Avuncular American

Clowns To the Left, Jokers To the Right: Stuck in the Middle?

The old song was swimming around in my head, and I knew I'd have to turn it into a post: Stuck in the Middle With You, a 1972 hit by the Scottish group Stealers Wheel (lyrics available here).   Some may remember the refrain.

President Obama was only about 9 years old when the record came out, so it may not have been on his mind when presiding over the Bipartisan Health Care Meeting this past week.  But the man deserves sainthood for his calm.

Actually, the line about "clowns to the left" is not fair, and may not be accurate, if The Nation's John Nichols is to be believed: he calls them and other advocates of Medicare-for-all or single-payer the "Missing Voices at the Healthcare Summit."  I agree that single-payer should have been seriously considered all along, but it never had a chance after "death panel" voodoo had taken hold last summer.

But "jokers to the right" there were aplenty, and like Dana Milbank, I wish that the moderate Presidential moderator had smacked some of them down when they got ornery.

Here's one of the things that bother me about the post-summit spin coming from the Democrats: the notion that

At the meeting, both sides found common ground on critical issues including

o   Eliminating waste and fraud in Medicare and Medicaid

o   Reforming medical malpractice laws

o   Providing more choices in coverage for individuals and the option to pool coverage for small businesses

o   Reforming the insurance market

"Common ground?"  Why should the Republicans be given any credit for seeming reasonable, when all indications are that they will continue to oppose any changes to the broken system?  If reform passes, it will be thanks to Democratic votes, and Democratic votes alone.

When the Republicans say "start over" on health care reform, that is not "common ground." It's code for grind to a halt.  Pass the bill, then go on to these nice "common ground" points in Step 2, from a position of strength.

Eisenhower Wept: Embassy London's Grosvenor Farewell

Think of it as akin to Canada picking up sticks from its gleaming Embassy edifice opposite the Capitol and moving to the towers of Crystal City.  Sure, it's still near the Metro, and you can glimpse the Potomac, but people would ask what does it mean?

Don't worry, the Canadians aren't about to leave their prized perch, where Congress is reminded daily of the United States' northern neighbor.

But, as we were reminded by yesterday's announcement of the choice of an architect, the US is leaving its historic Embassy location on London's Grosvenor Square, whose postal code W1A 1AE gives you an idea how central it is to Britain's political institutions.  The Qataris are buying it.

We are, you see, moving to the Borough of Wandsworth across the Thames.  The Wandsworth Council (thanks for the architect's drawing) is happy about what it terms

the biggest regeneration opportunity in central London. The Council has identified the potential for thousands of new homes and jobs in the area which stretches from Vauxhall Bridge to Battersea Park.

Battersea, for those of you who know London, is best known for its huge (defunct) power station on the Thames, and Vauxhall (of car manufacturing fame) is the "post-industrial" neighborhood that is now home to the new MI6 HQ (at least the secret part of the "special relationship" will be closer, literally).  There is also, apparently, a memorial to Benedict Arnold in the neighborhood.

I wouldn't want to begrudge the people of Wandsworth this development opportunity, but how many foreign embassies in Washington are moving to Northeast D.C. in the cause of urban development and diversity?  Likewise, I'm happy that the architect is as energy-conscious as security-aware, choosing "miracle polymer" ETFE, which appears to be a material of the future.

But what does it mean?

A decade ago, I was working at the US Embassy on Grosvenor Square.  I used to see small groups of demonstrators line up outside my window, protesting about whatever US policy they objected to at the moment.  This was 1999-2000, and though we were in our pre-9/11 mode, we were anything but blissfully ignorant about the need to enhance security.

The demonstrators weren't the problem - Grosvenor Square had accommodated thousands during anti-Vietnam War protests in the Sixties - and the Metropolitan Police kept them in check.  Vehicular proximity was a real concern, and we were working with the authorities and the neighbors to find a solution.  We even had worked out an arrangement with the Canadian High Commission - across the Square, in a building that used to be our pre-1960 Embassy building - to rent some of their unused office space while whole sections of our chancery underwent major security and other upgrades.

Then September 11, 2001 happened, and I guess all these plans (I had already moved on) were put on the shelf.  By the time I wandered back to Number 1 Grosvenor Square a couple of years later, the place was a maze of concrete bunkers and barriers, and if I was put off, imagine the effect on the locals.

So, what does it mean?  One, it means that the State Department has decided that for its Embassy in the UK to be "modern, open, and secure," it must leave its historic location.  When I say historic, I don't mean the present building only, which was the height of architectural modernity when it opened.  As Philip Kennicott writes in today's Washington Post

The relocation... breaks a tradition of American diplomacy at Grosvenor Square dating to John Adams's appointment as the first U.S. minister to the Court of St. James's in 1785.

Will the new Qatari owners care about the statue of Dwight Eisenhower that graces Grosvenor Square outside the current embassy?  Maybe it can be moved to Embassy Wandsworth, which will become the new symbol of Brand America.

Does the move indicate that we've decided that, like a mutant diamond, "terrorism is forever?"  Terrorism isn't new, only its weapons are.   And believe me, ETFE notwithstanding, if someone wants to find a way to target an embassy, they will.  Just as you lock your car door, you do want to put reasonable obstacles in their way.  But they will evolve beyond truck bombs, and already have, as we learned on 9/11.

The only thing I can say is that care has been taken to incorporate aesthetics into things like stand back, blast barriers, and polymers.  That is much more than can be said of the generation of "Inman Embassies," whose design often resembled forbidding fortresses.

The days of building new American Embassies in leafy residential neighborhoods have long been over, though many older ones still exist, beefed-up though they have been with bollards and, ick, barbed wire.  Maybe the bronze Eisenhower statue can be uprooted and moved across the Thames, where future embassy staffers can contemplate with irony the words from his inauguration, etched on the pedestal:

"The faith we hold belongs not to us alone but to the free of all the world."

Around the World In International English

Before the blogosphere, there was the ionosphere.  Actually, it's still there (image: NOAA), greenhouse effect or not.   And thanks to the ionosphere, you could listen in to the world of shortwave radio.

Thanks to the Taiwanese, who seem to be the only ones making SW radios, you still can - if you want to fool around with frequencies.  There is a certain adventure in zapping around and landing up in Cairo, Moscow, or Rio de Janeiro, even if you can't understand a word they're saying.  I know you can do the same thing with live streaming on the internet, but you might miss the crackle of the radio waves.

But from the comfort of your computer, you can discover a whole world out there - in English.  You and I already know that, but how many of us stick to our favorite sites, bookmarking our way through the usual suspects?  So let me propose a tour of the world, a random journey across time zones that I'll make up as we go along.

First stop, Burma, and the Irrawaddy News Magazine.  The Irrawaddy, based in Thailand and named after Burma's main river, is written by exiled Burmese journalists.  How often do you get an objective (well, anti-regime) glimpse inside one of the world's most secretive societies?

Staying on in Asia, wander over to Pakistan - rather important to know how things are developing there, n'est-ce pas?  No better place than The Dawn, where yesterday's editorial on "Secularism vs. Islamism" described a very outspoken debate on Pakistani TV.

You'll note how random this is: our next stop is the landlocked African country of Uganda, where the Daily Monitor has an interesting story about Fort Patiko, which dates back to the time of Arab slave traders.  Ugandans speak several languages among their ethnic groups and tribes, but the national language is English.

English is widely spoken in Egypt, the Arab world's most populous country, so it is not surprising that Al-Ahram has an English-language weekly, where you can read a report about "Fatah-gate," a developing scandal over corruption in Palestinian Authority circles in Ramallah.

Europe has scads of English-language media resources, so I'll cite a very unrepresentative sample of one: "A Fistful of Euros," a memorably-named blog by 15 writers.  Good stuff, and despite its name, not entirely devoted to economics.

Skipping over to Latin America, the Buenos Aires Herald is a 124 year old English-language daily, as befits a country of immigrants, a good number of whom hailed from England, Scotland, and Wales.

If all of my channel-hopping has been too demanding, you might just try WorldFocus TV's "Blogwatch," which has a changing blog roll of worldwide scribblers (including me).

American expats wanting to stay in touch with the "homeland" have a multitude of resources, and podcasts from Democracy Now and NPR are much appreciated.  But tonight, if I'm feeling a bit insomniac, I just might reach for that shortwave dial...

Océans

Jacques Perrin's new film Océans deserves wide-screen viewing, and I now regret that I never saw his 2001 Peuple Migrateur (Winged Migration) in the cinema.  For viewers requiring documentary purity, Roger Ebert's comment on Perrin's previous film still holds, this time for Océans:

[F]acts are not the purpose of "Winged Migration." It wants to allow us to look, simply look, at birds--and that goal it achieves magnificently. There are sights here I will not easily forget.

Substitute "sea animals" for "birds" and you have Océans.   Those of us who might doze during an earnest TV nature documentary won't be able to get any shuteye during Perrin's film.  The images are too spectacular, the soundtrack too stirring.  Perrin's voice is heard only occasionally, so the sea's own sounds stand out all the more.

No ordinary film maker sets out to present us 100 minutes of footage - eye popping though it is - on the sea without having a keen environmental sensibility.  Perrin certainly does, but he doesn't bludgeon the viewer with his message.  In fact you spend a good half of the film marveling at his unique shots of animals - fish, of course, but also marine mammals, aquatic birds, sea-going reptiles, invertebrates... everything lives down there - while wondering "when our we going to see the pollution?"

If anything, Perrin's editing for a wide audience has pared his film down from what might have been a tedious TV documentary on the threats to the oceans and our overall environment.  French TV's long running weekly "magazine of the sea" Thalassa invited Perrin for an entire evening a few weeks ago.  He provided a "making of" Océans (30 minutes, in French) plus lots of other footage that we expected to see in the film, but which probably just would have blown their time limits.

But Perrin's footage of the "Pacific Trash Vortex" in Océans - a closeup that could have been filmed in a very dirty swimming pool - is an understatement.   He knows that the Pacific's mid-ocean Texas-sized trash vortex is a death trap for millions of creatures, but even with the help of the European Space Agency (ESA), it's hard to capture that on film.  Ecological hell is best seen seal-level, as a mammal navigates an offshore swamp of detritus, within sight of a petrochemical plant belching out its gas-flaring worst.

France seems to excel in producing film makers who make us care about our natural environment.  Perrin was only making his debut as an actor (he's been in well over a hundred films and has produced or directed dozens more) when legendary undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau was attaining worldwide fame.  In recent years, environmental activist and outdoorsman Nicolas Hulot has put Ushuaia on the map, and aerial photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand has used his lens to document our amazing Earth from Above.

"Facts are not the purpose," as Roger Ebert said, but an appreciation of our precious watery resource and its denizens - that is what is behind Perrin's Océans.  The converted will see it - but how about those not in the choir?

(Poster - official site)

A Country Is a Terrible Thing To Waste

Apologies to the Ad Council and the United Negro College Fund for my deforming their long running "A Mind Is a Terrible Thing To Waste" ad campaign.  But the sentiment fits my message.

Further mea culpas to nationalists in both the United States and Belgium for what I'm about to do.  But I care deeply about both countries, being a citizen of the former and a resident of the latter.  Both have the potential to be greater than their current national selves, and both are suffering from an institutional malaise that causes the national machinery to break down - literally, in the tragic case of the train accident this week outside Brussels.

Just keep the trains from hitting each other

How so, you may ask?  As soon as news of a head on collision between two commuter trains hit the press, questions started to be raised: was this another example of linguistic confusion between traffic controllers?  Was this a "black day for Flanders," the scene of the accident, as the head of the Dutch-speaking region said?  No, not just Flanders, for there were probably as many or more Francophone wallons on the trains, part of the massive daily national exchange of populations across the "linguistic frontier."  But everything in Belgium is eventually linked to the thorny linguistic community question.

If anything, the breakup of the national train service into several entities, with crucial responsibility for infrastructure and security spun off to a company that holds no responsibility for making the trains run on time, is probably at the root of the problem.  But the political finagling underlying the breakup of something that had been a coherent whole is apparent: the newspaper photo captions identifying the supposedly technocratic bosses of the several entities that comprise the Belgian train system carried the political affiliations of each.  They are party creatures, carefully selected to reflect the correct ideological and linguistic balance.  But can they run trains?

Governments are supposed to govern, no?

Across the pond, meanwhile, political science dictionary writers are going to have to come up with a new term that goes beyond gridlock.  Terminal hold?   Rigor senatis?  Fili-busted?  Republicans appear to only know how to say no, and Democrats appear unable to understand that more than fifty percent of anything is a majority.

Blame games are for losers, and as Democrats and Republicans trade charges over their collective inability and/or unwillingness to get a move on, the Chinese, who have neither Republicans or Democrats but just Commie-capitalists, get to play Monopoly by themselves.  Monopoly over much of the world's industrial production and creditor to their biggest customer for cheap goods, the United States.

This, and the long term standing of the world's oldest democracy is what our elected officials should be dealing with.

With Belgium's regional and linguistic tensions always present in debate on the future of the country, the threat of division is never far away.  The "Belgian compromise" is legendary in Europe, where at the 11th hour a Belgian middle way is found to save the EU deliberations on sometimes obscure issues.  But domestically, this compromise has tended to compromise chances for good governance.  Cutting the train system into parts, insisting on a four-lane highway because the other region has one, proliferating parliaments to create jobs for politicians - you can compromise your way into a dysfunctional state.  Remember, Solomon only threatened to cut the baby in half.

In the US, at least no one other than a few fringe Republicans is calling for the breakup of the union.  Nostalgic for "American empire?"  We need to be taken down a peg or two if we think we can continue indefinitely in our unsustainably wasteful, greedy, consumerist ways.  But American democracy is quite another thing.  If today's politicians so disgust the citizenry that voters leave the business of elections and elective office to the crazy fringe, then the world will have lost very much indeed.

A country is a terrible thing to waste.

 

Blogs - Consider Your Sources

Think B4 U Post

Last week's "Safer Internet Day" was largely devoted to protecting children from the ravages out there online, but this year's theme - "Think B4 U Post" - is good advice for all of us. Even as eminent (but a mite too publicity-hungry) a philosopher as Bernard-Henri Lévy can fall for hoaxes, given his eagerness to pontificate.

Mother Jones ("Dr. Evil's Payday") reminded us that in the US, even the mainstream press is regularly hoodwinked by very private profiteers posing as nonprofit "public interest" groups.

Perhaps inspired by the need to warn people of the dangers of believing everything you see or read, Franco-German TV channel Arte carried a scary program, which you may still be able to see here.  Scary because of the kinds of things that pass for "news" or "fact" on the web, such as a whole lot of 9/11 conspiracy stuff.  Ludicrous as it is, many people apparently take it for gospel truth.

Meanwhile, a group of European journalists spent five days in a French farmhouse with Twitter and Facebook as their only source of information.  Along with the "flotsam and jetsam" of the "pointless babble," they reported, they also got repeated huge does of American headlines and little else.

Which brings me to sourcing.   Many years before I started blogging, before there was even something called the internet, I took a short course in "writing to order" at the Foreign Service Institute, and it was mostly about a core competency in diplomacy - reporting.  Prior to email's informalization and instantization of diplomatic communication, diplomats had to draft "cables" or telegrams from the field, reporting on developments in bilateral relations, the internal political scene - anything that might impact on US interests.

Every year, the State Department judged cables according to criteria that bloggers would do well to keep in mind:

• Sourcing: Is this first hand observation, based on a discussion with someone in the know, or is it derived from newspaper reporting?
• Relevance: It may be beautifully written, but is it important?
• Accessible: It better have a clear summary up front - even better if the title summarizes the message.

Our group was shown examples of what, at first glance, might have seemed award-winners, but the prose often covered up serious shortcomings in sourcing.  There was an awful lot of derivative stuff from newspapers, which came to be lumped in under "open sourcing."  The prizewinners were those who had gone out into the field and observed for themselves.

Recently, I read the late, great Polish correspondent Ryszard Kapuscinski's last book, Travels With Herodotus.   Herodotus' Histories was Kapuscinski's travel companion for his years reporting on war and coups from Accra to Zanzibar, and Mr. K. considers him not just the first historian, but the first reporter:

But how could Herodotus, a Greek, know what the faraway Persians are saying?  It was because he traveled to where they were, asked, observed, and collected information from what he himself saw and what others told him.  His first act, therefore, was the journey.  But is that not the case for all reporters?

Not all bloggers can hope to imitate Herodotus or Kapuscinksi, and even armchair generals have some good ideas.  But consideration of the source is essential.  It is still up to the reader of newspapers or blogs - as Whirled View's Patricia Lee Sharpe has shown - to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Vincere

Benito Mussolini - what a fascist!

And I'm not talking only about his political ideology.

Nowadays, the term "fascist" gets thrown around indiscriminately, especially in political circles.  But in Marco Bellocchio's 2009 Cannes-nominated film Vincere, we go back to its roots, and Mussolini's personal fascism was clear in his attitude towards his first wife and their son.

(Poster: Cinecittà News)

As it happens, "Vincere" or "to win, overcome" was a favorite word in Il Duce's public harangues, giving Hitler a run for his money on the bombastic front.

It's hard to say who wins in this movie, but I suppose that the truth coming out about Mussolini's secret wife and son, after years of fascistic suppression, is a final victory for the unfortunate Ida.  Back in the Twenties and Thirties, when much of the action of the film took place, this film might have been entitled "The Ida Dalser Story."

Writer/director Bellocchio, other than brief end notes, doesn't dwell on the final fate of Ida and little Benito, Mussolini's firstborn.   Most Italians were unaware of their existence until 2005, when a documentary "Mussolini's Secret" was shown on Italian TV.  The documentary, along with the publication of Alfredo Pieroni's book "The Secret Son of Il Duce: The Story of Albino Mussolini and His Mother Ida Dalser," provided Bellocchio with the historical background for his screenplay.

And then there is the period newsreel footage.  As Jay Weissberg wrote for Variety from Cannes last May:

Rarely has actuality footage been used so superbly, not merely for period flavor but as integral to the storyline: Once Mussolini renounces Ida, he's only seen as she sees him, through newsreels.

Some viewers may be put off by the recurrent use of black and white period footage, but as Weissberg writes, it really does work.  The music, and even the 1930s typeface on the titles, all contribute to the sense of the period, when an ideology based on nationalist violence ruled Italy and spread throughout Europe.  The confusion of the era, spanning pre-WW I through the eve of WW II, with Mussolini's evolution from socialism to nationalism to fascism, is accurately rendered.

Award-winning actress Giovanna Mezzogiorno plays Ida with remarkable passion, contrasting with the cold indifference of Mussolini, played by Filippo Timi.  Ida's protracted travails underscore just how long Mussolini's rule lasted (in contrast to Hitler's 12-year "1000 year Reich").  You can watch it as a remarkable human tragedy or grand historical drama.  It works on both levels.

This is the second time in as many years (Sanguepazzo, 2008) that the Mussolini era and fascism have been reexamined on the Italian big screen.

Vincere (it may have the unfortunate title of Win! in English) comes out in limited US release in March.

Store Your Containers in Haiti

Matthew Price, BBC Port-au-Prince, 12 February 2010:

In just a few weeks, by the end of March, or in April, the rainy season will begin. Some 700,000 people are living out in the open, in makeshift shelters. The luckier have found old and rusty corrugated iron roofs. Others huddle under bed-sheets strung between wooden poles. Shelter is, according to aid agencies, a monumental challenge.

As Haiti marks the one-month anniversary of its devastating earthquake, attention turns to shelter before the rainy season.  Matthew Price goes on to report the additional misery that a pre-season deluge caused in the shanty town.  However, as the Clemson University SEED Project (image) has shown, the solution is at hand:

Shipping containers are designed to carry massive amounts of cargo and withstand extreme weather conditions making them a logical housing component.  Completely constructed of steel... [they] resist overturn when exposed to winds up to 140 mph.  Without modification a 40 foot shipping container has 304 square feet of floor space and eliminates problems associated with insects, fire, and hurricanes.  With modification a 40 foot shipping container can be a safe, comfortable, and environmentally friendly home for numerous local inhabitants who would otherwise have less.

Okay, combine Clemson's research (begun, according to Science Daily, in response to hurricane damage) with this fact: even though the worldwide recession has hit the container shipping business badly, and traffic is down a massive 10 percent last year, container ships continue to be built.  See "New Ships Idle, Waiting for Cargo to Fill Them," Matthew Saltmarsh, New York Times, 15 January 2010:

... shipbuilders are expected to deliver 371 container ships this year and 127 in 2012, according to Alphaliner. The container fleet will grow 14 percent in 2010 and almost 10 percent next, meaning that even more ships will be competing for cargo.

Okay: shipping industry, meet container warehouses, meet aid agencies.  It's a perfect storm.  Meanwhile, the weather report for Haiti predicts heavy rain.

South Africa Before It Was Free

Hearing the news from South Africa twenty years ago today, we knew that Nelson Mandela's release from prison was historic.  If it was the turning of the tide against apartheid, it was a process that had already started in a number of ways.

You could tell that change was happening and that important things were imminent when we visited South Africa in the winter of 1989/1990, just weeks before Mandela's release (image: 1990 South African stamps, via Namib Stamps, "Africa's premier stamp site").

Our son and daughter, just kids when we traveled across the Indian Ocean from multiracial Mauritius on a visit to South Africa, now incredulously remind us that we actually went there while apartheid was still in effect.  Shocking, for liberals like ourselves, who listened regularly to Johnny Clegg's songs of protest, including his ode to the imprisoned Mandela, Asimbonanga.  I had even organized an alternate medevac site on French Réunion for US diplomats, so that black officials would not have to undergo the humiliation of being labeled "honorary whites" if flown to South Africa.

And yet, we went to what was then the RSA - the Republic of South Africa, as it was then called - under white rule.  There's no way around that.

But the South Africa we experienced was already in pre-liberation mode.  Staying at a timeshare near Kruger National Park, we chatted with black African guests, who seemed to take it as a matter of course that they were able to stay at what had previously been a whites-only resort.  Later, when we took the famous Blue Train from Pretoria to Cape Town, its "international" status meant that African passengers could also climb aboard - for the price of a pretty hefty ticket.

In Cape Town, I had lunch at the Rotary Club, which - in a city with 75% non-white population - had all of one "coloured" member.  But it was a start.

For anyone who takes for granted the incredible feat that was the Mandela-led peaceful transition after his release from Robben Island - his one-man rebranding of a country -  listen to his fellow former prisoner Ahmed Kathrada on the BBC's "Witness" program (10 minute podcast).  In other, less steady hands, South Africa may have had quite a different break from the past.

Johnny Clegg saw that, when he wrote the lines to "Asimbonanga" in the late Eighties:

Oh the sea is cold and the sky is grey
Look across the island into the bay
We are all islands till comes the day
We cross the burning water

Chorus

A seagull wings across the sea
Broken silence is what I dream
Who has the words to close the distance
Between you and me

No one other than Mandela could have closed that distance.

You Say Demagoguery, I Say Demagogy...

... but the meaning is the same: today is the 60th anniversary of the beginning of an era: "1950: McCarthy Launches Anti-Red Crusade," on the helpful BBC site "On This Day."

Actually, the red scare had already gotten underway, but Senator Joe McCarthy simply capitalized on the hysteria.  After needlessly ruining several careers among the State Department's Foreign Service, he was eventually censured by the Senate, but not before the greatest reproach to McCarthy was uttered by Joseph Welch, counsel for the US Army: "Have you no sense of decency?"

How convenient, this McCarthyite anniversary, while we consider this past weekend's populist fest, the Tea Party convention.  For you can't have demagogues without populists, and that's what Tea-Partyism is, our latest outburst of populism.

Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture by Benjamin L. Alpers (2002, UNC Press) reminds us that

The American populist tradition divides the world into "us" and "them." It typically imagines the great, virtuous mass of hardworking people arrayed against a small group of distant elites, bankers, bureaucrats, and the like.

If "virtuous" and "hardworking" sound innocuous enough, Alpers then cites the kind of "us and them" that went on under populist demagogue Father (yes, a Catholic priest) Charles Coughlin, an anti-Semitic rabble-rouser in the 20s and 30s.

Now we have the likes of Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh, who dangerously hark back to the "us and them" theme, and yearn for the days when "us" took no lessons from "them."  Their targets may be different - Muslims, Latin immigrants, Democrats - but they thrive on division, exclusion.  Dangerous daydreaming in the world of 2010, when not only the world has changed - just check the "Made in China" labels on everything from undershirts to the national debt - but the US has too.  The Palins, Tancredos, and Limbaughs are in denial.

Ms. Palin poked fun at the "hopey changey thing" that inspired people to vote for President Obama, but the truth is that her kind of populism is changeless, and hopeless.  Father Coughlin's rants about Jews were drowned out by repeated re-elections of FDR, the man he called a "betrayer and a liar."  Twenty years later, Senator McCarthy's hounding of some of the same "them" victims was shown for what it was, and he left the public scene in disgrace.

Demagogues and populists.  Can't have one without the other.