VINDICA

Pat Buchanan cautions against blindly trusting democracy and the belief that people will do the right thing. After all, he argues, people supported Hitler and people cheered when British and German soldiers marched off to WW I. “Hear no more of trust in men, but rather bind them down from mischief with the chains of the Constitution.” - Thomas Jefferson

For a very long time, the left has always viewed itself as having a nuanced position on various national issues while they saw the right as seeing everything in a simplistic black and white manner. Although the author Lillian B. Rubin does not say it explicitly, he exposes the extremism and silence of the left on a whole range of issues ranging from abortion to race relations. One powerful example he gives is the case of Bill Cosby scolding black parents for not taking responsibility for their kids. The white liberals all chided him, while ironically Barak Obama and other black leaders in the government endorsed his words ("...parents have to parent . . . children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white." - Obama).

"20th century India may well have derived its imagined history from Narayan"

This New Yorker review of recent books on Voltair manages to paint a succinct and vivid picture of the man and his times.

In Goa and in Jharkhand the governers have behaved in a clearcut unconstitutional manner. I am not a fan of NDA, but wrong is wrong. To their credit, the NDA never seemed to have misused its power in the Center to ride roughshod over democracy in the States. They accepted several unfavourable verdits, including in Jammu/Kashmir as mechanics of democracy. As soon as the Congress is back in power, the culture of manipulating state politics is back in vogue. This is a regression to the bad old days of Article 356 . The congress is throwing away gains and maturity that accrued to India as a whole because of BJP's concsentious stand on this issue.