The Friends of Obama
Scrapbook The Friends of Obama There’s a story, probably apocryphal, that Warren G. Harding, surveying his presidency, lamented that “in this job I am not worried about my enemies. It is my...
...In fact, as she explains, “white women have copied, all too often, the behavior of their fathers and their brothers”—which is not, as might be expected, good behavior...
...Remembering Michael Kelly Of the horrors of war, there is no end...
...Each was led by a former prime minister...
...Hu will be sent to prison for three and a half years...
...now comes novelist Alice (The Color Purple) Walker—“home from a long stay in Mexico”—with an “open letter” excerpted in Britain’s leftwing flagship, the Guardian...
...His style could be best described as energetic and amusing...
...After the article was published, both women contacted The Times and said they do not perform sex for money...
...But the former king understood that free and fair elections are an important part of modernization...
...The birth of the new democracy is a tribute to the judgment of Bhutan’s former ruler, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who called for elections and a new constitutional monarchy, before turning the throne over to his son in December 2006...
...But, as he did not fail to remind us later, his team won that day...
...He was everything a newspaperman should be, and everything the rest of us should aspire to...
...Hail, Bhutan THE SCRAPBOOK sends hearty congratulations to the people of Bhutan, the tiny Himalayan kingdom bordering China that became the world’s newest democracy on March 24...
...We’d call this the “holistic approach” to correcting one’s errors...
...The resulting misrepresentation of the two women’s work included a headline that referred to them as “high-priced call girls” and a paragraph that said they practiced “the 21st-century version of the oldest profession...
...THE SCRAPBOOK is reluctant to draw parallels between the political world of 1923 and this year’s presidential campaign, but we’re willing to risk a lowcaliber wager—say, two bits—that Senator Barack Obama might be thinking Harding-like thoughts about some of his admirers...
...Wilbert Davis, 40, of the 3rd Battalion, 69th Armor, 3rd Infantry Division, who lost his life in that same accident on April 3, 2003...
...He had a great talent for losing credit cards...
...Because of the kind of man he was, Mike would have been the first to insist that we remember as well the service of Staff Sgt...
...Walker expands on the idea in characteristic fashion: We look at Barack Obama, she declares, and we “are glad to be of our species...
...In the end the Druk Phuensum Tshogpa (don’t ask) crushed the People’s Democratic party...
...I wish I could say white women treated me and other black people a lot better than the men did,” writes Alice Walker, “but I cannot...
...Two parties contested the election...
...Five years later, those thoughts have dimmed not at all...
...He and the editors should have explored whether he had determined these things precisely...
...Readers will recall Andrew Ferguson’s delightful deconstruction of Senator Obama’s applause line—“We are the ones we have been waiting for”— which, as he revealed (“The Wit and Wisdom of Barack Obama,” March 24), is the title of a recent collection of essays by Alice Walker...
...He wasn’t exactly the best pitcher in the world...
...It is my friends that keep me awake at night...
...Jeremiah (God Damn America...
...Some of the essay is taken up with Ms...
...O’Donnell what her work actually was before characterizing it...
...To adapt a Democratic phrase: With friends like these, Senator Barack Obama might succeed in swiftboating himself...
...Message: She’s for Barack Obama for president...
...Correction of the Week From the March 30 New York Times: An article on March 16 profiling three sex workers in the wake of Gov...
...Bhutan’s much larger northern neighbor could learn a thing or two from its example...
...Apparently “leniency” is not in the Chinese government’s vocabulary...
...He is the change America has been trying desperately and for centuries to hide, ignore, kill...
...Speaking of which, in our last issue we wrote about Hu Jia, the Chinese dissident under trial at the Beijing Number One Intermediate People’s Court for “subverting state power” (“Gold Medal in Tyranny,” March 31 / April 7...
...There were few policy differences between them...
...While it was almost certain Hu would be found guilty, global human rights activists had hoped that the court would be lenient in sentencing him, considering the upcoming Beijing Olympic Games...
...Anderson advertises herself as a “dominatrix with a holistic approach,” he did not ask her whether that meant she also performed sex acts for money, nor did he ask Ms...
...he used the term “sex workers,” a term they used themselves that describes strippers and lap dancers as well as prostitutes...
...To begin with, she’s against Obama’s rival Hillary Clinton not because of the content of her character but the color of her skin...
...Like the Rev...
...We think of his capacity for personal organization, which was nonexistent...
...David Brooks memorialized him in these pages at the time: Mike never wrote for THE WEEKLY STANDARD, but he knew many of us well and a few intimately...
...We need hardly remind readers about Senator Obama’s spiritual mentor, the Rev...
...Wright...
...Ordinarily, this would be the place where THE SCRAPBOOK offers some pithy summary of the previous two paragraphs...
...But we remember this week with particular sadness the death in a Humvee accident in Iraq five years ago of the writer Michael Kelly, a friend to many of us at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Jeremiah Wright’s sermons, Alice Walker’s words speak for themselves, loud and clear...
...The change America must have if we are to convince the rest of the world that we care about people other than our (white) selves...
...Though Ms...
...When we think back on his remarkable life, we think first of endearing moments like that game...
...In her Guardian piece, Ms...
...Walker’s trademark lunacy—“True to my inner Goddess of the three Directions . . . this does not mean I agree with everything Obama stands for”—but in due course she gets down to business in no uncertain terms...
...And we think finally of his enormous contributions to his profession and to his country, as someone who sought out the truth, who fought for just causes, and who never backed down...
...It will be a while before Bhutan joins the community of nations that have an unrestricted press, a vibrant civil society, and integrated market economies...
...Well, last week the verdict came in...
...We think, sadly and prayerfully, of his wife, Max, and their two young boys, and of his parents and his siblings, who are at the heart of a warm and glowing community on Capitol Hill...
...but why bother...
...When he left the staff of the New York Times he found he had tens of thousands of dollars of expense account receipts he had never turned in...
...O’Donnell refused to be specific about what she does...
...And while he was editor of the New Republic, he did pitch against us during our annual softball game...
...Turnout was heavy...
...The reporter who interviewed them, one of two who worked on the article, never explicitly asked the women whether they traded sex for money or were prostitutes, call girls or escorts...
...Eliot Spitzer’s resignation after revelations that he patronized prostitutes misconstrued how two of the women, identified by the pseudonyms Faith O’Donnell and Sally Anderson, said they earned a living...
Vol. 13 • April 2008 • No. 29
