There’s an ongoing saga between the New York Sun and the novelist Nicolson Baker, who has written a seemingly batty book (which I haven’t and won’t read—why bother?) positing a world in which the pacifists and appeasers “won” and the Allies did not go to war against Hitler (and thus we did not kill lots and lots of innocents).

You can read all about it here, in the Sun’s latest salvo against Baker.

The editorial writers reprise the situation in Europe in June 1940:

German armies were rolling practically unopposed through France, and the British Expeditionary Force had just been evacuated by the skin of its teeth at Dunkirk. The swastika already flew over Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium, Holland, and Norway; on June 17, after Marshal Petain capitulated to Hitler, it would be raised in France. Nazi Germany was the unchallenged master of the Continent, and the full might of its military was about to be turned on Britain.

And then they ask an interesting question:

Why is it, then, that in the summer of 1940, even Winston Churchill’s fiercest critics were glad to see him in office?

Could it have had anything to do with his famous speech in the House of Commons?

“Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail,” he told the House of Commons on June 4, 1940. “We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. …”

Indeed, that might have done the trick [e.a.]:

Mr. Baker’s antipathy to Churchill can’t hold a candle to that of George Orwell, who as a socialist and anti-imperialist had been a fierce critic of the Tory Churchill during the 1930s. Yet “from the collapse of France onwards,” Orwell wrote, “nearly everyone who was anti-Nazi supported Churchill,” for the simple reason that “there was nobody else … who could be trusted not to surrender.”

Got that? When the appeasers finally figured out that Britain was done for, they turned to the only one who could be trusted not to surrender.

Despite the state of delirious denial in which most of us live (thanks to our extraordinary wealth, which buys us a lot of leisure time in which to indulge ourselves, and thanks to our distance—so far—from the frontlines of the GWOT or whatever you want to call it), we too live in perilous times.

Perhaps there will come a time when voters are forced to grapple with Orwell’s situation when he was confronted with a politician (Churchill) that he loathed [e.a.]:

To Orwell, a passionate democrat who lived through the hour of democracy’s greatest danger, Churchill possessed the indispensable qualification for the leader of a democracy in wartime: he was “able to grasp that wars are not won without fighting.”

The time may not be upon us yet—and I am lucky because I don’t have to worry too much about the bread-and-butter issues that concern most voters—but I know my litmus test for voting from here on out: the one who can be trusted not to surrender.

Using David Brooks’s heavy-handed Hillary Hit Job in today’s NYT (which I wrote about here) as a launching pad, Ann Althouse sketches out the contours of the Uncivil War Between the Supporters:

Brooks must have thought that last line was too clever not to use, but it’s actually only a childish flipping of a phrase to its opposite, and, worse, it’s not even true. She has the audacity of hope. By calling hope hopelessness, Brooks enables himself to ask why she goes on and to pretend there isn’t the obvious answer: she has hope of winning.

Why does she go on like this? Does Clinton privately believe that Obama is so incompetent that only she can deliver the policies they both support? Is she simply selfish…?

How is what’s she’s doing any different from what every other candidate does as long as there’s a chance? To say it’s “selfish” or “narcissistic” to think you’re special is to criticize everyone who has what it takes to campaign for the presidency.

And the real issue:

Brooks challenges her to step outside her own machine and stop it, to “surprise everybody with a display of self-sacrifice.” Why? Why should she behave differently from every other politician?

Indeed—especially since she is the kind of politician from whom we expect exactly this kind of grit, which is why some of us like her (I don’t actually like her, but I do like her in a match-up against the messianic-narcissistic holier-than-thou commie-lite Obama, whose proposed policies sound to me like the road to perdition, and I do like her in a match-up against McCain, because she can match her competency to his competency).

At TNR, Michael Crowley is less passionate than Althouse, but he also sees through Brooks’s “logic” and answers the question easily:

I think it’s quite possible that Hillary simply doesn’t think Obama is electable. (See Bill and “all that other stuff.”) *** Now that may be a delusion. But if you believed it to be true, you would soldier ahead. She also does have quite a lot of passionate supporters cheering her on, and is roughly tied with Obama in national polls; that’s not easy to ignore.

Once more I issue the caveat that I’m not a politico, but I’ve long been of the opinion that the Clintons don’t believe that Obama is electable (or, rather, they believe that he is unelectable). And I agree with them: he’s waaaaaay too much to the left, and he gives no indication of even wanting to do the necessary pivot, as Kaus pointed out recently.

But “progressives” seem to want to convince themselves (not to mention the rest of us) that Obama’s the one. And former conservatives have been converted (see Andrew Sullivan’s entire blog of the last few months; here’s one of today’s encomia.

Whatever. It’s their party!

And they’re welcome to it, says Kaus today, because an Obama win sounds like four years of insufferable pedagogic condescension.

After last Tuesday, I’m not sure I want to be instructed and elevated any more by Prof. Obama. I’d kind of like to rearrange his mental furniture on welfare and affirmative action, where his vagueness suggests incoherence more than brilliance.

Yep. And the Obama critics on the Dem side haven’t even begun to address the fatuous foreign-policy gobbledy-gook of the forthcoming “Obama Doctrine,” which features something called “dignity promotion”:

This ability to see the world from different perspectives informs what the Obama team hopes will replace the Iraq War mind-set: something they call dignity promotion. “I don’t think anyone in the foreign-policy community has as much an appreciation of the value of dignity as Obama does,” says Samantha Power, a former key aide and author of the groundbreaking study of U.S. foreign policy and genocide, A Problem From Hell. “Dignity is a way to unite a lot of different strands [of foreign-policy thinking],” she says. “If you start with that, it explains why it’s not enough to spend $3 billion on refugee camps in Darfur, because the way those people are living is not the way they want to live. It’s not a human way to live. It’s graceless — an affront to your sense of dignity.”

The Doctrine is sliced and diced by Dean Barnett today in the Weekly Standard. Barnett is not a Democrat, I suppose, but at least he is a rational observer of reality, unlike the dreamers on Team Obama [e.a.]:

If the Obama Doctrine held that President Obama would send a fleet of Navy vessels to the shores of every country where dignity wasn’t being adequately promoted, that would at least be a Doctrine worthy of the name. It would be a stupid Doctrine, but at least for once Obama would be matching his rhetoric with a plan for action. As it is, the Obama Doctrine is of a piece with the rest of his campaign. It’s an attractively outlined set of worthy goals unsupported by any apparent plan of action to realize those goals.

The Obama Doctrine dovetails nicely with Obama’s promise to begin an aggressive round of–what else?–talking with all our enemies. Once again, no clearly expressed goals preceded Obama’s promise to talk. Almost needless to say, Obama has offered no elaboration on how the talking will advance specifically defined American interests. The talking is itself the point.

These are just a few of the reasons why Obama Dissenters see him as unelectable: he’s full of hot air.

Meanwhile, while I was composing this post, Hillary has decided to go nuclear on Obama, via Wright:

Clinton: Wright ‘would not have been my pastor’

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, in a wide-ranging interview today with Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporters and editors, said she would have left her church if her pastor made the sort of inflammatory remarks Sen. Barack Obama’s former pastor made.
“He would not have been my pastor,” Clinton said. “You don’t choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend.”

At Contentions, Jennifer Rubin deduces why Hillary launched this attack:

This also tells us two things: that Clinton believes the media could not continue to run with this story without some added fuel from her and that she thinks this issue is a winner.

And one of her commenters describes the box Obama is in now:

Hillary is smart enough not to touch the Reverend, unless it is Obama getting burned. Obama camp is helpless. To engage in the ‘debate’ would continue to prop the story up.

Isn’t this fun?

————
*** the link is to the MSNBC site First Read:

*** “All this other stuff…”

Bill Clinton’s Friday afternoon comments about why he thinks a Clinton-McCain contest will be better for the country has been viewed by Obama supporters has an attack on the candidate’s patriotism. But be sure to focus on this phrase, “all this other stuff” intruding on the campaign and less on the “loves America” line. Wasn’t Clinton sending another message to the crowd of older, white male voters? (Remember, he was at a VFW and there was barely a member of the audience under 60, according to our reporter in the field)? The message: That if you don’t want to talk about race, then Clinton’s the candidate; if you do want race intruding into the campaign, then support Obama. There are many older, white voters, while sympathetic to Obama’s message on race, don’t want to be reminded to take their medicine and the subtle message Clinton may actually have been sending was just that, support Clinton and avoid taking your race medicine.

I saw Chuck Todd float this theory on Hardball last night, although he didn’t mention anything about “race medicine.”

That’s my best guess, anyway, after reading this item at Publishers Lunch ($$):

How Many More eBook Releases Will We See?

The press release from Ectaco draws on a variety of cliches (”kiss your
old-fashioned, dusty library goodbye”) to announce the company’s new jetBook ereader. The cheap-looking device weighs just 7 ounces and has a five-inch screen (smaller than Kindle and Sony Reader) and appears to handle only .txt, .pdf and .jpg text files, along with mp3s. The company specializes in translation dictionaries and those are a focus feature of this device as well, which sells for $350.

Mostly you look at their site and realize how relatively easy it must be to design and produce a reader like this, and how many similar products must be on the way.

Duh.

From the press release:

jetBook(R) is an incredibly sophisticated e-book reader with a built-in
mp3 player that allows users to listen to AudioBooks as well as keep up
with their reading. Preloaded with translating dictionaries, you can
simultaneously enjoy a good book, improve your vocabulary by looking up and
translating any words you want, listen to your favorite audio files and
check out photos — all in the same device! With an incredibly simple to
read, large 5-inch, high-resolution display that is easy on the eyes, users
can now read for hours without the eyestrain that comes from ordinary
computer screens. And those with trouble reading normal-sized print books
will benefit from the different fonts and sizes you can change to
instantly. Weighing in at a remarkable 7 ounces, the super-slim device fits
easily in the palm of your hand for a truly comfortable reading experience.

I don’t yet own an e-book reader. (I don’t have a commute, so there’s no urgency. I’m waiting for early adopters to test them out and to advise me on which one to buy.)

My motto, however, is: if you love books, set them free^TM.

The last time I urged book lovers and book cultists to embrace the technological revolution was here.

The conventional wisdom of the media elite, crystallized today by David Brooks, says that Hillary Clinton cannot possibly win.

Last week, an important Clinton adviser told Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen (also of Politico) that Clinton had no more than a 10 percent chance of getting the nomination. Now, she’s probably down to a 5 percent chance.

Five percent.

It would be way too tiresome to provide the dozens of links that support Brooks’s point of view. It’s much more interesting to link to the news side of things at the New York Times, where someone is (finally) asking the important question: can a “progressive” win the White House?

Of course the NYT doesn’t frame the question quite like that. Instead, the sly headline writer asks: “Can a Liberal Be a Unifier?”[ e.a.]:

the Obama campaign is challenging the fundamental political premise that has prevailed in Washington for more than a generation: that any majority coalition must be carefully centrist, if not center-right. Bill Clinton ran in 1992 as a candidate willing to break with liberal orthodoxy on many issues, including crime and welfare, and eager to move the party — which had lost five of the six previous presidential elections — to the middle. Mr. Clinton’s New Democrats assumed a certain level of conservatism among voters.

Mr. Obama and his allies are basing his campaign on a different bet: that the right-leaning political landscape Mr. Clinton confronted has changed. Several major Democratic strategists, and outside analysts as well, argue that the country has shifted to the left because of the Iraq war, the economy and seven-plus years of President Bush, and that it has become open to a new progressive majority.

Further down, we hear once more this claim about a new political climate that is favorable to Obama:

[M]any of Mr. Obama’s supporters say he has recognized this new political climate in a way that Mrs. Clinton has not. They say he is ready for a new, self-assured era in which progressives (few have returned to using the word “liberal”) make no apologies about their goals — universal health care, withdrawing troops from Iraq, ending tax breaks for more affluent Americans — and assume that a broad swath of the public shares them.

That’s an interesting assumption, but I fear it’s not rooted in fact. Indeed, the NYT quotes TNR in a most interesting way:

As The New Republic recently put it, “Clintonism is a political strategy that assumes a skeptical public; Obamaism is a way of actualizing a latent ideological majority.”

If skepticism is Clintonian, call me a Clintonite. A latent ideological majority? In what universe?

Currently, despite the party establishment’s wanting to give her (and the centrist voters who are loyal to her) the bum’s rush, she is neck and neck in votes with her messianic Democratic opponent. Call me skepetical, but I say this more or less ensures that in a general election, Obama will be buried in a match-up with McCain. And that when the voting is finally over, the dreamers’ “latent ideological ‘majority’ ” will represent an even smaller but more hysterically vocal minority.

Only by then, they will have (conveniently for their enemies) labeled themselves as a proudly out-of-the-mainstream political party. A neat trick, that.

What do you do if you’re a young writer facing a future in which the book is not a treasured cultural product? You become an explorer, a pioneer, an experimenter, and a partner with a traditional publisher, and you move into the unknown:

Some of the UK’s best young novelists are working with computer games designers to create digital short stories, each inspired by a classic work of literature but featuring games, blogs and web tools.

The first of the six stories is Charles Cumming’s The 21 Steps, based on John Buchan’s classic thriller The 39 Steps.

It uses Google Maps and Google Earth to follow the trail of a bewildered young Londoner who witnesses a murder and is forced to smuggle a mysterious liquid on to a plane.

Read about it here, in the Guardian.