't happen again. Not here in America! Really? Here's a few points about The Greatest Story Never Told that might interest you:

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Milton Viorst on Israel’s Tragic Predicament

By Milton Viorst | TruthDig | Posted on Feb 1, 2008

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

—Shakespeare, “The Merchant of Venice,” Act III.

In opening his stunning memoir, “Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine,” David Shulman declares: “I am an Israeli. I live in Jerusalem. I have a story, not yet finished, to tell.” It is a very sad story, of a society gone astray with power, and of decent Israelis in despair over the failure of their efforts to save it from itself. The story, as Shulman says, is not yet over, but he asks whether its end is not already determined. Is tragedy inevitable? Can Israel right its course to achieve its once glowing promise as a refuge and as a nation?

Shulman’s memoir is not unique in raising these questions. Two recent books share his foreboding: “Lords of the Land: The War Over Israel’s Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007,” a careful work of scholarship by Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, and “Toward an Open Tomb: The Crisis of Israeli Society,” a stinging essay by Michel Warschawski. Shulman and Zertal are college professors, Eldar is a journalist, Warschawski is a peace activist. All are Israeli Jews. Whatever the stylistic differences of their books, they are equally unforgiving of Israel for placing its future in stark jeopardy.

None of these authors, it should be emphasized, is an apologist for Arabs. They do not deny that two peoples of vastly different cultures are engaged in a conflict of nationalisms, in which both sides have killed intemperately. All agree it is a conflict with too many victims, in both cultures. But these writers, good Israelis, are convinced Israel cannot resolve it by military superiority, much less by physical abuse.

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He’d rather talk about sex than God

George Bush built his career on his faith. But his key religious adviser tells of a different man behind the born-again image



Jacob Weisberg | The Sunday Times | January 27, 2008

One of the defining aspects of George W Bush’s presidency is his professed belief in God. Yet what really are his religious beliefs? The question, which seems central to understanding his presidency, never receives a satisfactory answer. Indeed, one religious figure close to him soon after his conversion was shocked to find that he talked about sex rather than theology and says that a lot of his faith seemed to be politically calculated.

Bush’s religion has often been described as evangelical. But unlike most other evangelicals, he blithely uses profanity and as governor of Texas he would play poker. He doesn’t pay tithes, he doesn’t try to convert others – one of the central obligations in most evangelical denominations. And he didn’t raise his daughters in the faith.

What Bush clearly does believe in is the personal, transforming and sustaining power of belief in God. Having a personal relationship with God, praying and reading the Bible daily were the tools he used to get control of his life more than 20 years ago.

They made it possible for him to control his drinking, keep his family together after his wife Laura threatened to leave him, manage his aggressive behaviour, cope with the burden of a heroic father and attain success.

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