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By Gregory Taggart, January 1, 2013 10:37 pm

My brother Chris gave me a book for Christmas, a book by Ireland’s Aidan Higgins titled Blind Man’s Bluff.

The book, a series of short anecdotes, cartoons, and photos, contains the following two photos stacked on top one another on page 45:

The word chilling comes to mind.

Update: I was in a hurry last night. I want to add that I was struck by two questions when I first saw Higgins’s juxtaposition of the two photos, both of which I’d seen before: What was he thinking? And what do I think? We can only guess at his thoughts, but my guess is that they were close to mine: Hero worship is bad in that it can lead to unspeakable evil. Hitler would be but a footnote to history–if that–but for the adoring masses who apparently saw him as someone who could solve their problems and could see nothing more for some reason.

I hesitate to bring President Obama on stage at this point because I’ve just mentioned Hitler. I certainly don’t see Mr. Obama as Hitler. I don’t even see him as a bad man. In fact, from what I can tell, he’s a good man, trying to do good things. I don’t approve of some of his methods, but neither do I approve of what a lot of politicians do.

No, my gripe is really not with the President. Mine is with those who adore him, those–the media–who fail to probe, to question, to properly vet him and his policies. We need a vigorous, honest, critical press, one that gives equal treatment of both sides of the aisle and every side of an issue. We don’t have it, and if we don’t get it, don’t be surprised if someday we get something akin to what Germany gave the world.

Blind people men are easily bluffed. Unfortunately, much of what we see of the world and how we see it comes via the media. Right now, that view is squinted at best.

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By Gregory Taggart, January 1, 2013 1:29 pm

Ann Althouse has been full of suggestions for New Year’s Resolutions this year. For example, she’s going to write about The Great Gatsby, one marvelous sentence at a time. (The idea came to her as she responded to another fellow’s goal to again read a book a day in 2013.) I may follow along.

For another, she’s made it her goal to read Wikipedia’s history pages for all 206 countries of the world. I am going to follow her lead on that one. Given the changes to the world map over the last 20 years, I need a good refresher course in geography.

And you?

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By Gregory Taggart, January 1, 2013 1:03 pm

I will not attempt to score political points with this post. I’ll just say that the New York Times has some incredible photographs from the Heart Mountain Internment Camp between Powell and Cody, Wyoming (I’ve always referred to is at the Relocation rather than Internment Camp). The interesting mountain in the background of a couple of the photos is the camp’s namesake: Heart Mountain. My father and Uncle helped build the camp. You can read more about the camp here.