Opinion: In today’s pages
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The editorial board marks the passing of Boris Yeltsin without quite mourning him:
He embraced the rhetoric and ideals of democracy but cultivated none of its habits. He was erratic, autocratic, arrogant, unforgiving and drunken. He plowed salt into the political earth that his successors would have to cultivate when he administered economic ‘shock therapy’ without the anesthetic of a safety net or the rule of law, allowing communist bureaucrats to morph into oligarchic kleptocrats before Russian citizens knew what hit them. He invaded Chechnya against the advice of every advisor who knew the region and waged a war of shocking brutality against civilians.
The board is kinder to Nigeria (seeing the glass as half full for the country’s shaky democracy) and drug users (supporting a program to give them treatment instead of time).
On the next page, former presidential nominee George McGovern says Dick Cheney wrongly compared the current Democratic platform to McGovern’s 1972 plan. Columnist Jonah Goldberg probably finds that scuffle unnecessary, since he notes today that most Americans are completely clueless. Contributing editor Max Boot keeps hope alive on Iraq, noting that once-violent Ramadi is now fairly calm.
Virginia Tech still dominates the letters page. See what an Asian American psychotherpaist has to say about mental health in the Asian American community, and why Elayne Rodriguez-Haven thinks The Times’ coverage is ‘overly sensationalized’ and ‘appears to blame Seung-hui Cho’s family and culture for the killings.’