Time to call in the Dogs

Darrell Issa has been doing his damnedest to try to drag Obama into a scandal, but so far has only looked like the Congressional version of Glenn Beck with all his half-brained conspiracy theories. Issa simply won't let go of Benghazi, calling Jay Carney a "paid liar" the other day,which brought condemnation from within his own ranks. But, the GOP mostly stays mum about their McCarthyite pit bull, thinking if he digs around enough he might actually find something that they can all gnaw on.

Meanwhile, Obama pretty much defused the "Verizongate" scandal, noting that they only tracked phone calls, not listened in, which the Patriot Act allows the administration to do. For that matter, all the police needs is a court order to do the same, and the Obama administration has that too. But, the media-generated scandal does call attention to the fact that the Patriot Act was renewed for the second time, which Obama signed onto in 2011. So, if Americans are that concerned with unwarranted eavesdropping then they better urge their Congresspersons to not renew it again in 2015.

Still, there is this overall impression by those on the Left that Obama is continuing many of the same policies initiated under Bush, resulting in this caricature, while the Right continues to vilify him any chance it gets. David Frum effectively argued in his last piece on The Daily Beast, that the GOP would be wise to refrain from shibboleths about Obama and focus more on strategy in the coming months, because the midterms currently favor the Democrats.

Obama's "middle of the road" approach seems to infuriate persons on both ends of the political spectrum. Yet, his approval rating holds steady in the face of all these faux scandals, which I imagine is why Republican leaders would like to see Issa back off. The GOP runs the danger of being viewed purely as scandalmongers.

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Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

The People Debate the Constitution

As Pauline Maier describes in Ratification , there was no easy road in getting the Constitution ratified. After 10 years of living together as a loosely knit confederation, a few forward thinking men decided that the Articles of Confederation no longer worked and it was time to forge a Constitution. Washington would not go until he could be assured something would come of the convention and that there would be an august body of gentlemen to carry the changes through. But, ultimately Maier describes it was the people who would determine the fate of the new Constitution. This is a reading group for Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution 1787-1788 . The book has been well received by fellow historians like Jack Rakove , among others. Maier has drawn from a wealth of research piecing together a story that tells the arduous battle in getting the Constitution ratified. A battle no less significant than that Americans fought for independence.

Dispatches from Vilnius

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