Having done a brief meditation on mortality in my last post, I should mention the passing of a very good man recently: Eli Segal, who among other things, was the founding father of AmeriCorps. Al From wrote a tribute to Eli’s service to his country and his party that you can read here.My own most vivid memory of Eli was of a phone call I received from him at home late one night in the midst of congressional consideration of the original AmeriCorps legislation. Some veterans group had become concerned that the post-service educational benefits proposed for AmeriCorps participants were too generous in comparison to veterans’ benefits, and Eli was trying to get in touch with my former boss, long-time national service champion Senator Sam Nunn, to help put out the fire. But he greeted me with the words: “Ed Kilgore! History is calling!”At the time I thought the line was very funny, and typically Eli. But as I get older, I think he might well have been correct: tracking down Sam Nunn that night might have been one of my few personal contributions to the national welfare. Eli Segal had to put out many other fires that threatened the Clinton administration’s small but proud national service initiative, particularly after the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. He probably felt vindicated when George W. Bush made national service a major theme of his 2003 State of the Union Address, and promised to stop GOP efforts to kill AmeriCorps and related programs. But that’s why it especially outrageous that Bush’s latest budget renewed the Republican assault on national service, proposing to shut down the National Civilian Community Corps, an ancillary program to AmeriCorps whose members have particularly distinguished themselves in post-Katrina recovery efforts. The Office of Management and Budget’s rationale for this proposal is that the per-participant cost of NCCC is marginally higher than that of AmeriCorps. Well, that’s hardly surprising, since the whole point to NCCC is that it is a residential program targeted in no small part to young people from very disadvantaged backgrounds, who need residential support. Guest-blogging at Political Animal, Washington Monthly editor Paul Glastris goes after this proposed elimination of NCCC, and offers some alternative cuts if Republicans are actually serious about cutting frivolous federal spending. And like Paul, a whole generation of national service advocates, among whom I am proud to be a charter member going back to the 1980s, is mobilizing to expose the Bush proposal for the hypocritical joke that it actually is.Somewhere, Eli Segal is smiling.

Remember, O man, that dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return!This is, at least in the traditional Catholic and Anglican versions, what priests say to Christians during the imposition of ashes (created from the previous year’s Palm Sunday fronds) on this first day of Lent. The line comes from God’s injunction to Adam and Eve in Genesis about the consequence of their disobedience, which is mortality.It’s not a bad time for all of us to devote a day to the remembrance of our mortality, individually and as a species. And recent months have represented fine times for the Grim Reaper, in places ranging from Darfur to Iraq to subsarahan Africa to New Orleans. It’s also not a bad time for everyone to take notice of our collective responsibility that could lead to a virtual suicide of the human race, such as our potentially catastrophic tampering with global climate patterns, and our tolerance of a renewed nuclear arms race across the breadth of Asia. As the economist John Maynard Keynes once famously said when arguing with some long-term prediction: “In the long run, we’ll all be dead.” That’s true, and aside from our particular convictions about a life beyond death, it’s why the best possible meditation on Ash Wednesday is on ways we can give hope to those who will succeed us in this life. I know that sounds like some liberal injunction to collectivism and to the idea of investments in the future. But it’s an entirely Biblical train of thought. You could look it up.

Via Amy Sullivan in a Political Animal post, Washington Monthly founder Charlie Peters drifts into the treacherous waters of wondering why people under 35 don’t see to know or care much about political history, viz. the (anecdotal) lack of young-folk interest in his book on Wendell Willkie, Five Days In Philadelphia.Not surprisingly, the comment thread to that post is full of angry responses from people under 35 accusing Peters of old-guy-nostalgia, old-guy-arrogance and old-guy-overgeneralization, along with a few bitter comments about how young-uns are too busy fighting Bush and Rove to care anything about Wendell Willkie.Not having read Peters’ book myself, I won’t comment on his hypothesis that Willkie’s upset nomination in 1940 made internationalism safe for FDR, and hence for America. (My own impression from other sources is that Willkie, or “our fat friend,” as Thomas Dewey liked to call him, may have been a proud internationalist before and especially after 1940, but ran a fairly isolationist general election campaign against Roosevelt.)And I also won’t associate with Peters’ generationalizations (to coin a term) about the historical knowledge of people under 35 today as opposed to their predecessors. Hell, there are a million historical topics I know embarassingly little about, including the history of art and the history of science–two subjects on which my 19-year-old stepson could kick my ass on Jeopardy any old day.But I will say this: I am continuously struck, from personal experience, at how many very highly educated and politically obsessive young Americans don’t know seem to know that much about U.S. or international political history.This is not an observation based on self-inflated Boomer Nostalgia for the Huge Events of my own lifetime, BTW.In the throes of the 2000 presidential psychodrama, I wrote a piece for the DLC that in passing compared Ralph Nader to Henry Wallace. A very smart 30ish colleague, who used to teach American history, admitted to me that he had no clue about the identity of Henry Wallace. After I enlightened him about the vice president and Progressive Party leader, he got a little defensive and said: “You have to remember that was before my time.” “Believe it or not, it was before my time, too!” I replied rather heatedly. “And you know what? Andrew Jackson was before my time. Don’t you read?”Knowing I was only half-serious, my colleague didn’t deck me, but it did make me wonder, not for the first time, if there was something about my generation or his that made interest in political history so variable. The only common theory I’ve heard that makes sense is that today’s politically active young adults have been told, or have experienced, that their world is radically discontinuous from much of the past–post-Cold-War, post-industrial, post-modern, and in a word, post-historical.The topic in political history that seems to have suffered the largest drop-off in interest is Marxism, despite the crypto-Marxist views lingering in academia so often alleged by whiners on the Right. That obviously makes sense after 1989, and I should probably grow up about it and stop making obscure references to Communist figures in blog posts, like the one I did last night calling Katherine Harris the “Pasionaria of the Palms” (an obscure reference to La Pasionaria, a cult figure of the Spanish Civil War).Not surprisingly, interest and perceived relevance go hand in hand in determining which of the vast avenues of political history one decides to explore, beyond the basics. For example, Rick Perlstein’s fine book on the Goldwater Movement, Before the Storm, seems to have stimulated an enormous amount of interest among left-leaning young journalists and bloggers hungry to learn about the roots of their contemporary enemies on the Right. I expect a similar buzz to develop about Michael Kazin’s new biography of William Jennings Bryan, A Godly Hero, among both neo-populists and those interested in a revivial of the Christian Left tradition.And for all I know, interest in the Trotskyist backgrounds of so many contempory neo-conservatives may have led to a subterranean trend towards renewed study of Marxism among young lefties, who as we speak may be reading up on the murderous relationship between the Trots and Stalinists like La Pasionaria in the Spanish Republican coalition.Assuming relevance really is the key, I have an answer to Charlie Peters’ cri du coeur about declining knowledge of political history. Those of us who’d like to see the trend reversed need to make the case that our particular historical hobby-horses are immediately relevant. Peters obviously thinks that’s true about Wendell Willkie, and he should keep making that case instead of fretting about why his audience doesn’t automatically embrace it.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey

If you’re feeling restless and vaguely disgruntled at the amount of fun you’ve had this weekend, treat yourself to quick read by Michael Crowley about the majestically doomed U.S. Senate candidacy of Katherine Harris, the Pasionaria of the Palms who played such a key role in shutting down recounts in Florida in 2000.The Harris campaign has been a particular embarassment for Karl Rove and the national Republican Party for reasons that go well beyond her disastrous standing in general election polls against incumbent Democratic Senator Bill Nelson. She wildly popular among hard-core Florida conservatives–and thus unbeatable in a Republican primary–precisely because her fans believe and don’t mind saying they believe she personally and as a matter of partisan loyalty handed the presidency to George W. Bush (with a later assist, of course, from the U.S. Supreme Court). This is, of course, a story line the Bushies would like to bury forever, as Crowley notes:

Indeed, the GOP’s preferred Bush creation myth really begins on September 11, when a great man’s life intersected with world history. It’s a far better story than the one about the butterfly ballot, the “Brooks Brothers riot,” and a presidency claimed by a disputed 537-vote margin.But there will be no escaping all that now.

No, there won’t, but this time, it’s unlikely there will be a happy ending for Katherine Harris.

Ron Brownstein certainly nails it today in explaining why George W. Bush is running into some serious resistance to his “Nothing To See Here” line on the Dubai port sale:

President Bush may not like the arguments that critics are raising against the Dubai company attempting to take over cargo and cruise operations at ports in six U.S. cities. But he should recognize them. The arguments marshaled against Bush closely echoed the ones he deployed to defend the Iraq war. The president, in other words, is stewing in a pot he brought to boil.At the core of Bush’s case for invading Iraq was the contention that the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks changed the burden of proof in evaluating potential threats. Bush justified the war, despite inconclusive intelligence about whether Iraqi President Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, largely on the grounds that after Sept. 11, waiting for definitive evidence of danger was itself too risky.

In other words, looks like the Bush may be guilty of a pre-9/11 mentality, eh? I bet Karl Rove will have the shelve that phrase for a bit.

It didn’t get much attention beyond a couple of vague statements urging Iraqis to stay calm and renounce violence, but the President of the United States did yet another of his series of Big Speeches about the War on Terror to the American Legion yesterday. I really urge you to slog your way through this long speech for what it says and leaves unsaid about the administration’s basic concept of the War on Terror more than four years after 9/11. Remarkably, given the major controversy of last week, and Bush’s extraordinary threat to use his first-ever presidential veto of any legislation that might interfere with a foreign government lease of major U.S. ports, there’s not a word in the Legion speech about port security or anything even vaguely related to such crucial ancillary issues as U.S. efforts to keep nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists. Instead, the whole thrust of Bush’s speech revolves around two propositions: (1) the familiar if bizarre claim that we’ve succeeded in bottling up every al Qaeda operative in the world in Iraq, guaranteeing our safety against another 9/11, even if it’s at the expense of the agony of Iraqis; and (2) the March of Freedom and Democracy is irresistably destroying terrorism around the world, except for a few speed bumps like Hamas’ election win in Palestine. I won’t even bother to address the first claim, but the second is a fine example of Bush’s tendency to harness entirely solid principles to the goal of spinning his administration’s most obvious failures. I couldn’t agree more than opening the Arab Middle East to political, civic and economic freedom is the long-term key to victory in the war against Jihadist terrorism. But the idea that this administration’s policies in Iraq have given its people freedom and democracy, with the only residual question being whether they are willing to accept these gifts, is ludicrous and offensive. Iraq’s agony right now is the direct result of a whole host of Bush administration mistakes. Indeed, just this week, Lawrence Kaplan of The New Republic suggested the most urgent reason for maintaining U.S. troop levels in Iraq is that the bungled “reconstruction” of the country has produced a failed or at least failing state in chaos. It would not only be refreshing if someone in the administration actually admitted this situation; it might even help convince Americans that an immediate withdrawal from Iraq could produce terrible results. But so long as the president himself acts as though the glass is not half-empty or even half-full, but nearly full, and that Americans should ignore the evidence before their eyes that Iraq is a mess, then no one should be surprised if support for further military engagement in Iraq continues to erode. Ultimately, people know when they’re being cynically spun.

As Kevin Drum (generally a dissenter against the drumbeat on the Dubai port lease) rightly points out, the current brouhaha will be very useful to the country if it draws greater attention to the ongoing and potentially disastrous weaknesses in the security of our ports. In today’s Washington Post, David Sanger explains the reality underneath the administration’s trust-us talk:

The administration’s core problem at the ports, most experts agree, is how long it has taken for the federal government to set and enforce new security standards — and to provide the technology to look inside millions of containers that flow through them.Only 4 percent or 5 percent of those containers are inspected. There is virtually no standard for how containers are sealed, or for certifying the identities of thousands of drivers who enter and leave the ports to pick them up. If a nuclear weapon is put inside a container — the real fear here — “it will probably happen when some truck driver is paid off to take a long lunch, before he even gets near a terminal,” said Mr. [Stephen] Flynn, the ports security expert.

Some of you may recall that John Kerry talked about this a lot during the last presidential campaign, to little avail. But then he didn’t have the kind of “news hook” supplied by the Dubai lease controversy, right? And that’s why it’s important right now that we move as quickly as possible from that hook to the underlying vulnerability of our ports to the most critical threat post by terrorists: a nuclear 9/11. Even, and perhaps especially, from a political point of view, showing that the president who proclaims himself the living embodiment of the War on Terror can’t be bothered to budget the money necessary to secure our ports is a lot more powerful an argument than highlighting his soft spot for big corporate contracts.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey

You’d think the administration would just conduct a strategic retreat, admit it didn’t handle this too well, and agree to a more extended and less secret review of the security issues involved in the takeover of operations at six major U.S. ports by a company from Dubai. And maybe it will soon execute one of those classic Bush non-acknowledged flip-flops (see Department of Homeland Security, Intelligence Reform, Campaign Finance Reform, etc., etc.) and do just that.But for the moment, Bush is hanging tough, arguing that the criticism of this decision represents anti-Arab ethnic profiling, and actually threatening his first-ever presidential veto of any legislation that might overturn the Dubai port takeover.Aside from the rich irony of this line of argument from a president who has deliberately exploited stereotypes of Arabs in conflating the 9/11 attackers with Iraqis, there’s the little problem that Bush is avoiding the actual arguments of his critics. Today the DLC weighed in with a statement that stressed the simple if characteristic refusal of the administration to explain the process that led to its decision about port operations, and also reminded readers of the blind spot the Bushies have always exhibited towards port security. Others, including Matt Yglesias, emphasized the fact that the Dubai company at issue is essentially owned by the government of the United Arab Emirates–a fact that has also led Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Robert Menendez to introduce legislation focusing on state sponsorship of port operators, not their ethnicity.But I think Josh Marshall best described the absurdity of this particular president making a key homeland security decision based on an exquisite sensitivity to overseas opinion:

Even if he’s right on the merits, it just doesn’t work from a president who makes his political coin of the realm not caring what anybody else thinks or even what the law might be so long as security is even conceivably at stake.

Selah.

Another day–another very negative news story about the new Medicare “Part D” prescription drug benefit, this time from the Washington Post, where Ceci Connolly explains that even the very poor Americans targeted by the program are avoiding it like a cobra in a pill bottle. This finding is entirely in character with the benefit’s terrible history. Even back when it was new and shiny, and basically involved handing out prescription discount cards without premiums or other costs to beneficiaries, seniors didn’t like or trust the new program. The incredibly botched roll-out of the full Part D ball of twine has entrenched the perception of the program as a classic bureaucratic boondoggle, to the point that people who really need the benefit don’t much want it. (Check out TPMCafe’s subsite, Drug Bill Debacle, for ongoing lowlights).It takes a special breed of public officials to design and deliver a new entitlement program that nobody likes. Really, really special.

When I did my post yesterday welcoming the Bush administration’s apparent decision to push for a greater international peacekeeping presence in Darfur, I had not, unfortunately, read Mark Goldberg’s new article up at The American Prospect site. As Mark explains, there are all sort of signals that the U.S. is finally getting serious about Darfur, but the rest test of U.S. policy is whether the CIA goes along with efforts to bring to justice some of the worst perpetrators of the Darfur outrage, including at least one important “intelligence asset” in the Khartoum government.It’s reasonably clear by now that the threshold you have to cross to understand the Darfur disaster is to recognize that all the talk about racial or tribal conflict in the region is a smokescreen for a deliberate effort by the government of Sudan to neutralize Darfur once and for all as a “problem” for Khartoum, by the worst means possible. And as long as the U.S. fails to cross that threshold and keeps acting as though Khartoum is a part of the solution, and not the main problem, a small bump in peacekeeping forces won’t ultimately do much good.