Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book TV 20150316

There are two different one. First term in the second term. We see more africanamerican president. He knows who he is and hes not ashamed. First term he had to be strategic. There was a fight in the white house. He was the president who gave the payout after waiting for that money. He was the president who did that but at the same time it wasnt necessarily im going to do it. It took tactics. Are you surprised that barack obama didnt make a stronger case in his first . Know because looking back he had to be who he was. You can watch this and other us online at tv. Org. Ofat the chief of staff of the air force assembles a list of books he recommends for servicemen and women. Heres the 2015 list. We rarely see politicians on the left as contributing to this in fact we usually see them as the champions, right . At the time the congress was charging. Fullstop had for steam ahead with this law and order approach, then the senator joe biden basically not only cheered them on that helped them along. Some of you are old enough to remember the ad the Bush Administration campaign of 1988. Everybody looked at that and said that is so incredibly racially charged. Its a scare tactic and a very subtle way and that is pretty much to take on that ad but the fact is in 1988, joe biden sort of got on a boat he picked up the very same thing and said come and im quoting, one of my objectives quite frankly is to lock him up in jail. Now if you heard what he did everybody would want to lock him up but this might have been an opportunity for him to sort of give the time to offer some balance to mitigate this push by offering the other side. Not everybody is. There are other ways of preventing. But he jumped on the bandwagon. What i find really troubling about with them senator joe biden did is in 1994 when congress was putting in place with bill clinton called the toughest and smartest crime law ever enacted in the history of the country to racial advocates that i showed you before, what they wanted to do as clinton is expanding the Death Penalty to dozens more they wanted simply to include in that they Racial Justice measure and thats what they told him. It would have said okay for those who are in states where there are clear statistical disparities in the capital sentencing along racial lines lets allow the defendants in those cases to present that as evidence and then prosecutors would have to rebut that to show that there are nonracial incidences influences and its not about racism, just a very relatively innocuous way of helping to mitigate this. Joe biden basically said Racial Justice is not as important as passing the bill. More specifically he said the question is whether to accept the house provision Racial Justice which will kill the bill and that was correct and then eventually signed by president clinton. You can watch this and others online at the booktv. Org. Each month Representativetom Cole releases a list on his website. Heres a look at the recommended books that focus on the life of the white isenhour. Representative cole is currently reading those angry days by lynne olson which looks at the internal debate over the u. S. Involvement in world war ii. And he recently finished Paul Johnsons eisenhower a life. He recommends Steven Ambrose two volume biography of eisenhower which traces the past from soldier to president. Next on the list is going home to glory a memoir of the president by his grandson David Eisenhower and his wife julie nixon eisenhower. Also on the list is eisenhower the white house years by the editor at large of the los angeles times. Next is the personal account of the strategies, battles and outcome of world war ii in crusade in europe. What we witnessed in the first couple of months of the uprising is something i found inspiring not as a student just in politics but a student of history and of politics and identity all over the world. I had come to the leave as a child of the triangulation and moderate reform that radical change is impossible and system change is impossible that individuals can work if they work hard they can maybe nudge the government policy one way or another baby to have a big win here or there. But i believe that thats in the nature and the government and state systems were very hardships to turn and that it was naive, idealistic and foolish to think otherwise. And the moment that lasted about a year after the first uprising began showed that in fact it is not impossible and that in this case something that all of the experts knew was impossible had happened and millions of people who were terrified and refuse to utter even the smallest political speech were suddenly from one end to the next willing to be killed and rushed towards the police in the interest of the slogan that you took in the idealistic social justice in the fall of the dictatorship. That to me was mindbending and very humbling. As an individual and also as a reporter it was incredible to see. So how do you create the new politics and a broken society in which there is almost no freedom and one of the primary tools of government is to routinely humiliate your population, treat them as subjects in schools in the hopes that they internalize that and never challenge you. It is a very tall order to do that but we dont know today how thats going to turn out. But i do know that whatever is going to happen is good to take at least a generation to unfold. History doesnt work on the cable news cycle. It works on the cycle of generations. Booktv continues with afterwards. The former rector of the office of National Drug control policy under president george h. W. Bush argues against the legalization of marijuana with Jonah Goldberg Senior Editor of the national review. Host good to see you. First we shall have the usual disclosures we know each other and longtime acquaintance of your friend. You actually must have been awake for quite a while now. [laughter] guest a long time. Im not drug, a little bit of caffeine. Host im glad you got that out of there. As you know, my inclination in a situation like this is to make a lot of pot jokes. Guest i have a couple, too too. Host they are tasteful and in trouble to the story. One of the things about the show is that it is for offers and interviewers that it gives the author a chance to answer the greatest of all book tour questions what is your blog about. So what is your book about