Monday, October 11, 2004

The New Yorker on Bush Following the NYT's profile of John Kerry, the New Yorker has a fascinating profile of President Bush. 8:00:25 PM    comment []

Kwasniewski on rabble-rousing I'm currently reading Aleksander Kwasniewski's 2000 book "Our home - Poland" (PDF download available in English and Polish). It's a fairly interesting read, as re-election campaign books go. Mr Kwasniewski is rightly presidential in his attacks on partisanship, and the tendency for politicians to foretell the end of Polish democracy every time they disagree. (If Mr Kwasniewski is worried that this Chicken Licken syndrome is restricted to Poland, I'm sure the British Embassy can provide him with some back issues of the Mail, the Express and the Spectator.) I thought these paragraphs (from p. 19 of the English version), were a good illustration of the argument: The lack of dialogue, the language of political aggression and, in extreme cases, 'political apartheid', threaten to divide Poland in two halves. This is a great danger for democracy and Poland's future. I do not want to sound sarcastic, but this would be proof of a lack of imagination - felling the bough on which our entire political establishment is sitting. When I was a journalist, and editor-in-chief at the student weekly itd and later Sztandar Mlodych, I always opposed using the language of aggression. I believed that the task of the media, among other things, is to promote the political culture of the general public, to accustom people to the strength of arguments and not just strong language and accuusations. 8:41:29 AM    comment []