Globalization and politics

Yep. Failure in American politics only means you could probably get a job somewhere else, like the Ukraine, as a senior aide for Bob Dole found:

But Mr. Yanukovich has not done it all on his own. From an anonymous office off Kiev’s main square, a seasoned American political strategist who was once a senior aide in Senator Bob Dole’s Republican presidential campaign has labored for months on a Yanukovich makeover.

Though the strategist, Paul J. Manafort, has sought to remain behind the scenes, his handiwork has been evident in Mr. Yanukovich’s tightly organized campaign events, in his pointed speeches and in how he has presented himself to the world.

Mr. Manafort is by no means the only well-known American strategist lured to Kiev by the prospect of sizable fees and the chance to shape the course of a young and tumultuous democracy.

President Yushchenko’s party, Our Ukraine, has received advice from the firm run by Bill Clinton’s pollster, Stan Greenberg; from Stephen E. Schmidt, campaign manager for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California; and from Neil Newhouse, a pollster who worked for Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate, when he was Massachusetts governor.

Okay, so it's not only failures, which is probably good news 'cause it means endless retirement options for aging political hitmen. Any Bahamian candidates looking for a communications director?

Khruschev and Ahmadinejad

Rick Perlstein gives us good juxtaposition:

Here's a big question that I want to start addressing in upcoming posts: what is conservative rule doing to our nation's soul? How is it rewiring our hearts and minds? What kind of damage are they doing to the American character? And can we ever recover?

So: what is the American character? Hard to say, of course. But I daresay we know it when we see it. Let me put before you an illustrative example: one week in September of 1959, when, much like one week in September of 2007, American soil supported a visit by what many, if not most Americans agreed was the most evil and dangerous man on the planet.

Nikita Khrushchev disembarked from his plane at Andrews Air Force Base to a 21-gun salute and a receiving line of 63 officials and bureaucrats, ending with President Eisenhower. He rode 13 miles with Ike in an open limousine to his guest quarters across from the White House. Then he met for two hours with Ike and his foreign policy team. Then came a white-tie state dinner. (The Soviets then put one on at the embassy for Ike.) He joshed with the CIA chief about pooling their intelligence data, since it probably all came from the same people—then was ushered upstairs to the East Wing for a leisurely gander at the Eisenhowers' family quarters. Visited the Agriculture Department's 12,000 acre research station ("If you didn't give a turkey a passport you couldn't tell the difference between a Communist and capitalist turkey"), spoke to the National Press Club, toured Manhattan, San Francisco (where he debated Walter Reuther on Stalin's crimes before a retinue of AFL-CIO leaders, or in K's words, "capitalist lackeys"), and Los Angeles (there he supped at the 20th Century Fox commissary, visited the set of the Frank Sinatra picture Can Can but to his great disappointment did not get to visit Disneyland), and sat down one more with the president, at Camp David. Mrs. K did the ladies-who-lunch circuit, with Pat Nixon as guide. Eleanor Roosevelt toured them through Hyde Park. It's not like it was all hearts and flowers. He bellowed that America, as Time magazine reported, "must close down its worldwide deterrent bases and disarm." Reporters asked him what he'd been doing during Stalin's blood purges, and the 1956 invasion of Hungary. A banquet of 27 industrialists tried to impress upon him the merits of capitalism. Nelson Rockefeller rapped with him about the Bible.

Had America suddenly succumbed to a fever of weak-kneed appeasement? Had the general running the country—the man who had faced down Hitler!—proven himself what the John Birch Society claimed he was: a conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy?

No. Nikita Khrushchev simply visited a nation that had character. That was mature, well-adjusted. A nation confident we were great. We had our neuroses, to be sure—plenty of them.

But look now what we have lost. Now when a bad guy crosses our threshhold, America becomes a pants-piddling mess.

How a nation so great succumbs so easily to pettiness I'll never understand.

Et tu, Spacey?

C'mon now.

CARACAS, Venezuela - Actor Kevin Spacey met privately Monday with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, one of Washington's most outspoken critics in Latin America.

Who'd have thought so many people want to sit through this ugly fuck's speeches?

Yes

The downside of having a dog

A bittersweet--okay, just sweet--anecdote (with picture) over at Feministing.

As the ex-owner of a very mischievous dog, Oliver Wendell Holmes III (below), who even as a puppy was a big dolt of a dog with a massive, cinder-block head, I sympathize.

I'm not dead

No one regrets the dormant state of AGI more than yours truly. Things have been unexpectedly hectic lately, but we should be back to our regularly scheduled programming in about a week. In the meantime, enjoy Diana Krall covering Joni Mitchell.