A Straight Shot of Politics

A blog from a gentleman of the Liberal political persuasion dedicated to right reason, clear thinking, cogent argument, and the public good.

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Location: Columbus, Ohio, United States

I have returned from darkness and quiet. I used to style myself as "Joe Claus", Santa Claus’ younger brother because that is what I still look like. I wrote my heart out about liberal politics until June of 2006, when all that could be said had been said. I wrote until I could write no more and I wrote what I best liked to read when I was young and hopeful: the short familiar essays in Engish and American periodicals of 50 to 100 years ago. The archetype of them were those of G.K. Chesterton, written in newspapers and gathered into numerous small books. I am ready to write them again. I am ready to write about life as seen by the impoverished, by the mentally ill, by the thirty years and more of American Buddhist converts, and by the sharp eyed people [so few now in number] with the watcher's disease, the people who watch and watch and watch. I am all of these.

Friday, November 18, 2005

The Refusal To Acknowledge Failure, the Refusal to Confront Success

So what went wrong in Iraq in 2002? What is still going wrong there now. I have just come across a marvelous Washington Post piece, centered on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, with a quotation from Rumsfeld's own advisory think tank, the Defense Science Board, when it set out to evaluate the failures:

It might help if Americans and their leaders were to show less arrogance and more understanding of themselves and their place in history. Perhaps more than any other people, Americans display a consistent amnesia concerning their own past, as well as the history of those around them.

This is a tease. Go read the whole article. There's nothing I can say about it that it doesn't say better. Really.

posted by Joseph Marshall | 9:15 PM

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