Relentless Partisanship

...The Whigs, who invented modern political campaigning with the picturesque Log Cabin and Hard Cider election of Harrison and Tyler in 1840, and were the source of sensible abolitionist sentiment that ultimately liberated the country from the divisive evil of slavery, are generally dismissed as an almost worthless foil to the steady progress of the Democrats toward a just and fair America...

...It is still too soon to speak of a definitive biography of Mao--that may have to wait until the Chinese Communist Party finally loses its stranglehold on power and goes the way of its Soviet counterpart...

...The writing, despite occasional outbursts of pedantry and a tendency to dryness that understates the farcical aspects of much of the subject, flows Conrad Black is the author o f Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom (Public Affairs...

...about the moral and practical implications of slavery, but how do we know that he thought it evil and doomed, and why did he not emancipate his slaves...

...Who are the new anti-Semites...

...Because the memory of the Nazi Holocaust still lingers after all these years, the new anti-Semitism is disguised as the socially more acceptable "anti-Zionism...

...He is a yellow dog Democrat who romanticizes and exalts the forebears of the present Democratic Party, and denigrates their opponents with a mechanical and sometimes grating consistency...

...It may have been that in part, but there is room for other interpretations, such as that it was vindictive house-cleaning and simple and corrupt patronage...

...This is also incongruous in a book that is in other respects an exemplary work of scholarship and presentation...

...John Adams, a solid if unexciting New Englander, is portrayed as a buffoon masquerading as having martial aptitudes, avirtual counter-revolutionary, brushed aside by the virtuous Jefferson...

...Wilentz passes too swiftly and with too facile a confidence over the ambiguities created by Jefferson's ambivalence about slavery, treatment of the Indians ("merciless Indian savages," he called them in the Declaration of Independence), and attitude to the French Revolution once it degenerated into extremism...

...Jefferson, who was a slave-holder and Indianbaiter, comes through as almost without fault...

...The thoroughness of the author's research and organization of his material is exemplary...

...A few eyebrows are being raised around the world, but otherwise nothing is being done about it...

...444...

...The Republicans have endured 150 years and have defeated the Democrats 23 times in 38 presidential elections, and have produced some of the nation's greatest leaders...

...556, 561, 428), crowd, and generally American Democracy: enrich, the story...

...The discriminating reader quickly becomes alert to the author's leanings, and can compensate for them...

...This two-term president has launched the United States on an international crusade against terrorism and for democracy, the success or failure of which will have enormous consequences for world history...

...315...

...The leaders and instigators of this new anti-Semitism are concentrated on the political left, its most active and vocal spokesmen being found in our prestige universities...

...Iran feverishly pursues the Holy Grail of atomic weapons...

...Israel is the one exception...

...The Rise of Jefferson to Lincoln by Sean Wilentz (W,W, NORTON, 992 PAGES, $35) Reviewed by Conrad Black Relentless Partisanship T HIS BOOK IS a PRODIGIOUS FEAT o f scholarship and organization, weaving into its narrative every political splinter group, and attempting to give appropriate weight to all the tides and currents of American sociology from the Revolution to the Civil War...

...But Chang and Halliday have provided us for the first time with a comprehensive, reliable, and chillingly lifelike portrait of this evil megalomaniac, who thought "the world needed to be unified" under his dismal tyranny and who still casts a long shadow over China...

...After Jackson's administration, the Democrats' strongest argument for votes in the North was that only they could keep the South in the Union, by not pushing it too hard over slavery...

...Mao extracted the maximum from the president's visit, above all access to Western technology, pretending that the United States was now his ally against the USSR while continuing his anti-American propaganda...

...The hatred is aimed against the state of Israel, which, according to the new anti-Semites, represents all that is evil in the world and which is the main violator of human rights and guilty of virtually every other abuse that can be conceived...

...Every leftist demonstration - be it about the war in Iraq, against globalization, for or against whatever else - does inevitably include appeals against "Israeli subjugation of the Palestinians," the "occupation of Palestinian lands by Israel," or simply asks for the elimination of Israel...

...and deepening the economic crisis," and of being afflicted by "incompetence" and "larceny" (p...

...Henry Clay is presented as a whiskey-sodden schemer and poseur, wrongly seeking credit for the 1850 Compromise, which, according to Wilentz, really belonged to Douglas (pp...

...LENTZ'S PARTISAN BIASES a r e n o t entirely onfined to politics...

...But when he joins the premier Christian church, where he rose to considerable influence as the comparison with Newman implies, as far as Wilentz is concerned, he walks off the edge of the earth and is not mentioned again...

...What are i t s goals...

...But it is disappointing that such an important and valuable work should be so unrigorously partisan...

...This poison is now so widespread that a poll taken in Europe not too long ago found Israel to be the greatest menace to the peace of the world - far ahead of such murderous regimes as those of Iran or of North Korea...

...In deference to "world opinion" and also to the wishes of the United States, Israel has allowed itself to be pressured into innumerable concessions to those who are sworn to destroy it...

...They would presumably be left to the tender mercies of the Arabs, who would, of course, have no greater joy than to emulate or perhaps even to "improve" on the Nazi model and to give "final solution...

...Rebel With a Cause • [ • X i CAN SAY THIS with confidence," Fred ames asserts in the closing chapter of his ively book on George W. Bush, "Bush is a president of consequence" Most Americans would likely agree with Barnes's assessment, though Bush has become a polarizing figure, alienating both the left (predictably) and many on the right (somewhat surprisingly...

...Washington and Lincoln are too celebrated to be frontally attacked, but, not being Democrats, they are seriously diminished...

...The foolish professors and the hypocritical preachers are besotted by their leftism and by their hatred against Israel and America...

...This was a condition he only once in fact achieved, when he ran as third party anti-slavery candidate for president in 1848, causing the election of the Whig, 72 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 2006 BOOKS IN REVIEW Zachary Taylor...

...They enable us to pursue these goals and to publish these messages in national newspapers and magazines...

...He and Washington and Hamilton had been upholding "a hidebound elitism" (p...

...He receives no credit for installing Jefferson over the shadowyAaron Burr in continued on poge 72 70 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 2006 You deserve a factual look a t . . . 96 The New Anti-Semitism Who are i t s advocates...

...He excitedly claims that Brownson's ideas were "every bit as startling" as those of Marx and Engels (a wild exaggeration, p. 500...

...Spotty" Lincoln is presented as eloquent and cunning at times, but often devious...

...He was also the only one offered half a continent almost as a gift...

...The Holocaust, in which over six million Jews were brutally murdered by the Nazis and their enthusiastic collaborators, happened over 60 years ago...

...Any comparison with the Whigs is strained...

...Though changes to the status quo were necessary and justified, Jackson was clumsy and inflicted a terrible depression on the country, which swamped his chosen succes- i sor, the endearing scoundrel, Martin Van Buren...

...The author accuses the Bank of having been "mismanaged," of "hastening...

...The appalling treatment of the Indians is given minimal weight compared to Jackson's supposedly beneficent destruction of the Bank of the United States, and his founding of the modern Democratic Party...

...Its purpose is the research and publication of the facts regarding developments in the Middle East and exposing false propaganda that might harm the interests of the United States and its allies in that area of the world...

...Almost all of our revenue pays for our educational work, for these clarifying messages, and for related direct mail...

...He has also sought to redefine modern American political conservatism, an effort that may well help to determine the prospects of the Republican Party for decades...

...215), but provides no evidence of this...

...Too often, Wilentz engages in unsubstantiated mindreading for the benefit of famous Democrats...

...No detour into labor and religious and political factionalism is too obscure to be deserving of the brief redirection of the entire narrative to include it...

...Washington is passed over as an almost irrelevant figurehead as president who presumably rendered some service in the Revolutionary War and had earned the respect of his countrymen...

...Box 590359 _9 San Francisco, CA 94159 Gerardo Joffe, President FLAME is a tax-exempt, non-profit educational 501 (c)(3) organization...

...He drenches the readr in details about the most obscure and evanescent religious personalities, but cannot bring himself to refer to the existence of the Roman Catholic Church until page 450 (when it numbered over half-a-million Americans and was growing rapidly), and rarely thereafter...

...Anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism in whichever way it may be disguised...

...The implications of doing so after one or both of them had died are sufficiently disturbing that the point is better not made (lO...

...He has clarified his views in an exchange with another reviewer in Slate, and limited the scope of the comparison, but this puts the perspective of this book in a contemporary context...

...smoothly and is often pleasing and even stylish...

...Fueled by the extreme left, the "legitimacy" of Israel is a constant topic of discussion...

...Those on the extreme left call for the abolition of the State of Israel outright, although they do not tell us what they propose to do with the five million Israeli Jews...

...Wilentz's admiration for the Democrats is perfectly reasonable and is an arguable view, but it is not a legitimate filter to be imposed on the interpretation of historical events by a serious historian, which he certainly is...

...down, a most decisive response on the part of Israel can be expected...

...Andrew Jackson is lionized as the champion of modern democracy in America, despite his immense services to slavery, which are glossed over, including replanting the Democratic Party on slave-holding as its strongest pillar, as well as clearing 250,000 Indians out of the South and promoting the annexation of Texas, to facilitate the expansion of slavery...

...In fact, he suppressed the Whiskey Rebellion to preserve the government of the young republic from insurrectionists, not because he was a stooge of Hamilton's, as is implied (pp...

...Barnes character- Reviewed by Stephen M. izes Bush as "rebel-inchief," an "insurgent" leader who has ignored the Washington elites and challenged conventional wisdom when making policy...

...Orestes Brownson, who is described by his biographer, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., as America's closest equivalent to Cardinal Newman, is much touted by Wilentz as a political activist...

...Its president has publicly declared - not once, but repeatedly - that Israel is a "tumor" that must be excised and that it must be wiped off the map of the world...

...Amid outcries at home and abroad, he withdrew the United States from the Kyoto global warming treaty RebeMn-Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversia~ Presidency of George W. Bush by Fred Barnes (CROWN FORUM, 224 PAGES, $23.95) Klugewicz Stephen M. Klugewicz is executive director of Collegiate Network...

...So terrific were the events that - even today, about two generations later - nobody would wish to identify himself with them...

...It is important to be aware of it...

...But these are minor cavils and this book is quite readable despite its intense detail and complexity...

...BOOKS IN REVIEW the 1800 electoral college vote...

...Daniel Webster emerges as a bibulous and ineffectual windbag...

...It has only one serious problem: the author's relentless partisanship...

...A striking theme of this biography is the cunning ways in which Mao played oft" the Russians and the Americans against one another...

...Poor Stephen A. Douglas, according to Wilentz, was the earnest compromiser Clay was not, but the ground was taken out from under him, we are told, by the crafty Lincoln...

...But he is presented as essentially a ceremonious constitutional monarch who indulged the alleged cupidity, treachery, and anti-republican tendencies of Hamilton...

...136...

...But it seems clear that, when the chips are really consistency of this criticism against Israel is such that it cannot be considered as anything but anti-Semitism...

...But the viciousness, volume and consistency of this criticism against Israel is such that it cannot be considered as anything but anti-Semitism - the new anti-Semitism, disguised as anti-Israelism or anti-Zionism...

...James Knox Polk, a capable but colorless president, is presented, implausibly, as a second Jackson, in all his democratic virtue, and the inveterate and generally spineless political trickster, MartinVan Buren, comes out as a man of solid principle...

...Early in his first term, for instance, Bush summarily declared that the President would no longer consult the liberal American Bar Association when making judicial nominations...

...The palsied ineptitude of the (Democratic) Pierce and Buchanan administrations is soft-pedaled...

...Mediumrange missiles (so far, fortunately without atomic warheads) are being paraded through the streets of Teheran, with signs attached to them, shamelessly giving their destination as Jerusalem...

...i Wilentz tells us that blaming Jackson for the depression of the late 1830s "now appears simplistic at best," without elaboration (p...

...642-4...

...A death wish for Israel...

...The author recently compared (in the New York Times Book Beview) the current Republican Party and the crumblingWhigs of the 1840s...

...FEBRUARY 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 73...

...Sadly, quite a few Jews, having been saturated with leftism from their early years, participate in such demonstrations...

...The actions of Israel, just as the actions of any other countries, are subject to examination and criticism...

...There is no doubt that he was concerned Andrew Jackson is lionized as the champion of modern democracy in America, despite his immense services to slavery, which are glossed over, incluG ing replanting the Democratic Party on slave-holdings as its strongest pillar, as well as clearing 250,000 Indians out of the South...

...116...

...The active participation in the new anti-Semitism by the American clergy (beginning with the Presbyterians) is a scandalous reality...

...That isn't going to happen, of course, not because anybody in the world would lift a finger to prevent it, but because, fortunately, Israel is a very strong and most capable nation...

...His ultimate victory, and the salvation of the Union and Emancipation of the slaves, were mitigated by the deaths of 600,000 people in the War...

...Jackson's great service to the country was his suppression of Calhoun's movement to promote the right of the states to nullify federal laws, in 1832 and 1833...

...Jackson's notorious "spoils system" of replacing large numbers of civil servants in a new administration, we read, was really a desire to "ventilate and democratize the executive branch" (p...

...With the possible exception of Carthage during the Punic Wars, almost 2500 years ago, no country in the world, no country in recorded history, has ever been threatened with extinction...

...And so on...

...John Quincy Adams runs the author's gauntlet more successfully, but he was, after all, technically a Jeffersonian when he became president, having been Monroe's very successful secretary of state...

...524...

...Yet, a new anti-Semitism is now rearing its head...

...Neither condition matters particularly, but the impression left by treatment of religious subjects supplements the partisan credibility problems of the political narrative...

...He believed that slavery was evil and that it was doomed" (p...

...This ad has been published and paid for by FLAME Facts and Logic About the Middle East P.O...

...It is not clear whether Wilentz is papaphobic, or just inexplicably distracted by cranky religious sects...

...While the propagation of the new anti-Semitism by prestige universities started in Europe (mostly in England), it has found fertile ground in the universities of the United States...

...It is pursued and propagated by the radical left...

...The Southern Democrats' greatest leader, and slavery's foremost apologist, John C. Calhoun, is overindulged and repackaged as a conscientious regionalist, but a unionist at heart...

...Yet almost every serious historian has concluded that abolishing paper money caused an unnecessary and severe liquidity crisis...

...Though the Republicans had a very successful launch in 1856, according to Wilentz, that party magically eructed forth out of disparate elements, and Lincoln, William H. Seward, and Thurlow Weed, who are generally considered to be its founders, are given no direct credit for the birth of the Republicans...

...An endless sequence of labor and social and religious agitators, of Clodhoppers, Tertium Quids, Loco Focos, Hunkers, Barnburners, and Know-Nothings...

...138...

...Your taxdeductible contributions are welcome...

...Surely, not everybody who criticizes Israel is an anti-Semite...

...Overt vilification of America has to remain muted - it's somewhat dangerous to be too outspoken about it - but Israel, perceived as the satrap and the handmaiden of the United States in the Middle East, is an easy target...

...It is slightly disconcerting to read of"Walter" Whitman and "David" Crockett, or that Henry Clay "coaxed" President William Henry Harrison into something "before he died" (presumably before Harrison died...

...We have virtually no overhead...

...The progress of the voting franchise, by racial and property-holding criteria, is authoritatively recounted for almost all of the states...

...The new anti-Semites do not publicly proclaim their desire to bring about a second Holocaust or to subject the Jews to mass murder or annihilation...

...The Whigs lasted barely 30 years and only elected two indifferent presidents...

...What are the facts...

...The abolition of the "Zionist entity" gets serious attention, even in the hallowed halls of the United " . . . t h e v i c i o u s n e s s , volume and Nations...

...to the Jewish problem" once and for all...

...Jefferson was "the only national leader in history to achieve the vast expansion of his country.., while at the same time.., curtailing its military" (p...

...72-3...

...Nobody should be fooled...

...He apparently had almost nothing to do with founding the Republican Party, unjustly exploited the discomfort of the Democrats over slavery, and may not have exhausted acceptable means for avoiding the Civil War...

...of cameo figures from Madison Washington to Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar to the assertive Governor Wilson Lumpkin, (pp...

...Such is the anti-Zionist (anti-Semitic) focus of the left that, almost incomprehensibly, it includes a fair number of Jewish professors and other "intellectuals," not just here in the United States, but even in Israel itself...