Bin Laden: Dead or alive?

By Nicholas Kohler with Erica Alini - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 10:05 AM - 25 Comments

AFP/Getty Images

On Good Friday in 1865, Abraham Lincoln and his wife, Mary, appeared at Ford’s Theatre in Washington to watch Our American Cousin, a contemporary farce. During the play, John Wilkes Booth, a popular Shakespearian actor and Confederate sympathizer, made his way to the president’s box with a .44-calibre derringer and fired a single shot into the back of his head. Booth then leapt down onto the stage and is said to have cried: “Sic semper tyrannis”—“Thus always to tyrants!” Somehow, amid the subsequent commotion, Booth escaped, leading authorities on a 12-day chase that ended with his being locked in a burning barn in Virginia.

The men carrying Lincoln from the theatre hadn’t yet laid him down in the boarding house across the street, where he died the next day, before the conspiracy theories surrounding his shooting, Booth’s part in it, and the shadowy forces that might really lie behind the plot began proliferating. These narratives began with the conspiracy led by Booth to kill Lincoln in the days following the Confederate side’s surrender to the Union and the end of the Civil War, but quickly became more baroque.

By 1937, when amateur historian Otto Eisenschiml published his tract on the assassination—Why Was Lincoln Murdered?—Booth had become just a patsy to Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s steely secretary of war. In the one figure of the scheming Stanton, Eisenschiml sewed together all the accidents and curiosities of Lincoln’s shooting into one, cohesive plan. The book marshalled arguments that cast Stanton as an individual of such capacity and ambition that he could first manufacture a situation in which Lincoln was left unguarded, engineered Booth’s improbable getaway, then orchestrated a means of spiriting his fellow conspirators away, their heads hooded, to isolated prisons where they could never report on Stanton’s role in the plot. The book was a bestseller.

Continue…

In honour of Presidents Day

By John Parisella - Sunday, February 20, 2011 at 9:32 PM - 12 Comments

Every third monday in February, the U.S. celebrates a national holiday honouring George Washington and his successors as president. The presidency was not originally meant to be the most important elected office in the world. The separation of powers between the exceutive and legislative (Congress) branches made sure that American Revolution would not replace a royal monarch with a civil one. Also, at the time of the founding Constitution, the new nation was far from being the superpower it would become less than 200 years later. Yet, no one today would dispute that the American president, despite the checks and balances of the U.S. Constitution, is the most consequential political actor in the world.

Whether it is FDR announcing direct U.S. involvement in WWII after Pearl Harbour, Truman dropping the bomb at Hiroshima to end the war, JFK confronting the Soviets in the Cuban Missile Crisis and deciding to launch the program to put a man on the moon, Nixon going to China, Reagan telling the Soviets to tear down the Berlin Wall, or Bush choosing to go to war after 9/11, a president’s decisions can go a long way to steer the course of history. As a Canadian living in the United States, I choose to honour this February 21st holiday by highlighting those inspirational presidents who made an impact on me and otherwise made a significant contribution to improve the human condition:

-Abraham Lincoln for the abolition of slavery;
-Franklin D. Roosevelt for social security;
-Lyndon B. Johnson for the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, as well as Medicare, Medicaid and the War on Poverty;
- and Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton for active, inspiring and productive post-presidencies.

I know there have been many other significant presidencies and they deserve to be highlighted. It is also too early to draw conclusions on the current presidency of Barack Obama (although healthcare reform, if it lasts, and the repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ will be historic). Fifteen presidents governed a nation that condoned slavery, and women did not have the right to vote until the 28th president. But the rhetoric and vision of Jefferson and Adams, as well as the contributions of Andrew Jackson, have contributed to making Presidents Day a worthwhile celebration.

Tough presidential decisions have been made in the course of history around the world that have improved the lot of many in the world. Overall, the two-party system has produced men (and, hopefully soon, women) of stature, though only few of true greatness out of the 44 who have served.

What is truly inspiring and worth honouring this President’s’ Day is the stability and vibrancy of the world’s most successful democracy, and the importance of role the occupants of the office of the presidency have played in building it. Happy Presidents Day to my American friends.

'I have not willingly planted a thorn in any man’s bosom'

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, December 6, 2010 at 11:19 AM - 7 Comments

Peter Wehner notes the difference between civility and weakness.

Civility is not a synonym for lack of principles or lack of passion. They are entirely separate categories. Civility has to do with basic good manners and courtesy, the respect we owe others as fellow citizens and fellow human beings. It is both an animating spirit and a mode of discourse. It establishes limits so we don’t treat opponents as enemies. And it helps inoculate us against one of the unrelenting temptations in politics (and in life more broadly), which is to demonize and dehumanize those who hold views different from our own.

The Commons: If we can't talk to each other, we can only talk to ourselves

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 29, 2009 at 6:39 PM - 52 Comments

The Scene. The Conservatives cheered as Bob Rae, perhaps their preferred opponent, stood to start Question Period. Then, though, he spoke.

“Mr. Speaker, my question is for the minister responsible for public health and for H1N1,” said the white-haired one. “It is very clear that there was a delay in the decision of the federal government to order the vaccine. It is very clear that there has been a delay in the distribution of the vaccine. I would like to ask the minister, in light of these two clear facts that are delineated by the evidence, does she not understand that these delays have cost and will cost lives?”

The Conservatives groaned, having apparently expected something more laudatory of their efforts.

On this question of health policy, it was of course Tony Clement, the Industry Minister, who was offered up to respond. Just as Christian Paradis, the Minister of Public Works, would later take a question on climate change, the Treasury Board President Vic Toews would expound on the scourge of organized crime, and Heritage Minister James Moore would stand and account for the government’s approach to taxation.

“Mr. Speaker, in fact our Minister of Health has been working with the Chief Public Health Officer and has been working assiduously with the provinces and territories across this land to deliver the vaccine,” Mr. Clement informed the House

And surely we can all agree that assiduously is a very impressive-sounding word. Continue…

Gormless blather

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, September 11, 2009 at 1:24 PM - 5 Comments

Andrew Steele draws the line between raucous debate and what it is that we have.

Politics is a clash of ideas. Those ideas arouse passions. Parliament should not be a garden party. But at the same time, it should not be a cattle call. The role of MP in Canada’s current era of the minority government to that of chess piece, vote token, and occasional theatrical chorus member…

Our House of Commons has rarely been anywhere near the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but it would be nice if we could elevate our game to at least the caustic feud of Pearson and Diefenbaker rather than the morass of gormless blather we can anticipate.

Evolution evolving

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, February 12, 2009 at 11:17 AM - 4 Comments

It was 200 years ago today that Charles Darwin (and Abraham Lincoln, for that matter) saw the light of day, the first-born of the secular trinity of 19th-century thinkers who created the modern world. Darwin was widely hailed in his own day—he ended up buried with other English greats in Westminster Abbey—and his fellow titans admired him as much as anyone. A new edition of Darwin’s revolutionary 1859 tome The Origin of Species (packaged like a bestselling novel, with the author’s name in type larger than that of the title) has the presumably unique distinction for a 2009 publication of bearing a front-cover blurb from Freud: “An extraordinary advance in our understanding of the world.” And in 1873, Marx mailed Darwin a copy of his earthshaking 1859 book, Das Kapital, inscribed from “his sincere admirer, Karl Marx.”

The admiration was a one-way street, though. Darwin the well-mannered English gentleman did write Marx a polite thank-you note—“I believe that we both earnestly desire the extension of knowledge and that this in the long run is sure to add to the happiness of mankind”—but the copy itself is more revealing of his real reaction. Now on display in his home-cum-museum, the volume’s uncut pages prove the scientist got less than a third of the way through it. (It’s impossible to guess what the socially conventional Darwin, who died in 1882, long before Freud’s major works, might have made of The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900.) And as it began, so it continues. With Freud and Marx dating badly in the modern era (notwithstanding Marx’s recent economic stimulus bounce), Darwin is the only one still dominant in his field today. That’s not because evolution by natural selection is, as Darwin’s more fervent admirers like to declare, the single greatest idea anyone has ever had. Even though it may well be that, at least as long as you keep your list of potential contenders to how-the-universe-works concepts, as opposed to ideas on how we should treat one another; in the former case evolution’s only real competitors are Newton’s gravity and Einstein’s relativity. No, it’s because evolution is the finest example ever seen—and possibly ever to be seen—of an idea whose time has come, the ultimate intellectual supply and demand phenomenon. Continue…

In search of hope

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments

A beard and a stovepipe hat could hardly have made it plainer. Barack Obama now occupies a unique place in American history, but his ascension to the presidency was carefully modelled on a giant from its past, Abraham Lincoln. The 44th U.S. President retraced the 16th’s train journey from Philadelphia to Washington, stopping in the same communities to make speeches. He made the official theme of his inauguration “A New Birth of Freedom,” borrowing a line from the Gettysburg address. At six minutes after noon on Jan. 20, he took the oath of office on a Bible belonging to the Great Emancipator. And the celebratory lunch served in the Capitol afterwards consisted of that other Illinois president’s favourite foods, served on replicas of Mary Todd Lincoln’s china.

For a man who is expected to change so much, such backwards glances were a telling choice. A deliberate referencing of the darkest period in the country’s history. A reminder, not of triumphs and glories, but of struggle and sacrifice. And a stark acknowledgement that America’s incandescent dream has been largely forged from the ashes of its collective nightmares. “Obama is unlike many of our presidents, someone who has read history and who thinks he can learn from history,” says Doris Kearns Goodwin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning political historian. “And Lincoln has become the man whose spirit he most wants to summon.”

Continue…

Team of Rivals

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, November 18, 2008 at 2:17 PM - 4 Comments

Bad idea.

BTC: The Leader v. The Salesman

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, August 6, 2008 at 1:40 AM - 0 Comments

Back, for a moment, to David Foster Wallace’s take on John McCain.

Near the end of that little book Foster Wallace arrives at his definitive division of political leadership—laying out a distinction between “leaders” and “salesmen.”

“A real leader,” he writes, “isn’t just somebody who has ideas you agree with, nor is it just somebody you happen to believe is a good guy. A real leader is somebody who, because of his own particular power and charisma and example, is able to inspire people, with ‘inspire’ being used here in a serious and non-cliche way. A real leader can somehow get us to do certain things that deep down we think we are good and want to be able to do but usually can’t get ourselves to do on our own … In other words, a real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own…

“There is a difference,” he continues later, “between a great leader and a great salesman. There are similarities, of course. A great salesman is usually charismatic and likable, and he can often get us to do things (buy things, agree to things that we might not go for on our own, and to feel good about it. Plus a lot of salesmen are basically decent people with plenty about them to admire. But even a truly great salesman isn’t a leader. This is because a salesman’s ultimate, overriding motivation is self-interest—if you buy what he’s selling, the salesman profits. So even though the salesman may have a very powerful, charismatic, admirable personality, and might even persuade you that buying is in your interests (and it really might be)—still, a little part of you always knows that what the salesman’s ultimately after is something for himself.”

This leads to a consideration of whether John McCain (circa 2000) could quite literally sell himself as a real leader, without, in the process, becoming a salesman. (see also, Barack Obama circa 2008).

But, for the moment, let’s consider something else. Namely, when was the last time Canada had a real leader? Continue…

Gov't of/ for/ by the people

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, April 30, 2008 at 3:12 PM - 0 Comments

Clearly this has been around for a long time, but as I struggle with PowerPoint it’s new to me, and a handy cautionary tale: the Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation.