Wallwritings

by James M. Wall

Jimmy Carter kept a diary during his White House years.

His original diary notes and dictated daily personal observations were later typed by his personal secretary (Susan Clough) and filed in large binders.

In February, 1981, as the former president and Rosalynn began their post-White House life back home in Plains, Georgia, they were surprised to find that the large binders had become twenty-one large volumes.

The original copy of these twenty-one volumes remains in Plains, where the Carters have continued to live since leaving the White House. Another copy is “sequestered” in the Carter Presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta.

Carter began his book-writing career with a pre-presidential campaign book, Why Not the Best?, published in 1975. In September, 2010, a week before his 86th birthday, Carter went on a book tour to introduce his 24th published volume, White House Diary

Carter got the idea of keeping the diary from an offhand comment by Richard Nixon. He opens his book this way:

Rosalynn and I first met Nixon when we attended the National Governors’ Conference in 1971.  The president walked up to us at a White House reception, turned to Rosalynn, and asked, “Young lady, do you keep a diary?”

Rosalynn replied, “No sir.” Nixon then said, “You’ll be sorry!” Since this was our first conversation with a president, it made a lasting impact.”

The Carters have traveled extensively since they left the White House, operating out of the Carter Center to address health care problem in the developing world, conflict resolution within and between nations, monitoring voting in new democracies, and the building of houses, oftentimes with hammer and nails in hand.

In between these trips there have been frequent book tours since both Carters have been prolific authors. Jimmy Carter’s latest book tour was interrupted after he complained of not feeling well on a flight into Columbus, Ohio.

Doctors determined that he had a viral infection. After a two day hospital visit, the former president continued his book tour.

White House Diary is very much in the style of Jimmy Carter’s earlier books, Carter unvarnished. He writes like he talks, directly, without pretense. His only regret regarding his latest book, he says, is that he had to “omit three-fourths of the diary”.

Until now, none of the diary entries have been revealed except when snippets have been used in museum exhibits or when I have quoted brief excerpts in some of the books I’ve written about official matters.

Despite a temptation to conceal my errors, misjudgments of people, or lack of foresight, I decided when preparing this book not to revise the original transcript, but just to use the unchanged excerpts from the diaries that I consider to be the most revealing and interesting.

Carter chose to focus on “a few general themes that are still pertinent, especially Middle East peace negotiations, nuclear weaponry, US-China relations, energy policy anti-inflation efforts, health policy and my relationships with Congress.”

One afternoon, while reading Carter’s diaries and his annotations that put the entries in context, I put the book down and made a quick calculation.

Barack Obama was 15-years-old when Carter was elected president, 20 years-old when the Carters moved back to Plains.  Four presidents, three Republicans and one Democrat, have served as the nation’s president since Carter.  It is our loss that Obama did not have Carter’s diary entries to read before he entered the White House in 2009.

He has them now in this new book. Obama should certainly benefit from Carter’s March 21-22, 1978 entries, written during a visit in the White House with Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and Israel’s newly-elected Prime Minister, Menachem Begin.

Begin’s attitude toward his Palestinian neighbors were fully understood by Carter 32 years ago. Israel’s plans for its own expansion, at Palestinian expense, have remained consistent since 1978.  Most of the time they have remained hidden behind diplomatic double-talk negotiations.

They have also been increasingly embraced by an Israeli-friendly Congress and influential White House staff aides, the latest of whom, by the way, Rahm Emanuel, has just left his White House job to return to Chicago to run for mayor.

This excerpt from the Carter diaries in 1978, is especially revealing about Israel’s long-range goals:

March 20: When I returned to Washington Monday evening, we had a meeting on the enhanced radiation weapons. A lot of momentum had been generated to produce and deploy these neutron bombs. My cautionary words since last summer have pretty well been ignored, and I was aggravated. The general sense is that it protects buildings and kills people. That’s a gross oversimplification, but I decided to work out a way to cancel the idea without giving an image of weakness to our European allies, who don’t want it anyhow.

I talked to Arthur Goldberg about his interpretation of UN 242, which is the same as ours, and completely contrary to the Israelis, who have been trying to get him to certify falsely that it doesn’t necessarily apply to the West Bank

March 21: The response was excellent regarding our resolution calling for Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. As Goldberg pointed out last night, this is the first Security Council resolution the U.S. has successfully sponsored in more than ten years. The Israelis did their best to prevent our sponsor-ship of the resolution. They grossly overreacted in Lebanon to the terrorist attack on some Israeli citizens, destroying hundreds of villages, killing many people, and making two hundred thousand Lebanese homeless.

I met with Begin [and Dayan] and had an intense discussion of all the issues.

March 22: I got a scratch pad and wrote down the specific points for discussion with Begin. I then read to Begin and his group my understanding of their position:

they’re not willing to withdraw politically or militarily from any part of the West Bank; not willing to stop the construction of new settlements or the expansion of existing settlements; not willing to withdraw Israeli settlers from the Sinai, nor if they stay to permit UN or Egyptian protection for them; not willing to acknowledge that UN Resolution 242 applies to the West Bank/Gaza Strip area; and not willing to grant Palestinians a voice in the determination of their own future.

Begin said this was a negative way to express their position, but didn’t deny the accuracy of any of it. For the first time, over their strenuous objections, the true position of the Israeli government was revealed. Dayan tried to put the best face on the Israeli position. That they did not want to have any political control over the Arab population. He went as far as he could to leave some hope open without being disloyal to Begin.

Barack Obama inherited this hard line Israeli stance, now supported strongly in US ruling circles, just as much as he inherited the economic disaster that eight years under President George W. Bush brought to the American people.

The challenge now facing Obama is how to confront these two disasters, economic disaster at home and two wars abroad, both of which were largely precipitated by Israel’s refusal to reach a just agreement on how to live as neighbors with Palestinians.

After reading White House Diary, I turned to another new book, also just published, Obama’s Wars, written not by a participant, like a sitting president, but by Washington Post journalist, Bob Woodward, who has developed an ability to convince participants in White House power struggles to tell Woodward their version of what happened behind closed doors of rooms where White House decision-making occurs.

As MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell said recently in a television interview with Woodward, those participants are eager to tell their version of what has happened to Woodward, knowing that their opponents in the power struggles will be doing the same.  O’Donnell should know; he was once the staff director of the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, and a legislative aide to New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

The value of  all this behind-the-scenes research by Woodward is that what he turns up, will enable us to anticipate what might happen next in Washington. For example, now that Pete Rouse has been named to succeed Emanuel as Obama’s Chief of Staff, who will replace Rouse, a question that must be asked since Rouse has insisted he only wants the COS job on a temporary basis?

One possibility is Tom Donilon, currently Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser, under General James Jones, Obama’s NSA Director.  Jones has indicated he wants out after the mid-term elections. If he has any say in his successor, which as Woodward writes, has been the case in previous military positions he has held, it won’t be Tom Donilon, currently one name high up on the lists of most DC pundits to succeed Jones.

Donilon was recommended to Jones in 2008 by Rahm Emanuel to serve as Jones’ Deputy.  Donilon came with a strong resume.

The Daily Politics website writes about Donilon:

From 1999 to 2005 he was a registered lobbyist working for Fannie Mae. Donilon has also spent time inside the White House, serving President Clinton as the assistant secretary of state for public affairs and as chief of staff for Secretary of State Warren Christopher. As such, Donilon oversaw foreign policy initiatives, including the Balkan peace negotiations and the expansion of the NATO relationship between the US and China.

In his book, Woodward writes that Donilon was the “in-house counsel to Fannie Mae, the federally chartered mortgage giant that had nearly gone bust in the financial crisis, costing tax-payers billions of dollars.”

Jones’ successor does not need to undergo Senate consideration, which would help Donilon, since Senate questioning  could be a problem for a Fannie Mae graduate. Nevertheless, according to Woodward, Jones developed a dislike for his deputy, who, while a skilled diplomat and hard worker, has never served in the military, and again, according to Woodward, Jones did not like the fact that Donilon has never visited either Iraq or Afghanistan.

Which suggests, perhaps, given the fact that Emanuel and Donilon are close friends, a friendship that led Emanuel to relate more directly to Donilon than he did to Jones, Donilon could be named as Obama’s Chief of Staff, a position that does not require Senate conformation.

Which brings us back to the White House Dairy. I was the Carter campaign delegate chair for the Illinois delegation at the 1980 Democratic Nominating Convention. I had worked closely with a young Tom Donilon, then 24 years old,  who was President Carter’s national delegate director, to select candidates for Carter delegates in Illinois.

Tom was the campaign’s final arbitrator on who could run as a Carter delegate. We spent many hours at night and on the weekends (I had a day job, which was not political) arguing over which Illinois party chairman and which Carter loyalist could run as a delegate and which had to be dropped. It was a touchy job.

When all the elected delegates assembled at the 1980 Convention, Donilon was the chief of operations for all Carter delegate voting

Ted Kennedy was still trying to unseat a sitting Democratic president, right up to and including the convention, a fight that some observers feel had a negative impact on Carter’s general election run against Ronald Reagan.

The Kennedy delegates, under the direction of Harold Ickes, Jr., the same advisor who, 28 years later, managed Hillary Clinton’s 2008 delegate strategy against Barack Obama, took the 1980 Democratic Convention down to the final vote on a delegate rules battle, the “loyal delegate” issue.

Carter wrote on Monday, August 11, 1980:

Monday evening, the convention began. There were heated debates on the rules question. When the vote came, we did better than we had anticipated, getting 1,935 votes–about a 700 plus vote over Kennedy. He called me shortly afterward to say he was going to withdraw his name from contention.  I asked him if he was going to to endorse and be on the platform with me Thursday night. He said that would depend on how we worked out details of the platform.

Kennedy did issue a belated endorsement, but on the final night of the convention, he embarrassed the president by stalking around the platform for an extended period before finally coming up to Carter to jointly raise their arms in the traditional victory signal.

In his Diary, Carter makes no reference to that delayed victory moment. Instead, he writes glowingly of the young 24-year-old who had orchestrated his delegate victory in the rules fight:

Tom Donilon, a young computer and delegate management expert, did a superb job. As he walked through the crowd of people in our command headquarters, I could hear them shouting, “Donilon for president!”

From delegate rules fights to searching for Middle East peace, the issues have not changed that much.  Young staffers grow older and stay on the job. I don’t know if Donilon has the same intense zeal for Israel as Rahm Emanuel, but I do know, from personal experience, that Donilon is a hard worker who learned early how to be diplomatic with Illinois Democratic party chairs.

He might be just the man to take over as Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff in 2011, just in time to help another young president prepare for his stretch run toward the 2012 election and find a way to diplomatically ease Israeli and US congressional intransigence regarding the future of the region.

The picture of the Carters above is from my personal collection, taken during a visit I made to Plains to interview the Carters during the summer of 1981.

by James M. Wall

Middle East peace talks were doomed to fail the moment President Obama finished speaking to the United Nations General Assembly.

The President’s plea for peace was undercut by a speech that reveals what Professor Lawrence Davidson describes as Obama’s “ahistorical” grasp of the reality of a brutal occupation.

As Obama spoke, it was clear that there would be no change in his bias for Israel. His usual pretense of balance was firmly in place, the painful balance the Main Stream Media and liberal politicians are conditioned to express. (Conservative politicians could care less about “balance”.)

The President’s speech was yet another of his Middle Eastern “on the one hand and on the other hand” renditions, one sour note after the other.

There is just one problem with that rendition: The upper hand in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is controlled by the side with the most money, the most guns, and the empire-building backing of the world’s remaining superpower.

Nothing in the speech displayed any awareness of what brought us to this disastrous point in history.  The president gave no sign of even being aware of Ilan Pappe’s monumental The Ethic Cleansing of Palestine, which documents the meticulous Zionist plan, developed in advance of 1948, to clear land for exclusive Jewish settlement.

One year earlier, as Philip Weiss reminds us, Obama was aware of the Occupation.  He spoke to the 2009 United Nations General Assembly and said:

The goal is clear:  Two states living side by side in peace and security — a Jewish state of Israel, with true security for all Israelis; and a viable, independent Palestinian state with contiguous territory that ends the occupation that began in 1967, and realizes the potential of the Palestinian people.

This year, nothing about “occupation” and nothing about “contiguous territory”, only a plea for a settlement freeze and a focus on Israel’s security. Has Israel grown weaker in one year’s time?  I don’t think so.

The recent re-release of a series of March of Time documentaries includes one called “The Palestine Problem”,  initially shown to American audiences in the autumn of 1945.

The narrative of that Time-Life propaganda film is one that has served Israel’s purpose right up to, and including, Bibi Netanyahu’s refusal to even pause three months in his settlement-building project. Palestinians were, and remain, a problem because they inhabit land that the modern country of Israel wants for itself.

In his UN speech, President Obama continued to see the present moment as “The Palestine Problem”. He ignored the occupation and begged instead for “dignity” for all, an empty phrase for two imprisoned populations, one that is occupied and another that forces its young soldiers to enforce the occupation.

Phyllis Bennis wrote a perceptive analysis of the speech in which she pointed out that Obama “called on the international community to mobilize behind the U.S.-led ‘peace process.’ He called on the Palestinians to “reconcile with a secure Israel” and waxed eloquent on the illegality of killing Israeli civilians.”

A “secure Israel”? Reconciliation? It is not easy to “reconcile” with an army which has its foot on your throat.

At one point in his speech, the president strained for moral equivalency in the suffering of  Palestinian and Israeli children.

We can say that this time will be different – that this time we will not let terror, or turbulence, or posturing, or petty politics stand in the way. This time, we will think not of ourselves, but of the young girl in Gaza who wants to have no ceiling on her dreams, or the young boy in Sderot who wants to sleep without the nightmare of rocket fire.

President Obama knows better.  He reads the casualty reports; he knows that the rain of terror Israel sends into Gaza and the West Bank cannot be remotely compared to the scattered rockets fired at Sderot. He also knew his audience was aware of the faux “balance” his speech was peddling.

When President Obama spoke of the Gaza child who wants no “ceiling on her dreams”, did he even listen to the unfortunate language he used? The ceilings that concerns the children of Gaza are those in their homes which have been destroyed by Israeli air strikes.

Obama’s speech must be studied as an example of how little awareness of the reality of the death dance of occupation he displayed. One distressing example:

Those of us who are friends of Israel must understand that true security for the Jewish state requires an independent Palestine — one that allows the Palestinian people to live with dignity and opportunity.  And those of us who are friends of the Palestinians must understand that the rights of the Palestinian people will be won only through peaceful means — including genuine reconciliation with a secure Israel.

President Obama, who entered office with such promise, has been reduced to the status of a beggar, pleading for crumbs from the peace table, groveling before Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu as he pleads for the empty gesture of a moratorium on settlement building.

After all that travel and all those cups of tea, no agreement was reached. Everyone lost, except, of course, Israel, which continues merrily along its way, taking $3 billion annually from its American Sugar Daddy to maintain a diabolical occupation.

Nothing will change as long as President Obama’s mindset remains locked in its current pro-Israel certainty.

There is a book just out that could penetrate that certainty, if only the President would study it. I refer to Gideon Levy’s The Punishment of Gaza.

The London Independent explains:

Gideon Levy is the most hated man in Israel – and perhaps the most heroic. This “good Tel Aviv boy” – a sober, serious child of the Jewish state – has been shot at repeatedly by the Israeli Defence Force, been threatened with being “beaten to a pulp” on the country’s streets, and faced demands from government ministers that he be tightly monitored as “a security risk.”

This is because he has done something very simple, and something that almost no other Israeli has done. Nearly every week for three decades, he has travelled to the Occupied Territories and described what he sees, plainly and without propaganda.

“My modest mission,” he says, “is to prevent a situation in which many Israelis will be able to say, ‘We didn’t know.’” And for that, many people want him silenced.

The Independent’s Johann Hari recently interviewed Levy during a tour promoting his new book.  They met at a hotel bar in Scotland:

The 57 year-old looks like an Eastern European intellectual on a day off – tall and broad and dressed in black, speaking accented English in a lyrical baritone. He seems so at home in the world of book festivals and black coffee that it is hard, at first, to picture him on the last occasion he was in Gaza – in November, 2006, before the Israeli government changed the law to stop him going.

He reported that day on a killing, another of the hundreds he has documented over the years. As twenty little children pulled up in their school bus at the Indira Gandhi kindergarten, their 20 year-old teacher, Najawa Khalif, waved to them – and an Israel shell hit her and she was blasted to pieces in front of them. He arrived a day later, to find the shaking children drawing pictures of the chunks of her corpse. The children were “astonished to see a Jew without weapons. All they had ever seen were soldiers and settlers.”

“My biggest struggle,” he says, “is to rehumanize the Palestinians. There’s a whole machinery of brainwashing in Israel which really accompanies each of us from early childhood, and I’m a product of this machinery as much as anyone else. [We are taught] a few narratives that it’s very hard to break.

That we Israelis are the ultimate and only victims. That the Palestinians are born to kill, and their hatred is irrational. That the Palestinians are not human beings like us? So you get a society without any moral doubts, without any questions marks, with hardly public debate. To raise your voice against all this is very hard.”

Levy uses a simple technique, asking his fellow Israelis: How would we feel, if this was done to us by a vastly superior military power?

Once, in Jenin, his car was stuck behind an ambulance at a checkpoint for an hour. He saw there was a sick woman in the back and asked the driver what was going on, and he was told the ambulances were always made to wait this long. Furious, he asked the Israeli soldiers how they would feel if it was their mother in the ambulance – and they looked bemused at first, then angry, pointing their guns at him and telling him to shut up.

“I am amazed again and again at how little Israelis know of what’s going on fifteen minutes away from their homes,” he says. “The brainwashing machinery is so efficient that trying [to undo it is] almost like trying to turn an omelette back to an egg. It makes people so full of ignorance and cruelty.”

He gives an example. During Operation Cast Lead, the Israel bombing of blockaded Gaza in 2008-9,  “a dog – an Israeli dog – was killed by a Qassam rocket and [that news was] on the front page of the most popular newspaper in Israel. On the very same day, there were tens of Palestinians killed, they were on page 16, in two lines.”

Early in their long discussion, Johann Hari asks Gideon Levy if he is pessimistic or optimistic.

“I am very pessimistic, sure. Outside pressure can be effective if it’s an American one but I don’t see it happening. Other pressure from other parts of the world might be not effective. The Israeli society will not change on its own, and the Palestinians are too weak to change it.

But having said this, I must say, if we had been sitting here in the late 1980s and you had told me that the Berlin wall will fall within months, that the Soviet Union will fall within months, that parts of the regime in South Africa will fall within months, I would have laughed at you.

Perhaps the only hope I have is that this occupation regime hopefully is already so rotten that maybe it will fall by itself one day. You have to be realistic enough to believe in miracles.”

In the meantime, Gideon Levy will carry on patiently documenting his country’s crimes, and trying to call his people back to a righteous path. He frowns a little – as if he is picturing Najawa Khalif blown to pieces in front of her school bus, or his own broken father [a holocaust survivor] – and says to me: “A whistle in the dark is still a whistle.”

On a more positive closing note, we could soon see a development that will lift the dark clouds left  by the failed peace talks. A Sydney, Australia, newspaper, reports that talks are progressing which would unite the two political parties, Fatah and Hamas, in a union that would lead to new elections in the West Bank and Gaza to form a united Palestinian government to deal with Israel and other outside forces.

Fatah’s military forces are trained under a US-sponsored “security coordination” program headed by a US officer, Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton. The “security” program was launched by the Bush Administration in 2005 allegedly to help Fatah reform its security services.  The initial and main purpose, however, was to develop a Fatah army that could oust the Hamas party from control of Gaza, a project which failed.

After Obama’s election, the Electronic Intifada urged the new president to replace General Dayton. Thus far, this has not happened.

The picture at top is from B’tselem; Gideon Levy’s photo above is by Ashley Combes/Epicscotland.

by James M. Wall

Forget about Pastor Jones and his hate-filled threat to burn the Koran. With the eager assistance of  what passes these days for mass media, Jones has had his moment in the glare of worldwide publicity.

He called off his dangerously provocative bonfire with his own triumphant Mission Accomplished declaration:

“We feel when we started this out that one of our reasons was to show, to expose that there is an element in Islam that is very dangerous and very radical,” Jones said. “I believe that we have definitely accomplished that mission.”

That declaration came, of course, after Jones received a call from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

Imagine the scene: “Pastor Jones, burn a single Koran and American soldiers will die. You will be blamed. How will your patriotic followers like to hear from the Secretary of Defense that you have caused an American death in Afghanistan?”

What we must worry about now are not people like Jones, but with that so-called respectable crowd of politicians who have seized the attention of the American public with their own more sophisticated brand of hate and fear.

Start worrying with a film produced by Newt Gingrich and Citizens United.

Citizens United is the organization whose legal appeal produced a US Supreme Court decision which ended all limits on political campaign contributions from corporations.

And Gingrich? Well, he has been around since he set himself up as a Georgia college professor, after graduating from Emory University in Atlanta. Gingrich looked around the state of  Georgia for a congressional district where he could talk pretty to enough conservative voters to secure himself a seat in Congress.

It took Gingrich a few residential moves until he settled into a secure district from which he could transform himself from a lowly back-bencher to become the Speaker of the US House of Representatives.

Echoing Kris Kristofferson’s 1971 ballad, “Silver-tongued Devil”,  Newt sang his song and took off for glory.

At the peak of his power, Newt led the Republican crusade to save the country from Bill Clinton. The errant president survived, while Gingrich soon crashed and burned.

Now he’s back, building a new congregation of believers with the help of a new wife who has joined him in his prophetic warning that Islamists are coming to take over the world.

He is using another anniversary of 911 to introduce us to his new film, which premiered in Washington Saturday night.  It is ready for viewing on DVD. Here is the trailer. Be forewarned, it is ugly stuff.

In the film,  Gingrich and Citizens United warn Americans of the “impending threat of radical Islam.” As one talking head says in the trailer, “This is the end of times. This is the final struggle.”

The movie, America At Risk, paints the world as a dangerous place filled with radicalized Muslims who want to — and, importantly, can — destroy America.

“The war on terror, and the ideology behind it, have only just begun,” Gingrich’s wife, Callista Gingrich, intones while she and Gingrich stand in front of a green-screened New York skyline.

This is the same Newt Gingrich who just might emerge as a serious candidate for president in 2012. David Corn, writing recently  in Politics Daily, makes the case:

The other day an associate of Newt Gingrich surprised me: He told me there’s a 97 percent chance that Gingrich will run for president in 2012. Really? I replied, with a laugh.

Yes, he said seriously. He noted that he had recently spoken to the former Republican House speaker and had picked up a he’s-going-for-it vibe and that, more telling, he had seen that Gingrich was surrounding himself with veteran political operatives who would only likely flock to Gingrich for a presidential bid.

Then on Thursday, Gingrich delivered a speech at the American Enterprise Institute — one with a highfalutin’ title: “America at Risk: Camus, National Security, and Afghanistan” — that sure made it seem he’s looking to be the darling of GOP primary voters who yearn for Dick Cheney.

In his typical bombastic style, Gingrich blasted President Obama and his aides for being national security wimps. He declared, “America is at risk of a catastrophic disaster here at home, and that is a reality our elites are hiding from.”

He proclaimed that it is “clear the Obama administration is willfully blind to the nature of our enemies and the forces which threaten America.” And he essentially charged Obama-ites with treason: “It is the natural path of secular socialist intellectuals to prefer our opponents to us and to accept their lies over our truths.”

Gingrich could emerge as the alternative to the less erudite candidates now circling around the Republican nomination.  And with his “America at Risk” rhetoric turned up to dangerous levels, he would be a natural to pick up the banner of Israel in the struggle with Islam.

Think back, Pilgrim, think back to September 11,2001, and pay attention to Lobeblog‘s Marsha B. Cohen, with her recent column on the hectic days that followed 911:

On September 11, 2001, after two terrorist attacks occurred on US soil, Israeli political figures anticipated that the Americans finally be able to empathize with Israel’s vulnerability to terror. In the hours immediately following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Israeli leaders envisioned a massive U.S. retaliation in which Israel was uniquely equipped to be a partner, even a mentor, of the U.S.

“The fight against terror is an international struggle of the free world against the forces of darkness who seek to destroy our liberty and our way of life,” then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon declared in a televised statement just after midnight on September 12. “I believe that together we can defeat these forces of evil.”

Israel and its US Zionist friends are pushing the world into a gigantic war with Iran in time for a newly-slected Republican congress to take up Sharon’s offer of mentorship under the leadership of a future Republican president who reads Camus.

America is “at risk” and Obama is not responding to the danger, so goes the Gingrich warning of fear.  Could it lead to a Gingrich presidency? All speculation, of course, but in politics, it is always wise to connect the dots.