If Ronald Reagan engaged in racist behavior for appealing to white southerners at the Neshoba County Fair, then so did another candidate who liberals like Paul Krugman and Bob Hebert always forget to mention.

Krugman and Herbert also forgot to chide 1988 Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis for speaking atÂ…the Neshoba County Fair! The Massachusetts governor ignored Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner on the 24^th anniversary of their murders, which were committed about 12 miles away.

So, is Michael Dukakis a racist? You know, especially since, as Kevin Drum points out, he was there seeking to appeal to white Southern conservatives. Was Dukakis a racist – especially given his failure to note that he was speaking on the ACTUAL ANNIVERSARY of the discovery of the bodies of the slain civil rights workers. So if Reagan was engaging in a racist strategy, how can Dukakis not be so condemned – unless, of course, the critics are really engaged in a rank act of political hypocrisy with their application of a double standard. Especially since, as the New York Times itself noted at the time, the fair had nearly a century of history as a prime campaign spot for candidates – one which predated the murders and which continues into the present day.

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Is there nothing that Leonardo could not do?

It's a new Da Vinci code, but this time it could be for real. An Italian musician and computer technician claims to have uncovered musical notes encoded in Leonardo Da Vinci's "Last Supper," raising the possibility that the Renaissance genius might have left behind a somber composition to accompany the scene depicted in the 15th-century wall painting.
"It sounds like a requiem," Giovanni Maria Pala said. "It's like a soundtrack that emphasizes the passion of Jesus."

Painted from 1494 to 1498 in Milan's Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, the "Last Supper" vividly depicts a key moment in the Gospel narrative: Jesus' last meal with the 12 Apostles before his arrest and crucifixion, and the shock of Christ's followers as they learn that one of them is about to betray him.

The case made is interesting – and the illustration does show what could be interpreted as the notation for Gregorian Chant. This could certainly make for an interesting topic for scholarly debate for years.

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You know, for those of you who were taught that Joe McCarthy made such things up, and that there were not penetrations of sensitive programs and agencies by ideologues working for Moscow.

He had all-American cover: born in Iowa, college in Manhattan, Army buddies with whom he played baseball.

George Koval also had a secret. During World War II, he was a top Soviet spy, code named Delmar and trained by StalinÂ’s ruthless bureau of military intelligence.

Atomic spies are old stuff. But historians say Dr. Koval, who died in his 90s last year in Moscow and whose name is just coming to light publicly, was probably one of the most important spies of the 20th century.

On Nov. 2, the Kremlin startled Western scholars by announcing that President Vladimir V. Putin had posthumously given the highest Russian award to a Soviet agent who penetrated the Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb.

The announcement hailed Dr. Koval as “the only Soviet intelligence officer” to infiltrate the project’s secret plants, saying his work “helped speed up considerably the time it took for the Soviet Union to develop an atomic bomb of its own.”

Of course, we've known for years that stuff like this went on, but a loud chorus of denial cried out from the Left. Even now, when mounds of evidence has shown there were communists in the Departments of State and Defense and that the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss were guilty as sin, those who espouse such positions are called Red-baiters. Will one more candid admission by the heirs of the Kremlin do anything to lay to rest the canard that there was no Red Menace? I'd like to hope that it would, but I fear that ideology will continue to trump truth on this matter.

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In 1980, Ronald Reagan spoke to a county fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi. It has often been claimed that the event was an appeal to racism by the Republican candidate, given a civil rights atrocity committed by members of the Democrat Party's paramilitary terrorist wing, the KKK, sixteen years earlier. Often overlooked was the fact that in the same week he gave a speech to the National Urban League which was a specific outreach to black Americans by pomising an agenda for economic opportunity.

New York Times columnist David Brooks sorts out the history of the speech and how it came to be given.

Reagan’s speech at the fair was short and cheerful, and can be heard at: www.onlinemadison.com/ftp/reagan/reaganneshoba.mp3. He told several jokes, and remarked: “I know speaking to this crowd, I’m speaking to a crowd that’s 90 percent Democrat.”

He spoke mostly about inflation and the economy, but in the middle of a section on schools, he said this: “Programs like education and others should be turned back to the states and local communities with the tax sources to fund them. I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can at the community level and the private level.”

The use of the phrase “states’ rights” didn’t spark any reaction in the crowd, but it led the coverage in The Times and The Post the next day.

Reagan flew to New York and delivered his address to the Urban League, in which he unveiled an urban agenda, including enterprise zones and an increase in the minimum wage. He was received warmly, but not effusively. Much of the commentary that week was about whether ReaganÂ’s outreach to black voters would work.

You can look back on this history in many ways. It’s callous, at least, to use the phrase “states’ rights” in any context in Philadelphia. Reagan could have done something wonderful if he’d mentioned civil rights at the fair. He didn’t. And it’s obviously true that race played a role in the G.O.P.’s ascent.

Still, the agitprop version of this week — that Reagan opened his campaign with an appeal to racism — is a distortion, as honest investigators ranging from Bruce Bartlett, who worked for the Reagan administration and is the author of “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy,” to Kevin Drum, who writes for Washington Monthly, have concluded.

But still the slur spreads. ItÂ’s spread by people who, before making one of the most heinous charges imaginable, couldnÂ’t even take 10 minutes to look at the evidence. It posits that there was a master conspiracy to play on the alleged Klan-like prejudices of American voters, when there is no evidence of that conspiracy. And, of course, in a partisan age there are always people eager to believe this stuff.

Of course there is such an audience, given that the version attacking Reagan fits the false narrative built up by Democrat partisans about the GOP being a party of uneducated racists -- a narrative which is racist in its disregard for southern whites. ANd indeed, it overlooks the fact that, as Reagan points out in the speech, much of his audience was composed of Democrats -- folks who may have voted for Reagan that fall, but who also cast ballots for Democrats for every other office in that same election.

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Given that the "mint-on-the-pillow" Democrats constantly insist that failure to include that amenity constitutes a war crime at Guantanamo Bay, let's take a look at a book that examines real war crimes.

The perpetrators of some of the worst atrocities of the Second World War remain alive and unpunished in Japan, according to a damning new book.

Painstaking research by British historian Mark Felton reveals that the wartime behaviour of the Japanese Navy was far worse than their counterparts in Hitler's Kriegsmarine.

According to Felton, officers of the Imperial Japanese Navy ordered the deliberately sadistic murders of more than 20,000 Allied seamen and countless civilians in cold-blooded defiance of the Geneva Convention.

One favored tactic? Beheading prisoners. Sound like anyone we know today? That would be the so-called "freedom fighters" that Michael Moore and Cindy Sheehan say are the moral equivalent of America's founding fathers.

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As a history teacher, one of the things of which I am acutely aware is that history is all around us -- and today's current events are tomorrow's history. Our public figures and pop culture icons will be remembered tomorrow as the folks who shaped history and culture for an era. And each day, a little bit of history dies as we lose the participants in key events of earlier generations.

Yesterday was one of those days when there was no doubt that we lost a major figure in an important event.

Brig. Gen. Paul W. Tibbets Jr., the commander and pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in the final days of World War II, died today at his home in Columbus, Ohio. He was 92.

His death was announced by a friend, Gerry Newhouse, who said General Tibbets had been in decline with a variety of ailments. Mr. Newhouse said General Tibbets had requested that there be no funeral or headstone, fearing it would give his detractors a place to protest.

In the hours before dawn on Aug. 6, 1945, the Enola Gay lifted off from the island of Tinian carrying a uranium atomic bomb assembled under extraordinary secrecy in the vast endeavor known as the Manhattan Project.

Six and a half hours later, under clear skies, then-Colonel Tibbets, of the Army Air Forces, guided the four-engine plane he had named in honor of his mother toward the bombÂ’s aiming point, the T-shaped Aioi Bridge in the center of Hiroshima, the site of an important Japanese army headquarters.

At 8:15 a.m. local time, the bomb known to its creators as Little Boy dropped free at an altitude of 31,000 feet. Forty-three seconds later, at 1,890 feet above ground zero, it exploded in a nuclear inferno that left tens of thousands dead and dying and turned much of Hiroshima, a city of some 250,000 at the time, into a scorched ruin.

Colonel Tibbets executed a well-rehearsed diving turn to avoid the blast effect.

In his memoir “The Tibbets Story,” he told of “the awesome sight that met our eyes as we turned for a heading that would take us alongside the burning, devastated city.”

“The giant purple mushroom, which the tail-gunner had described, had already risen to a height of 45,000 feet, 3 miles above our own altitude, and was still boiling upward like something terribly alive,” he remembered.

It is easy for us today to question the morality of dropping the atomic bomb when and where we did. That said, there was no question that those in 1945 saw it as an appropriate decision, one that would shorten the war and ultimately save American lives. That there are those today who would revile Paul Tibbetts and his crew is symptomatic of a fundamental conceit that prevails in modern society -- the assumption that contemporary moral outlooks are somehow morally and intellectually superior to those made by other people at other times. Rather than place ourselves in the shoes of those intimately involved in historical events and seek to understand the, too many people would instead look askance at the failure of men and women of an earlier age to act and think like men and women living in the early twenty-first century.

This is not to say that we shouldn't question the morality or wisdom of the actions of historical figures -- indeed, we debated just such issues during a discussion of the slave trade in my classes this week. But as students of history, it is more important that we understand what was done and the reasons why, and to draw lessons accordingly.

And so America now bids farewell to a hero -- one whose deeds helped to end the most horrific conflict of the twentieth century. And if there is room for questioning the wisdom and the correctness of the policy decision that led Paul Tibbetts and his crew to drop the first atomic bomb ever used as a weapon, there can be no question of the importance of the men of Enola Gay -- or their heroism and love of country.

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