The Bronze Soldier, whose removal from downtown Tallinn last week prompted riots in which hundreds were arrested and one person -- a Russian national -- was killed, has been restored at a new location in the Defense Forces Cemetery. I'd have blogged about this anyway, but there's a fortuitous Jewish angle that justifies my paycheck:

The moving of the memorial drew criticism from others. The Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center called it an insult to the victims of the Nazis.

While recognizing the crimes committed under Soviet rule, ''it must never be forgotten that it was the Red Army which effectively stopped the mass murder conducted by the Nazis and their local collaborators on Estonian soil,'' Efraim Zuroff, the center's chief Nazi hunter, said in a statement.

It's also true that more Russian soldiers died in World War II, mainly as a result of Stalin's tactical blunders, than any other nationality involved in combat. However, even before Hitler invaded Poland, he was bartering over the ownership of Estonia and the other Baltic states with Stalin, who wanted them within the Soviet "sphere of influence" (really a military buffer zone between Europe and Russia). A metallic Ivan is not of quite the same ideological insult as a statue of Lenin, Stalin or even Marx would be. Plenty of brave and courageous Ivans perished on Baltic soil doing exactly what Zuroff says they did. Still, for ethnic Estonians, to be reminded of having one's country turned a plaything between two blood-thirsty Colossi is another point of sensitivity that deserves to be kept in mind.

Nikolay Kovalyov, the Duma's heavyhanded envoy to Tallinn, is absurd to insist that the Estonian government resign over the fury and chaos the relocation project has incited. (What other response can he have imagined?) But -- and how rare it is to say this these days -- one can appreciate Moscow's point: The monument used to perch on a sepulchre containing the remains of 13 Red Army soldiers. Any attempt to make their tomb less august than it was is thus subject to the queasy-making term desecration.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 11:50 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

"Interested in the world beyond his own" might have been a cute double entendre for a preacher if it didn't actually refer to cuddling up to dictators and Jew-baiting demagogues:

Mr. Obama was entranced by Mr. Wright, whose sermons fused analysis of the Bible with outrage at what he saw as the racism of everything from daily life in Chicago to American foreign policy. Mr. Obama had never met a minister who made pilgrimages to Africa, welcomed women leaders and gay members and crooned Teddy Pendergrass rhythm and blues from the pulpit. Mr. Wright was making Trinity a social force, initiating day care, drug counseling, legal aid and tutoring. He was also interested in the world beyond his own; in 1984, he traveled to Cuba to teach Christians about the value of nonviolent protest and to Libya to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, along with the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Mr. Wright said his visits implied no endorsement of their views.

This past Martin Luther King Day I attended a service at the New York Synagogue, presided over by Rabbi Marc Schneier, the co-founder of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, which aims to repair any cultural breach that may have developed between the black and Jewish communities. Russell Simmons, the other founder as well as Schneier's friend, was an invited speaker. Simmons isn't known for being the savviest velor tracksuit-wearing mogul alive, but please believe me when I tell you that it was value for money to hear him mention the name Farrakhan as an admirable civil rights leaderamidst a packed house of davening Reform Manhattan Jews. I'm not sure if the congregation misheard him or was just too polite to raise a fuss (itself a sign of just how far black-Jewish relations have improved). But Farrakhan's enduring prestige within ostensibly progressive black quarters is a disgrace, and it should be a bigger one that no amount of race sensitivity or political correctness mitigates.

Rep. Keith Ellison, he of the Thomas Jefferson Koran oath-taking cleverness, lied about his affiliation with the Nation of Islam and its sordid bowtied poobah, and when Ellison was found out on it and offered a feckless and deceitful apology to Minnesotan Jewish groups, which calmly let the matter go and in some cases even endorsed him.

Any national candidate's religion is always legitimate grounds for inquiry but much has been made recently of Mitt Romney's Mormonism. Given that religion's 19th century cult origins and, shall we say, financially informed theodicy, there's good reason to expect the Republican candidate to be taxed on his real thoughts about Joseph Smith, polygamy and the revelations of the Angel Moroni. Romney's evasiveness or attempt to have it both ways will be used against him as evidence that he's loyal first to the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter-Day Saints, second to the U.S. Constitution. Also, that he's easily taken in by hucksters, rogues and con-man -- not the most encouraging sign of one's soundness for high government.

When asked what he thinks of his own reverened and baptizer and spiritual enabler, Obama lamely states that Jeremiah Wright is a "child of the sixties." That may well be true, but even reconstructed hippies should be held responsible for their meretricious alliances. So should candidates for the White House.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 11:49 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It's no secret that Putin has been patching up the ancient bridge between church and state since his assumption (I like that word better than election) to the high office of the Kremlin. The ex-KGB agent's reign embodies a galumphing, autocratic hybrid of Red and White Russian traditions:

The funeral was the first the Russian Orthodox Church has officiated for a head of state here since the next-to-last czar, Aleksandr III, died in 1894. It took place not in the Column Hall of the House of Trade Unions, where Soviet leaders lie in state, but rather in the Christ the Savior Cathedral, the gold-domed city landmark destroyed on Stalin’s orders and rebuilt on Yeltsin’s.

The brief Soviet interlude notwithstanding, Russia has always thought of herself as the last bulwark of Christianity following the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, and the ennervating Protestant and sectarian upheavals in Europe. It was the stuff of domestic bombast that Russia was the "third Rome," the divinely blessed colossus resting with one elbow on Europe, the other on Asia.

Church and state were only ever separated with the virtual abolition of the former in 1917. What Putin sees in the sacred today is the same messianic zeal it once lent to the twin ideas of Russian nationalism and Russian exceptionalism. The tsar used to be known as the vicar of Christ on earth, a conflation of Caesar and Pope. Indeed, when someone suggested to Peter the Great that country was in need of a holy Patriarch, he bared and then pounded his chest, declaiming that it already had one.

The history of Russian depotism, unlike the fossil record, can be played backward without any deviation in the known narrative.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 11:47 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Now that Iran is sending an envoy to the regional talks on Iraq's security, it's worth asking to what extent the Islamic Republic suborns and enables the jihadist murder in Iraq. Here is David Petraeus:

We do definitely see links to the greater al Qaeda network. . . . There is no question but that there is a network that supports the movement of foreign fighters through Syria into Iraq. . . . The Iranian involvement has really become much clearer to us and brought into much more focus during the interrogation of the members--the heads of the Qazali network and some of the key members of that network that have been in detention now for a month or more. This is the head of the secret cell network, the extremist secret cells. They were provided substantial funding, training on Iranian soil, advanced explosive munitions and technologies, as well as run-of-the-mill arms and ammunition, in some cases advice, and in some cases even a degree of direction. When we captured these individuals--the initial capture, and then there have been a number of others since then--we discovered, for example, a 22-page memorandum on a computer that detailed the planning, preparation, approval process, and conduct of the operation that resulted in five of our soldiers being killed in Karbala. . . . [T]he spectacular car bomb attacks, which we believe are generally al Qaeda and elements sort of connected to al Qaeda. Typically, in fact, still we believe that, oh, 80 percent to 90 percent of the suicide attacks are carried out by foreigners. That's a network, again, that typically brings them in through Syria and is--again a major concern and certainly a hope that Syria will crack down on the ability of people to come through their airport and so forth and then be brought into Iraq. . . .

Posted by Michael Weiss at 11:46 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I'm not made of wood, people.

Though I will say this is the furry version of the Arundel Tomb:

Versified by you-know-who:

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd--
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends could see:
A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
Their air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the grass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone finality
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 4:29 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

If you translate the good Robert Pinsky's paragraph on the necessary "difficulty" of poetry out of its academician's Guide to Life-speak --

Difficulty, after all, is one of life's essential pleasures: music, athletics, dance thrill us partly because they engage great difficulties. Epics and tragedies, no less than action movies and mysteries, portray an individual's struggle with some great difficulty. In his difficult and entertaining work Ulysses, James Joyce recounts the challenges engaged by the persistent, thwarted hero Leopold and the ambitious, narcissistic hero Stephen. Golf and video games, for certain demographic categories, provide inexhaustible, readily available sources of difficulty.

-- you have a rough equivalent to the following: "The reader is not a consideration."

Here's a secret shared by poets who write poetry worth reading and remembering: When they read a good poem they don't talk about dissociation of sensibility or even comment on the expert use of caesura or spondee. They say, "That was a bloody good poem."

T.S. Eliot is a brier patch of pretension wherein a few odd roses gasp into existence. Ezra Pound? Not just "difficult," but unintelligible, wrongheaded and scholastically disastrous (his translations of ancient Greek were on par with his politics).

As for the manufacturers of contemporary verse, that collective workshop of rhyme-less, rhythm-less insecurities, Philip Larkin got their number long before they were a number:

“Kingsley [Amis] and I used to read other people’s poems, and seriously planned getting a rubber stamp made – or rather two rubber stamps made, one for each of us – reading ‘What does this mean?’ and ‘What makes you think I care?’”

Posted by Michael Weiss at 4:21 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

All right, all right, let's just get this over with:

How strange for one man to think that he could write the story of another man, a real living man who is perfectly capable of telling his story himself--and then call it an autobiography. It is just one more instance of the accelerating mash-up of truth and falsehood in the culture, which mirrors and--who knows?--maybe even enables the manipulation of truth in politics.

Thus spake Sprezzatura, and believe you me, the comment thread of this TNR hatchet-job on Dave Eggers has fast degenerated into the inevitable guessing game of who those "Welcome back, Lee Siegel" posters really are... David Foster Wallace unspooling his funniest postmodern fabric yet? Eggers himself, acceding to the critic's main point that childlike self-deprecation is not the hallmark of serious art, but rather a six-figure advance wrapped in Linus' safety blanket? Who knows: Maybe Lee's haunting the thread himself again, this time annihilating his own stuff just to throw those wily n 1 bastards off the scent.

Now for serious business: Siegel is on-target with this piece. I came close to demanding my money back after reading Eggers' You Shall Know Our Velocity!, with its blank pages and lame insert photography and completely unlikable protagonists. (If only I'd been able to find the Icelandic MySpace page that must handle McSweeney's refunds...)

"Dude, we're in Africa. Africa!" I vaguely remember as an actual line of dialogue from YSKOS, or the gist of it, anyway. This rather scuttles Siegel's point about Eggers' "post-colonial arrogance" in thinking he'd be able to tell the part-fabricated story of a survivor of Sudanese genocide. It's not post-colonialism or arrogance that's Eggers' problem: it's the gee-whiz sense of wonderment he should have outgrown in his twenties coupled with a sickly-sentimental condescension that he displays towards his all his narrative victims, himself especially and foremost.

Siegel's ill-chosen comparison to Martin Amis is rather revealing, then:.House of Meetings excelled at a kind of filigreed human misery because its narrator had to have developed a carapace against the horrors of the Stalinist gulag and was therefore able to write about it with a molten temperature that devours euphemism and moral distancing techniques such as the face-kicking passage from What is the What Siegel excerpts. House of Meetings was also a more challenging book because that narrator was a horrible human being who still managed to come off as pitiable. Imagine Eggers' trying his hand at depicting villainy or moral ambiguity and you see why he's a failure as a novelist.

I once heard an editor of a popular political magazine describe Eggers as a "professional orphan," a judgment I thought harsh at the time. Now I'm not so sure. No doubt his very real and poignantly rendered suffering in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was rooted in the months-apart loss of both his parents, and the burden of acting a surrogate father to his brother. However, Eggers has not evolved as a writer since then, nor has his ken shown any signs of widening. Oliver Twist has not let go of the pen that tells the same story of pummeled and robbed youth. He's professed a wide reading and an assimilation of good influences (even though the man who thinks Henderson the Rain King is Bellow's best novel is probably going to want to write about Africa -- Africa! -- to his own peril), but Eggers hasn't yet realized that his true metier is for salvation, not fiction.

Let Eggers do his good works in peace. Let him save the children and the shelf space at the same time.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 4:19 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I went through a severe Hal Hartley phase my senior year of college, and I still think Henry Fool is one of the best films of the last ten years. It's about a Mephistophelean figure, the titular Henry Fool, who wanders into Woodside, Queens one day to disrupt the mildly retarded-seeming life of a garbageman called Simon Grim. Henry claims to be working on the book of the century -- sort of a Tropic of Cancer/Gravity's Rainbow affair, judging by his irritatingly oblique references to what's contained in his stack of marble notebooks. The problem? He's about as talented as anyone claiming to be working on the book of the century would be. Simon, on the other hand, is an epic poet of great promise. Henry nurtures Simon's gift, falls for Simon's sister - the nympho-maniacal Fay, played by Parker Posey - and then commits a crime years later, forcing him to swap identities with Simon (now a reclusive international figure, and recent recipient of the Nobel Prize) and flee the scruffy little burg he washed up in at film's beginning. Got that?

It doesn't matter. Hartley's movies are essentially plotless; what drives his narrative is a rhythmic, outre style of dialogue that, as I type this, I badly want to call "metro-gnomic." Imagine Whit Stillman on acid. At Noah Baumbach's house.

"Look, Simon, I made love to your mother about half an hour ago, and now I'm beginning to think that maybe it wasn't such a good idea." That and a fascist local politician and a few nods to Wordsworth, and before you know it, Camille Paglia's making a cameo as herself, dilating on the merits of pornographic literature, the kind Simon happens to traffic in to ever-widening notoriety.

Hartley's an acquired taste, but it looks as if his long awaited sequel to Henry Fool, Fay Grim, is a tad more accessible. Watch the trailer here.

Good to see Parker Posey back in front of the lens where she belongs. The only discernible bummer is that Thomas Jay Ryan, the actor who played Henry, will only appear at the end of this flick. Ryan was a real discovery, and his performance as a misanthropic anti-genius pretty much made the first film. I ran into him in a Starbucks on Montague Street not too long ago. Nice guy, with a striking resemblance to Lenin if he brought out the Gillette.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 4:17 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I nominate that as the title for Tom Stoppard's sequel to The Coast of Utopia, updated for the 21st century era of Russian oligarchs and Group of 8 petro-supremacy.

Well, I mean to say, will you just read Sergei Roy's essay in The Liberal?

It is assumed, and sometimes stated outright in the circles in which Mr. Yavlisnky is popular, that here in Russia we are in a pre-February 1917 situation. Sergei Shelin has remarked that “…certain… nuances in today’s behavior of the upper and lower classes give rise to ‘February’, or, more accurately, ‘pre-February’ associations in many people”. Specifically, the Putin administration is said to be authoritarian and even autocratic and thus slated for an overthrow. The mere formulation of this position should make any true Russian liberal shudder – if he really holds the future of liberalism in Russia dear to his heart. It is my firm belief that no revolution in Russia, liberal, democratic, or any other, is either possible or desirable, either now or in the foreseeable future.

I'll admit, anyone who can describe Solzhenitsyn's prose as a massacre of the Slavonic idiom has immediately got my attention, however wary or antagonized it may be. Though the irony here would seem to operate at Roy's expense: He's both confirming Solzhenitsyn's revisionist disdain for the February Revolution, which brought down the tsar and might have led to a genuine constitutional democracy instead of "October" and its ensuing Bolshevik tyranny, but he's also dismissing that seismic event as little more than ripples of liberal miscalculations and failures. You can't have both: Either Nicholas II remained in power as the unmitigated "Master of the Russian land," or he did not. Once you decide that, the second tier of hypothetical options for possible modes of government presents itself.

I dare say I know which tier one outcome Sergei would have preferred because his shrugging regard for the status quo under Vladimir Putin is enough to make you check that you're reading this piece in a journal called The Liberal.

The army general Andrei Nikolayev, a Duma deputy whom I interviewed a few years ago, provided me with some memorable statistics. Apparently in Moscow alone, ‘close security protection services’ are 100,000 strong. That is ten divisions - fully armed, well-paid, and ready to defend their style of living and that of their masters. This is entirely apart from the state ‘repressive apparatus’ - which has also done pretty well for itself in recent years, and is not likely to welcome any revolutionists in the streets of Moscow or anywhere else.

One rubs the eyes. A member of the Russian intelligentsia endorses a ruling regime because of its every-ready and omnipresent security service, which is too large and well-financed and comfortable to brook any Father Gapons, let alone chessmaster revolutionaries, parading around the streets and upsetting the new White Paradise. I forget now: Is noticing that you're living in a police state and simply accepting the fact the Bakunin or Herzen interpretation of sociohistorical dynamics*? I also loved Roy's sentence: "[T]he Putin administration is said to be authoritarian and even autocratic..." which is said to be evasive and even pathetic. The Kremlin might offer Roy his old job back at the Moscow Times if he's willing to produce favorable press like this for nothing...

I am a Westernist in the sense that the culture of liberalism, historically speaking, is not endemic in Russia, and was transposed onto Russian soil from the West. Unfortunately, the term zapadnik (‘Westernist’) is now often applied – with sufficient reason – to individuals who advocate the subordination of Russia’s national interests to those of the West. I have absolutely nothing to do with this kind of Westernism; I am a Russian Westernist – and there are plenty of us over here. So far as I can judge, Mr. Putin is one; a European to the core – however hard it may be for the Western reader to accept this.

Putin as Peter the Great, comrades!

The title of this shabby essay is "From Autocracy to Anarchy." Always beware the deep thinker who warns of civil chaos as a consequence of political opposition. If he sounds as if he's got something to hide, it's usually because he's got something to preserve, too.

*It's just occurred to me that the answer is Belinsky. The literary critic took his Hegelianism to eleven when he suggested that Nicholas I's reign of injustice and subjugation was harmonizing. Part of the paradox of the Russian tradition is its bequest of brilliant minds struggling to find radical solutions that don't succumb to their own forms of autocracy. Roy's problem is that he writes long after Isaiah Berlin made such a paradox a matter of conventional wisdom. Any intellectual who earnestly rationalizes statist tyranny today is almost too unselfconscious to be trusted on anything.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 4:16 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Make Fred Thompson your running-mate. They're practically twins already, as John Dickerson points out, and yet Thompson's got that saddle-bag cheek gravitas the red states like in their conservatives. He oozes Southern charisma, according to those who thought Bob Hope was a scream. And you can be sure he hasn't got a two war minimum in terms of executive hubris. Like a genial stepfather who wasn't particularly interested in raising another brood at this late stage in the game, but who loves his wife too much to grumble much about the hard-partying teens that come with her, Fred's philosophy is simple: "You kids have fun now, but try not to make too big a mess of things. I just swept in here, for chrissake." There's your Plan B Man for Iraq.

You want Burkean restraint and prudence? Here's Fred as the admiral in The Hunt for Red October: "This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we'll be lucky to live through it." Missing Russian sub, uranium enrichment in Natanz. He's got that voice of venerable wisdom you're gonna want in a vice president.

What's more, he looks like Gerald Ford, who couldn't go wrong with a fawning Washington press club upon the occasion of his still memory-fresh demise. So Fred gives good face recognition.

If he's not quite ready for the show, he's the perfect second-in-line. Now watch how quickly McCain snaps him up. Watch.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 4:15 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Generally described by whom? And is "England's best known-literary critic" really something to sound the gong about when James Wood could easily pack it up and move back to Durham?

You are generally described as England’s best-known literary critic. Where does that leave Clive James, whose essay collection, “Cultural Amnesia,” was just published amid great fanfare in New York? I don’t really think he is a literary critic, although he is very clever.

Do you disapprove of the way he treats high culture and pop culture with equal seriousness? Not at all. My chair is in cultural studies. But that’s not the same as running off on chat shows.

Terry Eagleton wrote "if Philip Larkin didn't exist, we would have to invent him," which is certainly one way to coax Martin Amis back onto the frontlines of the war against cliche. And as I'll never tire of reminding myself, everyone's favorite Catholic Marxist culture critic has compared suicide-bombers in Baghdad and Jerusalem to Rosa Luxemburg. (He saves his philippic energies for those "redneck fascists in Texas.")

Marx spoke, contra Proudhon, of misere de la philosophie. He might have had some of his so-called disciples in mind, too.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 4:14 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I think I'm beginning to understand -- if not quite condone -- our friend John Derbyshire's rage and pride over what has become of a once mighty martial class in England. At bottom, Arthur Batchelor, the youngest Royal Navy sailor captured last month by Iran, yuking it up at a night club in Plymouth. He's the blindfolded yob in the second picture.

It's always been a shade easier to be both antiwar and anti-soldier in Old Blighty than it has been here. Typically, the English are pro-war and anti-solider at the same time, which is why Kipling remains the gold standard anatomist of this vicious double standard:

I went into a public-'ouse to get a pint o'beer,
The publican 'e up an' sez, "We serve no red-coats here."
The girls be'ind the bar they laughed an' giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street again an' to myself sez I:

O it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, go away";
But it's ``Thank you, Mister Atkins,'' when the band begins to play,
The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
O it's ``Thank you, Mr. Atkins,'' when the band begins to play.

I went into a theatre as sober as could be,
They gave a drunk civilian room, but 'adn't none for me;
They sent me to the gallery or round the music-'alls,
But when it comes to fightin', Lord! they'll shove me in the stalls!

For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, wait outside";
But it's "Special train for Atkins" when the trooper's on the tide,
The troopship's on the tide, my boys, the troopship's on the tide,
O it's "Special train for Atkins" when the trooper's on the tide.

Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap;
An' hustlin' drunken soldiers when they're goin' large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin' in full kit.

Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy how's yer soul?"
But it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll,
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
O it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll.

We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints:
Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints;

While it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, fall be'ind,"
But it's "Please to walk in front, sir," when there's trouble in the wind,
There's trouble in the wind, my boys, there's trouble in the wind,
O it's "Please to walk in front, sir," when there's trouble in the wind.

You talk o' better food for us, an' schools, an' fires an' all:
We'll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.
Don't mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face
The Widow's Uniform is not the soldier-man's disgrace.

For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!"
But it's "Saviour of 'is country," when the guns begin to shoot;
An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please;
But Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool - you bet that Tommy sees!

Though by "goin' large a bit," the Bard of Empire hardly had this buffoonery in mind. He'd have loathed Batchelor's lack of seriousness about the extreme peril in which his comrades still find themselves overseas, as he most certainly would the fact that Batchelor and Faye Turney have sold their hostage stories for 5-figures each. There's another Kipling stave that would make short work of that act of prostitution:

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!

Posted by Michael Weiss at 4:12 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

So here's the latest celebrity outburst caught on tape and propagated by the stand-ups gents at TMZ:

An enraged Alec Baldwin unleashed a volcanic tirade of threats and insults on his 11-year-old daughter, Ireland, calling her a "thoughtless little pig," and bashing her mother Kim Basinger -- and TMZ has obtained the whole thing unfiltered and raw. And we've learned, a family law judge was so alarmed after hearing the tape, she has temporarily barred Baldwin from having any contact with his child.

You can listen to the voicemail here.

I have to say, this sounds like Christmastime around the old Weiss hearth. My respect for Baldwin just took a trip to the North Counties after hearing him lose it in a way that's got me nostalgic for my insufferable preteen years. It's clear from his tone and his explanation that he's a taxed papa justifiably dealing with a spoiled brat of a child, who's acting in accordance with the nasty caprices of her manipulative mother. He shouldn't have referred to Basinger's shortcomings to his daughter, but still... From what I gather about Kim, pumpkin's sure to have hipped to them by now anyway.

That this voicemail -- conveniently leaked by Basinger to the press: there's good parenting for you -- is being cited as Exhibit A for placing a ban on Baldwin's visitation rights shows just how ridiculously overprotective and cossetting the culture has become. (People who tell me, "Oh, I don't hit my kids" might as well say, "Next up: Jeffersonian democracy in Iraq.")

For those from households governed strictly by the precepts of Voltaire, allow me to lend a little "context": Alec's a Long Islander -- Queens, where I'm from, is technically Long Island -- and he was no doubt reared in that ethnically fungible lexicon of Id-Speak one is likely to encounter on the terminal moraine. No matter what you make of yourself, no matter how you trundle and grope your way to the cosmopolitan riches of the Big City, you'll never have to go home again because you'll never shake your native patois in moments of high agita. Jewish, Irish, Polish, German: No one gets away clean. You think I exaggerate? My shiksa mother to my Ashkenazi father: "Fuck you in your Dead Sea ass." (They were divorced, rather mercifully, when I was two.)

If anything, Baldwin's demonstrated what years on the fey West Coast will do to a good Atlantic verbal blast furnace. The poor boy's turned a featherweight.

Check in with me again the next time I knock over a piece of Mom's Lladro.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:32 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

David Bowie survived his period of sieg hailing on stage more or less unscatched, I'm sure Bryan Ferry will be forgiven these twittish remarks:

"The Nazis knew how to put themselves in the limelight and present themselves. I'm talking about the films of Leni Riefenstahl and the buildings of Albert Speer and the mass marches and the flags – just fantastic. Really beautiful."

Spoken to Welt Am Sonntag in praise of the Nazi aesthetic. Spoken to Welt Am Sonntag in praise of the Nazi aesthetic. Ferry also admitted to that gazette that he's named his London recording studio (which might be located on the site where Luftwaffe bombs once fell) the Fuhrerbunker.

Well, it took Mark's & Spencer, the posh clothing line whose duds Ferry hawks, no time at all to consider bidding Auf wiedersehen to the former Roxy Music frontman, even as England's Jewish leaders swiftly and commendably accepted his apology, which came with the explanation that he in no way was endorsing the ethos of National Socialism. (Say what you will about the architectural cohesiveness of nihilism, dude.)

Now I happen to dig Ferry's music and even more his style, and I'm a firm believer in the odd case of verbal diarrhea not unmaking a lifetime of pleasant accomplishment. (Imus was different: his case wasn't odd and there was clear malice in what he said.) Furthermore, I understand Ferry's point while still appreciating how idiotic it was to air in an interview with the German press, which I'm surprised even printed the quotation.

In the underrated 2002 film Max, the Jewish Weimar-era art dealer Max Rothman, played by John Cusack, comments on the allure of the deranged young painter Adolf Hitler's kitsch daubings. Hitler regurgitates the military uniformity of imperial Rome for the age of anxiety. On canvas, his work seems more like a modernist cartoon: undifferentiated Aryan soldiers parading around a gleaming industrial metropole. This kind of artwork was the inverted image of socialist realism, and would have gone the same way as that unsmiling genre -- into ridicule and then postmodern celebration -- if the Third Reich hadn't turned its parody-ready symbolism into practicable ideology. Ferry was 70 years too late to make a judgment of "taste" with respect to Nazi iconography; taste has been overwhelmed by the moral indecency of what the icons stood for.

I would add that Ferry's type is pretty well recognizable. He's a glam-rocker channeling the leisure class wastrel. His stage presence has always been about rumpled evening wear and a carefully mussed forelock (where the hell do you summer, Robert Palmer?). Ferry appreciates the finer things in life, like Bollinger and a well-tailored suit and the novels of P.G. Wodehouse. In keeping with those almost self-perpetuating characteristics, he can be expected to have feathers in his head when it comes to grasping the horrors of history, or grasping how to talk about them, anyway. Wodehouse, remember, paid a high price for his notorious broadcasts on German radio as an involuntary guest of the Gestapo. The creator of Bertie Wooster knew evils of fascism not at all; it was the old feudal spirit that got him going in the morning.

Ferry was once rejected from the recherche Courtauld Institute of Art, a biographical fact that puts me instantly in mind of his intellectual better in pop music: David Byrne, graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, haunter of Arts & Letters Daily, and PowerPoint virtuoso. Byrne would have known better.

So for the singer of "Avalon" and the bedder of Jerry Hall, I think it can be firmly stated that his frivolous ways got the better of him. He was in the birthplace of Bauhaus and philosophical idealism and wanted to sound profound. He ended up sounding pretentious and sinister instead.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 1:39 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Two formidable titans of the Euston Left. My take on their fraternal dust-up at Contentions:

So what [are] they arguing about? About this puzzling statement from Kamm in the Guardian last week:

Blogs are providers not of news but of comment. This would be a good thing if blogs extended the range of available opinion in the public sphere. But they do not; paradoxically, they narrow it. This happens because blogs typically do not add to the available stock of commentary: they are purely parasitic on the stories and opinions that traditional media provide.

This was a curious lament from one who not only has his own blog but who sees nothing but political tendentiousness on display in such “old media” outlets as the BBC and, indeed, the Guardian. What is more, Kamm’s book Anti-Totalitarianism: The Left-Wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy shows how ideological echo chambers, whether on- or offline, have always diminished the style and substance of political debate. Were Communists in the 1930’s any less “parasitic” on the stories and opinions of the Daily Worker than bloggers are on their mainstream-media counterparts today?

In making his case, Kamm cited Nick Cohen, another disillusioned leftist whose book, What’s Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way, is the polemic of the hour in Britain. If Cohen “did not exist,” Kamm asserted, “a significant part of the blogosphere . . . would have no purpose and nothing to react to.” To this, Geras’s swift riposte was to point out that Kamm had things backward. In fact, the torrents of anti-Semitic abuse on certain left-wing blogs, including the comment thread on the Guardian’s own “Comment Is Free” blog, provided Nick Cohen with much of his evidence for the rabid degeneracy of today’s British Left. If anything, one might say that political blogging, by bringing this degeneracy to light, has gone some way toward getting at least a few liberals to break ranks with old comrades.

More here.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:22 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Germain Greer argues that Mary Shelley had to have written Frankenstein because, well,

The driving impulse of this incoherent tale is a nameless female dread, the dread of gestating a monster. Monsters are not simply grossly deformed foetuses. Every mass murderer, every serial killer, the most sadistic paedophile has a mother, who cannot disown him. Percy was capable perhaps of imagining such a nightmare, but it is the novel's blindness to its underlying theme that provides the strongest evidence that the spinner of the tale is a woman. It is not until the end of the novel that the monster can describe himself as an abortion. If women's attraction to the gothic genre is explained by the opportunity it offers for the embodiment of the amoral female subconscious, Frankenstein is the ultimate expression of the female gothic.

Actually, the merits of this Romantic novel are more medical than literary. A friend of my sister's wrote her PhD. (as part of an MD/PhD program) on the scientific accuracies of Shelley's work, no doubt made all the more impressive by the fact that Frankenstein was begun over the course of one opium-addled summer at Lake Geneva, during which the daughter of the proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (author of The Vindication of the Rights of Women) was crushing big time on the echt cad and unbeatable modern Prometheus, Lord Byron.

You want life imitating art in creepy fashion? Percy Shelley drowned after his schooner Don Juan sunk off the coast of Viareggio, Italy under circumstances that still remain mysterious. Some think the Italians, mistaking Shelley for the more wanted Mediterranean man of intrigue, Byron, attacked the boat, while a recent hiccup in Serbian academe, of all places, has advanced the theory that British agents assassinated Shelley for his atheism and subversive writings. He was working, at the time of his demise, on the radical journal The Liberal, which he co-edited with Leigh Hunt.

During his famous beachfront funeral -- captured with such Romantic and fact-iffy flourish by the painter Louis Edouard Fournier in 1889 -- Shelley's comrade Edward Trelawny rescued the dead poet's heart from the pyre and later presented it to Mary. She kept this desiccated organ, which she had pressed like the petals of a flower, in a book for the rest of her life.

The heart is what the monster snatches, albeit while it's still moist and beating, from the chest of Victor Frankenstein's bride, thus exacting Oedipal revenge on the father who would not love him and the mother who probably wouldn't have loved that face.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 2:49 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Michelle Malkin follows up her NRO tu quoque to the rap industry in the aftermath of Imusgate by posting lyrics and videos of the latest misogynistic chart-toppers:

The "song" is "This Is Why I'm Hot." It has topped the charts for the last 15 weeks. Here's a taste of the lyrics that young men and women are cranking up in their cars:

This is why I'm hot
Catch me on the block
Every other day
Another bitch another drop
16 bars, 24 pop
44 songs, nigga gimme what you got…

… We into big spinners
See my pimping never dragged
Find me wit' different women that you niggas never had
For those who say they know me know I'm focused on ma cream
Player you come between you'd better focus on the beam
I keep it so mean the way you see me lean
And when I say I'm hot my nigga dis is what I mean

Here's my qualm with choosing now as the best time to make a scandal of the latest platinum records: It's defensiveness masquerading as outrage. Malkin may clear her throat by saying that she has no love for Don Imus or anyone else who spouts vile, racist remarks, but why is the thoroughgoing nastiness of rap suddenly worth condemning all over again? Because it must be demonstrated that angry, reactionary white men aren't the only ones with sloppy tongues. If Imus thought he'd get away with sounding like Ludacris, we have only Ludacris to blame...

This is conservatives' form of moral jujitsu at times of cultural combat, yet they never seem to land a palpable hit. Now, Stanley Crouch hardly goes a week without pointing out how what he sees as neo-minstrelsy damages black identity in America and, agreed with or not, he's taken seriously as a public intellectual. Crouch requires no display of Jim Crow antics from an overrated shock jock to renew his license on commentary.

Moreover, Malkin's case suffers from a slight category problem. Had Imus referred only to "bitches and hos," it might have been seemly to immediately broach the subject of rap's degenerate influence on the wider discourse. But Imus gave the game away by calling the Rutgers players "nappy-headed," which is no different than making allusions to flat noses, watermelon or fried chicken. Imus is someone with a history of thinking that indecency is coterminous with political incorrectness, so he deserved to be accorded no benefit of any doubt. Good for MSNBC for canning his television show. He should also lose his spot on the air.

But rather than take a perfect opportunity to ask why it is that radio remains a playground for such masters of verbal diarrhea, the Right's conversation automatically turns to how blacks have brought this upon themselves. This reeks of bad faith.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 2:47 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I'm thinking of a president. Ready? This guy:

• Is an obnoxious religious fundamentalist


• Recently offended many with his remarks about Israel


• Presided over a nasty oil shock, including price hikes and severe rationing


• Built his energy policy on finger-wagging and a national system of nuclear energy doomed never to take off


• Presided over record unemployment and economic malaise


• Ultimately undone by restive Iranians

Give up? The president I have in mind is: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad this time next year.

Those who live by the oil shock, die by the oil shock.

Slate | Why Iran's Mullahs will never silence Ahmadinejad

Posted by Nic Duquette at 9:57 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Sunday is the 300th birthday** of Leonhard Euler, an easy candidate for the greatest contributor to the modern age the man on the street has probably never heard of. A mathematician and scientist of breathtaking originality and fecundity, it took years to postumously publish the backlog of the man's worthy submissions, and his many volumes of work and correspondence are just now starting to be edited and compiled in great detail. Mathematicians like joke that important results are named after the second person to discover them, because if they weren't, everything would be named after Euler.

(**Digression: any time I see a remark on some long-dead person's birthday, I can't help but remember what a philosophy professor of mine once remarked: "Of course, if Rene Descartes were alive today, we know what he'd probably say. (beat) 'I am sooo ollllld.' ")

Someone who is a legitimate mathematician will probably have a better summary of the man's work than I could possibly provide, but I'm familiar with the man's greatest hits: Euler discovered Euler's constant, more commonly known as just e, a transcendental number that pops up virtually everywhere. If you haven't proceeded far enough up the math ladder to have encountered e, you've been deprived of a major pillar of a liberal education -- it really first makes an appearance in calculus, as e^x has the strange property of being its own derivative, that is, the slope of the line tangent to e^x at any point is equal to e^x. Euler's constant is therefore bedrock of any discipline that studies rates of change, including physics, biology and finance.

Euler also proved the much-admired Euler's Formula, which states that e raised the a power of any number times i, the square root of -1, is equal to the cosine of that number plus i times the sine of that number. Or in its most famous special case,

e^(pi*i) + 1 = 0

There you have the five most important numbers in mathematics, combined in a simple and surprising manner.

Euler fans might consider the upcoming Euler 2007 events, celebrating the Swiss master's tercentennial. Come for the symposia, stay for the Basel nightlife.

Posted by Nic Duquette at 1:42 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Via SciTechDaily: scientists find correlation between being a chain-smoking coffee-slurper and not getting Parkinson's. The link has been known for a while, but scientists now studied variation within families afflicted by the disease, and the correlation held. This makes it more likely, though not certain, that the drugs are the cause and less Parkinson's is the effect.

Although the article is at pains to stress that this is by no mean the case; and even if it were, the cardiac effects of smoking are so bad that it's not a reason to smoke. In fact, this is stressed twice in an article only fifteen sentences long.

Well: no shit. Smoking kills, and it's hard to stop letting it kill you. And it makes you broke. And smell bad. But is it possible to debate this drug (or any drug) rationally, considering its positive as well as negative aspects? Those really nasty side effects are indeed mitigated by, it seems, Parkinson's reduction. And weight loss. And the pleasurable sensation of sucking the aromatic smoke of burning tobacco leaf into one's mouth and lungs. And -- let's be honest -- it does make you look cool, especially if you're a teenager.

I don't see why we can't just admit these things without a pitchfork-wielding mob going after one's NIH grant.

And then there's coffee. Oh God, coffee. (hands tremble)

New Scientist | Do coffee and cigarettes protect against Parkinson's?

Posted by Nic Duquette at 7:19 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

As someone who's groped his way through the bramble patch of artistic anti-Semitism, I had a natural sympathy with Paul Dean in his review of Craig Raine's new biography of T.S. Eliot. Admirably, if also a touch selfconsciously, Dean refrains from the inevitable "issue" for as long as possible. That Eliot disliked the Jews is so hackneyed a notion as to induce no shock or scandalous reply at this stage.

I have left until last the matter of Eliot’s anti-Semitism, not wanting it to swamp the review. Raine opposes the case first made extensively by Anthony Julius in T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (1996) and since taken up by Ricks, George Steiner, James Fenton, and others. In brief, Raine contends that Eliot’s detractors have distorted his comments in After Strange Gods (but his suppression of the book is surely a material fact), have failed to see that the alleged anti-Semitic lines come in poems which are dramatic monologues (and hence are not authorial utterances), and have discounted Eliot’s explicit denials of malice and some later statements supporting Jews. Raine admits that clinching evidence for his defense is lacking, though without mentioning that this is partly because the Eliot estate is dragging its feet over publishing the relevant volumes of the poet’s correspondence. He wants to enter a “plea of mitigation.” The element of special pleading here arouses unease. My hunch, for what it’s worth, is that Eliot, when newly arrived in England, absorbed the casual anti-Semitism fashionable in the social circle to which he aspired to belong, and that when he realized the truth about the Holocaust (whenever that was) he felt, for whatever reason, unable either to repudiate his earlier views or to state his new ones plainly. It was too late to alter his poems, which had too long been in the public domain, but he put conciliatory statements into circulation as opportunity allowed. It seems very difficult to maintain that he had simply never been anti-Semitic at all.

Evelyn Waugh, too, tried to make up for a lifetime of bigotry in his Sword of Honor trilogy by giving half-cocked tributes to God's chosen people, of whom World War II, at battle's end, was seen to have been a necessary rescue operation. But Dean is surely right: Eliot actively scorned the Jews as innate subversives who were irreconcilable with his medieval Christian utopia.

The poetry comes away cleaner than the criticism in this respect. People who take objection to "Gerontion," for example, quote,

My house is a decayed house,
And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.

-- forgetting that the speaker here is an "old man," which Eliot himself decidedly was not in 1922 when these lines were put down. Only a philistine automatically assumes the opinions of a fictive character are those of its author, even if, as Eliot went to great trouble to show later on, he thought much worse of the Jews than his poetic creations did. "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar" -- try harder, please. Aim also for originality: Shakespeare had the first and final word on tracing the sinking rot of Venice to the bearded bondsman. Or compare the Jewish figures in Eliot's poetry to "Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant / Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants" in "The Waste Land." No one ever reads this description as anti-Greek sentiment.

"Free-thinking" is the key modifier of "Jews" in Eliot's shabby polemic After Strange Gods. All you need to know about the poet's anti-Semitism is that it was ineluctable from his suspicion of political radicalism, and in this way rather resembles the paranoia that gripped Stalin in the years before his death. Eliot much admired the Kremlin mountaineeer, not just as a wartime ally but as a liquidator of intellectuals and "rootless cosmopolitans." (Churchill, though he certainly made up for it, felt the same way about Stalin because he killed more Communists than Hitler ever could.)

Eliot was the one who got Faber and Faber to reject Orwell's Animal Farm for fear that its obvious anti-Communism might offend Uncle Joe. Orwell got the last laugh, however. In 1984, he has O'Brien tell Winston Smith that his future is the ultimate waste land, by his activities with Julia in the underground he'll be reduced to "splinters of bone and handfuls of dust."

There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

I would also add to any further discussion of Eliot's feelings toward the Jews how the famed New York intellectuals, coalescent around Partisan Review in the 30's and 40's, were completely enthralled by the haunting, apocalyptic symbols of modernism. Irving Howe said that part of Eliot's appeal was his biography: a shabby-genteel banker from St. Louis ups and moves to the world capital of London and redefines himself as -- though I normally shudder to use this term, I think it's actually the best one in this instance -- the voice of his generation. That was the boot-strapper tale par excellence, consonant with the poor but precocious immigrant's dream to "make it" in America.

The history of socialism is filled with these intriguing concatenations between leftist politics and reactionary art. Cultural conservatives are excellent at identifying the angst and anxieties of an age, and in the service of painting or literature, they rise to the level of diagnosticians. The revolutionaries who tilt against them hope to administer the cure. Trotsky (pay attention here, Dan Freeman) famously wrote of the Futurist poet Mayakovsky that he was greatest as a poet precisely where he was worst as a Bolshevik. He was still trapped in a pre-Revolutionary bourgeois aesthetic, but this was eminently useful in cultivating and refining the post-Revolutionary one.

Such sophisticated sensibility -- which, had it been successful, might have done something worthwhile with socialist realism -- carried to the tenements of the East Bronx, and later to the book-lined railroad apartments of the Upper West Side, where, as Bellow once satirized Eliot (in Yiddish, no less), "the women [came and went], talking of Marx."

So you might say that Eliot's anti-Semitism was ironic and paradoxical; he had the profoundest impact on the very Jews that had him twitching in his tweeds.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 1:12 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Apropos of my Chomsky post, I've been thinking about the multiform art of persuasion and who uses what tactic in order to turn a crowd. Orwell's classic essay, "Politics and the English Language," needs updating. What is one to do about a creature like Noam Chomsky, whose mechanical style and permanent calm seem to many the wardrobe of objectivity and universal moral principles.

With born writers like Martin Amis, it's all about getting the language to out-perform itself at every opportunity. There is no such thing as a synonym, and cliches of expression are insidious for their confirmation of cliches of thought and feeling.

For instance, you can bang on about genocide and mass murder. You can trot out all the old adjectives to describe the gulag or Auschwitz -- "horrific," "nightmarish," "incalculable," "unfathomable" -- but watch what happens to the furniture in your head when you deploy a term like "species shame" to account for events that have been accounted for an, well, "incalculable" number of times already.

Here's a clip of Amis discussing his ongoing war against cliche with Charlie Rose. It's not just instructive. It's quite funny, too.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:54 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Could South Africa intervene in Zimbabwe to rescue Robert Mugabe? Both countries train each other's military forces and, as James Kirchik points out in The New Republic,

As members of the SADC, South Africa and Zimbabwe are also signatories to that organization's Mutual Defense Pact. Article 7 of the agreement stipulates that "No action shall be taken to assist any State Party in terms of this Pact, save at the State Party's own request or with its consent." Thus, Mugabe can continue to run a police state and his neighbors can't do anything about it without his permission. Conversely, if Mugabe feels that the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), his opposition, poses a threat, he could theoretically ask SADC members to help him stamp it out.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 11:49 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It's like the Battle of Stalingrad. Urban combat and command posts established in gutted, blasted-out buildings.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 11:49 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

According to the New York Times, Shin Bet has been issuing vague but ominous warnings about Hamas' intent to carry out terrorist attacks inside Israel. A suicide-murder mission was evidently thwarted in Tel Aviv, and despite a peaceful Passover, Israeli security seems to think a new wave of attacks are imminent. The Times:

A senior Israeli army commander, speaking on condition of anonymity, said recently that in Israel’s assessment Hamas had not changed its policy, but that there are “some groups in the military wing of Hamas that don’t like the cease-fire or the unity government.”

The debate over Hamas boils down to one question: Who's in charge? Is it the so-called "outer group," which constitutes the militarized radicals who will stop at nothing to see Israel destroyed, or is it the so-called "inner group" that is tasked with the Hezbollah-like dispensation of civil services within Palestine? The inner group says it will stop at nothing to see Israel destroyed but plays at pragmatism to retain any semblance of international legitimacy. (The inner group functions like the Central Committee, the outer like the KGB. Also, if you want to extend the Soviet analogy, you might call this a kind of Third Period for Palestinian jihad -- one of tahdia, or relative calm.) So far, under the tenuous coalitional government ruled by Hamas, the bureaucratic-advisory approach developed by the group's chief policy wonk Musa Abu Marzuq is regnant. But that hardly means the goal of jihad has been, to coin a phrase, wiped from the pages of time.

After all, Hamas rose to power by biding its time and cultivating short-term, cynical alliances with the PLO. As Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela write in their flawed but useful book The Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence, And Coexistence, "[E]ven though Hamas regreted the PLO's right to represents the Palestinian people, it was willing to forge a political coalition on an agree program focused on jihad." Actually, this set of circumstances was infinitely preferable to Hamas because it was Arafat who had put forward a diplomatic face, undertake the farce that was Oslo, and otherwise placate the hard-nosed anti-Zionists he'd "betrayed."

The goal for Haniyah now is to recapture that blessed air of unaccountability even though he's now exclusively accountable as prime minister. This means broadening a coalition within Hamas itself to the point of turning the outer group into its own off-shoot terrorist network, one that can't be traced back to Ramallah. Israel isn't fooled, even though the UN, Jimmy Carter, and everyone else who fails to realize what the intractable Hamas charter represents, of course are.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 11:47 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Onion man-on-the-street section once carried a great response to the question of obese people protesting airlines that would charge them for two seats: "I can't wait to see that picket line." Likewise, I'm eagerly awaiting the epidemic of Tourette's Syndrome this unleashes on the internet:

Readers should be warned when they are reading blogs that may contain "crude language", a draft blogging code of conduct has suggested.

The code was drawn up by web pioneer Tim O'Reilly following published threats and perceived harassment to US developer Kathy Sierra on blogs.

The code begins: "We celebrate the blogosphere because it embraces frank and open conversation."

The draft says people should not be allowed to leave anonymous comments.

Blogs which are open and uncensored should post an "anything goes" logo to the site to warn readers, the code suggests.

Readers of these blogs would be warned: "We are not responsible for the comments of any poster, and when discussions get heated, crude language, insults and other "off colour" comments may be encountered. Participate in this site at your own risk."

Posted by Michael Weiss at 11:45 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This is admirable, though insufficient. The United States has a moral responsibility to accept as many refugees from Iraq as choose to emigrate here.

Karen Koning AbuZayd, commissioner general of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, said Thursday no specific country has offered to receive Palestinian refugees in Iraq, "but I know the United States confirmed it can take 7,000 of them."

She told United Press International in Damascus that while there were no plans to permanently settle Palestinian refugees, "some live in difficult conditions, especially those from Iraq and who are stranded on the Iraqi borders" with Syria and with Jordan. The UNRWA chief noted her agency and the U.N. high commissioner for refugees have requested third countries to grant refuge to Palestinians from Iraq.

Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees and Migration Ellen Sauerbrey told reporters at a Washington briefing March 23 that previous reports about the United States accepting an additional 7,000 Iraqi refugees in the coming months are inaccurate. She said this figure simply reflects the number of U.S. referrals the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) feels it realistically can expect to make in the coming months.

“UNHCR, which has the international mandate, if you will, to do the protection and make referrals for resettlement has indicated … that they had the capacity to be able to register, identify the vulnerabilities and make referrals of about 20,000, and that they anticipated that they would refer 7,000 to the U.S. resettlement program,” she said.

Does mean that the UN is only concerned with Palestinians fleeing Iraq? Not that Palestinians don't deserve safe haven, but what about native-born Iraqis?

Or is the figure just a coincidence?

Posted by Michael Weiss at 11:44 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

"And here we can see in ... (Diwaniya), a civil strife the occupier planned, to drag the brothers into clashing, fighting and even killing. Oh (Mehdi Army) and my brothers (Iraqi forces) enough of this clashing and killing. This is success for your enemy ... and (Iraqi army and police) don't be dragged behind the enemy."
--Muqtada al-Sadr, April 8

The immediate reaction one should have to yesterday's peaceful protest against the U.S. "occupation" by Iraqi Shia in Kufa and Najaf is how it reflects the Mahdi Army leader Muqtada al-Sadr's late recourse to "soft power" to sway public opinion in his favor. Sadr has been for the past few months in Iran, wielding whatever remains of his diminishing influence on a parlous sectarian militia. (He's hiding there no doubt to avoid capture by the coalition or -- what is more likely -- assassination by own of his own Mahdi warriors jockeying for power.) According to Reuters, the turnout of yesterday's protest was actually far smaller than what Sadr had hoped for. U.S.-Iraqi troops did the right thing by only banning the presence of automobiles and otherwise letting the marchers get on with it. (Roadside and car bombs have become the deadliest threat in and around Baghdad after the new security plan was implemented eight weeks ago.) That some enlistees in the Iraqi Army joined the protest is not as discouraging as it may seem: Better they do that than moonlight as murderous thugs for Sadr. Out in the open is preferable to going to ground.

Additionally, the Mahdi's retreat to the city of Diwaniyah, where coalition troops are in the fourth day of counterinsurgency operations that have so far led to the arrest of 39 fighters, indicates desperation. As Bill Roggio reports:

Diwaniyah is the city where large segments of Sadr's Mahdi Army fled to after the commencement of the Baghdad Security Plan, a U.S. intelligence official told us. With the split in Sadr's Mahdi Army, and a large segment looking to reconcile with the Iraqi government, the extremist elements of the militia have hunkered down in Diwaniyah. Security in Diwaniyah is said to have been deteriorating since the Mahdi Army concentrated power in the city. The Iraqi government and Coalition is pursuing the Mahdi Army holdovers remaining in Diwaniyah.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 11:42 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I'll never forget the day Saddam Hussein was captured. I was on the phone with a family member who'd not only been, in his day, a recognizable figure in print journalism but also a consultant to the Kennedy administration. He's one of the most intelligent men I've ever known, even if he thinks Julius Rosenberg never smuggled atomic secrets to Moscow and JFK's halo remains uncracked and incandescent as ever. We got to discussing Saddam, thrown up there on CNN looking like a farouche homeless man, prodded by doctors. "Well, I'm glad they got him," said this relative of mine, "but I hate how this is going to help Bush."

Norm Geras calls this the yes-butter syndrome of the antiwar left. "Yes, Saddam was an awful man, but..." What follows is something like: "What about Robert Mugabe? There are a lot of awful men in the world. We used to help him." If you're really dealing with someone special, you might have even heard: "I really don't know who's worse -- him or Bush."

That formulation, the yes-butter, was invented to stay a war that, by the time I was kibitzing with my good ancestor, was an accomplished fact. So by then the yes-butter syndrome had evolved to account for good news out of Iraq. It's good, sure, sure, but it's also bad because it ups George Bush's political currency.

Got that? Swish it around for a bit. Then try what I try. Imagine how a Kurd whose family was gassed at Halabja might respond to this sort of shrewd American book-keeping. Then put it to a hypothetical Iraqi widow, whose husband Uday Hussein had hung upside-down on a hook (perforating his flesh), the base of his feet whipped, then shoved into a burlap sack filled with starved, feral cats. You can go whole hog: Add to your imaginary rap Halliburton and yellow-cake and Valerie Plame and Hans Blix and tax cuts and social security reform and Kyoto and Arctic wildlife preserve drilling and Dick Cheney's Marvel Comics-like villainy and Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Knock yourself out.

Then read this:

It is not true that the Americans invaded Iraq against the will of the Iraqi people. They did so against the will of Saddam, against the will of those who flourished under Saddam, and against the will of numerous Sunn'is and Christians, most of them utterly blameless for the crimes of the regime, who feared what would happen to them after the Shi'ites got out from under Saddam. This last is not an inconsiderable group - except as compared to the Shi'ites and the Kurds, who overwhelmingly wanted the invasion and welcomed it.

I know that these anecdotes will sound as if Karen Hughes or somebody paid me to cook them up, but they all really happened: The day I met Riyadh, he told me what he had been doing before the war. He and his family would sit around and listen to underground BBC radio. And if the French or somebody else in the U.N. seemed to come up with something that would offer the world a glimmer of hope that war could be avoided, their reaction was not, "thank God." It was: "Oh shit."

Posted by Michael Weiss at 11:39 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A Serbian court today sentenced four former Serb paramilitary policemen for up to 20 years in jail after they were caught on film killing six Muslim men during the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 11:38 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

These race rows are par for the course, aren't they? I don't doubt that Don Imus has less than a sloppy tongue to answer for with his comment about "nappy-headed hos," but to see anyone reduced to the show trial of having to answer for it to Al Sharpton is cruel and unusual punishment.

You can write the rest of the script in your sleep. During his two-week suspension will come archconservatives defending Imus, arguing that he hadn't said anything worse than what you'll hear on the latest Jay-Z album. Imus will mutter some network-mandated "official" apology when he returns on the air, on his own show. This episode will sink before the new wave of grim headlines out of Baghdad. Then some other "personality" will open his mouth and talk with his spleen, and the whole pathetic thing will repeat itself.

Why the same displays of bigotry and the same unseemly mea culpas, that often do more damage than the original offense? Rather than ask the hard questions of why it is that a comedic nonentity suddenly turns dire and Jim Crowish on stage in Los Angeles, or a scorched-larynx shock jock coopts an inner-city patois for outer-city racism, we have moments of "healing" and "dialogue." As if the knife had even begun to make an incision; as if any meaningful conversation ever got started.

There was one notable exception to these yawning round-robins of condescension and cant. In the mid to late 90's a play was staged in New York called "Spinning Into Butter." It was about a right-thinking college professor (we're talking "Think Globally, Act Locally" bumper stickers here) who lapses into a way beyond the melting pot tirade about blacks. Why is it, she thunders, that at this late stage in social advancement, the sight of young black men riding the subway give her the creeps and have her clutching her handbag? (This was the most charitable part of her spiel.)

You can imagine the mortified looks from white people in the audience. What made the play undeserving of the adjective "forgettable," however, was the reaction of black people in the audience. They sat there nodding, some even smiling as if to say, "Finally. A white person tells it like she really means it."

Too soon? Maybe. Which is why instead we get "you people."

Posted by Michael Weiss at 11:37 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Every NRO staffer has his moment. David Frum stage a putsch against Harriet Miers' nomination to the Supreme Court in 2005, and he won. (Miers, who? I can hear you mumbling.) Jonah Goldberg gets out of bed in the morning to point out instances of liberal authoritarianism masquerading as multiculturalism, political correctness, etc. Now Jewcy's favorite English gentile John Derbyshire has found his thunder-and-grumble metier. It's the "saps and worms," "insults to the Queen's uniform" that are the 15 British sailors let go by Iran last week. This post would rank high in any "And that will be England gone" anthology:

I caught the tail-end of that old England—that bumptious, arrogant, self-confident old England, the England of complicated games, snobbery, irony, repression, and stoicism, the England of suet puddings, drafty houses, coal smoke and bad teeth, the England of throat-catching poetry and gardens and tweeds, the England that civilized the whole world and gave an example of adult behavior—the English Gentleman—that was admired from Peking (I can testify) to Peru.

It's all gone now, "dead as mutton," as English people used to say. Now there is nothing there but a flock of whimpering Eloi, giggling over their gadgets, whining for their handouts, crying for their Mummies, playing at soldiering for reasons they can no longer understand, from lingering habit. Lower the corpse down slowly, shovel in the earth. England is dead.

Andrew Sullivan confesses to a "soft spot" for this reactionary refrain, and I confess to having my own, too. This is the postwar loss of empire elegy reproduced, albeit in more selfconscious fashion, by someone from a generation that arrived too late to really lay sentimental claim to it. In his "Is Kevin MacDonald Right About the Jews?" dialogue with Jewcy editor Joey Kurtzman, Derb mentioned a comment once passed about Orwell -- that he was obsessed with 1910 -- and now I think this must have been self-revealing. Derb is obsessed with 1945, or at least was until Faye Turney and company set fire to the tattered fabric of the Union Jack and drop-kicked the bust of Churchill, disillusioning him for good.

What poverty will come to discourse of British conservatism once voices like Derb's no longer exist. Christopher Hitchens has written very well on what's commonly (if mistakenly) called the 'Larkinesque' strain to this mode of feeling, conveniently enough in a remarkable essay on my favorite poet Philip Larkin. I derive no small pleasure from the fact that this was originally printed [$] in New Left Review:

I have never had any difficulty in comprehending the appeal of Larkin to some part of the British (not so much the English) consciousness. This is because I recall, with very little trouble, the tone of my own father’s table talk. (Readings of the old Peter Simple column in the Daily Telegraph, or of the Denis Thatcher epistolatory parody in Private Eye, have the same effect upon me, and I simultaneously envy and mistrust those who fail to see the authentic seriousness of such jocularity.) What are the psychic and biographical ingredients here?

For the interwar petty-bourgeois and functionary generation, these would include a consciousness of life—indeed youth—passed in the exigencies of the Depression, the Second World War and the subsequent age of austerity. To this would have to be added the strain imposed by the ‘scholarship or nothing’ fork in the education system; itself very often an enforced choice between over-work and conformism on the one hand and relegation to menial or bureaucratic work on the other. With the privileged above and the forces of craft unionism below them, it is a mercy that more of this class did not turn to fascism than actually did. In the post-war period, though, their rancour was sublimated into a diffuse but persistent drizzle of complaint. End of Empire and Commonwealth immigration were disliked for their own sake, to be sure, but probably more formative was the sense that these momentous decisions had been taken without anyone’s permission—without, as it were, a by-your-leave. Juvenile delinquents and wildcat strikers were a Poujadiste staple, as, briefly, were ‘revolting students’ in the 1960s. (Especially painful to comrades of this journal will be Larkin’s August 1969 letter to Brian Cox, commenting on a contemporary piece of pedagogic repression by saying ‘Isn’t it splendid about that young swine Blackburn?’). The nearest this mentality came to acquiring a leader was in the advent of Enoch Powell, and its most acute anatomist has been David Edgar, most particularly in his play Destiny.

Beneath the unstable political manifestations lay a profound, inchoate sense of loss about the erosion of the English countryside, the diminished prestige of the nation and the amoral amnesia of the Affluent Society. No doubt there were elements of vicarious envy behind the scorn and disapproval: my father never read Larkin’s ‘Annus Mirabilis’, which locates the beginnings of sexual freedom ‘Between the end of the Chatterley ban/And the Beatles first LP/(Which was rather late for me)’, but I can recall him saying wistfully that he was sorry to have missed the Permissive Society. Actually, I don’t think he read much poetry at all. But I could have given him ‘Going, Going’ (‘And that will be England gone’) or a half-dozen other mournful laments, and seen them strike a chord. As with Larkin himself, there were moments of antic subversiveness, where it was suddenly doubted that a dutiful life spent on the pursuit of traditional obligations had been worthwhile, or had been appreciated by those superiors in whose service it had been passed. Andrew Motion’s biography tells us, of that celebrated emblematic photograph, that it ‘shows Larkin sitting demurely, ankles crossed, on the large sign which says “ENGLAND”; immediately before posing he had urinated copiously behind the word.’

There was one large difference between my father and Larkin, which was that my father spent most of his life wearing the King’s uniform; an honour that Larkin steadfastly, not to say assiduously, declined. Very occasionally, though, and usually bearing some relationship to the state of the decanter and the lateness of the hour, one could hear them both taking leave to doubt that the Second World War—the ‘Finest Hour’, the ‘Valiant Years’, the special source of cross-class pride—had really been ‘worth it’, succeeded as it had been by an era superpower triumph and money-worship. I want to return to this trope but for now it’s enough to say that the proneness of English culture to this sort of pessimistic chauvinism is a subject insufficiently explored. That is why many on the Left have condemned themselves to experiencing major phenomena—the Falklands fever; Mrs Thatcher herself—as a surprise. The stubborn persistence of chauvinism in our life and letters is or ought to be the proper subject for critical study, not the occasion for displays of shock.

More conveniently, I just discovered that Derb posted Larkin's "Homage to a Government" right after the one cited above.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 1:00 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

As usual, the hard left's favorite intellectual is as leaden and disingenuous as it's possible to be in print, this time on the subject of Iranian intrigue. Noam Chomsky writes, in a piece that has been syndicated in The Nation:

The debate over Iranian interference in Iraq proceeds without ridicule on the assumption that the United States owns the world. We did not, for example, engage in a similar debate in the 1980s about whether the US was interfering in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, and I doubt that Pravda, probably recognizing the absurdity of the situation, sank to outrage about that fact (which American officials and our media, in any case, made no effort to conceal). Perhaps the official Nazi press also featured solemn debates about whether the Allies were interfering in sovereign Vichy France, though if so, sane people would then have collapsed in ridicule.

1. Did the Soviet Union have a UN mandate to occupy Afghanistan, thus giving it legal authority to monitor foreign infiltration of the country and expel such infiltrators?

2. The U.S. is once again, in Chomsky's bankrupt mind, compared to Nazi Germany, even though the analogue for the Allies in this case is a theocratic fascist state that makes it a matter of state policy to deny the signal crime of the Nazi regime. This no longer rises to the level of moral equivalence. It's cartooning as polemic.

Added to which, Chomsky can't keep his anarcho-syndicalist prescriptions straight. He now contradicts himself in the same essay. So, for instance, we get this --

Even if the White House clique is not planning war, naval deployments, support for secessionist movements and acts of terror within Iran, and other provocations could easily lead to an accidental war.

-- with no attempt whatsoever to clarify what he means by "secessionist movements" (let alone "acts of terror"), while a just few paragraphs down, we get:

Democracy promotion at home is certainly feasible and, although we cannot carry out such a project directly in Iran, we could act to improve the prospects of the courageous reformers and oppositionists who are seeking to achieve just that. Among such figures who are, or should be, well-known, would be Saeed Hajjarian, Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, and Akbar Ganji, as well as those who, as usual, remain nameless, among them labor activists about whom we hear very little; those who publish the Iranian Workers Bulletin may be a case in point.

Please explain how our supporting oppositionists will somehow not be seen by Tehran as a "provocation" that may lead to accidental war. And given the opportunity to secede from the fetid mullahocracy that rules Persia, would Hajjarian, Ebadi and Ganji not happily count themselves among the secessionists, even if they did blanch at the idea of receiving American aid or encouragement?

The rest of this screed is awash with the same platitudes about spreading "democracy at home," an idea that draws from the fact that the war powers delegated by the Constitution to the president of the United States are not automatically held in check by the latest Zogby/ABC News poll. That a majority of Americans oppose the surge and yet the surge is still undertaken means we don't live in a true democracy. There's political sophistication for you.

I suppose it would be small beer to Chomsky, given his frequent and cavalier recourse to 20th century history, to point out that prowar opinion ensnared Europe in the charnel event that was World War I, and antiwar opinion kept Europe from stopping Hitler when it might have done some good. But then, most people will concede that a genocide did indeed occur in the mid and late 1990's on European soil. So much for public opinion, eh, Noam?

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:45 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I well understand why Oliver Kamm is so frustrated with the chaotic nature of the blogosphere. You work all day, read countless books to bolster your case for a neoconservative foreign policy, and in swoops some ignoramous with a TypePad account to challenge your assertions and waste everybody's time. Why let the untutored masses graze in such rarefied slopes as political punditry? Why even allow blogs at all?

In its paucity of coverage and predictability of conclusions, the blogosphere provides a parody of democratic deliberation. But it gets worse. Politics, wrote the philosopher Michael Oakeshott, is a conversation, not an argument. The conversation bloggers have with their readers is more like an echo chamber, in which conclusions are pre-specified and targets selected. The outcome is horrifying. The intention of drawing readers into the conversation by means of a facility for adding comments results in an immense volume of abusive material directed - and recorded for posterity - at public figures.

The blogosphere, in short, is a reliable vehicle for the coagulation of opinion and the poisoning of debate. It is a fact of civic life that is changing how politics is conducted - overwhelmingly for the worse, and with no one accountable for the decline.

The easy shot here is to suggest you read three lines down from the above to find: "His blog is at oliverkamm.typepad.com." I'll refrain from comment on that because I've never found hypocrisy to be one of the deadlier vices, and also because it's clear that Oliver's gripe is not with blogging per se but the sorts of riffraff who constitute the blogging multitude. More should be like him, presumably.

However, I don't quite gel to his implied definition of democracy: "The great innovation of web-based commentary is that readers may select minutely the material they are exposed to. The corollary is that they may filter out views they find uncongenial. This is a problem for a healthy democracy, which depends on a forum for competing views."

Oh, yes, and off-monitor I routinely encounter arch-conservatives versed in the latest issue of New Left Review, or a DailyKos contributor versed in anything other than the Howard Dean mailing list.

What's going on here? If I didn't respect and admire Kamm's writing, I might say that he's become a parody of neoconservative idealism, where "freedom" necessarily means "progress."

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:15 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

We should all look and sound so good at that age:

Today Glucksmann doesn't have to fight against Marx-worship as he did in the 1970s, when even Sartre was swearing allegiance to Mao. But even if Marx is no longer being evoked, his spirit lives on in other forms. If we don't live like Gods, Glucksmann says, it's the brutal laws of the market, Wall Street, globalisation, and the free movement of people, ideas, goods and feelings that are to blame. "Those who fight against the West have retained from the fallen Marx his critique of capitalistic society and the command to destroy it. He disposes of communist dreams and convoluted Utopias but piously maintains the radicalism of heavy accusations. This New Age Marxism–Nihilism is a major nodal point, where religious fundamentalism, national fanaticism, revived racism and the cynicism of the over-saturated all meet."

And here is the confession -- "Why I Choose Sarkozy" -- that has the philosophe in the soup back home. (Originally published in Le Monde, this essay was reprinted in Democratiya. What would we do without Democratiya? I mean, what would we do?):

Nicolas Sarkozy is the only candidate today to place himself in this large-hearted French tradition. He deplores the sacrifice of the Bulgarian nurses condemned to death in Libya, he denounces massacres in Darfur and the murder of journalists, and then states a principle of governance far removed from that of Jacques Chirac: 'I don't believe in what people call 'realpolitik', which rejects values and still doesn't win any deals. I don't accept what's going on in Chechnya, since 250,000 dead or persecuted Chechens are more than a detail of world history. Because General de Gaulle wanted freedom for everyone, the right to liberty is theirs, too. To be silent is to be an accomplice, and I don't want to be any dictator's accomplice' (14/1/2007).

It's self-evident that Glucksmann has become midly neoconservative, if he wasn't in fact there already before Irving Kristol gave tongue. However, note that Andre also writes that his dream ticket for '08 would be Royal-Kouchner. Royal is socialism with a human pair of legs, for sure, but why Bernard Kouchner?

Because the founder of Medicins sans frontieres is the only leftist activist I can think of who did not attempt to climb-down from his organization's chilling findings into Saddam's Iraq when those findings were being reiterated by Tony Blair as justification for war. (Compare this to Amnesty International's claim that Blair had "selectively" taken evidence provided by that NGO in order to indict Baathism. Also see Amnesty's files under "gulag, Guantanamo.")

Some things are true, noted Orwell, even if The Daily Telegraph says they are true. So too is genocide real menace even if New Labour or a pampered New England Yankee in Austin, Texas points it out.

The lesson here comes, felicitously enough, at the expense of mouth-breathing, nativist Francophobes in this country, who seem not to realize that the duchy of Jacques Chirac is also the home of men like Glucksmann, Kouchner and Bernard Henri-Levy.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:00 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

What would the New York Times' war coverage be without John Burns?

Less pessimistic than this Week in Review piece on how roadside bombings and civilian death tolls are beginning to creep back up into pre-surge levels is Burns' brilliant video dispatch about how Saddam had been planning for just these postwar conditions for months before the coalition invasion.

According to Burns, Baathist thugs shepherded $2 billion in cash in steel trunks just the day we entered Baghdad. This money had been used to finance the Al Qaeda and Sunni Baathist insurgency, however, whether or not any of it is left begs the question, how is it that the insurgency continues its daily slaughter of civilians and military personnel? Through theft (oil pipelines are routinely tapped for ciphoning off Iraq's most lucrative natural resource), counterfeiting, and through kidnapping and exortion efforts. In the other words, the bad guys, in true gangster fashion, have grown self-sufficient. They require no longer require a state sponsor.

Now here's the most chilling fact from this video: According to leaked Pentagon records, the United States spends $8 billion a month in keeping the war afloat. The insurgency spends $200 million a year. That means the insurgency spends less money in a year than what the American military spends in a single day.

Watch the video here.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 11:45 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Meet Paulina Porizkova. She's Czech by heritage but was born in Sweden, which, in raw pleasantness calculus, is like having a beer garden with chocolate on tap.

Paulina's written a book called A Model Summer, all about her profession. It's modeling. The title's a pun, see.

The New York Times Book Review has excerpted the first chapter. So far, I got through Paulina's plane ride to Paris and the awkward attempt to hide her communist-sounding last name from a stewardess. Then I turned the page and the picture at right disappeared only to be replaced by more text.

Much like communism, this book is a big tease that leaves you wondering what might have been had someone more humane been in charge.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 11:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Quid pro quo, suggests Andrew:

Iran’s state-controlled media reported that an Iranian diplomat would now have access to the five Iranians arrested in Irbil — captives whose whereabouts bears close scrutiny in the weeks ahead. And an Iranian official, Jalal Sharafi, also detained in Iraq two months ago, was returned to Tehran last Tuesday. Hmm. In The Washington Post last Friday the very well connected neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer bragged that “American action is what got this unstuck”. Last week, Vice-President Dick Cheney told ABC News radio that he “did not know” if any deal was made. That is, to say the least, an interesting nonresponse to the question.

As unfortunate as such a set of circumstances may be -- we're now trading spies for soldiers, assuming these reports are true -- one takeaway is positive. Can there be any doubt that the Anglo-American "special relationship" has solidified into a permanent one?

Anti-Americanism is choking in the UK, far worse than it is in France, and yet, somehow, we still manage to sacrifice for our English cousins in ways that would be unthinkable for anyone else. I smiled reading the above paragraph in Sullivan's Times piece. Not because it means that once again and Yankee Doodle Dee, we're plucking Blighty out of the soup, but because news like this must drive Geoffrey Wheatcroft and Simon Jenkins crazy. A disastrous war that should never have been fought actually strengthens U.S.-British ties the more disastrous it gets.

There's every indication that should either David Cameron or Gordon Brown be elected the next prime minister, the nexus between Washington and London would remain unbroken. George Washington's famous admonition against "entangling alliances" was right, save for one the ally he never thought we'd have.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 10:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

You think I maybe exaggerate when I say that for almost every occasion there's an apposite Auden poem? The Romans used to have a superstitious ritual called sortes virgilianae, whereby they would, when faced with a life dilemma, flip to a random page of The Aeneid and whatever stanza they landed on, there'd be the answer, however cryptically imparted. So we're on solid ground with Auden for All Seasons.

On the phone the other day with a certain Vanity Fair columnist and he tells me of an article he's just read that mentions how Grendel in Beowulf is denied the gift of speech. Right away, the lines from "August, 1968" come rushing back:

The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for man;
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master speech.

About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and its slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

You can do this all the time, and I find myself recalling "Good-Bye to the Mezzogiorno" after reading this areverderci to the best show on television.

Out of a gothic North, the pallid children
Of a potato, beer-or-whisky
Guilt culture, we behave like our fathers and come
Southward into a sunburnt otherwhere

Of vineyards, baroque, la bella figura,
To these feminine townships where men
Are males, and siblings untrained in a ruthless
Verbal in-fighting as it is taught

In Protestant rectories upon drizzling
Suunday afternoons—no more as unwashed
Barbarians out for gold, nor as profiteers
Hot for Old Masters, but for plunder

Nevertheless—some believing amore
Is better down South and much cheaper
(Which is doubtful), some persuaded exposure
To strong sunlight is lethal to germs

(Which is patently false) and others, like me,
In middle-age hoping to twig from
What we are not what we might be next, a question
The South seems never to raise. Perhaps

A tongue in which Nestor and Apemantus,
Don Ottavio and Don Giovanni make
Equally beautiful sounds is unequipped
To frame it, or perhaps in this heat

It is nonsense: the Myth of an Open Road
Which runs past the orchard gate and beckons
Three brothers in turn to set out over the hills
And far away, is an invention

Of a climate where it is a pleasure to walk
And a landscape less populated
Than this one. Even so, to us it looks very odd
Never to see an only child engrossed

In a game it has made up, a pair of friends
Making fun in a private lingo,
Or a body sauntering by himself who is not
Wanting, even as it perplexes

Our ears when cats are called Cat and dogs either
Lupo, Nero or Bobby. Their dining
Puts us to shame: we can only envy a people
So frugal by nature it costs them

No effort not to guzzle and swill Yet (if I
Read their faces rightly after ten years)
They are without hope. The Greeks used to call the Sun
He-who-smites-from-afar, and from here, where

Shadows are dagger-edged, the daily ocean blue,
I can see what they meant: his unwinking
Outrageous eye laughs to scorn any notion
Of change or escape, and a silent

Ex-volcano, without a stream or a bird,
Echoes that laugh. This could be a reason
Why they take the silencers off their Vespas,
Turn their radios up to full volume,

And a minim saint can expect rockets—noise
As a counter-magic, a way of saying
Book to the Three Sisters: “Mortal we may be,
But we are still here!” might cause them to hanker

After proximities—in streets packed solid
With human flesh, their souls feel immune
To all metaphysical threats. We are rather shocked,
But we need shocking: to accept space, to own

That surfaces need not be superficial
Nor gestures vulgar, cannot really
Be taught within earshot of running water
Or in sight of a cloud. As pupils

We are not bad, but hopeless as tutors: Goethe,
Tapping homeric hexameters
On the shoulder-blade of a Roman girl, is
(I wish it were someone else) the figure

Of all our stamp: no doubt he treated her well,
But one would draw the line at calling
The Helena begotten on that occasion,
Queen of his Second Walpurgisnacht,

Her baby: between those who mean by a life a
Bildungsroman and those to whom living
Means to-be-visible-now, there yawns a gulf
Embraces cannot bridge. If we try

To “go southern,” we spoil in no time, we grow
Flabby, dingily lecherous, and
Forget to pay bills: that no one has heard of them
Taking the Pledge or turning to Yoga

Is a comforting thought—in that case, for all
The spiritual look we tuck away,
We do them no harm—and entitle us, I think
To one little scream at A piacere,

Not two. Go I must, but I go grateful (even
To a certain Monte) and invoking
My sacred meridian names, Vico, Verga,
Pirandello, Bernini, Bellini,

To bless this region, its vendages, and those
Who call it home: though one cannot always
Remember exactly who one has been happy,
There is no forgetting that one was.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:14 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

One of the most telling and grim spectacles in the mayhem of today's Iraq is the systematic murder of trade unionists by barbaric psychopaths. Quite like Jews, they're are a good bellwether for the state of a country's sanity. Saddam's Baath had trade unionists slaughtered or arrested because they represented the most sophisticated and cohesive form of opposition to his rule. It used to be an automatic response by the international left to stand in solidarity with the workers living under a blood-brutal fascist regime, or trying to reconstitute themselves in its aftermath. Alas, you won't find an obituary for Najim A Jasem, the general secretary of Iraq's Mechanic Workers' Union, in the pages of The Nation or Mother Jones (hat tip: the Trots):

The TUC has condemned the abduction, torture and murder of Iraqi trade unionist Najim Abd-Jasem, General Secretary of the Mechanic Workers' Union..

Sue Rogers, Chair of the TUC Iraq Solidarity Committee, had met Najim, and said:

'Najim was one of the most positive influences in the Iraqi trade union movement. He was very progressive, and very clear about where the movement needed to go.'

The TUC will continue to support trade unionists in Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan, and will continue to press for better labour laws and more protection for the trade union movement from sectarian killings.

The Iraqi trade union movement, the GFIW, has issued the following statement:

' Najim A Jasem was kidnapped by militias on 27 March. His body was found on 30 March 2007. His body bears huge signs of torture. He was member of the underground Workers' Trade Union Movement (WDTUM) and fought against the regime of Saddam. He was dismissed from his job because of his trade union activities. He was reinstated after the fall of Saddam. He was one of the key founder of the new democratic IFTU, now the GFIW, and was elected the General Secretary of the Mechanics Workers' Union.'

The TUC send condolences to his family and colleagues.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:12 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I sit here ready to begin an essay on the state of the British left and Nick Cohen's tonic critique of it, What's Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way .There are so many quotable strophes in this book, but one in particular struck me for its foresight:

For when their [the liberal-left’s] fury passes, what will they have left? They will look to their core principles for guidance, only to find that they, rather than their conservative opponents, have battered them to the point of destruction. If they talk about the urgent task of combating terror by spreading the freedoms they enjoy, the audience they taught to sneer at others will sneer at them. If they provide evidence of a totalitarian menace, the accusation of lying they have thrown so freely at others, will be thrown back in their faces. If they belatedly rediscover the moral imagination to show solidarity with those who share their values, their own charges of consorting with the dupes of American imperialism will be used in evidence against them.

In other words, they've fashioned a rod for their own backs by opposing Bush and Blair, not on principle but out of "visceral" hatred. The left has become improvisational, which is really the performative way of saying it has become nihilistic. Cohen understand this as someone who has spent his entire life on that side of the spectrum yet who hardly recognizes the types of people who should be his comrades and co-thinkers.

One aspect missing in What's Left is how Marxism, so far from being a dead mode of historical analysis, can in fact explain the degeneration of socialists into excuse-makers for jihad, the enslavement of women, the murder of homosexuals and the destruction of trade unions. Anyone who's read The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte knows that the agitative middle-classes, who have lived through at least one revolution in their time, never think very far in advance when it comes to seizing political opportunities in the present. They will rob their future selves, in the name of vanquishing a temporary antagonist, of precisely the rights and privileges those future selves will need to survive. And when they thus find themselves victims of their own intellectual and moral shallowness, lack of consistency in action, and disregard for long-term strategy, guess who they'll never once think of blaming for all their misfortunes?

Nancy Pelosi cuddles up to Bashar al-Assad, who creates havoc and chaos in Lebanon the better to enable a Syrian reconquest of that neighboring country. If her efforts at negotiating a deal with Assad succeeded, and if, with his partner-in-peace status with the United States renewed he found it that much easier to coax Hezbollah into staging a coup in Beirut, where would that leave a rising generation of Lebanese citizens and their feelings towards the West? After Hezbollah immiserated Lebanon, what would teenagers coming of age during that immiseration think of people like Madame Speaker and her realist cohort? Talk of "root causes" of the sprouting of new enemies of this country fades into silence when it's not George W. Bush or Tony Blair worrying those roots in the name of anti-fascism and democracy.

RELATED: An Old Leftist Definition of Fascism

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The top news story on Technorati right now is the Washington Post article discussing a just-declassified report by the Defense Department that allegedly puts paid to the notion that the Baath government in Iraq had suborned or sponsored Al Qaeda.

Of course, Dick Cheney's appearance on Rush Limbaugh's radio program in which the vice president insisted that Saddam and Osama were well acquainted and cooperating before 2003 has incited the type of responses one would expect. (Though Cheney has never come out and said that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks, his qualified statements about Iraq's culpability in sponsoring global jihadists -- Al Qaeda operatives included -- have been taken up by the antiwar crowd as just such a propagation of falsehood, another canard in the quick, furious and irresponsible march to war.)

Nowhere in this WaPo piece is it mentioned that Richard Clarke, now the doyen of the truthiness-to-power factions, included Saddam's covert negotiations with Al Qaeda in the U.S. legal brief that justified the Clinton administration's spate of bombings of military sites inside Iraq in the late 90's. Nor will you find much on this: As early as October 2001, members of Ansar al-Islam had attempted to assassinate the brilliant, brave PUK secretary-general of Sulaimaniyah Dr. Barham Salih. Salih went on record saying, in effect, that isn't interesting that jihadists would come out of the woodwork in Iraq's northern region at the exact time that Bin Laden declared himself international Public Enemy Number One.

Ansar al-Islam is (or was) a terrorist cell that, according to Human Rights Watch, culled from the ranks of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and native Kurdish Islamist groups. It was previously known as Jund al-Islam, which openly declared itself a sworn enemy of the "secular" Saddam Hussein yet never shied from murdering and intimidating his Kurdish democratic antagonists. (The enemy of one's enemy is still an enemy according to the stupid and primitive logic of jihad.) Ansar al-Islam was later absorbed into Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's precursor outfit as what he conveniently called "Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia." The inevitable question: Just how affiliated was Zarqawi with Bin Laden before the coalition invasion of Iraq, and when exactly did the late Jordanian thug enter the country?

This is false:

Zarqawi, whom Cheney depicted yesterday as an agent of al-Qaeda in Iraq before the war, was not then an al-Qaeda member but was the leader of an unaffiliated terrorist group who occasionally associated with al-Qaeda adherents, according to several intelligence analysts. He publicly allied himself with al-Qaeda in early 2004, after the U.S. invasion.

The only biography written of Zarqawi was by the French journalist Jean Charles-Brisard. Here's what Charles-Brisard wrote in Zarqawi: The New Face of Al Qaeda, published in 2005 [Note: Suwaqah is the Jordanian prison in which Zarqawi served a sentence for terrorism before being released in 1999 by a universal act of amnesty for terrorists by King Abdullah, who was worried at the time about what native Islamists might do with their parliamentary bloc if he refused]:

On the basis of the charisma he had displayed at Suwaqah and his knowledge of the small world of Jordanian Islamists, Zarqawi had established himself as the leader of the group of Jordanians who came with him to Afghanistan. These included not only his first comrades from the time of Bayt Al-Imam, Khaled Al-Aruri and Abdel Hadi Daghlas, both of whom had left prison in 1999, but also all sorts of future fighters. In the space of a few weeks he had shown surprising skill in reconstituting an operational group and bringing his partisans into Al-Qaeda.

Zarqawi then moved into a "guest house" large enough for his group of about forty Jordanians in the village of Logo, several kilometers west of Kabul, an area traditionally under the control of the extremist leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. He leaned on Al-Qaeda, of course, at first to take advantage of its equipment and logistical support so that he could plan large-scale operations. The man who opened the door of Bin Laden's structure to this group of Jordanians was a Jordanian himself, Abu Zubaydah, Al-Qaeda's head of operations.

By the end of 1999 and the beginning of 2000 Zarqawi had proved himself an important part of the Al-Qaeda apparatus in Afghanistan, and in 2001 he took the oath of allegiance to Bin Laden. To void any conflict between dissident factions (in particular the Algerian groups), starting in May 2001 the Taliban required all heads of training camps who wanted to pursue their activities to swear allegiance to their regime.

Having taken this step, Zarqawi had to conform to the ideological line set by Osama Bin Laden. The oath of allegiance was a way for Bin Laden to rein in rebellious spirits, but it was primarily a way to bring the different "Islamo-nationalist" groups together under a single banner. The oath, written by Bin Laden himself, is as follows: "I recall the committment to God, in order to listen to and obey my superiors, who are accomplishing this task with energy, difficulty, and giving of self, and in order that God may protect us so God's words are the highest and his religion victorious."

[...]

According to a confidential document of the Spanish antiterrorist unit UCIE (Unidad Central de Informacion Exterior), at the end of the summer of 1999 Zarqawi joined the second circle [of Al Qaeda], the circle of Bin Laden's lieutenants. By this time he was no longer an unknown or marginal figure. He was assigned the planning of the group's operations, and as such was in charge of several dozen militants.

Shadi Abdalla, Bin Laden's former bodyguard, later told the German intelligence services that Zarqawi's rise within the Al-Qaeda hierarchy owed a great deal to Abu Zubaydah, who was himself very close to Osama Bin Laden. Both men were Jordanians; both were inspired by a visceral hatred of the Hashemite regime. Zarqawi is said to have assisted Zubaydah in the preparation of the so-called millennium attacks against Western interest in Jordan. During this first terrorist operation on the international level he would win the trust of the Al-Qaeda staff and of Bin Laden in particular.

Abu Zubaydah is now in U.S. custody and though some argue he's mentally unhinged, his information has apparently led to the capture of multiple Al Qaeda agents abroad.

So, then: Zarqawi took an oath of fealty and allegiance to Osama Bin Laden just four months prior to the September 11 attacks. Why on earth was such an oath mandated at that time, do you suppose? And why are we still reading in major American newspapers that Zarqawi and Bin Laden were barely even on nodding terms with each other?

UPDATE [April, 9]: I stupidly forgot to mention in my original post the following revelation in a Foreign Affairs essay, published last year, on the internal mechanics of Saddam's republic of fear. Based on captured Baathist records, we now know that the fascist tyrant supposedly "in his box" had tasked his most gruesome paramilitary milita the Saddam Fedayeen with

[taking] part in the regime's domestic terrorism operations and planned for attacks throughout Europe and the Middle East. In a document dated May 1999, Saddam's older son, Uday, ordered preparations for "special operations, assassinations, and bombings, for the centers and traitor symbols in London, Iran and the self-ruled areas [Kurdistan]." Preparations for "Blessed July," a regime-directed wave of "martyrdom" operations against targets in the West, were well under way at the time of the coalition invasion.

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Neil Hannon makes me proud all over again to be half Irish.

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We can expect the English Right's favorite chivvier of New Labour not to change his tune about women serving in the armed forces for the fact that Faye Turney was apparently told by her captors that she was the only hostage remaining. After all, Iran would not have cordoned her off from the men and used her delicate, mommy-like sensibilities as leverage if women were never admitted to the Royal Navy in the first place, right? Whatever you think of Wheatcroft's sexual politics of warcraft, you owe it to yourself to give this remarkable paragraph a double read:

Contentious borders used to be called "debatable land," and the whole Persian Gulf is debatable water. In the vast estuary of the Tigris and Euphrates at the northern end of the Gulf, the coastline itself continually shifts, and the notional sea boundary with it. We are credulous about modern high-tech gadgetry, including the wonderful Global Positioning System, although plenty of evidence, from automobile satellite navigation to voting machines, might be a caution against blind faith in machinery. From my own modest experience of navigating a small boat, I know it is far-fetched to think you can know your exact position on the high seas to within a few hundred yards—and that may still be true even with GPS.

Allowances made for Skipper Geoffrey's experience manning dirigibles in the Persian Gulf -- or, you know, Oxford Canal, or whatever -- note how the first two sentences axiomatically fault the Iranians as much as they do the Brits. If the coastlines are forever changing, then what right did Iran have to nab the Royal Navy sailors and marines? Tehran no more than London could have determined the case for "trespassing." Yet that didn't stop the former from creating a two-week spectacle of an international crisis, did it?

Wheatcroft's pathetic attempt to blame the prime minister he's made a late-stage career out of reviling collapses under the weight of its own rationale. By his own admission, there's hardly anything that "vulnerable inflatable craft, little more than lightly armed dinghies" can do that could possibly be interpreted as threatening to a foreign military. Were the British attempting covert reconaissance in Iranian territory? Hardly with the martial analogue of a boogie board.

Iran is still the only one to blame for this affair, whatever you think of Tony Blair's handling of its paltry and shameful conclusion.

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You'll pardon any spelling errors or solecisms in this post. I've just come back from a two-martini Good Friday lunch.

Philologos, the Yiddishkeit-loving language maven at The Forward, celebrates the Jewish weekly's anniversary issue with a potted -- but flawed -- history of the paper's socialist origins (hat tip: Norm):

The second Vorwärts, named for the first, was started as a daily in Leipzig in 1876 as the official organ of the German Social-Democratic Party, which had been founded a little more than a decade earlier. Its first editor was William Liebknecht, a leading socialist politician who, years later, at the time of the Spartakus uprising in 1919, was murdered together with Rosa Luxemburg by the German police, and it, too, had its brushes with the law. Closed by the Prussian government in 1878 as part of an anti-socialist campaign, it started up again in 1891 in Berlin, again under Liebknechtâ??s editorship; it supported a socialist revolution but opposed Lenin and Bolshevism, and continued to publish until 1933, when the Nazis banned it soon after taking power. In 1948 it was re-founded as the Neuer Vorwärts, and since 1955 it has been the German left-wing monthly Vorwärts .

Thus, when Cahan founded the Yiddish Forverts in 1897, the German Vorwärts was a going concern. Presumably he wanted the name, despite its shopworn character, precisely because it was well known in radical Jewish circles and was a way of declaring where the Forverts intended to stand politically -- namely, in the 19th-century social-democratic tradition and in favor of revolution but against the Leninist "dictatorship of the proletariat." In this respect, it accomplished with one word what many editorials might have been needed to do.

William Liebknecht should read Karl Liebknecht (William was Karl's father and also Marx's babysitter.) And as Norm points out, Lenin hadn't discussed the dictatorship of the proletariat by 1897, though I suspect this is just sloppy phrasing on Philologos' part.

Also, you wouldn't now it from this description but the Forverts crowd hosted Trotsky during his tour of New York -- a slight retrogression from the anti-Leninist social democracy it purported to represent. Trotsky left Gotham concluding that the Jewish socialists were milquetoast Mensheviks and not real revolutionaries.

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What's more worrisome -- at least to me -- than Pelosi's politics is her IQ. She's a twit. How did she think she'd possibly pull something like this off? Imagine Newt Gingrich trying to establish peace with Saddam Hussein in 1998, fresh off Clinton's aerial bombardment campaign of Iraq. Can you picture it clearly? How about the probable reaction of les bien-pensants?

The Washington Post editorial board gets it right:

Ms. Pelosi was criticized by President Bush for visiting Damascus at a time when the administration -- rightly or wrongly -- has frozen high-level contacts with Syria. Mr. Bush said that thanks to the speaker's freelancing Mr. Assad was getting mixed messages from the United States. Ms. Pelosi responded by pointing out that Republican congressmen had visited Syria without drawing presidential censure. That's true enough -- but those other congressmen didn't try to introduce a new U.S. diplomatic initiative in the Middle East. "We came in friendship, hope, and determined that the road to Damascus is a road to peace," Ms. Pelosi grandly declared.

Never mind that that statement is ludicrous: As any diplomat with knowledge of the region could have told Ms. Pelosi, Mr. Assad is a corrupt thug whose overriding priority at the moment is not peace with Israel but heading off U.N. charges that he orchestrated the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri. The really striking development here is the attempt by a Democratic congressional leader to substitute her own foreign policy for that of a sitting Republican president. Two weeks ago Ms. Pelosi rammed legislation through the House of Representatives that would strip Mr. Bush of his authority as commander in chief to manage troop movements in Iraq. Now she is attempting to introduce a new Middle East policy that directly conflicts with that of the president. We have found much to criticize in Mr. Bush's military strategy and regional diplomacy. But Ms. Pelosi's attempt to establish a shadow presidency is not only counterproductive, it is foolish.

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A guest blogger at business-law-omnibus Conglomerate wonders: how should the government levy tax on assets contained in video games?

Games like [World of Warcraft] raise income tax issues, in part because items in them, though part of a "game," have real market value. In the paper Gordon mentioned, I discuss two of the issues: the taxation of loot "drops" and the taxation of exchanges within the game, such as the exchange of a virtual sword for gold. From a policy perspective, my view is that drops and purely in-game trades should not bear income tax. One of the problems with taxing them would be the regressive nature of the tax because players who put in the most time and the least money would owe the most tax, although players who put in the most time (40-80 hours a week or more) tend not to be employed full-time (e.g., students). Players with higher incomes tend to be those putting in less time; they tend to spend money in the "real market" in lieu of hours of "grinding" to level up. Such a tax would also pose administrability issues because of its enforcement difficulties. For these reasons and others, I argue that players of games like WoW should be taxed if and when they cash out—that is, on real market trades. That approach would allow those playing for entertainment not be taxed on their game play (beyond the tax they already paid on the money spent on the game), while catching most profit-seeking activity.

And I infer from the title that there is more to come on this topic. I know they say to write what you know, but can papers on role-playing public policy get you tenure? Isn't the petty minuet of ivory tower politics sufficient role-playing for most professors, or do we have to get the warlocks mixed up with everything, too?

Conglomerate | Virtual Tax, Part 1

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If you've never seen The Private Life of Henry VIII, Netflix that tonight and skip the bodice-ripping, doggie-styling longueurs of Tudors, Showtime's 16th-century answer to what Showtime normally broadcasts after midnight. Whereas Tudors allows Jonathan Rhys Meyers to smolder and pout his regal way into historically inevitable blimpishness, The Private Life, directed by that great Hungarian emigre Alexander Korda, offered the same bawdy good fun at one-tenth the length and ten times the quality. Charles Laughton plays an older Henry, by now gleefully decapitating Ann Boleyn -- successor to the heir-impaired Catherine of Aragon -- and eating and fucking his way into high church Protestantism. (That today's evangelicals have the family values of this man to thank for their existence is an irony that deserves mention at every opportunity.)

Anyway, Sacha Zimmerman at TNR has a good review of the tumescent mini-series:

The lean, muscled, pale-blue-eyed "it" boy of the moment languishes shirtless throughout most scenes lustily eating juicy pomegranates, getting shaved by his dressers, bedding everyone but his wife, and even wrestling with the king of France. No doubt his many lovelorn fans will appreciate every shirtless, simmering shot. Nevertheless, the sex is decidedly laughable at times. At one point, before mauling a chambermaid, the king asks, "Do you consent?" as though it's 1994 at Antioch College. Another scene finds the young king receiving his first blow job from Mary Boleyn (Anne's sister) after indelicately asking her what she had learned during her time in France. It is simply Jonathan Rhys Meyers porn. Unfortunately, the writing is so dreadful, the normally evocative Meyers is reduced to stomach-churning frat-boy antics and the sulky tantrums of the boy king. Considering Henry was supposedly a Renaissance man of true order--a musician, an artist, a theologian--this insipid portrayal seems grossly gratuitous.

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Nancy Pelosi gladhands Bashar al-Assad, Baathist dictator of Syria and the man responsible for the assassinations of Rafiq Hariri and Pierre Gemayel.

This one goes out to Matt Yglesias, proudly welcoming moments like these since (at least) April, 2007.

RELATED: Could You Eat Enough To Vomit Enough?

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It isn't everyday one finds Bill Kristol quoting Faulkner. Santayana seems more the Weekly Standard editor's style, especially with respect to the famous apercu about history coming back around to bite you on your uninformed beak. Still, he sees the past as present as future in Fred Thompson, the big ole slab of condemned Tennessee veal who's heir to... Ronald Reagan?

In the two weeks since the Thompson boomlet began, many times I've heard conservative friends consider Thompson's merits (which are real) and then--chuckling, but almost dispositively--add, "The last time we nominated an actor, it didn't turn out badly."

And the New York Observer says one way to get out the vote is to stay home and tune in:

Most of Mr. Thompson’s acting roles have played like slickly produced Presidential auditions: the tough-but-fair military man, the tough-but-fair F.B.I. agent, the tough-but-fair prosecutor—even a President. Law & Order, in which Thompson plays a conservative Southerner who somehow managed to get elected Manhattan D.A., has functioned as an hour-long campaign commercial beamed into the nation’s collective cerebral cortex for the past five years. “More people will watch Fred Thompson on Law & Order next week than will vote in both parties’ [super] primaries on Feb. 5 next year,” Mr. Galen said.

Sam Waterston is too Eugene McCarthy.

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From the Times:

Mr. Blair repeated his assertions that Britain had exchanged nothing in return for the detainees’ freedom.

They were released, he said, “without any deal, without any negotiation, without any side agreement of any nature whatsoever.”

From the BBC:

Speaking as the Royal Navy crew arrived back at Heathrow, Mr Blair said he rejoiced at their return.

But it had to be tempered with the "ugly reality" of the deaths of four British soldiers in Iraq, killed by "a terrorist act" in Basra.

The Ministry of Defence confirmed on Thursday that four soldiers had been killed in a roadside bomb blast and a fifth was seriously injured.

Mr Blair said it was "far too early" to point to any Iranian involvement in that particular attack.

But he added: "The general picture, as I have said before, is there are elements at least of the Iranian regime that are backing, financing, arming terrorism in Iraq."

Meanwhile, Norm Geras has got the goods on the engufling, mandible-straining blowjob the Guardian performs on Ahmadinejad.

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Let us now praise eloquent Irishmen. In the wake of the sordid Paisley-Adams rapprochement, it's worth recalling the historic Hibernian stake in questions of nationhood and constitutional federalism. Among those scholars toiling in this complex field none impresses me more than Brendan O'Leary of the University of Pennsylvania.

Professor O'Leary, a one-time contributor to the New Left Review (and how far that journal has fallen since) and an advisor to the Kurdistan Regional Government, has written a must-read riposte in Democratyia to the Baker-Hamilton Commission's nonstarter report on what to do about Iraq.

If you think this document is passe, think again. As O'Leary suggests, it's sure to crop up at least in the subtext of the 2008 presidential election as every Democratic -- and almost every Republican -- candidate vies to outdo one another on "realist" bona fides.

There's a lot of ground to cover, but here's the witty gist of his polemic:

The answer is that The ISG Report is a full-frontal assault on Iraq’s constitution of 2005. It commends a course of action that would push the U.S. government completely to unravel Iraq’s constitution, which was endorsed by four of five of Iraq’s voters, a higher level of endorsement than that enjoyed by any attempts to change the constitution of Canada. While suggesting no changes in the constitutions of any of Iraq’s neighbours (let alone regime changes), The ISG Report treats the new democratic constitution of the United States’ Iraqi ally with contempt.

The ISG Report is a recipe for a constitutional coup d’état, but without local coup-leaders, for now. The prescription is terse, ‘The USG should support as much possible central control by governmental authorities in Baghdad, particularly on the question of oil revenues’ (see page 39). It carefully does not say ‘within the limits of the constitution,’ or ‘the rule of law’; it just says as ‘much possible central control.’ ‘Go figure.’

Remarkably, The ISG Report claims that it offers a ‘new approach.’ In fact it is no different from that promoted by L. Paul Bremer III before the making of the Transitional Administrative Law of 2004. It is an interesting anthropological fact that Americans with III after their names often have the same ideas. Perhaps they come from the same sect?

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Matt and Trey's inexhaustible creation is the only show I always regret losing touch with because every time I tune into a new episode, I laugh myself silly.

If you didn't see last night's Da Vinci Code parody -- using the mythos of the Easter Bunny as its plot mover -- you need to be TiVoing it the next time it airs, which is actually a few hours from this writing.

Stan questions why we color eggs worship a rabbit on the day that the world's most famous nice Jewish boy came back from the dead. "Isn't there a gap of information" between Jesus and chocolate Cadburys, he asks to the chagrin of his secret-keeping father Randy.

I don't want to give more than that away, but suffice it to say, what I thought was going to be a cameo by Karl Rove turned out to be one by the physically indistinguishable Bill Donohue. I'm not sure what kind of profile Donahue has outside of New York, but round these parts he's known as the pitchfork-wielding villager who also goes by the name of the Catholic League (apparently the "League" is just Bill), the bete noir of... well, pretty much everybody at one point or another.

Frankly, this episode comes in a strong second behind "The Passion of the Jew" and the one where Cartman cooked the school bully's parents and made him eat them to the mockery of Radiohead.

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Here's what I'm holding my breath for: The comparison between John McCain's meretricious and self-defeating photo op in Baghdad's marketplace and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's vile PR coup, which served as today's sad denouement to the British hostage crisis.

You know this is coming because all the clever diplomacy firsters have been sniffing around both stories all day. It's only a matter of time before they hit it a nice, steaming turd of moral equivalence.

Now what about McCain's trip to Iraq? What made his oh-so-cavalier stroll through the capital even more depressing is that his takeaway propaganda is rooted in fact. Things are improving in the Baghdad marketplace, as this report from ABC News nicely demonstrates without the flak jackets, rooftop snipers, armored SUVs and aerial assault cover.

Especially galling is to see a once brave dissenter from "national opinion," who convincingly said he'd rather win a war than a presidential election, reduced to such a spectacle as this: a ridiculously fortified campaign stop in the wrong country.

Worst of all is how the Iraqis must feel to know McCain's intentions have changed with his steadily declining place in the polls.

McCain Wrong on Iraq Security, Merchants Say - New York Times

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I met John Cassidy a few months ago, outside a bar in Carroll Gardens -- Brooklyn being the preferred sliver of Little England in Gotham. Nice bloke, very down to earth. Somehow I suspect he'd be a little put off by the fact that among all the terrific tidbits in his New Yorker profile of World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, the fact that the money man has got holes in his socks is the one with which everyone seems preoccupied. Here's what I would have highlighted, if I were, you know, a blogger or something:

Many of Wolfowitz’s critics suspect that his motive in fighting corruption is political rather than economic. “I think he was completely genuine in the notion of bringing Western-style democracy to Iraq, the Middle East, and other areas,” Dennis de Tray said to me. “That hasn’t changed. He’s still committed to that agenda, and I think he sees the bank as another instrument to achieve what I see as long-held goals. The focus on ‘corruption’ and ‘good governance’—for him, those are code words for democracy and human rights. He knows he can’t use those words publicly, because the bank’s charter says we can’t engage with politics. But he goes pretty close by saying we are not going to deal with corrupt regimes anymore.”

Even if your eyes gloss over the side note that the international lending body created in the smoldering aftermath of World War II is prohibited from using terms like "democracy" and "human rights," you might be inclined to notice two things about the head of that body: 1. He's a liberal down to his softy core; 2. He obviously did learn a thing or two from the single Leo Strauss course he took at the University of Chicago if the terms "corruption" and "good governance" have become the new noble lies for economic policy wonks.

And if you're really caffeinated when you read this piece, you'll also observe that it's remarkable for what it leaves out: the fact that qualms about third world corruption with respect to humanitarian aid don't begin with Scoop Jackson idealists but with more conventional lefty types like David Rieff. Rieff has argued, most visibly in the pages of the American Prospect, that the good intentions of popular, non-government campaigns such as LiveAid have been eclipsed by the sordid use of the money those campaigns raised. What happens to "We Are the World" dollars once they get transferred into bank accounts that tinpot dictators have arrogated as their own private property?

For one thing, bolstering the loan-for-lives ratio in an organization that's mainly kept afloat by the United States is a way of eliminating any associative guilt the United States may be charged with in a lendee’s crimes against humanity. Though I doubt that, say, denying loans to China because of its miserable human rights record will be seen by the the hard left as anything other than self-serving and Machiavellian act by Wolfowitz. He can't win. Either he's a pawn of the Bush administration, putting their Just Say No to Dictators foreign policy to work at the World Bank, or he's lining the coffers of some of the worst dictators money can and does buy.

Now what about his notorious gracelessness under pressure?

After leaving the Selimiye Mosque, we were driven to a nearby restaurant, where Wolfowitz had dinner with mayors and governors from both sides of Turkey’s border with Bulgaria, which is ten miles from Edirne. The dinner lasted several hours and featured half a dozen courses as well as numerous speeches, and by the time we boarded a Turkish military helicopter for the flight back to Istanbul it was almost ten o’clock. I sat next to Wolfowitz, who promptly nodded off. For about half an hour, we flew south without incident. It was a clear night, and the lights from remote farmhouses and hamlets were visible. Then we hit something—an air pocket, a hailstorm, it was impossible to tell. The helicopter shook violently and plunged down to the right. For a few moments, it seemed that the pilot had lost control. Looking out the window, I saw the ground rushing toward us. Mercifully, the aircraft levelled off.

Wolfowitz, who had been shaken awake, said nothing, and neither did any of the other passengers on board. Cold air was rushing in from somewhere, and Patrick English, the head of Wolfowitz’s security detail, appeared from the front of the helicopter and said that the co-pilot’s door had sheared off and fallen to the ground. We flew on, slower and lower than before. A few minutes later, English said that the pilot had offered to land at a nearby airstrip, where we could wait for another helicopter to pick us up. Wolfowitz said that he wanted to continue.

Back in 2004, when the Al-Rashid Hotel he was staying in in Baghdad was bombed by jihadist thugs, journalists like William Langewiesche of The Atlantic, had claimed that Wolfowitz yelped in fear and skedaddled before the rubble had been gone through for body parts. What then of this display of Black Hawk Paul's fortitude even when the turbulence gets rough?

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I've always maintained a warm spot for the films of Paul Verhoeven. RoboCop is one of the smartest, most acid satires on corporate capitalism, not to mention eminently more watchable than any reeled species of manufactured dissent by Michael Moore or Tim Robbins. (The frequent news interludes that peppered this gory and bleak cyborg dystopia were worth the price of admission: the weather satellite that precipitates natural disasters and kills vacationing ex-presidents; the Battleship-like board game centered on nuclear annihilation; the gargantuan 6000 SUX sports car advertised as bigger than Godzilla, “An American Tradition.")

Part of Verhoeven's appeal stems from his love of kitsch and a willingness to transform B-movie subjects (and B-movie dialogue) into blockbuster entertainment. Basic Instinct without his direction would been the most lucrative screenplay Joe Eszterhaus ever sold to Cinemax AfterHours. The underrated Starship Troopers, which, as a smart Robert Heinlein novel, provided him with an ideal blend of sci-fi pulp (giant bugs, intergalactic warfare) and political cynicism (citizenship was purchased through military enlistment, and jingoism topped the list of deadly virtues).

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that, as a Dutchman, Verhoeven treats vulgarity – physical or emotional – with a kind of vaudevillian exuberance that seems more attuned to the seedy cosmopolitan stages of Weimar than to the soft-lit lens of Hollywood. This is another of saying it was only a matter of time before he tackled fascism. Verhoeven's latest film is entitled Black Book, and Manohla Dargis thinks it’s great, sick, brilliant fun:

The thrashing rarely lets up in “Black Book,” a film in which a Jewish woman’s body is saved from the off-camera death camps, gas chambers and ovens to become a site of negotiation, a means of survival and an erotic spectacle. Abused and misused, stripped and stripped again, Rachel — named, it’s worth noting, for the mother of Israel — survives by masking that body with a putatively Aryan disguise. She also falls for a Nazi.

Not any old Nazi, but the head of the Gestapo in The Hague, where Rachel has landed after fleeing an ambush that claims her brother and parents. Now working for the resistance, Rachel signs up for the ultimate Mata Hari assignment and agrees to bed Ludwig Müntze (Sebastian Koch) so she can uncover Gestapo secrets. She does that and more. After dyeing her hair a brassy blond, Rachel insinuates herself into the superdashing Nazi’s confidences and, soon enough, his bedroom. It takes just one glance at the top of her head with its creeping dark roots for Müntze to guess the truth. Grasping her naked breasts in her hands, Rachel pleads her case with Shakespearean gravitas, “Hath not a Jew, er, eyes?”

Posted by Michael Weiss at 5:59 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Mr. Ahmadinejad said that the captives had all confessed to trespassing in Iranian waters and that Iran had “every right” to put them on trial, but had decided not to. “I want to give them as a present to the British people, to see that they are free,” he said.

I'm not sure if offering human lives as a "gift" back to a government that was guilty of no breach of international law is worse than what followed from the lips of Mahmoud the Magnanimous: the entreaty to Tony Blair not to have the 15 British sailors and marines court martialed upon their return!

Matt Ygelias of course seizes upon Ahmadinejad's finest PR coup yet as an opportunity to flaunt the medals of "realist" victory. Here he is in Comment is Free:

Disappointed though the hawks may be, the fact that the crisis arose in the first place illustrates the continuing dangers posed by the Bush administration's policies of confrontation. Even if the administration isn't deliberately seeking war - and its behavior in this matter indicates that it isn't - the continued attempts to strong-arm Iran and its allies in the region pose a constant risk of misunderstandings and miscalculations. Indeed, according to Haaretz, one of the things Nancy Pelosi will do during her current trip to Damascus is seek to bring the Syrians a reassuring message from Israel, which fears that the general tensions in the region could prompt an accidental war. Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House of Representatives, has to do the job because the Bush administration refuses to conduct diplomatic talks with Syria.

For Yglesias to fob the responsibility of the criminal kidnapping of British sailors onto the Bush administration is extraordinary, as must be his definition of "confrontation." If Iran may be said to feel "strong-armed" into illegally kidnapping at gun point 15 servicemen and women of a foreign military (a mere miscalculation or misunderstanding, according to such logic), then how is the U.S. capture of Iranian intelligence agents in Iraq any more peremptory?

Here we see yet another sorry and fatuous attempt to locate all wrongdoing in Washington, even when a regime that makes a boast of Holocaust denial, messianic war with the West and its own relentless ambition for a nuclear arsenal is the one -- and the only one -- to blame.

And all this with a fitting coda that cozying up to the lambish Bashar al-Assad is a task that only a Democratic Congress can accomplish.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 5:58 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

"It's interesting to argue that if [abortion is] Constitutionally protected, it should be funded by the taxpayers. One doesn't follow the other. If it does, I want my government-issued firearm today." -- Markos Moulitsas

Posted by Nic Duquette at 5:27 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Nic and I wipe the tears of pride from our eyes to see the Chronicle of Higher Ed select our alma mater's humor magazine - which we both edited at one point - as the purveyor of the funniest college prank YouTube. (Linked on Arts & Letters Daily, no less: Be afraid, parents.)

Drinkin' Time

The needlessly long set-up is annoying, but the prank itself makes the wait worthwhile. The victims are a group of prospective students on a tour of Dartmouth College. In the video, the tour guide is droning on when suddenly there comes a primal scream: "It's drinking time!"

Students stop their conversations, drop their books, and begin running down the street. Then a character called Keggy the Keg appears. And a marching band. Andoh, just go watch it yourself. Credit for the prank belongs to the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern Humor Society, which, according to its Web site (http://www.dartmouth.edu/~jacko), has been around since 1908.

Nic invented Keggy the Dartmouth mascot, which exceeded all comic expectation by giving the administration a nasty case of the Awkwards.

Now if only it was tequila that flowed on the verdant quadrangles instead of Milwaukee's Best.

The Chronicle: 4/6/2007: The College Prank as Viral Video

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