Memo To Karen Hughes

Karen Hughes' job in the administration is to burnish the U.S. image abroad, particularly in the Muslim world. A reasonable person would therefore think that pretty high up on the old To Do List would be say... arranging for the foundational writings of American political thought and history to be translated into Arabic, right?

Apparently not, because a year into Ms. Hughes' efforts it is up to a bunch of bleeding heart, America hating, academic elite, liburuls to see to this seemingly fundamental task.

The classics of American thought and history have been little translated into Arabic. Worse, even when they have been translated, they have appeared in small editions and fairly quickly go out of print.. Worse still, the distribution system for Arabic books is poor, and there are few public libraries, so that many books that have been published in the past are no longer available to most readers. We have therefore begun a project to translate important books by great Americans and about America into Arabic, and to subsidize their publication so that they can be bought inexpensively.

We intend to have all the founding fathers translated -- —Madison, Franklin, Washington, Paine, and so on. We would also like to see works that treat issues in democracy and multi-culturalism, as well as engaging histories of the United States. We cannot find in OCLC, an electronic catalogue of over 40 million books held in participating libraries, any Arabic translation of the major speeches and letters of Martin Luther King or of the works of Susan B. Anthony. Eventually it would be nice to see in Arabic a good solid book about, e.g., the history of the American Jewish community, and other important minority groups about which most [sic] Arab readers would find it difficult to get solid knowledge from the sources now available to them.

The Bush Administration: Fractally fucked up.