Stories of the Gorilla Country, 1895The explorer Paul Du Chaillu depicted his African adventures in books, but critics accused him of exaggerating.

In 1859, Paul Du Chaillu, a young explorer of French origin and adopted American nationality, wandered out of the jungle after a four-year expedition in Gabon.  He brought with him complete specimens of 20 gorillas, an animal almost unknown outside West Africa.  The gorilla’s resemblance to humans astonished many people, especially after Darwin published “On the Origin of Species” later that year.  The politician Edwin M. Stanton was soon calling Abraham Lincoln “the original gorilla” and joking that Du Chaillu was a fool to have gone to Africa for what he could as easily have found in Springfield, Ill.
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On Tuesday, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People released this statement: “Over 2,000 N.A.A.C.P. delegates today unanimously passed a resolution—as amended—called ‘The Tea Party Movement,’ asking for the repudiation of racist Tea Party leaders.”

That same day, a White House official told ABC News’s Jake Tapper that “al Qaeda is a racist organization that treats black Africans like cannon fodder and does not value human life.” (It was a followup to President Obama’s statement that “these terrorist organizations … do not regard African life as valuable in and of itself.”)

A day later, an Iowa Tea Party group “replaced a billboard comparing President Barack Obama to Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin, calling the sign a bad decision that reflected poorly on the organization.”
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• Blogger Field Negro on the incident at a swim club outside Philadelphia where more than 60 black children were denied access to swim:

The Valley Swim Club is a nice Sunday morning jog from my house, and the type of people who make up the membership are the ones who joined to get away from all the Negroes who might pollute the city pools. So this story is not surprising. What’s surprising is how surprised everyone seems to be that this actually happened. Obviously they don’t read black blogs. And they certainly don’t keep up with the racism chasers. If they did, they would realize that we can’t keep up. Racism is all over the place, and chasing it is becoming just too damn hard.

• Crunchy Con: Rod Dreher asks, “Why shouldn’t the Uighurs riot?”

Why is it cause for celebration and cheer in the West when the Tibetans riot against Chinese oppression, but a cause for alarm and condemnation when the Uighurs do the same thing? If the Uighurs were trying to establish a Taliban-like state, that would be one thing. But I’ve not seen evidence that they want anything more than to be treated with justice, especially in their own historic land. If you have other information, please share it.

• London Times: Rubiya Kadeer writes, “I was imprisoned from 1999 until 2005 for using my position as a delegate to a top Chinese governmental body to call upon the Chinese Government to change its policies toward Uighurs.”

Unfortunately, there is no place within Chinese officialdom for the expression of concern over ethnic policies. While in prison, I was subject to extended periods of solitary confinement and medical neglect. But far more horrifying were the times I was forced to witness torture of my fellow prisoners — those without an official government position, or the support of groups such as Amnesty International.

• Washington Post: Oscar Arias writes, “This coup d’état [in Honduras] demonstrates, once more, that the combination of powerful militaries and fragile democracies creates a terrible risk.”

It demonstrates, once more, that until we improve this balance, we will always leave open the door to those who would obtain power through force — whether a little or a great deal, approved by the majority or only by a few. Furthermore, it shows what happens when our governments divert to their militaries resources that could be used to strengthen their democratic institutions, to build a culture of respect for human rights and to increase their levels of human development. Such foolish choices ensure that a nation’s democracy is little more than an empty shell, or a meaningless speech.

• Daily Beast: Richard Brookhiser tells what it’s like to get un-promoted by William Buckley.
• Informed Comment: Juan Coles writes about Tal Afar, “a northern city [in Iraq] with a mostly Turkmen population and some Arabs,” where at least 34 people were killed this morning in a suicide bombing.

US military operations in Tal Afar caused the Turkmen Sunnis to leave for the most part, leading to a take-over of the city by the Shiite Turkmen. The Sunni Turkmen were allied with a minority Sunni Arab community, and both had thrown in with the secular Baath regime. After the US overthrew the Baath, many Sunnis in the region turned toward vigilante fundamentalism or “al-Qaeda,” provoking a fight between the Sunnis and the Shiites. The Shiites won, with the help of US and NATO fighter pilots, and turned Tal Afar into a Shiite place.. The angry Sunni guerrillas are the ones most likely behind the bombing on Thursday.

That is, the massive ethnic cleansings in Iraq, under the nose of the US military forces, bodes ill for Iraq.

• World Affairs: Andrew Bacevich says that “for those today seeking to understand how the United States blundered so badly in Iraq and Afghanistan, The Quiet American remains an essential text.”

America means well: on this point the vast majority of Americans will permit no dissent. . . .

When U.S. policy goes awry, therefore, the culprit might be bad luck, bad planning, or bad tactics, but American motives lie beyond reproach. Thus, the reassuring take on the Iraq War, now emerging as the conventional wisdom, is that—however mismanaged the war may have been early on—the “surge” engineered by General David Petraeus has redeemed the enterprise: a conclusion doubly welcome in that it obviates any need to revisit questions about the war’s purpose and justification, while meshing nicely with the Obama administration’s inclination simply to have done with Iraq and move on.

The implications of trivializing Iraq are already evident in the debate regarding “Af-Pak”: the overriding concern becomes one of finding the general best able to apply to Obama’s war the “lessons” taken from Bush’s war. That such an approach should find favor in Washington would not have surprised Graham Greene. Those who conceived the Iraq War, the cheerleaders who promoted it from the sidelines, and critics of that war who have now succeeded to positions of power share a common interest in wiping the slate clean, refurbishing the claim that the United States meant well because the United States always means well. No doubt mistakes were made. Yet America’s benign intentions expiate sins committed along the way—or allow those in authority to assign responsibility for any sins to soldiers who in doing Washington’s bidding became sources of embarrassment.

• Civil Eats: Nevin Cohen says, “We are in the midst of a revolution in urban agriculture.”

In a growing number of cities, suburbs, and small towns, community groups and entrepreneurs have discovered innovative ways to harvest and grow food, using networks of relatively small plots of public and private land and shared resources, and in the process, forging novel relationships among producers and consumers.

While these innovations are based on historical precedents, from the radical Diggers movement of 17th century Britain, to sharecropping arrangements, the victory garden movements during the World Wars, and recent community supported agriculture systems, they are unique in that they apply social networking tools, mapping technologies, unusual land tenure arrangements, or novel business models to forage and farm cities and suburbs.

• Real-Time Economics: Conor Dougherty passes on the results of a national study that shows that in 2007, the amount of time drivers spent stuck in traffic dropped for the first time in 25 years.

People living in the 439 metro areas surveyed in the report spent 36 hours in traffic in 2007, an hour less than in 2006 (”in traffic” is defined as wasted time that is above and beyond than the natural length of the commute). In the over 25 years of the TTI mobility report, this is the first time congestion time has fallen nationally, said David Schrank, a researcher at TTI and a co-author of the report. And declines are likely to continue through 2008 amid last year’s run-up in gas prices and a deepening recession.

John McCain and Sarah Palin are taking a lot of heat for going to negative on the stump, and while claims that their criticisms of Barack Obama are inherently racist may seem a stretch, there are some conservatives who offer what may be wise counsel. Former Bush speechwriter David Frum, for example:

Republicans used negative campaigning successfully against Michael Dukakis and John Kerry, it’s true. But 1988 and 2004 were both years of economic expansion, pro-incumbent years. 2008 is like 1992, only worse. If we couldn’t beat Clinton in 1992 by pointing to his own personal draft-dodging and his own personal womanizing, how do we expect to defeat Obama in a much more anti-incumbent year by attacking the misconduct of people with whom he once kept company (but doesn’t any more)?

Here’s another thing to keep in mind:

Those who press this Ayers line of attack are whipping Republicans and conservatives into a fury that is going to be very hard to calm after November. Is it really wise to send conservatives into opposition in a mood of disdain and fury for the next president, incidentally the first African-American president? Anger is a very bad political adviser. It can isolate us and push us to the extremes at exactly the moment when we ought to be rebuilding, rethinking, regrouping and recruiting.

I’m not suggesting that we remit our opposition to a hypothetical President Obama. Only that an outgunned party will need to stay cool. A big part of Obama’s appeal is his self-command. It’s a genuinely impressive quality. Let’s emulate it. We’ll be needing it.

“It’s not the negative campaigning that’s the problem,” adds Allahpunidt at Michelle Malkin’s Hot Air.

“It’s the fact that negative campaigning’s being offered as the entree instead of the side dish. Exit question: Is there still time left to whip up something hearty and nutritious?”

Along the same lines, Danny Shea at Huffington Post reports on a little chat The Times’s David Brooks had with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg on Monday. Here’s his transcript of Brooks’s comments:

[Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at the National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley famously said he’d rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But he didn’t think those were the only two options. He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I’m afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.

This leads Robert Stacy McCain at the American Spectator to call Brooks the “Dr. Kervorkian of conservatism.” “God forbid any ordinary American should ever aspire to be a conservative,” writes McCain. “To Brooks, conservatism is not a political movement, it is an intellectual clique. Certainly this Brooksian clique would never admit to its ranks a small-town boy with a diploma from Eureka College who cribbed his anecdotes from The Reader’s Digest.”

Allahpundit (yeah, again) takes a look at Palin’s latest interview, and sees improvement:

She [is] clearly is having fun out there, in spite of the nastiness towards her, in spite of the economic freakout, in spite of Maverick’s downturn in the polls, in spite of having been tasked with being the bad guy in bringing out the brass knuckles against The One. Is she resolutely optimistic? Expecting defeat but putting on a brave face? Just enjoying the attention and the rush of campaigning? What’s the frequency, Kenneth? The base sees Reaganesque sunniness, David Brooks sees someone too studiously ignorant to care what’s going on around her. I don’t know what we’re going to talk about all day if McCain loses and she has to go back to Alaska.

A concern the Opinionator shares, Allahpundit.