David Remnick’s account of Clinton’s trip to Africa is a good read, with some interesting truth-related points along the way.

“The Republicans are brilliant at creating bogus issues, cartoon cutouts,” he said, “and the press, even if it doesn’t agree with them, brings it along…This deal with Iraq makes me want to throw up,” he said. “I’m sick and tired of being told that if you voted for authorization you voted for the war. It was a mistake, and I would have made it, too. And Congress made it once before, at the Gulf of Tonkin resolution.” The blame was with the White House: “The Administration did not shoot straight on the nuclear issue or on Saddam’s supposed ties to

I read a bit of Keith Ward this morning, looking for some sophisticated theological arguments, since we keep being told there are some and we don’t respect them enough. Various thoughts occurred to me as I read. On pages 13-14 of God, Chance and Necessity, for instance, Ward says ‘The argument of this book, then, is that a theistic interpretation of evolution and of the findings of the natural sciences is by far the most reasonable…and that it is the postulate of God, with its corollary of purpose and value, that can best provide an explanation for why the universe is as it is.’

That’s just the introduction, not the argument itself, but all the same, it prompts me … Read the rest

The Archive

The Interrogations Archive… Read the rest

There is sophistication and then there is sophistication.

In this age of terror fueled by the ideology of Islamic extremism, some old insights of the liberal historiography of the roots and nature of Nazism remain relevant. In works published in the 1960s and 1970s, two of Nazism’s preeminent historians…made a similar point about the political significance of ideological fanaticism…This underestimation, the refusal or inability to understand that Hitler meant what he said was thought to be a mark of political sophistication in the 1930s…The great classic of the postwar years which did take Nazi ideology seriously, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, took specific issue with this liberal and left-wing reductionism. Arendt…redefined the meaning of political sophistication so