Charles Krauthammer and Bill Kristol have been making the rounds on television dismissing Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders as a "demagogue," which has got many conservatives abroad disgruntled and confused. Wilders, who was denied entry to the United Kingdom last year by the ever-fatuous (now sacked) Home Secretary Jacqui Smith on the grounds of his being a hate-figure and someone whose arrival might incite Muslims violence, has been idealized -- one hesitates to use the term "martyred" in this context -- by those on the right who see him as a platinum-dyed Cassandra of our time. Is Wilders not a minority voice challenging the suicidal Western passivity toward the "Islamization" of Europe? Are there not double standards in place which bar him, a mere speaker, essayist and documentarian, from travel to London whilst admitting radical imams who preach the murder of Jews, Christians and apostates and back up their preachings with material aid to jihadists?

There is merit to much of the right's defense of Wilders, but only up to a point. A fair summation of his willy-nilly politics is offered by this profile at the Swiss-German newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung (in an admittedly rough English translation):

His opinions do not arrange themselves into the left-right schema. The self-declared admirer of Ariel Sharon and Margaret Thatcher is opposed to big banks, the liberalization of the labor market and increasing the retirement age. He wants to close the borders... and is in agreement with the Social Democrats that the Netherlands has done enough in Afghanistan. At the same time, he constantly insists on the universal validity of human rights, especially for women and homosexuals. Dutch culture must be protected from foreign influences. Subsidies for the welfare [state] and culture, however, should be abolished. Pensioners, animals, disabled persons and the police should receive more state funding.

A gay-friendly feminist isolationist who applauds free-market principles and the war on terror as waged by others in the Levant. This sounds like a postmodernist's retelling of A Pilgrim's Progress. But Wilders has also called for the banning of the Koran, a view I've heard euphemistically described as "provocative" but is more accurately described as idiotic and totalitarian. Here is where Krauthammer and Kristol have their well-founded grievances.

It is impossible to believe in the notion of Muslim-run democracy without also believing in Muslims who do not adhere to the orthodox tenets of their faith, much less the Salafist and Wahhabist renditions of it. Clearly sixty percent of adult Iraqis have demonstrated that they are quite comfortable with terrestrial legislation and the electoral process, a statistic that, according to Wilders' theological-political interpretation, is simply impossible. Also, neoconservatives shouldn't be the only ones to point out that it is inadvisable in a cold war against a toxic ideology that must be fought intellectually and culturally to advocate for the censorship of that ideology's core literature. Would Richard Pipes or Robert Conquest or George Kennan have ever suggested banning the Communist Manifesto or Lenin's State and Revolution? Of course they wouldn't. They'd have also apprehended that the Velvet Revolution and the Solidarity movement could not have been successful without the participation of socialists, trade unionists and variegated intellectuals who still found something worth salvaging in Marxism even after seventy years of failed Marxist experimentation.

The "Wilders phenomenon," as NZZ calls it, has been best expressed in Switzerland's recent decision, undertaken by plebiscite, to prohibit the further construction of minarets, those architecturally optional adornments which function as call-to-prayer towers on some mosques. While Switzerland has hundreds of mosques at present, it has only four minarets, making this constitutionally amended rule both otiose and harmful at the same time: it does nothing to stop Islamism but everything to alienate law-abiding Swiss Muslims. There's also a sad irony in the fact that this referendum was the joint yield of the Swiss People's Party and the Federal Democratic Union, or as I prefer to call them, the only xenophobic parties in Europe that must express themselves quadrilingually. Try stumping for bourgeois cultural "unity" in German, Italian, French and Romansche.

I don't blame Ayaan Hirsi Ali for never wanting to see a minaret again in her life. And I don't blame Wilders for worrying that his homeland is becoming a playground for messianic butchers whose mantra is, as the great Wole Soyinka aptly phrased, "I'm right, you're dead." (For what's it worth, I also agree with Soyinka that England is the cynosure for Islamic radicalization, much more so than Yemen or Nigeria or Pakistan.) But a distinction must be drawn between liberal necessity and illiberal excess. Wilders has thrown in his lot with excess. And while his travel schedule should be as promiscuous as he likes, his allies and apologists might be a bit more discriminating.

When Vladimir Nabokov had difficulty finding a publisher for his manuscript about an European pedophile loving and lurking his way through 1950's suburban America, he found one slightly encouraging respondent who suggested a slight tweak of the plot for purposes of marketability. Why not change Lolita "into a 12-year-old lad and have him seduced by Humbert, a farmer, amidst gaunt and arid surroundings, all this set forth in short, strong, 'realistic' sentences ('He acts crazy. We all act crazy, I guess.)"?

Every time some mid-ranking celebrity is caught with underage pornography on his computer (Pete Townshend just "researching" a memoir, Charlie Sheen driven to sexually confused distraction by the ruthless cunning of Denise Richards, the principal from Ferris Bueller's Day Off too unemployable to bother with damage control at all) or a hitherto unknown congressman is made to do some explaining to the wife and constituents, I cackle to think what might have been of transgressive postwar literature were it not for the artistic resolve of one Russian genius.

Rep. Eric Massa would have us believe that heterosexual 50-year-old Navy veterans like to tickle younger men in their employ. He would also like us to think that "groping" is something that can be done playfully but chastely. Look up "groping" in the dictionary.

Then there is this from those long, quiet nights at sea:

Clarke says that Massa's roommate, Tom Maxfield, was also assaulted. "Tom lived on upper bunk," Clarke say. "When you're on ship, you're almost exhausted 24-7. So a lot of times you sleep with your uniform on. Tom and Massa shared a stateroom together. Massa climbed up on the top of his bunk, which is hard to do--you never crawl up on somebody else's bunk. He wakes up to Massa undoing his pants trying to snorkel him." Ron Moss also confirmed hearing this story from Maxfield. Maxfield did not return calls and messages left for him--I'll update if he does.

And I'll eat my sock if that poor man comes forward or goes shallow diving in front of news cameras in the near future.

Massa's strongest defense is that he recently resigned from Congress not because of an Ethics Committee investigation into his rumored sexual harassment of male staffers but because of White House pressure against his opposition to the Democrats' health care plan--pressure exerted most memorably, he claims, by a nude Rahm Emanuel in the House of Representatives' gym shower. (Massa's strongest defense is still not any more hetero-erotic than any of the ethics charges against him.)

What is extraordinary -- and also extraordinarily unacknowledged in our narrative-driven, salacious press -- is how so much of the Obama's political career has hinged on sex lives of others, particularly the timing of their public exposure. He won his Senate seat in Illinois in 2004 because the Republican candidate Jack Ryan's ex-wife -- the woman who played "Seven of Nine" on Star Trek: Voyager -- chose an election year to say that Ryan used to take her to "a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling," forcing him coyly out of the race and allowing the entry of the always entertaining Alan Keyes. Had John Edwards' extramarital relationship and reproduction with Rielle Hunter been reported in outlets other than The National Enquirer before the Iowa caucuses in 2008, Hillary Clinton might well have found herself the recipient of Edwards' substantial votes in that harbinger contest and, quite possibly, the eventual Democratic nominee for president.

Now it is left to disgraced New York governor, himself the subject of sexual and criminal allegations and another reluctant antagonist of the president, to appoint Massa's replacement. Will it be someone more amenable to health care reform, or will a hapless and justifiably nihilistic David Paterson repay the party that disowned him by tapping another conservative blue dog Democrat who could jeopardize the biggest piece of social legislation introduced in a generation?

"Follow the money" is so passe. To see where political corruption begins and whence America's next loss of innocence is coming, follow the blacklight.

Anyone who has kept up with politics lately is no doubt aware that certain intellectual attitudes and habits recur no matter what the subject under discussion. The rise of the Internet has democratized what was once the purview of the professional opinion journalist, policy analyst, or historian and thus made certain tendencies in the debate over domestic and international politics into full-blown categories of bad thinking. By my count, there are five main varieties of these without which there would be far fewer cable news channels, blogs, documentary filmmakers, and entries on The New York Times bestsellers list for non-fiction. All varieties are subject to overlap.

Tragic Manicheanism. The metaphysical battle between good and evil has many engaged spectators, some of whom are so chronically assured of evil's triumph that they appear to subconsciously root for it. This is the religious concept of original sin in political grammar. The tragic Manichean believes that everything one's own government or society does is bad and that all those who oppose it are axiomatically good. A very childlike worldview, it nonetheless caters to a large swath of people who believe that passion is a valid substitute for evidence.

The recently deceased historian Howard Zinn made tragic Manicheanism his academic legacy and personal fortune when he published A People's History of the United States, a bestselling volume on the occluded history of the republic written on behalf of its tired, poor, and systematically duped. As Michael Kazin, a leftist critic, has pointed out: "U.S. history for Zinn was... a painful narrative about ordinary folks who kept struggling to achieve equality, democracy, and a tolerant society, yet somehow were always defeated by a tiny band of rulers whose wiles match their greed."

Abolition, suffrage, civil rights, the welfare state are thus stray clearings of social justice in an otherwise uninterrupted vale of oppression. Zinn made no genuine attempt to explain why the underdogs--who represent 99 percent of the American population by his own estimation--have worn their servitude with shrugging acceptance, other than to say that they're easily "distracted" by wars and periods of patriotic fervor. This was no improvement on the Marxian notion of false consciousness. How could it be since Zinn's hero-victims transcend the narrow category of class to include anyone who's ever got a raw deal in the past 235 years?

The problem for the tragic Manichean is that, in the eternal struggle for the dominion of heaven, arguing that some angels quite like what the demons have done with interest rates and constitutional amendments is an unspeakable blasphemy.

Read more...

Given that Rep. Ron Paul is now the dubious recipient of a CPAC straw poll for White House hopefuls, this essay by David Harsanyi at Reason magazine would appear to be a definitive libertarian rebuke of a crackpot fringe figure on the American right who has managed to capture the hot minds of so many graveyard shift AM disc jockeys and von Misesian economists:

Paul isn't a traditional conservative. His obsession with long-decided monetary policy and isolationism are not his only half-baked crusades. Paul's newsletters of the '80s and '90s were filled with anti-Semitic and racist rants, proving his slumming in the ugliest corners of conspiracyland today is no mistake.

Let us be clear: Paul is the honorary chairman of a group called Campaign for Liberty, whose website carries dossiers on "The History of Satanic World Banking" (any guess to what ethno-religious minority are the designated Satanists?), "The Bolshevik-Zionist Axis"and "Was Hitler was an Illuminati agent?" There's also a rich trove of 9/11 conspiracism and claims that the Rothschild family assassinated Presidents Lincoln, Garfield and Kennedy. For more on this delightful website, consult the excellent anti-racist blogger Adam Holland.

As Jamie Kirchick of the New Republic exposed during the 2008 primaries, there is hardly a lunatic cause to which the Congressman has not, in some way and at some time in his political career, had his name attached. And yet Paul's defenders have included Andrew Sullivan and Geoffrey Wheatcroft, both eccentric Brits and self-proclaimed conservatives.

Some have downplayed the significance of the CPAC straw poll by pointing out that it was the result of a voter turnout of a mere 30% of 10,000. But this just means that the unhinged and sinister elements are the most "mobilized."

William F. Buckley's finest hour was cleaving the John Birch Society -- still, I'm sorry to say, a prominent invitee at these CPAC confabs -- from the mainstream of the conservative movement. We have reached another crucial crossroads in extremist politics, yet there is nary a Buckley in sight.

Found any magazine of literary or cultural value that is explicitly inflected by the dialect of the tribe and you risk running into the same uneasy joke, time and again. "It's like a Jewish Slate," I once informed an editor at Slate by way of describing the nature and form of my old start-up haunt Jewcy. "So you mean just another Slate" came the reply I might have expected.

Where once ethnicity was a subtle or implicit characteristic of the highbrow publication (Partisan Review, Dissent), now it's simply bad manners to put out a new journal of criticism that doesn't claim to answer to a higher authority than Conde Nast.

I kid, but only a little. Here's Abe Socher, editor-in-chief of the already remarkable Jewish Review of Books, in his inaugural editorial:

This is an especially good time to launch a Jewish magazine of ideas and criticism. Perhaps it has always been a good time: the history of Jewish thought over the last two hundred years could be charted through a dozen periodicals in a half-dozen languages. But we live at a moment in which more Jewish books, and books of particular Jewish interest, are being published than ever before. Of the making of such books, it seems, there is no end. But of real criticism, considered judgment rendered in graceful, accessible prose, there is something of a scarcity.

The problem is not a lack of interesting Jewish writers, thinkers, or scholars. There are, to begin with, dozens of journals of Jewish Studies, for the most part geared to specialized academic work. Such scholarship is necessary and often important. But it does not suffice for understanding what it means to be a Jew in the modern world, or what Jewish texts and ideas might have to contribute to the larger discussion of important issues--religious, philosophical, political, ethical, literary--of the day. Then there are the newspapers, magazines, and websites that make it their full- or part-time business to report on Jewish culture. Here, with noble exceptions, the pressure of timeliness and the constraints of space combine to restrict the full, measured consideration that Jewish books and issues, in the widest sense, deserve.

Any endeavor that can meld art criticism of R. Crumb with a learned discussion of Israeli settlements is off to a good start. I also like the aura of assumed interest that most of the pieces in this maiden issue adopt. There's no attempt to talk down to the reader with my-bubbe-made-a-kishke folksiness, or titillate him with his own demographic inclusiveness. "Hey, did you know J.D. Salinger was Jewish?" Nor, I sincerely hope, will Mosaic patrimony be used as a moral standard for celebrating or scandalizing those who meet or fall short of it: "How does one quarter of Madeleine Albright live with itself?"

These are the vices of a niche magazine uncomfortable with its own mandate.

Until two weeks ago, Gita Sahgal led Amnesty International's gender-affairs unit and was considered an exemplar of human-rights activism. Now she's suspended from her job and in need of an attorney willing to confront a venerable nongovernmental organization that is celebrated by the likes of Bono and Al Pacino.

What happened? Ms. Sahgal tried to get her Amnesty colleagues to cease their partnership with Moazzam Begg, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee who is, as Ms. Sahgal rightly describes him, "Britain's most famous supporter of the Taliban."

Mr. Begg is a British citizen who was captured in Pakistan in 2001 as an enemy combatant and sent to Guantanamo. He was released without charge in 2005. Mr. Begg claims he was tortured and threatened with execution. He has since become a minor celebrity in the Western human-rights community.

He is currently the director of Cageprisoners, a group that bills itself as an organization that exists "solely to raise awareness of the plight of prisoners . . . held as part of the War On Terror." Amnesty describes Cageprisoners as a "leading human rights organization." Yet one of its senior members, Asim Qureshi, spoke at a 2006 London rally sponsored by extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, which promotes the idea of a renascent Islamic caliphate. Mr. Qureshi took the occasion to glorify terrorism in Iraq, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Kashmir.

Mr. Begg does not hide his own Islamist convictions. In his memoir, "Enemy Combatant," he recalls his interrogation at Guantanamo, in which he credits his emigration to Afghanistan to his desire "to live in an Islamic state--one that was free from the corruption and despotism of the rest of the Muslim world." The Taliban, Mr. Begg insists in his book, were "better than anything Afghanistan has had in the past twenty-five years." Elsewhere he has cited and sold the works of the "charismatic scholar" Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, erstwhile mentor to Osama bin Laden.

Read more...

Note to those following the Sahgal affair. I interviewed her for this piece and, as far as I can tell, she discloses original information about her internal criticisms of Begg and how these were received prior to her going public with them:

Especially galling for Ms. Sahgal is the fact that she only accepted her job after insisting to Widney Brown, senior director of International Law and Policy at Amnesty, that she be allowed to address the Begg alliance.

"I told her, 'If you don't give me the power to clean up this Begg situation, I won't take on the gender affairs assignment. Widney encouraged me to write a memo on it and even came past my office late one night while I was writing to discuss it. There was no internal resistance against this. So I was promoted with full support. Then, when the Sunday Times story broke, everything I uncovered was deemed 'innuendo.'"

Facing the beginning of a long period opposition that would culminate with a pick-ax lodged in his skull, Leon Trotsky is said to have remarked to his comrade Victor Serge, "Sometimes you end up like Lenin, and sometimes like Leibknecht." The leader of the Red Army is not today known for his ludic folk wisdom yet his communist in-joke captured a sentiment common to radicals of the twentieth-century; that of being both hopeful and pessimistic at the same time, morale and morbidity competing on any emotional stock exchange that runs from 1917 to 1989. Sometimes it's difficult enough to understand the world, changing it seems an unfathomable fantasy.

No journal of opinion has better embodied this manic-depressive outlook better than New Left Review, which celebrated its fiftieth year in print in 2010. Stefan Collini at the Guardian reflects on the curious lifespan of a "little magazine" of enormous influence that has outlived all other comers (Ramparts is obituarized in book-length form) principally by undergoing a vital transformation from fiery organ of the revolutionary vanguard into a cooler platform for sober--if often soporific--assessments of political and cultural realities. That change happened ten years ago exactly and it is more accurate to call the 40th anniversary of NLR the real milestone. As Collini writes:

Over the years, NLR had shown a proper regard for Gramsci's celebrated motto "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will", but many readers thought Anderson's 2000 editorial overdid the pessimism and gave precious little nourishment to the optimism. A French critic, in a reproach that must have stung the famously nonparochial and francophile Anderson, accused him of viewing things too narrowly from one side of la Manche: various forms of resistance, it was suggested, were much more visible in France, while others felt that forms of protest elsewhere in the world were similarly being undervalued. But, a decade on, Anderson's pessimism on this score scarcely seems exaggerated: in so far as the imperium of neoliberalism is being curbed, which is not far, it does not appear to be primarily the outcome of organised and politically effective opposition.

The debunking of Stalinism--the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 being the New Left's original charter--had proceeded apace with a worldwide economic evolution that this graying contingent was less equipped to anticipate much less fit into inductive "systems" of thought. Underestimating Thatcher's appeal as both a reactionary and revolutionary gave way to a dismissal of the hybridized juggernaut of the "Third Way," wherein free-market policies donned the softer vestments of social democracy. The Blair-Clinton program proved triumphant throughout Europe. The vogue intellectuals confined themselves to the specialized quarters of the academy where they were straightjacketed by the impenetrable jargon of postmodernism that, even amongst its finer spokesmen, never hovered far above self-parody. As Anderson phrased it, another gravedigger of radical promise was the current state of leftist writing that would "leave Marx or Morris speechless." The scintillating Hegelian of Rheinische Zeitung had come to dust as prophet and sage and Judith Butler was surely no replacement. Most dispiriting for those who once found time for Plekhanov and disarmament rallies was that the designated interpreter of the New World Order was not a proper member of the intelligentsia at all but a vulgate columnist for the New York Times.

Anderson's sorrowful acknowledgment of these losses quietly coincided with an announced rethink in publishing strategy. The January-February issue of NLR, his editorial stated, would mark the first installment of an aesthetically redesigned journal that took a proper accounting of these seismic shifts:

Its general approach, I believe, should be an uncompromising realism. Uncompromising in both senses: refusing any accommodation with the ruling system, and rejecting every piety and euphemism that would understate its power. No sterile maximalism follows. The journal should always be in sympathy with strivings for a better life, no matter how modest their scope. But it can support any local movements or limited reforms, without pretending that they alter the nature of the system. What it cannot--or should not--do is either lend credence to illusions that the system is moving in a steadily progressive direction, or sustain conformist myths that it urgently needs to be shielded from reactionary forces: attitudes on display, to take two recent examples, in the rallying to Princess and President by the bien-pensant left, as if the British monarchy needed to be more popular or the American Presidency more protected. Hysteria of this kind should be sharply attacked.

Of such scolding sobriety is a kind of left-wing cultural conservatism fashioned, although that was not the conjuncture Anderson wished to pursue at the time. Yet if refusing to cushion monarchy or the executive branch are the full extent of today's barricade struggles--even the implosion of the credit market and the global recession was greeted by the NLF masthead as a mere hiccup in the continued dominance of market capitalism--then the left could really do no other than objectively accommodate with the center and center-right elements.

Indeed, since Anderson's essay was published, there have been some telling areas of congruence between the elder statesmen of the soixante-huitard tradition and the complicated right, even if most have occurred outside the pages of NLF itself. September 11 happened, for one thing, and while the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were roundly condemned in the magazine using all the hoary mental categories of "imperialism" and national "resistance"--categories one would have assumed shelved by Anderson's prescription--the study given to neoconservative thinking in other left-wing quarters has yielded at least as much sophistication as lunacy. See the work of Paul Berman, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Kazin, Michael Walzer, Oliver Kamm, Nick Cohen and others.

Alexander Cockburn's climate change skepticism, which puts him comically out of sorts with the editors and readers of his Nation column (who must think a medieval warm period is when tempers are raised at the Palin household) is well-cited among the Telegraph-bound monitors of the University of East Anglia. Many progressives dissatisfied with the Obama administration for its perpetuation of Bush-era war policies unwittingly or complacently echo the isolationist tones of Pat Buchanan's American Conservative. Meanwhile, Nat Hentoff--a First Amendment absolutist by any definition--describes the new Democratic president as the most dangerous yet to our republic.

Other micro examples exist. Standpoint magazine's celebratory judgment of Tariq Ali's writings on his native Pakistan see daylight despite Ali's routine hosannas to Hezbollah and Hamas--those fetid zephyrs in the "radical winds of change"-- that appear in the pages of... New Left Review. The cooperation between uneasy left-liberal opponents of "anti-Zionism" and more reflexive conservative cheerleaders of Israel is another little-explored zone of ideological fusion.

Would that NLF fulfilled the terms of its renascent manifesto and addressed some of these ironies...

President Obama can be credited for having been the first American leader to meet with members of the Other Russia opposition, including Gary Kasparov and former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, co-author of the definitive white paper on the Putin regime. That event, small but significant in itself, took place last July during Obama's two-day summit in Moscow, at which the much-sensationalized topic of a "reset" on U.S.-Russian relations culminated in the following decisions:

1. In the interest of prompting Russian cooperation on further UN sanctions against Iran and the halting of its nuclear weapons program, the United States would abandon its proposed missile defense shield in Poland and the Czech Republic and refrain from publicly criticizing Russia's authoritarian domestic policies and human rights abuses;

2. Both countries would initiate negotiations toward a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) and a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT);

3. Russia agreed to let U.S. military planes to transport troops and weapons in its skies toward Afghanistan without incurring transit charges;

4. A bilateral presidential commission would be created to accelerate the pace of U.S.-Russian engagement on a host of issues ranging from civil society, culture, arms control, agriculture, education, and science and technology.

Six months have passed since the United States set about offering inducements to good behavior to its former Cold War antagonist, and it's worth assessing the progress that's been made thus far.

Read more...

"Through no wish of my own I have become the protagonist of a Jamesian problem. Do you ever read any Henry James, Mr. Schultz?"
"You know I don't have the time for reading."
"You don't have to read much of him. All his stories are about the same thing--American innocence and European experience."
"Thinks he can outsmart us, does he?"
"James was the innocent American."
"Well, I've no time for guys running down their own folks."
"Oh, he doesn't run them down. The stories are all tragedies one way or another."
"Well, I ain't got the time for tragedies neither. Take an end of this casket. We've only half-an-hour before the pastor arrives."
-- The Loved One

I am about embark on a trans-Atlantic adventure in part to see if my Anglophilia withstands actual Anglos at close proximity. "You don't understand," said my expat friend Ben, who's lived in New York for five years. "You like the ones you meet here fine, but we're the ones that got away." Maybe. But then I've also liked, at distance, the ones who chose not to get away and rather made a point of pride of the fact. Both Amises (one who alighted in Tennessee--of all places--for an academic stint and one who called America, borrowing a line from Bellow, "the moronic inferno"), at least three Waughs, a Larkin (who said that the United States was two cities interrupted by "vast deserts of bigotry"), a Stoppard, a Bennett, and only the one Powell (who pronounced it "pole.")

But from Paine to Dickens, there have been Brits who've toured our humble little experiment in exceptionalism and found much of interest and comfort but not quite enough to keep them from returning home. To this category we must now add Stephen Fry who, like his great mentor and on-screen embodiment, has nothing to declare to Customs except his genius:

"Stephen Fry in America" is an outgrowth of a six-part BBC miniseries of the same name, and organization of the book is closely related to the show. Through nine months of filming, on and off, he at least sets foot in all 50 states, and often navigates American waters. He works a lobster boat off Eastport, Maine; sails off Newport, R.I. in an America's Cup winning vessel; canoes the Mississippi River; tours a nuclear submarine in Connecticut; ferries across Lake Champlain to New York; and swims with dolphins off Florida.

He also descends into a West Virginia coal mine, ascends in a hot-air balloon over North Carolina, goes hunting with plaid-wearing weekend warriors in upstate New York, canvasses New Hampshire with presidential hopeful Mitt Romney and does turning doughnuts on a Texas beach in his trademark London big black cab.

The coal mine was an act of all too obvious homage:

Then I had to open a new vein, or lode, which with a silver drill I brilliantly performed, amidst unanimous applause. The silver drill was presented to me and the lode named "The Oscar." I had hoped that in their simple grand way they would have offered me shares in "The Oscar," but in their artless untutored fashion they did not. Only the silver drill remains as a memory of my night at Leadville.

If you believe, as I do, that with the retirement of Daniel Patrick Moynihan from the U.S. Senate the brightest flame in government was snuffed, you might also marvel at how the seat that once belonged to the distinguished gentleman from New York has been eyed and picked over by only the least worthy successors. Clinton, Kennedy, Gillibrand -- two beneficiaries of their own surnames with a shared sense of entitlement the size of the Hudson River, and one gubernatorial appointment who has so far made cheerful consensus and a perfect NRA rating the fresh face of New York exceptionalism.

To this sad assembly it seemed natural, not to say foreordained, that Harold Ford, Jr., a former representative from Tennessee and lately an MSNBC news analyst, Merrill Lynch executive, and Democratic Leadership Council chairman, should announce his membership.

If you read closely Ford's extensive interview with Michael Barbaro of the New York Times this month -- no easy feat in itself -- then you came away with the following understanding of the prospective legislator:

1. Even though he donated to Kristen Gillibrand's campaign two days after she'd been appointed senator in 2008, and did so solely at the request of an unnamed mutual friend, Ford sees no contradiction in opposing her now or in mildly assailing her legitimacy as unelected.

2. Most of Ford's time in Manhattan has been spent being driven from his home to the MSNBC studio on 42nd Street and 5th Avenue -- except when it's too cold and difficult to hail a cab; then he takes the subway.

3. Ford took a guided tour of the five boroughs with Sir Harold Evans and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, and because their helicopter landed in Staten Island, he can safely say he's been there.

4. Ford's appreciation of New York football is limited to the time he's spent at either team's home venue as the invited guest of the respective owners of the Jets and Giants (the Jets win by that metric).

5. Ditto baseball (the Yanks take it).

6. Ford became a supporter of gay marriage because of the political pressure he faced as an opponent of it.

Just as your mandible begins its slow ascent back into place, Ford outdoes himself as a shameless carpetbagger in yet another hometown newspaper, the Daily News, announcing that he's a regular Joe Chardonnay, chauffeured to work only once a week, and on strict network executive orders. Oh, and he "loves the smell of New York," a claim that not even the Tammany princeling Al Smith, who professed to be educated at the fish markets of Fulton Street, ever hazarded.

As the blogger Adam Holland reminded me recently, there are other, more sobering reasons why Gotham doesn't need Ford.

Read more...

Perhaps uninhibited by a victory they seldom thought possible, liberals wasted no time at all, upon the election of Barack Obama, in writing the obituaries for their vanquished opponent ideology. Numerous claims that the U.S. was now a "center left" nation were speciously advanced in print, but none so boldly as Sam Tanenhaus's essay in the New Republic, unambiguously titled, "Conservatism is Dead," which actually began with a dialectical observation about the past that subsequent paragraphs seemed to foreclose for the future: "In the tumultuous history of postwar American conservatism, defeats have often contained the seeds of future victory." How true.

Although Tanenhaus's analysis was historically rooted, his conclusion was premature in the extreme. He argued that, having forsaken the meliorist principles of Burke and Disraeli, American conservatism had transformed itself into a Marxist-style all-or-nothing warrior politics, abetted by intellectuals and at the mercy of "revanchist" impulses, chiefly being suspicion of big government, resentment of cultural "elites" and an unwavering faith in laissez-faire capitalist dogma. These impulses, said Tanenhaus, culminated in the presidency of George W. Bush but now, definitely with the election of a Hyde Park liberal and the dual failure of trying to transport democracy to Babylon and Milton Friedman to Wall Street, depleted themselves as electoral forces.

That was one year ago, before town hall meetings, "tea parties," Glenn Beck, Going Rogue and countless other examples of demagogic affronts to what Tenenahus, borrowing from Whittaker Chambers, termed the "Beaconsfield position" of classical conservatism, named for Disraeli's earldom. (Queen Victoria's favorite prime minister, it should be noted, inaugurated more social reforms favorable to the industrial working class than his Whig rival Gladstone ever could or that Marx and Engels were prepared to stomach from an arriviste Tory.)

Scott Brown is closer to the Beaconsfield position than he is to the "movement" politics of the Tea Party, however much the latter faction chose to ignore this glaring discrepancy. Indeed, no Republican who spoke as effusively of the late Ted Kennedy as Brown did at his victory celebration on Tuesday night could ever truly be mistaken for second coming of Sarah Palin. And yet, is there any doubt that revanchist impulses helped this unknown state legislator dislodge a 50-year partisan hold on a Senate seat in one of the "bluest" states in the union?

Timothy Noah of Slate points to one irony of the Massachusetts upset that was unforeseen by the liberal establishment: Fifty-six percent of those polled by Rasmussen Tuesday said that healthcare was their top priority while fifty percent of the same sample pool professed to want no healthcare bill at all over the one now in consideration in Washington. Even if these voters are misinformed as to what is in the Washington bill, they can afford to be as the recipients of a popular statewide health plan, carpentered by former Massachusetts governor and presidential hopeful Mitt Romney (another centrist Republican), which has served as a tacit model for ObamaCare and which the senator-elect is said to support.

Was it hubris or stupidity, then, that caused Democratic establishment to pin the hopes of its most ambitious piece of domestic legislation on a regional electorate it presumed to have the interests of the entire nation in mind? The only conclusion that can be drawn from Brown's victory is that healthcare was not an overriding concern for most Americans until it was turned into a controversy that begat a political liability. The president has compounded the problem by going back on his word to make the debate over a sweeping social reform transparent (broadcast live on C-Span) rather than occlusive. He has also intimated that voters hostile to his plan need only wait until it's implemented, with or without their consent, before appreciating its full effects. ("We are the ones we've been waiting for, except those of us too dumb to wait.")

The special election also reflects a justifiable animus against Democratic vices. No voter in Massachusetts wished to listen to John Kerry, spousal heir to the Heinz ketchup fortune worth an estimated $750 million, sound off about Brown's five residences, two of which are adjacent condominiums in a low-income neighborhood. Nor did any constituent want to be treated as if a special election were no more meaningful than a game of touch football at Hyannisport, and that campaigning out in the cold quite was too uncomfortable for the designated heir of the party apparatus.

Of such incidents are revanchist impulses rekindled.

In this illuminating profile in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Professor Tony Judt seeks and indulges no sentimentality about his terminal condition (he suffers from Lou Gehrig's disease, diagnosed about a year ago, which has all but incapacitated him). A life of the mind can be hindered but not stopped by wheelchairs and breathing mechanisms, and I found myself coming away with admiration for how Judt still seems only to care about social democracy and European intellectual history despite his debilitation. As a chronicler of the latter subject, he has attained a level of mastery that even his strongest detractors must concede.

Judt's undoubted masterpiece is Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, a book whose continental scope is belied by its incredible attention to the telling national detail. I learned a great deal about Central European Stalinism from Postwar, and it's a rare achievement for an encyclopedic history to allow a reader to breeze through 900 pages of Displaced Persons camps, Romanian Central Committee purges, and nationalized healthcare schemes, only to leave him only desiring more. The book arrived on the heels of a couple of intriguing volumes on French socialism and the twilight of intellectuals in the face of Soviet tyranny. Indeed, had Judt confined himself, at the apex of his justly earned celebrity, to what knew best -- the menacing shapes of political fevers in the second half of the twentieth century -- his legacy would be that of a hawk-eyed archivist of heady but purposeful debates, the Isaiah Berlin of Special Collections. But it is perhaps inevitable that one who had made a life's study of engage intellectuals should risk becoming a lesser specimen oneself.

Judt is the most popular stateside proponent of the so-called one-state solution in the Middle East, which is to say a fully democratic, secular country in which Arabs and Jews get along just fine, no matter what the demographic or parliamentary split. Whether you regard this project as a fairy tale out of Scheherazade or an anti-Zionist feint intended to eliminate the Jewish state altogether, may depend on how closely you parse this paragraph:

Judt was born into a lower-middle-class Jewish family of Marxist anti-Communists. They lived in London's East End, a historically Jewish section of the city. "Anti-Semitism at a low, polite, cultural level was still perfectly acceptable," Judt recalls. Fearing that their teenage son was too socially withdrawn, his parents, in 1963, sent him to a summer camp on a kibbutz in Israel. Judt became a committed Zionist. "I was the ideal convert," he says. A leader in left-wing Zionist youth movements, he even delivered a keynote address at a large Zionist conference in Paris when he was only 16 years old. (A smoker at the time, he seized the opportunity to denounce smoking by Jewish adolescents as a "bourgeois deviation.") In 1967, a few weeks after the Six-Day War, Judt volunteered as a translator for the Israel Defense Forces on the Golan Heights. He was surprised to find that many of the young Israeli officers he worked with were "right-wing thugs with anti-Arab views"; others, he says, "were just dumb idiots with guns." Israel, he came to believe, "had turned from a sort of narrow-minded pioneer society into a rather smug, superior, conquering society."

Unless this is poorly rendered by the article's author, who happens to be my friend Evan Goldstein, Judt appears be saying that a few rough run-ins with obnoxious sabras disillusioned him of the merits of Ben-Gurion's project, a plaint that, even in nostalgia, belongs more to an Evelyn Waugh reactionary than to an ivory tower social democrat. Let me inquire, then: were he today to spend a few hour in Gaza talking to Hamas militants about topics as diverse as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the proper attire and educational prospects for Muslim women, would Judt be prompted into a re-evaluation of his current integrationist model for peace in the Middle East?

I think I can say with confidence that he would not, but not because that would make him politically inconsistent. There's a whole narrative at stake here. Like many sound thinkers distracted by the din of the Levant, Judt has turned his attention to a complicated and well-populated field, been found wanting in his analysis by those who've been at it longer and know more than he, and come away feeling martyred for his trouble. It's a familiar story in which Judt seems to think himself an original protagonist

"The Shahid of Washington Square" was how Leon Wieseltier not long ago described Judt's narcissistic agonies when, in 2006, the Polish consulate of New York decided to disinvite him from a speaking engagement because, as its diplomat said at the time, Judt's views on Israel didn't quite mesh with those of the Polish government. It wasn't that simple; it never is when it comes to Israel, and dark motives were apprehended by the Voltaireans of the New York Review of Books, who would sooner die than give up the right to RSVP.

Odd, though, that Judt should have seen in this otherwise forgettable episode the dark hand of conspiratorial Semitic censorship: the elegant, Kundera-esque theme of Postwar, after all, was how Europe was only able to reinvent itself in the aftermath of the Second World War by "forgetting" its shameful participation in it. Poland, much like Germany, has maintained a soft spot for Israel for reasons rooted to ethics as much as to international relations. If Judt had been snubbed by anything, it wasn't the Anti-Defamation League; it was his own thesis.

His decline on matters of political economy has been steady ever since. To what pasted-together philippic against the legitimacy of Jewish statehood has Judt not lent his imprimatur? His warm appraisal of the Mearsheimer-Walt school of foreign policy, which argues that the United States will invade Iraq on Ariel Sharon's say-so--was that really a function of his intimate knowledge of Aipac lobbying efforts in Washington, or is it a way of sketching a tenuous line between the personal and the political? Judt may think Shlomo Sand's book on the "myth" of Jewish peoplehood is a vital contribution to ethnography and Sorelian illusion, but chances are that, as Jeffrey Goldberg put it, this volume will go the way of Arthur Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe for being yet another stale entry in the anti-Zionist's bibliograhic answer to Leon Uris. (Anita Shapira and Hillel Halkin have dealt with the substance of the book, here and here.)

Elsewhere in the landscape of current affairs, Judt has proved equally coarse and unreliable. 2006 was clearly his annus horribilis, the year he published "Bush's Useful Idiots" in the London Review of Books. Here, Judt reveled in making lists of dissidents and intellectuals he thought scandalized by their shared belief that removing a genocidal totalitarian was both wise and necessary:

In Europe, Adam Michnik, the hero of the Polish intellectual resistance to Communism, has become an outspoken admirer of the embarrassingly Islamophobic Oriana Fallaci; Vaclav Havel has joined the DC-based Committee on the Present Danger (a recycled Cold War-era organisation dedicated to rooting out Communists, now pledged to fighting the threat posed by global radical Islamist and fascist terrorist movements); Andre Glucksmann in Paris contributes agitated essays to Le Figaro (most recently on 8 August) lambasting "universal Jihad", Iranian "lust for power" and radical Islam's strategy of "green subversion". All three enthusiastically supported the invasion of Iraq.

Might the first two men, having grown up bullied by commissars and secret police, be expected to harbor natural sympathies with those living under the same conditions in a warmer climate? And before George W. Bush became president, what does Judt suppose Michnik, Havel and Glucksmann thought of Iraqi Ba'athism and the sanity of its continuance? As Goldstein notes, the rebuttal to this lame J'accuse of non-interventionist purity was authored by Todd Gitlin and Bruce Ackerman, both leftists opposed to the Iraq war, who called Judt's essay "nonsense on stilts." But no matter. Facts in the London Review of Books can be promiscuous as the commissioned prose:

But like Christopher Hitchens and other former left-liberal pundits now expert in "Islamo-fascism", Beinart and Berman and their kind really are conversant -- and comfortable -- with a binary division of the world along ideological lines. In some cases they can even look back to their own youthful Trotskyism when seeking a template and thesaurus for world-historical antagonisms.

I still eagerly await Peter Beinart's forthcoming memoir: Against the Grain: My Youth as a Trotskyist Revolutionist. And as for Berman, Kronstadt wasn't even his Kronstadt: he subscribed to an anarchism derived from the decidedly anti-Bolshevik Peter Kropotkin and best embodied in organized form by the IWW.

How curious that a fellow historian of the left would be so poorly conversant -- and comfortable -- with the manifold divisions of a radical tradition. Then again, you would expect the founder of the Remarque Institute to be able to draw the most basic distinctions between soldiers and the societies they inhabit, wouldn't you?

I can't claim immunity to the lure of assessing popular culture through an ideological lens, but sometimes the sort of case studies that might inspire book-length exegeses by David Foster Wallace can seem dull and pointless. Consider the brouhaha over James Cameron's visually impressive but substantively void film Avatar, which, after making $1 billion internationally in three weeks, has got some U.S. conservatives grumbling as to its supposed theme of anti-Americanism. The fictionalized Mark van Doren in Quiz Show put this kind of failure of cultural proportion best when told about his son's duplicitous intellectual sportsmanship on NBC: "That's like trying to plagiarize a comic strip."

Not that science fiction can't be both wondrous and intelligent. Robert Conquest is a scholar and practitioner of the genre, and his handle on twentieth-century politics, he might insist, deeply influenced both leisurely pursuits. But as far as sci-fi parables go, Avatar is no 2001: A Space Odyssey, nor, come to that, does it contain any sophisticated or Strangelovean quotient of political commentary relevant for our time.

The film concerns 10-foot cat people inhabiting an enchanted but perilous jungle planet and the human-run private enterprise looking to mine that planet, at the expense of its indigenous population, for an expensive element with untold industrial uses. For this, Cameron is said to dilate pessimistically on the Iraq war in particular ("No Fur for Unobtainium!") and Pax Americana in general. Are those Blackwater mercenaries cutting down ancient animist plantlife before setting their helicopter gunships on the ill-equipped feline subalterns? Before one tries to locate the Saddam Hussein of the Na'vi, it is worth mentioning that phrases like "shock and awe" occasionally pop out of Cameron's CGI imaginarium, already rendered in some theatres in the third dimension, which is exactly two more than the film's dialogue. Indeed, carping about Cameron's politics is like guessing at what George Lucas had in mind about the philosophy of Leo Strauss in the last Star Wars fiasco. Conservatives would do better to discuss the merits of a relevant and important film like The Hurt Locker lest they give some earnest counter-critics, like Slate's Tom Shone, reason to await the Goldstone Report on Avatar. Here's Shone:

Cameron has an uncanny feel for asymmetrical fights: It's what gives his films such a vicelike grip on the national unconscious and makes him a useful filmmaker to have around right now. If I were on the right, I'd be celebrating the director for his keen-eyed, conservative critique of Wilsonian foreign adventurism. Yes, its regrettable that the pivot point of the final battle hinges on the incursion of a deity, no less, but I also learned some interesting stuff about how to subdue any huge flame-colored dragons I see flying around the skies: You attack from above, where he least expects it. "Tarouk is the biggest, baddest boy in the sky," Jake Sully informs us. "He never gets attacked." With yet another airplane bomber in American custody, it would seem we cannot get enough of that lesson.

This is one way to put it. Another way would be to say that middlebrow entertainment is in over its head again, as is Shone when it comes to contemporary politics. (Wilsonian foreign adventurism typically does not mean genocide at the hands of private contractors). I'm also not sure how the abortive attack of Christmas Day, coming as it did more than nine years after air travel entered a state of permanent bureaucratic siege, represents anything other a near-miss victory for Islamist nihilism.

Now the real question is this: Did the Na'vi bring it all on themselves for making a pact with the devil?

The Onion once ran a headline: "Neighbors Remember Serial Killer as Serial Killer." In its own grimly hilarious way, this counters so much of the stupidity with which an international media now wonders how a seemingly polite graduate student from Nigeria could become the unsuccessful mass murderer Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

In fact, the would-be bomber spent years as a blissfully unmolested radical in training - not in the deserts of Yemen but on the cosmopolitan streets of London.

Here is Malcolm Grant, provost of University College London, where Abdulmutallab studied mechanical engineering and business finance from 2005 to 2008 - and where, for about a year, he also acted as president of the school's Islamic Society:

"The events of Christmas Day came as a complete shock to the UCL community.... [H]is tutors observed no aberrant behavioural issues. The same picture is painted by his fellow students - here was an ordinary student."

Either Grant has no idea what goes on at his own school, or British standards for "aberrant behavioral issues" are today remarkably low.

One of Abdulmutallab's accomplishments as Islamic Society president was to coordinate a so-called "War on Terror Week" - a five-day series of conferences in 2007 at which only the most well known anti-American and pro-jihad figures were invited to speak. These included Yvonne Ridley, a British journalist who was captured by the Taliban in 2001. Having emerged as a "fierce critic of the west," as the Guardian phrased it, who defended future Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's bombing of three Jordanian hotels in 2005, Ridley now draws a salary from Press TV, the English-language channel that is owned and operated by the Iranian regime.

Read more...

The summary of White House review of the abortive Christmas Day massacre of a planeful of Detroit-bound travelers leaves no room for debate as to accountability. The main points are:

1. Although Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was cited in the Terrorist Identities Datamark Environment (TIDE), he was not placed on the Terrorist Screening Database's watchlist--which would have prevented him from boarding a U.S.-bound aircraft--because he did not "meet the minimum derogatory standard to watchlist." This was due to a failure by National Counterterrorism Center and Central Intelligence Agency personnel to "correlate" all the available derogatory data on Abdulmutallab;

2. An initial search that would have identified the U.S. visa-holding Abdulmutallab with the man his father indicated to the CIA had been "radicalized" was the result of a misspelling of Abdulmutallab's name;

3. Nobody in the U.S. intelligence community seems to have appreciated the potential of Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

"Failure to connect the dots," "systemic failure," "the buck stops with me" -- such are the phrases produced by the president today to explain the second major act of terrorism -- excuse me, "foreign contingency operation" -- to occur within U.S. borders since his inauguration. As bureaucratic and euphemistic as these phrases are, they certainly beat his earlier non sequitur that Yemen, the country where Abdulmutallab is said to have first thrilled to jihadism, is a poor and backward nation, the implication being that the son of one of the wealthiest Nigerians was driven to set his crotch alight by poverty.

At a press conference a few minutes ago, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano actually managed to say that had Abdulmutallab landed in Michigan, well, then, we'd have surely nabbed him.

I have an op-ed in Monday's Daily News showing how the Underpants Bomber ought to have raised eyebrows while president of the Islamic Society at University College London. Never mind that M15, much like our own valiant CIA, had the goods on him yet failed to impede his itinerary....