Seumas Milne, a windbag previously confined to the Comments section of the Guardian, has had his byline upgraded to the Foreign Correspondence page, and imagine the results. The same guy who in 2004 called the "resistance" in Iraq the only real force for liberation now glorifies one of its lead spokesmen, who is said to be shopping around France for the establishment of a political headquarters for his murderous Islamist phalanx:

At the heart of the new insurgent alliance is a rejection of the murderous sectarianism that has come to grip Iraq - and the role of al-Qaida in particular. Most striking is the case of Zubeidy, whose hardline salafist (purist Islamic) group Ansar al-Sunna recently split in half over the issue (his faction is now called the Legitimate Committee of Ansar al-Sunna - Goure says such splits are endemic in the resistance movement). "We wanted to unite with other resistance forces, but the other group is moving closer to al-Qaida and refused. Al-Qaida has brought benefits and problems," Zubeidy says. "They attack the US occupiers. But every day the problems they bring become greater than the benefits.

Milne is painting a rosy portrait of a young thug who boasts of killing American and British soldiers and not just anyone who cooperates with them but anyone who participates in the parliamentary system of Iraqi government. Whole swaths of an ethnically and confessionally mixed population participating in national elections? Legitimate targets of Mr. Zubeidy and his goon squad.

Though Milne would do well to better remember his former advocacy. Now pitted against the brave Sunni resistance hymned above are countless Shia sectarians, themselves guilty of murder, torture and kidnapping. Here's what Milne wrote of them back in 2004:

Their tactics are overwhelmingly in line with those of resistance campaigns throughout modern history, targeting both the occupiers themselves and the local police and military working for them. Where that has not been the case - for example, in atrocities against civilians, such as the Karbala bombing in March - the attacks have been associated with the al-Qaida-linked group around the Jordanian Zarqawi, whose real role is the subject of much speculation among Iraqis. The popularity of the mainstream resistance can be gauged by recent polling on the Shia rebel leader Moqtada al-Sadr, who was said to have minimal support before his Mahdi army took up arms in April and now has the backing of 67% of Iraqis.

Zubeidy's outfit, if it stays true to its own doctrine, wars with the Mahdi Army, which controls three key Iraqi ministries and are rather conspicuous in its "collaboration" with the current Iraqi government. How's that "mainstream resistance" definition look now?

Posted by Michael Weiss at 5:28 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I've often wondered what it is that drives a self-described anarcho-syndicalist to focus exclusively on the high crimes and international graft of only a few governments -- or one, to be more exact, and its satellite allies. When Samantha Power published her chilling book A Problem From Hell: American and the Age of Genocide -- a volume that hardly depicted the United States in a beatific light -- Noam Chomsky's comment amounted to this: There is no point in discussing the American obligation to forestall genocides around the world since America has been complicit in many of them. It was the tu quoque argument as mouthed by a star of his kindergarten class, wending his way through the basics of moral philosophy.

It's become obvious that if the term "anti-American" has any legitimate political definition, it is embodied by the style and substance of Chomsky. His latest essay in Monthly Review is a fair example. Using harsh truths about U.S. foreign policy, his conclusion is that every media-anointed rogue state and enemy of not just our own national interests but of human rights, pluralism and transparency are actually the defiant victims of the One True Hegemon. Some paragraphs do more work than the MIT linguist intended, such as this one:

Saddam may have been despised almost everywhere, but it was only in the United States that a majority of the population were terrified of what he might do to them, tomorrow.

I should think that most Iraqis were similarly terrified, if not more so. Though their opinion only counts when it can it be ranged against the avowed policy of the United States:

It is an astonishing fact that the United States and Britain have had more trouble running Iraq than the Nazis had in occupied Europe, or the Russians in their East European satellites, where the countries were run by local civilians and security forces, with the iron fist poised if anything went wrong but usually in the background. In contrast, the United States has been unable to establish an obedient client regime in Iraq, under far easier conditions.

One admires the use of the word "usually," which would surely come as a surprise to occupants of the Warsaw Ghetto, Estonians in 1940, and then again in 1941, the Polish dissidents who met their end in Katyn Forest in 1940, Berliners in 1945, Hungarians in 1956, Czechs in 1968, etc. But wait -- there's more in the same vein:

The second responsibility [of an invader] is to obey the will of the population. British and U.S. polls provide sufficient evidence about that. The most recent polls find that 87 percent of Iraqis want a “concrete timeline for US withdrawal,” up from 76 percent in 2005.4 If the reports really mean Iraqis, as they say, that would imply that virtually the entire population of Arab Iraq, where the U.S. and British armies are deployed, wants a firm timetable for withdrawal. I doubt that one would have found comparable figures in occupied Europe under the Nazis, or Eastern Europe under Russian rule.

Thus, sufficient evidence is offered about conditions in present-day Iraq but we are left to educated doubts of Chomsky to determine the sentiments of occupied populations toward fascism and Stalinism. Also, those same polls to which Chomsky alludes are characteristically asked in such a way that the crucial question preceding the pull-out one is this: "Do you think withdrawal of U.S. troops would enhance or diminish Iraqi security?," the implication being that an American footprint in the country greater provokes the true enemies of civil society: namely, Al Qaeda, sectarian death squads, Baathist revanchists, double-dealing police officers, etc. In what congruent way would, say, occupied France have similarly wished for the withdrawal of the S.S. in 1940? Because the Nazis were, despite their best efforts, doing little to hold the democratic structure of France together, or because they were by design doing everything possible to tear it apart?

China, too, has only the tenebrous specter of U.S. military and economic aggression to combat:

That is the basic reason for Washington’s strategic concerns with regard to China: not that it is a military threat, but that it poses the threat of independence. If that threat is unacceptable for small countries like Cuba or Vietnam, it is certainly so for the heartland of the most dynamic economic region in the world, the country that has just surpassed Japan in possession of the world’s major financial reserves and is the world’s fastest growing major economy. China’s economy is already about two-thirds the size of that of the United States, by the correct measures, and if current growth rates persist, it is likely to close that gap in about a decade—in absolute terms, not per capita of course.

Nothing here about China's human rights violations, or its support for the racist, genocidal Khartoum regime. Remember: the U.S. isn't squeaky clean on genocide either, and China is at least redeemed for its oil plunder at the expense of 400,000 dead black African Muslims by its status as our chief global competitor. Chomsky is also silent on Hugo Chavez's "axis of unity" with a Jew-hating Iranian state, whose nuclear ambitions, after all,

fall within its rights under Article IV of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which grants non-nuclear states the right to produce fuel for nuclear energy.

Ah, but Iran has violated Article II of the NPT, which states:

1. Each non-nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes to accept safeguards, as set forth in an agreement to be negotiated and concluded with the International Atomic Energy Agency in accordance with the Statute of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Agencys safeguards system, for the exclusive purpose of verification of the fulfillment of its obligations assumed under this Treaty with a view to preventing diversion of nuclear energy from peaceful uses to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices. Procedures for the safeguards required by this article shall be followed with respect to source or special fissionable material whether it is being produced, processed or used in any principal nuclear facility or is outside any such facility. The safeguards required by this article shall be applied to all source or special fissionable material in all peaceful nuclear activities within the territory of such State, under its jurisdiction, or carried out under its control anywhere.

Iran is only now claiming to be willing to negotiate those safeguards with the IAEA, as reported on the agency's website, but whether it actually will do or so not is undetermined. To this Chomsky would reply, as he does following his point about Iran's compliance with Article IV, that Mohammed ElBaradei's proposed solution for threatening that article of the NPT -- by placing all fissile material production under international supervision -- was accepted last February by only one country: Iran. Yet why Chomsky credits the Islamic Republic with good faith on a prospective new model for monitoring atomic activities throughout the world is a mystery given that it has proven recalcitrant in complying fully with the model already in place.

So much for the universal wariness of government power from the intelligentsia's favorite Cassandra.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 2:34 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Via my mates the Trots:

BERLIN (Reuters) - A German bus driver threatened to throw a 20-year-old sales clerk off his bus in the southern town of Lindau because he said she was too sexy, a newspaper reported on Monday.

"Suddenly he stopped the bus," the woman named Debora C. told Bild newspaper. "He opened the door and shouted at me 'Your cleavage is distracting me every time I look into my mirror and I can't concentrate on the traffic. If you don't sit somewhere else, I'm going to have to throw you off the bus.'"

I'll not cross any picket line that Ms. Debora chooses to convene...

Posted by Michael Weiss at 1:46 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Via Jamie Kirchick, who as a columnist for the New York Blade must find it especially amusing that he's being called a "gay-basher" in the TNR comments section:

A leading Palestinian “resistance” figure has confirmed what many suspected all along: Yasser Arafat died of AIDS.

In an interview with Hizballah's Al-Manar TV earlier this month, Ahmad Jibril, founder and leader of the Damascus-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, revealed a shocking conversation he recently had with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and his staff.

Hardly shocking. Edward Said always said -- out of print, anyway -- that Arafat was gay, and we have Orianna Fallaci's famed interview with the PLO leader, whose entourage she described as something out of a Nordic Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue. Of course, this matters not at all unless (or until) Hamas seizes on it to try and further discredit Fatah as a corrupt, kufir outfit founded by a queer. And the Stalinoid left, trying to forge an alliance with "revolutionary" Islamism, takes up the mantle it wields so well, of painting its enemies and heretics sexual perverts.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 1:45 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Political Teachings of Jesus, by Tod Lindberg, gets the Wall Street Journal's thumbs up, though for my money, this graph tells you all you need to know about the Saviour's moral philosophy:

To be sure, the Golden Rule was not without precedent. Similar formulations can be found, among other places, in the Mahabharata, the ancient Indian epic, and Confucius's Analects. The rule in each of these texts, though, is stated negatively: In essence, do not do unto others what one would not like done to oneself. Jesus' positive wording, Mr. Lindberg says, allows for a greater "range of possibility for mutually beneficial interaction." Jesus does not merely forbid injustice; he proposes a principle applicable to our every act and constrained only by the limits of our imagination.

Anyway, the guy who got Jesus' number best, I think, was Kingsley Amis. Here's his poem "New Approach Needed":

Should you revisit us,

Stay a little longer,

And get to know the place.

Experience hunger,

Madness, disease and war.

You heard about them, true,

The last time you came here;

It's different having them.

And what about a go

At love, marriage, children?

All good, but bringing some

Risk of remorse and pain

And fear of an odd sort:

A sort one should, again,

Feel, not just hear about,

To be qualified as

A human-race expert.

On local life, we trust

The resident witness,

Not the royal tourist.

People have suffered worse

And more durable wrongs

Than you did on that cross

(I know—you won't get me

Up on one of those things),

Without sure prospect of

Ascending good as new

On the third day, without

"I die, but man shall live"

As a nice cheering thought.

So, next time, come off it,

And get some service in,

Jack, long before you start

Laying down the old law:

If you still want to then.

Tell your dad that from me.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 3:59 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It's sort of cute to see the battered and ragged defenders of Alger Hiss contort themselves in unseemly ways to prove the Soviet spy was just a crusading New Dealer whose typewriter happened to produce State Department documents that wound up in a confessed Soviet spy's hollowed-out pumpkin. Ron Rosenbaum, an attentive student of cold war historiography and the Le Carresque intrigues of 50-year-old questions, has a must-read piece in Slate about the resurgence of the Innocent Hiss plaint, this time cobbled together in the American Scholar by the otherwise distinguished scholar Kai Bird and his Russian dragoman Svetlana Chervonnaya, whose interesting last name means "red." (Note: In Polish -- czerwony -- as it'd be Russified. Krasnyi is Russian for "red." Should have been clearer about this in my original post. Sorry for the confusion.)

There's a lot of arcane details to weed through, but this paragraph by Ron captures the heart of the matter:

In the end, they have the worst of both worlds. Without exonerating Hiss (since there's a great deal of evidence beyond the "Ales" identification against Hiss, more than "association"), they've raised the possibility that there were two spies rather than none. They've made Joe McCarthy look good, or anyway, better. Perhaps new evidence will finally turn up from Soviet archives to vindicate one side or another in this endless embittered battle. One can't rule out the possibility that Bird and Chervonnaya are right, but they haven't proven it here.

The second "spy" here is Wilder Foote, another progressive Truman administration official whom Bird and Chervonnaya have fingered as the notorious "Ales" in the VENONA decrypts, or F.B.I. documents captured from the Soviets decades ago, but only declassified and pored over by Iron Curtain peepers (like yours truly) since the Berlin Wall came a-tumbling down. (I sent Rosenbaum's piece to Ron Radosh, who knows more about this subject than any practicing journalist. The second Ron's write-up is available at TNR's academic blog Open University.)

What you need to know is this. The bien-pensant left has, in its agonizingly prolonged quest to show that the self-evident is merely a sham, now resorted to hauling in an unusual suspect into the Stalinist lineup, and it has done so in a manner that McCarthy himself might have envied. A real Marxist wouldn't fail to recognize this as the cunning of history -- even if it comes at the expense of fellow travelers, or modern symps of them.

Actually, if we're to be historically precise, McCarthy had nothing at all to do with the Hiss-Chambers case, or, for that matter, with the HUAC investigations. The "H" stood for House after all, and McCarthy was a conspicuous senator (also a recipient of Commie aid in his first Wisconsin campaign), however much the bland eminence over the disastrous mini-epoch of Red baiting that did more damage to serious cold war concerns about Soviet infiltration of U.S. government than it ever did to martyred men and women of cinema. Or maybe not so martyred.

My buddy, comrade and all-around Jewcy baba Stephen Schwartz has a good anecdote about the lines of demarcation that were drawn in Hollywood over l'affaire Kazan. (Unlike most neocon intellectuals and erstwhile Red diaper babies, Stephen comes from the West Coast and grew up entrenched in the myth, lore and occasional reality of the On the Waterfront generation.) Apparently, it was the only the screenwriters who ever had beef with the filmmaker who named names, whereas the directors -- and today we can enlist Scorsese and Coppola, for whom Stephen once worked, on Kazan's side -- never condemned him. This was often because the ones credited with keeping their heads held high realized that that was about the most talented thing they could ever contrive to do.

I'll pay a shiny nickel to anyone who can name three of the Hollywood Ten without resorting to Wikipedia. Unlike Tailgunner Joe, you're on your honor.

P.S. Socialists and liberals who emerge the cleanest from the dearly departed century all suspected Hiss was guilty as sin: Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald, Murray Kempton and I.F. Stone, whose own encounters with beetle-browed Tass correspondents are also the source of much revisionist agita. Sitting on my hard drive is an interview I hope to one day make use of, conducted with Oleg Kalugin, the former KGB agent who claims Stone was an "agent of influence" for Moscow Central. Stone's most recent biographer Myra MacPherson says the charge is bogus, or at the very most, misleading due to chronology. Yes, Stone appears as "Blin" (the Russian word for "pancake") in a few VENONA docs, but he was either approached and uncooperative, or mildly cooperative but only during the Russian-U.S. period of comity during and slightly after World War II, a time when more establishment journos like Walter Lippman were dishing good Beltway gossip to Stalinist goons, too. See Paul Berman's mash-up with Eric Alterman and MacPherson on this here, here, and here. Also Radosh's New Criterion review of All Governments Lie!: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:47 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Spoken of the New York City mayor who let herpes-infected rabbis suck infant penises out of concern for "religious freedom":

At this juncture America needs a Jewish president. Not for some silly P.C. diversity reason but because America and much of the world are crying out for a change in U.S. Middle East policies, which entails putting pressure on Israel. A Jewish president is in the best position to do that.

Richard Nixon, who made his political name as the implacable, uncompromising foe of Communism here and abroad, opened relations between the United States and Communist China. He was the one person who could do it politically. In like measure only a Jewish president who also has the best interests of Israel at heart will be able to make the changes that must be made if we are to wiggle our way out of the hellish dilemmas which are gradually killing us.

I once wrote a parody for my college humor mag titled, "Bush Appoints 'Self-Hating Jews' Woody Allen, Philip Roth Mideast Ambassadors" -- the logic being that only kvetches who talk of castrating Zionist mothers could foster a binational peace solution. Well, at least they were unmistakably Jewish. Bloomberg has always struck me as a ferrety patrician manque, some unfortunate hybrid of "How'm I doin'?" meets "People Like Us," but more Asshole than Astor. He's about as authentic as a pizza bagel.

And as a presidential prospect, entirely laughable. Couldn't the New York Observer, if it wanted to be edgy in that vote-ethnic-but-out-of-principle-not-PC way, have said that it's time for a black commander-in-chief who might, say, add a geneaological imperative to ending the genocide in Darfur? As it happens, I know of a good man for the job, and he actually embodies leadership, integrity and political savvy. His name is Al Sharpton.

Kidding!

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:44 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Gotta go with the liberal on this one.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:43 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Henry Porter makes the case in the Guardian that, unlike with the IRA, Al Qaeda cannot be negotiated with or even debated on civilized terms:

A couple of weeks after a man had attempted to blow up hundreds of young women at a London nightclub, it makes you quite proud to see the clubs and pubs in London full of people enjoying themselves. As I watched, a voice at the back of my mind asked: 'What the hell is al-Qaeda on about?' Which is not such a dumb question because most of the standard answers concerning Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan do not explain the terrible level of violence that the four men jailed last week - all of whom had benefited in some way from the Britain's hospitality - planned for their fellow citizens. The Middle East may seem to provide convincing pretexts but we shouldn't for a moment believe that withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq and a settlement in Palestine would stop al-Qaeda. For one thing, there is a devotion to cruelty, a blood lust if you like, among the extremist sects of Islam which seems to go way beyond the desire to gain certain political goals or religious goals. Look at the way Arabs are being killed by al-Qaeda in the Anbar province of Iraq or at the murders of barbers in Basra, or the decision by an Iranian court to order a 43-year-old woman named Mokarrameh Ebrahimi to be stoned to death for adultery, which Amnesty International says 'beggars belief'.

Of course, this should be self-evident by now. But it isn't. Still we hear that Islamists are reverse-engineered foreign policy analysts and that if the U.S. did things like pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan and dismantled its air strips in Saudi Arabia (done, by the way), Bin Laden would call off his goon squad and retire to quiet life of the sharia-saturated mind. Never mind that Al Qaeda seems more preoccupied with the goings-on in Pakistan and Nigeria, over which the U.S. has precious little sway (it takes Gen. Musharraf to ask Bush to stand down on killing known jihadists, and to do so for Musharraf's own political "stability"), and that a caliphate is, by design, a theocratic imperium whose origins preexist secular republicanism.

From now on I'd like the obverse of Porter's argument the Burnt Pot Roast thesis, for it amounts to the same collapsible logic: if only the wife didn't ruin the dinner, her husband would stop beating her.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:42 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

New York's Daily Intelligencer caused an avalanche of mail (well, at least one letter) featuring the polite menace of English residents on Greenwich Avenue, who, in an effort to protect small enterprise from the creeping enroachments of corporate America, have lobbied to rename the block "Little Britain." After having this novel special relationship solidifier mocked by DI, one roast-beef-and-warm-beer shopowner wrote in that such a honorary retitle is no different than Koreatown or Little India or what have you, to which came this reply:

Is Koreatown an official designation for which local businesses lobbied the city? Or is it merely a descriptive term for an area that has a lot of Korean businesses? We suspect the latter. (Anyone know officially, for any of those neighborhoods?) But here's the point: Even if Koreatown is an official designation, it's also clearly a descriptive term. Has anyone ever colloquially thought of that slice of the West Village as "Little Britain"?

No, but not even Martin Scorsese still thinks of Mulberry Street as Little Italy, unless bubble tea is the late-discovered delicacy of the mezzogiorno.

The real cringe-making travesty of "Little Britain" is that this is also the name of a painfully unfunny BBC sitcom which trafficks in the kind of catchphrase yuks well-parodied by Ricky ("Are you havin' a laugh?") Gervais on Extras. "Little England" is a much apter designation for square inch conquest of our Atlantic cousins, what with its connotations of the loss of empire and the diminished grandeur of the scepter'd isle.

Then again, I happen to think it's a sign of progress that old metropole has gone from Lord Palmerston at the Travellers to Nick Denton at Balthazar. (Only trouble there is, that's in SoHo, not the West Village.)

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:41 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Will from Drink-Soaked Trotskyite Popinjays for War has invited me to blog a bit over there. Some stuff will be original content, other stuff poached from here. At all events, their site is a preferred Laborite and Eustonian one, drawing from an international pool of contributors. Good thing I've been playing Yank all my life.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 6:27 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

There's a debate being had between Norm Geras and Damian Counsell on the subject of Terry Eagleton, specifically T-Bird's odious essay in the Guardian about the dearth of radical literature. All the left has got left is -- wait for it -- Harold Pinter! Among his other offenses, Eagleton mischaracterized the views of Martin Amis on British Muslims, and the opinions of Salman Rushdie with respect to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. I'm not sure he even got Rushdie's take on Afghanistan right either since Eagleton used the phrase "criminal adventures" to describe the wars against both the Taliban and the Ba'ath.

Anyway, Norm was appalled by his fellow Marxist's drivel, as well he should have been. Damian's only problem was that Norm hasn't quite been appalled enough by Eagleton over the years: the mocking if gentle title of Damian's post, "Professor Wakes Up At End of Seminar," did the bulk of his work for him.

Norm has fashioned a counter-response to the effect that, well, yes he has profited from Eagleton's scholarship in the past and does admire the literary theorist's wit and humour when it's on display. Though he's by no means an uncritical admirer. Damian wrote back, "[T]he impression I get is that Norm is more forgiving of Eagleton’s errors of reasoning than he should be (and they’re grave ones). This is a credit to Norm’s intellectual generosity and loyalty, but it doesn’t mean he’s right," which in turn begged the question of "loyalty."

Both scholars teach -- or taught -- at the University of Manchester, making them colleagues. But unless the academy has grown into much a cuddlier place than I remember it, I see no reason to suspect a code of professional courtesy that asks one professor to talk well of another who talks balls. Is it the shared Marxism, then, that makes Norm "loyal" to Eagleton? Evidently not, though even that is beside the point. That Norm unhesitatingly called out someone he professes to admire when principle demanded it is enough to satisfy me. A writer's work would never be done (and he'd be much less trustworthy) if he repudiated everything about those who no longer impress him, or who fail him in some crucial way. However, another kind of questionable motivation is at the heart of the affair--it belongs to Eagleton.

It is by now banal or point out that a sinister twit in politics can demonstrate great talent in art, literature or poetry. One thinks immediately of Eliot, Yeats and Waugh. The same must also be true of a literary critic. Yet this allowance is precisely the one Eagleton himself is incapable of making toward his chosen subjects, no doubt upholding the finest aesthetic standards of the commissar class he so misses. You're either with the proles (and now the suicide-bombers), or you're against them so far as your artistic credibility is concerned.

I recall reading not too long ago a LRB review Eagleton wrote -- typed is more like it -- of Author, Author!, David Lodge's fictional account of the repressed life of Henry James, who must have transferred his difficulties below the waist to his bogus Boswell. Here was a Catholic socialist calling out another (former) member of the faith for sex-obsession, the result of -- can you feel the Theory gearing into overdrive? -- vestigial guilt from Holy Mother Church. Catholic apostates like Lodge make the best sublimated panty-sniffers, according to Eagleton, finally discovering the tie that binds The British Museum is Falling Down to "Like a Virgin." Also, his cliched stupidity in approaching the complicated ideology of Philip Larkin was best dynamited by Christopher Hitchens -- in New Left Review, no less -- during the infamous mid-90's "row" over the poet's legacy:

[Eagleton] opens his J’accuse by saying of Larkin that ‘few poets of his stature have been so remorselessly concerned to negate rather than affirm, diminish rather than enhance.’ I had not before understood that Professor Eagleton believed in poetry as uplift. Nor did I gather, until I read that ‘the Hull setting was symbolically apt for Larkin: as the twentieth century unfolded its wars and revolutions, he cowered behind the book stacks in this remote provincial outpost’, that the ivory tower or the academy were to be hawked upon from the height of a dreaming spire. Nor would I, as a tutor even in Oxford, have given high marks to an undergraduate submission which said that: ‘if Larkin hadn’t existed then he would have to have been invented’.

Now toss onto this already smoldering reputation Eagleton's stone-faced assertions in that latest Guardian piece that

1. Virginia Woolf was to the "left of almost every other major English novelist." Yet the radical author of Three Guineas harbored rather orthodox establishment opinions of Jews;

2. Byron "scourge[d] the corruptions of the ruling class" despite also reveling in those same corruptions and composing epic verse about the Eastern cultures that no modern theorist worth his tenure would fail to describe as "Orientalist";

3. Thomas Carlyle "denounced a social order in which the cash nexus was all that held individuals together," but also wrote sentences like this: "The very falsehoods of Mahomet are truer than the truths of [an insincere man]," which Bertrand Russell and others viewed ominously as the relativist underpinnings of fascism.

4. H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw were mere "socialist writers," despite their glowing endorsements of Stalinism.

Eagleton's crimes of ideology are nothing compared to his crimes of criticism.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 11:56 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

As Josh brilliantly posted yesterday, time's effacing fingers have quite finished their work on Terry Eagleton's cortex. In a much-bruited belch in Comment is Free, Eagleton wrote that the radical left was completely devoid of literary talent now -- unless those salad days of Virginia ("I do not like the Jewish smell") Woolf and the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid. Who's Hugh MacDiarmid? Oliver Kamm will tell you:

Yes, Eagleton really did eulogise the old fraud, describing him as "the great communist poet Hugh MacDiarmid [who] died just as the dark night of Thatcherism descended". Conservative government, to Eagleton, was a "dark night"; Soviet tanks don't warrant a mention against such a nightmare. The best description of MacDiarmid I have come across was Kingsley Amis's, when he referred in a review to "vole-faced, red-shirted Hugh MacDiarmid, arguably (as one tribute has it) the greatest Scottish poet since William McGonagall, inferior to him only in sense of irony". (The reference is cited in a footnote in The Letters of Kingsley Amis, edited by Zachary Leader, 2000, p. 817.)

Substantiating Amis's judgement is the work of a moment. My copy of the selected poems (I've never run to more than that) of MacDiarmid includes the execrable "First Hymn to Lenin", published in 1931, which assures the dead tyrant: "Christ's cited no' by chance or juist because/ You mark the greatest turnin'-point since him/ But that your main redress has lain where he's/ Least use - fulfillin' his sayin' lang kep dim/ That whasae followed him things o' like natur'/ 'Ud dae - and greater!"

Robert Conquest - a real poet, a great friend of Kingers and an even better friend of another real poet called Philip Larkin - once noted that an anthology of Pablo Neruda's verses neglected to include the strophes that hymned Joseph Stalin as "the noon, the maturity of man and the peoples" and that reassured nail-biting fellow travelers, after the demise of murderous tyrant, that "Malenkov would finish his work." (He also approved the hanging of his chum, the Prague author Zavis Kalandra).

At the most generous, it could be argued that Neruda had talent when it was divorced from ideology. It might even be ventured that he had talent when dilating ideologically on the plight of his native Chileans, which Czeslaw Milosz credited him with doing. But what price MacDiarmid's unintelligible sub-Burnsian caws?

Another of one T-Bird's quarry was Salman Rushdie, who has had to endure an unending spate of obloquy due to his receipt of what has come to be a prosaic and meaningless honor (that arch Scottish nationalist Sean Connery has a Knights Bachelor, placing him in the service of the imperial British realm). Rushdie has now replied in the Guardian's letters section to Eagleton's accusation that he'd been "cheering on [the United States'] criminal adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan" -- an accusation that wasn't even half-true given the word "cheering," and also the words "criminal" and "adventures." But I digress. Here is Rushdie:

As to Afghanistan, it is true that I, in common with many others, not all of them on the right, and many of them in the Muslim world, believed that the hold of al-Qaida and the Taliban over Afghanistan needed to be broken. Eagleton may be the kind of "radical" who would prefer those fascist, terrorist gangsters to have retained their hold over a nation state, but that is his problem, not mine.

As to Iraq, it is true that I wrote, before the beginning of the Iraq war, that there was a case to be made for the removal of Saddam Hussain. In the same article, however, I also wrote that the American plans for regime change, unsupported as they were by a broad international coalition, were not justifiable.

Ordinary, non-political suicides are those whose lives have come to feel worthless to them, and who accordingly need a quick way out. Martyrs are more or less the opposite. People like Rosa Luxemburg or Steve Biko give up what they see as precious (their lives) for an even more valuable cause. They die not because they see death as desirable in itself, but in the name of a more abundant life all round.

Suicide bombers also die in the name of a better life for others; it is just that, unlike martyrs, they take others with them in the process. The martyr bets his life on a future of justice and freedom; the suicide bomber bets your life on it…"

The suicide bomber bets your life on a future of justice and freedom. Yes, well, I'll take the author of Fury, let alone The Satanic Verses or Midnight's Children, over such a dead-end "Marxist" who, not content to bestow the crown of thorns on his beloved Catholic savior*, now happily does so on the global replicants of Mohammed Atta.

Those who think the project of reclaiming the left from this sinister tendency is a fool's errand need only examine the gallery of fools they're content with calling real leftists.

*Yes, Eagleton's dirty little socialist secret is his belief in Holy Mother Church. He's like Graham Greene in that respect, and in that respect only.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 4:54 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (2)

Continuing in my fine tradition of bringing you this morning's YouTube this afternoon, here's another benchmark to toss on the barbie: Kill the necrophagic giant badgers. Or IOUSes: Insurgents of Unusual Size.

The guys in this clip are laughing because moments before demapping the critter they chanted, "Muqtada! Muqtada!" Critter was nonplussed.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 3:01 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

vagina dentata ne plus ultra Judith Regan

I mean, come on.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 2:52 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This is quite funny. Tony Greenstein, "a founding member of Palestine Solidarity Campaign and a member of Jews Against Zionism," has done what might have been the short work of pointing out the many intellectual and moral blindspots ofChannel 4's racist berk Richard Littlejohn. The occasion was a Littlejohn-hosted program on the rise of anti-Semitism in the UK.

The best apoplectic Brit blogger (and fellow Eustonista) Mr Eugenides shows how sad it is when Greenstein is unhorsed in this endeavor. This is Greenstein at Comment is free:

The main thrust of the programme was the alleged increase in anti-semitism. Yet even the statistics used by the All-Party Parliamentary Committee on Anti-semitism show (paragraph 29, page 14) that there was a 14% decline in anti-semitic incidents from 2004 to 2005.

Here's Mr Eugenides in reply:

Oh dear, Tony, you shouldn't have linked to the report. For when you check the citation, you find this (pdf):

In 2005 the CST, a charitable organisation which provides security and defence services and advice to the Jewish community, recorded 455 antisemitic incidents, a 14% fall from 2004, but the second highest annual total since the Trust began recording incidents in 1984.

So anti-Semitic incidents fell from their highest-ever annual total in 2004 to their second highest-ever annual total in 2005. In other words, you've just cited a report that shows that anti-Semitic incidents are indeed at an all-time modern high.

Now, it's possible that Greenstein stopped reading at the comma after the word "2004", and so didn't realise his schoolboy error. The alternative - that he read the whole sentence, clearly understood it, and then deliberately misrepresented its import - well, that would be fatal for his credibility, wouldn't it?

(Also, the figure Greenstein cites refers only to the 2004-2005 period. As Eugenides points out, anti-Semitic incidents jumped 31% from 2005 to 2006.)

The best part of all this is what Eugenides really thinks of the perfectly named Dick Littlejohn. I find I can't stop laughing when I read this post reacting to his column on the murder of prostitutes in Ipswich.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:41 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Well, I guess the best you can say is that at least barbarism is becoming more gender-neutral:

The Iranian government confirmed Tuesday that a man was executed by stoning last week for committing adultery, and said that 20 more men would be executed in the coming days on morality violations.

Iranian judiciary spokesman Alireza Jamshidi said "the 20 additional executions were for such things as “rape, insulting religious sanctities and laws, and homosexuality.”

Gay pagan rapists are just neutronized like Gozer in Ghostbusters.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:21 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

I've been pining for that perfect Jesus and Mo cartoon that'd find a way to skewer Judaism, too. Wait for Moshiach, the 12th Imam or the Riz all you want, but I wait no more (hat tip: the Trots):

Posted by Michael Weiss at 11:57 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Matt Yglesias responds to a Nick Kristof op-ed that calls for a pull-out from Iraq on the basis of Iraqi public opinion. Here is Kristof:

First, a poll this spring of Iraqis — who know their country much better than we do — shows that only 21 percent think that the U.S. troop presence improves security in Iraq, while 69 percent think it is making security worse. . . .

We simply can’t want to be in Iraq more than the Iraqis want us to be there.

Yglesias seconds this judgment and adds, without a trace of irony, that another plebiscite shows that most Iraqis approve of attacks on American soldiers...

Now consider these two majorities for a moment. On the one hand, you have the question of whether a U.S. troop presence is beneficial for the country's security, a question that carries with it the implication that U.S. troops are working for the national good but may or may not be successful at it. On the other hand, you have another question that implies U.S. troops are inherently malignant and worthy of being killed. Does this not strike you as a pretty stark fissure in the edifice of Iraqi consensus? And to which poll are we to defer if relying on sentiments on the ground is to be our metric for determining future war policy?

Posted by Michael Weiss at 11:33 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Bob Woodward's four-page article on the CIA Director Michael V. Hayden's surmise of Iraq's potential:

He compared the Iraq situation to the prolonged warfare in the Balkans. "In Bosnia, the parties fought themselves to exhaustion," Hayden said, suggesting that the same scenario could play out in Iraq. "They might just have to fight this out to exhaustion."

Hayden catalogued what he saw as the main sources of violence in this order: the insurgency, sectarian strife, criminality, general anarchy and, lastly, al-Qaeda. Though Hayden had listed al-Qaeda as the fifth most pressing threat in Iraq, Bush regularly lists al-Qaeda first.

Even giving Hayden the benefit of the doubt (and the organization he oversees and its conclusions are more deserving of intense skepticism), the question then becomes: If Iraq is like Bosnia, then what would a withdrawal of U.S. forces do but hasten a genocide? Is it not better to have a protectionist force in country that, however enervated it might be, will still stand in the way of that country's self-cannibalization?

As for the true threat of Al Qaeda, of course it's been easier for the president to use it as a soundbite metonym for "bad guys" despite the situation on the ground being much more complicated. In case you think this contradiction comes at only the administration's expense, consider that those on the other side of the debate who say that Iraq only ever became a cynosure for Al Qaeda after the coalition invaded don't hesitate to then minimize the threat of Al Qaeda in Iraq. It's easy to score points against Bush by citing both arguments, virtually in the same breath.

Of course, every once in a while, the president offers an accurate assessment of the menace our troops face daily, as he did in 2005 in a speech before the U.S. Naval Academy:

The enemy in Iraq is a combination of rejectionists, Saddamists and terrorists. The rejectionists are by far the largest group. These are ordinary Iraqis, mostly Sunni Arabs, who miss the privileged status they had under the regime of Saddam Hussein -- and they reject an Iraq in which they are no longer the dominant group.

Not all Sunnis fall into the rejectionist camp. Of those that do, most are not actively fighting us -- but some give aid and comfort to the enemy. Many Sunnis boycotted the January elections -- yet as democracy takes hold in Iraq, they are recognizing that opting out of the democratic process has hurt their interests. And today, those who advocate violent opposition are being increasingly isolated by Sunnis who choose peaceful participation in the democratic process. Sunnis voted in the recent constitutional referendum in large numbers -- and Sunni coalitions have formed to compete in next month's elections -- or, this month's elections. We believe that, over time, most rejectionists will be persuaded to support a democratic Iraq led by a federal government that is a strong enough government to protect minority rights.

The second group that makes up the enemy in Iraq is smaller, but more determined. It contains former regime loyalists who held positions of power under Saddam Hussein -- people who still harbor dreams of returning to power. These hard-core Saddamists are trying to foment anti-democratic sentiment amongst the larger Sunni community. They lack popular support and therefore cannot stop Iraq's democratic progress. And over time, they can be marginalized and defeated by the Iraqi people and the security forces of a free Iraq.

The third group is the smallest, but the most lethal: the terrorists affiliated with or inspired by al Qaeda . Many are foreigners who are coming to fight freedom's progress in Iraq. This group includes terrorists from Saudi Arabia, and Syria, and Iran, and Egypt, and Sudan, and Yemen, and Libya, and other countries. Our commanders believe they're responsible for most of the suicide bombings, and the beheadings, and the other atrocities we see on our television.

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

WaPo reports:

"We have received fresh evidence" about Esfandiari and Tajbakhsh, judiciary spokesman Alireza Jamshidi told reporters in Tehran. "Fresh investigations have started based on this evidence."

The Woodrow Wilson Center, at which Esfandiari is a fellow, sent this press release in reaction to the news:

The Wilson Center today rejected as totally without merit the suggestion that Iran has discovered new evidence that Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Center’s Middle East Program, acted against Iran’s national security...

“We are deeply disturbed by these new reports from Iran, and by the fact that Haleh remains in Evin prison despite not one shred of truth to any of the charges brought against her,” said Lee H. Hamilton, president and director of the Wilson Center. “We are gravely concerned about Haleh’s physical and mental state. We have been unable to get anyone in to see Haleh, and to report to us on the state of her health and well-being. The reports we have received are that Haleh has lost weight and that she is not getting the medical attention or the medicines she needs. I ask the Iranian government to end this nightmare for Haleh and the other imprisoned Iranian-Americans. As I have said countless times before, Haleh is a scholar. She is not a spy. Let Haleh go.”

Josh and I attended an Amnesty International rally for Esfandiari and other imprisoned Iranian-Americans last month. Pictures and write-up available here.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 10:42 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

On the plus side, the matador had just got done fucking Madonna.

(Special thanks to Eddy Portnoy and his linx-like eye for sly tribal retribution.)

Posted by Michael Weiss at 10:09 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

For those unfamiliar with Small Wars Journal, it's simply the best resource on the military and tactical nature of the Iraq crisis. In response to Operation Phantom Thunder -- the official name of the second phase of the "surge" -- contributor Malcolm Nance has an unmissable post that should be read in full. How effective a strategy is it, exactly, to call Al Qaeda the number one enemy and tout local tribal elements' turn against it?

It is well documented that the Sunni insurgency is composed of three wings of insurgents. It is composed of the nationalist Former Regime Loyalists (FRLs) and their former military elements (FREs). This force may be upwards to 29,000 active combatants carrying out over 100 unconventional attacks per day using improvised explosive devices, rockets and automatic weapons ambushes. The FRL-originated Jaysh al-Mujahideen is composed of former Saddam Fedayeen, Special Republican Guard intelligence officers, former-Ba'athists, Sunni volunteers and their families. The second wing is the nationalist Iraqi Religious Extremists (IREs). These are forces including the Islamic Army of Iraq, Ansar al-Sunnah and other smaller groups, which may total approximately 5,000 fighters, sprinkled throughout western, central and northern Iraq. On occasion come into the conversation when one of their attacks is particularly daring or when the coalition claims it is negotiating their departure from the battlefront. Inevitably these “lesser” insurgent groups are portrayed as bit players on the sidelines of the epic.

Finally, the foreign fighters of the Al Qaeda in Iraq and its umbrella group the Islamic Emirate of Iraq (aka Islamic State of Iraq) may be as few as 1,500 fighters and supporters and may also have direct links to the two other tiers. Overwhelming evidence exists that that the FRLs have been waging the lion’s share of the insurgency. Until 2004 they were considered a separate part of the insurgency but recently they have been called ‘Al Qaeda-associated’ because AQI was operating in their area of operations … by 2007 it wasn’t hard for Washington to make a semantic and rhetorical leap to refer to all insurgency forces as “Al Qaeda.”

Also worth noting in Nance's post is the following statement of fact, often forgotten in the "All lies. All the time." meme:

It must be remembered that Zarqawi’s original AQ backed group Tawheed Wal Jihad came into Iraq just days before the invasion and set up in Fallujah under control of the Saddam Fedayeen. The Iraqi Baath party grew from a covert political organization and its current adherents still operate as “neo-Ba'athists” in Damascus and Latakia, Syria; Cairo, Egypt and even the UAE. The FRLs are operating as a covert intelligence and Fedayeen driven terrorist force, just as they were in the 1950 and 60s before they overthrew the government of Abd al-Karim Qasim and took power. Having had decades of experience researching the lives of the population, they are even more dangerous as their knowledge of the political and personal dynamics in Iraq runs deep. When necessary they have AQI, organized criminals and other forces to assist them...

Many supporters of the ‘All AQI. All the time.’ meme have limited knowledge of Iraq before the war. The former regime intelligence and paramilitary forces were active for years prior to the war perfecting numerous types of unconventional weapons, which are used extensively throughout the insurgency. In each instance, these systems were first developed and deploy by the FRLs in both the invasion and post-war insurgency. Take beheading for example. Largely attributed to AQI and Zarqawi there was in fact an extensive use of it in 2000 and 2001 by the Saddam Fedayeen. They were tasked to carryout an “anti-prostitution” campaign that targeted against political opponents. They publicly beheaded over 200 wives and women family members of Saddam’s enemies. Videos of the brutal beheadings could be found on the streets of Baghdad for less than .25 cents a full year before AQI carried out their first beheading.

If it needs added comment, the Fedayeen Saddam were up to no good before Zarqawi got to Iraq. This is from a Foreign Affairs article, "Saddam's Delusions: The View From the Inside," published a little over a year ago:

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

Damn. If only the coalition had stayed home... Saddam would have called off "Blessed July," Zarqawi would have camel-hopped it back to Jordan to try his hand at antique sales on eBay, and all would be right with the Middle East.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 5:57 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

David Vitter (R-La.) has confessed to frequenting Pamela Martin and Associates, the best little whorehouse in D.C.

"Several years ago, I asked for and received forgiveness from God and my wife in confession and marriage counseling," Vitter continued. "Out of respect for my family, I will keep my discussion of the matter there -- with God and them. But I certainly offer my deep and sincere apologies to all I have disappointed and let down in any way."

How does he know he's received forgiveness from God? Also, a cultural conservative boinks a high-class female prostitute? So 1983. Can we throw a little crank and maybe a transsexual concierge into the mix or something?

Posted by Michael Weiss at 3:20 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I wrote here a few months back that a formidable Republican ticket for 2008 would be McCain-Thompson. I got the order wrong:

"I think we're doing fine. I'm very happy with the campaign the way it is," McCain said at the Capitol, even as the departures roiled his staff.

Like telling people you're a tough guy or a devoted husband, if you have to say it yourself, you ain't it.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 3:19 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

As Dahlia Lithwick and others have assiduously demonstrated, Alberto Gonzales is not merely an evasive toady looking to protect his by now shameless Justice Department -- he's also a liar. To Congress. The Washington Post reports today:

[T]he FBI sent Gonzales a copy of a report that said its agents had obtained personal information that they were not entitled to have. It was one of at least half a dozen reports of legal or procedural violations that Gonzales received in the three months before he made his statement to the Senate intelligence committee, according to internal FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.

The acts recounted in the FBI reports included unauthorized surveillance, an illegal property search and a case in which an Internet firm improperly turned over a compact disc with data that the FBI was not entitled to collect, the documents show. Gonzales was copied on each report that said administrative rules or laws protecting civil liberties and privacy had been violated.

Can you guess, without reading on, Gonzales' justification for this contradiction? Only procedural "safeguards" were trangressed -- not civil liberties. Never mind that such safeguards are all that stand between constitutionality and well, you know the rest...

No government bureau, even one that looks to justify actions that polite society would deem unreasonable and autocratic, can deny the findings of its own internal investigations. Not only does denial make that bureau lose credibility, but it makes it well near impossible to convince the public that, say, torturing suspected jihadists is both necessary and morally legitimate. (Dear commenters: I'm not convinced.)

I'm now waiting for the next Gallup poll which says the majority of Americans no longer condone torture in extreme cases like the ultra-hypothetical "ticking bomb" scenario. When that happens, the Bush administration's assault on the Bush administration's agenda will be complete.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 3:18 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I'd pay real money if someone other than Michael Moore would argue with such wide popular appeal the need for socialized healthcare in America. Christopher Hayes is characteristically flattering of The Nation's favorite parade float-cum-documentarian, who, while we're on the subject of public health, thinks suicide-murderers in Iraq are the equivalent of revolutionary Minutemen. (Hayes is like a gorilla on roller skates moving past these unseemly aspects of Moore's "ad hoc approach" to showing, in his awful film Fahrenheit 9/11, that the United States had no quarrel with Saddam Hussein, and that Baathist Iraq was a nation of kite-flying moppets and sunny boulevards.)

If I bring all this up again it's because no review I've read of Sicko has done so, and it's always worth pointing out that a demagogic idiot can be right about some things. Nevertheless, Moore and Hayes do have one honorable social democratic principle on their side:

Moore's solution is simple: Get rid of the health insurance companies. Don't just tinker with the healthcare system, banish profit from the delivery of healthcare altogether. Socialize it. Make it a public good. It's a testament to the health insurance industry's power that as "universal healthcare" lurches toward the political middle, this proposal seems in some ways more radical than ever. Moore recognizes that if single-payer is ever going to come to America, it's going to be over the insurance companies' dead bodies. One way of understanding Sicko is as the opening salvo in a battle to make that happen. The movie alone can't do that, which is part of the reason Moore has teamed up with the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, the labor union most zealously committed to single-payer. It'll be sending its members, along with like-minded doctors, to every single showing of the film's opening night to talk up single-payer to audiences. And it's currently rolling across the country in a multicity tour designed to leverage the film's publicity to push single-payer back into the national conversation.

There's no question that the quality of healthcare service one can get in the United States is vastly superior to that of any European country -- if the patient can afford it. We have no qualms about agreeing that literacy and numeracy are rights not privileges, but when it comes to the basic precondition for putting those rights to use -- namely, physical well-being -- we get antsy and start looking to the mercenary marketplace. Why?

We all have our insurance company horror stories. A new one befell my family recently. Two weeks ago, my mother was hospitalized for chest pains. After her EKG read-outs were deemed abnormal by ER doctors, she was admitted overnight for a battery of tests -- blood, stress and echo-cardiogram. She's well insured and should be, with a monthly premium of $400 (as a real estate broker, she's an independent contractor and thus ineligible for a company policy). Well, a few days ago her insurance provider called and said they weren't paying for her hospital stay because the physician who recommended it was wrong. Her initial EKG was fine, she should have been monitored for a few hours and sent home. Instead, thousands of dollars were racked up for what this insurance provider has deemed gratuitous tests.

My mother was not ever given the option, though I suppose she was legally entitled to it, of denying her own hospitalization and demanding to be released. Moreover, what patient complaining of chest pains would do something so stupid as to challenge an attending physician's worry that the patient may have in fact suffered a heart attack, or worse? (She's fine, thanks for asking. No one's quite sure what caused her chest pains, although if it's of any cautionary value, she was taking in a matinee of Mamma Mia! when they started...)

This is the state of competitive healthcare in this country for the reasonably well-off. What's it like for the poor? Does it deserve to be that way? If not, how can the situation be corrected?

These are some of the urgent questions which, though I hate to say it, Michael Moore deserves credit for raising.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 5:27 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I'm sure the leader writers of the New York Times have waited as patiently as they claim for signs of real improvement in the administration's war strategy. But this last lapsed deadline for "milestones" -- all of which have failed to be achieved -- has got them throwing up their hands in terminal frustration. It's time to leave Iraq and let the skies fall, if they must.

Am I the only one who gets the impression the Times editorial board isn't terribly concerned about the bloody aftermath of their bring-them-home-now proposal, judging by this sentence? "At first, we believed that after destroying Iraq’s government, army, police and economic structures, the United States was obliged to try to accomplish some of the goals Mr. Bush claimed to be pursuing, chiefly building a stable, unified Iraq." It's almost as if stability and unification were the only elements missing from Mesopotamia prior to 2003.

Setting a firm date might, according to this editorial, force "Iraq’s leaders — knowing that they can no longer rely on the Americans to guarantee their survival — [to] be more open to compromise, perhaps to a Bosnian-style partition, with economic resources fairly shared but with millions of Iraqis forced to relocate. That would be better than the slow-motion ethnic and religious cleansing that has contributed to driving one in seven Iraqis from their homes." That "perhaps" does more work than the absence of any mention of how ethnic and religious cleansing would be redoubled in the event of our army's departure, or fall-back to permanent but scattered garrisons in Iraqi Kurdistan and the Shia-dominant south.

No biggie. This much-discussed op-ed, given the sententious and misleading Cormac McCarthyesque title "The Road Home" (it's to be airlifts all the way), arrives too late and with no new information to be of great moment. Joe Klein has recently written in Time that a de facto deadline for troop withdrawal -- or rather the declaration of U.S. military defeat, has long been established, whether or not an incompetent president acknowledges it or not:

There is another clock, not often mentioned, that sits in the Pentagon. It is the Broken Army clock, the service timeline for an exhausted force. Petraeus and his staff were deeply concerned when rumors of another tour extension, from the current 15 months for soldiers, spread in mid-June. "It would be a last resort," Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told reporters — but troop morale is so iffy that Petraeus quietly urged his commanders to "get the word out" to their soldiers that the extension rumors were false.

As the matter stands, the actual "surge" hasn't yet begun. We've only just imported the sufficient number of troops for Gen. Petraeus's counterinsurgency doctrine to be put into full effect, and his Operation Phantom Thunder is only just beginning. As Frederick Kagan, the main articulator the surge policy, puts it like this in the Weekly Standard:

[P]revious clearing operations in Iraq were not part of a coherent plan to establish security in a wide area, but rather reactions to violence in particular places. Thus, U.S. commanders made no extensive efforts to contain the accelerants to violence--vehicle-bomb factories, insurgent safe houses, training grounds, smuggling routes, and weapons caches--located outside the cities being cleared. By contrast, the current strategy aims to establish security across greater Baghdad, and Petraeus and Odierno have added a phase between the preparation phase and the major clearing. This is Operation Phantom Thunder, which aims to disrupt enemy networks for many miles beyond the capital, as far away as Baquba and Falluja. What's more, Phantom Thunder is striking the enemy in almost all of its major bases at once--something Coalition forces have never before attempted in Iraq.

And John Burns, whose own newspaper doesn't really deserve him, has a cautious but encouraging article about the success of turning Sunni tribal networks against Al Qaeda in areas like Ramadi, the Amariya district in Baghdad, and the notorious Triangle of Death.

When I first investigated Gen. Petraeus and his plan for revolutionizing the nature of combat in Iraq, I said that the full measure of his success would not be evident, if at all, for at least a year. It has been five months so far. This strikes me as preferable to the Times' fingers-crossed endorsement of the worst colonial exit strategy for the Middle East, or anywhere: divide and quit.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:08 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Just for the record, I only ever opened my yap about Scooter Libby because I found Andrew Sullivan's original take to be both ludicrous and hysterical. Now comes his clarification, responding to what my friend Jamie Kirchik wrote at TNR's The Plank (full disclosure: Jamie linked to my post "The Scooter Chronicles"):

I do not believe, as Jamie Kirchick asserts, that the commutation of Libby's sentence for perjury is a sign of creeping authoritarianism. I've said it's constitutional, but indefensible. My concern with authoritarianism is related to the Bush administration's claims that it has the right to detain any American or non-American anywhere in the world, detain them indefinitely without charges and torture them, if deemed necessary to national security; it is related to the use of signing statements that exempt the president from enforcing the laws; to wire-tapping Americans with no court oversight; and to the suspension of habeas corpus. I know Jamie seems utterly unconcerned by any of these things - and for good reason. We now know that neocons need not fear the justice system. They have a president who will exempt his ideological supporters from the rule of law.

Leaving aside for a minute how fast Jamie would find himself out of prison stripes by the grace of neoconservative infallibility, Andrew's elaboration hardly meshes with what he originally wrote in response to the commutation news, which was this:

"It is hard to think of an action more contemptuous of the rule of law - except for so many decisions made by this lawless president, acting as a monarch. De facto pardoning or commuting of a sentence was once a royal prerogative that even kings reserved for those they didn't know, convicted clearly unjustly, whose sentence had often largely been served. And yet Bush uses it in office for a friend, hours after the failure of his appeal, to protect his own political and legal liability for jeopardizing intelligence and compromising national security."

"Contemptuous of the rule of law," followed by a comparison to absolute monarchy... And we're to believe this was not uttered as a warning sign of "creeping authoritarianism" in Washington?

One of the more absurd gotchas in the aftermath of this affair has been to point out that a Republican Justice Department indicted, tried, and sentenced Libby, so clearly he must have done something really bad to command such categorical evidence against interest. Yet if a Republican president chooses to contradict his own judicial appointees or co-partisan prosecutors, how is this a sign, in itself, of ideological venality? Moreover, why are there so many registered Democrats lobbying on Libby's behalf, and for no other reason than they believe his prosecution was unlawful from the start?

Not that it should matter or that I should have to clear my throat with this, but I am with Andrew up to the hilt in opposing the Bush administration's policy of torture and domestic espionage and suspension of habeas corpus. But I remember when the kind of Burkean conservatism his Bloggy Lordship otherwise extols meant intellectual honesty and a careful use of language, not this silly promiscuity with semantics, evidently undone with the work of a keystroke.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 3:34 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The most obvious question that arises from Michael Kranish's seemingly devastating piece in the Boston Globe is this: Why would Fred Thompson choose to incriminate himself in his own memoir of the Watergate affair?

In his all-but-forgotten Watergate memoir, "At That Point in Time," Thompson said he acted with "no authority" in divulging the committee's knowledge of the tapes, which provided the evidence that led to Nixon's resignation. It was one of many Thompson leaks to the Nixon team, according to a former investigator for Democrats on the committee, Scott Armstrong , who remains upset at Thompson's actions.

Thompson actually divulged it to Nixon's counsel J. Fred Buzhardt, which at least one conservative blog I've read seems to think is a distinction with a difference.

And yet, At That Point in Time was written after Thompson acknowledged Nixon's guilt, which he initially thought would be disproved by the content of the White House tapes and return his hero-president to a non-criminal national standing. Odd, then, to have your own published recounting of this sordid episode in American history dug up as the gravamen of revisionist charges against you. Even if I had no plans in the 70's of running for president in the aughts, I still wouldn't write down my underhanded doings as a federally-appointed attorney.

"Even though I had no authority to act for the committee, I decided to call Fred Buzhardt at home" to tell him that the committee had learned about the taping system, Thompson wrote. "I wanted to be sure that the White House was fully aware of what was to be disclosed so that it could take appropriate action."

Well, I'm not sure what the protocol is for Senate committee investigations, but in a court of law apprising the defense of the prosecution's evidence is mandatory. ("It's called 'disclosure,' ya dickhead," for those of you who gleaned jurisprudence from My Cousin Vinny.) But acting with "no authority" seems to implode any claim Thompson might make that he was strictly by-the-book.

Armstrong said he and other Democratic staffers had long been convinced that Thompson was leaking information about the investigation to the White House. The committee, for example, had obtained a memo written by Buzhardt that Democratic staffers believed was based on information leaked by Thompson.

Armstrong said he thought the leaks would lead to Thompson's firing. "Any prosecutor would be upset if another member of the prosecution team was orchestrating a defense for Nixon," said Armstrong, who later became a Washington Post reporter and currently is executive director of Information Trust, a nonprofit organization specializing in open government issues.

Baker, meanwhile, insisted that Thompson be allowed to ask Butterfield the question about the taping system in a public session on July 16, 1973, three days after the committee had learned about the system.

I also don't find it cute that Thompson took the occasion of the Globe story to reply: "I'm glad all of this has finally caused someone to read my Watergate book, even though it's taken them over thirty years."

Very witty, Fred. But now that you've got us reading, would you mind answering a few questions...

Not all would put a heroic sheen on Thompson's Watergate role - The Boston Globe

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That's the rumor, according to UK magazine The Business (not to be confused with The Bidness, a Rasta triphop zine out of Staines). Purchase price: $5 billion.

According to sources acting for Dow Jones in the negotiations, the deal was delayed until agreement was reached on a legally-binding undertaking by Murdoch to preserve the Wall Street Journal’s editorial independence.

Under the terms of this agreement, News Corporation will have the ability to hire and fire the top editors and publishers (a matter on which Murdoch would not budge); but a nominally independent five-person committee will have the right of veto on these decisions.

Full disclosure: I've written for both the NY Post and The Weekly Standard and I've been to the News Corp. Christmas party (the food in "Australia" last year was tops), so take whatever I say in the vein of corporate obeisance. What sort of difference, hypothetically speaking, would non-independence make on the Journal's editorial page?

Ben Smith at Politico puts it best: “[P]erhaps the China bureau shouldn't be the only ones worrying. What will become of the Clintons' long-time persecutors on the editorial board? Will their anti-Clinton posture go the way of the New York Post's?”

Of course, Dow Jones says it's all untrue, the only agreement that has been struck is the editorial independence one, begging the question of why such a deal is necessary if a sale is not imminent.

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Now if I were a militant Islamist party, politically neutered and isolated and in control of an immiserated islet on the Mediterranean, I'd start impressing the world like this too:

Mr Johnston was kept in chains for 24 hours but was not harmed physically until the last half hour of his captivity, when his captors hit him "a bit".

He said Hamas's seizure of power in Gaza and its subsequent pledge to improve security in the territory had facilitated his release.

"The kidnappers seemed very comfortable and very secure in their operation until... a few weeks ago, when Hamas took charge of the security operation here," Mr Johnston said.

I find it hard to react with any cynicism to this news. Johnston's capture and imprisonment was an international crisis that ought to have concerned every journalist -- and every person of conscience -- on the planet for the last 114 days. And if this is the kind of self-serving gesture Hamas resorts to in the months to come, so much the better.

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I don't believe in god, but I do believe in Nick Cave. From the man who gave us the lyric, "the hyman-busting Zulu says... 'Babe, I'm on fire.'"

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Anticapitalist revolutions are fueled more by dictatorships than by poverty. In Venezuela there was no dictatorship, and poverty was not key to Chávez's ascent. Every revolution imposes austerity, and this is something to which Venezuelans on the right and left remain immune. Venezuela is not an industrial capitalist state but rather one of export and consumerism. Chávez is strengthening the economic role of the state, redistributing oil income and forming new economic elites, all mixed with doses of populism, corruption and business opportunities. All this is new--but it is not revolution and it is not socialism.

What fire-breathing neoconservative thus spake?

Joaquin Villalobos, top commander and strategist of the leftist FMLN in El Salvador. Reprinted in The Nation.

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His real problem is he does it outdoors and looks a terrier that's just gone through the car wash. Quelle horrible.

The new mission civilatrice for the French: le indoor treadmill.

“Is jogging right wing?” wondered Libération, the left-wing newspaper. Alain Finkelkraut, a celebrated philosopher, begged Mr Sarkozy on France 2, the main state television channel, to abandon his “undignified” pursuit. He should take up walking, like Socrates, Arthur Rimbaud, the poet, and other great men, said Mr Finkelkraut.

More Rimbaud and less Rambo, critics tell sweaty jogger Sarkozy - Times Online

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It was only a matter of time, wasn't it? There must be plenty of ex-jihadists in our midsts, but the price they'd pay for coming forward like Hassan Butt, is too great for us to know more about them.

Every ideology has its outspoken former members. We'd know much less about Communism than we do were it not for Silone, Malraux and Koestler.

By blaming the government for our actions, those who pushed the 'Blair's bombs' line did our propaganda work for us. More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.

Friday's attempt to cause mass destruction in London with strategically placed car bombs is so reminiscent of other recent British Islamic extremist plots that it is likely to have been carried out by my former peers.

And as with previous terror attacks, people are again articulating the line that violence carried out by Muslims is all to do with foreign policy. For example, yesterday on Radio 4's Today programme, the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said: 'What all our intelligence shows about the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force is not Afghanistan, it is mainly Iraq.'

He then refused to acknowledge the role of Islamist ideology in terrorism and said that the Muslim Brotherhood and those who give a religious mandate to suicide bombings in Palestine were genuinely representative of Islam.

I left the BJN in February 2006, but if I were still fighting for their cause, I'd be laughing once again.

Butt's interview with 60 Minutes (hat tip, Josh):

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | My plea to fellow Muslims: you must renounce terror

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The Times' new movie gal Caryn James reviews Live Free or Die Hard and thinks that, much like Michael Douglas and the national id, Bruce Willis has an unerring finger on the latest mode of terrorism:

Grafting media manipulation onto techno-terror, the latest “Die Hard” expertly captures a current fear: What if we’re disconnected from our information overload? The clogged traffic contributes to the film’s explosive action, but that idea carries the musty whiff of a Y2K meltdown (been there; we’re over it). The loss of our information fix, though, hits a very raw nerve. It evokes the disoriented feeling from April when all the BlackBerrys went out, or the isolation we experience when an Internet connection is lost. Cellphones and television may still work, but if one part of the information package disappears, it’s like sensory deprivation.

I took this wonderfully ridiculous action flick last night with my dad and brother. The best scene -- where a car is launched into a helicopter -- was in the trailer, but there are others worth the price of admission if you like that kind of spectacle, and I like it fine.

My problem with John McClane's own personal World War IV (Norman Podhoretz has got nothing on the Yippie Ki Ay franchise) is this. He's so visibly exhausted from the first three go-rounds that he dials in his heroic slob at a baud rate shaming to the wifi glamor of his mission. Unlike Stallone's autumnal Rocky Balboa, there's no arc with this elder statesman of pain. McClane's in his fifties and well past too old for this shit.

He's also stuck in a ridiculously modest paygrade as an NYPD detective after -- let's see now -- displays of lone derring-do in Nakatomi Towers, Dulles Airport, and Gotham's Summer of Gruber. Can't we get a book deal or Medal of Freedom for this guy already?

All the baddies expire without too much trouble in Live Free, unless you count driving an SUV into a hot Asian hacker and then plunging her, self and vehicle down an elevator shaft "trouble." ("Disbelief" is McClane's middle name.) Even the acrobatic French Jackie Chan who, in the more formulaic days of the shoot-em-up genre, would have accounted for at least a good 5-minute carnival of pain. Fan blades make fast and easy bouillon of him here. And the head villain -- the drug dealer from Go with Christian Slater's hairline and talent -- is the type of computer geek Harry Knowles would write into existence. Speaking of which, Kevin Smith plays his own biggest fan in a scene that had every reason to be better than it was.

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The cabinet had to compose this with almost a third of its members absent due to sectarian boycotts. Still, this agreement was hatched with the full cooperation of the Kurdistan Regional Government, and seems demographically fair:

The net revenue, after deducting the expenses of the Federal Government for delivering its federal duties and funding any agreed strategic projects, will be shared between Kurdistan and the governorates not organized as regions. Kurdistan will receive 17% of the net revenue, and the balance will be used, according to the population distribution, to meet the needs of the governorates.

No guarantees, though, on whether the Oil Law will be approved by parliament. Nevertheless, it's the most important piece of legislation Iraq can pass in coming months, and deserves more attention stateside.

Even the Times, which juxtaposes its report on this development with a photograph of two kids performing a mock execution of a third, can't call up a more cynical quote than this:

Representatives of the Sunni bloc said that they were not opposed to the law, but that there were a number of aspects they wanted to discuss.

“We are astonished at the government’s rush to submit the law to Parliament,” said Salim Abdulla, a member of the Sunni bloc, known as Tawaffuk.

“We were waiting to finish with the constitutional amendments to make sure there is no contradiction between the oil law and the constitution,” he said. “We will not be an obstacle in the road of the law, but we have some comments and reservations.”

Pretty conciliatory by Sunni bloc standards, wouldn't you say? Dinars talk.

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I really haven't followed the case and its stultifying minutiae carefully, so I won't comment on the defendant's innocence or guilt. However, some statements are self-evidently silly and histrionic, and Andrew Sullivan has made the issuance of them his signature blog form:

It is hard to think of an action more contemptuous of the rule of law - except for so many decisions made by this lawless president, acting as a monarch. De facto pardoning or commuting of a sentence was once a royal prerogative that even kings reserved for those they didn't know, convicted clearly unjustly, whose sentence had often largely been served. And yet Bush uses it in office for a friend, hours after the failure of his appeal, to protect his own political and legal liability for jeopardizing intelligence and compromising national security.

The phrase bandied around the Daily Dish for last twelve hours has been "rule of law." In what sense has this president violated such an adamantine concept with respect to Scooter Libby, exercising, as is his full constitutional right, the ability to pardon or grant clemency to convicted criminals?

Timothy Noah -- surely another a beetle-browed agent of Dick Cheney's master plan -- fills in some of the abuse-of-power blanks that the Saint Sebastian of the Right evidently felt were too niggling to fill in himself:

Judge Reggie Walton went overboard in sentencing Libby to 30 months. This was about twice as long as the prison term recommended by the court's probation office, and if Libby hadn't been a high-ranking government official, there's a decent chance he would have gotten off with probation, a stiff fine, and likely disbarment. Walton gave Libby 30 months and a $250,000 fine, then further twisted the knife by denying Libby's routine request to delay the sentence while his lawyers appealed it. (Libby was duly assigned the federal prison register number 28301-016, but Libby's lawyers managed to move quickly enough to keep Libby out of the slammer until his appeal was denied on July 2, the same day Bush commuted his sentence.) The voluminous pleas for leniency from Libby's A-list friends seem to have annoyed Walton, who erred on the side of severity not in spite of Libby's high position in government but because of it. Walton wanted to make an example of him.

The term for Walton in conservative circles would be "activist judge." But far be it from the author of The Conservative Soul to know one when he sees it.

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That a few doctors aren't terribly good with their hands helped, but Anne Applebaum says a functioning civil service infrastructure deserves most of the credit:

[T]he London bombs failed because open, Western societies are more resilient than we sometimes think they are. The police found one of the Piccadilly car bombs because an ambulance crew, responding to an unrelated call, saw smoke seeping from its trunk and alerted the police. The other car was illegally parked, and London's supervigilant, much-hated traffic wardens towed it to a parking lot, where someone noticed that it smelled of gasoline and alerted the police. That Britain has functional ambulance services and working traffic wardens, all of whom are civic-minded enough to call the police when they suspect something is amiss, may not sound extraordinary. But these are precisely the kinds of institutions that are missing in many places, among them Baghdad, a city where parking isn't exactly a public preoccupation, and where the civic-minded avoid police who are, fairly or unfairly, suspected of everything from ethnic cleansing to taking bribes.

Point well taken, but let's not forget that Britain, which has one of the most lax immigration and asylum policies in the world, is by no means an entry point for advertised jihadists from Syria and Iran.

Londoners got lucky this time. They likely won't the next time; nor will we.

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Beneficient socialist Hugo Chavez further demonstrates his commitment to people's democracy:

Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who both often rail against Washington, also signed a series of other deals to expand economic cooperation, ranging from setting up a dairy factory in Venezuela to forming an oil company.

"The two countries will united defeat the imperialism of North America," a beaming Chavez told a news conference during an official visit to the Islamic Republic, which the United States has labeled part of an "axis of evil".

I know it'll upset some readers to think of this as a Hitler-Stalin pact in miniature (after all, Chavez hasn't purged any bolivarians yet -- he's just taken to eliminating all forms of opposition), but this alliance will no doubt be welcomed effusively by those "leftists" who see hatred of the United States as ideology enough.

Daniel at Venezuela News and Views puts it well:

What is Chavez doing in Iran again, when Iran is now openly involved with the Hamas takeover of Gaza, when the Iran backed Syrian interference in Lebanon is vox popili, when Ahmadinejerk is cracking down on any dissent as he faces for a tough nuclear situation? Chavez has nothing to do there, of course, since even the Iranian model of repression would not apply much in Venezuela. But he is so bereft of ideas that he cannot pass an opportunity to go to a country where at least one street will be lined with flag waving supportive people.

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