Von Stauffenberg’s son’s story

The New Neo Posted on by

And now for a change of pace.

I’ve written before about the many failed plots to assassinate Hitler—the most famous, of course, being that led by Claus von Stauffenberg, with which you’re almost certainly familiar.

Here’s a different perspective on the Stauffenberg plot, based on a 2008 interview with von Stauffenberg’s oldest son Berthold, who was ten years old at the time of the assassination attempt that spared Hitler but cost his father (and many others) his life:

Claus’s eldest son recalled with precise clarity how he learned of the event that shattered his family’s lives. “On 21st July I heard a radio report of a ‘criminal attack on the fuhrer,'” Berthold said. “But my questions about this were evaded, and the adults tried to keep me and my next youngest brother Heimaren away from the radio.

“Instead, we children were taken for a long country walk by our great-uncle Nux – a former general staff officer in the Austrian Imperial Army – who kept us entertained with stories of his youthful adventures as a big-game hunter in Africa,” said Berthold. “Naturally, none of us knew that he, too, was a member of the anti-Hitler conspiracy. Today, I still ask myself what thoughts were going through his head during that walk.” Uncle Nux would be tried and hanged a few weeks later for his part in the plot.

The entire thing is well worth reading.

Obama’s character flaws are nothing new

The New Neo Posted on by

Everything—and I mean everything—that’s wrong with Obama’s character was on full view during the 2008 election and earlier for anyone who cared to notice.

The tendency to unseal divorce records to take down opponents.

The immaturity.

The excuses.

The grandiosity.

The snark.

The overvaluation of his own abilities.

The broken promises and the forgiveness of followers for them.

The bad taste.

The eagerness to stab people in the back and then smile and smile and be a villain. This should have been no surprise at all, based on his behavior during his very first foray into elective politics, the Alice Palmer affair of 1996. I continue to marvel how few people know about Obama and Alice Palmer, although the facts are not in dispute and have not been from the start. Anyone who thinks him a decent sort of guy has only to study what he did to former mentor Palmer—as well as his other Democratic opponents in the 1996 Democratic primary—and there will be no doubt that he’s a ruthless SOB.

And speaking of grandiosity and overvaluation of his own abilities, here’s a stellar moment I’d forgotten (till William A. Jacobson reminded me of it):

Has there ever been a president in the history of the republic so conceited (there’s no other word, really) and so unapologetic about it? With so little reason to be?

Jefferson and Hemmings revisited

The New Neo Posted on by

Many people think it’s virtually certain that Thomas Jefferson had an affair with slave Sally Hemmings and fathered at least one child by her. After all, wasn’t it proven by DNA testing?

No, no, a thousand times no, says this new book on the subject. The DNA testing involved merely implicated some male in the Jefferson clan:

But there are approximately 25 known potential male candidates…Jefferson’s younger brother Randolph, a widower and regular visitor to Monticello who was ignored in the initial research of Annette Gordon-Reed, was in better health than Jefferson and said to “play the fiddle and dance half the night” with the slaves, while the president was not known to do so. A tradition among descendents of Eston Hemings held that an “Uncle Randolph” was Eston’s father””that being a name by which Randolph Jefferson was known at Monticello. A surviving letter from Thomas invites Randolph to come to the house shortly before Hemings became pregnant with Eston. Randolph was reported to have fathered children with other slaves: Might he be a more probable father than Thomas?

There’s much, much more. And actually, the fact that a different male Jefferson might have been a better candidate as Eston’s father was well known right along. A combination of ignorance of science on the part of readers, and politically correct hype (Founding Fathers as hypocritical exploiters) on the part of theory-populizers, conspired to make the Thomas Jefferson fatherhood narrative seem more certain than it should have seemed to the general public.

Last night’s debate

The New Neo Posted on by

Comment of the evening:

Two weeks left; I say, fix bayonets!!

Those picayune military details are hardly Obama’s forte, although that doesn’t keep him from mocking Mitt Romney. Actually, I’m hard-pressed to think what Obama’s forte might be: snark, perhaps? It’s sure beginning to look that way.

I didn’t watch the debate and I got back too late to join in the comments. But from my perusal of the blogosphere it seemed that Romney was trying to run out the clock and appear presidential and above the fray, whereas Obama was his now-familiar petty debate self, nasty and small.

That Obama is the same Obama most of us have seen for four long years. For some reason Romney’s personality works to bring out that side of Obama even more than usual, and it’s not a pretty sight.

To Obama, Romney must seem like a big fat hanging curveball right smack in his wheelhouse, and Obama can’t resist taking a good hard swing at it. But apparently the pitch that looks so eminently hittable is really a dancing knuckleball after all.

The third debate

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a thread for discussing debate number three, which takes place tonight at 9:00 PM Eastern Time.

I have a family event to attend and won’t be watching, although I might be home in time to see the very end and to comment afterward. But you all have a go at it here.

You know how I hate debates anyway. I don’t feel as nervous as I did before debate number one. But whatever the polls say, I will be anxious and worried right up through election evening—and then depending on the results, I will be either exceedingly distressed or quite elated and relieved.

So in the meantime:

:

Lance Armstrong’s guilt

The New Neo Posted on by

So, what do you think about this? Was Lance Armstrong guilty, despite having passed a gazillion doping tests at the time? Is the testimony of former teammates under the following circumstances convincing enough?:

Former Armstrong team mates at his U.S. Postal and Discovery Channel outfits, where he won his seven successive Tour titles from 1999 to 2005, testified against him and themselves and were given reduced bans by the American authorities.

“It wasn’t until the intervention of federal agents…they called these riders in and they put down a gun and badge on the table in front of them and said ‘you’re now facing a grand jury you must tell the truth’ that those riders broke down,” McQuaid added.

I confess I haven’t followed this story—or cycling itself—much. Its practitioners at the highest level, like those in so many other sports, are driven to be the very best, and many are willing to cut corners to do so. The more people who dope, the more the others will feel it necessary that they do it too to keep up, even though it’s wrong.

That means the sport will probably always be a race between the doping detection commissions and the cheaters to see who’s more technically advanced.

And if everybody was doing it, why focus on Armstrong? Is it because he started it, or because he perfected it, or because he did it more often? Or is it just because he was the very best—at cycling and at doping?

Ah, those fickle women voters

The New Neo Posted on by

That’s what Obama must be thinking.

What struck me when I read this article was how many of the women interviewed focused on bits and pieces of things without looking at the whole picture or even the bigger picture, and how little understanding they seemed to have of even the small picture. It was hardly a large or random sample of women, but nevertheless the responses were disturbing.

At least as disturbing was the ignorance (or purposeful misleading?) of the article’s author, Molly Ball, who first describes Romney’s position on abortion as wanting to repeal Roe v. Wade, then mentions several women she interviewed who are “pro-life and staunchly Republican,” and then describes some “undecided” women interviewees this way:

Unlike their more conservative cohorts, these women agreed that abortion is not any of the federal government’s business.

The fact that this is precisely the stance of so many people who are personally pro-life (like Romney, and possibly the “conservative cohorts” she had interviewed) and would also like to see Roe v. Wade overturned seems to be lost on Ms. Ball. Does she—or any of the women she interviewed—even know that the slogan “overturn Roe v. Wade” is not at all the same as “ban abortion,” especially at the federal level? That overturning Roe v. Wade would merely throw the entire issue back to the states, and take it out of the hands of the federal government?

Depressingly abysmal ignorance.

RIP George McGovern

The New Neo Posted on by

George McGovern, the man Nixon trounced in 1972, has died at the age of 90.

McGovern was the first presidential candidate I ever voted for. Yes, he was a liberal, but of the more old-fashioned kind, without nastiness and with a fair amount of collegiality between the parties.

McGovern may have gotten his clock cleaned in 1972, but voters in Massachusetts—the only state that had gone for McGovern—got to display bumper stickers saying “Don’t Blame Me; I’m from Massachusetts” after the Watergate scandal.

And remember this?

RIP, George McGovern.