This article I wrote appeared on the Newsmax.com website on Monday, July 15, 2024.
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Summer 2024 Reading for Political Junkies – By George J. Marlin
July 9, 2024The following appeared on Monday, July 8, 2024, in the Blank Slate Media newspaper chain and on its website, theisland360.com:
Here are books I recommend political junkies read while vacationing:
The World That Wasn’t: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century by Ben Steil.
At the 1944 Democratic Convention that renominated Franklin Roosevelt for a fourth term, party bosses had the good sense to convince the ailing president to dump his vice president, Henry Wallace, in favor of Sen. Harry Truman.
Steil, in his meticulously researched work, argues it was a good decision because Wallace was a dupe of Stalin and was surrounded by Soviet agents and assets.
As vice president, Wallace “toured a Potemkin Siberia, guided by undercover Soviet security and intelligence officials who hid labor camps and concealed prisoners. He then wrote a book together with an American NKGB source hailing the region’s renaissance under Bolshevik leadership…Running for president in 1948, he colluded with Stalin to undermine his government’s foreign policy, allowing the dictator to edit his most important election speech.”
Hats off to old-time political bosses.
Ascent To Power: How Truman Emerged from Roosevelt’s Shadow and Remade the World by David L. Roll.
Roll, the author of the best one-volume biography of General George C. Marshall, vividly describes why FDR made the right choice of Truman at the 1944 convention.
After serving only 82 days as VP, Truman inherited the office of president totally unprepared by his predecessor. Roll’s work, which covers the years 1944 to 1948, describes Truman’s struggles to emerge as a president in his own right.
“Yet, from a relatively unknown Missouri senator to the most powerful man on Earth,” Roll concludes, Truman’s legacy transcends his “come-from-behind campaign in the fall of 1948, his courageous civil rights advocacy, and his role in liberating millions from militarist governments and brutal occupations, [his] decisions during these pivotal years changed the course of the world in ways so significant we live with them today.”
True Believer: Hubert Humphrey’s Quest for a More Just America by James Traub.
This is a fine, readable biography of a truly decent man, and one of the last genuine 20th century liberals.
“For Humphrey, as for such writers and thinkers as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Reinhold Niebuhr, and Lionel Trilling, liberalism meant faith in the individual, openness to debate, optimism about man’s prospects….” Humphrey also understood that to govern one had to seek consensus by compromising.
In the 1960s, Humphrey was a victim of the budding New Left’s radical orthodoxy that now dominates the Democratic Party.
Mansfield and Dirksen: Bipartisan Giants of the Senate by Marc C. Johnson.
Yes, there was indeed a time in our own recent history when members of both political parties believed it their duty to govern. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, senators rose above ideological and geographical differences and reached bipartisan consensus on the pressing issues of the day.
The story of that era is described in historian Mark Johnson’s excellent new book.
During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, the flamboyant Republican leader, Sen. Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois, and the mild-mannered Democratic Majority Leader, Sen. Michael Mansfield of Montana, worked together to pass legislation including civil and voting rights laws and Medicaid.
Dirksen was no pushover. In negotiations, he made it clear what it would take his GOP caucus to sign on to bills. Mansfield, knowing that to pass landmark legislation he needed overwhelming GOP support, often ceded to Dirksen’s needs and publicly gave him credit.
If Republicans should win control of Congress this fall, I recommend they read Johnson’s book to learn how to govern.
Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History by Nellie Bowles.
Bowles, a journalist at The New Press, is a committed Progressive. But during COVID-19, when the Black Lives Matter movement blossomed on the political landscape, she began to sense a significant change on the left. Old-time liberals were being washed away by the New Progressives whose politics were “built on the idea that people are profoundly good, denatured only by capitalism, by colonialism, and whiteness and heteronormativity.” The New Progressives, she concluded, “were leading a political movement that went mad.”
Readers will find Bowles work, which is a collection of dispatches on the ideological excesses of the New Progressives, painful, comical, and insightful.
Happy summer reading.
Hochul’s Congestion Tax Paves Way for Voter Revolt – By George J. Marlin
July 1, 2024This article I wrote appeared on the Newsmax.com website on Monday, July 1, 2024.
Dr. Fauci’s Pseudo Science – By George J. Marlin
June 25, 2024The following appeared on Monday, June 25, 2024, in the Blank Slate Media newspaper chain and on its website, theisland360.com:
Throughout the COVID lockdown, Dr. Anthony Fauci and his associates at the National Institute of Health, in the name of science, dictated how we were to conduct our lives.
Their public utterances were infallible and had to be accepted ex cathedra.
Members of the medical profession who dared to disagree with a Fauci diagnosis or interpretation of data were publicly shamed as cranks spreading disinformation. They were excommunicated from the fellowship of scientists because they were incorrigible sinners.
The term “science” means experiment and observation. It is concerned with the nature of things, not in its abstract form, but in its observable and material appearance. Conclusions reached by scientists after analyzing accumulated data are always contingent. In other words, a scientist interpreting data cannot lay claim to the absolute certitude of his conclusions. The most scientists can say is “as far as we know….”
But during COVID, Fauci spoke in absolute terms when imposing restrictions on Americans.
However, with COVID behind us, the truth about the crisis is finally coming out, and those findings are dimming the aura that has surrounded Dr. Fauci.
On Sunday, June 9, The New York Times ran two major pieces under the umbrella title “Can we finally have an honest conversation about COVID?” It is fascinating reading but received little attention from the mainstream media.
Dr. Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at Harvard and MIT, writes in her piece “Why COVID Probably Started In a Lab”: “Although how the pandemic started has been hotly debated, a growing volume of evidence—gleaned from public records released under the Freedom of Information Act, digital sleuthing through online databases, scientific papers analyzing the virus and its spread, and leaks from within the U.S. government—suggests that the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China.”
Dr. Chan’s lengthy analysis points out that at the “Wuhan Institute of Virology, a team of scientists had been hunting for SARS-like viruses for over a decade … [and] the year before the outbreak, the Wuhan Institute, working with U.S. partners, had proposed creating viruses with SARS-CoV-2’s defining feature.”
She adds, “…the Wuhan lab pursued this type of work under low biosafety conditions that could not have contained an airborne virus as infectious as SARS-CoV-2.”
The doctor concludes, “…the hypothesis that COVID-19 came from an animal at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan is not supported by strong evidence.”
Dr. Chan asks for a “credible investigation [that] would deter future acts of negligence and deceit by demonstrating that it is indeed possible to be held accountable for causing a viral pandemic.” And she calls on Dr. Fauci to cooperate with the investigation.
Sadly, despite all the evidence, the New York Post has reported, Dr. Fauci, in his forthcoming “tell all” memoir, continues to insist that talk about a lab leak in Wuhan is a conspiracy theory that generated smear campaigns.
In the companion essay, Times columnist, Zeynep Tufekci, concedes “Big chunks of the history of the Covid pandemic were rewritten over the last month or so in a way that will have terrible consequences for many years to come.”
Under questioning of Dr. Fauci, at a congressional subcommittee hearing, Americans learned “that some key parts of the public health guidance… during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, were not backed up by solid science. What’s more, inconvenient information was kept from the public suppressed, denied or disparaged as crackpot nonsense.”
Studies did not support the six-foot apart mandate, or that the virus was spread by droplets, or that schools and businesses had to be closed. “Officials did not just spread these dubious ideas, they also demeaned anyone who dared to question them.”
And then there was the cover-up. A senior National Health Institute doctor, for example, deleted emails to avoid public oversight.
“Delays, falsehoods, and misrepresentations,” Tufekci concludes, “had terrible real-time effects on the lives of Americans.”
As for the long-term impact: “Public Health officials squandered our faith in them for not being transparent.”
Pretty powerful stuff for the left-wing Times.
To begin the long road of redemption, Dr. Fauci and his confreres should confess they are not omniscient and God-like, ask for forgiveness, and publicly proclaim “mea culpa, mea maximus culpa”—”through my fault, through my most grievous fault.”
Hochul, an Ineffective Political Chameleon – By George J. Marlin
June 17, 2024This article I wrote appeared on the Newsmax.com website on Monday, June 17, 2024.
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