Sea legs

OK, I'm coming back on board, but it may take me a few moments to find my sea legs again. In the meantime, be sure to read these excellent pieces from around the web:

- Via HuffPo, former Kennedy Administration policy adviser Theodore Sorensen compares the current U.S./Iranian standoff with the Cuban Missle Crisis - and urges the President to take a few notes. Excerpts:

When the world was on the precipice nearly 44 years ago, the President of the United States averted nuclear destruction by choosing constructive communication, not vituperation. He tried negotiation and cooperation, not escalation. As President Kennedy had earlier said in his inaugural, "Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate."

In retrospect, President Bush's dismissal of Ahmadinejad's letter may come to be seen as a missed opportunity to avert military conflict - not the first missed opportunity for peace under this President. True, the situation is very different now: JFK and Khrushchev already had a back-channel correspondence in place by the time of the missile crisis, whereas Ahmadinejad's letter is the first from an Iranian head of state to a U.S. President since the Iranian revolution of 27 years ago. But that is all the more reason why President Bush should have seized this opportunity.

- Anthony Ioven at UpdateAmerica/604 comments on Robert Kennedy, Jr.'s vitally important Rolling Stone report concerning organized 2004 election fraud (be sure to read Mr. Kennedy's disturbing piece in its entirety). Money quote:

If Kennedy's allegations are true and the election was literally stolen, American democracy is in more trouble than even the most pessimistic of us have suspected.

But the question is, do we dare do anything about it?

- The Nation posted this sobering editorial yesterday on the Haditha massacre, and why an investigation into the atrocities matters not only to ensure that justice is served, but also for what it says about the character of an entire Administration. To wit:

Even under intense battlefield conditions, troops can instigate atrocities, or they can resist them. In the My Lai massacre, in 1968, Hugh Thompson Jr., an American helicopter pilot, saved many lives by putting himself between the guns of Charlie Company and the villagers whom those behind the guns--led by their officers--were wantonly killing. A generation of future US military officers were taught the details of the My Lai massacre as a particular lesson: What makes war crimes is criminal leadership. Whatever the responsibility of the unit commanders in Haditha, it is George W. Bush as Commander in Chief who has sent the clear message that human rights abuses and violations of international law are justified in the "war on terror."

- Finally, The New York Observer's Joe Conason lambasts the traditional media for its recent - and potentially ongoing - tabloid examination of the Clintons' marriage. Conason notes:

Ultimately, this episode reveals less about the Clintons than about the decaying culture of Washington journalism. Like the Bourbons, the Washington press corps forgets nothing, forgives nothing and learns nothing. They remain utterly oblivious to their own mean-spirited hypocrisy.

Is there a reason why the enduring, 30-year bond of the Clintons merits more withering scrutiny than the multiple unhappy marriages of ambitious politicians such as Senator John McCain and Rudolph Giuliani? Is there a reason why the marital privacy of elected officials should be violated, while media moguls like Rupert Murdoch can discard their wives with impunity?