We have heard more than we needed to know about the First 100
Days, not to mention the Next 100 Days, and the Next, and the Next.
The rock star president has been compared to everybody from Bill
Clinton to God (the Wall Street Journal actually hinted
that after six frenetic days, maybe he (He?) too should rest on the
seventh). Even his dog is a rock star, his wife a fashion plate,
his kids the cutest little things that ever came along. All I know
is that we are sick of this nonsense, sick of hearing about him,
his plans for the country, for the great shift he has in store in
taking what we thought was a center- right country and turning it
into a bastion of liberalism that will put the New Deal and the
Great Society to shame.
The Pelosi-Reid and now Specter Democratic Congress was bought,
lock, stock, and barrel, by the White House for a mess of pork, all
with your grandchildren’s money, the whole thing now directed by a
visionary president intent on changing the direction of the
country, no, the world, and who is the savior of us all, besides
being a very cool guy. For liberals, these first hundred days were
wildly successful—more, certainly, than in their wildest dreams.
Not so for the rest of us.
We offer a break from the incessant chatter about Obama with a
variety of good reading in this first issue of the summer; some,
but certainly not all, about other political topics, starting with
a thoughtful piece on Mexico by our increasingly regular
contributor Angelo Codevilla (just now recovering, in California,
from a heart transplant). Readers will profit from the history
lesson Angelo provides, and from his balanced discussion of drugs,
immigration, and trade; his analysis of what is wrong with our
relationship with our neighbors to the south; and what should be
done. David Aikman, also a familiar face in TAS, writes
about China’s celebration (well, the regime is not celebrating) of
the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, especially
the efforts of human rights advocates to keep the memory of it
alive, despite the government’s efforts to bury it.
We welcome Dov Zakheim, Don Rumsfeld’s comptroller from 2001 to
2004, to TAS with a piece on the Pentagon’s new budget and
what he thinks might become of it as the Obama regime progresses.
Zakheim is no shrinking violet; I traveled to China with him and
Rumsfeld in 1999, and watched, in awe, as Dov, at the top of his
lungs, dressed down one of the most senior generals of the Chinese
Army for the way the good general and his colleagues had conducted
themselves at Tiananmen.
There is much more as well, from Roger Scruton on what students
no longer want to learn and the price they pay for their invincible
ignorance, to Brian Wesbury and Andrew Wilson on economics, to
Jonathan Aitken on the renewal of the current archbishop of
Canterbury (no John Paul II, he). And for readers who may spend
their summer in Paris, or at least wish they could, Joe Harriss,
who heads our Parisian bureau, writes of the Académie Française,
the defender of French tradition and the most exclusive club in
France, and of one particularly distinguished member. No doubt the
egalitarian Obamaites would abolish such an institution were it
ours, and perhaps there is the lesson for us. If such an “elitist”
organization can survive 375 years of monarchy, revolution, empire,
humiliating military defeats, and five constitutions, surely we
tough Americans can survive eight, or preferably four, years of the
rock star president
