podpolia

The Border Patrol has gone to extremes in playing the political game. Now they’re intentionally not doing their job to try to discredit people who were making them look bad. I don’t really have any say in the issue, but if it were up to me, the person or persons who gave that order would be in the unemployment office, and would never work for another federal agency.

Little as I generally disagree with Pat Buchanan, I’m quite impressed by this article. It’s rare for commentators today to thoroughly scrutinize the Second World War, other than to discuss how evil Hitler was. Buchanan leaves that topic alone, and instead asks, “Why was Stalin any better?” The short answer is that he wasn’t, and was quite possibly worse. Just because when he died in 1953 he hadn’t gotten around to it yet didn’t mean he wasn’t quite willing to exterminate Jews as well.
Needless to say, this new perspective has already caused quite an outcry. Veterans are mad that he’s questioning the rationale behind something they sacrificed in performing. Jews are angry because he didn’t mention the Holocaust. It almost sounds as if Yaffa Eliach (who is quoted in the Newsday story) thinks that the Second World War was about the Holocaust. As Buchanan discusses in his article, it was about something else. The assumption here seems to be that if he doesn’t mention all of the horrible things Hitler did, then he agrees with Hitler himself. (It doesn’t help that Buchanan has a history of anti-semitic comments already.)
Challenging the established view of history can be quite a controversial thing, and I think that the attitude that Ed Koch and others have exhibited — that of refusing to acknowledge the ideas or even the existence of those who you disagree with — slows the progress of our understanding of history as it really was.

Condoleezza Rice seems to share my opinion on the Second Amendment. I know I shocked my professor and a number of people in my 20th Century Political Ideologies class when I argued that the Second Amendment was as important as the First Amendment. We were discussing what rights could justifiably be taken away in case of an emergency, and I said that I thought all of them except the Second Amendment rights and possibly the First. With guns in the hands of the citizenry, whatever rights were abridged could later be reattained, by force if necessary. It’s good to hear someone in a position of power in this country thinking along those lines about the whole thing, and showing a brilliant and personal example as well.

“You stop that, or… or… I’ll go to the Security Council!”
Europe is finally getting the picture that Iran isn’t going to listen to them. Going to the Security Council should have been done a while back, but you have to wonder what the Security Council (which has already shown its willingness to let countries in the area get away with things) is going to threaten them with. A complete embargo would probably be about the extent of it, and it’s probably safe to say that in a couple years the same European countries that are threatening “action” now will be agitating for the lifting of sanctions.
Just like Iraq.

This article shows us the kinds of reactions President Bush is getting to his policies that have made America “hated around the world.”

This article shows us the kinds of reactions President Bush is getting to his policies that have made America “hated around the world.”

It’s good to see that World War II (or the Great Patriotic War) is still pulling together the East and the West. For the good of everyone, the United States and Russia should stand behind what unites them, instead of what divides them. Some differences of opinion are inevitable, but in order to build a better world we must work together.
Even on the little things.

It’s interesting to watch the interplay between the US and Russia in the former Communist Bloc states. Not suprisingly, many have sided with the United States, but Russia still holds a great deal of influence in them. This is the sort of article in which one can read the tensions of the past feeding the tensions of the present, and it makes you wonder: are the US and Russia likely to start butting heads again?
My prediction would be that it’s very likely that tensions will get worse before they get better, but a democratic Russia (assuming it stays that way) competing against a democratic United States would not necessarily be a bad thing, as long as it doesn’t involve direct and confrontational military competition.