Our new "Think Again" column, "The Surprising Success of the Right-Wing Rant," is here. It's an exploration of the weird success of the right's hysterical racist and sexist attacks on Sonia Sotomayor in setting the MSM's agenda for their coverage.

I also did two columns this week for The Daily Beast; one this morning about Osama's attempts to link Obama to George W. Bush, here and one on the success of the Christian Right in this country in preventing access to abortion, even without murdering the doctors who perform it.

Regarding my Nation column here, the twentieth anniversary of Tiananmen Square puts me in mind of the death of I.F. Stone, which happened right around the same time. It was one of Izzy's charms that it is entirely believable that, while in a hospital in Boston where he would finally give out, he awoke briefly from a lengthy period of unconsciousness to ask his doctors about the fate of the young protesters there. (His opposition to Chinese Communist oppression was of a piece with his brilliant exposes of the abuses of Soviet psychiatry at the end of his six days career. These do not of course "make up" for the mistakes he made defending Stalin half a century earlier, but they do provide context for those who would paint his politics as monochromatic.)

This is yet another column about the attempts to smear Izzy's reputation. I've written about him quite a lot during the past twenty or so years beginning with a profile in Mother Jones back in June, 1988, which you can find here. I've also done some first-hand investigation of the nature of the charges against him, which I described here and here I was a close friend of Stone's during the final decade of his life and so I was pleased when Tina Brown asked me to take a look at charges on the day that they appeared for her website, The Daily Beast. I was amazed at the disconnect between the inflammatory language employed by the authors and the skimpiness of their evidence. That is here.

In my Daily Beast post I also admitted that if the notes were accurate, they did require some adjustment of the historical record, noting that Stone must not have been proud, in retrospect of this part of his life, because he never mentioned it to me. I attributed his reticence to my own strongly voiced anti-Communist sentiments that came up in our discussions. Consistent with the sloppy tactics of the anti-Stone smear campaign I described in my column, the one-time historian-turned right-wing polemicist Ronald Radosh misread my comment--whether for reasons of stupidity or cupidity I honestly cannot say--and claimed both here and again here that I had argued that Stone could not have been a spy because he never mentioned it to me. This self-evidently phony occasion was then repeated elsewhere in the blogosphere, including by Michael C. Moynihan on the website of Reason magazine. It is clearly an almost perfect misreading of what I wrote but Radosh was so careless that he repeated it twice and whether Moynihan even bothered to read what I wrote before endorsing what Radosh wrote one cannot say. (The above example of the care Radosh puts into his work is unfortunately representative of much of what he writes. He was once a respected historian. But in recent decades, he has chosen to ally himself with David Horowitz--whom even the Iraq hawk and Stone accuser Paul Berman calls "a demented lunatic"--and Pajamas Media, and become just another Neocon ranter in the style of not only Horowitz but also Martin Peretz, Norman and John Podhoretz and their acolytes on the blogs of The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, Commentary and National Review.)

As I note in the column, the only intellectually responsible reaction to the The Vassiliev Notebooks is one of modesty. The Cold War International History Project has done us the favor of posting them here and to get a fix on just who this fellow is, I urge you to read Don Guttenplan's review of the book here. (Todd Gitlin's review is here and Myra McPherson's is here). And so it was odd that both the Wilson Center and the CWIP agreed to provide a forum for the series of wild allegations leveled by their authors. Radosh was actually invited to chair a panel. And panelist Max Holland speculated that Stone had received KGB funding both for the publication of I.F. Stone's Weekly and his book on the Korean War, again with absolutely nothing in the way of evidence. Other panels, including one on the Hiss-Chambers controversy and one that dealt with Robert Oppenheimer were similarly stacked. (Martin Sherwin, who co-authored a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography on Oppenheimer with Kai Bird, was not invited to be a panelist even though he lives right there in Washington.)

The controversy among historians will continue in the forthcoming issue of the Journal of Cold War Studies, edited by Mark Kramer at Harvard University, but as it will apparently contain not only yet another attack by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, but Holland's baseless speculation, and an essay by Eduard Mark, who made some egregious statements during his panel about historians who happen to disagree with him on the Hiss case. One can therefore hardly be optimistic about the degree to which the scholarship on these issues will actually be advanced, particularly in light of these authors desire to place their own personal and political agendas above and beyond where any careful historian would go based on the available evidence.

And so this sad saga continues....

Alter-reviews: Sal on new cds by Dave Matthews and Elvis Costello.

About halfway through the new Dave Matthews Band record, Big Whiskey & The Groo Grux King, I realized just what it is that I don't like about this band. Every song is a slice of pizza with everything on it; an exercise in showoffiness that rarely relents. It leaves you with a mouthful of mess, with no opportunity to savor the core of it all. If it is to be argued by the throngs of DMB fans across the globe that Matthews himself is a songwriter worthy of your time, at no time does the band allow you to wrap your head around his lyrics or melodies. It's kitchen sink production at its worst. And this is something I've been hearing in their music for years.

Now before all of you DMB fans start violently pelting me with hacky-sacks, let me say that I do indeed recognize many good songs on this new release. Unfortunately, the band is a distraction on almost every song, with drummer Carter Beauford being the worst offender. He just never stops playing. Even the greatest drummers in the world, Buddy Rich & Art Blakey through Keith Moon and John Bonham, all stopped at some point to just groove while the rest of the band played behind the leader.

On "Groo Grux," songs like the upbeat "Funny The Way It Is," and the Sting meets Coldplay ballad "Lying In The Hands Of God," both have so much going on at all times, they resemble a dysfunctional family all shouting at the same time over Thanksgiving dinner. In the drummer Beauford's case, there is this constant beating that at best sounds like a drum machine gone awry, and at it worst sounds like someone throwing a refrigerator down a flight of stairs. It is too much and it is distracting and annoying when someone is trying to sing, especially a ballad. Beauford's a fine player, but even the notoriously loud Tony Williams waited for Miles Davis to finish before he soloed.

My favorite tune on the record is the incredibly infectious "Why I Am," with its killer riff and great sing-along chorus. But the DMB changes tempo and time signatures so many times, and to my ears, pointlessly, you are out of breath for all the wrong reasons. "Squirm" suffers as well. Drums, too many drums, then horns, then strings. Louder and louder. Seriously, this band makes Phil Spector's Wall Of Sound sound like folk music. It is an unnecessary assault on your senses. It is not until "Time Bomb," which does indeed explode in its second half, that the band just flat out rides with some simple four on the floor rock and roll. Too bad it's a weak track overall.

I maintain, there are some great songs on Big Whiskey & The Groo Grux King, and the boys in the band have some excellent chops. But every once in a while, a slice of pizza with nothing on it is the better choice. I'd love to hear "Groo Grux Light." I bet it'd be a better album. Then again, Dave himself okayed it all. Ironically, the one record I liked from the get-go was "Stand Up," widely thought of as a disappointment by DMB fans.

On a Much Lighter Note

Another record and another direction from the always surprising and rarely disappointing Elvis Costello. Recorded in just 3 days with producer-extraordinaire T-Bone Burnett at the helm, and some Nashville heavyweights such as Jerry Douglas, Jim Lauderdale, and Dennis Crouch on various stringed instruments and vocals, Secret, Profane & Sugar Cane is Bluegrass Noir. Similar in feel, but not necessarily style as the brilliant King Of America album from 1986, Costello proves yet again, there is no genre too daunting, and no song he is incapable of writing. He revisits two songs that appeared elsewhere, "Complicated Shadows," which appeared in a much more raucous state on "All This Useless Beauty," and "Hidden Shame" which was written for and recorded by Johnny Cash on his 1987 release Johnny Cash Is Coming To Town. Most of the rest are new to record, but not to Costello fans who have been hearing them live for years. There is a definite, Nashville round table, campfire feel here that makes this collection all the more special. Really a fantastic record.

Sal Nunziato
www.burnwoodtonite.blogspot.com

The mail:

Name: Michael Meranze
Hometown: Los Angeles, CA

Dear Eric,

I wanted to write to correct one of the letters in your latest "altercation blog." Proposition 1A was not a permanent tax increase, instead it was a temporary tax extension of taxes passed this year (making the taxes go on from 2-4 years) and proposition 1C was not a tax on lottery earnings but a way to borrow money based on the state's presumed lottery profits. Many people voted against these propositions precisely because they would not have helped much with the present budget crisis (with the exception of 1C although that would have increased borrowing down the road). And 1A had the potential to lock in government spending at a level that would simply be insufficient for the future. , 1D and 1E would have shifted money from those who need it to to others who need it but would not have generated any new revenue) Given that the press out here has done little to combat all of the myths about government spending and taxation it is not surprising that people are confused.

Name: Timothy Barrett
Hometown: Louisville, Ky

Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearing will most certainly spotlight the ignorance of the esteemed panel of elected officials who will set about questioning her. We can all agree that our education system has failed so many, but to have the media constantly celebrate its own ignorance by smugly elevating childish snarkiness above actual knowledge ought to enrage its listeners, if they only knew enough to see it. But the people of the US deserve to be much better informed.

Yes, I am touting the benefits of education in a patronizing elitist fashion. But, because I actually study constitutional law and care how the sausage is made, I can't help myself when I am forced to endure media blather like "activist judges", "policy making courts" and "courts that legislate from the bench". None of these idiot pundits could tell you the difference between the common law and statute, between judicial precedent and dictum, between law and equity, or between de novo and appellate hearings.

They don't understand that prior to the explosion of Congressional power, brought about by the Supreme Court's rulings that greatly broadened the scope of the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause, Congress passed few laws affecting an individual state's authority over its citizens. How Congress all but wiped out the judge-made law, developed and administered by US state courts since the early settlements and taken from English common law. They can't explain the nuances of how that tension continues today with state laws on marriage and federal laws like the Defense of Marriage Act.

Pundits can't take the time to tell you how the Supreme Court battled in the early years to become the final arbiter of constitutional law, a position not actually envisioned by the drafters of the Constitution or entirely agreeable to members of the early Congress or Executive.

Over the years everything changed from the beginnings of the Supreme Court. The six member court was first in New York City. The justices each traveled a circuit hearing local appeals. Each justice would write his own opinion in every case. Then the Marshall Court's early majority opinions soon established the independent power of the Court. The Taney Court further limited the power of Congress to control the Court's reach and scope. The White and Taft Courts began the process of applying the Bill of Rights to state action. These decisions weren't made in 1776 they stretched across 130 years! The Warren Court fashioned most the individual rights we all talk about today when we discuss civil liberties, including the right to privacy that is the benchmark for protections for parental, reproductive and sexual autonomy.

All of these Supreme Courts wrote opinions that altered the constitutional interpretations of the time. They were activist courts. They reviewed the policies set by the federal Appeals Courts. They legislated from the bench. These are all things we want the courts to do so that our Constitution, laws and regulations remain relevant to the present and the ever-changing future. It's a shame that any newly minted naturalized citizen knows more general civics than the typical media pundit or, more sadly, college graduate. General ignorance is the reason Americans are so easily distracted from what really matters and why they so often vote and act against their own self-interest.

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