From North Carolina To The Moon

Bob Lemberger, who helped organize the Nixon Library's popular model train exhibitions over the holidays in 2006 and 2007, writes as follows about an interplanetary image he brought back from a recent visit to North Carolina, birth state of flight:

I took it at Kill Devil Hills, not Kitty Hawk, where the Wright brothers made their historic flight. Atop the large hill named Big Kill Devil Hill is a granite monument dedicated in 1932 commemorating the first man-powered flight in 1903. The dedication was attended by Orville Wright; Wilbur had passed away in 1912. The hill was often used by the brothers for testing gliders for a three-year period starting in 1900 and was the site of their first attempted powered flight, which resulted in Wilbur crashing their Wright Flier. Three days later, after some repairs, Orville made the first successful flight from level ground a few hundred yards away.

On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 touched down on the moon with a small piece of fabric from the wing of the 1903 Wright Flier along with a small sliver from one of its propellers. Look in the upper right hand corner of the picture, and you can see the moon rising. I like the picture, as it captures where man's powered flight first began and where it has gone -- so far.

President Before God?

Google's most popular query in 2007: Who is God? In '08: Who is Obama? God didn't even make the top ten this year. Maybe everyone's figured Him out.

A Blessing It Wasn't Worse

White House press secretary Dana Perino got a black eye in the scuffle that inevitably resulted when Muntather al-Zaidi attacked the President in a crowded room full of heavily armed security agents.

Welcome To Our Shoe

The courageous John Dickerson manages a kind word for the President, assaulted by a lunatic in a foreign country with not a Secret Service agent in sight:

Bush brushed off the incident, joking that he saw into his attacker's "sole," a reference to his famous misreading of Vladimir Putin. It's the kind of incident where Bush's no-big-deal attitude, so maddening in other contexts, serves him well. "It was just a bizarre moment," Bush told journalists later on Air Force One. "But I've had other bizarre moments in the presidency."...

At the very least, I suspect a spark of patriotism will kick in when some Americans watch the tape or see al-Zaidi heralded in the streets as a hero. Hey, you can't throw shoes at our president, they might say. Only we can throw shoes at our president. This may test Nixon's theory that presidents benefit from rough treatment by journalists.

Perfect Songs: "Like A Rolling Stone" (1965)

Bob Dylan in 1966, accompanied by musicians who would later be known as The Band (although that doesn't look like drummer Levon Helm)

A Prophet For Then And Now

Isaiah, the prophet of the Christian season of Advent, lived in the 8th century before Christ and advised a scared young king named Ahaz, who had the bright idea of leveraging the Assyrians against the Syrians to keep his tiny kingdom of Judah safe. Isaiah advised him to trust in God instead of diplomacy or military power:

For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. [9:6, NRSV]

It would be a little like President Bush saying to Secretary Gates that then Russians and al-Qaeda were coming, and Gates replying, "Wait for the messiah; trust not in B-2s and the CIA." Hebrew Testament potentates usually found prophets annoying as best.

As far as Christians are concerned, Ahaz would've had to wait 740 years for the promise to be kept, in the form of the Bethlehem baby. In "Messiah," G. F. Handel set the King James Version of Isaiah 9:6 to such sublime music that the words can seem to belong exclusively to Christ's story. (That's world-class bass-baritone Robbie Britt at right, appearing in a recent Nixon Library performance of selections from Handel's oratorio.) Yet Christians' challenge is to enjoy the wonder of Isaiah's prophecy without diminishing the significance in his own time of his powerful vision of peace and God's saving power.

My church friend Randall Lanham (above) deftly walked that frontier while appearing as the great prophet in my 5th grade religion classes at St. John's. Randall's message for the children: "God always keeps his promises," whether the Hebrew Testament's promise of justice and righteousness or the New Testament's of a Christ to save all creation.

Trig Palin 1, Andrew Sullivan 0

Andrew Sullivan’s modified limited hang-out on the Palin pass-the-baby story. Having let his adjutant rebut him last week on his own site, “The Daily Dish,” he has announced a suspension of the distasteful campaign he has been waging to get Gov. Palin to prove she is Trig’s mother.

It’s a relief he won’t be harrassing Trig anymore. It’s a shame he wasn’t accountable for having republished a lie on his Atlantic Monthly-owned web site without checking the facts. No other “Atlantic” journalist would have, and he shouldn’t have, either. Ever since, Sullivan says he’s just been trying to get the truth. It’s actually looked as though he’s been trying to get Palin or Sen. McCain to provide records or some other official response so that he would be able to say he had posed a legitimate question. In this effort, he has failed.

Whenever he insists, as he does yet again in his last (we hope) post, that by republishing a lie and then defending his behavior for months, he was just asking questions or expressing opinions, he underscores how desperately we need newspapers, or at least professionally-trained newspaper reporters. The Hackosphere — though not Sullivan; this was a bizarre aberration — is still too prone to sophomoric and poorly-formed content, and blatant lies carefully disguised as fact (what first fooled Sullivan). Bloggers also go to bed too early. Last week no “Atlantic” blogger had anything on the failure of the auto bailout until the next morning.

The Trig story was the most effective libel of the ‘08 campaign, and Sullivan will always be complicit in it. He gets some credit for letting a contrarian colleague say his piece and using it as a means of making a passably graceful exit from a disgraceful episode in the history of the so-called new media.

Hey, Ron: How About "Moorer/Nixon"?

During 1969-73, before he was consumed by Watergate, Richard Nixon redrew the geopolitical map, repositioning the United States in relationship to the Soviet Union and China and helping usher in the era of globalism. His administration also conducted secret talks with the North Vietnamese in the hope of bringing U.S. involvement in Indochina to an honorable end.

These initiatives and others made Pentagon hawks so nervous that they spied on the President and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger. Papers illegally stolen from the White House over a 13-month period by a Navy yeoman were passed up the line to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Thomas Moorer (pictured here), who eventually admitted he'd read them without inquiring too aggressively where they'd come from. The thefts were uncovered by the famed White House Plumbers, figures of fun for most historians, little-sung heroes in this case.

New details about the Radford affair, which struck at the heart of the concept of civilian authority over the military, are revealed in an article by Fox News's James Rosen, author of a remarkable new biography of John Mitchell whose new insights about Watergate and John Dean, though startling, didn't merit a review in the New York Times.

Perhaps for some of the same reasons, Radford never got as much as attention as Watergate. Those who like to say that Mr. Nixon was undermining the Constitution have never seemed exercised about the tunnel the brass were busy digging under the White House. As "Frost/Nixon" shows, Nixon as sinner is potentially big box office. When he was sinned against? Rarely green lighted.

One reason may be that for the sake of the military's credibility, the President chose not to make more of the affair. According to Rosen, here's how he put it on one of the tapes:

"Admiral Moorer," Nixon told an aide in May 1973, "I could have screwed him on that and been a big hero, you know. I could have screwed the whole Pentagon about that damn thing ... Why didn't I do it? Because I thought more of the services."

Steve's Breakdown

According to the good folks at "No Depression," the music magazine for our times, comedian Steve Martin (who hails from Orange County, California) is making a banjo album, due out in 2009. He's a pretty good bluegrass picker, as you'll see in this 2006 Letterman performance in which he appears alongside Earl Scruggs playing "Foggy Mountain Breakdown," which Scruggs says he wrote in about 15 minutes in 1949. Those of a certain age will remember it from "Bonnie and Clyde."

Perfect Songs: "We'll Sweep Out The Ashes In the Morning" (1969)

Joe Doe and Kathleen Edwards (written by Gram Parsons)