May 14, 2003

Time Magazine: Democrats Must Reinvent Themselves.

And so, yes, the Democrats do have a chance in 2004. A chance, but they will have to become something different from the Democrats we have come to know and ridicule. They face challenges on three different fronts: patriotism, optimism and confidence. They will have to convince the public that they are as committed to national defense, and to the judicious use of military force, as the Republicans are. They will have to shed their congenital pessimism. They can’t just rant against the Administration and hope for bad news to confirm their prejudices. They will have to propose firm, reasonable policy alternatives that are easy to understand and defend. If they oppose the Bush tax cuts, they will have to lay out, in some detail, what they would do instead.

Finally, they will have to change the mingy, defensive, consultant-driven style of recent campaigns. They will need a candidate who is easy in his skin, who sounds different from other politicians?freer, perhaps; funnier, certainly?and who is confident enough to risk broad, bold themes that capture the national imagination rather than parsing the special yearnings of enough demographic slivers to win the election. Camouflage will not be enough this time.

You know the left is looking pretty sorry to most people when TIME Magazine runs an article like this.

U.S. Textbooks Distorting History?

This is bizarre. Arab kids are taught false things about us. It looks like our kids are too. This opinion piece by Diane Ravitch appeared in the L.A. TIMES this week.

You Can’t Judge These Books by Their Covers

Many school texts distort history, slamming the U.S. and glorifying despotic regimes.

By Diane Ravitch
Fifteen years ago, I helped write the guidelines for teaching history in California public schools. Those guidelines – drafted by a committee of teachers and historians and approved by the state Board of Education – won national praise for their insistence that students should learn the importance of democratic institutions, human rights and the rule of law.

Last year, while doing research for a book, I read two dozen leading textbooks in world and American history, including many of those used in California’s schools, and I was surprised to find that the spread of democratic ideas is no longer a central theme.

Instead, the textbooks reflect the relativistic views that permeated higher education during the last decade: All cultures are equal; none is better than any other; we are not to judge other cultures’ ways of life.

Most alarming was discovering that many of the books contain dangerous half-truths and distortions. They do not speak honestly about some of the world’s most tyrannical regimes. Over and over, they depict the brutality and avariciousness of Europeans and white males in the United States, while presenting glorified portraits of other nations and cultures.

The textbooks go out of their way to sanitize the very practices in non-Western cultures that they rightly condemn in our society. For instance, every textbook acknowledges that the enslavement of Africans by the West was a great crime. However, when describing slavery in the Middle East or Africa, many claim that it was a path to upward career mobility or a chance to join a new family. Slavery is wrong in any time and place and should be recognized as such.

Read the whole article.

Which raises the question: what the heck is going on here? Why would our own textbooks slam us? Why would we teach our kids false things about us that make us look bad? Isn’t that crazy? And… why should left-leaning politics be taught by schools that are funded by taxes we all pay for?

AL QAEDA THREATENS ARAB LEADERS.

This is one of the best things that could have happened. AP reports:

The al-Qaida operative, who identified himself as Abu Mohammed al-Ablaj, wrote in an e-mail Sunday to the London-based Al-Majalla magazine that al-Qaida has stored arms and explosives and set up “martyrdom” squads in Saudi Arabia to launch what he described as a “guerrilla war” on its leaders and the United States.

It is very much in our favor that Al Qaeda has explicitly threatened Saudi leaders. This means the Saudis will have to get off their terrorist-tolerant position because they themselves are now being threatened. When it was bombs going off in other countries, they could try to keep their heads in the sand. But now that the bombs are going off in their own country, killing their own people, and Al Qaeda is even threatening the Saudi leadership, that may change.

Sure enough, Instapundit reports two instances of stories in Arab media calling for outrage against Al Qaeda.

We needed to hear three questions that are never asked. Like dust, they are swept under the carpet: Why are more and more Saudi young men being fed with radical ideas? Who are the people brainwashing them? How are they being radicalized?

and

We cannot say that suicide bombings in Israel and Russia are acceptable but not in Saudi Arabia. The cult of suicide bombings has to stop. So too has the chattering, malicious, vindictive hate propaganda. It has provided a fertile ground for ignorance and hatred to grow.

Whammo. Sometimes the world changes faster than we think it does.