Michael Weiss 10/31/07 11:56 AM
i think im voting for hillary. the more the other dems pick on her, the more i want her to win

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 11:57 AM
my landlord -- who literally watches CNN from 7 AM to 11 PM every day -- thinks she's going to win. and i assume anyone who watches that much CNN probably has a good handle on the election

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 11:57 AM
i do too. it'll be hillary v giuliani and giuliani is just too dim on the stump. he doesn't play in peoria.

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 11:58 AM
yeah. also, he's terrifying. you think it'll come down to New York vs New York?

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 11:58 AM
yup. subway series!

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 11:58 AM
because hillary doesn't necessarily play in peoria either

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 11:58 AM
yes she does. i mean, not to the far right, who will always hate her. but her biggest base in ny is upstate farmers. she's very, very shrewd. actually pretty conservative, which can't help but come across, even as she's attacked by both parties for essentially the same behavior.

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 11:59 AM
well, but those farmers have had her as senator for a while

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 11:59 AM
which is why she's still a hawk on foreign policy

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 11:59 AM
yeah, she really is

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 11:59 AM
yeah but in that time she's learned to speak their language. she's nestled up to the status quo as much as she can without actually turning republican. i still think - despite the anti-hillary sentiment - that people will vote for her wanting her husband back

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 12:00 PM
right. but do you think that given the choice between a thrice-married Republican and a Clinton Democrat, conservative rural types will vote for the Democrat?

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 12:00 PM
and he will be back if she gets elected.

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 12:00 PM
yeah, he totally will

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 12:01 PM
well, it depends on the segment of conservative rural types. if thomas frank's "what's the matter with kansas" argument has any legs, then hillarycare, etc. should play well in the sticks. giuliani isn't reagan the way thompson also isn't but wants to be. rudy will have a tougher time convincing the cultural conservatives that he's not too new york, a john lindsay with a testosterone surfeit. whereas hillary's never suffered from island-itis. her unspoken appeal to moderates in the heartland is her metro-phoneyness. if she can fool yankees fans into voting for her, anything's possible.

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 12:01 PM
that's true

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 12:01 PM
so really it'll come down to one of the most hawkish senators following 9/11, and the guy who ran the country on 9/11. rudy has more cachet as a muscular leader, no question. but that's not all he needs. and hillary's not willowy enough to make it all he needs

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 12:02 PM
yeah, she's tough enough to give him a run for his money

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 12:03 PM
also, it'll be one of the most entertaining administrations.... all the corruption, double-dealing, memory lapses before senate subcommittees. vince foster flitting through the west wing like banquo's ghost. i can't wait.

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 12:03 PM
hee. yeah, it'll be good. also fun to have a lady president. i'm excited for four years of gender commentary -- "what does it mean that the President wore a mauve pantsuit to the peace talks?" that kind of thing. i'm also just excited to see what happens to Colbert and the Daily Show

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 12:04 PM
my mom hates her which is funny because she reminds me of my mom (with anger management classes under her belt)... i think he jumped the shark with that, to be honest

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 12:04 PM
yeah, it's sort of a dumb stunt. but what i'm wondering is how their audiences will deal with them satirizing a Democrat

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 12:04 PM
let's see: robin williams makes a box office bomb about a colbert-type late night news satirist running for president. colbert decides to put williams' dead script to work for himself...hmm.

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 12:04 PM
ha ha

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I knew something was absent from Rachel Morris' excellent exposure of the trespasses and constitutional encroachments of the Giuliani mayoralty. Now I know what it was. It was Rudy's political philosophy. John Judis at TNR goes farther back into the biography to cull this telling episode:

Of course, Giuliani made his career as a prosecutor rather than a philosopher, and there are certainly Catholic teachings he has repudiated or ignored. In 1989, wanting the New York Liberal Party's endorsement for his GOP mayoral bid, Giuliani renounced his past opposition to abortion and Roe v. Wade. But his exposure to Catholic and classical political thought clearly had a lasting impact on him. At a forum on crime in March 1994, sponsored by the New York Post, Giuliani voiced views on liberty and authority that seemed to flow from these teachings. He criticized liberals for seeing only "the oppressive side of authority." "What we don't see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be," he said. "Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do." Asked in the question period to explain what he meant, Giuliani said, "Authority protects freedom. Freedom can become anarchy." Norman Siegel, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said afterward that he was "floored" by Giuliani's definition of liberty and authority. But anyone who studied philosophy at a Catholic college would not have been surprised by Giuliani's words.

Nor would Mark Lilla be, as his well-received new book, The Stillborn God, defines American exceptionalism -- or why our democracy is so different from European or Asian democracies -- as a "post-Christian phenomenon." It was Thomas Hobbes who first sought to examine revelation from the bottom-up, asking why it is we believe what we do, rather than from the top-down, simply applying assumed revelation to the various levers of state power. Transported to these shores by persecuted Protestant fundamentalists, the bricks and mortar of the wall that separates church and state were easily assembled, ab initio.

Here is Lilla in a fascinating discussion he started at Cato Unbound:

What we seem to have forgotten is how unique the circumstances were that made possible the establishment of the American compact on religion and politics. Perhaps now is the time to restore the much needed concept of American exceptionalism and remind ourselves of some basic facts. The most important one that set our experience apart from that of Europe was the absence of a strong Roman Catholic Church as a redoubt of intellectual and political opposition to the liberal-democratic ideas hatched by the Enlightenment � and thus also, the absence of a radical, atheist Enlightenment convinced that l�inf�me must be �cras�. For over two centuries France, Italy, and Spain were rent by what can only be called existential struggles over the legitimacy of Catholic political theology and the revolutionary heritage of 1789. (Though the term �liberalism� is of Spanish coinage, as a political force it was weak in the whole of Catholic Europe until after the Second World War.) Neither side in this epic struggle was remotely interested in �toleration�; they wanted victory.

For a politician like Giuliani, raised (forgive the alliteration) in a tight ethnic and ecumenical enclave, Catholic political theology is still paramount. What accounts for his vaunted liberal tendencies -- his approval of gay marriage, abortion rights, etc. -- is the head-on collision that such theology has had with another breed of exceptionalism: the New York one. The strict law-and-order mayor of the city was also one of its most cosmopolitan mayors. (The man who tried to shut down a museum over a dung-slathered Christ painting also dressed up as Marilyn Monroe.)

Glib talk of Il Duce of Gotham, then, misses the larger point about Giuliani's true character, which was, after all, once attracted to the muscular, theodicy-based liberalism of the Kennedys. The Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban missile crisis, the tensest moments of the Cold War, were really fought between an American Roman Catholic dynasty and the Russian Communist clerisy.

This is why neoconservatism, although pioneered by Jewish ex-radicals, has proved so enticing to political Catholics like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Richard John Neuhaus and George Weigl. They have recognized in it the germ of a deeply Christian phenomenon -- the Manichean worldview that binds recovering City College Trotskyists and their children to Thomas Aquinas. (Not for nothing did the French philosopher-historian Raymond Aron once term Marxism a "Christian heresy.") In other words, they are the exceptions to American exceptionalism.

There's no question that an international purview will only strengthen the core Catholic doctrine in Giuliani. For one thing, the Manichean rumble will now be properly situated between two open faiths, one amenable to Western democracy, and one violently opposed to it.

The popular refrain among progressive alarmists today is, "If you liked Bush, you'll love Giuliani." But this isn't quite right because Giuliani would be staggeringly competent as president, regardless of whether or not you liked the results he produced, or how he set about producing them. Indeed, the "broken windows" theory of crime prevention is, as I've been banging on about for months, the closest analog to what constitutes the counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq.

So rather it should be said that if you didn't like him as mayor, you'll downright hate Rudy as president.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 3:42 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Monday's shaping up to be book pimping day at ye olde Snark depot. My comrade and fellow Drink-Soaked Trotskyite Popinjay Terry Glavin is currently on tour in England promoting his new volume, The Lost and Left Behind, which already sounds like scientific-literary journalism at its very best.

It was sensitively reviewed by our co-blogger Gadgie:

Subtitled, Stories from the Age of Extinctions, the book examines the huge destruction of species and loss of diversity in a world becoming blanketed by "??sameness" -- the sixth great extinction. The scale of the devastation is staggering. The book is not a dry ecological text, nor is it a Green polemic, Terry is a far better writer than that. It consists of what it says, stories. This is important because when he writes of extinctions, he means more than the loss of animal or plant species. He is as concerned with the loss of human cultures, of languages, of mythologies, and of stories �?? the stories that enable us to interpret and understand our place in the world. And so Terry takes us on a series of journeys to places that symbolise loss and, on occasions, regeneration.

He is a fine story teller but just as the world is complex, each story is too. Each chapter is like a Russian doll, within every tale is another, and, as you open it up, yet another appears underneath it, and many smaller stories spill out from the shell of the narrative about the places he visits and the people he meets. History, politics, science, anthropology and more are encompassed with a deftness that entertains and a touch of humour that always amuses. Yet this layered approach is more profound than a literary device; it is the key to his understanding of ecology.

Drink-soaked Trotskyite Popinjays for WAR � For internationalism and all-day opening hours

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Editorial pride gets the better of me, again. My good friend Josh Strawn has a brilliant commentary on last week's Hitchens/D'Souza debate on atheism and its discontents:

D'Souza's compartmentalized his thinking and is thus so unaware of what it feels like to stand on solid argumentative ground, he couldn't possibly be aware how much he's leap-frogging. What do I mean by leap-frogging? One example: in his opening statements, he proposed to prove the value of religion on the basis of evidence with no recourse to superstition. For the remainder of the discussion, he proceeded to remind everyone that certainty was problematic, thus negating the atheist's adherence to evidential argument. Furthermore, he consistently reproached Hitchens for not presenting evidence, meanwhile failing to live up to his initial promise. Instead, he reiterated the impossibility of evidence-based certainty. Whatever lily-pad will keep you from sinking, I guess...

But Hitchens could have done more to educate the folks who were getting off on his opponent's bullshit (and I mean that in the most Harry G. Frankfurt sense of the word). Not once did he remind Dinesh that atheism is not a firm belief but rather a stance with regard to knowledge. In fact, D'Souza actually made this point himself accidentally when he reminded us that in absence of evidence of unicorns he feels no need to speak out for their non-existence but simply lives as if there are none. I'd have like to have heard Hitchens remind him that a) the belief in absurdity is offensive on its own b) that if part of the unicorn myth involved the sanctioning of murder in the name of one's unicorn tribe, it would become necessary to fervently attack the belief in unicorns and that c) if Dinesh understands this principle with regard to unicorns, his willingness to suspend it for the Christian God proves his hypocritical selectivity and disqualifies him as one worth paying any attention to when he speaks about the universe and the human mind operating according to a rational set of laws.

Hitchens v. D'Souza, and Thoughts on the New Atheism Debate | Jewcy.com

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Ed Hamilton, who's devoted the last few years to blogging a kind of Arabian Nights of the preeminent node of funky, New York bohemia, has just released a book of his collected efforts: Legends of the Chelsea Hotel. That'd be where Janis Joplin was "giving me head on the unmade bed," where "me" was Leonard Cohen. Also where Maurice Girodias, owner of the ribald Olympia Press, solicited Valerie Solanas' SCUM Manifesto and convinced her that the male-hating tract would sell because Lolita did. (It sold because she shot Andy Warhol, really.)

Legends was reviewed in the Sunday Times:

What really resonates in the book, what makes it so sorrowful at times, is Hamilton�s evocation of all the young and old hopefuls who have just enough ambition to push their lives past the point of no return. �Legends� comes close to convincing you that, as destructive drugs go, self-delusion has heroin beat. Hamilton dedicates his book to a Japanese painter named Hiroya, who first appears as a giddy, heavyset young man phosphorescent with love for art and for the city itself: a hilarious self-promoter, fond of giving his paintings of bunnies to local shop owners. �He was from a wealthy Japanese family, who had sent him to New York � it�s my theory anyway � so as to get him out of Japan,� Hamilton writes. �Obviously he would have been an embarrassment to any halfway respectable family.� Soon, art-world hipsters adopt Hiroya as a mascot and insist that he change his clothes, his art, himself. �Once they had remade him,� Hamilton writes, �they decided he wasn�t all that original anymore.� The hipsters ultimately abandon Hiroya. You can predict his trajectory from here � steep and downward � but you�re surprised by how low it lays you.

Check out Ed's blog here.

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Andrew Tilghman of the Washington Monthly has a well-argued piece that suggests the role and influence of Al Qaeda in Iraq is a fraction of what official estimates (read: White House and Pentagon stats) claim:

How big, then, is AQI? The most persuasive estimate I've heard comes from Malcolm Nance, the author of The Terrorists of Iraq and a twenty-year intelligence veteran and Arabic speaker who has worked with military and intelligence units tracking al-Qaeda inside Iraq. He believes AQI includes about 850 full-time fighters, comprising 2 percent to 5 percent of the Sunni insurgency. "Al-Qaeda in Iraq," according to Nance, "is a microscopic terrorist organization."

Tilghman also provides evidence that the Golden Mosque bombing -- which Ayman al-Zawahiri all but castigated his lieutenant, the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, for carrying out* -- was actually a sophisticated demolition job of former Baathists:

The man who the military believe orchestrated the bombing, an Iraqi named Haitham al-Badri, was both a Samara native and a former high-ranking government official under Saddam Hussein. (His right-hand man, Hamed Jumaa Farid al-Saeedi, was also a former military intelligence officer in Saddam Hussein's army.) Key features of the bombing did not conform to the profile of an AQI attack. For example, the bombers did not target civilians, or even kill the Shiite Iraqi army soldiers guarding the mosque, both of which are trademark tactics of AQI. The planners also employed sophisticated explosive devices, suggesting formal military training common among former regime officers, rather than the more bluntly destructive tactics typical of AQI. Finally, Samara was the heart of Saddam's power base, where former regime fighters keep tight control over the insurgency.

However, this begs a further question: If Saddamists were responsible for the most devastating symbolic attack on Iraqi civil society since the war began, did they not foresee that it would lead to Shia death squads and a possible genocide of Sunnis? How does the old regime presume to retake power (its one true goal) if it ignites a civil war that will likely devour its already minuscule ethnic base? Zarqawi had a much clearer motive in razing the holy shrine: It was only holy to a sect of Muslims he believed were polytheistic and thus no better than atheists, Christians or Jews. His vision was decidedly less realist than regime dead-enders; he salivated for a regional war that would cull fighters from all corners of the Middle East and culminate in a 21st century caliphate. This is why his bosses in Waziristan tried to rein him in.

Tilghman also admits that if any cross-pollination between AQI and the Saddamists has taken place, then it is the former that are joining the larger ranks of the latter. He quotes Nance: "Al-Qaeda can't operate anywhere in Iraq without kissing the ring of the former regime."

AQI recruits often find themselves taking orders from a network of former regime insurgents, who assemble their car bombs and tell them what to blow up. They become, as Nance says, "puppets for the other insurgent groups."

So there is every reason to believe that, even if AQI is as small a force as Tlighman imagines, it is still responsible for executing the violent designs of the Baathist leadership. This makes it something of a vanguard force of the insurgency worth taking seriously, doesn't it?

More telling is what Dan Murphy of the Christian Science Monitor reports today: That Al Qaeda is, apart from atrophied, almost non-existent in Iraq -- not because it never was there, but because it has been soundly beaten:

The Brookings Institution's Iraq index, which monitors security indicators in the country, appears to back up Mr. Crocker's assessment. In its latest report, the index found that the flow of foreign fighters to Iraq has dropped from about 85 to about 50 over several recent months. US officials say the number of suicide bombings in Iraq has fallen from more than 60 in January to about 30 a month since July.

Suicide-bombings are the worst kinds of attacks because the perpetrators can't be captured or interrogated, and thus their affiliations are always open to speculation and paranoia. Though AQI has made suicide bombing its heinous specialty, so a 50% reduction in attacks per month is, even for a tiny organization, a stark sign of that organization's attrition. Moreover, if the Mujahadeen Army of Iraq -- another Sunni terrorist outfit but with nationalist rather than imperialist aims -- is responsible for any number of those suicide-bombings, then the above suggests they're being defeated as well.

* See Zawahiri's letter to Zarqawi. He doesn't address the Golden Mosque atrocity directly, but the pedantic rhetorical questions he asks of his man in Mesopotamia seem to hint at it: "If the attacks on Shia leaders were necessary to put a stop to their plans, then why were there attacks on ordinary Shia? Won't this lead to reinforcing false ideas in their minds, even as it is incumbent on us to preach the call of Islam to them and explain and communicate to guide them to the truth? And can the mujahedeen kill all of the Shia in Iraq? Has any Islamic state in history ever tried that? And why kill ordinary Shia considering that they are forgiven because of their ignorance? And what loss will befall us if we did not attack the Shia? And do the brothers forget that we have more than one hundred prisoners - many of whom are from the leadership who are wanted in their countries - in the custody of the Iranians? And even if we attack the Shia out of necessity, then why do you announce this matter and make it public, which compels the Iranians to take counter measures? And do the brothers forget that both we and the Iranians need to refrain from harming each other at this time in which the Americans are targeting us?"

Posted by Michael Weiss at 1:45 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (2)

If I had to come back as anything, it'd be a Hungarian Jew or a Cocker Spaniel. Meet Kingsley, the puppy my girlfriend and I adopted in July. He's a rescue dog given to us -- after a mercifully easy and painless Q&A unlike anything Ellen DeGeneres has experienced lately -- by Abandoned Angels. I can't recommend this shelter highly enough to those who live in the greater tri-state area. Run by two wonderful volunteers, Ellen and Dolores, AA specializes in Cockers and Cocker-mixes that would otherwise languish in municipal limbo and/or be put to death.

When I got Kingsley, he was just recovering from cherry eye surgery, kennel cough and a slew of other nasty ailments that typically befall strays. (He'd also just been neutered, which must have felt like falling down an open manhole, then getting mugged in the sewer.) According to his records, he was slated to be killed before AA intervened, and I hope you don't think me maudlin to say that this very idea still terrifies me.

Ironically, what made him so appealing at the Brooklyn boarding facility, to which he was shipped from Miami, was his sorry condition. Kingsley was so drugged up when I met him that he was unperturbed by the other baying woofers, some of whom were literally jumping over his head as he just sat there and quietly contemplated being and nothingness. He's since discovered his zest for life again. (My mom has a unique ability of picking the right dogs for the right people, and she noticed him before I did. She now calls him her "grandson" and comes to Brooklyn Heights to visit him, not me.)

What's in the name? you ask. Hernando de Soto once told an interviewer that he called his two mutts Marx and Engels because they were both very hairy and had no respect for private property. I named mine after Kingsley Amis because he likes to drink, he's very funny, and he has an unimpeachable interest in the opposite sex. (He's practiced loose gallantry on my girlfriend's leg.) Also, he's managed to chew up a few books, all of which I found I could part with (Rick Moody's The Black Veil, etc.), so he's quite the literary critic, too.

Anyway, the point of this post is to encourage to you adopt a rescue dog if you're looking to get a dog at all. Stay away from breeders who overcharge and will take good care of their animals regardless of whether or not you elect to. Rescues are consigned to a miserable fate, and somehow they know you've done them a favor. At the very minimum, you'll go about your business with smug self-satisfaction, start a blog, and harangue others about your mitzvah. Value for money, really.

You can -- and should -- also donate to Abandoned Angels here. I think the Lionel Ritchie soundtrack on the main page of their website deserves a pass, don't you?

Posted by Michael Weiss at 1:40 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

These are days of woe for the New Republic, so let me be the first -- or last -- to congratulate the magazine for publishing the best moral argument for the Congressional passage of the Armenian Genocide resolution that I've yet read. Irshad Manji, author of The Trouble with Islam Today, nails it:

America remains the only country in the world with a universal constituency. Domestic politics in the United States often have a profound effect in every corner of the earth, from determining immigration flows and investment patterns to handing leaders and their heirs the excuses they crave to blur the lines between God and government.

[...]

The question for Americans ought to be: Since when is it wrong to speak out against genocide, however many years have elapsed? People of good conscience continued raising their voices against slavery in the United States well after abolition. Are they reckless or sinister for offending many Americans? In any event, is causing offense a reason to stop remembering?

Here is the question for Turks: Why should your history be immune to America's judgment when, according to surveys of global attitudes about the United States, you as a nation are among the most anti-American (read: judgmental) in all of the Muslim world?

Of course, these are precisely the considerations being sidelined by both the left and the right in favor of more urgent matters of foreign policy: the war in Iraq, winning hearts and minds in the Muslim world, etc. But ask yourself: If the U.S. failed to rebuke an ally for its shameful record of denial and distortion about a 20th century atrocity, don't you think the same critics of the Armenian Genocide resolution would eventually use that failure as a cudgel against cynical American self-interest when it became convenient to do so? Of course they would.

The more one thinks about Fallows' Law (perhaps I should downgrade it to an Axiom, since he's only written one blog post about it), the more one sees how hollow it is. The U.S. makes decisions of international scope all the time that alienate other countries with which it otherwise maintains amicable relations. What can Turkey do out of umbrage for having had a parliamentary finger wagged in its face? Start sponsoring terrorism? That'd put a damper in its campaign against the PKK, wouldn it? Invade Iraq? That'd pit it militarily against a NATO ally and further diminish its chances for inclusion in the European Big Boys' Club.

In short, even the dread Nancy Pelosi comes out looking good on H.Res.106., if she sticks to her guns against Bush and company.

I said yesterday, w/r/t Iran, that one could tell a lot about a country by how it wages wars. Well, one can also tell a lot about a country by how it reacts to tough love. Guess who Turkey blames for the resolution? Come on, now... Try harder.

In an interview with the liberal Islamic Zaman newspaper on the eve of the resolution's approval October 10 by the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Turkish Foreign Minister Ali Babacan said he had told American Jewish leaders that a genocide bill would strengthen the public perception in Turkey that "Armenian and Jewish lobbies unite forces against Turks." Babacan added, "We have told them that we cannot explain it to the public in Turkey if a road accident happens. We have told them that we cannot keep the Jewish people out of this."

The Turkish public seems to have absorbed that message.

An on-line survey by Zaman's English-language edition asking why Turks believed the bill succeeded showed that 22 percent of respondents chose "Jews' having legitimized the genocide claims" - second only to "Turkey's negligence."

Wait, what happened to the secular, philo-Semitic republic that's bosom buddies with Israel? I thought that state invitation Ankara extended to Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal was a one-off. And I was all ready to see past Turkey's righteous defense of Syria when the Israeli Air Force took out the incipient nuclear weapons facility Bashar al-Assad mail-ordered from North Korea...

If you'd like to know why American Jewish-Armenian solidarity is running high at the moment, you may turn to this latest news item showcasing how our Armenian comrades deal with fanatical despots who try to woo them by offering heavily leveraged support. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was given an honorary doctorate this week by Yerevan State University, one of the more prominent schools in Armenia. (Since the Southern Caucasian country suffers under a dual blockade by Turkey and Azerbaijan, it receives Iranian largess. There are quite a few ethnic Armenians living in Persia, too.)

The Armenian Weekly, the official newspaper of the Armenian National Committee, was swift to denounce the university in no uncertain terms, demonstrating once against that a U.S. ethnic lobby doesn't always see eye-to-eye with the country on whose behalf it agitates:

But why did Yerevan State University bestow an honorary doctorate and a gold medal upon a politician, who has shown disregard to basic historical research and memory by denying the Holocaust of the Jews during WWII?

It is worth noting that one of the manifestations of Ahmadinejad�s Holocaust denial is calling for further �impartial� studies on WWII. We have heard that very same argument regarding the Armenian genocide from Turkey and its allies.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 1:11 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

I'll try to simplify as much as I can: A few years ago, the remaining Trotskyists in England teamed up with the swelling Islamists to form the RESPECT Party, or "Unity Coalition." The idea was to counter Tony Blair's New Labour and oppose the war in Iraq; at least, that's the idea that the media fell for. But if you've heard of this Halloween contingent at all, it's because it has managed to get exactly one member of Parliament elected, George Galloway, who is a kind of patchwork goblin himself, part Stalin, part Saladin.

Anyway, the delicious news is this: RESPECT is now imploding because the Trots are calling it quits. Turns out, Marxists don't really like theocrats who call for the murder of Jews, queers and apostates and the enslavement of women. (Who knew?)

My comrade David T at Harry's Place has been blogging furiously about this, but I think he hit pay-dirt today with this post, written by "Dave Dudley (Editor Leninist Vanguard � writing in a personal capacity)."

I can't tell which is funnier -- the content itself or the commenters at HP who aren't sure if it's a parody or not:

RESPECT has made huge strides in the past four years � taking on and defeating New Labour across its heartlands, bringing millions on to the streets to oppose imperialism, forging deep and lasting links between class conscious workers and the massed ranks of Celebrity Big Brother viewers.

George, (I�m on first name terms with him since he stopped talking to the SWP), has been an inspiration to us all and has led RESPECT out of the trenches of sectariana and into battle with the mainstream political parties � now the SWP has stabbed him in the back.

We have been warning George of this danger for several months (see my pamphlet 'On the Cliffite Threat') but initially, probably due to his Labourite-Stalinist bureaucratic-collectivist background, George was unable to see the dagger being drawn. Now though, George has woken up to find the knife hanging out of his back with the bloodstained hands of German and Rees all over it.

I am aware that some of our comrades in Leninist Vanguard have been alarmed by George�s recent derogatory comments about �Leninists� in RESPECT but I can assure you, having spoken personally with George about this, he was not referring to any of us. I quote: �No, don�t worry about it Dave, you�re a good lad�. In fact George bought me a samosa as we walked back from the Tower Hamlets branch meeting � a clear signal that the alliance we have forged remains strong.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:49 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (2)

Thousands of Venezuelan students took to the streets to protest Hugo Chavez's attempt to alter the country's constitution so that he can keep running for president indefinitely. Daniel Duquenal has details:

The march was held to ask the National Assembly to postpone the referendum until February 3 2008, because as anyone with enough common sense will admit, you did not discuss the validity of 70 constitutional amendments in 4 weeks. The very least would be to give at least one day of electoral campaign per amended article, no?

Of course as it is now usual the Nazional Guard across Venezuela now blocks any bus that goes toward Caracas for an opposition rally of any type. The only result as usual is propaganda points for the opposition and another black mark on a guard whose reputation is so low that even Chavez is trying to get rid of them, no matter how much they try to support Chavez fascism. Meanwhile the whole states of Carabobo and Aragua slided into a gigantic gridlock just because some stupid fat assed Nazional Guard tried to score brownie points with Chavez.

What's a fair indication that a fascist masquerading as a socialist has lost his "base"? When a student named Stalin says enough is enough:

"The message to the Congress and to the government is that there is ... a part of this country that rejects these reforms and we want to be heard," student leader Stalin Gonzalez told a local television station.

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Izzy at Jewcy tells me an episode of 30 Rock already had oodles of fun with this, and every pundit a year ago was gibbering away at how easy it would be for, say, Hillary to accidentally say "Osama" when she meant her charismatic Democratic rival for the White House.

Still, this is pretty funnny:

�I think that is a position which is not consistent with the fact,� Mr. Romney said. �Actually, just look at what Osam � uh � Barack Obama, said just yesterday. Barack Obama calling on radicals, jihadists of all different types, to come together in Iraq. That is the battlefield. That is the central place, he said. Come join us under one banner.�

The comment set off some confusion among the press corps. Glen Johnson of the Associated Press was momentarily frantically searching for comments made by Mr. Obama, another Democratic presidential contender, about jihadism and Iraq.

The last paragraph is almost a perfect Evelyn Waugh set-piece.

UPDATE: Found the 30 Rock clip!

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:46 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (3)

Needless to say, he thinks it was a bad idea:

Why not go all the way? How about a resolution condemning China for the millions who suffered in the Cultural Revolution and the tens of millions starved during the Great Leap Forward � right as we�re seeking China�s help on Burma, North Korea, the environment, etc? I mean, for each Armenian the Ottoman Turks slaughtered, at least ten Chinese citizens perished at the hands of the regime whose successors still rule the country. And the government's official stance of denial is just about as strong. So, why not just tell them they were evil? The timing would be especially nice during China's current Party Congress.

I'm sure we could get a unanimous vote for a resolution condemning North Korea for any of a hundred grievous offenses; that would be a good complement to the recent nuclear deal. Why not one denouncing Russia for the Czarist pogroms, to accompany efforts to reason with/rein in Putin? Maybe another condemning England for its subjugation and slaughter of the Scots, to say nothing of the Irish � while also asking Gordon Brown to stay the course in Iraq? What about Australia for its historic treatment of the Aborigines? Or the current nations of West Africa for their role in the slave trade?

The Armenian genocide was real; many Turks pretend it wasn�t. They are wrong, and we should stand for what's right. But it�s hard to think of a more willfully self-indulgent step than lecturing Turkey's current government and people 90 years late.

Leaving aside the fact that Soviet Union acknowledged and repudiated the Czarist pogroms -- before it planned its own version of them -- these points are worth exploring since Fallows' argument hinges not on the question of Why? but on the question of Why now? Of all times to express our solidarity with the Armenian people, he asks, why choose a time when our military alliance with Turkey has suffered, perhaps irrevocably, by the Iraq war and the escalating PKK crisis in Kurdistan?

Fallows' plaint is not new, but it is compelling, at least on the surface. Diplomacy is game that depends partly on the wise seizure of opportunities when they present themselves. Only an idealist or a fool acts without regard for immediate consequences. Yes, dear, geopolitics sometimes means making moral sacrifices to ensure the comity of nations. Better still: Who are we, with all our warts, to chide another country for its atrocities and ongoing attempts to cover them up?

Very well. Let's consider the proposition of a poorly timed historical reckoning with the roles reversed. Let's say that tomorrow China's Central Committee decides to pass a non-binding resolution that condemns the United States for its former slave economy. What would our reaction be? Would we stop lobbying China to intercede in Burma, bolster global environmental policies, and see the North Korean nuclear deal to completion, or would we give up these pursuits to express our outrage at the "self-righteously posturing measure" (Fallows' words) enacted by a repressive regime that would do better to concern itself with its own human rights abuses in the 21st century than with ours in the 19th?

What would the cold, hard logic of realpolitik -- which is what Fallows advocates, after all -- dictate we do under such circumstances? And are other countries immune to this logic? To put it another way, why hasn't Turkey already invaded Iraq after 12 of its soldiers were killed and 8 more were kidnapped?

Even if one agrees that the United States has a responsibility to behave with more self-restraint than other countries, I can't see how the timing for recognizing a genocide would ever be "right." The Ottoman Empire no longer exists. What does exist is the modern Kemalist state of Turkey, which bears no responsibility for the murder and dislocation of 1.5 million Armenians, only for the annihilation of the legacy of this gruesome event. Since it hasn't already, at what point in the future, then, will Turkey realize, without feeling the full weight of shame brought down upon it by an international consensus, that its policy towards facing the past is both immoral and self-defeating? Will it be able to join the European Union so long as even speaking of the Armenian Genocide is a crime punishable by jail time? If the Iraq war had not happened, or if it had gone smoothly, would Congress then have been allowed to hold a NATO ally to account for its denial of history?

There are always excuses to be made for deferring justice a little while longer. Many anti-Dreyfusards of fin de siecle Paris, for instance, suspected that the French captain was innocent but that "now was not the time" to acquit a Jew of false charges if that meant jeopardizing the stability of the teetering Third Republic. La patrie en danger: Couldn't France afford to remain under the cloud of clerical paranoia and medieval superstition a few years longer?

What the excuse-makers fail to realize, however, is that by deferring justice they in effect deny it by making it the hostage of convenience. This is a game infinitely more suspect than diplomacy, and it's bad enough when it's played in Great Britain or the United States, where the most jingoistic refrain is "My Country, Right or Wrong." But how much worse is it when it's played in Turkey, where scores of citizens take to the streets to chant self-righteously in defense of a genocide, and where the refrain seems to be "My Country, Never Wrong"?

Posted by Michael Weiss at 5:42 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

As someone who's a great admirer of Ibn Warraq's scholarship on Islam -- though he tends, as he freely admits, to be more of a bibliographer than an original thinker -- I was fascinated by the essay in the New York Review of Books entitled, "How to Understand Islam." The first part is a lucid critique of the politically correct history of Islam, the one that maintains the faith was not spread by the sword or by coercive materialist means -- like the taxation benefits recently lauded by Osama bin Laden -- or that it is intrinsically a religion of peace. (For one thing, I doubt very much that the Prophet would have accepted such a homilistic depiction of some of the most stunning military campaigns waged in the post-Hellenic period.) But the second part of the essay is a kind of in-house rebuke of Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash. The author, Malise Ruthven, rejects Buruma and Garton Ash's ludicrous term "Enlightenment fundamentalist" -- which they promulgated in the pages of the New York Review -- as a fair or adequate assessment of the brave Islamic apostate and fearless atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

It might be more appropriate, however, to describe Ali as a "born-again" believer in Enlightenment values. Infidel has the hallmarks of a spiritual autobiography in which she progresses through various stages of illumination, from childhood trauma in Somalia (entailing genital mutilation inflicted by her own grandmother), through an adolescence in Saudi Arabia and Kenya, where a brief espousal of the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood empowers her to question her family's tribal values within the frame of the movement's stultifying, still patriarchal religiosity, toward eventual enlightenment and emancipation in Holland, aided by encounters with Dutch fellow students and readings from Spinoza, Voltaire, Darwin, Durkheim, and Freud. This remarkable spiritual journey is interlaced with a classic story of personal courage in the face of a parochial and misogynistic social system that systematically brutalizes women in the name of God, and in which women routinely submit to neglect and violence. Told with a rare combination of passion and detachment, it is a Seven Storey Mountain in reverse: a pilgrimage from belief to skepticism.

Yet for all Hirsi Ali's questioning, there is a spiritual quality about her rebellion. The final break with her family occurs when senior members of her clan arrive in Holland to persuade her to rejoin the husband chosen by her father, in order to save the family's honor. Her refusal seems divinely mandated. "I paused for a moment, and then the words just came out of my mouth. 'It is the will of the soul,' I said. 'The soul cannot be coerced.'" The clan leaders, and her husband, accept the verdict. The soul cannot lie.

"Born-again atheist, practicing troublemaker" is a Morrissey lyric by way of Gore Vidal. But I don't know if I'd call this rebellion "spiritual" so much as moral and intellectual. For instance, "soul" can easily be used as a synecdoche or metaphor for human will by an evolutionary psychologist who rejects the mind-body dichotomy but also, say, appreciates the novels of Dostoevsky. However, it is true that Hirsi Ali displays reverence and awe for some of the finer manifestations of the religion she deplores.

"Enlightenment fundamentalist" wasn't only a smirking and stupid term to coin with respect to her, it was also a profoundly ungenerous one. As I wrote a few months ago in my capsule review of Infidel, published on Commentary's contentions blog:

Right-thinking intellectuals may choose to ignore or rationalize Koranic injunctions like �Your wives are your tillage, go in unto your tillage in what manner so ever you will,� arguing that these are only interpreted literally in a few third-world countries. Yet Hirsi Ali, who grew up in Somalia and traveled with her divided family to Saudi Arabia and Kenya, stands as a living reply: these literalists really get around. They are now, in fact, comfortably ensconced in cosmopolitan cities like London and Amsterdam, where Theo van Gogh, her friend and collaborator on the film Submission, was pulled off his bicycle and shot to death by Mohammed Bouyeri in 2004.

What best refutes Garton Ash�s charge of fundamentalism is the demonstrable fact that, even in her newfound atheism, Hirsi Ali can still pay homage to the rituals of faith. She writes in Infidel: �People were patient with each other in the Grand Mosque, and communal�everyone washing his or her feet in the same fountain, with no shoving or prejudice. We were all Muslims in God�s house, and it was beautiful. It had a quality of timelessness. I think this is one reasons Muslims believe that Islam means peace: because in a large, cool place full of kindness you do feel peaceful.�

Now show me bin Laden�s public acknowledgment that the Bill of Rights has its charms, too.

So can we now please have done with the animadversion that suggests Spinoza is in any way the inverse mirror image of Sayyid Qutb or Hassan al-Banna?

Posted by Michael Weiss at 3:36 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Dr Michele Mendelssohn, a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, is coming out with a new book that suggests Oscar Wilde plagiarized all his best epigrams and insights and was absolutely obsessed with the critical mind of Henry James:

One of the fascinating revelations of her book is quite how successful Wilde was at identifying himself with the Aesthetic movement. Her first illustration is of an American advert from 1882 which reads: "To be truly esthetic [sic] buy your ice cream and confections at JN Piercy's." Alongside this unlikely slogan is an image of Wilde, complete with floppy hair, cravat and velvet knee-length breeches. She points out that similar images of the author, who at the time had little literary output to his name, were used to sell hosiery, corsets, stoves and washing machines. Wilde had never endorsed such products and made no money from the adverts but, in an age long before today's celebrity-fuelled culture, he profited by association just as much as a Big Brother contestant will milk a career by hopping from one tabloid to the next. He had not invented Aestheticism, but he seemed to embody it, so much so that the illustrations that accompanied James's novel Washington Square show a languid, decadent character who looks like nobody so much as Wilde. This is all the more odd when you remember that James was by several years the older of the two, had been riding the Aesthetic bandwagon first and would go on to have a decidedly frosty relationship with a man he cattily described as a "fatuous fool, tenth-rate cad" and an "unclean beast".

The fashionable way of describing this is to say that Wilde poured his real genius into his life and not his art. He was a better self-promoter than he was a playwright, wit or critic. However, can that really be true? At the same time "The Importance of Being Earnest" was selling out at the St. James, Henry James' play "Guy Domville" was tanking across town. What does this tell us? Wilde may have stolen like a bandit, but he was still the best exponent of Aestheticism that ever lived. T.S. Eliot famously stole the term "Waste Land" from... well, from so many different people that it's almost impossible to divine the exact provenance of it. Martin Luther King plagiarized his doctoral dissertation whole-cloth. And does anyone remember -- or care -- about the scandal that almost scuppered Doris Kearns Goodwin's career before she published Team of Rivals and redeemed it forever? And a forgettable Nazi propagandist named Heinz von Lichberg wrote a story in 1916 about an older man who's obsessed with a young girl. The story was called "Lolita."

My sin, my soul. Big fucking deal.

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

As someone who's dutifully stayed away from the Harry Potter series, I can't really see what all the fuss is about over Dumbledore's preference for the company of wizards over witches. This is perhaps because it was round about the time I heard someone refer to Tom Cruise as "so far in the closet, he's in Narnia" that I alighted on the somewhat natural parallels that exist between children's fantasy and gay themes. What I mean to say is this: What made-up magical realm of your adolescence can you cite that would have been downright hostile to jazz hands or California wine country? The Freudian uses of enchantment are well documented, and I'm sure there's some graduate thesis being written on the subject -- if it hasn't already.

Indeed, Oscar Wilde is considered by some to have been a better children's author than he was a playwright (though I find this judgment absurd). An openly gay English professor at, I think, NYU supplements his income by ghost-writing the admittedly non-magical and hard-boiled Hardy Boy stories. He's copped to infusing them with homoeroticism. When asked by a friend of mine if he didn't worry that this might make for inappropriate reading material for the 10-14 year-old set, he replied: "The reader is not my problem." Roald Dahl meets John Waters.

Anyway, try Google image-searching "wizard" and see what you turn up. A random sampling:

Posted by Michael Weiss at 5:05 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (2)

Gawker's Emily went to the N+1 party celebrating their new pamphlet about how books do furnish a room but not a dorm. She came away with this (what I'd call an apercu if I weren't afraid the Talking Points Memo people were still lurking around here):

These people's other regrets include having read Paul de Man before Wordsworth and Deleuze before Proust and having read Frederic Jameson instead of Perry Anderson. The pamphlet is 126 pages long. However, it only takes 5 minutes and 52 seconds to listen to the song "Common People" by Pulp in its entirety.

Read more.

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

What's the old Buckley definition of a conservative? Someone who stands athwart history and yells, "Stop!" The Newsweek editor hauls out a few helpful but insufficient facts:

Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland's and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?

I had the same cosmological inquiry when I read the transcript of Mohammed ElBaradei's speech to the 51st Regular Session of International Atomic Energy Agency's General Conference. The IAEA director listed four points about Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons:

First, the Agency has been able to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran. Iran has continued to provide the access and reporting needed to enable Agency verification in this regard.

Second, Iran has provided the Agency with additional information and access needed to resolve a number of long outstanding issues, such as the scope and nature of past plutonium experiments.

Third, contrary to the decisions of the Security Council, calling on Iran to take certain confidence building measures, Iran has not suspended its enrichment related activities, and is continuing with its construction of the heavy water reactor at Arak. This is regrettable.

Fourth, while the Agency so far has been unable to verify certain important aspects relevant to the scope and nature of Iran's nuclear programme, Iran and the Secretariat agreed last month on a work plan for resolving all outstanding verification issues. These verification issues are at the core of the lack of confidence about the nature of Iran?s programme, and are what prompted actions by the Security Council. Iran?s agreement on such a work plan, with a defined timeline, is therefore an important step in the right direction. Naturally, Iran?s active cooperation and transparency is the key to full and timely implementation of the work plan. If the Agency were able to provide credible assurance about the peaceful nature of Iran's past and current nuclear programme, this would go a long way towards building confidence about Iran?s nuclear programme, and could create the conditions for a comprehensive and durable solution.

In other words, the mullahs are baiting a global regulatory body for more time to amass the very arsenal they say they don't want. Points 1, 2 and 4 are meaningless without 3, don't you think?

Zakaria's mention of North Korea as the real totalitarian menace that should keep Mssrs. Giuliani and Podhoretz awake at night is, to me, only a further validation of their fears.

North Korea is a beggared failed state. It manufactures no substantial good worthy of export, save for military materiel. It enslaves and brainwashes its population under the maxims of a messianic death cult moored to a decades-old revolution. It envisions itself as the perennial victim of foreign aggression and imperialism and assumes no responsibility for the sorry lot of its own people. It possess no real domestic industrial or commercial base. Whatever semblance of an intellectual class it may have once had, it has murdered or hounded into non-existence. It has, by its own transparent behavior, earned almost the entire world's suspicion and scorn. It sees a nuclear arsenal as the only means of self-preservation because it can use the threat of unleashing that arsenal to blackmail thriving nations into helping it improve its economy.

Does any of this sound at all familiar?

I'm with Zakaria on keeping perspective about the mad mullahs. Ayatollah Khameini is not Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot, and to compare him to them diminishes some of the worst crimes of the 20th century. (Neoconservatives would do well to remember one Straussian injunction -- the one against moral equivalence.) However, the Islamic Republic can and should be examined on its own terms and with due attention to how it operates in war. One can learn a lot about a regime by how it chooses to defend itself. A regime that creates "human waves" of sacrificial soldiers and a large army of suicidal children, all promised divine reward for their hollowed-out and dismembered cadavers, is not that can be called anything other than totalitarian. Three to eight years before such a regime has a nuke? OK, then. What can we do to ensure it never has it?

Zakaria errs, too, in saying that Iran has not "invaded a country since the late 18th century." What the hell is it doing in Iraq right now?

Posted by Michael Weiss at 4:01 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This blog has not been known for its patience with the Turkish government or military. But the restraint exercised by the Erdogan/Gul regime with respect to Iraqi Kurdistan is both necessary and telling.

To catch you up: Over the weekend, the Kurdish PKK, a Stalinoid terrorist group, ambushed and killed at least 12 Turkish soldiers on Turkish soil, under circumstances that remain unclear, then fled to northern Iraq. In addition, eight more Turkish soldiers are listed as missing, which means they're likely prisoners of the PKK, if they haven�t been killed already, too.

Turkey is demanding that the U.S. and Iraq do everything in its joint power to bring the PKK to heel, although Iraq�s President Jalal Talabani argues that it's almost impossible for any army to find guerrillas who hide in the mountains of Dohuk. And he would know, being a Kurd himself. Moreover, he says, Iraq is not prepared to hand over to Ankara any Kurds it might eventually arrest because � though he doesn't put it like this � Turkey treats its own Kurdish minority miserably.

Are you feeling deja vu? Should you expect a calamitous showdown between two neighboring states that begs comparison to the IDF-Hezbollah war from two summers ago? No, I don't think so. Here�s why.

As Iraq's Defense Minister Abd al-Qadir al-Ubaidi put it to a closed session of Parliament today, the Multi-National Forces-Iraq are still solely responsible for Iraq's security. Only they can dispatch soldiers to the north to strengthen the border against a foreign invasion, and only they can perform search-and-capture missions to bring outlaw guerrillas to justice. Well, guess who still controls MFN-I? We do. The chances that the U.S. would divert resources away from Baghdad and Anbar right now to go after a handful of non-Islamist militants who don�t threaten Iraq�s domestic stability, are, quite frankly, slim and none. We can't afford to jeopardize the success of the surge, which relies on manpower, nor can we countenance a massive, state-backed foreign invasion of Iraq, especially when infiltration by Iran and Syria poses a greater threat to the country than Al Qaeda does. (Talk at the Pentagon now centers on whether or not to come right out and declare "victory" against Al Qaeda. It�s not that doing so would be premature, only hubristic. That's how successfully the Bin Ladenists have been routed in Iraq.)

Now, two NATO members have never gone to war with each other and they never will, not unless the entire charter is to be ripped up. Whatever you think of the late failures of multilateralism, consider that the implosion of NATO would be the greatest crisis to befall a military alliance since Adolf Hitler reneged on his friendship pact with Josef Stalin. A U.S.-Turkey skirmish would cause untold devastation in Afghanistan, which is now guarded chiefly by NATO forces (can you imagine soldiers from two belligerent nations fighting side-by-side in another part of the globe?)

There�s good motive, in other words, behind Turkey�s climb-down in bellicose rhetoric:

Turkey has worked hard to avoid military action, said a Western official, because it knows that an offensive would damage relations with the United States as well as Turkey�s bid to join the European Union, a goal Mr. Erdogan�s government has aggressively pressed.

�We don�t want to go into northern Iraq � it�s a mess,� said Suat Kiniklioglu, a lawmaker from Mr. Erdogan�s party and a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee. �We are a country negotiating with the European Union.�

But the Sunday ambush on Turkish troops was carried out by a much larger force than the P.K.K. typically uses, the Western official said, and appeared aimed at drawing Turkey into conflict.

�I think we�ve passed the threshold,� Mr. Kiniklioglu said. �It looks like for two days or three days there will be a holding off and a waiting period. Unless the U.S. comes up with something magic in the next few days, which is highly unlikely, we�ll probably go in.�

Turkey�s defense minister, Vecdi Gonul, speaking to reporters in Kiev, Ukraine, after talks with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, played down plans for swift military action against the Kurdish militants. �We have plans to cross the border, however, not immediately,� Turkey�s Anatolian agency quoted Mr. Gonul as saying.

Something tells me that the Kurdistan Regional Government already knows the fate of the 8 missing Turkish soldiers. Something also tells me that they�re now sharing that knowledge with Baghdad and Washington. The �waiting period� is euphemism for damage control. Whatever the case, it would require a stunning collapse of diplomacy � and probably an attempted coup against the Ankara regime � for Turkish tanks to cross the border into Iraq.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 2:53 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Here's the problem with les enfants terribles: They grow up.

In the eighties, Martin Amis was the caustic golden child of the literary left, a chain-smoking, cliche-loathing prodigy who took time out of satirizing the brute materialism of the Reagan-Thatcher decade to condemn what he called the "mega-death intellectuals." You remember these guys, don't you? They were the ones who occupied the Rand Institute, quietly calculating the estimated corpses of a very likely nuclear "exchange" with the Soviet Union. They weighed their options of a "first-strike" against Russia. They rationalized "escalationism" as the only means of ensuring peace. Perhaps most important of all to language worshiper like Amis, they used these terms outside of inverted commas; they spoke of nuclear war unironically because they thought it was a war that could be won by something other than nuclear weapons.

Yes, the left once loved Martin Amis. But no more. Today he rightly calls Islamism a "murderous ideology" (all mega-death, in other words, no intellectuals). Amis deplores Bin Laden almost as much as he does those correct-thinking Londoners who make excuses for him, or elect to do his PR work. This is a surprisingly large segment of the population, mainly because it's an unsurprisingly large segment of the Guardian editorial board.

I've already posted about Nick Cohen's write-up of the London School of Economics rethink on Putin's Russia and how it has spawned a new generation of British fellow travelers. Well, now here's a thorough recounting of Amis holding forth at the Institute of Contemporary Arts against the same mouth-breathing contingent which applies itself toward the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda, and Saddam Hussein:

First question: "In view of the fear over Islamism, is it time to bring communism back?"

"Er, no", came the polite answer. "You loon", the impolite, unexpressed addendum.

It was at this point that TV's greatest satirist, the shaggy-haired Swift of our age, took his turn to speak.

And what a wonderful turn it was.

"How many members of the Muslim Brotherhood have you actually spoken to in your research?" he pronounced, in the tone of the man who's sure he's got a dead cert, TKO, killer question.

"Er, quite a few, actually," replied Anthony.

Needless to say, Morris was somewhat deflated, as the haymaker he was sure would condemn his opponents to the canvas somehow fell short. But like any true champion, he kept plugging away.

"And you're saying they're all murderers," he jabbed.

"I think Islamists subscribe to a murderous ideology," parried Amis.

"So you mean they're all murderers?"

"No, but I believe the ideology they subscribe to is murderous."

This continued for what seemed like years, until Anthony deftly tagged Amis, and immediately set about the exposed belly of Morris's argument.

"For example, [insert name of prominent member of MCB, well known to Cif readers] supported Osama bin Laden right up to Sept 11 2001, a period including the Kenyan embassy bombings among others."

Morris, on the ropes, threw out the last lunge any southpaw can in these situations: "Well we supported Saddam Hussein."

Posted by Michael Weiss at 1:31 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (3)

That's a dog. Under all that. Though the real bitch is the DeNiro-mugging thing that transformed it into a fucking Ninja Turtle called "Leonardoodle."

HT: Mr Eugenides.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 5:21 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Here's a petition that asks Mahoud Ahadminejad to release this brave Iranian whose actions aim only to improve the lot of impoverished bus workers, who "undermine" the regime not a whit.

Hat tip: Gadgie.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 4:52 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

What a carnival it has been seeing the liberal-left react to the ungenerous reviews of The Israel Lobby. Surely a sign that knee-jerk charges of anti-Semitism and the reductio ad Hitlerum hobble any substantive debate about Israel --?? ah, if only such a debate could be had in the first place!

Matthew Yglesias has gone out of his way to defend John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, even furnishing the latter's curriculum vitae in defiance of Martin Peretz's suggestion that Walt had led a "lackluster"?� academic career until the London Review of Books made him an offer he couldn'?t refuse. Walt is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations! He'??s written three whole books before this one! cries Yglesias, who has also bravely affirmed that AIPAC does not represent Jews like himself, his family and the blogger Josh Marshall*.

I very much hope, though, that Yglesias, who has his own humdinger of a volume on U.S. foreign policy in the works, appreciates how categorically conservative and xenophobic his new heroes are. Mearsheimer and Walt belong, along with Michael Scheuer, Bin Laden's book-of-the-month author, to the reactionary isolationist establishment, the one Harry Truman had to defy it in order to merely recognize the state of Israel in 1948, and the one Scoop Jackson had to war against when the Kremlin's outlandish "??education tax" levied against emigrating Soviet Jews became a scandal worth jeopardizing d�tente over in the 1970's. How the sabras must laugh to see a book dedicated to Samuel Huntington, he of the "clash of civilizations" thesis, celebrated everywhere from the University of Chicago to Al Jazeera.

Never ask those suffering from ideological amnesia to examine the irony of their current positions. Forget Che Guevara: the hot new silkscreen t-shirt on campus bears the likeness of Charles Lindbergh. Pat Buchanan's rag the American Conservative asks if the hard right and hard left can make common cause against Bush, then devotes an entire article to naming the non-Jewish neocons in Washington. Taki Theodoropoulos, a man who refers to New York as "The Big Bagel"?� and otherwise spends his time inveighing against the city's rampant sodomites, thinks that Justin Raimondo alone can prevent more earthquakes in San Francisco by blogging the germ of Marxist thought that infects all neoconservative logic.

Fortunately, a few classical leftists do remain in our midst. They don'??t support the war in Iraq, much less Israeli colonialism in the West Bank, but they are admirably unwilling to leverage their internationalism in opposition to either. Denis Lazare of the Nation is one:

Given the kind of people who are criticizing Mearsheimer and Walt and the way the anti-Semitism card is used to silence dissent on the Israel-Palestine question, many might feel compelled to defend their thesis.

They should think twice before doing so. To be sure, Mearsheimer and Walt are not anti-Semites, and The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy does not portray Israel as uniquely evil or "singularly pernicious." But just because a book is not bigoted does not mean it is good, and the one that Mearsheimer and Walt have written suffers from significant methodological deficiencies, which is a polite way of saying it's a mess. In expanding their 13,000-word article into a 500-page book (with more than 100 pages of notes!), they have succeeded mainly in exacerbating the flaws of their original argument. They seem to know little about how American government works, how lobbyists function or how the United States interacts with the world at large. They are blind to history and tone-deaf to ideology. Because they blame America's Middle Eastern rampage on a knot of wily Zionist agents, they seem to think that the US role in the region would turn benign if those agents were removed.

[...]

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy is a notable example of a new form of nativism that sees foreigners and their domestic allies as a big source of America's problems and believes that the country would be better off if it could eradicate such influences. Anti-Semitic this is not, but it is still an evasion of the truth that could turn out to be highly dangerous. America will remain in its infantilized state as long as it tries to shift blame for its ills onto foreigners and their domestic agents. It will never solve its problems until it realizes that they originate entirely at home.

* The original version of this post referred to Marshall as a "gentile." A link from Talking Points Memo later and suddenly as I'm bad as Rabbi Morteira, excommunicator of Spinoza. It was an honest mistake, really, and I wasn't suggesting anything about Josh's true-blue Jewishness. I went by Andrew Sullivan's post in response to Yglesias, which indicated Marshall was not on Team Chosen. Oh, and I misspelled Taki Theodoropolous' name and left out the "c" in "reductio."

Posted by Michael Weiss at 2:28 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Benazir Bhutto may have been an incompetent and corrupt prime minister, but her ill-greeted return to Pakistan leaves me wondering if incompetence and corruption is a small price to pay for combating terrorism.

It should be remembered that the Taliban was given succor and military safeguarding under the Bhutto administration of the mid-90's, under the presumption that a totalitarian Islamist state was better than sheer anarchy.

However, Bhutto's time in exile has not been misspent. She's now both clear and firm in her opposition to Al Qaeda. She's managed to pull off what the U.S. Defense Department had hoped Ahmad Chalabi could do in Iraq and cultivate a massive electoral base from outside her own country. And as a Western-educated woman of great beauty and charm, her place at the head of a Muslim state would surely send a signal to the Bin Ladenists that their former patron regime is now unambiguously ranged against them. Bhutto is quite right to say that the ISI can never really fight Al Qaeda while it is still infiltrated by Al Qaeda sympathizers and rogue generals like Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, the man responsible for her father's murder.

Ms. Bhutto earlier said in the interview atop the truck that she was concerned about her security and that she had told General Musharraf that she suspected people in his administration and the security forces of supporting the militants and terrorism.

�This is not the same Pakistan it was in 1996 when my government was overthrown,� she said. �The militants have risen in power. But I know who these people are, I know the forces behind them, and I have written to General Musharraf about this. And I�ve told him there are certain people I suspect in the administration and security.

�Unless there is some thought given to that, this is what emboldens the militants,� she said. �They�ve got some covert support from sympathizers within the system.�

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What Jeffrey Hart hath wrought:

Having long since shed his conservatism, now Mr. Gessen and his colleagues at n 1 have decided to create a liberal version of Mr. Hart's pamphlet, in order to offer college freshmen some guidance about what to read and how to approach their education. The theme of the pamphlet, which consists of transcripts of two roundtable discussions held in n 1's office this past summer, is regret: what they wish they'd read; what they wish they'd known. There is a list at the end of the pamphlet of all the works cited � including those that the participants mocked or that were mentioned because someone regretted having read them. Each of the participants has also contributed a list of around 10 "Books That Changed My Life."

This sounds like a Wes Anderson loop de loop of Allan Bloom's disciples reciting Plato to beat back the bandolier-clad black militants at Cornell in 1969.

The Canon According to n 1

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In all the reports and essays being written on the supposed imminence of a U.S. bombing campaign against Iran, has any really addressed the possible Iranian responses? What would the mullahs do if, tomorrow, they awoke to find Bushehr reduced to rubble courtesy of American smart bombs? Would they dispatch the Quds Force into Baghdad; turn the entire nation into a latter-day Basiji martyrdom "wave" and try to drive the MNF-Iraq into the Gulf? Or would they start lobbing missiles of their own into Haifa and Tel Aviv, more or less guaranteeing if not World War III, as President Bush ominously phrased it, then at least the greatest international crisis the Middle East has yet known?

Or, given that a fear of regime change impels each and every policy decision and PR blitz undertaken by the mullahs, would their response be more rhetorical than martial? What would do more damage to long-term American interests in the Middle East: Iran's waging a disastrous war against us that it can by no means win, or expanding its interests in the infrastructure of Iraq?

Bomb us and we'll blackout Sadr City after giving its residents unhindered electricity for the first time in four years. Bomb us and we'll create economic chaos to add to your quixotic "political reconciliation." Bomb us and we'll stoke enough sectarian fire in Iraq to make you nostalgic for the razing of the Golden Mosque.

BAGHDAD, Oct. 17 -- Iraq has agreed to award $1.1 billion in contracts to Iranian and Chinese companies to build a pair of enormous power plants, the Iraqi electricity minister said Tuesday. Word of the project prompted serious concerns among American military officials, who fear that Iranian commercial investments can mask military activities at a time of heightened tension with Iran.

The Iraqi electricity minister, Karim Wahid, said that the Iranian project would be built in Sadr City, a Shiite enclave in Baghdad that is controlled by followers of the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr. He added that Iran had also agreed to provide cheap electricity from its own grid to southern Iraq, and to build a large power plant essentially free of charge in an area between the two southern Shiite holy cities of Karbala and Najaf.

Iraqi Contracts With Iran and China Concern U.S. - New York Times

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Background here.

Dear Grandmother,

I heard from a mutual friend that you woke up the other morning and decided it would be a good idea to join in Rush Limbaugh's campaign of vilification against Media Matters by complaining that I haven�t wished you a happy birthday. To someone who is familiar with me and my work, this claim is patently absurd. In my six books and many thousands of articles, columns and blog posts over the past twenty-five years, I have repeatedly argued against privatization of the Social Security and Medicare systems and other policies that would harm senior citizens such as yourself.

Not long ago I was attending a dinner party in Manhattan where the topic of aging came up over the third glass of an excellent pinot noir that I brought from my most recent trip to wine country. Though I am always reluctant to mention famous people I know, I was pressured to discuss my long acquaintanceship with the pre-eminent philosopher Richard Rorty, who had recently passed away. Dick faced the end of his life with grace and class, finding time to leave a few final marks of his brilliance on the world, such as a recommendation letter he wrote for me. You, of course, are hardly Dick Rorty, Grandmother. But my respect for the aged and interest in discussing your demographic with powerful pundits at a dinner party benefits your life much more than a mere card with the words �Happy Birthday!� that I could have bought for $1.59 at the local drug store chain, where the workers most likely don�t earn a living wage or have access to health insurance.

Given that I am just finishing my seventh book and continue to update my hugely popular blog Altercation, located at mediamatters.org/altercation, while still serving as a Distinguished Professor of English, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, Professor of Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC, where I write and edit the �Think Again� column, senior fellow (since 1985) at the World Policy Institute at The New School in New York, and a history consultant to HBO Films, I'd not be surprised if I may have forgotten your birthday, though this card is not an admission that I did.

However, in charging that I �forgot� your birthday, your cluelessness is aiding and abetting a campaign led by Limbaugh and others to delegitimize Media Matters and the careful work it does. One cannot depend on either the intelligence or the good will of those in the MSM and conservative media not to use your nonsense for the purposes of further manipulation and misrepresentation. Shame on you.

Best wishes to Grandpa.

Love,

Eric Alterman, PhD

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Vanessa Grigoriadis on Gawker:

Journalists are both haves and have-nots. They�re at the feast, but know they don�t really belong�they�re fighting for table scraps, essentially�and it could all fall apart at any moment. Success is not solid. That�s part of the weird fascination with Gawker, part of why it still works, five years on�it�s about the anxiety and class rage of New York�s creative underclass. Gawker�s social policing and snipe-trading sideshow has been impossible to resist as a kind of moral drama about who deserves success and who doesn�t. It supplies a Manhattan version of social justice. In the past couple of years, Gawker has expanded its mission to include celebrity gossip, sacrificing some of its insider voice in the process, but on a most basic level, it remains a blog about being a writer in New York, with all the competition, envy, and self-hate that goes along with the insecurity of that position.

Tell it, sister.

I've Gawked, been Gawked, and I once abortively Wonketted. Through it all I came away thinking Denton was a good guy (he more or less got me my job at Slate). And my therapy bills are way higher than Emily Gould's.

Gawker and the Rage of the Creative Underclass -- New York Magazine

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Part of the problem with our current debate about the intellectual and moral superiority of atheism has to do with semantics. Atheism is simply defined as the disbelief in God. Yet are the bestselling atheists in our midst -- Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens -- only arguing against the argument from design, or is there more to their collective plaint than that? Spinoza used God and Nature interchangeably and synonymously, which has led modern readers of his Ethics and Tractatus Theologico-Politicus to surmise that he was a closet atheist. It's true that Spinoza's life work sought to debunk and discredit emotion and faith-- not for nothing did the non-Jewish Jew rank imagination as the lowest form of cognition -- in favor of Pure Reason or a priori truth. Sub specie aeternitatis does not mean everything that endures by the will of heaven but rather by the known (and unknown) laws of the cosmos.

What do we really mean in modern parlance when we refer to an "atheist"? Is this someone who reflexively laughs away the notion of an invisible man in the sky as prima facie absurd, or someone who uses a centuries-old methodology to arrive at the same conclusion? (Orwell once admitted that it would take him a while to combat a flat-earther because all the evidence of the earth's roundness had to be remembered or relearned on the spot.) What we're talking about is the difference between a lazy heckler and a careful investigator, an irascible dogmatist and a cool-headed scientist. The former takes it on faith, as it were, that there is no God; the latter sets out to prove it.

Joseph Stalin's atheism came cheap. Rebecca Goldstein and Steven Pinker's did not.

In your book on Spinoza, you talk about your own religious education in an orthodox Jewish school, and how Spinoza was trotted out by one of your teachers as precisely the kind of heretical thinker that good Jewish girls should avoid. But this seemed to make you especially interested in him. Why do you still like Spinoza so much?

GOLDSTEIN: It's interesting. It's almost like there are two different Spinozas. And I really didn't bring them together until I wrote the book. At my very orthodox all-girls high school, Spinoza was presented to us as a kind of cautionary tale: This is what can go wrong if you ask the wrong questions. I was in a school that discouraged one from even going on to college. And philosophy was absolutely the worst thing you could study because it does ask you to question everything. Then there was the Spinoza I came in contact with when I was a professional philosopher. Spinoza is a metaphysician of a very extravagant sort. He wants to deduce everything through pure reason. And that was a kind of philosopher that I was also taught to dismiss and disdain. So both sides of my training -- the orthodox Jewish training, the analytic philosophy training -- pushed me to dismiss Spinoza.

I also like the grandeur of his ambition. He really does believe that we can save ourselves through being rational. And I believe in that. I believe that if we have any hope at all, it's through trying to be rigorously objective about ourselves and our place in the world. We have to do that. We have to submit ourselves to objectivity, to rationality. I think that's what it is about Spinoza. He's just such a rationalist.

Spinoza certainly dismissed the religion he'd been exposed to. Do both of you consider yourselves atheists?

[pause] GOLDSTEIN: Yes.

PINKER: Yes.

GOLDSTEIN: Proud atheists.

PINKER: There, we said it. [Laughs.]

So you have to hesitate for a moment before you use that dirty word?

PINKER: Atheists are the most reviled minority in the United States, so it's no small matter to come out and say it.

I find it puzzling how the recent atheist manifestos by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens have all turned into bestsellers in a country that's overwhelmingly religious. According to various polls, half of all Americans believe the Bible is the literal truth. A recent Newsweek poll found that 91 percent believe in God. How do you explain the enormous popularity of these books?

PINKER: Part of it is that the people who buy books -- at least that kind of highbrow trade book -- are not a random sample of the population. The opinions sampled by these polls are probably soft. When people are asked a question, they don't just turn a flashlight into their data bank of beliefs and read out what they see. When people say, "Yes, I believe in God and the Bible," they're kind of saying, "I'm a moral person. I have solidarity with the community of churchgoers that I was brought up in and that I currently belong to." I think that if you were to probe a lot of people's religious opinions, they would not be as religious as the numbers would suggest.

GOLDSTEIN: It would be fascinating, though, to see a poll of the people who are buying the new atheist books and see how they are answering these questions.

PINKER: Well, the question often arises whether these authors are preaching to the choir. Especially since these books make no concessions toward religious sensibilities. It's a full-throated intellectual assault on the concept of God. My sense is that the books are really not aimed at the 91 percent of the people you cited who believe in God, but rather at some minority of people who are wavering, who've been brought up in a religious way but now have some private doubts. They perhaps think that confessing to being an atheist is like confessing to being a child molester. So they're not willing to even think those thoughts. Then they come across a book that seems to vindicate all of their doubts. And that tortured minority of reflective, analytic people from a religious background -- perhaps like Rebecca from her religious background -- are who the books are aimed at. Julia Sweeney's one-woman show, "Letting Go of God," would be representative of the kind of person whose mind could be changed by a book like that.

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Robert Conquest once tried to account for why it was that certain countries were convulsed by full-blooded totalitarianism whereas other countries only ever suffered the outcroppings of it in endowed chairs at major universities. It's the difference, noted the author of The Great Terror and the onetime Sidney and Beatrice Webb Fellow at the London School of Economics, between "ideitis" and "ideosis." Ideitis is a chronic ailment of ideological or messianic thinking, whereas ideosis merely the occasional and easily treatable case. Russia and Germany have ideitis, England and the United States have ideosis. When the two come together, we get the journalism of Walter Duranty, the plays of Lillian Hellman, the non-historical writings of Eric Hobsbawm, and titles like Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation, written by Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

Nick Cohen recently sat through what sounds like an agonized circle-jerk at the LSE about free speech in Russia. As ever, the Kremlin needn't have sent any of its own apologists:

On the stage were sleek representatives of Putin�s new civilisation. Like the Webbs before her, Dariya Pushkova, the London correspondent of Russia Today, a state-controlled TV channel, dealt with the difficult question of Kremlin repression by changing the subject. The British media were just as bad, she said. They reported unverifiable facts as truth and came out with half-baked accusations that Alexander Litvinenko had been poisoned with polonium 210 on the orders of Putin�s henchmen. What was the difference between her propaganda and ours? Who were we to throw stones?

Pavel Andreev from Novosti, the state-controlled Russian news agency, took the stage to argue for the censorship of investigative reporting. Eighty per cent of Russians approved of what Putin was doing and tough tactics were needed to give the people what they wanted. �Russia has always been best under strong leaders,� he added with a nod towards the legacy of the Webbs� Stalin.

I expected the audience to go along with him. Just as urban legend has it that you are never more than six feet away from a rat on the streets of London, so dismal experience has taught me that you are never more than six feet away from an apologist for tyranny at a meeting of London liberals. (A good example of this came a few days later when Martin Amis, a serious novelist, was confronted by Chris Morris, a light entertainer, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Amis was so exasperated by the betrayals of principle that he asked members of the audience to raise their hand if they considered themselves morally superior to the sexist, racist, homophobic and psychopathic Taliban. Fewer than a third did.)

I've just found out from Simon Sebag Montefiore's Young Stalin that Vladimir Putin's grandfather worked as a chef in the kitchens of Rasputin, Lenin and Stalin, a culinary trifecta that makes him the most poison-paranoid -- and poison-tempted -- man of the 20th century. Given that Alexander Litvinenko's assassination was eerily reminiscent of the KGB's "Umbrella Murder" of Georgi Markov (see my earlier post about that here), might we conclude that Putin channels his Soviet forebears in every way possible?

Another thing that's been bugging me all week. Martin Amis did not say, as the dire Terry Eagleton claims he did, that he favored treating Muslims as second-class citizens. Nor did Amis say it, as Eagleton maintains, in his Guardian essay, "The Age of Horrorism." Amis told an interviewer that "there is a definite urge" to treat Muslims badly until they "get their house in order," which is a distinction with a difference. Put it this way: If you argue against racial profiling on airplanes, do you do so because your instinct tells you that singling out the one demographic associated with religious terrorism is wrong? Or do you do so because you eventually reason that it is unjust and cruel? What is the "definite urge" and what is the moral calculation?

Eagleton, inexplicably credited for his way with irony, sculls the shallow bay of literalism when he says that he was able transition from Catholicism to Marxism "without having to pass through liberalism." How easy it must be to reupholster the wardrobe of the captive mind. But odd that a literary critic would so disastrously confuse "texts;" odd also that he is able to parse Amis' "definite urge" as Amis' endorsement of state policy.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:39 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

The attention to detail is extraordinary. "Good Night and Good Fuck," the naming of the production company "Absolutely Elegant," etc.

Hat tip: Will, after whom I'll name my first born son for this.

Use Of 'N-Word' May End Porn Star's Career

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