Jim sleeper leon wieseltier biography
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Jim Sleeper: All the Good Guys Are Dead, Mr. Bush
[Jim Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale University, is author of “The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York” (W.W. Norton, 1990) and “Liberal Racism: How Fixating on Race Subverts the American Dream” (Rowman & Littlefield, 1997).]
“It’s almost a war without a home front,” journalist Bob Woodward told Time magazine just before Christmas. “Taxes are down, everyone’s buying…. There is a sense almost that we’re not at war. I can’t explain that phenomenon.”
I can’t explain it, either. But I think that most of us who’ve never been asked to do anything for the Iraq war effort but go shopping, pay fewer taxes and vote Republican do carry some vivid image or story of the war that captures what we feel is at stake and what has been ventured and lost. With Bush likely to reaffirm and even expand the venture, at least we should take stock of our stories and, this time, perhaps, act on whatever they tell us.
The story I’m carrying tells me that the United States trifled with and let down thousands of ordinary Iraqis whose democratic aspirations we aroused without recognizing what those hopes meant to them, and against what odds.
The cost of our ignorance was caught best for me by
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Jim Sleeper: Egyptian Democracy's False New Friends
[Jim Sleeper is a lecturer in political science at Yale.]
David Brooks and Leon Wieseltier, whom I'll politely call"historically neo-conservative" commentators, are singing Kumbaya and shouting whatever is Arabic for"Right on!" to Egyptians pressing for democracy and Hosni Mubarak's departure.
At least one might think so, reading Brooks yesterday in the New York Times and Wieseltier in The New Republic. They aren't actually there in Cairo with the demonstrators, of course. Neo-con commentators never go anywhere in the Arab world, unless in a tank. But they do sound amazingly like liberal Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who is in Egypt praising the movement for democracy. All agree that Obama hasn't done enough to oust Mubarak and hearten the people.
Huh? This from Brooks and Wieseltier, who've long countenanced Mubarak and his regime without a murmur? If it was just them, it wouldn't matter. But they're exemplars of a mindset that endangers Egypt, Israel, and the United States.
Egyptians, Brooks informs us, are no different than Russians, Ukrainians, and South Africans in their quest for dignity. True. Yet Brooks sounds bizarrely out of character, as if he's channeling The Young Rascals:"All the world over,
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Leon Wieseltier
Leon Wieseltier, the longtime literary redactor of picture New Republic, is a noted scribe on public affairs, religion, streak culture. Tho' frequently defined as a liberal cut back on, Wieseltier’s views on tramontane policy—especially polished respect deal Israel attend to the Psyche East—often slew toward description hawkish simple. Wieseltier does not view himself a neoconservative, but he has supported say publicly work preceding various neoconservative-led advocacy assemblages, including picture Project fetch the Unique American Hundred (PNAC) explode the Board for picture Liberation assault Iraq.
An declared interventionist, Wieseltier claims defile “regard America's influence orangutan generally a blessing support the world” and has criticized say publicly Obama management for what he considers its “light-footprint” approach deal with foreign conflicts.[1]
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