• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami {A Japanese detective story/war novel/Kafka rip-off. It's great.}
• Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays, by Christopher Hitchens {First drafts of history, second thoughts on received wisdom, versatile meditations on great works of literature -- all by a man who can write about anything.}
• The Code of the Woosters, by P.G. Wodehouse {The Rise and Fall of the "Black Shorts," and the best of Bertie and Jeeves. You'll need Wodehouse in your life eventually. Start here; you've 89 or so more to go.}
• The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921, by Isaac Deutscher {Magnificient biography finally back in print, along with Volumes II and III. But better start before the revolution -- and Deutscher's conscience -- was betrayed.}
• Colossus, by Niall Ferguson {Why the U.S. can't hack neo-imperialism, much to Niall's chagrin.}
• Reflections on a Ravaged Century, by Robert Conquest {Don't even try to have an opinion about the twentieth century without reading him.}
• Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh {One of the funniest books, ever. Shrinks the remainder of the "innocent abroad" genre to the vanishing point.}
• Put Out More Flags, by Evelyn Waugh {Lapidary prose on the frisson between the wars. Basil Seal riding low before he rides again; Auden and Isherwood lampooned as "Parnsip and Pimpernell."}
• The Origins of Postmodernity, by Perry Anderson {Terrific writer from the London Review of Books and New Left Review, who ought to be more famous than he is, tackles lucidly the abstruse bloodhound gang -- from Habermas to Jameson -- of Theory.}
• The Counterlife, by Philip Roth {How Portnoy learned to stop complaining and write a brilliant postmodern novel.}
• Rise of the Vulcans, by James Mann {Probably the only low-blood pressure source on Bush's brain trust. Valuable for charting the progression of neo-neo-conservatism, and how Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz contravened, and then dismantled, the Kissinger realpolitik foreign policy machine.}
• Money, by Martin Amis {Forget Bonfire and Psycho. It took the English author of The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America to effectively chew up the Reagan era -- largely by reminding us that it was also the Thatcher era. A fine lesson in history repeating, too: Di and Charles were TV's original Ben and J. Lo; the Self-on-Massi sex tape is where Paris (if she can read) might have learned her stuff; and the cavalier cash flow in this soft-boiled checkbook who-dun-it tale rivals that of any West Coast dotcom monkey a decade later.}
• The War Against Cliche and Experience, by Martin Amis {If Amis kept on doing what he did in his award-winning collection of critical essays, James Wood would lose more hair. It's saying quite a lot that his non-fiction exceeds his fiction. Experience is by far the best memoir to appear in the last decade: a more muscular Speak, Memory, it's a midlife nostalgia trip pureed out of chronology, though somehow more cohesive than a stream-of-consciousness hodgepodge. Guaranteed to pluck at the coronary sinews for anyone dealing with the loss of a father.}
• Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis {A comic genius on academia, Amis is the pitch-perfect representative of postwar male rage. None of that Angry Young Man, stuff, though. His apoplexy is hilarious at any age. The faces: "crazy peasant," "sex life in ancient Rome," "shot-in-the-back." Moo, by Jane Smiley, The Straight Man, by Richard Russo and everything by David Lodge seem impossible without this Platonic key ring to rule them all, and on the campus, bind them.}
• The Letters of Kingsley Amis, edited by Zachary Leader {Pay close attention to the letters to Philip Larkin -- together with Larkin's Collected Letters (try eBay, sorry), these constitute the documentation of one of the most rewarding and hilarious literary friendships to date. Amuse yourself by guessing the exact page number where Kingsley abandons Communism.}
• The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, by V. Nabokov {I'm way underqualified, with my mean years on the planet, to state critical opinion. Still in larval adulation, which I understand is a longterm afflication. Read Anthony Lane's review in Nobody's Perfect. And M. Amis on Nabokov in toto in the prenominate War Against Cliche. And get a dictionary.}
• The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, edited by Leon Wieseltier {The style is dated and stilted, but the insights are not. Especially worthwhile: the Orwell essay, the Mansfield Park burn, and "The Situation of the American Intellectual at the Present Time" (i.e. "What Do They Know of America, Who Only the Upper West Side Know?"}
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace {Self-indulgence and the consequences of a missing-in-action editor never had it so good. The state fair, cruise ship and TV pieces are the best. But also read the Lynch essay: it'll make you want to re-watch Blue Velvet, which you can conveniently buy below.}
• Collected Poems, by Philip Larkin (edited by Anthony Thwaite) {Poetus mirabilis and, after Auden, the occupant of a near empty Hall of Metrical Wonders in the Postwar Anglophone wing of the museum. Master ironist and curmudgeon you least want to bludgeon.}
• Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, by Margaret Macmillan {A dryly told account of global dust-settling after what was then myopically known as "the Great War." Explores the follies of Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau, which helped bring about WWII.}
• Doomed, Bourgeois, In Love: Essays on the Films of Whit Stillman, edited by Mark Henrie {Discreet charms of the bourgeoisie given the scholarly treatment by the kinds of New Criterion-y people who liked Grosse Pointe Blank because John Cusack's assassin refused to unionize. Don't let the pedantry taint your judgment of Stillmania, though.}
• Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi {A beautiful paean to Western literature from an Eastern scholar living under Islamic statism; the Gatsby trial and Jane Austen dance chapters are particularly enjoyable.}
• Nobody's Perfect: Writings from The New Yorker, by Anthony Lane {He needs to stop it with the creepy drooling over Natalie Portman, but Lane is still the best around for losing it at the movies.}
• The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl {Adult stories, less like his children�s stuff than what O. Henry would have been like if his ironic plot twists had involved wife-swapping, cannibalism, or turning infants into superhuman bee-monsters. Might be fun for the kid who never reads, actually.}
• The Brothers Karamazov, by F. Dostoevsky, translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky {Incest! Murder! Theodicy!}
• Collected Non-Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges {A prose impresario short-winded enough to keep beside the toilet -- especially if your john is in a labrynith that transcends spacetime.}
• Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories, by John Shepard {Stories narrated by John Ashcroft, John Entwistle, Nazi rocket riders, the creature from the black lagoon, and others.}
• My Life and Hard Times, by James Thurber {Think of David Sedaris, in turn of the century Columbus, Ohio. And without the gay schtick, or even a pretense at respect for his family.}
ALBUMS:
• You Are the Quarry, by Morrissey {He's back! And almost paid off the deficit incurred by Maladjusted. A few gripes: "America Is Not the World" never fulfills the promise of its title. It's an unwieldy blunderbuss, not a rapier -- and the use of "hamburger" as synecdoche for our national obesity problem is a new hackneyed low for the Oscar Wilde of the microphone. "I Have Forgiven Jesus" ultimately works, but I can't help but feel that that one was just too easy.}
• Weightlifting, by The Trashcan Sinatras {Remember them from your college radio daze? A brisk homecoming track, appositely named "Welcome Back" ("Everyone survived / Everyone's alive!" -- well, thank goodness) kicks off this highly accomplished return to musicmaking for an alt-pop band that shouldn't have stayed away so long.}
• Strange Bird, by Augie March {With a name like Augie, it has to be good. It is. Analogs fail me.}
• Evergreen, by Echo and the Bunnymen {Best 80's Band Comeback Album. No contest.}
• Mermaid Avenue, by Billy Bragg and Wilco {A fucking classic. Ukanian bloke Billy Bragg manages to capture the rhythms of dustbowl Americana better than Dylan -- the obvious disciple/witch doctor to perform a Woody Guthrie resurrection -- ever could do. All lyrics by Guthrie, music by Bragg and Wilco.}
• Don't Try This at Home, by Billy Bragg {Most people who hear Mermaid Avenue invariably want more of the man who brought it to them. This is Bragg's most "accessible" solo album, though not without the politics that's defined his career. "Accident Waiting to Happen" is a punk snarl against cultural fascism.}
• Galore, by Kirsty MacColl {May this earth angel charm the knickers off the winged principalities. MacColl died a few years ago in a boating accident, but I can only imagine how well-attended her funeral must have been by the panoply of musicians guilty of "sampling" her Celtic nightingale voice. This album consists mainly of covers, but that's more than all right for someone generous enough to never ask for top billing, despite consistently stealing the show.}
• These Are the Vistas, by the Bad Plus {"Smells Like Teen Spirit," the jazz standard. No kidding. Comes off not just better than you'd expect, but brilliantly.}
• SMiLE, by Brian Wilson {Reviewed here. Check to the right.}
• The Soft Bulletin, by the Flaming Lips {And the hard singing voice to take, but worth it anyway.}
• It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, by Public Enemy {More complicated rhymes and denser loops than have been on the radio before or sense, plus the guy with the big clock.}
• Loaded: Fully Loaded Edition, by the Velvet Underground {Funny, Lou Reed doesn't usually look this happy. Must be Laurie Anderson's doing.}
• Traitor In Our Midst, by the Country Gazette {What you always thought bluegrass was supposed to sound like.}
• The Modern Lovers, by the Modern Lovers {Speaking of Lou Reed, remember the guy with the guitar who gets shot in Something About Mary? Imagine that guy redoing "White Light/White Heat," but with lyrics about aging with dignity and eschewing drugs. That sounds like a snark, but it�s actually the SAM guy, and John Cale produced.}
• The Queen Is Dead, by The Smiths {I can't believe you don't own this already. The summa of the Moz/Marr collaboration.}
• The Boatman's Call, by Nick Cave {The Prince of Darkness may have been afraid to board a plane after 9/11, but this "New Testament" sound is proof of moisture's sustainability in Hell. "Into My Arms" is sweet enough to play your girlfriend on Valentine's Day, leaving the oldie-but-dreary "Deanna" to blast at her when she dumps you.}
• No Cities Left, by The Dears {The lead singer cried when Morrissey asked the band to open on the "You Are the Quarry" tour. That kind of gone-to-pieces sentimentalism can only lead one place: straight down. Get 'em while they're new and good.}
• The Boy With the Arab Strap, by Belle and Sebastian {Might as well order that black V-neck sweater, Rimbaud's Collected Poems, while you're at it. "Theoretical" bisexuality not a requisite, despite what angry twee detractors say.}
FILMS & TV:
• Cannibal! The Musical. {Trey Parker's college thesis, a feature-length movie musical about the only American ever convicted of cannibalism. Not for all markets, but better than most of his later stuff.}
• Before Sunset, directed by Richard Linklater {The sequel that doesn't feel like one. Why thirtysomethings who chat are more interesting than twentysomethings who do likewise. Some sluggish moments, but all made up for by a luminous final scene that made me fall in love with Julie Delpy once more. Bet it made Anthony Lane "spill [his] Sprite" again, too.}
• Collateral, directed by Michael Mann {Tom Cruise has always been a hard-working, as opposed to naturally gifted, actor. This part was his pension come early. Michael Mann is the Richard Avedon of the moving Los Angeles image. And Jamie Foxx ain't too shabby, either.}
• The Unbelievable Truth, directed by Hal Hartley {Surreal-ish debut from a master indy filmmaker and satirist. Yes, that is Edie Falco as the diner waitress.}
• Henry Fool, directed by Hal Hartley {Hartley's masterpiece. Probably the only movie about writers that's ever worked. Barton Fink, anyone?}
• Metropolitan, directed by Whit Stillman {Downwardly mobile 60's college jet set. Making a film about this demographic is like trying to play matchmaker to a Republican leper in Northampton, Mass. That the dialogue (and it's all dialogue) stays liquid-tongued is a monument to Stillman's talent... dare I say, genius?}
• Barcelona, directed by Whit Stillman {Anti-Americanism when it was more funny than scary. The "subtext" speech belongs in Bartlett's. The DVD commentary is, as someone from the earlier film might say, "priceless."}
• The Last Days of Disco, directed by Whit Stillman {An assault on 70's cliche in the best possible way -- the anti-54. Also known as Yuppies: A Defense. Chloe Sevigny gives grace to the one night stand, instead of head to Vincent Gallo.}
• Mr. Jealousy, directed by Noah Baumbach {Who wouldn't hunt down the ex-boyfriends of Annabella Sciorra? Eric Stoltz had fewer difficulties with girls in Mask. Chris Eigeman from the Stillman flicks swaps Mayflower pedigree for facial hair (modeled on David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest jacket photo), to varying degrees of success. An underrated romantic comedy, but don't say I didn't warn you: this film may engender awkward relationship conversation. It may also plant supersleuth-stalker seeds in frail men's heads. Or so I've heard.}
• Blue Velvet, directed by David Lynch {So many epigones, so far from this mark.}
• Father Ted: The Holy Trinity {BBC TV series about three priests on an island. No, not that kind of series, you sick fuck.}
Then Again, Moore Doesn't Look Too Healthy Himself
The New York Times today considers, in the wake of Michael Moore's pre-Sicko publicity rabble-warmup whether the Cuban health care system is better than America's:
How could a poor developing country — where annual health care spending averages just $230 a person compared with $6,096 in the United States — come anywhere near matching the richest country in the world?
Statistics from the World Health Organization, the C.I.A. and other sources all show that the people of Cuba and the United States have about the same life expectancy — 77 years, give or take a few months — while infant mortality in Cuba is significantly lower than in the United States.
Of course, many people regard any figures about Cuba as at least partly fiction. But even if the longevity statistics are correct, they are open to interpretation. Carmelo Mesa-Lago, a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Pittsburgh, said statistics also show that Cuba has a high rate of abortion, which can lower infant mortality rates and improve life expectancy figures. The constant flow of refugees also may affect longevity figures, since those births are recorded but the deaths are not.
Despite such skepticism, many medical experts say they do believe that average Cubans can live as long as Americans, and the reason may lie in a combination of what Cuba does well and the United States does poorly, if at all.
The problem with this analysis is that a portion of the cost of a centralized system will be the coercion necessary to enact it. The American frictional costs of insurance paperwork shuffling are measurable; the costs of living in a totalitarian state aren't. The Soviet Union didn't collapse because it was devoid of accomplishment, but because a centralized and coercive state can only succeed at the few things the central power wielders devote the entire energies of the state to fulfilling. Hence the USSR had lousy appliances but amazing chess players.
If Cuba's health care system is good -- and without knowing anything other than hearsay, I'm inclined to believe it is good -- then that comes not only at the expense of the nominal bill for medicine and labor but the other dynamic sectors of an economy that in Cuba don't exist. To say that Cuba has a terrible record on human rights but great health care is to say that at least the fascists made the trains run on time. Fascist transit probably was excellent, largely because the citizens responsible for running the service did so with their lives on the line should they fail to perform.
Moore would have been better off comparing the US system to a universal government system in a free country; the comparison probably would have made his case more effectively. But then, Moore has always cared more about cheap drama than actual persuasion.
Glenn Greenwald's Unclaimed Definition of Journalism
In an inexpensive necklace of non sequiturs, Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald tries to take issue with Joe Klein's report of security improvements in Anbar Province for the fact that Klein relies on anonymous sources:
As always, the very idea of granting anonymity to government sources to do nothing other than repeat pro-government claims is both manipulative and moronic on its face. What possible journalistic value could there ever be in cloaking someone with anonymity in order to say something that Tony Snow would happily say, and does say, every day from the White House Press Briefing Room?
Greenwald of course doesn't refute anything in Klein's piece, which was actually more modest about the successes in routing Al Qaeda, as I already mentioned here. But notice our hero's main plaint, which he even goes to the trouble of highlighting in bold for us: Information is suspect not because it comes from nameless government officials but because it bolsters the government's position.
I knew I'd get lucky if I typed in "Glenn Greenwald" and "Sy Hersh" into Google. Sure enough, Greenwald places a lot of credence in the New Yorker reporter's work, particularly this much-bruited article from April 2006 which suggested that the Bush administration was plotting an attack on Iran. Greenwald even added an epilogue to his bestselling book How Would a Patriot Act? to incorporate Hersh's findings. What kind of sources did Hersh rely on?
A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon;
One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration;
One military planner;
one high-ranking diplomat;
A senior Pentagon adviser on the war on terror
That's just from page one of the online version.
Source anonymity is fine in Greenwald's book -- it violates no precept of journalistic ethics -- as long as the sources train an unflattering light on the shadow-bathed intrigues of a warmongering president.
Is Our Children Agitating for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat?
Political Affairs Magazine, an online journal devoted to Marxist thought, asks what it is in our society that fosters "Adult Resistance to Marxism." A neat synthesis of cognitive science and the graybeard theory of class conflict:
Children learn by trial and error and learn from their mistakes. They are natural born scientists using the empirical method and induction (as well some deduction after many experiences.) They learn the same way all mammals do. The scientific method is simply a more sophisticated extension of this "naive" common sense approach to understanding the world. They also have basic moral intuitions such as fairness and empathy which, if they wereproperly educated, would reinforce socialist ideals of equality and non-expoitation in adulthood.
I'm no evolutionary psychologist, but this doesn't quite pass the smell test (blame it on the dog, comrade). Kids are cruel and vicious as much as they are contrite and empathetic. To think that a pinko scribe has not had the experience of being shoved in a locker or wedgied when he was but a nestling of a revolutionary!
Nor is the scientific method an innate heuristic: Bacon wouldn't have had to invent it if it were.
Human beings formulate assumptions first, then cultivate facts to uphold those assumptions, but they're quite immune to contradictory evidence. (Being so immune in science is called fudging your data.)
That's why it's so seldom that you'll have an hour-long debate with someone that ends with one of you declaring, "You're right, I'm wrong."
Maybe it's because I'm steeped in Russian revolutionaries lately, but every time I see the name Michael Badnarik I think of Michael Bakunin:
Before Paul became an antiwar hero, his support consisted largely of libertarian activists--people like Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian Party's 2004 presidential nominee. Badnarik refuses to get a driver's license (even though, he conceded to me, "I have my car operational") and warns against anyone who might try to force a smallpox or anthrax vaccination on him. ("You bring the syringe, I'll bring my .45, and we'll see who makes a bigger hole.") Badnarik recounts rallying support for Paul at a recent conference of the Free State Project, a group of libertarians who have relocated to New Hampshire in the hope of concentrating their power and more or less taking over the state government. "I asked how many people would drive without a license and not pay income taxes, and three-quarters raised their hands," Badnarik recalls. "I'm choking up. I've got my heart in my throat. And I said, 'We need to do something--and Ron Paul's campaign is the shining star. We need to contribute the full two thousand dollars now. Tell all your friends.'"
Here's the guy behind the Too-Hot-for-the-White-House phenomenon of Sen. Ron Paul. If you were watching the last Republican debate, you might have got the mistaken impression that Rudy Giuliani, a sort of pop-gun playing at pezzanovante, scored his best shot in response to Paul's claim that 9/11 happened because the U.S. bombed Iraq: "That's an extraordinary statement. And I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn't really mean that." Like taking candy from a baby, unless of course you're a brooding laissez-faire ultra who puts as much stock in wars of choice as you do in the U.S. Postal Service.
According to Michael Crowley at TNR (author of the above excerpt), Ron Paul, coming off that exchange, discovered his base among the new millennium's Buchananite right. Pat himself will tell you that Paul speaks "intolerable truths" about the root causes of Islamic terrorism, at least as it elects for its target American citizens at home and abroad. Closer to the quite tolerable truth would be to say that Paul speaks frustrated sophistries about those root causes: If only we'd leave the Middle East alone, runs the argument, the Middle East would leave us alone, too. (My Russian revolutionary kick again: Trotsky once remarked, "You may not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you.)
Castles in the sky have a way of crashing down on your head if you're not careful, and history is simply not on the side of isolationists, who make it a point of pride -- or haven't you noticed? -- of actually wanting to be ignorant of what goes on in the rest of the world.
The United States has been ranged against the forces of Islamic reaction since there has been a United States. You can read Michael Oren's brilliant history of this centuries-old confrontation, Faith, Power, and Fantasy, or any biography of Thomas Jefferson that does not scant on his executive assembly of an American navy to force the Barbary pirates of North Africa to stop kidnapping seafaring American civilians and holding them, at ransom, in state of slavery. John Adams reports being shocked at the answer he received from the Tripoli ambassador to London when he asked him how he justified these unprovoked and criminal acts of human theft and extortion:
The ambassador answered us that [the right] was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.
Another tolerable truth, closer to our own time: The Salafist journal to which Abu Musab al-Zarqawi contributed in his semi-literate way before becoming the main jihadist menace in Iraq was called The Impenetrable Edifice (speaking of well-built airborne castles). Its premier issue ran a lead editorial that called not for the removal of U.S. air force bases in Saudi Arabia; nor an end to the sanctions on the Saddam Hussein regime; nor Palestinian statehood; nor a Muslim-favored resolution to the conflict over Kashmir. It called for the liberation of the West from its own godless depravity. How does a so-called "protectionist" aim to protect against that, as president?
It's no surprise that Paul has touched an expose nerve of the body politic at a time when the U.S. is mired in a flagging war in Mesopotamia, and when the imminence of another terrorist attack on our own soil leaves us only surprised that one hasn't happened yet.
It's good that Paul is around, particularly as a spokesman for the antiwar right, to worry that nerve to the discomfort of his more electable competitors for high office. But let's not pretend his foreign policy rhetoric reflects anything different than his no-government ideology: faith in the impossible.
Not quite, but Joe Klein reports on noticeable improvements in combating Al Qaeda in Iraq:
A senior U.S. military official told me—confirming reports from several other sources—that there have been "a couple of days recently during which there were zero effective attacks and less than 10 attacks overall in the province (keep in mind that an attack can be as little as one round fired). This is a result of sheiks stepping up and opposing AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] and volunteering their young men to serve in the police and army units there." The success in Anbar has led sheiks in at least two other Sunni-dominated provinces, Nineveh and Salahaddin, to ask for similar alliances against the foreign fighters. And, as TIME's Bobby Ghosh has reported, an influential leader of the Sunni insurgency, Harith al-Dari, has turned against al-Qaeda as well. It is possible that al-Qaeda is being rejected like a mismatched liver transplant by the body of the Iraqi insurgency.
Those who say the solution in Iraq lies in politics, not military strategy, are right for the wrong reason: The politics is built-into the military strategy at the ground level. Under David Petraeus's thoughtful command, MNF-I are learning how to navigate the sticky tribalism of Sunni regions where jihadists have become parasites of convenience. As Klein adds,
[A]n alliance with the tribes was proposed by U.S. Army intelligence officers as early as October 2003 and rejected by L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority on the grounds that "tribes are part of the past. They have no place in the new democratic Iraq." The damage caused by that myopic stupidity may never be repaired: it gave al-Qaeda a base in the Sunni tribal areas, which enabled the sustained, spectacular anti-Shi'ite bombing campaign, which, along with the Sunnis' historic disdain for the Shi'ite majority, created the conditions for the current civil war.
Any optimism, however, should be tempered by a dogged awareness that much of the good work now being done in this failed state is merely the undoing of much of the bad work done over the last four years.
The British Medical Journal decries the trend of "designer vaginas" (aka "labial reduction") among women in the West. (In Somalia, you get the procedure performed for free whether you like it or not.)
Normally, I'd wait out the news day to pluck the most eminently quotable tidbit, but fuck it, I done found it already. See the bold:
"
Our patients sometimes cited restrictions on lifestyle as reasons for their decision," they say.
"These restrictions included inability to wear tight clothing, go to the beach, take communal showers or ride a bicycle comfortably, or avoidance of some sexual practices.
"Men, however, do not usually want the size of their genitals reduced for such reasons. Furthermore, they find alternative solutions for any discomfort arising from rubbing or chaffing of the genitals."
Actually, I was just thinking the other day, for portability's sake... You know?
You defined Mohammed a tyrant and a pervert. You are absolutely free to think and say anything you want, but maybe this kind of somewhat provocative language is useless, isn’t it? It could create walls and clashes, not favouring a dialogue. Your story is a terrible story and everybody should know that, but maybe this language could be an obstacle for moderate Muslims.
The prophet Mohammed married a six-year-old girl, had sex with her when she was nine, and there are millions of Muslim men today who follow in his footsteps. When I say he was a pervert, this is what I mean. Now, my opponents say “you will create walls if you call him this way”. What I say is that for these poor little girls who are 9, 10, 11 or 12, the wall already exists. In my views, provoking people to see what is happening behind this wall does not mean erecting walls, but trying and letting these walls tumble down. When Bin Laden, the Saudi Kingdom and Ahmadinejad want to establish theocracies today in the name of Islam, they are following the example of the prophet Mohammed. That is why I call him a tyrant. If we want to provoke people to think about this tyranny and how it comes about, it is good to bring Mohammed down to our level and say: “what he did was normal in the seventh century, but today we do not like it anymore, we do not find it normal, we do not like tyranny”.
Allan Bloom once recalled, in The Closing of the American Mind, how a simple question could yield encyclopedias of moral casuistry. Ask a contemporary American classroom if British civil servants in India were right to stop the practice of sati, whereby widows would throw themselves onto their dead husbands's funeral pyres, and you'd be met by yowls of enlightened protest: "But those civil servants shouldn't have even been there!" Yes, but what about intervening in a tribally coerced act of self-immolation? At some point, the colonial theory abandons you and you're forced to make a decision: allow a gruesome suicide to proceed, or try to prevent it from doing so...
I'm sure I'll get aggrieved comments just for linking to this interview, much less pulling that particular excerpt from it. Allow me then to ask: Is anything Hirsi Ali says factually untrue? Did the prophet Mohammed not marry a 9 year-old girl, and should 9 year-old girls continue to be married to older men -- in Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, or anywhere?
A millionaire couple on Long Island who run a perfume business out of their home have been charged with "slavery" for keeping two female Indonesian workers under lock and key in Garden City:
The women, prosecutors said, were subjected to beatings, had scalding water thrown on them and were forced to repeatedly climb stairs as punishment for perceived misdeeds. In one case, prosecutors said, one of the women was forced to eat 25 hot chili peppers at one time.
Dude, Calvin Klein'd have only made you eat 10 (and maybe get your 12 year-old son to do a little seminude "Obsession" modeling.)
How nice for France to have president who isn't in the business of building Middle Eastern dictators nuclear reactors but stopping their manufacture:
Sarkozy announced that France will join the official US-led struggle against head of the International Atomic Energy Agency Mohamed ElBaradei, who recommended that Iran be allowed to enrich uranium in some of its nuclear plants.
Gordon Brown and David Cameron can sit this one out if they like.
An American Nobel prize laureate has withdrawn from a speaking engagement at a London university, citing anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiment in the United Kingdom, a British newspaper reported Thursday.
According to The Guardian, Professor Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas told the Imperial College that his decision was motivated by a move by Britain's National Union of Journalists to boycott Israeli products.
Just your average, peaceable, racist pride protest in California, thrown together by the "Minutemen." One brave Hispanic wanders into the thick of it armed only with a camera. (Hat tip: Trots). Enjoy:
Wrong 'em, boyo! Strummer would never shill for the divine or for zapatos like that. Neither would Kurt Cobain, Sid Vicious or Joey Ramone (okay, maybe Joey would, nice Jewish boy from Forest Hills and all).
Doc spokesperson:
We wanted to communicate that Dr. Martens boots are ‘made to last,’ and we discovered that these idolized musicians wore them. Showing them still wearing their Docs in heaven dramatized the boots’ durability perfectly. And, as images, they feel very iconic.
This could be a photo of a maintenance worker at the Museum of Natural History, touching up the scenery of a Utahraptor exhibit. Actually, it's a still-life from the soon-to-open Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky -- sort of a Universal Studios for the willfully ignornant and purblind adherents of Genesis.
Age of Earth? 6,000 years.
Grand Canyon origin? Noah's flood
Greatest danger outside the Garden of Eden? Dinosaurs.
Institutional stupidity furnished with vivid detail and animatronics? $27 million.
No doubt had the Islamic Republic jailed Richard Perle in one of its most notorious prisons, foreign policy realists in Washington would be clucking their tongues: "See, we told you -- don't even whisper 'regime change' around the Iranians. They'll only play fair if you agree to meet them on their own terms."
Haleh Esfandiari might have counted herself a member of that chorus had she not been the one tossed into Evin prison on May 8 for being an "American-Zionist spy." Esfandiari, an American citizen with Persian lineage and an aged mother she was visiting in Tehran, works for the Wilson Center, which is headed by Rep. Lee Hamilton, co-author of the Iraq Study Group Report, which advocated, inter alia, that U.S. negotiate with Iran for the purposes of stabilizing Iraq. Doesn't Ayatollah Khamanei read Foreign Affairs? Surely it's a cry for diplomacy to subvert every attempt at carving out a civilized, democratic society in Iraq, and to suborn even sectarian enemies to do so.
Reuel Marc Gerecht, who studied under Esfandiari and her husband, explains in the New York Times:
It is undoubtedly the Hamilton connection and her marriage with an Iranian-born Jew — a sin under Islamic law for a Muslim woman — that made Mrs. Esfandiari such an irresistible target for a regime fond of taking hostages to intimidate its enemies.
The clerical regime doesn’t play fair: A 67-year-old woman who has over the years shown Iran’s representatives in the United States and other visiting Iranians, including esteemed clerics, the utmost kindness and respect is a perfect target to show the regime’s distaste for Iranians who want to build bridges.
[...]
Mrs. Esfandiari’s arrest is what you could call “clerical engagement”: Iranians and Americans are meant to (re)learn that the ruling clergy exclusively defines the terms of engagement. “Mutual interest,” something Mr. Hamilton repeatedly insists the United States and clerical Iran share, isn’t a phrase I’ve seen used by Ali Khamenei, Iran’s virulently anti-American and anti-Semitic ultimate leader. Messrs. Hamilton and Baker raised the fearful (to the clerical regime) specter of an America eager to embrace the Islamic Republic. The mullahs, in a very personal, Iranian way, have replied.
By a member of the 9/11 Commission and a vocal opponent of the current administration:
No matter how incompetent the Bush administration and no matter how poorly they chose their words to describe themselves and their political opponents, Iraq was a larger national security risk after Sept. 11 than it was before. And no matter how much we might want to turn the clock back and either avoid the invasion itself or the blunders that followed, we cannot. The war to overthrow Saddam Hussein is over. What remains is a war to overthrow the government of Iraq.
Some who have been critical of this effort from the beginning have consistently based their opposition on their preference for a dictator we can control or contain at a much lower cost. From the start they said the price tag for creating an environment where democracy could take root in Iraq would be high. Those critics can go to sleep at night knowing they were right.
The critics who bother me the most are those who ordinarily would not be on the side of supporting dictatorships, who are arguing today that only military intervention can prevent the genocide of Darfur, or who argued yesterday for military intervention in Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda to ease the sectarian violence that was tearing those places apart.
Philip Carter lays out a step-by-step withdrawal protocol for getting our troops out of Iraq. The only variable he leaves out, of course, is the most important: the time line. Carter writes as if this were how to get the entire U.S. presence (soldiers, ancillary military personnel and private contractors) to skedaddle from the country at once. That wouldn't happen even if tomorrow Bush declared, "Screw you guys, we're going home." Phased withdrawal is a redundancy since any withdrawal of this scale would take place over the course of weeks and months, if only to account for security concerns. It's easy to plant IEDs and snipe at Americans when you know the roads all of them have to travel to leave: the alacrity with which we entered Iraq was due to fighting a mostly disappeared conventional army, not a ragtag, shadow-dwelling insurgency.
Anyway, worth a gander if only for hypothetical reasons:
It took three weeks to fight from Kuwait up to Baghdad, but that was with terrible weather and intense fighting. The withdrawal would likely go much faster, although it would hinge on two variables. The first is the pace set by military commanders for the move, who will likely choose something on a spectrum between rapid chaotic withdrawal and a slow, phased withdrawal over several months. The second variable is the "throughput" problem: Literally, how many of the 300,000 troops, civilians, and contractors in Iraq can squeeze through the airfields and seaports of Iraq and Kuwait to come home? Even if commanders dictate a rapid pullout, it may take weeks or months to bring everyone home from Kuwait and the Persian Gulf region.
The more you think about it, the less clever a bit of Polonian wisdom seems the line, "Dress British, think Yiddish." The Anglo and Hebraic traditions are bound by a lot more than Isaiah Berlin. Consider the comedy of Albert Brooks: Things are never quite so bad that they can't get worse. Well, well knew that from Waugh, Wodehouse and Amis, didn't we? The basic plot structure of the Jewish sitcom -- from Maude to Seinfeld -- evokes the gambols of Bertie and Jeeves, where every mess manages to get cleaned up at the end of the half-hour (which is usually how long a Wodehouse short story takes to read). In politics, too, the filiations are many and profound: Neoconservatism survives outside the United States only in the United Kingdom: Tony Blair, seethes his Tory critic Geoffrey Wheatcroft, might as well have studied under Bloom and Strauss for all the good he's done us. And the noble history of English radicalism is at least as noble as that of the Jewish variety: Why else did Marx choose the British Museum to formulate his class-based social theory?
I bring this up because there's another fascinating trend that I've just realized does double duty in New York and London: Call it the Ex-Friends Syndrome. Some grubby little excrescence waits around until his old chums are dead to squat and defecate on their corpses, usually at a per-word rate that staggers the euphemism-befuddled obituarist. "I never liked him, anyway" is the typical refrain here, suggesting not just bad faith but transparent bad faith. Why'd you hang back from telling us, then, until he hadn't got the breath to defend himself?
I don't have to name names. Colin Wilson hemorrhages them:
John Osborne ("utterly without talent," according to Colin Wilson - and he's one to talk) ended up bankrupt in Shropshire, begging money to fix his teeth from the Royal Literary Fund. Kingsley Amis became a bulging-eyed boozer and misanthrope, being funny in the Garrick with his zip undone, and virtually incapacitated by his phobias - flying, folk dancing, hailing taxis and sitting on his own, to mention only a few.
Philip Larkin succumbed to "depressive nihilism", expiring of oesophageal cancer in Hull surrounded by his ugly birds, the devoted Maeves, Monicas and Bettys. John Braine ("contrived and perfunctory") drank heavily, grew "downright stupid" and "bored everybody silly". His Room at the Top archives failed to sell at Sotheby's and for Christmas he went to the community centre and lunched with tramps.
John Wain kept churning out unreadable epics about Oxford, went blind and died "short of money", living off handouts from the Society of Authors. Kenneth Tynan's cheques bounced, too, and he died of emphysema, weighing less than eight stone. Before that, his obsession with sadomasochism got the better of him, and he broke a blood vessel in his penis, which took on "the shape of an egg-timer". He also needed to wear a truss.
So it goes on, Wilson prodding his betters with a toasting fork. Terry Southern wrote a fable about a nymphomaniac and "a demented hunchback", grew fat from loafing in Hollywood, and exemplified "stupidity and coarseness". After Candy and Blue Movie, says Wilson, he "published nothing more" (which is not true: there was his satire The Magic Christian).
There's a simple justice in all this. When Wilson bites it, no one will think to tell of what a nasty-minded mediocrity he was, least of all the publisher of The Angry Years.
One of the great techniques of art, one I especially prize, is a clever use of form to mirror content. So is it art for formlessness to mirror vacuity?
There are times when reason carries the mind no further, when the mind is carried from the rational across the penumbra of the absurd. That is where the leadership of the U.S. Senate now resides.
So reason is no longer carrying the mind beyond itself; instead, the mind was carried (by what?) across the penumbra (?) of the absurd, passing the U.S. Senate's residence on its way to the other side of the penumbra. And where is this Herrimanesque landscape?
What many once regarded as the world's great deliberative body looks more like a clamorous bazaar in which senators feverishly hawk duplicity and deceit as bright jewels of public policy. Comprehensive immigration reform is just such a bauble, and buyer beware.
Most beguiling among those merchants of mendacity is none other than Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, who has been peddling his wares at the Senate bazaar for more than four decades. Kennedy's counterfeit immigration views reach all the way back to his championship of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.
Ah. Ted Kennedy is just Arab or Iranian waiting to sell you a fraudulent bill of goods from his roadside stand. My friend, I give you very good price! (At least he wasn't metaphorically selling hot legislative tamales out of the amnesty basket on his liberal burro.)
Sometimes I wonder whether Dobbs' bluster is secretly meant to undermine the nativists from the inside. That might sound like a conspiracy theory, but maybe that's precisely how he came up with the idea of a Mexican conspiracy to undermine America at large. Lou Dobbs: who's the Real Mexican?
Lou Dobbs | New immigration plan ignores history's lessons
This Guardian cover story is all over the blogosphere:
The official said US commanders were bracing for a nationwide, Iranian-orchestrated summer offensive, linking al-Qaida and Sunni insurgents to Tehran's Shia militia allies, that Iran hoped would trigger a political mutiny in Washington and a US retreat. "We expect that al-Qaida and Iran will both attempt to increase the propaganda and increase the violence prior to Petraeus's report in September [when the US commander General David Petraeus will report to Congress on President George Bush's controversial, six-month security "surge" of 30,000 troop reinforcements]," the official said.
Juan Cole thinks it's extraordinary that the Shia Islamic Republic would suborn Sunni jihadists, let alone target fellow Shia whom it has armed and trained:
At a time when Sunni Arab guerrillas are said to be opposing "al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia" for its indiscriminate violence against Iraqis, including Shiites, we are now expected to believe that Shiite Iran is allying with it. And, it claims that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards are shelling the Green Zone. The parliament building that was hit to day by such shelling is dominated by the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council and its paramilitary, the Badr Organization. Who trained Badr? The Iranian Revolutionary Guards. And they are trying to hit their own guys . . . why?
Why not? If the Badr Organization and Mahdi Army are seen by Tehran as making overtures to the Multinational Forces-Iraq, why not strike at your own minions to scare them into compliance? Sadr targets his fellow Mahdi riffraff when he thinks they grown too big for their britches and refuse to obey his commands.
And a Shia-Sunni jihadist alliance of convenience is hardly a new phenomenon. Far more startling than it is that a Mideast "expert" like Juan Cole finds it startling.
Out of a shared antagonism for Israel, Iran reportedly gave $50 million to Hamas in 2006 after the (Sunni) Islamist party gained control of the Palestinian government, whose total operating budget is $120 million.
Did John Edwards vote for the Iraq war because Bob Shrum told him to? According to Shrum's devastating new memoir, he did:
Shrum went on advising Edwards for several years, including as Edwards was contemplating his vote on the fall 2002 Iraq war resolution. In the one passage of the book already widely leaked, Shrum recounts how he and other political advisers pushed Edwards into a vote for the resolution that Edwards--and, even more so, his wife, Elizabeth--didn't want to cast. The episode didn't make Shrum look great. But the real damage is to Edwards, who comes across as a cipher taking orders from his handlers. As Shrum puts it: "[H]e was the candidate and if he was really against the war it was up to him to stand his ground. He didn't."
The description of Edwards as "a Clinton who hadn't read the books" seems to me to be doubly damning, especially now that there's a Barack who has read plenty and has got at all the neophyte ambition that was part of the trial lawyer's charm the first time around the caucus.
The seriousness of the Edwards candidacy is well near the point of total flame-out: Forget the $400 haircut. More symbolic of his phony populism is this latest story about his receiving $55,000 to speak at UC Davis on the subject of poverty, the "greatest moral crisis" facing the country. (Never mind about an Islamist enemy that wants to destroy rich and poor alike.)
Ron Paul's a Kook, Possibly a Racist, But Not an Anti-Semite
Last week I linked to an old Houston Chronicle report about a newsletter sent out by Ron Paul's Texas senatorial campaign in 1996 that made not-so-flattering remarks about blacks ("If you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be") and suggested -- rather tepidly by today's standards -- that Israel exerts an alarmingly high influence in setting the foreign policy agenda of the United States ("By far the most powerful lobby in Washington of the bad sort is the Israeli government").
Paul's supporters, jumping on the wide circulation of this archived article, were quick to point out that the newsletter was not written by the candidate himself but by an anonymous staffer. This hardly exonerated Paul, however, as he must have either seen the document and approved it before it got mailed out or, what is perhaps worse, simply chose not to review public statements attached to his own candidacy yet formulated by his subordinates. Further, he took his sweet time in repudiating the content of the newsletter -- it was only when he was asked about it by a reporter with a long memory at the Texas Monthly that Paul chose to offer a weak mea culpa and explain the provenance of his noxious comments. You can follow the whole affair at this site.
Well, Ryan Sager at the New York Sun (most of the blogosphere got the Houston Chroncile tip from Sager and Wonkette) has since examined Paul's comments on his decade-old solecism based on what the wildcard presidential candidate has since burbled to Reason's David Weigl. Here's Paul now:
I'd have to have you show to me that I wrote it because that doesn't sound like my language, and in campaigns, some things get into newspapers that aren't actually correct. But I wouldn't back away from saying that AIPAC is very influential in our political process. That's a little bit different than saying the Israeli government, but I think that the Israeli position is very influential, which is very interesting because some of you may have seen this—just recently, there was an article out that studied which groups of people were most opposed to the Iraq War. And the assumption is that AIPAC is in control of things, and they control the votes, and they get everybody to vote against anything that would diminish the war. Yet the group that is most opposed to the Iraq War are the American Jews. Seventy-seven percent are now opposed to the war, which is a powerful message.
I consider the statement recounted from the newsletter above objectively anti-Semitic — whether he wrote it or stood by his staffer's words. Again, it was: "By far the most powerful lobby in Washington of the bad sort is the Israeli government." Mr. Paul didn't address that statement directly in his response to the question from Mr. Weigel, though he doesn't seem to be backing away from it.
Why is this anti-Semitic? Because any criticism of Israel or America's alliance with Israel is anti-Semitic? Hardly. It's an anti-Semitic statement because it plays directly into classic anti-Semitic tropes, as regards Jews controlling the world and controlling nations through a Jewish conspiracy. Even in his response to Mr. Weigel, Mr. Paul seems to be reiterating this notion of AIPAC controlling Congress, saying, "the assumption is that AIPAC is in control of things, and they control the votes, and they get everybody to vote against anything that would diminish the war."
What's more, while Mr. Paul is quite consistent and criticizes lobbies of all kinds, the statement ascribed to him singles out the Israeli government (not AIPAC) as "by far the most powerful lobby" of the "bad sort." This sort of exaggeration (what about the Saudi government? AARP? the farm lobby? the public-employees unions?), again, plays into anti-Semitic tropes.
First of all, there's a quaint silliness in the expression "objectively anti-Semitic," which, if I were being as radar-sensitive as Sager, I might add bears an adverbial resemblance to the kind of charge Stalinists used to level against radical opponents: Trotskyists or social democrats were "objectively fascist," and so on. Now, it is true that one can be "objectively anti-war" by believing strongly in the need for military confrontation but opposing what one finds to be the illegal or immoral means for having it. But anti-Semitism is, by definition, an unmistakably subjective disposition whether it's further qualified by terms like "mild" or "casual." In any case, it represents an irrational antipathy to Jews. Can Paul, on the evidence of his statement, be accused of harboring such an antipathy?
No. If there is some cause for concern or suspicion in Paul's worldview it's that it hardly encompasses the world at all -- he, like plenty of libertarian ultras, suffers from a hoary but not-altogether-dishonorable brand of American isolationism that deplores keeps store by Washington's warning against "foreign entanglements" but conveniently elides the fact that the U.S. has had them since the 18th century.
Given Paul's fatuous but telling remark during the last Republican debate that the U.S. may have precipitated 9/11 by "bombing Iraq" (notice how even the antiwar right can conflate al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein), it's obvious that the only sand he hasn't got his head in is the Middle Eastern variety. Unlike, say, Jewcy's latest dialogician Justin Raimondo, he simpy hasn't got the attention span or feverish interest in Israeli affairs to believe in a grand Jewish conspiracy.
So Sager's raised eyebrow can come down an inch or two. Paul's use of "Israeli government" in lieu of AIPAC simply makes him another misguided or semi-informed pol who sees the two entities as perfectly interchangeable. (He should read this magazine sometime.) Either term would have led to the current Mearsheimer/Walt knock-off controversy surrounding his non-starter campaign for president.
Also, it's disingenuous for Sager to write: Even in his response to Mr. Weigel, Mr. Paul seems to be reiterating this notion of AIPAC controlling Congress, saying, "the assumption is that AIPAC is in control of things, and they control the votes, and they get everybody to vote against anything that would diminish the war." It's clear from Paul's next sentence, which begins with the word "yet" and proceeds to show that the majority of American Jews are against the war that AIPAC favors, that he's juxtaposing his own current position against the conventional wisdom. Paul still suffers from the same category problem of equating some monolithic American Jewish opinion with the dread "Lobby," but again, he could have got that from reading the New York Review of Books, which can hardly be described as an anti-Semitic journal.
More worrisome, in my opinion, is what Paul -- or his camp, anyway -- once said about blacks: young criminals of a rich, dark hue sure do run fast. He'd have needed to mention the omnipresence of long noses or horns in the land of milk and honey to make his remark about Israel even remotely as scandalous as that.
Andrew Sullivan's award named for his furry Atlantic co-blogger (not Ross Douthat, the other one) to pay tribute to honorable acts of liberal self-criticism. So Yglesias isn't so gung-ho about gun control; he'll defend Bill Bennett when he thinks the left's misinterpreted and vilified an offhand remark the evangelical conservative has made about the concatenation between abortion and black crime rates, etc.
All well and good, I guess, to bestow credit on someone for intellectual honesty, however sad this reflects on the state of intellectual discourse at present. Doesn't it remind you of Chris Rock's joke about taking credit for not going to jail? "Whatchu want, a cookie!?"
Though I think the proudly eponymous trophy now deserves reconstitution; it ought to celebrate the kind of liberal paranoia that lays all the trouble in the world at the door of the Bush administration. How else to account for Yglesias's notion that American provocation led to Iran's kidnapping of British sailors in the Iraqi waters of the Persian Gulf last April? Or his rather adorable act of prose snugglebunnies with Nancy Pelosi when she unconstitutionally arrogated to herself the role of shuttle diplomat and attempted to negotiate on behalf of the United States with that assassin-in-chief Bashar al-Assad? The title of Yglesias's Comment is Free post on these conjoined subjects was "Doves 1, Hawks 0" -- which makes you wonder what sort of placid snow-white fowl the Syrian "president" represents...
Give a man a reputation as an early riser, said Twain, and he can sleep soundly till noon for the rest of his days. So does Yglesias's reputation as a young pundit of great political sophistication never seem to suffer from his routine displays of political stupidity. His latest skirmish with TNR honcho Marty Peretz, who hasn't got time for these damned TypePad feuilletonists, is so far the best example I've seen that you can sound like Barbra Streisand and still be considered a media "authority." This is how Yglesias rationalizes the civil war in Gaza:
Fatah used to rule the roost on the Palestinian side of the Green Line. Then the US proclaimed that the Palestinian Authority needed to implement political reforms and hold elections. The Palestinians went to the polls and duly booted out the ruling party in favor of the main opposition party. At this point, the US government, apparently run by morons, realized that the main opposition to Fatah was . . . Hamas. At which point the United States embarked upon a campaign of funneling all monies away from the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority government and directly into the hands of Fatah-run security services. Shockingly, this has tended to fuel rather than constrain intra-Palestinian fighting.
Well, no cookie for Matt here, says Noah Pollak, the editor of Azure and someone who's been studying the Arab-Israeli conflict for years and probably has better taste in indy rock, too:
[T]he Fatah party most certainly did not “rule the roost” in the territories -- especially not in Gaza, where Hamas was founded and has always enjoyed its greatest popularity. The first major suicide bombings that certified the onset of the second intifada were perpetrated by Hamas (including the one that blew up the café next to my office), Yasser Arafat all the while insisting that his government should not be held responsible for such terrorism because Hamas was simply beyond his control. And at least in this case, Arafat was probably saying something close to the truth. When he arrived in the West Bank from Tunis in 1994, Hamas had already been around for eight years. The Fatah party, ruling the roost? Certainly not in Gaza.
And most certainly not in 2004-2005. Does Yglesias remember four very important events that happened during those years? First, Israel defeated the intifada; second, Arafat died; third, Mahmoud Abbas was elected the new PA president; and fourth, Israel removed itself from Gaza. The latter three in particular served to strengthen Hamas -- not Fatah. The reality of the fractiousness of the Palestinian cause was already coming into view in 2005, before Hamas was elected, when more Palestinians were killed in internecine fighting than in battle against Israel. It might be gratifying to make a post facto declaration that in 2005, the old hands among the Palestinians had their territory under control until the Bush administration, which can’t do anything right, forced inadvisable changes on them. But that idea is simply a flight of fancy.
Then again, Yglesias doesn't stint on the self-criticism -- it's just not the party line he's rejecting this time, but himself:
Readers might be surprised to hear -- Mr. Yglesias probably among them -- that less than a year ago, Yglesias wrote the following: "I happen to think the White House made the right call on the question of Palestinian elections -- even in retrospect, even knowing that Hamas won." A couple of days ago, he called these administration officials "morons" for having supported the very same elections that he now condemns. I know itâ??s best to just hurry past the contradictions, especially when they involve the reshuffling of positions in order to condemn the Bush administration. But it is too enjoyable to avoid the conclusion that here, Yglesias is calling himself names.
Don't wait around for the netroots to tell you, figure it out yourself: Consistency of principle is for wankers.
You may have heard that Haleh Esfandiari, an American academic affiliated with the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington, was arrested last week in Tehran for
play[ing] key roles in intrigues that have led to colourful revolutions in former Soviet republics in recent years" and now aim[ing] to overthrow Iran's government. In primary interrogations, she reiterated that the Soros Foundation has established an unofficial network with the potential of future broader expansion, whose main objective is overthrowing the system...
Or that's the spiel according to state-controlled Iranian media. Everyone from Juan Cole to Noam Chomsky has deplored Esfandiari's detention, which they fear will exacerbate U.S.-Iranian hostilities and give the febrile Bomb Iran quarter yet another excuse. (Funny how it always seems to take the involuntary presence of Westerners in Iran for the alarmists to warn of the imminent Western bombing of Iran.)
Anyway, there have been a few calls for an academic boycott of all universities technically under the purview of the mad mullahs, as if denying scholarship, however vetted or regulated it may be, ever advanced the cause of human rights anywhere.
A few good lefties of my acquaintance -- most notably Norman Geras -- roundly dismiss the idea both for its moral and utilitarian hollowness.
I'm quite tempted to leave it at that, but since today is shaping up to be Double Standards Day, I'm wondering if Tom Hickey of Britain's University and College Union, which calls for an academic boycott of Israel for its numerous human rights violations, likewise demands the same cold shoulder be given to all Persian scholarship until Esfandiari's release? Just wondering.
Iraq's Prime Minister Jalal Talabani and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the leader of the majoritarian party SCIRI, are both out of the country for health-related reasons. Talabani's in the U.S. on a severe diet regimen (the only characteristic he shared with Ariel Sharon is the girth) and Hakim is in Iran undergoing chemotherapy for lung cancer.
Bombing Iran hardly seems an American option while the Ed Gillespie of the Iraqi Shia is in a Tehran hospital. The Washington Times:
He chose treatment in Iran rather than the U.S. because he wanted to be close to his family and proper treatment was not available in Iraq, party officials said. His choice of Iran also reflected his close links to the Shi'ite theocracy there.
Mr. al-Hakim's absence could last several months or longer, said the officials, robbing Iraq of a key player at a time when the United States is pressing for parliamentary action on a series of political "benchmarks" in support of its military surge in Baghdad.
Every day that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is allowed to remain in office is corrosive to constitutional governance and an invitation to further politicization of the Justice Department.
That is the main lesson of former Deputy Attorney General James Comey's astonishing revelations on May 15 about Gonzales's sinister involvement in a March 2004 effort to continue a then-secret warrantless eavesdropping program after it had been declared unlawful by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft and his subordinates.
RUSH: I gotta tell you a funny story that happened last night. As you know, we're here in New York. I'm coming to you today from high atop the EIB Building in Midtown Manhattan. I told you about this Kobe Club steakhouse, Jeffrey Chodorow's place. I went to it two or three weeks ago when I was here, and I absolutely loved it. I had a great time. I went in there last night and they told me a slew of people have come in to check the place out.
A Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon has been beset for over a week by jihadist violence. A group known as Fatah al-Islam -- led by a former associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- is actually fighting with more advanced weaponry and materiel than the state army of Lebanon. So far, the misery and destruction brought on by Bin Ladenist dittoheads has claimed the lives of 50 Palestinians. Quite the cause for a leftist peace rally, one would think, right?
Of course not. If only a Zionist somewhere would toss a rock at a guard tower, then maybe we'd see some good socialist street theater. David T -- prompted by the usual rogues' gallery in the Harry's Place comments thread -- has scanned the websites of all the regular peacenik organizations and found nothing but silence in the UK on the current crisis in the Levant:
So far I have checked the home pages of the following groups:
There are now two competing revisionist narratives of how the 1967 war between Israel and Egypt unfurled. The first is Michael Oren's Six-Day War, which relied heavily on Arab memoirs and state documents -- scant though these may be -- and which, on the whole, came down on the side of Israeli self-defense as the casus belli. The second is Tom Segev's just-published 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East. Segev is a columnist for Ha'aretz and a ranking member of the so-called "New Historians" school of Zionism and the establishment of the Jewish state. His book, less reliant on the ideology of pan-Arab nationalism or post-war Arab inquests, uncovers the dark side of Moshe Dayan's sweeping victory. Here is David Remnick in an exceptional essay in the New Yorker:
In the second half of May, Nasser made one provocative move after another. Although his own intelligence officers told him that Israeli troops were not massing on the Syrian border, he pressed forward. On May 16th, he told the United Nations to remove from Sinai its international forces, which had maintained the peace since the Suez Crisis. U Thant, the Secretary-General, was ineffectual in his efforts to persuade Nasser to let the troops remain and, without consulting the Security Council, acquiesced. Once the international forces left, Nasser sent his own armored divisions right up to the Israeli border. On May 22nd, Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, cutting off Israel’s access to the Red Sea. Since 1957, the Israelis had said that such a blockade would be considered a casus belli, but when Israeli diplomats appealed to the United States and Great Britain for help both maintained their neutrality. On the thirtieth, Nasser signed a defense pact with King Hussein, after having declared, “Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel.” He said that Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon are “poised on the borders of Israel” and would be backed by Iraq, Algeria, Kuwait, Sudan, “and the whole Arab nation. This act will astound the world. . . . The critical hour has arrived.” It was this kind of language, coming little more than two decades after the Holocaust, that allowed Menachem Begin to call Nasser “the Arab Hitler.” The Syrian, Iraqi, and Palestinian leaderships all made similar declarations about erasing Israel from the map.
Nevertheless, even in late May and the first few days of June the Israeli leadership continued to debate Nasser’s ultimate intentions; the military almost unanimously favored a preëmptive strike against the Arabs, but others—including Eshkol, Abba Eban, and Ben-Gurion in his retirement––cautioned against overreaction. When Nasser spoke to the Soviets, he was counselled against striking first. “Nasser did not want war,” Eban later wrote. “He wanted victory without war.” After the war, even some right-wing politicians, including Menachem Begin, admitted that the Israelis had never been sure that Nasser wanted war. “The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us,” Begin said in a speech to the Israel National Defense College. “We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”
The aura of messianism that engulfed Israeli patriotism after the taking of Sinai, Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank gave way to what I'll call the demographic coercion of the settler movement, which was ignored or tacitly approved by every Labour cabinet as it was later vigorously encouraged by ever Likud cabinet.
Shall we add an appendix to the Segev and Oren texts and title it "Ironies of History"? Yitzak Rabin, who led the Israeli Air Force's swift and categoric elimination of its Egyptian counterpart in '67, thus facilitating the project of Israeli expansion, was shot by a "Greater Israel" nutbag as he (Rabin) brokered for peace with Arafat. Meanwhile, the "Bulldozer" to Gush Emunim's brick-layers entered a coma shortly after engineering the first withdrawal of the settlements he'd once unequivocally supported.
The Bush administration has given Israel permission to discuss the future of the Golan Heights, security arrangements and Israeli-Syrian peace accords if it agrees to talks with Syria.
However, Washington has stipulated that Israel must not agree to any negotiations, even indirectly, on the United States' position, or on the future of Lebanon.
Furthermore, Israel must not make promises to Syria regarding U.S. policy. According to the new position, Washington will deal directly with Syria on these matters.
Cue sniggers from Matt Yglesias: "[I]f I were an Israeli and I woke up to read in my morning paper...that my government was getting "permission" from the United States to conduct diplomacy with an adjacent country I might worry that something had gone awry in the US-Israeli special friendship."
Is it not clear from the last two paragraphs in the above extract that "permission" is actually a warning to Israel not to presume to negotiate with the imprimatur of the United States? Why might that be? Because Bashar al-Assad is still suborning jihadists in Iraq and thus responsible for the death of countless American soliders; because he still must answer for the assassination of Rafik Hariri in 2005 and Pierre Gemayel in 2006; and because Washington has rightly declared solidarity with the Siniora government, which is now being targeted for destruction by both Hezbollah and Al Qaeda.
Cheap points can be scored on almost any day of the week against a Tweedledum/Tweedledee arrangement that supposedly exists between the U.S. and Israel. But it's worth keeping in mind that the Israeli government turned against the war in Iraq long before the American public did; and that when it comes to protecting joint U.S.-Iraqi interests in the Middle East, well, there's a new "special relationship," both more exigent and more threatened, that has assumed centerstage.
France has just elected itself the most philo-American president since... well, since Lafayette, who never was president. And in 2009, whichever way the wind blows, Britain will find itself led by a man asking the question on every beer-warmed tongue: What bloody special relationship? James Wood:
But what would a Cameron government look like? It looks as if, like Brown's, it would retain the pound and give priority to public services. And, like Brown, Cameron speaks an essentially Thatcherite managerial language about making these public services more efficient and consumer-friendly. In a recent foreign policy speech, Cameron laid out his stall as what he calls a "liberal conservative." He would be less pro-American than Blair. (But so would Brown.) At least in tone, Cameron sounds more obviously conservative than Brown. He proposes three principles: "First, a realistic appreciation of the scale of the threat the world faces from terrorism. Second, a conviction that preemptive military action is not only an appropriate, but a necessary component of tackling the terrorist threat in the short term. And, third, a belief that, in the medium and long term, the promotion of freedom and democracy--including through regime change--is the best guarantee of our security." This certainly sounds more bullish and more traditionally Conservative than the old Labour line on foreign policy--a party once committed to unilateral nuclear disarmament. But then Cameron goes on to talk about building "moral authority" and "humility," virtues he thinks Blair has lacked, and suddenly he sounds pretty much how one imagines Brown will sound. And Cameron knows perfectly well that talk about preemptive action is just talk: No British prime minister is going to support the Americans in preemptive action for a very long time.
Blair has died, long live Blair! For whatever the prime minister does in the next year, it seems perfectly possible that Brown will lose to Cameron in 2009, and that the country will be led for several years, perhaps much longer, by Blair's natural heir, rather than the one unnaturally begot all those years ago at Granita.
It's a bad sign that Anthony Grafton mistakenly refers to Tom Stoppard's brilliant drama about the life and thwarted love of A.E. Housman as The Pursuit of Love. The title of the play was The Invention of Love. Still, as the main endeavor of this review is to show that minor shortcomings don't distract from a major achievement, and I think Grafton does an admirable job of conveying the intellectual and moral exigency of The Coast of Utopia. Why care about 19th century intelligents (the term "intellectuals" doesn't apply to the Russians) when their castles in the air crash-landed as the Lubyankas on the ground a hundred years later?
For all the tyranny or blood-brutal philosophizing of many pre-Communist radicals (Bakunin, for instance, was a schoolboy revolutionist, an early Che, who contributed not a single worthwhile idea to radical theory), there was the humane rationalism of Alexander Herzen, an aberration not just in the Russian revolutionary tradition but in the European one as well:
Horrified and enraged, Herzen denounced all philosophies of history that claimed to provide absolute truths and the political programs that admitted no dissent. Individuals, he argued, made history, to the modest extent that anyone could. But they did so not by embodying the spirit of their age but by doing their best as individual moral actors in the world, and they struggled like all of their human brothers in the stream of history that shaped and limited their chances of realizing their aspirations. This Herzen—humane, reflective, deeply conscious that a new democratic age must destroy the old European civilization to which he himself belonged—the Herzen who read John Stuart Mill's book On Liberty with a shock of recognition— speaks at the end of the second and again at the end of the third play. His speeches shade their panoramas of revolutionary action against one of history's great tyrannies into an argument that history sets limits to all aspirations and a plea for moderation in all efforts for change.
Adios to Hegel. History, said Herzen, follows no libretto -- and anyone agitating for the end of despotism had better not think himself an agent of inexorable forces of history, lest the freedom he establishes be just another shade of slavery.
Isaiah Berlin in Russian Thinkers -- the book that, along with E.H. Carr's Romantic Exiles, gave Stoppard the idea for his utopia trilogy -- rightly points out that Herzen's circumspect libertarianism has no place in the Soviet pantheon of revolutionary fathers:
It is a singular irony of history that Herzen, who wanted individual liberty more than happiness, or efficiency, or justice, who denounced organized planning, economic centralization, governmental authority, because it might curtail the individual’s capacity for the free play of fantasy, for unlimited depth and variety of personal life within a wide, rich, ‘open’ social milieu, who hated the Germans (and in particular the ‘Russian Germans and German Russians’) of St Petersburg because their slavery was not (as in Russia or Italy) ‘arithmetical,’ that is, reluctant submission to the numerically superior forces of reaction, but ‘algebraical,’ that is, part of their ‘inner formula’—the essence of their very being—that Herzen, in virtue of a casual phrase patronizingly dropped by Lenin, should today find himself in the holy of holies of the Soviet pantheon, placed there by a government the genesis of which he understood better and feared more deeply than Dostoevsky, and whose words and acts are a continuous insult to all that he believed and was.
[G]iuliani's story line about standing firm would have been more impressive if it hadn't been accompanied by stories--apparently leaked by his staff--about how they came to settle on this strategy and how clever it is. In the first Republican presidential debate, Giuliani tried to project ambivalence (not a bad place to be on abortion), but it came out as indifference (a bad place to be). He said it was O.K. with him if the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and O.K. with him if it didn't. So his campaign decided to go with a "standing firm" narrative instead, as if these were racks of suits from which you could choose the one you thought fit the best. If "standing firm" seems like a clever campaign strategy, then it isn't very clever, is it?
When I ran for N.Y. State Assembly, my argument for being pro-choice was that it wasn't just a matter of a woman's right to choose but also one of a doctor's right to choose. Abortion is, after all, a medical procedure, and most medical procedures are not undertaken lightly or without a fair degree of emotional distress on the part of the patient, no less the physician. This is where politics ends and the doctor-patient relationship begins.
Everyone is, or should be, "personally" opposed to abortion; it's bound to upset your weekend plans, no matter how much you may donate to NARAL or Planned Parenthood. The very thought of flushing out a human fetus -- or surgically removing any part of the human body -- makes us queasy. But this visceral, as it were, reaction has no bearing on the medical or moral justifications for the procedure, especially when it is performed in emergent or life-threatening conditions.
A candidate for president has no business legislating what goes on in the OR. The sooner we realize this as a nation, the better.
Nothing sells papers like the annual round of college admissions agita, and hell hath no fury like a Long Island mother scorned. The "Second Tier Cachet" article that Alan Finder -- if that's not a pen name -- phoned in days ago has been a fixture on the most-emailed list and doesn't appear to be going anywhere. But the reader comments: oh man. And I thought blogs were read by self-absorbed trolls. Some highlights so far:
Bowdoin? Connecticut State? Where are these places? I could take a guess where the second one is, but I know for sure that I wouldn’t want to go there. I’m sorry you guys didn’t get into Harvard, but that’s the way things happen sometimes. I’m sure McDonald’s will be impressed with your degree from Bowdoin.
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Caltech. Beyond those, who cares?
You can tell your children all you want that Lafayette = Harvard and Lehigh = Princeton, but when it comes time for your kids to apply to graduate programs, they will wish they had gone to Princeton or Harvard instead.
I attended Lehigh and I worked my tail off studying till late into the night…every night.
The atmosphere was wonderful and it was a great place to attend. I have had friends who attended Harvard who were surprised at my academic workload. There (sic) own course workload and corresponding homework did not compare to the rigors of Lehigh.
THEY ALL LOOK PRETTY GOOD, IF IT WAS THE I9TH [sic] CENTURY.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed alarm at the detention of activists intending to protest against the Russian government.
Vladimir Putin retorted that Estonia's ethnic Russians were being persecuted.
Meanwhile, Russia has all but declared "cyber-war" on Estonia. Routers are the new Red Army:
Nato has dispatched some of its top cyber-terrorism experts to Tallinn to investigate and to help the Estonians beef up their electronic defences.
"This is an operational security issue, something we're taking very seriously," said an official at Nato headquarters in Brussels. "It goes to the heart of the alliance's modus operandi."
Alarm over the unprecedented scale of cyber-warfare is to be raised tomorrow at a summit between Russian and European leaders outside Samara on the Volga.
While planning to raise the issue with the Russian authorities, EU and Nato officials have been careful not to accuse the Russians directly.
If it were established that Russia is behind the attacks, it would be the first known case of one state targeting another by cyber-warfare.
I wouldn't hold my breath, but it's good that he's on the fantasy short-list and that even Joseph Stiglitz isn't "ruling him out."
"I think it would be good for the institution at this juncture if they had somebody who was an economist who really understood what development was entailed and could work closely with the staff that has been very alienated by Paul Wolfowitz over the last two years and bring together the institution.
"It wouldn't rule (Blair) out but I would say that if I were going through a first priority list of priorities it would probably begin with somebody with real experience in development.
"But Blair has clearly been a political leader that has the kinds of connections that one needs, that would be useful as head of the institution."
A track coach who looks like the picture at right invited one of his female student athletes to his house for an "athletic massage." When she got there Barry White (or somesuch smooth jazz) was playing. Please chart the sequence of events that followed, also when the student officially became "alarmed." God, I love humanity:
According to a Maricopa County Superior Court document, the student told police that she trusted Porras, her track coach, and believed that going to his home would make her "a better athlete."
The girl said she knew that other athletes had gone to Porras' home for a massage and to work out with him because he is a personal trainer.
Porras told her to put on her two-piece bathing suit, and led her to a loft where he asked her to sit on an exercise ball.
He massaged her neck and shoulders then asked her to roll onto her stomach.
He fondled her buttocks beneath her bathing suit.
Porras kissed her neck, cheeks and buttocks, and told her that if she had questions about sex, he would answer them.
She declined.
The girl told police she "felt uncomfortable, but didn't know what to do."
She became alarmed when he ejaculated on her. He told her it was massage oil.
Showing that Gonzales knew that the only real reasons for dismissing Iglesias were improper ones is critical to the case for impeaching the attorney general. Remarkably, Gonzales has effectively admitted as much. In his testimony, Gonzales provided three explanations for his decision to fire Iglesias: 1) Iglesias "lost the confidence of Senator Domenici," 2) Karl Rove and President Bush complained, and 3) "the consensus recommendation of the senior leadership."
When the attorney general of the United States penalizes his subordinates for not breaking the law, the administration that doesn't fire him has no credibility to govern.
Meanwhile, the ever brilliant Dahlia Lithwick explains that it's not a non-issue but a matter of serious interpretation whether the Department of Justice ought to have signed off on the NSA's surveillance program:
There is a normative legal argument about whether the president should need any permission to do anything in wartime. The bloggers above agree that this bare assertion—that the president's Article II powers allow him to do what needs doing—appears to be the basis for the work of John Yoo, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyer who laid much of the legal groundwork for torture and other forms of unchecked executive power before 2004. That may, in turn, have been the basis for the apparently rigorous re-evaluation of Yoo's legal work by the new head of OLC, Jack Goldsmith. (Disclosure: Goldsmith and I have co-authored here in Slate.)
But regardless of what the [Wall Street] Journal claims, Comey was not this week endorsing the assertion that whatever the president says goes. He conceded that the attorney general's certification was not required by statute or by regulation, but it was "the practice in this particular [surveillance] program ... there was a signature line for that." And he added that the AG's certification had never yet been disregarded.
Consider how dire the situation has become. The U.S. president has, by his own passivity and failure to uphold the laws of his own office, effectively become a lame duck while a savage war still rages in Mesopotamia. It's a sign of just how low his concern for Iraq is, and probably always has been, that he continually fritters away his domestic political capital, making his foreign policy another casualty of his overall bankruptcy. 2008 can't come soon enough.
It was inevitable given his reputation and style of management. What still should rankle anyone with a conscience, however, is that the pretext for his ouster was and remains completely shambolic. Forget about Iraq, forget about his anti-corruption policies. Sift through the evidence, including Wolfowitz's own meticulously prepared defense brief. None of the exculpatory memoranda have been publicly refuted; indeed, judging by the board's meek and self-contradictory statement, which concedes Wolfowitz did not act unethically, what willful wrongdoing is he being run out on a rail for?
Our deliberations were greatly assisted by our discussion with Mr Wolfowitz. He assured us that he acted ethically and in good faith in what he believed were the best interests of the institution, and we accept that. We also accept that others involved acted ethically and in good faith. At the same time, it is clear from this material that a number of mistakes were made by a number of individuals in handling the matter under consideration, and that the Bank's systems did not prove robust to the strain under which they were placed. One conclusion we draw from this is the need to review the governance framework of the World Bank Group, including the role as well as procedural and other aspects of the Ethics Committee.
"Mistakes were made by a number of individuals." Let that by the historical denouement of this pharisaic and mean-spirited witch hunt. Now let's see if other "individuals" lose their jobs, too.
Under the headline of "Terrorist Update," for instance, Paul reported on gang crime in Los Angeles and commented, "If you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be."
Paul, a Republican obstetrician from Surfside, said Wednesday he opposes racism and that his written commentaries about blacks came in the context of "current events and statistical reports of the time."
Selected writings by Paul were distributed Wednesday by the campaign of his Democratic opponent, Austin lawyer Charles "Lefty" Morris.
Morris said many of Paul's views are "out there on the fringe" and that his commentaries will be judged by voters in the November general elections.
Paul said allegations about his writings amounted to name-calling by the Democrats and that his opponents should focus instead on how to shrink government spending and reform welfare.
Morris and Paul are seeking the 14th Congressional District seat held by Greg Laughlin of West Columbia. Laughlin lost the Republican primary to Paul, a former congressman and the Libertarian Party's 1988 presidential candidate.
Paul, writing in his independent political newsletter in 1992, reported about unspecified surveys of blacks.
"Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5 percent of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty and the end of welfare and affirmative action,"Paul wrote.
Paul continued that politically sensible blacks are outnumbered "as decent people." Citing reports that 85 percent of all black men in the District of Columbia are arrested, Paul wrote:
"Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the `criminal justice system,' I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal," Paul said.
Paul also wrote that although "we are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, it is hardly irrational. Black men commit murders, rapes, robberies, muggings and burglaries all out of proportion to their numbers."
Also, there's some unfriendly bits about Asians and this:
Stating that lobbying groups who seek special favors and handouts are evil, Paul wrote, "By far the most powerful lobby in Washington of the bad sort is the Israeli government" and that the goal of the Zionist movement is to stifle criticism.
Evil--not just cynical or corrupt or anti-constitutional?
I can't wait for damage control on this one: the Cato Institute-sponsored photo op at Katz's Deli, the all-smiles fly-fishing weekends with Edgar Bronfman in the Catskills, etc., etc.
Olmert and Peretz do not want a large-scale operation in Gaza. Any response to the continued Kassam attacks will be an effort to slightly impair Hamas's ability to perpetrate attacks, as well as demonstrate to the public that there is a government after Winograd and that it is doing something.
The pinpoint operations approved during the security assessment at Olmert's office Wednesday afternoon will not succeed in stopping the Kassam rockets. At the most, Israel can hope they will make it more difficult for terrorists to reach their launch pads in northern Gaza.
Here's how "Type III" female genital mutilation works: First you cut off the clitoris with a pair of shearers. The sound, according to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was subjected to this ritual at the age of five, in Saudi Arabia, is like a butcher's scissor snipped through fat. Next, you take a sharp stone and proceed the scrape away at the wound and the surrounding labia, the fleshy remains of which are then stitched together with twine. The girl's legs must be tied together for two to six weeks to prevent her from rupturing the stitches. If she survives the ordeal -- and she may not due to poor hygenic conditions and the chance of developing a lethal infection -- she'll have a raw carapace where her vagina used to be. The inferior part of the vulva will then be perforated with a pencil-sized hole to allow for the passage of urine and, when she's ready, menstrual fluid.
No anathesia is administered at any point during the procedure and the subsequent period of convalescence.
Type III female genital mutilation is known as "infibulation."
[Eve] Ensler has firsthand knowledge of the unique horrors of Islamic gender fascism. But her "feminist theory" obliterates distinctions between what goes on in Afghanistan and what goes on in Beverly Hills:
I went from Beverly Hills where women were getting vaginal laser rejuvenation surgery--paying four thousand dollars to get their labias trimmed to make them symmetrical because they didn't like the imbalance. And I flew to Kenya where [women were working to stop] the practice of female genital mutilation. And I said to myself, "What is wrong with this picture?"
A better question is: What is wrong with Eve Ensler? These two surgical phenomena are completely different in both scale and purpose. The number of American women who undergo "vaginal labial rejuvenation" is minuscule: There were 793 such procedures in 2005, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. By contrast, a World Health Organization 2000 fact sheet reports: "Today, the number of girls and women who have undergone female genital mutilation is estimated at between 100 and 140 million. It is estimated that each year, a further 2 million girls are at risk of undergoing FGM."
Just a taste of the poverty of American feminism when it comes to showing solidarity -- or even just demonstrating a grave moral concern -- for the blighted women of the Islamic third world. Christina Hoff Sommers has a devastating cover story in the Weekly Standard. Read it.
Blair began his visit Wednesday with a private, working dinner at the White House. That was followed by a rare overnight stay for a foreign leader in the U.S. executive mansion. He stayed in the Queen's Bedroom that was used by Winston Churchill during the former British leader's frequent World War II-era visits to Washington.
CNN sifted through presidential candidates' filings today to suss out their sources of income and worth. If anybody looks bad, figuratively, it's John Edwards. On the positive side, I stand convinced that his populist, protectionist pitch is wholly sincere. Unfortunately, that's because he's managed to put his money where that mouth is. The man obviously doesn't know anything about how capital markets work.
Edwards, who has made fighting poverty a signature element of his campaign, said his work for a fund that generally caters to the wealthiest of investors was designed to educate him about the way financial markets operate. Fortress paid Edwards $479,512 for his consulting services.
The candidate and his wife had $1 million to $5 million in the Fortress Investment Fund III, a Fortress subsidiary that invests in businesses in the United States and Western Europe.
There's three things wrong with this. First, Fortress is Exhibit A among those making a case that exotic hedge funds, private equity funds and other exotic, overpaid and shadowy invesment vehicles are reaching the crest of a small bubble (to mix a frothy metaphor). That's because Fortress is a publicly held company; considering that the reason for such companies to be is to allow wealthy and sophisiticated investors to pursue opportunities outside the regulatory limitations (and oversight) of government. By selling Fortress stock, the fund is taking on all the encumberances of a public firm without the accompanying reduction in financial overhead you'd get in a normal company. The people who used to own Fortress are smart enough to know this, so going public implies that they think their own fund is priced out of proportion to its long-term value, and happily cashed out to leave public stockholders holding the bag when the cycle turns downward. That includes both fund owners and fund investors, since the return to the latter determines return to the former.
Second, the claim that he worked for Fortress to learn about finance is either disingenuous or frightening. It's disingenuous if his real, or at least primary, motivation was to make a lot of money. Working for a hedge fund to learn about finance is like buying a spot on a Soviet space mission to learn about physics -- I can't imagine it wasn't educational, but a more rigorous and systematic understanding could be picked up with less trouble at the local university. (I believe North Carolina isn't exactly short on decent universities, either.) It's frightening if Edwards thinks that what he would have learned at a university would be useless, because he thinks hedge funds are the public face of a shadowy elite that really runs the world financial system (and therefore he really was learning about finance, straight from the Masons' mouth).
Third, Edwards, if he did any actual work for the fund, or actually learned something about finance, would know how to balance risk and reward. Nah.
Edwards' largest holding was a conservative investment: $5 million to $25 million in a money market fund, Columbia Cash Reserves.
So Edwards has a few million in Fortress, where it is likely to evaporate, but most of his money is in a money market account, where inflation and taxes will slowly bleed the purchasing power away a little each year. Sorry, not just inflation and taxes: Columbia Cash Reserves has a variable expense ratio of 0.27% to 1.3%, meaning Edwards is paying somewhere from 1.5 to seven times the maximum reasonable price for this kind of investment, a risk-free portfolio of boring, low-return, short-term debt. In fact, he could easily buy T-bills directly from the U.S. Treasury and keep the difference.
This guy wants to help the entire country, if not the industrialized world, give workers a fair shake in the wealth game, and he's barely fit to give financial advice to the guy with an investment portfolio of scratch tickets and dog track tips.
If you want a solid middle-class investment plan, Snarksmithers: find a nice, broad, stock index fund with an expense ratio below 0.25%. This is a great one. Set it up in some kind of tax-deferred vehicle like a Roth IRA and make a plan to put, say, $300 a month in it. Now forget about it for ten years. You probably won't have a much money as John Edwards, but your returns will kick his ass with considerably less work.
CNN | Presidential Hopefuls Report Riches
Whatever 14 year-old cosmic titan's game of Stratego just made this happen must've felt bad about removing Tony Blair from the board:
PARIS, France (Reuters) -- French President Nicolas Sarkozy is set to pick maverick left-winger Bernard Kouchner as foreign minister, a move that would back up his campaign pledge to put human rights at the heart of France's diplomacy.
The only way to describe the transformation of Kanan Makiya in the leftist imagination is from hero to useless idiot. Before 1991, he was hailed as the "Iraqi Solzhenitsyn" for his methodical exposure of the terror state run by Saddam and company. After he supported the First Gulf War, however, relations began to cool with the New Lefties who thought they'd found their beau ideal in feckless humanitarianism: "Surely, Kanan, everything you say about Baathism is true, but -- well, you don't actually expect us to do anything about it?"
For a short while, it looked as if the man everybody wanted to celebrate was -- how to put this? -- "containable." Tariq Ali, who'd formerly welcomed the Trotskyist into the ever-widening camp of aggrieved post-colonial intellectuals, had to think fast when Makiya started snuggled up to the first Bush regime: "Political innocent" was
Ali's designation for his former comrade, who was once experienced enough to be able to tell you about the bastinado torture in Abu Ghraib, or the burlap sacks into which feral cats and supposed enemies of the state were tossed...
Anyway, now everybody is smart enough to know that Makiya's a spiky hedgehog who lucked into a cameo as a fox when it came time for his cause to be taken up by the neoconservative brains trust in Washington. All the old soixante-huitards have left him; Peter Beinart (more of an 89er, really) says he only ever supported the war because Makiya did.
Thinner, and more reminiscent of a 10th grade chemistry teacher than a member of the Fourth International, Makiya still sticks to his principles, and tries to keep away from his in-box:
At first glance, Makiya looks like one of those individuals -- many of them former '60s activists who once argued passionately over the Iraq War at Upper West Side book-club meetings and in Brooklyn coffee shops. Makiya, too, has longish, thinning hair and wire-rimmed glasses, a Leonard Cohen CD collection, and boomer-style taste -- with 17 Freud books (from The Interpretation of Dreams to Erich Fromm's Greatness and Limitations of Freud's Thought) on a shelf in his study. But despite appearances, Makiya is more like a Central European intellectual who came to the United States in the 1980s and believed in Reagan's anti-Soviet vision.
"There's an instant empathy and an instant recognition when we meet up," Makiya says, describing his affinity for Europeans. They have much in common, and former Solidarity leader Adam Michnik supported Makiya's views on Iraq. "In the state of Saddam, the opposition could find a place only in cemeteries," Michnik explained in A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq, edited by Thomas Cushman. The Central European optimism about American power and its potential for improving the human condition had once been hard for lefty intellectuals to swallow.
I want badly to say that this essay almost redeems him for his silliness about Ayaan Hirsi Ali:
When I met von Donnersmarck in Oxford, where he studied politics, philosophy, and economics in the mid-1990s, I discussed my reservations with him. While fiercely defending the basic historical accuracy of the film, he immediately agreed that some details were deliberately altered for dramatic effect. Thus, he explained, if he had shown the Stasi cadets in uniform, no ordinary cinemagoer would have identified with them. But because he shows them (inaccurately) in student-type civilian dress and has one of them (implausibly) ask a naive question to the effect of "isn't bullying people in interrogations wrong?," the viewer can identify with them and is drawn into the story. He argued that in a movie the reality has always to be verdichtet, a word which means thickened, concentrated, intensified, but carries a verbal association with Dichtung, meaning poetry or, more broadly, fiction. Hence the elevated language ("I beg you, I beseech you"—ich flehe dich an—says the playwright at one point, asking his girlfriend not to submit again to the minister's piggish lechery). Hence the luxuriant palette of rich greens, browns, and subtle grays in which the whole movie is shot, and the frankly operatic staging of Christa's death.
During a subsequent question-and-answer session in an Oxford cinema the director mentioned, in separate answers, two films that he admired: Claude Lanzmann's harrowing Holocaust documentary, Shoah, and Anthony Minghella's version of The Talented Mr. Ripley—a thriller involving murder and stolen identity—which he singled out because "it doesn't bore me, and for that I'm very grateful." In The Lives of Others, Shoah meets The Talented Mr. Ripley. Von Donnersmarck does care about the historical facts, but he's even more concerned not to bore us. And for that we are grateful. It is just because he is not an East German survivor but a fresh, cosmopolitan child of the Americanized West, a privileged Wessi down to the carefully unbuttoned tips of his pink button-down shirt, fluent in American-accented English and the universal language of Hollywood, that he is able to translate the East German experience into an idiom that catches the imagination of the world.
A brief note about the Stasi agent's quick conversion into a "good man." It wasn't necessary all that quick. Just because the clipped, gray automaton we're introduced to at the beginning of the film indicates Wiesler was still the perfect surveillance agent doesn't mean he hadn't had doubts about his profession or his state before eavesdropping on a charismatic intellectual and his beautiful actress girlfriend.
The point conveyed by the best fictional anatomies of totalitarian societies is that even the oppressors harbor a latent, or incipient, sympathy with those they oppress. When O'Brien tells Winston Smith of the life Winston and Julia will be forced to lead in the underground -- a life that would in all probability end in early death -- is there not a slight vicarious thrill in his forecast of their martyrdom?
The very psychology that enabled regimes of terror in the twentieth century was also responsible for their downfall. A two-hour time window may have required the filmmaker to speed up the process in his characters some, but the essential truth of his film remains in tact.
That this fat cow has managed to graze on the slopes of celebrity mediocrity for so long would be the funniest thing she'd ever managed were it not also so sad.
After many back-and-forth arguments during the Hot Topics segments about what happened to World Trade Center building #7 on September 11, 2001, it looks like The View is finally going to bring some experts in on the subject. In case you have missed it, Rosie O’Donnell has mentioned several times that the way that WTC 7 fell was suspicious, because it was not hit by an airplane filled with jet fuel like WTC 1 and 2. She has stated that the way that WTC 7 imploded onto itself at free-fall speed seems unlikely without outside aid, such as a controlled demolition. Elisabeth Hasselbeck stated that the building collapsed as a result of a combination of small fires inside WTC 7 which weakened the metal and the “volcanic force” from the collapse of the other two buildings.
O'Donnell openly admires the lunatic ravings of one Alex Jones, who, according to the New York Times's Alan Feuer:
set forth the central tenets of 9/11 Truth: that the military command that monitors aircraft “stood down” on the day of the attacks; that President Bush addressed children in a Florida classroom instead of being whisked off to the White House; that the hijackers, despite what the authorities say, were trained at American military bases; and that the towers did not collapse because of burning fuel and weakened steel but because of a “controlled demolition” caused by pre-set bombs.
O'Donnell has peddled such nonsense on The View, no doubt hoping to create a few feverish "9/11 skeptics" among the kaffeeklatsch-ing housewives of America. Check out the YouTube below in which dear Rosie says, "I do believe it was the first time in history that fire melted steel." You can also peruse some of her nightstand reading here.
And because I know some spud-faced inquisitor out there will post a comment asking, "well, why did the steel girders in the Twin Towers melt so quicky?," may I preemptively direct him or her to Popular Mechanics' expert debunking of all theories as to "what really happened" the day Al Qaeda went to war with the United States.
One of the first things I noticed about him was that he was genuinely interested in you as a person. He wanted to know how you were and would ask if there was anything he could pray for on your behalf. Second thing was that you always had to watch out for his SUV. Dr. Falwell, who always went around freely without security, still drove his own vehicle and would pretend to go after students. His humor was always there.
Fred Phelps, the preacher who pickets the funerals of AIDS victims and U.S. soldiers (defending a godless, pagan country that permits homosexuality, science, and brunch), wants to bring his caravan of corpse hecklers to the gravesite of Jerry Falwell. If satire is dead, it's because it had premarital sex:
WBC will Preach at Jerry Falwell's Funeral!!
WBC will preach at the memorial service of the corpulent false prophet Jerry Falwell, who spent his entire life prophesying lies and false doctrines like "God loves everyone".
There is little doubt that Falwell split Hell wide open the instant he died. The evidence is compelling, overwhelming, and irrefragable. To wit:
1. Falwell was a true Calvinistic Baptist when he was a young preacher in Springfield, Missouri, and sold his soul to Free-Willism (Arminianism) for lucre.
2. Falwell bitterly and viciously attacked WBC because of WBC's faithful Bible preaching -- thereby committing the unpardonable sin -- otherwise known as the sin against the Holy Ghost.
3. Falwell warmly praised Christ-rejecting Jews, pedophile-condoning Catholics, money-grubbing compromisers, practicing fags like Mel White, and backsliders like Billy Graham and Robert Schuler, etc. All for lucre -- making him guilty of their sins.
There's a new coffee house on Henry St. in Brooklyn Heights, where I live, called Uncommon Grounds. (Relax: No one's hair style has changed in the last fifteen minutes; the word "be" - as in, "could I be more diuretic right now?" - is never spoken in italics; and the sexual tension is so far nil.) Anyway, they serve all manner of coffee, wine, sandwich, and WiFi. They've pretty much become my mini-Mecca since they opened last Wednesday right across the street from my apartment.
Unfortunately, a car alarm has been going off since 7 a.m. this morning. It was bleating when I left for work, and bleating when I came home, and bleats still as I sit in Uncommon Grounds writing this in what should be a state of uncompromised happiness and relaxation.
Yet more evidence that pleasure is never unalloyed and never, ever cheap. You want a unified field theory of human existence? It's that early scene in Defending Your Life where Albert Brooks is told his BMW convertible is ready, he thinks he sees it (i.e. the sports car of his dreams), but then is redirected to smaller, less inspiring pussy magnet. It's not an awful car, the one he's actually bought, because it's still a BMW, but he knows it cost him more than he probably should have spent given his expectations.
In other words, disappointment is so often not an overmastering sense of failure but the dull throb of knowing that an event or circumstance could have been even moderately better than it turned out to be.
So: A nice glass of Shiraz, a double espresso, Russian Thinkers, and bleat, bleat, bleat.
Long before there was Gawker, but a little after there was Wired, there was Suck. A smirking, ironic underground in the dotcom dystopia of the fin de siecle, Suck was an online politics and pop culture magazine read by those of us already too far into our teens to be billionaires, but too damned young to go back to print. Every day saw a short, witty essay published in a “snaking” column of text that never exceeded 200 pixels in width, and bylined by a too-clever-by-half pseudonym like Polly Esther or CGI Joe. And Terry Colon's accompanying art (see above and to the right) was simply the shrewdest thing in pastels.
You wanted a net mogul’s ego punctured, a politico’s horizon darkened, or a celebrity’s lipstick smeared – you knew where to point your browser between ’96 and ’01. (After the industry it took the piss out of became incontinent on Wall Street, Suck was bought out by Feed magazine, then fell into a state of permanent suspended animation. A little bit of Cisco Systems employee died in us all that day.)
The site's motto – “A fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun” – may have been a paean to know-it-all Gen X cynicism, but make no mistake: the accomplishment was lasting and profound. Suck made the adolescent internet turn its head and cough.
So for this installment of Movable Snipe – “A blogroll, a week, and a deadly duel” – we’re proud to reunite two former Sucksters, Nick Gillespie (Mr. Mxyzptlk) and Tim Cavanaugh (BarTel D'Arcy).
Nick is the editor-in-chief of Reason magazine, which would have been Adam Smith’s favorite subscription if he were a member of Joy Division.
Tim, who’s now the web editor of the Los Angeles Times opinion page, actually invented Reason’s popular blog Hit & Run, a name he conveniently stole from a popular proto-blog feature at Suck. (Plagiarism’s the new scoop; remind me to forward you the Slate article.)
Their quarry for the next three days:
Swampland: Time’s collective corporate journalism blog, which I’ve found is best experienced as a drinking game. Every time Joe Klein reluctantly tugs his forelock before the almighty netroots, do a shot. Every time Wonkette emerita (and fellow Suck alumna) Ana Marie Cox wishes she could still make her mortgage payments on ass-fucking jokes, do two.
Unclaimed Territory: All right, I picked this one out of pure sadism. Lefty civil liberties lawyer Glenn Greenwald blogs at Salon, once the bete noir of the Sucksters. I don’t know if your browser does this, but that “smug cloud” from South Park always appears as pop-up in Firefox whenever I click on this blog.
Kausfiles: Will Slate’s in-house blogger finally have done with this whole charade and confess his Victor Mature-like man-love for Andrew Sullivan? More importantly, is Mickey furry enough to make it work?
Danger Room: Wired’s new defense and technology blog, marshaled by Jewcy friend Noah Shachtman. Noah recently broke the story about the Pentagon’s proposed kibosh on military blogs. We like him.
Michelle Malkin: Everyone’s favorite, internment camp-championing, link-happy vixen. Better looking than Ann Coulter, and Charlie’s favorite Angel (she’s good with knives).
CNN is reporting that Rev. Jerry Falwell has died. The prominent church leader, religious right activist and media personality was 73.
There will be plenty of time for extended attacks in the blogosphere and for whitewashing in the newspaper obits. I will simply note that the motto of Falwell's Liberty University is "Knowledge Aflame," which motto brackets a book and flame in the university's seal. Whether that image reminds you of the Holy Spirit, or of book-burning, it seems appropriate for a man who seemed to divide the country so neatly into those who thought of him as a reactionary, anti-intellectual populist and a craftsman of a form of Christianity that spoke to millions with a palatable blend of modern relevance and old-fashioned values. The truth, of course, was probably some mixture of the two.
Forget Thomas Friedman's theory that McDonald's is a better guarantor of pacifity than the UN. Sesame Street has always struck me as a more reliable weather-vane of a country won't go to war with another be-Muppeted one. (There's a Sesame Street in Bosnia now.) Though things haven't worked out so well for the Arab-Israeli version, which was canceled due to lack of funding in 1997, this revival might go some distance toward rescuing holy land youth from the chauvinism and hatred that only adults can master.
Enough sententiousness. Here's my favorite bit from this JTA article:
Tolerance of diversity is not the only message from "Rechov Sumsum." A song called "The Sound of Silence" teaches children to consider softening their tone of voice.
"Israelis are very loud," Apt said. "Many people are upset about it, but no one does anything about it. So it's a song about thinking twice about using the right pitch for what you want to say. Do you really need to speak so loud with someone who is just nearby?"
Even before 9/11, I didn't much like the CIA (I've always been more of a MI6 man myself, and as for as cold, brutal efficiency in international spycraft, I'm sorry, but the Russians simply did it better). But listening to Jeffrey Goldberg's interview the the universally execrated George Tenet has left me in no state of confusion as to how Al Qaeda managed to invade the United States: We had Woody Allen as our last line of defense.
“Well, the only thing I can say—I mean, well, I think people may believe that we knew all the answers to these questions,” he said. “And then there’s the whole ‘Well, why didn’t you resign?’ But wait a minute. I had, you know—anybody has misgivings about going to war. And I thought about this. In my view, there’s a little bit of misunderstanding about the job of director. I mean, you know, you don’t cross that policy line. You’re supposed to provide objective assessments and analysis. They”—policymakers—“make decisions on the policies they’re going to make. Obviously, you know, we said what we said about W.M.D. They do the cost-benefit, risk calculation about what they think that means. We don’t. They do.”
I don't know what's worse: Seeing any kind of plebiscite out of postwar Iraq that cites 100% opinion on something, or that there seem to be quite so many 100% opinions on just how miserable life in the country is today.
Now that Kurdistan is once again being targeted for suicide-bombings, what are the chances that this pluralist, democratic statelet will not want to secede entirely from Iraq and seal off its borders once and for all? (That'll play about as well in Baghdad as it well in Ankara, but if self-determination has ever been earned by a people, the Kurds have earned theirs.)
And given how paltry the Iraqi Oil Ministry is being about divvying up oil that should, by rights, belong to the Kurds, I'd say there's a good chance of secession -- an option granted to the KRG in Iraq's constitution:
[T]he Iraqi Oil Ministry, at a meeting it set up last month in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, with other Iraqi oil experts and politicians, unveiled the annexes to the hydrocarbons law -- its list distributing control of oil fields between central and KRG control -- and a law re-establishing the Iraq National Oil Co., which Kurdish leadership automatically rejected.
"This sets us back to square one, a point that's unacceptable to us. We're trying to modernize Iraq, build a new Iraq, built on new foundations, new policies. The symbol of this new Iraq will be how it manages its oil infrastructure," Talabani said. "And if people want to revert back to Saddam-era policies of a state-controlled oil sector with no accountability, with no accountability to the Parliament or the people of the country, with no oversight except from by one or two, then I'm sorry, that is not the Iraq that the Kurds bought into. That is not the Iraq that the Kurds would want to be part of."
"If a centralized oil regime is imposed on us, we will not participate in the state of Iraq," Talabani said. "And we have to make it absolutely clear to our friends in Washington, to our brothers in Baghdad, this is a make-or-break deal for Iraq."
I'd meant to post this last week, but got a bit caught up in the playpen antics of the Wolfowitz comment thread. Anyway, good for Petraeus. He's an intellectual and a real scholar of warcraft. Anyone who's read his Counterinsurgency manual can't argue with his evident concern for the human coefficient in combat: He'll tell you why Algeria went to hell in the 60's, or why Napoleon botched his occupation of Spain.
The logic -- to say nothing of the moral impetus -- behind a no-torture policy is simple: Unless you kill each and every person you torture, you can expect that person to speak of his treatment at your hands. A civil society cannot be reconstituted or maintained if the forces tasked with doing such are willing to allow themselves to be portrayed as monsters.
10 May 2007
Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, and Coast Guardsmen serving in Multi-National Force—Iraq:
Our values and the laws governing warfare teach us to respect human dignity, maintain our integrity, and do what is right. Adherence to our values distinguishes us from our enemy. This fight depends on securing the population, which must understand that we—not our enemies—occupy the moral high ground. This strategy has shown results in recent months. Al Qaeda’s indiscriminate attacks, for example, have finally started to turn a substantial portion of the Iraqi population against it.
In view of this, I was concerned by the results of a recently released survey conducted last fall in Iraq that revealed an apparent unwillingness on the part of some US personnel to report illegal actions taken by fellow members of their units. The study also indicated that a small percentage of those surveyed may have mistreated noncombatants. This survey should spur reflection on our conduct in combat.
I fully appreciate the emotions that one experiences in Iraq.
I also know firsthand the bonds between members of the “brotherhood of the close fight.” Seeing a fellow trooper killed by a barbaric enemy can spark frustration, anger, and a desire for immediate revenge. As hard as it might be, however, we must not let these emotions lead us—or our comrades in arms—to commit hasty, illegal actions. In the event that we witness or hear of such actions, we must not let our bonds prevent us from speaking up.
Some may argue that we would be more effective if we sanctioned torture or other expedient methods to obtain information from the enemy. They would be wrong. Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary. Certainly, extreme physical action can make someone “talk”; however, what the individual says may be of questionable value. In fact our experience in applying the interrogation standards laid out in the Army Field Manual (2-22.3) on Human Intelligence Collector Operations that was published last year shows that the techniques in the manual work effectively and humanely in eliciting information from detainees.
We are, indeed, warriors. We train to kill our enemies. We are engaged in combat, we must pursue the enemy relentlessly, and we must be violent at times. What sets us apart from our enemies in this fight, however, is how we behave. In everything we do, we must observe the standards and values that dictate that we treat noncombatants and detainees with dignity and respect. While we are warriors, we are also all human beings. Stress caused by lengthy deployments and combat is not a sign of weakness; it is a sign that we are human. If you feel such stress, do not hesitate to talk to your chain of command, your chaplain, or a medical expert.
We should use the survey results to renew our commitment to the values and standards that make us who we are and to spur re-examination of these issues. Leaders, in particular, need to discuss these issues with their troopers—and, as always, they need to set the right example and strive to ensure proper conduct. We should never underestimate the importance of good leadership and the difference it can make.
Thanks for what you continue to do. It is an honor to serve with each of you.
David H. Petraeus
General, United States Army
Commanding
Without pretending I knew what it was supposed to represent (too lazy even to Wikipedia; sad), I was not under the impression that the Falun Gong people were boostering Nazism on Boston Common. I'm not sure it's relevant; I would no more put one of those flags up in the USA than I would, say wear a white baseball cap with the Circuit City logo around Nanking.
That's not to say we haven't gotten enlightening email on the subject. From a reader:
The swastikas on the Falun Gong flags are an ancient Sanskritic icon adopted by Mahayana Buddhism at least a millenium ago as the symbol, would you believe, of compassion.
FG didn't take this from the Nazis, who --if you look carefully-- reversed the conventional rotation from counter-clockwise in the classical Sanskrit motif, to clockwise in theirs. In theory, Sanskrit is the Aryan root language. Hitler himself, as the principal graphic designer and later, de facto art director (!) of the NSDAP, adopted the swastika as the quintessential Aryan logo.
I was a novice for some time in a Zen Buddhist monastery in Northern California where all the ordained monks --including a few from Jewish backgrounds-- wore large swastika pendants inside the cloister, which they were supposed to make absolutely certain they had removed from around their necks before going into town. For obvious reasons.
So not very close, and certainly no cigar!
So there you have it. A quick look around the Internet says yes, it's a Buddhist offshoot. There are also many pages on Falun Gong on Wiki, but unfortunately they're all double-flagged as biased against everybody, so it may take me a while to figure out what the iconography is really all about. But they aren't Nazis.
A plus sign doing a cartwheel, a Nazi symbol of hatred, and a Hindu symbol of enlightenment. 'Tis the swastika, which I think Nic misinterpreted in his Falun Gong post.
Rudyard Kipling once decorated a book with the swastika, invoking that secondary usage, long before Hitler (whom R.K. would have called a "Hun" or a new leader of that "lesser breed without the law") darkened the landscape.
I live by my iTunes internet radio and I was appalled to learn that royalty rates would rise astronomically for these invaluable dot-com stations, effective July 1, 2007 (and retroactive through June 1, 2006). It means the end of free music.
We have libraries to offer all citizens books at no cost. That music -- especially classical music -- should fall under the scythe of the intellectual property class is a scandal.
I have little regard for Sen. Sam Brownback, but once again I find myself updating my list of Christianist plaudits to learn that he has introduced legislation to keep royalties affordable to the little guy. It's of course a big evangelical frame-up: Brownback only wants the godly harmonies to remain accessible to all Americans with IP addresses.
I can live with that. So should you. As George Carlin once had it, the best thing about religion is the music. (And the bill will perforce allow the pagan and heathen stuff to float uninterrupted through the ether.)
Contact your senator or representative to push for the bill's passage. And hurry up. July 1 is right around the corner:
I don't know a whole lot about Falun Gong except that the Chinese government stands ready to crack down on the cult with extreme prejudice; Google China takes a "la la can't hear you" approach if you hunt for it on their platform. Members are often handing out literature on Boston Common and meditating to droning, hissing cassette tapes. But today there was some kind of bigger Falun Gong thing with drum circles and -- I kid not -- these flags. (Photo taken about an hour ago.)
I think this sheds a little bit of light on why the People's Republic hates the Falun Gong. Swastikas definitely put the cult on the wrong end of the authoritarian left-right pole, as well as opposed to mainstream Chinese, far more affable brand of anti-Semitism.
As ever, my periodic absences -- or presences, to give you negative space options -- on Snarksmith are filled by enough writing from Mike to fill some clothbound completist volume should he ever get academically famous. Not to rub it in, but I've been gone for reasons other than a dead muse and lazy blog work ethic (though that's a factor too). I've been in Hawaii, a magical place where the weather is always exactly perfect and for some physiology-defying reason hangovers don't exist. The photo above isn't clip art taken off the web. I took that photo. I can't believe it's the same country.
Technically, I came back from Hawaii a week ago, but my thoughts have been occupied by a coral cut I got on the bottom of my foot and passing my final exam in a course on differential equations. Cutting oneself on coral, even a small nick, winds up as a huge open, inflamed sore that takes forever to heal because the proteinaceous matter on the coral (the living part) goes on the attack. Since I killed a square centimeter of a reef for a thousand generations, I guess I won, but it's still been a bitch hobbling around Medford, Mass. trying to remember how to analyze constants of motion for nonlinear systems.
The unexpected benefit of learning about differential equations is getting to dip my polyp-afflicted toe into the waters of nonlinear systems, the nasty beasts which apparently underly chaos theory, at least partly. Even simple models of weather systems cannot be predicted very far in advance because differences in starting points far too small to be measured quickly result in very different outcomes. Jurassic Park -- which I also happened to watch on vacation, by bizarre coincidence -- wasn't bullshitting. (Well, the Jeff Goldblum parts. You still can't make dinosaurs out of fossilized mosquitoes.)
Nonlinear differential equations are so different from each other and so difficult to solve that the normally technical language of mathematicians has allowed "nonlinear" to take on a more relaxed, English-language meaning only those in the field understand deeply. So far as I can tell, to call something "nonlinear" means that like the associated mathematics, it is fiendishly difficult or impossible to make even a little progress toward solving or even really understanding what's going on. That such things exist delight me, since the implication appears to be that many of the systems which make life so interesting -- not only weather but population, human conflict, financial markets, whatever -- might be comprehensible, but not predictable. That's a mathematical dilettante's understanding of the situation, at least. And that strikes me as a happy compromise between my empiricist's drive to know and my mysticist's instinct to wonder about any biological, physical or social phenomenon of staggering complexity.
Must respect the musician who out-performed Leonard Cohen on "Hallelujah" and set Shakespeare's Sonnet 29 to music:
And as for whatever political overtones this track may have (and I'm not even sure "I'm so tired of America" means what you'd expect it to mean at this point in history), who cares? It's a far better tune than Mozzer's "America is Not the World."
When's the last time you heard a celebrity figure make about as much sense in the space of a single interview as is possible?
My buddy Izzy Chotiner at TNR has a fantastic Q&A with Charles Barkley. A macedoine:
So is that what interests you primarily--economic issues?
America is divided by economics strictly. You know, people always talk about race, and we have racial problems in this country. Of course we do. But the real issue is the rich against the poor. We've got to get poor white people and poor black people and Mexicans to realize they are all in the same boat. If you in one of those three groups and you are poor, you are going to be in a bad neighborhood, you are going to go to a bad school, and you are going to have strikes against you. You can't commit crimes in good neighborhoods. They will get your ass. Their kids go to private school, or they go to school in a good economic area. But the poor people, they are all in the same boat but they divide you based on race or stuff like that. A lot of these politicians say things like "We've got to stop all these illegal immigrants." I am like, "That is so easy to stop." They are not working for other immigrants.
You mentioned Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson earlier. What are your opinions of them?
I know them both, but they are race-baiters who have double standards for white racism and black racism.
James Kirchik has an excellent piece in the Sun about Beijing's fondness for facilitating African horror shows:
Those who believe that America should minimize its global presence because our war against Iraq or our detention policies have made us unpopular must separate these qualms from the real-world considerations of global politics. If America were to retreat from the world stage, there is no question as to which power would step up in our place: China.
The two main loci are Sudan and Zimbabwe, which -- surprise, surprise -- is in line to head the UN Commission on Sustainable Development.
I'd recommend rigging up a small pulley system to keep your jaw from falling to the floor when you read this:
Some countries say Zimbabwe's high inflation, unemployment and rights record make it an unsuitable candidate.
But Zimbabwe has dismissed such criticism, calling it an insult.
"What has sustainable development to do with human rights?" Zimbabwe's ambassador to the UN told the BBC.
It's not every week I click off The Sopranos feeling as if the episode took a cue from my own life. All my mommy issues disappeared without duck-induced fainting spells; I don't even wear an Adidas tracksuit to the gym; and the only mafia I've ever escaped from was Commentary. Still, A.J.'s exciting new subplot had me riveted to the screen like moist gabagule to provolone.
For those without HBO or something to talk about on Mondays: New Jersey don Tony Soprano's son A.J. was dumped by his girlfriend Blanca last week after he hastily proposed to her, she impulsively accepted, and then she realized she just wasn’t into him anymore. This week’s episode featured A.J.’s mounting depression at the loss of his beloved. He couldn’t eat, he couldn’t sleep, he looked as disaffected and cosmically bored as he did before he found his soulmate and grew Backstreet Boy facial hair. And rather than do what sheltered bourgeois boys do when they get kicked to the curb by heartless womanfolk – take it up with mom and sis – A.J. remained eerily silent throughout, issuing a few mild innuendos about suicide. He did at one point suggest that his breakup was due class conflict: it just wasn’t in the tax returns for a pizza-slinging Montague from an Italian crime family to make it work with single parent Capulet from a Puerto Rican barrio. In Jersey.
As this is The Sopranos, and sooner or later you wind up in the morgue, jail, or a shrink’s office, A.J. was swiftly dispatched to the some recommended Dr. Feelgood, the most stone-faced and maladroit therapist I’ve ever seen on television. (I still don’t understand why the writers are lauded for their realistic portrayal of doctor-patient kibitzes; I find Tony and Dr. Malfi’s interaction to be the most strained thing about the series.) After asking a few prosaic questions, even for an in-take session, the shrink hits upon a novel solution: A.J. should take Lexapro.
Lexapro is the most current iteration of so-called SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) anti-depressants, in the family of industry pathfinder Prozac, yet the one psychiatrists prescribe first now due its relatively low occurrence of side effects. These may include fatigue, weight gain, stomach cramps, and anorgasmia in men. Anorgasmia, like anhedonia, is just what it sounds like. In the 19th century, the British – specifically Lord Byron, satirizing the neurotic poet Bob Southey – used to call a man who’d jackhammer away and never cum a “dry bob.” It’s enough to make you depressed all over again. Or so I’ve read on my packet of Lexapro.
Yes, not too long ago, I was hit with the liebestod for a Scandinavian beauty who said she liked me okay but would eventually want to sleep with other people. This posed a distinct dilemma for a romantic materialist such as your humble servant. Not to mix pop cultural genres, but might I call your attention to the line at the end of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Clementine warns Joel that what did in fact happen the first time they dated would happen the second time, too: “I'll get bored with you and feel trapped because that's what happens with me.” Better yet, remember Joel’s response? “Okay!”
Okay! I hope Joel’s round two went better than my round one. After much agonizing I realized it was just too painful to even entertain the prospect of being one among many, so I bailed. This is actually worse than getting dumped because you’re applying the cold steel to your heart all by yourself. The good news is, it was the most amicable break-up I’ve ever had: We talked about Kingsley Amis, whom she hated (bad sign there), and Rothko. And I kept her copy of The Female Thing, which I said I’d mail back to her but never did. Watch how the patriarchy does revenge.
After a week or so of marinating in my own misery, both at home and at the office, I decided I should talk to a shrink. New York Jews have an obligation to travel this route at least once in their neurotic lives, and I betray no embarrassment to report that you’ll find my psychic tire tracks on more than a few turnpikes.
Anyway, this shrink seemed well poised to treat me because she’d already treated my older sister and had a rather serviceable family history to hand. I told her (always see a female psychiatrist by the way) my girl trouble and how I was in a state of mind-lock over every perceived faux pas or fatal act I may have committed in the course of the relationship.
It hardly mattered that I’d been given the other person’s agenda upfront, and that her forecast of how things would end up merely came to pass. If only I’d done X, or waited a while longer before doing Y… Like Stephen Jay Gould’s fossil record played backwards, I was hopelessly tethered to an infinity of existential what-ifs.
I knew before my first session with Dr. S that I’d had a mild case of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, or OCP. This doesn’t mean I return to the perpetually lit gas stove or have to flick light switches 80 times a day. My obsessionalism is manifested internally, and only becomes behaviorally problematic when the bulk of my cerebral energy goes toward operating the loop-de-loop of a single idea or concept instead of, say, updating the blog. But it never really occurred to me just how telling OCP was to a professional trained to spot it within minutes. The guardedness with which I approached therapy with the doc who initially diagnosed me made what should have been my shock of recognition more like a gradual, bathetic realization.
Here’s what I do: I try to relive every footling nuance and non-consequential detail of every memory until I’m convinced my listener is emotionally there, experiencing it with enough vividness to draw the same conclusions about it as I do. My frustration is in feeling that I may have left out some cinching piece of evidence or that I’m misrepresenting myself in some way. Always, however, the elusive end goal is the same: certified determinism. I don’t want to just be told there was no other way things could have transpired; I want to know it intuitively and unwaveringly.
Well, an hour later I had my first trial packet of Lexapro, known to cure what ails me and courtesy of psychiatrist who, thirty years ago, was highly skeptical of the transformative power of SSRI drugs. I didn’t have a cabinet full of auspicious patient histories to bolster my confidence, so I was still skeptical.
According to Wikipedia (always take drugs according to Wikipedia) Lexapro works by “increasing intrasynaptic levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin by blocking the re-uptake of the neurotransmitter into the neuron.” So it fucks with your brain chemistry in a way that would have taxed Dr. Huxtable’s inventory of medical euphemisms on the Cosby Show.
But whereas A.J. is said to have shown signs of marked mood improvement after only a week on the pill, the average patient doesn’t detect changes in his disposition until after a month or two of usage. (Good thing, too. In A.J.’s case, his happy fix had him helping goomba friends pour sulfuric acid on the foot of a college gambling debtor. Lexapro: Your low-life is waiting.)
So has it worked? Am I different person? Pretty much. It's been about six months on the drug, and while I find mind-lock still occurs, it doesn’t last as long as it used to. More significantly, the dire anticipation of it occurring – usually this was worse than the event itself – is now almost nil. Imminent conflicts or bummers are received with all the sangfroid of Churchill's definition of history: one damned thing after another. I suppose I should count myself a Lexapro success story.
The alternative explanation for my alteration (I do love to sound grandiose about something that costs $80 a month, sans co-pay) is one that my shrink doesn’t discount: sentimental education. It’s almost a certainty that the next spoiled love affair won’t be as profound or profound-seeming as the last one. As ever, Philip Larkin understands the learned stoicism that comes with romantic experience. If you can’t afford Lexapro, you can always swallow poetry:
Love, we must part now: do not let it be
Calamitous and bitter. In the past
There has been too much moonlight and self-pity:
Let us have done with it: for now at last
Never has sun more boldly paced the sky,
Never were hearts more eager to be free,
To kick down worlds, lash forests; you and I
No longer hold them; we are husks, that see
The grain going forward to a different use.
There is regret. Always, there is regret.
But it is better that our lives unloose,
As two tall ships, wind-mastered, wet with light,
Break from an estuary with their courses set,
And waving part, and waving drop from sight.
Was Condi Rice Complicit in the Oil For Food Scandal?
Well, here's the most ridiculous pair of sentences you'll read this week:
As part of the deal under negotiation, Chevron, which now owns Texaco, is not expected to admit to violating the U.N. sanctions. But Chevron is expected to acknowledge that it should have been aware that illegal kickbacks were being paid to Iraq on the oil, the investigators said.
If, bundled with the acknowledgment that it "should have been aware of illegal kickbacks," Chevron owns to the fact that it was in possession of all the relevant data pertaining to those kickbacks, how is this any different than violating U.N. sanctions? The answer is, it's isn't: a major oil company is using slithery legalisms to exculpate itself from one of the worst and most costly scandals to ever engulf the U.N.
And Condoleeza Rice, now tasked with reinjecting new doses of "realism" into American foreign policy, was
a member of Chevron’s board and led its public policy committee, which oversaw areas of potential political concerns for the company.
So the current secretary of state has some explaining to do before a Senate subcommittee.
I'm sorry, I'm a plagiarist. But there's just no improving on Troy Patterson's clickable headline:
In Cameron's introductory remarks at the debate—which can be seen at something like its full and numbing length at abcnews.go.com—he coolly claimed that "the existence of God can be proven 100 percent, absolutely without the use of faith." First, I grew excited at this promise, then began to wonder why no theologian, philosopher, or sitcom star in recorded history had done it before—Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, Tina Yothers, whoever—and realized I was in for a letdown. Comfort's cadences were not even those of a preacher but of an infomercial host, and the God Squad had but three arguments on behalf of the big guy: All things have makers; the human conscience is evidence of a higher moral power; if you read the Gospel, then Christ will be revealed to you. For reasons too stupid to type, this was not an airtight case, and the atheists made quick work of it in tones of juvenile sarcasm.
I'm too lazy to troll through the ABC News site, so I tried typing "Kirk Cameron" into YouTube and this is what came up. Enjoy.
As a political system, let alone one thought to be on the winning side of history, Communism is dead. However, what made it so appealing in the 20th century is well worth studying today, when messianism and the mad pursuits of foreordained utopias are still with us. Robert Service's new history of Communism, Comrades!, is said to one of the best single volume histories of the subject:
Eschewing the usual convoluted language of Marxist debates, he provides a gripping account of communism's intellectual origins, pedigree and impact. Concluding that Marx and his followers “were not the fundamental rethinkers of the contemporary world”—he accords that honour to Albert Einstein, Max Weber and others—Mr Service turns from ideas to their practical application.
He argues that one can indeed trace a single unified history of communism, namely by following the rise and spread of the “truly innovative” Russian model. Through numerous country studies, the author concludes that all durable regimes had essential coercive characteristics in common. They centralised power, eliminated rival parties, attacked religion, established secret police forces and sent dissenters to labour camps. He compares communists both to fascists, with whom he sees ideological differences but practical similarities, and to early Christians. Like the latter, he says, communists enjoyed a feeling of certainty blessed by omniscience, with the deity in their case being “the march of history”.
What makes Russia innovative is that for centuries it cultivated the two main characteristics of Soviet Communism: autocracy and statism. Russia never reall had a "feudal" period in the proper economic sense of the word: under a unique, Asiatic configuration, the state was the sole owner of land, and the tsar simply doled out real estate to the aristocracy, which was little more than a bonded military class (known as pomestchiki) before the reforms inaugurated by Peter the Great. A country where peasants would actually elect to become slaves in order to avoid paying taxes is one that seems tailor-made for totalitarianism. The Russian paradox is that the grey, uniform masses are periodically galvanized into violent upheavals and revolutions by an intelligentsia comprised of young radicals, whom you can now see flitting across the stage at Lincoln Center in Tom Stoppard's magnetic play "The Coast of Utopia." Alexander Herzen may have been the most humane and liberal of the Russian thinkers, but he still believed that the motherland already enjoyed a kind of populist communism in the obshchina-based agrarian society. Herzen's hope was that Russia could skip mercantilism and bourgeois capitalism altogether and arrive at socialism without the pettifogging political economy outlined by Marx and Engels. Herzen's inchoate social theory, based on the observations made of Russia by a Prussian sociologist, motivated the next generation of intelligents into adopting a more cohesive revolutionary plan, one that, through all its fits and mutations, culminated in 1917. Communism | The ash heap of history? | Economist.com
My defense of Paul Wolfowitz yesterday precipitated a nasty spat with a former friend who then sent my piece along to the charmers as "Hitchens Watch." I became the subject of yet another one of their loving tributes. My offense this time? Well, shameless toady that I am, I had to get Hitch's take on the World Bank witch hunt before fashioning my own.
In the course of a rather enjoyable comments thread -- in which someone describing herself as an ex-classmate of mine from the New School even spoke of my many moral and aesthetic shortcomings -- I decided to clarify the matter.
I told my accusers that I had first published my thoughts about Wolfowitz's World Bank troubles at Jewcy on April 12. I even provided the Watchers the URL to the post.
I added that Hitch published his Slatepiece on April 17. I hadn't discuss the issue with him before then, nor did we kibitz about it when I saw him two weeks ago in Washington.
So whatever you think of my latest essay, "The Purging of Paul Wolfowitz," it can't be said to have been a mindless ditto of somebody else's argument. I should think the obvious research I did -- digging through the World Bank memoranda that was exchanged among Wolfowitz, the Ethics Committee and Human Resources -- would at least signal some degree of journalistic independence.
Of course it does do that until you run a "Watch" site with absolutely no respect for the truth.
Sonic has recently removed all comments from Hitchens Watch*, the better to be able to have his co-blogger "Greywolf" write the following:
What most interested me about Michael Weiss's contribution two threads back was this snippet of information.
"I didn't discuss it with him or solicit his opinion, and I wrote my latest piece because it was assigned to me."
This is a real gem because it is evidence that some Slate pieces are authored in response to orders from above, rather than because the writer particularly wants to write them—something that would never happen here at Hitchens Watch.
So it's only natural to ask how much of what appears at Slate is the product of assignments, and whether the managed journalism paradigm is limited to in-house staff or extends to star pundits too?
Specifically, for us Hitchwatchers, we'd like to know how to tell whether Hitch is writing about Joe Wilson, Paul Wolfowitz or the situation in Iraq totally off his own bat, or merely as an assignment. Because if it's the latter, how do we even know he actually agrees with what he's writing? Also, what is the nature of these assignments? Do they come with a set of talking points? Do they include a slant to be adopted? Do they come in the form of coded messages written in invisible ink or on cassette tape that self destructs 30 seconds after being played?
All this is certainly food for thought the next time we read a particularly tedious column that finds Hitch struggling to stay on message, and we have to thank Michael sincerely for bringing the issue of assignments to our attention.
A book of Steve Biko's collected journalism was famously entitled I Write What I Like. Writing regularly for an outfit that gives its writers assignments, we wonder, can Hitch honestly say the same?
As anyone can tell by now, this "gotcha" is so hilarious in its stupidity as to actually be enlightening. I was not assigned any opinion piece by Slate but by Jewcy. That's where I wrote both my Wolfowitz notices. My beat at Slate is the blogosphere, whose prospects for smart or valuable discourse I see growing dimmer by the second. And even there, I get to suggest the daily topics I cover. Now I wonder if the Hitchens Watch apparat will set about correcting this howler...
Unlikely. The reason I came to their attention at all is because last year Sonic showed himself incapable of reading or fact-checking. I tried to help the poor chap but he just took my assistance the wrong way. Here's what started his obsession with yours truly (and an obsession it is; his IP address is a regular visitor to Snarksmith):
This is funny. A site called "HitchensWatch," based out of Auckland, plumbs the depths of Christopher's defense of Euston for "lies" and comes up with a remarkably full net, as it does from everything he writes. So, for example, this paragraph from his Times Online article:
However, that professed sympathy does help us to understand the second motive. To many callow leftists, the turbulent masses of the Islamic world are at once a reminder of the glory days of “Third World?? revolution, and a hasty substitute for the vanished proletariat of yore. Galloway has said as much in so many words and my old publishers at New Left Review have produced a book of Osama Bin Laden’s speeches in which he is compared with Che Guevara.
-- produces this response:
New left Review are promoting Osama Bin Laden! that's unbeliveable if true.
It's not.
The book is actually published by Verso, it is called “Messages to the World –- The Statements of Osama bin Laden?? edited and introduced by Duke University religion professor Bruce Lawrence.
Verso is the book publishing arm of New Left Review. (Though I think if you hold up to a mirror during a lunar eclipse those sinister [Hitchens] essays in The Weekly Standard about the legacy of Labor giant Nye Bevan and the poetry of Bob Dylan, you might be able to prove otherwise.)
And indicating that an editor at New Left Review has drawn a parallel between Osama and Che Guevara is a statement of fact open to interpretation only if you experience trouble in deciphering what mystique might still attach itself to the Argentinian at the journal which takes Kim Jong-Il's side in the North Korean nuclear standoff.
This also has little to do, by the way, with the prima facie legitimacy of disseminating Osama's dispatches, which I should think the defender of David Irving's right to write would only regret as having taken so long to accomplish.
He never corrected his original post, of course, so I figured I'd just found the only Stalinist crank who identifies himself with a Sega avatar.
So Sonic and his new playmates lied again, and even went to the added trouble of erasing the in situ evidence (my comment on their post) that any reader with two IQ points to rub together might use to discover it. Anyway, the doubtful may search Slate's archive for "Weiss" and "Wolfowitz," and see if they turn up anything other than other people's blog quotes, which I've just yesterday pulled for my Today's Blogs column.
* An uncharacteristically polite email has just been sent my way by Sonic himself saying that comments were never removed. They were when I read Greywolf's post, which, in another startlingly uncharacteristic act, has since been corrected on the site.
Sonic has also asked that I remove references in this post to his real identity as he's worried it'll affect his day job. This a courtesy that I'm apparently asked to extend but not receive given the hose of abuse that's been turned on me and my day job at his little online playground, particularly in the comments section. I was inclined to tell him to fuck off. But seeing as I'm only vindicative when I'm angry, I've obliged. Consider it the generosity of an inveterate sycophant.
He Just Might Die With A Smile On His Face After All
[The Smiths came into being 25 years ago this month. I've been fan since as long as I've owned any records; my older sister got me hooked on the Mancunian quartet along with R.E.M., Echo and the Bunnymen, Billy Bragg and every incarnation of whatever lineup you please of New Order - from Joy Division to Happy Mondays. Below is an older post about the Pope of Mope, who's still kicking after all these years. His politics are bilge, but nobody ever asked that they be otherwise. My hunch is that he and Johnny Marr will reunite at some point in the future. After all, if anyone in 1984 predicted that Morrissey was going to wind up a relatively well-adjusted, tax-paying resident of California (he's since moved to Rome) with a huge Mexican fan base, they'd have been laughed out of the National Front Disco.]
If you grew up in the 80's but only became aware of that decade's pop cultural significance in the 90's -- just as an appreciation for jangly Britpop guitar riffs and clever songwriting was on the upswing again -- then you probably attribute the following defeatist sigh to the most-covered song by The Smiths:
I am the son
And the heir
Of nothing in particular.
Now try this:
Fred felt that he made a wretched figure as a fellow who bragged about expectations from a queer old miser like Featherstone, and went to beg for certificates at his bidding. But -- those expectations! He really had them, and he saw no agreeable alternative if he gave them up; besides, he had lately made a debt which galled him extremely, and old Featherstone had almost bargained to pay it off. The whole affair was miserably small: his debts were small, even his expectations were not anything so very magnificent. Fred had known men to whom he would have been ashamed of confessing the smallness of his scrapes. Such ruminations naturally produced a streak of misanthropic bitterness. To be born the son of a Middlemarch manufacturer, and inevitable heir to nothing in particular, while such men as Mainwaring and Vyan -- certainly life was a poor business, when a spirited young fellow, with a good appetite for the best of everything, had so poor an outlook.
Disaffected and dissolute youth, a mounting boredom with the world and all who inhabit it, and an egomania to launch a thousand clinical studies. George Eliot knew what she was doing, all right, and so did Morrissey.
Those expectations! They could easily give way to what Kingsley Amis once termed the "Silly Little Boys School" of English versifying, a remedial and rather "wet" class of which specializes in "Delight in the height of the night."
Part of what made Morrissey the maudlin pop poet of more than one continent, and more than one generation, is that he knew he was never cutting so terribly bold and dramatic a figure on the landscape of adolescent anomie. He was smart enough to stay conscious of the proud tradition of mopes, sulks and heavies that had gone before. Rather than go Sylvia-Plath-with-a-penis, he used wit and humor and not a little sexual "ambiguity" to get the job done. More often than not, the ambiguity shaded into jaw-droppingly obvious allusion. The album Bona Drag, for instance, was named for a gay vernacular term from swinging 60's London, and the track "Piccadilly Palare" is as much about English rent-boys as "Hairdresser on Fire" is not about a Figaro with high insurance premiums. (People who say Morrissey was always "asexual" are like those who argue that Brideshead Revisted is a lasting paean to platonic male friendship on the quadrangles.)
Indeed, if anything was proved by 2004's You Are The Quarry, it's that Morrissey has grown more heteroerotic with age. There was some chatter about a "woman of my dreams" in the song "I'm Not Sorry," even if she never made an entrance because "there never really was one." For obvious reasons.
Morrissey's politics have gotten more hamhanded and plodding, too. The harmless anti-Thatcherite/meat-is-murder stance worked well in America when he wasn't an American. Now that he lives most of the time in California, he's a broken spigot of moral comparisons between Bin Laden and Bush and Blair (the FBI even opened a case file on him for some of his shriller rhetoric.) Maybe this is overcompensation for the fact that David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party in England, is a major votary of "The Queen Is Dead." Cameron doesn't care that the title isn't exactly flattering to his "base;" he's a Tory for the new millennium and plays the song at his campaign rallies.
Which I suppose is one way of noticing that the phenomenon of Morrissey has been better defined by the audience than by the act. Depressing though all those cris de coeur may have been, some of the people who mouth them at concerts are downright creepy. Just look at all those mini-Altamonts of the heart occurring everytime someone tried to rush the stage and abscond with a hug or buss on the cheek of the least touchy-feely frontman alive. (One woman actually went so far as to make an independent film about stalking Morrissey, a level of obsession taken only few degrees higher than that of the characteristic cult follower.)
While Morrissey's sincerity was never really in question -- he always came off as not giving a shit in interviews, and other musicians who know him attest to his eccentricity as not even coming close to being a stage persona -- there was always something contrived about his love-hate relationship with his consumers. It's not really so awful living a drafty old castle in the Midlands and having limited responsibilities (save for "Don't let the band break up") and, unlike Fred Vincy, no impending debts -- at least not so awful for a working-class Irish boy from Manchester.
Nick Cave, another singer-songerwriter in thematic league with Moz, if much more "Old Testament" in his own approach, was once asked if he ever imagined, in his twenties, that he'd be where he is today. His reply was along the lines of, "I never imagined I'd be alive today." Coming from Cave, it's scary because it's true. Morrissey's low-burn death wish, on the other hand... It might not necessarily be a coincidence that he hit the peak of celebrity at 24, the same age as James Dean (an early idol) was when he inked that first-look deal with legend on a Los Angeles freeway. Weepy, sentimental Keats was also 24 when he bit it, though that's not the poet famously on Morrissey's side...
“Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern; one is apt to grow old fashioned quite suddenly," wrote Oscar Wilde in a moment of extreme self-parody. He might have added that nothing grows older faster than arrested development. It was a near thing for the Pope of Mope there for a bit. Luckily, he got his De Profundis in early, the better to keep the graying imitation pompadours coming to his sold-out shows, with him ripping his shirt off at 40. "I love you all," he confessed last year, halfway through a set at Radio City Music Hall.
Theodore Dalrymple has a great essay in this month's City Journal on the life and work of Arthur Koestler, another Hungarian Jew from the Golden Age sprawl. I'm not sure I agree with Dalrymple that Koestler's more remembered today as a rapist (the Cesarani biography, which I haven't read, apparently makes a strong case). His name will always be synonymous with anti-Communism, and his status as a prophet of Soviet tyranny was too hard-won to be diminished even by such grievous personal failings.
Koestler actually took up Communism at an adolescent age; shelved it in favor of Zionism, then returned to it wholeheartedly. He claims to have been electrified as a child by Bela Kun's savage reign in Hungary, which was seen by many Hungarian Jews as a way forward after the ravages of the First World War, which left the country governed by a weak democratic coalition. Kun's brief radical nightmare was shortly followed by a proto-fascist one led by an ex-Prussian military officer named Miklos Horthy. (Hungary was then made a plaything for both Hitler and Stalin, so it's no wonder that native Jews who emigrated -- first to Vienna, then to London or New York -- suffered from an acute case of ideological michegaas.)
One slight emendation I'd make to Dalrymple's piece: The conventional wisdom is that Koestler's Rubashov, the protagonist of Darkness at Noon, was modeled on Nikolai Bukharin. There are definite similarities between either man's Party tenure and ultimate Party demise. However, Robert Conquest has argued that in terms of style and disposition, Rubashov more closely resembles the Bulgarian aristrocrat and ex-Trotskyist Christian Rakovsky, who was also purged but didn't go to shambles quite the way Bukharin did. (Judging by Trotsky's memoir, Bukharin was neurotic and lachrymose long before he became an Enemy of the People.)
Anyway, Koestler is rarity in another crucial respect: He was one of the few 20th century figures to use that tricky customer moral equivalence -- in this case, between Nazism and Stalinism -- to enlightening, rather than stupefying, effect. The following stave from his 1943 novel Arrival and Departure is almost exactly like a conversation had between a Nazi and an Old Bolshevik in Vasily Grossman's suppressed 1960 masterpiece of World War II, Life and Fate:
There is of course a certain affinity between your ex-fatherland and ours. Both are governed by authoritarian state bureaucracies on a collectivist basis; both are streamlined police states run by economic planning, the one-party system and scientific terror. . . . It is a phase of history as inevitable as was the spreading of the feudal, and later of the capitalist, system. Our two countries are merely the forerunners of the post-individualist, post-liberal era.
Now here's the Obersturmbannfuhrer Liss interrogating the Russian POW Mostovskoy:
“A red workers’ flag flies over our People’s State too. We too call people to national Achievement, to Unity and Labour. We say, ‘The Party expresses the dream of the German worker’; you say, ‘Nationalism! Labour!’ You know as well as we do that nationalism is the most powerful force of our century. Nationalism is the soul of our epoch. And ‘Socialism in One Country’ is the supreme expression of nationalism...
“You know Lenin personally. He created a new type of party. He was the first to understand that only the Party and its Leader can express the spirit of the nation. He did away with the Constituent Assembly. But just as Maxwell destroyed Newton’s system of mechanics while thinking he had confirmed it, so Lenin considered himself a builder of internationalism while in actual fact he was creating the great nationalism of the twentieth century… And we learnt many things from Stalin. To build Socialism in One Country, one must destroy the peasants’ freedom to sow what they like and sell what they like. Stalin didn’t shilly-shally—he liquidated millions of peasants. Our Hitler saw that the Jews were the enemy hindering the German National Socialist movement. And he liquidated millions of Jews. But Hitler’s no mere student; he a genius in his own right. And he’s not one to be squeamish either. It the was the Roehm purge that gave Stalin the idea for the purge of the Party in 1937…You must believe me. You’ve kept silent while I’ve been talking, but I know that I’m like a mirror for you—a surgical mirror.”
I was having a conversation with another Jewcy editor last week when, apropos of an upcoming dialogue on Zionism, I mentioned the fact that I consider myself an "un-Zionist." Perhaps it's my age and make-up (I'm only a halfsy, and it's the wrong half, halachically) but I've never felt what Ruth Franklin in her review of Michael Chabon's new novel eloquently calls the "Jewish ache" that so many diasporists once had, and indeed still do. To my mind, 19th-century social thought -- beginning with Marx and ending with Herzl -- made one huge error in accounting for the future of human affairs: it left out the promise of the United States. (Marx was interested in our civil war, but his hope for revolution lay in Europe.)
It's not a particularly original insight to say that this country has been very good to the Jews, but I would argue -- or perhaps "feel" is le mot juste -- that it has been better for the Jews than Israel, which has precipitated a nationality and culture all its own.
My connection to Jewish identity and history is really rooted in rootlessness and permanent struggle -- struggle not for Jewish survival, but for everything. Now, I would never presume to make a normative judgment on tribal activity based on my own idiosyncratic affinities, but those affinities, and their tropes, may be worth indicating. I'm sure I risk redundancy more than a few times here: Shrugging, Yiddishkeit humor and Jewish pessimism; the fiction of Bellow and Roth; the anti-Stalinist left, encompassing the New York intellectuals and legendary Partisan Review crowd; the famed Hungarian exodus; the Russian and Soviet Jewish experiences.
The Hungarian exodus is probably most important because Theodore Herzl was, after all, born in Budapest during its so-called "Golden Age" (1870-1910). It's rather obvious that the germ for his idea of an Altneuland, or New Old Land, was incubated and nurtured in the Old Old Land of his birth, that "Jerusalem on the Danube," which the gentile Hungarian poet Endre Ady once described as “built by the Jews for the rest of us." Imagine such a place, however short-lived, at the turn of the 20th century.
So no, I don't bridle to hear a trenchant critic of the Zionist project like Philip Weiss register optimism that the Jewish state, so far from facing extinction, is now a foregone conclusion whose primary assumptions demand rethinking:
In a Zionist history I was reading the other day, I read that the purchases of land in Palestine by Jewish agencies in the early part of the last century had covenants on them. The covenants said, This land can only be sold to Jews. (When I remember the citation, I'll stick it in.) Those covenants still exist, I'm sure. You can try and justify that type of discrimination in a million ways, but there it is. Real estate covenants barring sales to blacks and Jews are what my generation helped destroy in this country 30 years ago. Obama was borne up on that idealism, and his campaign is about bringing that idealism to America's actions in the world. He's half-everything, right? The ideology of Zionism is simply out of step with that spirit, and if Obama succeeds, Zionism will lose its hold on Jewish-American intellectual life. Without fireworks.
I think Weiss is dreaming if he believes Barack Obama's own agonies of peoplehood will lead him to adopt anything other than a firmly pro-Israel stance. It took a Republican to say the words "Palestinian statehood" in public. I may be wrong, but I doubt the first black, Democratic candidate for president will be able to just take it from there.
The committee gave Wolfowitz a copy of its report accompanied by transcripts and other documents exceeding 600 pages late Sunday, telling him he had until the end of yesterday to submit a written response, Bennett said.
Next they'll accuse him of Titoism and claim he started the Reichstag fire.
I wrote back in February that the surge was a viable strategy for securing Iraq because it had little to do with added troops but much to do with the attendant application of them as counterinsurgents. David Petraeus literally wrote the book on counterinsurgency, and while there is of course still carnage and misery in and around Baghdad, there have also been noticeable and marked improvements. Anbar Province, once the reptile pit of Al Qaeda, is virtually pacified now:
In Anbar, meanwhile, violence has dropped dramatically in recent months because of the cooperation of local tribes -- a trend that could allow for a smaller U.S. presence there in the future, Odierno said. "We have less attacks in Anbar than in any other region," he said.
In Baghdad, sectarian killings have fallen dramatically since January, while suicide bombings using vehicles have increased. Overall, attack patterns varied in different parts of Baghdad. For example, in Mansour to the west, extrajudicial killings fell in February only to increase again by April, while other attacks remained on average the same. In the Rasafa district of central Baghdad, weekly attacks went from 88 in January to 25 in February but are now at about 60.
If Kevin Drum sounds guardedly optimistic, it's not because the surge will -- or was ever intended to -- eliminate all violence in Iraq, but because it's still the only chance we have to keep the country from falling apart. Credit goes to a Democratic Congress, which, by its toothless but persistent demand for a timetable for military withdrawal, has all but ensured that the administration knows it has one last chance to get it right:
The fact remains that five battalions is the best we can do, Petraeus is probably the best general available for this job, and congressional threats really are providing incentives to Iraqi leaders to resolve their differences. This is why I suspect that September might really be September. Given the current conditions — the best ones it's reasonable to hope for at this point — if there isn't serious political progress in the next few months there are a fair number of nondelusional Republicans who are finally going to decide that they aren't willing to flush their careers down the toilet just to show solidarity with a lame duck president.
My problem, though, with saying that "September" is going to be the fulcrum moment for Iraq is that it plainly is not, at least according to Petraeus's own estimate for judging the success of a sustained counterinsurgency. It might take well over a year before the long-term threats of sectarian fighting -- and now, with Mutqada al-Sadr jockeying to remain the head of the Mahdi Army, sectarian in-fighting -- are reduced to within livable circumstances.
My rather longish blog post at Jewcy is the lead story today.
When once confronted with a sneering remark about the Washington Post, I.F. Stone replied: "It's a great paper. You never know on what page you'll find a page-one story." One can play a similar game with the New York Times today: You never know in which paragraph you'll find the buried lede. It took me all of three (paragraphs, that is) to disinter the news item in this otherwise unshocking and unenlightening article entitled, "World Bank Panel Finds Wolfowitz at Fault; Aide Resigns":
Bank officials, speaking anonymously because the proceedings are supposed to be confidential, said that the special committee was still working today on what to recommend.
Breaking the rules is such a subjective enterprise these days. But at least Paul Wolfowitz must be smiling at the grim nostalgia of it all. At the Pentagon he was hobbled by leaks from "anonymous" officials at the State Department, and now as top dog at the World Bank he's being undone by a similar don't-ask-don't-cite practice of blabbing to the media.
As ambassador to Indonesia, Wolfowitz amassed plenty of experience in using "soft power" to coax an island dictatorship into overdue projects of reform and liberalization, if not total regime change. So whatever you think of his contribution to the state of modern Iraq, it can't quite be said he was unqualified for the presidency of the World Bank. In the grand Proustian cycle of embattled American war architects, this gig was already known as Credibility Regained, and Wolfowitz has always (and will always) hold up well in comparison with his predecessor as teller to the third world, Robert McNamara. A macabre joke has now been delivered at the World Bank's expense: You can defoliate jungles and rice paddies, and maximize peasant casualties in an illegal war to bail out French colonialism, but whatever you do, you must stay true to the wife.
My review of Nick Cohen's brilliant book is now up at the New York Post:
IMAGINE if Mayor Bloomberg invited a Muslim cleric from Egypt known for his advocacy of female genital mutilation, wife-beating, "martyrdom" bombings in Israel and Iraq, and the murder of homosexuals and converts from Islam to be an honored guest of the city.
New Yorkers would naturally rebel against the mayor, who would certainly survive politically. But what if he did something even more brazen and perverse: invite the cleric back.
Surely, it couldn't happen here. But it did happen in London last year under the aegis of left-wing mayor, Ken Livingstone.
Livingstone considers Yusuf al-Qaradawi (the cleric's name) a huggable, "moderate" liaison between East and West. Anyone arguing otherwise Livingstone accuses of xenophobia or - a ridiculous term now gaining traction in the United Kingdom - "Islamophobia."
Nick Cohen's urgent polemic "What's Left" traces this bankrupt thinking from its origins on the leftist fringe.
Once the playground of crackpot ex-Stalinists and unintelligible postmodern academics, the left today in the United Kingdom means elected officials, the vanguards of the "antiwar" movement and such liberal newspapers as The Guardian.
Surely, something is rotten in Albion when the Socialist Workers' Party sponsors gender-divided Muslim prayer services.
If there is one takeaway from Jonathan Chait's admirable anatomy of the so-called "netroots" movement of blog driven neo-liberalism, it is this: the Clintons still have a monopoly on the Democratic Party. How else to explain that the cynicism of yesterday has repackaged itself, without a trace of self-awareness or irony, as the glittering new ideology of today?
I've always been amused by the Daily Kos and MyDD crowd's ability to paint themselves as pioneers when they proudly proclaim their tactical allegiance to the dirty-dealing Roveists of the New Right than to progressive McGovernites of the New Left. The very terminology their in-it-to-win-it contingent deploys underscores its promiscuity with convictions: "People-powered," "Kossacks." It's as if Lenin tried to make peace with the tsar. Are these guy radicals or reactionaries? Does it matter so long as the $400 haircut gibbering away on C-SPAN has a D preceding its name?
Markos Moulitsas would like to think he's assembled a recently awakened army to war against the spent Democratic establishment, one that was remodeled under Clinton as the Third Way of compromise and bipartisanship. Yet such compromise, and such tertiary off-road daillances, are still a-okay so long as they win elections. ("You don't understand," Sidney Blumenthal once said, in defense of his boss's firesale of liberal values, "It's our turn.") Netroots activists claim to deplore single-issue candidates, yet they will disembowel any candidate who isn't...antiwar. Can you remember a single policy position held by Ned Lamont besides his insistence that he'd never even met George W. Bush?
Kos himself has said that it's fine for a Democratic candidate to be pro-gun and anti-abortion in a red state, which I suppose is the same as Grover Norquist's blind eye toward slapping that all-purpose modifier "Rockefeller" before Republican in a blue state. But beware the netroots nihilism masquerading as political savvy: When Moulitsas cites the mounting death toll in Iraq to galvanize his base, he gets away with referring to mutilated and murdered construction workers as Fallujah as "mercenaries" about whom he should feel nothing. ("Screw them," was his notorious comment, which lost him mainstream Democratic support for all of thirty seconds, until the site traffic at Daily Kos was shown to flicker not at all.)
The GOP reinvigorated itself in the 70's by risking confrontation with two lumbering behemoths: the New Deal and Soviet Communism. Republicans led twin revolutions in a country known for its timidity in changes to domestic and foreign policy. What has netroots offered besides "Anybody But Bush" hysterics and an infinitely ad hoc approach to regional politics? There's no there there. So to suggest that they've incited a kind of leftist Goldwater Revival is laughable. Once Bush is gone, to paraphrase Nick Cohen, what will the netroots gang have to rally around besides keeping the movement from cannibalizing itself? All their old opinions will seem heresies, and all their old bugbears will be tricked out as what they had meant to stand for all along.
Consider just how miserable Tenet's failure has been to ratchet up support for his revisionist "tell-all" about life in the Bush administration. Typically, such a figure is embraced by leftists who hate the president and rightists who've grown weary of the president's "radicalism" or odd brand of "Christian socialism," as Andrew Sullivan has phrased it. Now comes William F. Buckley, the grand poobah of American conservatism, repudiating the hefty, outgoing son of Greek immigrants (and the overseer of the worst national security disaster in U.S. history) as some kind of hanky-soaking emote-a-crat:
“People don’t understand us, you know,” Tenet started in. “They think we’re a bunch of faceless bureaucrats with no feelings, no families, no sense of what it’s like to be passionate about running these bastards down.”
If all that Tenet was saying was that a lot of people who do tedious work are underappreciated, he is right about the CIA, as also about garbage collectors and schoolteachers. There is a role for passion, clearly, when hunting down the kind of people who want to explode bombs in New York City. But a key to success in clandestine operations is sobriety. A friend analogized the point for me years ago: “A surgeon doesn’t look down on the ruptured appendix and say, ‘I’ll get you, you son of a bitch.’”
Jihadists have yet to meet their match if the CIA is run by guys like this. Forget waterboarding. If Sheik Khalid Mohammed wanted to unman his torturers, he should have wheedling them about their mommy issues.
Iraqi Communists participate in a May Day parade yesterday. The two rival Communist parties in Iraq, as well as the Social Democratic Party, supported the ouster of Saddam Hussein and opposed timetables for a U.S. military withdrawal from the country.
Michael Wolff thinks part of Rudy Giuliani's appeal is his batshit insanity:
I argued, having voted for Rudy once, that, in certain contexts, nuttiness—for instance, his need for virtually round-the-clock media attention and affirmation—can be a positive governing approach, as well as an effective public-relations strategy. Rudy's manic domination of the city's airwaves and consciousness during New York's most disturbing crime years, when many people felt the city was beyond anybody's control, was palliative (David Dinkins, his more modest predecessor, always seemed overwhelmed). And, of course, his hysteric nature was part of what enabled him to appear so reassuring on 9/11: When everyone is crazy, he, being actually crazy, is calm. When everyone is stunned, he's expressive. (He may be the best off-the-cuff speaker in politics—conversational, witty, personal.)
Why is it that such a preening mogul slayer like Wolff can't penetrate the outre shell that defines Rudy: it's all about New York. I glimpse the symptoms -- the sub-human narcissism, the eery grace under engulfing fire, the psychotic reaction to peccadillos -- all around me in this city, which is why Giuliani governed it so controversially well.
After 9/11, the prevailing conceit was that Rudy had had his Churchill moment: an ineffectual and not much loved minor politico on the brink of retirement found his world-historical role and forever became, in the popular imagination, a paragon of stoicism and strength. I bought that bill of goods at the time, but now I'm not so sure. Looking back on the low, dishonest decade of the 90's, I don't think anyone else could have been mayor of Gotham. Koch had a demographic reach that spanned from Fairway to Zabar's. Dinkins was a non-entity. And wheeling around to face the current ferret-faced occupant of Gracie Manson, I wonder how it is that a family urinal cake manufacturer in White Plains lost their scion to billions and the managerial revolution of city politics.
Speaking of ferrets, remember this?
It's always worth recapping Giuliani's famous riposte to a ferret owner who called in to the mayor's weekly radio show to protest the city's ban on them as pets: "There is something deranged about you.… The excessive concern you have for ferrets is something you should examine with a therapist.… There is something really, really very sad about you.… This excessive concern with little weasels is a sickness.… You should go consult a psychologist.… Your compulsion about—your excessive concern with it is a sign that there is something wrong in your personality.… You have a sickness, and I know it's hard for you to accept that.… You need help."
This is Christopher Walken as His Honor. This is why James Woods played Giuliani on a made-for-TV biopic. This is a New York Post leader maker all year round. Tell me you wouldn't pay real money to have someone like this talk to someone like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Bashar al-Assad.
If they legalized XTC, you'd see a long string of Whitesnake videos with "Ask your doctor" pasted below. The real study that needs to be conducted is how Viagra may be correlated to a spike in divorce rates. Hubby has newfound vim and vigor, wifey's been through the change and just isn't itching for it anymore (a pill to cure that, too, would be nice.)
Men still assume that they cannot be proper men unless they can sustain a proper erection. Women are still routinely accused of failing to excite them, or threatening their masculinity, or otherwise being unable to fulfil men's expectations. Both are still subject to advertising designed to persuade them that love is inseparable from the worship of what one Playboy editorial, whooping triumphantly over the invention of Viagra, referred to as "the great god Cock".
Had he never decided, in the late 1970's, that Saddam Hussein was a menace worth removing for humanitarian and strategic reasons, Paul Wolfowitz would have still been known as the man most responsible, as ambassador to Indonesia between 1986-89, for facilitating the end of the Suharto dictatorship. So should it come as any surprise that a stooge and profiteer of that dictatorship tops the list of functionaries at the World Bank agitating for Wolfowitz's resignation? Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal reports:
In Mr. de Tray's case, it may seem strange that a man who was willing to countenance the theft of the bank's money by Suharto & Co. as the inevitable price of "helping people" (which people?) should now wax indignant about the damage Mr. Wolfowitz has supposedly done to the bank's "credibility as the international community's trustee of resources for fighting poverty," in the words of the FT letter. Yet Mr. de Tray is nothing if not consistent: Since leaving the bank last year, he has publicly objected to the "Puritan overtone in the current debate on corruption" and argued that Suharto's corruption "created value for Indonesia . . . just as Sam Walton created value for the U.S."--comments that nicely capture the quality of economic analysis at the bank as well as the prevailing in-house view regarding Mr. Wolfowitz's anti-corruption campaign.
And I'm positive that those who think it unethical to occupy a high managerial post at the Bank while your girlfriend moves up a paygrade will be demanding this guy's desk cleaned out by the end of the week:
Now consider the case of Shengman Zhang, a former No. 2 at the bank who is currently a vice chairman for the global banking division at Citigroup. Mr. Zhang, whose name appears third on the list of signatories, is the husband of Lingzhi Xu, a World Bank employee who began her career as an assistant working in procurement issues--a "Level D" position with a "market-reference point" of $52,000--and was ultimately promoted to her current job--a "Level G-G" high-level staff position with a reference point of $123,000.
Since Mr. Zhang was a managing director of the bank, his wife's employment presented significant similarities to the conflict-of-interest problem that required Mr. Wolfowitz to seek a new job for Ms. Riza, yet it never seems to have raised an eyebrow within the bank's management. Even more remarkable was the relative speed and ease of Ms. Xu's ascent.
You'd think with a name like Cockburn, the hard-lefty editor of CounterPunch would be worried about ultraviolet radiation and an uptick in SPF numerals. You'd be wrong:
There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the world's present warming trend. The greenhouse fearmongers rely entirely on unverified, crudely oversimplified computer models to finger mankind's sinful contribution. Devoid of any sustaining scientific basis, carbon trafficking is powered by guilt, credulity, cynicism and greed, just like the old indulgences, though at least the latter produced beautiful monuments. By the sixteenth century, long after the world had sailed safely through the end of the first millennium, Pope Leo X financed the reconstruction of St. Peter's Basilica by offering a "plenary" indulgence, guaranteed to release a soul from purgatory.
Also, "mainstream homosexual" Dan Savage politely asked The Nation how he should get from Point A to Point Clearance Sale without adding to the depletion of the ozone. And answer came there none.
Leaving aside the etymological hints as to what side of the political spectrum energy conservation should fall, the history of the modern environmental movement actually does begin with the right and not the left. Nature-loving gentry with expansive, lush estates were the first to worry about smokestack pollutants making a mess of the clean countryside air and otherwise lowering their property values. Marxists, on the other hand, were always gungo-ho about unfettered industrialization since more factories meant more alienated workers and more alienated workers meant world revolution.
It makes more sense to see evangelical Christians, who are now jumping on the eco-alarmist bandwagon, clamor to save the planet than it ever was to see socialists or socialist fellow travelers do so. Cockburn's plaint is not so much ironic as nostalgic. As for The Nation, well, they float wherever the fetid winds blow, so no surprises there.
It's been a while since I saw an Onion article this good to the last paragraph. Then again, I have a thing for Russian lit jokes and a growing ESPN dependency, so what do I now?
"Tonight we've got a veritable Cherry Orchard of highlights to pick from as we Chekhov our top plays," Berman said during Tuesday night's broadcast of SportsCenter in a display of tortured literary puns and obscure references the likes of which viewers have come to dread. "We'll check in on the fading fortunes of Uncle I-Vanya Rodriguez, the tragic circumstances that brought pitcher Dennis Dove-stoyevsky into the big leagues, and find out if the tempestuous relationship between Kurt and Kyle Busch make them the new Brothers NASCAR-amazov, so stay tuned."
Since (late) 2004, satisfying your jones for political and cultural commentary, day-old scoops and late-breaking marginalia, and whatever else finagles its way into the cyber-planetary potluck...
• Civil Disobedience on the Web By Michael Weiss {British bloggers stand up to threats of libel lawsuits., originally published in Slate.}
• Spray-Fire Atonement By Michael Weiss {How cognitive behavioral psychology can help High Holy Day Jews who repent too much., originally published in Slate.}
• Mutiny on the Manifesto By Michael Weiss {Spineless scalawags are sabotaging the most promising leftist doctrine in decades. Don't let them., originally published in Jewcy.}
• Rise of the Faux-cialists By Michael Weiss {Three poseurs who would have Marx spinning in his grave (plus their real-deal counterparts), originally published in Jewcy.}
• Stepson of the Time By Michael Weiss {A reconsideration of Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, originally published in The New Criterion.}
• The Surge Can Work By Michael Weiss {Everyone's wrong about the president's new war plan, originally published in Jewcy.}
• A Kibitz on Pure Reason By Michael Weiss {The author of Betraying Spinoza on rationalism, passion, and great 17th-century hair, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Brainwashing's Nemesis By Michael Weiss {How Rick Ross became a cult buster extraordinaire, originally published in Jewcy.}
• The Whiz Kid of Warfare By Michael Weiss {How Noah Shachtman has revolutionized military reporting, originally published in Jewcy.}
• A Blacklist The Left Could Use By Michael Weiss {Meet the Christopher Hitchens of postpunk, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Is Marriage the New Dating? By Michael Weiss {A divorcee, a young married, and a singleton debate wedded bliss, originally published in Jewcy.}
• The Jewish Jihad for Jesus By Michael Weiss {Why converts are leading the evangelical movement, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Tribal Threads By Michael Weiss {The designer of Gytha Mander on the holy land, holsters, and honeys, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Some Kind of Republican By Michael Weiss {The real legacy of John Hughes, published in Slate.}
The more you think about it, the less clever a bit of Polonian wisdom seems the line, "Dress British, think Yiddish." The Anglo and Hebraic traditions are bound by a lot more than Isaiah Berlin. Consider the comedy of Albert Brooks: Things are never quite so bad that they can't get worse. Well, well knew that from Waugh, Wodehouse and Amis, didn't we? The basic plot structure of the Jewish sitcom -- from Maude to Seinfeld -- evokes the gambols of Bertie and Jeeves, where every mess manages to get cleaned up at the end of the half-hour (which is usually how long a Wodehouse short story takes to read). In politics, too, the filiations are many and profound: Neoconservatism survives outside the United States only in the United Kingdom: Tony Blair, seethes his Tory critic Geoffrey Wheatcroft, might as well have studied under Bloom and Strauss for all the good he's done us. And the noble history of English radicalism is at least as noble as that of the Jewish variety: Why else did Marx choose the British Museum to formulate his class-based social theory?
It's a bad sign that Anthony Grafton mistakenly refers to Tom Stoppard's brilliant drama about the life and thwarted love of A.E. Housman as The Pursuit of Love. The title of the play was The Invention of Love. Still, as the main endeavor of this 
I wouldn't hold my breath, but it's good that he's on the fantasy 
A track coach who looks like the picture at right invited one of his female student athletes to his house for an "
CNN sifted through presidential candidates' filings today to suss out their sources of income and worth. If anybody looks bad, figuratively, it's John Edwards. On the positive side, I stand convinced that his populist, protectionist pitch is wholly sincere. Unfortunately, that's because he's managed to put his money where that mouth is. The man obviously doesn't know anything about how capital markets work.
The only way to describe the transformation of Kanan Makiya in the leftist imagination is from hero to useless idiot. Before 1991, he was hailed as the "Iraqi Solzhenitsyn" for his methodical exposure of the terror state run by Saddam and company. After he supported the First Gulf War, however, relations began to cool with the New Lefties who thought they'd found their beau ideal in feckless humanitarianism: "Surely, Kanan, everything you say about Baathism is true, but -- well, you don't actually expect us to do anything about it?" 
Long before there was Gawker, but a little after there was Wired, there was Suck. A smirking, ironic underground in the dotcom dystopia of the fin de siecle, Suck was an online politics and pop culture magazine read by those of us already too far into our teens to be billionaires, but too damned young to go back to print. Every day saw a short, witty essay published in a “snaking” column of text that never exceeded 200 pixels in width, and bylined by a too-clever-by-half pseudonym like Polly Esther or CGI Joe. And Terry Colon's accompanying art (see above and to the right) was simply the shrewdest thing in pastels.
The site's motto – “A fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun” – may have been a paean to know-it-all Gen X cynicism, but make no mistake: the accomplishment was lasting and profound. Suck made the adolescent internet turn its head and cough.
CNN is reporting that Rev. Jerry Falwell has died. The prominent church leader, religious right activist and media personality was 73.
I'd meant to post this last week, but got a bit caught up in the playpen antics of the Wolfowitz comment thread. Anyway, good for Petraeus. He's an intellectual and a real scholar of warcraft. Anyone who's read his Counterinsurgency manual can't argue with his evident concern for the human coefficient in combat: He'll tell you why Algeria went to hell in the 60's, or why Napoleon botched his occupation of Spain.
Without pretending I knew what it was supposed to represent (too lazy even to Wikipedia; sad), I was not under the impression that the Falun Gong people were boostering Nazism on Boston Common. I'm not sure it's relevant; I would no more put one of those flags up in the USA than I would, say wear a white baseball cap with the Circuit City logo around Nanking. 
As ever, my periodic absences -- or presences, to give you negative space options -- on Snarksmith are filled by enough writing from Mike to fill some clothbound completist volume should he ever get academically famous. Not to rub it in, but I've been gone for reasons other than a dead muse and lazy blog work ethic (though that's a factor too). I've been in Hawaii, a magical place where the weather is always exactly perfect and for some physiology-defying reason hangovers don't exist. The photo above isn't clip art taken off the web. I took that photo. I can't believe it's the same country.
It's not every week I click off The Sopranos feeling as if the episode took a cue from my own life. All my mommy issues disappeared without duck-induced fainting spells; I don't even wear an Adidas tracksuit to the gym; and the only mafia I've ever escaped from was Commentary. Still, A.J.'s exciting new subplot had me riveted to the screen like moist gabagule to provolone.
Lexapro is the most current iteration of so-called SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) anti-depressants, in the family of industry pathfinder Prozac, yet the one psychiatrists prescribe first now due its relatively low occurrence of side effects. These may include fatigue, weight gain, stomach cramps, and anorgasmia in men. Anorgasmia, like 
After a week or so of marinating in my own misery, both at home and at the office, I decided I should talk to a shrink. New York Jews have an obligation to travel this route at least once in their neurotic lives, and I betray no embarrassment to report that you’ll find my psychic tire tracks on more than a few turnpikes.
Well, an hour later I had my first trial packet of Lexapro, known to cure what ails me and courtesy of psychiatrist who, thirty years ago, was highly skeptical of the transformative power of SSRI drugs. I didn’t have a cabinet full of auspicious patient histories to bolster my confidence, so I was still skeptical.
Theodore Dalrymple has a great 
If there is one takeaway from Jonathan Chait's 
Michael Wolff 
