Category: History

It is a Myth that US Forces Lost No Battles in the Vietnam War

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That quote from the recently deceased General Vo Nguyen Giap is false, but we still find people claiming that neither the Viet Cong or the (then North) Vietnamese army ever won a battle.

David Petraeus was one of these people. He wrote that, “Military leaders recall US units never lost a battle,” in 1986.

This is something that you will hear said from members of the US Military all the time.

It it might be legitimately through provoking if it weren’t complete humbug.  A cursory examination reveals 70 lost battles in the Vietnam War.

Given that General Giap died a few days ago at the age of 102 (!), it behooves us to examine what happened in Vietnam, and Cambodia, and Laos, and ask how General Giap, and the people of Indochina beat us.

The military, as been asking a slightly different question, “How did we lose,” and so blame the American public.

Tell me You Don’t See Echos of Wiemar Germany Here………

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Greece, of course, though I would argue that it was a foreseeable consequence of policies foisted on them by the Germans.

We have seen an explosive growth of the Fascist Golden Dawn party, with the tacit approval of the more mainstream Greek political parties, because they see them as providing a counterweight to the growth of the SYRIZA party, and because it allowed them to cast the Socialist SYRIZA, which is a real threat to the corruption of the Greek elites and to the interests of the banksters.

Basically, Golden Dawn allows them to play the, “Both sides of the same coin,” game.

They aren’t of course.

SYRIZA doesn’t engage in systematic violence against people that they do not like, and they haven’t made a concerted effort to infiltrate the Greek state security apparatus to obtain approval for their campaign of intimidation and violence.

Golden Dawn has done all of this in spades, and now, following the murder of anti-Fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas by a Golden Dawn member, the Greek government is trying to put the Genie back into the bottle, and ban the Golden Dawn party:

The Greek government has hinted that it will seek to ban Golden Dawn after the far-right party was linked to the murder of a leading leftwing musician in Athens.

 As violence erupted on the streets and demonstrators protested after the fatal stabbing of Pavlos Fyssas, a prominent anti-fascist, the public order minister, Nikos Dendias, cancelled a trip abroad saying the government would table emergency legislation that would seek to outlaw the group.

 ………

 Earlier in the day, police raided Golden Dawn offices across the country, with media reporting running street battles outside branches in Crete, Thessaloniki and Patras.

 Voted into the Greek parliament for the first time last June, the neo-fascist Golden Dawn has been widely accused of employing violence to further its ratings in the polls.

 The socialist Pasok party, the junior member of Antonis Samaras’s two-party coalition, [The ruling coalition, not SYRIZA] has campaigned openly for it to be banned, saying it should be considered a criminal gang.

 ………

 Eyewitnesses said the singer was stabbed several times by a man who suddenly appeared in a car after being phoned by members of the mob. The attack bore all the hallmarks of a premeditated assault, they said.

Unfortunately, it may be too late, because it looks like Golden Dawn has already infiltrated the Greek state security apparatus:

The killing of Mr. Fyssas has spurred the government to begin a risky crackdown on Golden Dawn, opening its first investigation into whether the police forces are infiltrated by sympathizers or members of the group, one of the most violent rightist organizations in Europe.

On Tuesday, officers raided three police stations on the outskirts of Athens. The sweep came a day after the government replaced seven senior police officials — including the chiefs of special forces, internal security, organized crime and the explosives unit — to ensure the investigation would take place with “absolute objectivity.” In addition, two top members of the Greek police force resigned abruptly Monday, citing “personal reasons.”

Such steps have the potential for volatile repercussions in a country where the security forces have had links to far-right organizations at various points since the end of World War II. They are likely to test the determination of the government and the public to turn back the influence of Golden Dawn, which has climbed steadily in opinion polls in the past year and has 18 of its members in Parliament.

………

The public outcry after the killing of Mr. Fyssas, who used the stage name Killah P, placed greater pressure on Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, a member of the right-leaning New Democracy party, to investigate a police force he has repeatedly defended, despite a cascade of reports drawing links between the police and Golden Dawn.

Human rights groups say the police have for the most part looked the other way as Golden Dawn has systematically terrorized immigrants. These aggressive acts, sometimes captured on video by Golden Dawn members and posted on the Internet, involve roving groups crushing market stands run by immigrants, riding in gangs on motorbikes armed with clubs and shields bearing swastika-like symbols and beating immigrants with wooden poles draped in the Greek flag.

Nikos Demertzis, a professor of political sociology at the University of Athens, said allegations of police collusion with the far right were not surprising. “Generally there is a tradition in Greece that the far-right organizations have certain links with the police — this is a historic, recurring theme,” Mr. Demertzis said.

They are Fascists, and they have a large amount of influence over the police during a period of social disorder.

It might already be too late to fix this.  History is littered with who thought that they could control extremists (on both right and left) and end up being devoured by the monster that they have created.

Quote of the Day

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“The first thing I’m going to tell my successor,” Kennedy told guests at the White House, “is to watch the generals, and to avoid feeling that just because they were military men, their opinions on military matters were worth a damn.”

—Robert Dallek

Read the whole article.

The entire General staff was insane.

They wanted to drop nukes on everyone.

Stop the World, I Want to Get Off

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Have you heard, in preparation with negotiations with the Russians over Syria, John Kerry is seeking advice from Henry Kissinger.

Yes, that Henry Kissinger.

The man who orchestrated our dropping more bombs on Cambodia than we had on Germany during WWII.

The man who did his level best to bring the murderous psychopath Agusto Pinochet to power.

The man who did his best to cover up the facts of the terrorist attack in Washington DC conducted by the Pinochet government. (Orlando Letalier assassination)

The man who sabotaged peace talks between North Vietnam and the US in 1968 for political advantage.

An avowed enemy of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, for whom John Kerry was the public face at a critical juncture.

And then there are the accusations that Kissinger was complicit in numerous crimes against humanity in much of Latin America.

This ……… is ……… ……… ……… ………

I have no words.

It Has Been 12 Years, Stop Waving the Bloody Shirt

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It is not my intent to demean the feelings of people who suffered personal losses on September 11, 2001, but the rest of us have to attempt a modest return to sanity.

As I have noted before, we as a society have been driven to insanity by this, and it has convinced us  to commence destroying ourselves. (Read the book Wasp by Eric Frank Russell)

The deaths on 911 are less than:

As to the last item, think about how many of this children we could have saved by spending just one tenth of the roughly $4 Trillion spend on this.

It’s normal to freak out after something like 911, but we are still freaking out 12 years later.

We need to chill out, and deal with the reality we have, not the reality we want to have.

Not a Great Day for Jews

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It is Tisha B’Av, the 9th day of the Hebrew month Av, and a small subset of the nasty bits of Jewish history follows:

  1. The report of the spies from Canaan, resulting in the people of Israel spending 40 Years in the Desert.
  2. The destruction of the 1st Temple.
  3. The destruction of the 2nd Temple.
  4. The Romans razed Betar, killing 100,000 Jews.
  5. The Romans plowed the temple mount.
  6. The start of the 1st Crusade.  (You see it as a coming together of Christendom.  I see it as a pogrom with years of murder and rape.)
  7. The expulsion of Jews from England.
  8. The expulsion of Jews from France.
  9. The expulsion of Jews from Spain.
  10. Germany entered the WW I. (Can be legitimately claimed to have directly led to the Shoah)
  11. Formal approval of the “Final Solution” by the Nazis in 1941.
  12. Deportations to Treblinka from the Warsaw Ghetto begin in 1942.

Excuse me while I find something sturdy to cover my head with.

    The Supreme Court Makes the Same Ruling It Always Does on Affirmative Action

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    It allows for continuing affirmative action, but they have ruled against the specific remedy.

    That is the nickel tour of
    Fisher v. UT Austin:

    Today a broad majority of the Court reinforced that affirmative action must be strictly reviewed, but it did not outlaw those programs. In an opinion that required only thirteen pages, the Court explained that a university’s use of race must meet a test known as “strict scrutiny.” Under this test, a university’s use of affirmative action will be constitutional only if it is “narrowly tailored.” The Court in Fisher took pains to make clear exactly what this means: courts can no longer simply rubber-stamp a university’s determination that it needs to use affirmative action to have a diverse student body. Instead, courts themselves will need to confirm that the use of race is “necessary” – that is, that there is no other realistic alternative that does not use race that would also create a diverse student body. Because the lower court had not done so, the Court sent the case back for it to determine whether the university could make this showing.

    They have been making this same decision since Bakke.

    I expect this to continue, until affirmative action is effectively a dead issue.

    Good Point

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    C.P. Chandrasekhar, discussing the so called middle income trap, where developing countries stall out at a slightly improved standard of living.

    Why did places like Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan become prosperous, while newer partners to the dance don’t.

    Money quote is at the end:

    And there are many who argue that growth in Asia stalled not before they liberalized but after they did. This is based in particular on the evidence that dynamism in Asian economies other than China, and to an extent India, faltered after the 1997 crisis. That crisis, we must recall, was related to the financial liberalisation many of these countries were forced to adopt, either as a quid pro quo for continued access to the export markets on which they were excessively dependent, or because waning manufacturing export competitiveness as a result of rising wage costs and appreciating currencies, pushed them into liberalisation of financial policies in the hope of making financial services the new engine of growth. The result was vulnerability to boom-bust cycles of various kinds that led to the synchronised downturn in many countries (with Thailand, Korea, Malaysia and Indonesia, among them) in 1997-98.

     This should possibly lead to two conclusions. The first is that, beyond a point export-driven growth has a way of running into internally generated constraints. Second, that among the factors that can undermine a country’s growth prospects, even at relatively higher income levels, is excessive liberalisation, especially financial liberalisation. Possibly most countries, whether poor, rich or in some ‘middle income’ range, find their growth has stalled for reasons such as these.

    (Emphasis mine)

    Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan experienced their growths during the 1960s and 1970s, before we had “liberalization” (deregulation) and expanding inequality.

    I tend to come from this from a more sociological perspective than a classical economic one, and I would argue that a liberalized economic policies, and in particular financial liberalization, is analogous to the colonial regimes in the 1800s.

    The expanded financial services industries suck the marrow out of, well basically everyone in an orgy of non productive rent sinking, much like the colonial Satraps in the time of Victoria.

    Basically, the banksters are f%$#ing the rest of us like a drunk sorority girl.

    It shows that Timothy Geithner’s, and Wall Street’s creepy vision of the future:

    Geithner hunched his shoulders, pressed his knees together, and lifted his heels up off the ground—an almost childlike expression of glee. “We’re going, like, existential,” he said. He told me he subscribes to the view that the world is on the cusp of a major “financial deepening”: As developing economies in the most populous countries mature, they will demand more and increasingly sophisticated financial services, the same way they demand cars for their growing middle classes and information technology for their corporations. If that’s true, then we should want U.S. banks positioned to compete abroad.

    Is a disaster for the rest of us.

    Things that Pundits do Not Understand

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    To paraphrase Paul Krugman, it’s not all about them.

    He’s right, of course, but I think that he misses the dynamic:  Pundits are supposed to be narcissistic sociopaths.  It’s the nature of the medium:

    Brad DeLong and Dan Drezner wearily continue the policing of Michael Kinsley. I’ll leave it in their hands. But may I say that there is a serious pundit lesson here — namely, that it’s not about you.

    Basically, Kinsley has been on a jihad against Krugman because other people took apart Kinsley’s essay on austerity, which was both wrong on the basic history, and fetishized other people’s suffering.

    I’m not sure why patron saint of dumb-f%$# mindless contrarianism is upset with Paul Krugman, but being wrong is what Michael Kinsley does best.

    In His House at R’lyeh, Dead Cthulhu Waits Dreaming*

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    Archeologists have found a massive buried structure beneath Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee):

    The massive circular structure appears to be an archaeologists dream: a recently discovered antiquity that could reveal secrets of ancient life in the Middle East and is just waiting to be excavated.

    It’s thousands of years old — a conical, manmade behemoth weighing hundreds of tons, practically begging to be explored.

    The problem is — it’s at the bottom of the biblical Sea of Galilee. For now, at least, Israeli researchers are left stranded on dry land, wondering what finds lurk below.

    The monumental structure, made of boulders and stones with a diameter of 70 meters (230 feet), emerged from a routine sonar scan in 2003. Now archaeologists are trying to raise money to allow them access to the submerged stones.

    “It’s very enigmatic, it’s very interesting, but the bottom line is we don’t know when it’s from, we don’t know what it’s connected to, we don’t know its function,” said Dani Nadel, an archaeologist at the University of Haifa who is one of several researchers studying the discovery. “We only know it is there, it is huge and it is unusual.”

    A massive ancient structure underneath a body of water full of historical and mystical overtones.

    I’ve got a bad feeling about this.

    * Not exactly my line, Molly NYC made an abbreviated version of this in thee comments for the linked article.

    Cowardice From Almost Everyone in Washington, DC

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    John Judis was one of the few people among the punmditocracy who opposed the Iraq war.

    On the 10th anniversary of the war he reveals that dozens of people in the military and defense establishment opposed it too, but were afraid to say so:

    In the six months before the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and the six weeks after the invasion (culminating in George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech), I often compared my situation in Washington to that of Jeannette Rankin, the Montana congresswoman and pacifist who voted against entry into both World War I and II.  Not that I would have voted against declaring war in 1941; the comparison was to her isolation, not with her isolationism.

    There were, of course, people who opposed invading Iraq—Illinois State Senator Barack Obama among them—but within political Washington, it was difficult to find like-minded foes. When The New Republic’s editor-in-chief and editor proclaimed the need for a “muscular” foreign policy, I was usually the only vocal dissenter, and the only people who agreed with me were the women on staff: Michelle Cottle, Laura Obolensky and Sarah Wildman. Both of the major national dailies—The Washington Post and The New York Times (featuring Judith Miller’s reporting)—were beating the drums for war. Except for Jessica Mathews at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington’s thinktank honchos were also lined up behind the war.

    ………

    I found fellow dissenters to the war in two curious places: the CIA and the military intelligentsia. That fall, I got an invitation to participate in a seminar at the Central Intelligence Agency on what the world would be like in fifteen or twenty years. I went out of curiosity—I don’t like this kind of speculation—but as it turned out, much of the discussion was about the pending invasion of Iraq. Except for me and the chairman, who was a thinktank person, the participants were professors of international relations. And almost all of them were opposed to invading Iraq.

    In early 2003, I was invited to another CIA event: the annual conference on foreign policy in Wilmington. At that conference, one of the agency officials pulled me aside and explained that the purpose of the seminar was actually to try to convince the White House not to invade Iraq. They didn’t think they could do that directly, but hoped to convey their reservations by issuing a study based on our seminar. He said I had been invited because of my columns in The American Prospect, which was where, at the time, I made known my views opposing an invasion. When Spencer Ackerman and I later did an article on the CIA’s role in justifying the invasion, we discovered that there was a kind of pro-invasion “B Team” that CIA Director George Tenet encouraged, but what I discovered from my brief experience at the CIA was that most of the analysts were opposed to an invasion. (After Spencer’s and my article appeared, I received no more invitations for seminars or conferences.)

    I had a similar experience when I talked to Jon Sumida, a historian at the University of Maryland, who specializes in naval history and frequently lectures at the military’s colleges. Sumida told me that most of the military people he talked to—and he had wide contacts—were opposed to an invasion. I confirmed what Sumida told me a year or so later when I was invited to give a talk on the Iraq war at a conference on U.S. foreign policy at Maryland. A professor from the Naval War College was to comment on my presentation. I feared a stinging rebuttal to my argument that the United States had erred in invading Iraq, but to my astonishment, the professor rebuked me for not being tough enough on the Bush administration.

    John Judis was right about the war, of course, and so were the people that he talked to.

    The difference is that Judis got a whole sh%$ sandwich for telling the truth, and they did not.

    On a matter like this, this makes them cowardly punks, and if someone were to call them traitors, I would not object.

    H/t Brad Delong.

    This Explains a Lot About Bob Woodward

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    The author of a biography on John Belushi compared his understanding of the life, and death, to Bob Woodward’s account, the book Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi, and finds the Washington Post scribe’s account to be bizarrely inaccurate.

    Tanner Colby is not suggesting that Woodward fabricating anything, but rather that he is completely incompetent when it comes to putting the facts he has in an accurate context:

    A little more than a week ago, during an interview with Politico, Bob Woodward came forward to claim he’d been threatened in an email by a “senior White House official” for daring to reveal certain details about the negotiations over the budget sequester. The White House responded by releasing the email exchange Woodward was referring to, which turned out to be nothing more than a cordial exchange between the reporter and Obama’s economic adviser, Gene Sperling, who was clearly implying nothing more than that Woodward would “regret” taking a position that would soon be shown to be false.

    A rather trivial scandal, but the incident did manage to raise important questions about Woodward’s behavior. Was he cynically trumping up the administration’s “threat,” or does he just not know how to read an email? Pretty soon, those questions tipped over into the standard Beltway discussion that transpires anytime Woodward does anything. How accurate is his reporting? Does he deserve his legendary status?

    I believe I can offer some interesting answers to those questions. Thirty-one years ago, on March 5, 1982, Saturday Night Live and Animal House star John Belushi died of a drug overdose at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles—which, bear with me a moment, has more to do with the current coverage of the budget sequester than you might initially think.

    ………

    Twenty years later, in 2004, Judy Belushi hired me, then an aspiring comedy writer, to help her with a new biography of John, this one titled Belushi: A Biography. As her coauthor, I handled most of the legwork, including all of the interviews and most of the research. What started as a fun project turned out to be a rather fascinating and unique experiment. Over the course of a year, page by page, source by source, I re-reported and rewrote one of Bob Woodward’s books. As far as I know, it’s the only time that’s ever been done.

    ………

    Wired is an infuriating piece of work. There’s a reason Woodward’s critics consistently come off as hysterical ninnies: He doesn’t make Jonah Lehrer–level mistakes. There’s never a smoking gun like an outright falsehood or a brazen ethical breach. And yet, in the final product, a lot of what Woodward writes comes off as being not quite right—some of it to the point where it can feel quite wrong. There’s no question that he frequently ferrets out information that other reporters don’t. But getting the scoop is only part of the equation. Once you have the facts, you have to present those facts in context and in proportion to other facts in order to accurately reflect reality. It’s here that Woodward fails.

    ………

    Woodward also makes peculiar decisions about what facts he uses as evidence. His detractors like to say that he’s little more than a stenographer—and they’re right. In Wired, he takes what he is told and simply puts it down in chronological order with no sense of proportionality, nuance, or understanding.

    ………

    Of all the people I interviewed, SNL writer and current Sen. Al Franken, referencing his late comedy partner Tom Davis, offered the most apt description of Woodward’s one-sided approach to the drug use in Belushi’s story: “Tom Davis said the best thing about Wired,” Franken told me. “He said it’s as if someone wrote a book about your college years and called it Puked. And all it was about was who puked, when they puked, what they ate before they puked and what they puked up. No one read Dostoevsky, no one studied math, no one fell in love, and nothing happened but people puking.”

    Here is the money quote:

    Whenever people ask me about John Belushi and the subject of Wired comes up, I say it’s like someone wrote a biography of Michael Jordan in which all the stats and scores are correct, but you come away with the impression that Michael Jordan wasn’t very good at playing basketball.

    It’s not that Woodward is a manipulator with a partisan agenda. He doesn’t alter key evidence in order to serve a particular thesis. Inconsequential details about rehearsing movie dialogue are rendered just as ham-handedly as critical facts about Belushi’s cocaine addiction. Woodward has an unmatched skill for digging up information, but he doesn’t know what to do with that information once he finds it.

    My thesis about Woodward, and I’ve thought this for a while is that he’s kind of a big Hoover* for information, but he needs someone who can connect the dots to create actual meaning.

    As I have followed Woodward’s solo career, I have increasingly given more credit to Bernstein.

    *The vacuum cleaner, not the former FBI director.

    This is Fascinating

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    An analysis by Robert Parry suggests that both Watergate and Iran Contra were about covering up collusion to subvert US foreign policy for electoral advantage, something that the less sophisticated amongst us might call treason:

    ………

    A favorite saying of Official Washington is that “the cover-up is worse than the crime.” But that presupposes you accurately understand what the crime was. And, in the case of the two major U.S. government scandals of the last third of the Twentieth Century – Watergate and Iran-Contra – that doesn’t seem to be the case.

    Indeed, newly disclosed documents have put old evidence into a sharply different light and suggest that history has substantially miswritten the two scandals by failing to understand that they actually were sequels to earlier scandals that were far worse. Watergate and Iran-Contra were, in part at least, extensions of the original crimes, which involved dirty dealings to secure the immense power of the presidency.

    Presidents Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan photographed together in the Oval Office in 1991. (Cropped from a White House photo that also included Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.)

    In the case of Watergate – the foiled Republican break-in at the Democratic National Committee in June 1972 and Richard Nixon’s botched cover-up leading to his resignation in August 1974 – the evidence is now clear that Nixon created the Watergate burglars out of his panic that the Democrats might possess a file on his sabotage of Vietnam peace talks in 1968.

    ………

    Similarly, Official Washington and many mainstream historians have tended to dismiss Ronald Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal as another case of some overzealous subordinates intuiting what the President wanted and getting everybody into trouble.

    ………

    So, while congressional and federal investigators looked only at how the specific 1985-86 arms sales to Iran got started, there was no timely attention paid to evidence that the Reagan administration had quietly approved Israeli arms sales to Iran in 1981 and that those contacts went back to the days before Election 1980 when the hostage crisis destroyed Carter’s reelection hopes and ensured Reagan’s victory.

    The 52 hostages were not released until Reagan was sworn in on Jan. 20, 1981.

    Over the years, about two dozen sources – including Iranian officials, Israeli insiders, European intelligence operatives, Republican activists and even Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat – have provided information about alleged contacts with Iran by the Reagan campaign.

    And, there were indications early in the Reagan presidency that something peculiar was afoot. On July 18, 1981, an Israeli-chartered plane crashed or was shot down after straying over the Soviet Union on a return flight from delivering U.S.-manufactured weapons to Iran.

    In a PBS interview nearly a decade later, Nicholas Veliotes, Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for the Middle East, said he looked into the incident by talking to top administration officials. “It was clear to me after my conversations with people on high that indeed we had agreed that the Israelis could transship to Iran some American-origin military equipment,” Veliotes said.

    In checking out the Israeli flight, Veliotes came to believe that the Reagan camp’s dealings with Iran dated back to before the 1980 election. “It seems to have started in earnest in the period probably prior to the election of 1980, as the Israelis had identified who would become the new players in the national security area in the Reagan administration,” Veliotes said. “And I understand some contacts were made at that time.”

    When I re-interviewed Veliotes on Aug. 8, 2012, he said he couldn’t recall who the “people on high” were who had described the informal clearance of the Israeli shipments but he indicated that “the new players” were the young neoconservatives who were working on the Reagan campaign, many of whom later joined the administration as senior political appointees.

    I really don’t think that “treason” is too strong a term here.

    The assertion here is that the Watergate break-in was about trying to find files implicating Nixon in deliberately extending the war for electoral advantage, and the arms deliveries to Iran were payback for holding the Tehran embassy hostages from being released until after the elections.

    It does provide some context to the “Third Rate Burglary” the brought Nixon down.

    There were files on his interference, and he could not find them because a Johnson aide had taken them with him, and he was desperate to ensure that they would not be used against him in the 1972 elections.

    Considering the 30,000 American deaths, and the million+ dead Vietnamese, Nixon and his merry band of rat-f%$#ers (their term) had to have been in a panic about this.

    Bummer………

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    The Higgins Armory Museum is going to close at the end of this year. The collection will be merged with the Worcester art museum:

    The Higgins Armory Museum, an 82-year-old Worcester institution with an internationally renowned collection of arms and armor that is the second largest in the country, announced Friday it will permanently close Dec. 31 after losing a long battle to raise enough endowment money to ensure its future.

    The collection will be moved and integrated into the Worcester Art Museum, which plans in time to display all of Higgins’ core 2,000 objects. Higgins will stay open for the rest of the year and offer “top-notch” programs and events.

    Although Higgins may not have succeeded in its long-term attempts to stay an individual entity, interim executive director Suzanne W. Maas said that she is excited the future of the collection has been secured and will be staying in Worcester. Meanwhile, Matthias Waschek, director of the Worcester Art Museum, said acquiring the collection gives the WAM “incredible opportunities.”

    “Yes, we’re staying in Worcester,” Ms. Maas said in an interview Wednesday. “But I expect people to grieve the loss of this building as we grieve the loss of it.”

    This is the arguably the best military history museum in the world.

    I never went there when I lived in Massachusetts. Crap.

    To Be Fair, You Cannot Say this in The New York Times

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    Krugman talks about Monti and his catastrophic embrace of austerity when he was installed by the European Union.

    What I want to point out is this rather interesting paragraph buried toward the end of his OP/ED

    For Mr. Monti was, in effect, the proconsul installed by Germany to enforce fiscal austerity on an already ailing economy; willingness to pursue austerity without limit is what defines respectability in European policy circles. This would be fine if austerity policies actually worked — but they don’t. And far from seeming either mature or realistic, the advocates of austerity are sounding increasingly petulant and delusional.

    (emphasis mine)

    It’s an odd turn of phrase, “The proconsul installed by Germany,” and I’m wondering if he is making an oblique reference to Vidkun Quisling.

    Of course, were he to make a direct reference to the infamous Norwegian collaborator in the pages of The Times, at least in the terms of current policy and politics, he would not be in the pages of The Times for much longer.