Daily Archives: June 4, 2009

Tianamen Remembered

by

What I Saw at Tianamen by Claudia Rosett

It’s now 20 years since I ran through a cross-fire of tracer bullets, heading into Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in the early hours of June 4 to witness the end of the uprising in which millions of Chinese, in the spring of 1989, peacefully seized control of their own capital and demanded democracy.

In a long career as a reporter, which has included both tanks and gunfire elsewhere, there is no story I have covered that has been more haunting, inspiring and important than that Tiananmen uprising. And there is no story that, in its plotline, has been more heartbreaking.

During the protests, on one of those warm spring evenings just before the crackdown, I was wandering around Tiananmen, notebook in hand, and came across a young man sitting in a beach chair on the monument where the demonstrators were soon to make their last stand. He had a question about what happens when you get your dream of democracy: What then? As he put it: “I know what China is dreaming. What is America dreaming?”

The answer of free societies, the old American dream, is that you may choose for yourself. Freedom, in the framework of a true democracy, allows individuals to weigh their own talents, skills and ambitions, choose their own trade-offs, and chart their own dreams. That gives rise to innovation, exuberance and prosperity of a kind that no government can plan or centrally command into existence.

When It Comes To Sotomayor-Don’t Ask,Don’t Tell

by

As AllahPundit reports the modus operandi seems to be: Dont’ ask-Don’t tell, but that isn’t working:

The real significance, of course, is that it puts the lie to the White House’s feeble spin about how Sotomayor supposedly misspoke in 2001, a position the nominee herself has been forced to adopt even though people on her own side admit it’s nonsense. Evidently, the idea that her biology makes her a superior judge has been with her for decades. The only wrinkle: In 1994 she insisted it was her gender that made her “better” and by 2001 that notion had evolved to include race as well. Nice to know that her progressivism became more “sophisticated” over time.