THIS JUST IN!! BILL CLINTON ADDS TO HIS MEMOIRS!

HE ALSO SAID HE RAISED TAXES TOO MUCH -- AND THEN TRIED TO RAISE THEM AGAIN [John Podhoretz]
Bill Clinton now acknowledges that his agonizingly boring memoir, My Life, was excessively verbose. ""Most people thought it was too long — a fair criticism," Clinton says. Unfortunately, he says it in a new paperback edition that adds something like 15 pages to the already endless 957 of the hardback.
Posted at 12:11 AM

John Lewis Gaddis on Bush's Grand Strategy

I have blogged on Gaddis before. (See February 8, 2004 entry for Gaddis' on Bush's first articulation of the grand strategy.) I heartily recommend this recent speech (given at Middlebury College in Vermont) by John Lewis Gaddis, professor of history at Yale and first to advocate the idea that Bush's war on terror, specifically, the pre-emptive war on the "axis of evil," is the first "grand strategy" of the 21st Century.

But, it's not all praise! It is a substantive, dispassionate, level-headed assessment of Bush's leadership failures and successes, his learning from mistakes, and the boldness of his vision, especially as it has been refined in his 2nd Inaugural Address.

Newsweek (flush)

Richard Brookhiser: Bush the Relentess Revolutionary

Here is a taste of Brookhiser's latest column in NY Observer.

Now President George W. Bush has gone to Moscow, on the 60th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe, to pay tribute to the Soviet Union’s achievement in defeating Hitler. At the same time, in very Bush-like fashion, he has been ruffling feathers.

Russia deserves Mr. Bush’s tribute. The first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan were pretty scary, but in the scale of the eastern front in World War II, it was a burp. Hitler lost his vision, his war and his life on the plains of Russia and Poland. Britain and America stabbed Germany in the belly and back in Africa, Italy and France, and incinerated it from the air. But it was annihilated by the Soviet Army.

. . . President Bush added to his trip to Moscow a side trip to Latvia, a former Soviet republic enjoying a still-tentative independence. Latvia’s first tentative independence followed World War I and ended when it was obliterated by the Soviets, the Nazis and then the Soviets again during World War II. Mr. Bush’s visit is an effort to do what we could not do at the time— to say "Alas!" to the defeated. "In Western Europe," Mr. Bush said, "the end of World War II meant liberation. In Central and Eastern Europe, the war also marked … Soviet occupation."

Michael Yon's picture and blog

By now, most people probably have seen this picture of Major Mark Bieger rescuing a small girl, Farah, mortally wounded in a suicide bombing in Mosul, on Wednesday I think. She did not live. But here is a little more information about the photographer, Michael Yon, and his work documented at his blog, a really interesting, upclose perspective, including more moving pictures, of some of our troops in Iraq. More power and prayers to him, the troops, and the Iraqis.
(Click for larger image.)