Nymphadora Tonks

New York Times Magazine: How did you feel when you heard that Buckley died this year?

Gore Vidal: I thought hell is bound to be a livelier place, as he joins forever those whom he served in life, applauding their prejudices and fanning their hatred.

Well put. Coincidently I recently saw Jeff Garlin's documentary John Waters: This Filthy World which was hilarious. Waters is a unique guy.

and the singer ... rams Buddha down the throat of a giant silver dragon

There's a high you get from the classic 1970s "art-rock" of Yes, Genesis, or King Crimson-- and when it hits, there's nothing like it. I'm not talking about the way other music peaks, like a dance track where the beat kicks in and the crowd goes berzerk, or metal music that gets louder and louder until your skull caves, or gutbucket singers who can make your heart jump out of your chest. With art-rock, there's a lot of mumbo-jumbo and funny time signatures, and sometimes there's like 10 or 15 minutes of really boring shit (see: Yes, "Awaken"). But when the "good part" hits? Holy shit-- the band crescendos and the singer, smooth as silk but loud as God, rams Buddha down the throat of a giant silver dragon. If I sound like I'm growing a mullet, I've done my job.

Speaking of which, Stereolab has a new album dropping on August 18th, then a tour of the States this fall.

Oops

Defense Secretary Robert Gates fired the top civilian commander and the top general in the Air Force over "Atomic errors."

The inquiry involving the Air Force was an effort to determine how four high-tech electrical nose cone fuses for Minuteman nuclear warheads were sent to Taiwan in place of helicopter batteries. The mistake was discovered in March - a year and a half after the mistaken shipment.

Mr. Gates made clear that most troubling was that the inquiry showed how little the Air Force had done to improve the security of the nuclear weapons infrastructure even after it was disclosed last year that a B-52 bomber had flown across the United States without anyone’s realizing that it was carrying six armed nuclear cruise missiles.

Some had said that the bomber flight was consciously done as a warning to Iran. I didn't find that persuasive at the time and especially don't find it persuasive now that NATO-ally Turkey and Iran are coordinating attacks on Kurds in northern Iraq.

Dirt off your shoulder and shit off your shoes



(via Yglesias via Spencer Ackerman.)

"'If he had signed just one platinum act, all would have been forgiven. Instead he gave them Luna, Stereolab and the Afghan Whigs.' Things go from bad to worse, until 'Terry had lost his wife, which he pretended not to care about. Now he had lost his job. ... Six months later he was working at a gas station in New Jersey, changing oil and brake liners by day, snorting heroin by night.'"

Liz Phair quoting from Dean Wareham about "One particularly unforgettable story [involving] the rags-to-riches-to-rags-again tale of a high-flying A & R executive at Elektra named Terry Tolkin".

Herger the Joyous

Stick A Fork In It

I just heard the honey-voiced Wade Goodwyn say Obama won Texas.

To quote Heath Ledger's Joker: "Why so serious?"

said one commenter to a pro-Clinton commenter at Yglesias's blog.

Who's more radical?
(or poetry versus prose)

On paper Hillary Clinton or John Edwards may look better for progressive hopes - although no doubt Obama supporters would dispute this. I'll admit my enthusiasm for Obama wavered when I read that two of my favorite writers obliquely favored Edwards (Barabara Ehrenreich and Christopher Hitchens).

But then I read this brief for Obama by Lorrie Moore and my mind was blown like an audience member at a Tenacious D gig*.

Moore articulates my inchoate thoughts about the Democratic primary. Hillary Clinton made a category mistake when she said people shouldn't succumb to "false hopes." Cornel West has made a useful distinction about the term "hope." He said people are optimistic when they erroneously believe conditions are more favorable than they actually are. Pessimism is when one is erroneously negative. Hope is when one has a realistically negative outlook but also recognizes the possibilities for and works towards - against the odds - positive change. In West's formulation you can't have "false hope."

Obama and his supporters had hope which ended up transforming the political economy after the Iowa primary and altered the landscape, at least for the time being. (Was there an actual paradigm shift? We'll see.)

David Brooks wrote on that occasion "This is a huge moment. It’s one of those times when a movement that seemed ethereal and idealistic became a reality and took on political substance."

Maureen Dowd, who once called Obama "Obambi" opined: "The Obama revolution arrived not on little cat feet in the Iowa snow but like a balmy promise, an effortlessly leaping lion hungry for something different, propelled by a visceral desire among Americans to feel American again."

One can overstate the changes and significance - that would be being optimistic. Nevertheless the Obama campaign gave people more reason to hope.

-----------------
*Is that Amy Adams in the audience?

Do you come from the land down under?


Kendra Shaw had to make some tough choices in the new Battlestar Galactica movie. As circumstances forced her - for the most part - to become more and more like the cold "toasters" she was fighting, she began to hate herself more. This meant putting herself in risky situations without a second thought and using drugs to numb the pain and cope with the stress.

Lots of good things coming out of Australia lately. Like NPR's Jamie Tarabay or the John Butler Trio. Then there's Bret and Jermaine, who are from New Zealand of course.

The photo is of Iorek Byrnison, who appears in the Philip Pullman trilogy His Dark Materials. The first installment, The Golden Compass, is coming to the movie theaters soon. The website has an interesting feature which tells who your daemon is. Mine's a fox named Delilah.

BEHOLD THE POWER OF THE NERDFURY AND DESPAIR!

(via theGarance)

The question at hand was how to find good restaurants, and his answer was to take the city you want to go to and just google up some restaurant names that serve the dish you're after. Then go to chowhound or another foodie site, and rather than asking about restaurants, you put up an enthusiastic post talking about how you just had the best whatever you're looking for at one of these restaurants.

At that point, what drivingblind likes to call the nerdfury will begin. Posters will show up from nowhere to shower you with disdain, tell you how that place used to be good but has now totally sold out and - most important to your quest - will tell you where you would have gone if you were not some sort of mouth breathing water buffalo.

(via Kevin Drum, via Jim Henley, via Robert Donoghue)

A Devil's Haircut In My Mind



Great film. Have to say my favorite scene in No Country For Old Men is when Josh Brolin is trying to swim away from the furiously paddling pit bull. But there are many, many other great scenes. It is a violent, gory movie (which I'm not into - can't understand why so many people pay money to see all of those horror films Hollywood churns out) but it's a Coen brothers film. A wonderful, sad, scary, suspenseful, funny one with great actors. It's one of those movies where you don't know which way it's going to go.

Makes me feel lucky to live in Chicago which got screenings before the nationwide release.

Alfredo Stroessner, Colorful Dictator of Paraguay for 35 Years, Dies in Exile at 95

Thus was the obit heading in the New York Times I picked up this morning.

Lorrie Moore writes about Shakespeare.

That Bitch-Goddess Success

Random subject heading for some random thoughts. I love the Internet exclusive trailer and theatrical trailer for Jack Black's new movie Nacho Libre.

I love the new song by The Raconteurs

Find yourself a girl and settle down
Live a simple life in a quiet town

Steady as she goes (steady as she goes)
Steady as she goes (steady as she goes)

So steady as she goes

Your friends have shown a kink in the single life
You've had too much to think, now you need a wife

Akbar Ganji released from prison after serving a 6-year sentence.

Trial Began for Members of Aryan Prison Gang

The trial in the federal courthouse here is the first in a series growing out of a 2002 indictment of 40 members of the gang, which was formed in the mid-1960's by white inmates in the racially divided California prison system.
...
Prosecutors said the brotherhood had since adopted the tactics of organized crime families as it expanded to several other states and to a half-dozen federal penitentiaries, particularly the most secure "supermax" prisons at Florence, Colo., and Marion, Ill.

On trial now are four senior members of the brotherhood, including two of its early leaders, Mr. Mills, 57, known as "The Baron," and Tyler D. Bingham, 58, who goes by "T.D." or "The Hulk." Also on trial are Edgar W. Hevle, 54, known as "The Snail," and Christopher O. Gibson, 46.

The four are accused of ordering or participating in 15 murders or attempted murders over the past 25 years. They are being charged under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization laws, which have been used to prosecute Mafia families and other criminal groups. Federal prosecutors call the Aryan Brotherhood case, the result of four years of investigation by numerous agencies, the biggest federal death penalty case ever brought.

It takes a village

Events in Iraq called to mind these words which were written about another land with a much different history

We have been told that "it takes a village" and--never mind the implication for now--it probably does. A village or small town like Gorazde can mature for years in history's cask, ripening away for all its provincialism. The large majority of its citizens may be content or at any rate reconciled. But the awful and frightening fact about fascism is that it "takes" only a few gestures (a pig's head in a mosque; a rumor of the kidnap of a child; an armed provocation at a wedding) to unsettle or even undo the communal and humane work of generations.

Normally the fascists don't have the guts to try it, they need the reassurance of support from superiors or aid from an outside power and they need to know that "law," defined nationally or internationally, will be a joke at the expense of their victims. In Bosnia they were granted all three indulgences. But even at the edge of those medieval paintings of breakdown and panic and mania, when people still thought the heavens might aid them, there was often the oblique figure at the edge of the scene, who might hope to record and outlive the carnage and perhaps help rebuild the community. Call him the moral draftsman, at least for now, and be grateful for small mercies.

I'll admit it: I rely on the New York Times too much for my news. But it's so convenient and my "time management skills" are so lacking. And then there's my laziness. Michael Weiss over at Snarkwatch writes a pitch-perfect post about why the New York Times keeps ya coming back (besides the fact it gives you the lowdown on what everyone else is thinking however much you may disagree):

Once In A While In The New York Times... A passage like this comes along:

The subjects of his books included the Kronstadt naval base rebellion of 1921, an uprising of sailors against the Bolshevik regime that left more than 10,000 dead or wounded; the Haymarket Riot of 1886, in which seven Chicago police officers were killed by a bomb thrown at a workers' gathering; and the Sacco and Vanzetti case. He interviewed hundreds of adherents of the movement for one book, "Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America."

Paul Avrich, CCNY historian of anarchism and the Russian revolution, is dead at 74. The Old Left is steadily moving to the final stage beyond old.

Well, the Old New Left, as Avrich was slightly ahead of his time in a way. In other words, he was an inspiration to the New Left, like Herbert Marcuse.

Strange to learn Richard Kelly wrote the screen play for the Tony Scott film Domino. (Kelly also wrote and directed Donnie Darko.) Domino gets off to a good start with one of the three bounty hunter central characters employing their shotgun to blow away an attacking pit bull. Keira Knightly plays one of the bounty hunters, as does Mickey Rourke who was notably brilliant as Marv in Sin City and is good in this. Tom Waits also has a walk on part.

Rourke's character - who had spent hard time in Angola (the Louisiana State Penitentury and largest prison in the U.S.) - gives a nice speech to his bounty hunter buddie after said buddie freaks out because he has fallen for Knightly's character.

Let me tell you something. You see this? There was no prison riot. I blew off my own God Damn toe. Just to numb the pain. We all get weak over women. We all get weak over women. Fucking broads, they're all nuts. They know how to kill us. This kid in there? She's killing you.

Not anti-union

Interesting piece on how Cingular Wireless is neutral when it comes to unions organizing its workforce.

The Cold War fades into the distance

Theodore Draper, Freelance Historian, Is Dead at 93

The following in Thomas L. Friedman's (TimesSelect!) column caused me to do a mental doubletake:

To understand the Danish affair, you can't just read Samuel Huntington's classic, "The Clash of Civilizations." You also need to read Karl Marx, because this explosion of Muslim rage is not just about some Western insult. It's also about an Eastern failure. It is about the failure of many Muslim countries to build economies that prepare young people for modernity - and all the insult, humiliation and frustration that has produced. (emphasis added)

Shit

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 22 - Insurgents dressed as police commandos detonated powerful explosives on Wednesday morning inside one of Shiite Islam’s most sacred shrines, destroying most of the building, located in the volatile town of Samarra, and prompting thousands of Shiites to flood into streets across the country in protest.

A Few Good Men

Jane Mayer writes about Alberto J. Mora - once the general counsel of the United States Navy - Guantánamo Bay, and Torture.

One of the writers who has been good on the torture travesties is Andrew Sullivan. He writes about Mayer's piece at his blog.

from Chinatown

Jake Gittes: I just want to know what you're worth. Over ten million?
Noah Cross: Oh my, yes.
Jake Gittes: Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can't already afford?
Noah Cross: The future, Mr. Gitts, the future.

Julian Sanchez writes about the NSA warrantless spying program.

He links to an interesting Washington Post piece and a New Republic piece by Richard Posner.

I caught the Attorney General on Charlie Rose's show tonight and he brought up a new justification beyond the Force Resolution (AUMF) of 2001. He wasn't clear, but he said something about the President's power to act in national security matters. He also argued again that there's a clause in FISA that says Congress may give the President greater powers - or take away oversight - in future cases, but critics continue to argue FISA has the word "exclusive" in it.

Equilibrium, i.e. non-dictatorial
(or the Domestic Spying/Terrorist Surveillance Program)

I recorded the entire Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with Attorney General Gonzalez about the administration's NSA domestic spying program and watched the entire thing.

The hearing focused on a program Bush authorized for the NSA that allows it to use warrantless electronic surveillance on international communications from Al Qaeda or affiliated groups with American citizens within the "homeland." Warrantless means the other two branches of government have no oversight or "check" on what the administration is doing in regards to the domestic half of the international communication being spied upon.

Justice Jackson's concurring opinion in the "Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer" Supreme Court decision was referred to by some because of its discussion of the limits of the Executive branch's powers.

The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was Congress's response to the abuses of wiretapping by previous administrations. Apparently, according to this law the government needs a warrant from a special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court in order to perform certain electronic surveillance. Shortly after 9-11 and the 2001 resolution, the Authorization of the Use of Military Force (AUMF, against al Qaeda) given to the President by Congress, the administration decided that it didn't need to go to this court to get warrants for NSA spying on international communications from al Qaeda or related groups to American citizens in the US.

The issue is that half of the communication is within the US and hence domestic. Attorney General Gonzalez told the hearing the President didn't authorize a warrantless domestic to domestic communications surveillance program, because of the politics, essentially. However, he didn't say whether or not the AUMF, or the Constitution, gave the Executive that power.

It looks like politics, the media and the public will decide this issue. It came to light because of a leak and, outside the Executive branch, only the top 8 members of Congress regarding intelligence issues had been informed of the program. (Gonzalez said because of the AUMF and the Executive's constitutional powers, it wasn't required to inform anyone else.)

However, after 9-11 Congress changed FISA to make it easier to use. Someone elsewhere on the Internet wrote

While Feinstein touched on it, what is the explanation of the Administration for the clause in FISA allowing the President warrantless wiretapping for 15 days after Congress declares war? According to Gonzalez, FISA is Constitutional, he just doesn't think it applies in time of war. So what was the point of that clause? According to him, wouldn't that clause be unconstitutional because it appears to limit Presidential powers in wartime?

Gonzalez told the hearing that the AUMF superceded FISA - or did he? - plus FISA is too burdensome. Well if FISA doesn't apply because of the AUMF, how is it burdensome? And how come this program wasn't mentioned when FISA was altered after 9-11?

Interestingly, Gonzalez noted that the AUMF is *not* a declaration of war by Congress, but simply what it states: a Congressional authorization of the use of military force.

Republican Senators Specter, Graham, DeWine and Brownback all questioned the administration's use of the AUMF to back up the legality of the NSA/al Qaeda-domestic spying program. As the New York Times reports

Mr. Gonzales also clarified again a statement he made on Dec. 19, a few days after the spying program was disclosed by The New York Times. At the time, he said the administration had not sought an amendment to the 1978 law because "certain members of Congress" had "advised that that would be difficult, if not impossible." Since then Mr. Gonzales has said the real problem is that such legislation could not be enacted without compromising the program.

So it sounds like they knew the other branches of government would see it as a power grab.

Those who subscribe to the Vic Mackey* theory of law enforcement wonder what the big deal is. They should study the domestic spying abuses which led to the encactment of the 1978 FISA law and consider the experience of other countries which don't value a system of checks and balances. Senator Specter spoke of the equlibrium amongst the various branches of govenment and warned that the administration may be disturbing it. All he recommended, though, was that the administration bring the program before the FISA court and see what it had to say. Perhaps there's a chance Congress will do something if Gonzalez doesn't follow his advice, but it looks like this will be decided by the public and politics rather than the law and Constitution.

Emily Bazelon writing in Slate on the hearings.

blogger Glenn Greenwald

Noah Feldman writing in the New York Times Magazine

*character on the television show The Shield

Havrilesky writes about the State of the Union speech.

The Market System and Shifting Alliances
President Bush, who was well-known for not travelling outside the country much at all, spoke a great deal in his state of the union on America's need to globalize and mix it up with the rest of the world. In fact, in his opinion it's America's duty to lead all other nations.

I haven't seen the film Syriana but from what I hear it portrays the US government's foreign policy as highly cynical and mercantilist, the very opposite of what a global leader should be. Or does it?

The plot involves an oil-rich Middle Eastern nation whose leader has made contracts with China to sell its oil at much higher prices than the US is currently paying. This leader is a genuine reformer who wants to use the increase in government revenue to benefit his citizens. The market system at work, in a sense. The CIA assassinates this leader so that his pro-American brother can assume power and continue the preferential treatment of America.

So, yes the Americans behave badly on the international stage. But what about the Chinese? In the real world, they back the genocidal regime of Sudan because of oil. They back the klepto-theocratic rogue regime of Iran because of oil. And they keep the American government and economy afloat via massive loans. But they need the American consumer to keep their economy growing.

I'm in the middle of reading Steve Coll's Ghost Wars which is partly about the CIA's support of the Afghan rebels in their war with the Soviet Union's invading force. Most of the weapons the CIA initially supplied to the rebels came from Communist China, a mortal enemy of the Soviet Union.

So, first the US formed an alliance with the Soviet Union against fascist Germany. Then it allied with radical Islam, a defeated Germany and Communist China against the Soviet Union. Now it's allied with Germany, Russia and China against radical Islam.

"Gameness" (or man's best friend)

Malcolm Gladwell, about whom I know nothing, writes:

Pit bulls, descendants of the bulldogs used in the nineteenth century for bull baiting and dogfighting, have been bred for “gameness,” and thus a lowered inhibition to aggression. Most dogs fight as a last resort, when staring and growling fail. A pit bull is willing to fight with little or no provocation. Pit bulls seem to have a high tolerance for pain, making it possible for them to fight to the point of exhaustion. Whereas guard dogs like German shepherds usually attempt to restrain those they perceive to be threats by biting and holding, pit bulls try to inflict the maximum amount of damage on an opponent. They bite, hold, shake, and tear. They don’t growl or assume an aggressive facial expression as warning. They just attack. “They are often insensitive to behaviors that usually stop aggression,” one scientific review of the breed states. “For example, dogs not bred for fighting usually display defeat in combat by rolling over and exposing a light underside. On several occasions, pit bulls have been reported to disembowel dogs offering this signal of submission.” In epidemiological studies of dog bites, the pit bull is overrepresented among dogs known to have seriously injured or killed human beings, and, as a result, pit bulls have been banned or restricted in several Western European countries, China, and numerous cities and municipalities across North America. Pit bulls are dangerous.

Hitchens continues his war on cliche in a review of a Flaubert book:

This made me laugh:
"Still, it is a trope to rival that of Proust's Mme. Verdurin, who loved nothing better than 'to frolic in her billow of stock expressions.'"

Julian Sanchez interview with Russell Tice, one of the NSA leakers. Reminds of that cheesy movie Sneakers, which starred Ben Kingsley, Mary McDonnell, Dan Aykroyd, Sidney Pointier, David Strathairn, Robert Redford, and River Phoenix, deceased brother of Joaquin.

Article on Cat Power, 33, and Beth Orton, 35, and their new albums.

CyberMonday (or virtual shoppers, reality-based debtors)

Just when you thought the Holiday season couldn't get any worse, a new word is given birth. Just kidding. No, but if it's used again next year, it means the word has staying power.

Animal Planet Reality Show To Put Bear, Antelope, Hawk, Cheetah In Same House

Paradox or not?

Thought-provoking piece on the development, to use a dry word, of science via the human imagination/instinct/creativity by Ian McEwan.

I noticed the same thing Neal Pollack did:

As the Sox cruised toward their destiny tonight, with one out in the 9th, Mr. Buck started naming off South Side neighborhoods. He got them right: Bridgeport, Hyde Park, Back Of The Yards, and a couple of others. He then mentioned how the South Side is home to many different ethnic groups: Irish-American, Polish, Lithuanian....and then he stopped.

How in the world can a grown man in the sports business talk about the South Side of Chicago and possibly not mention that black people live there? Or hundreds of thousands of Mexicans? Or, you know, people from non-Caucasian ethnic groups.

Lakshmi Chaudhry takes issue with some of the themes of Ariel Levy's new book which I brought up here.

(via Doug Ireland.)

Iran vs. Israel

I don't know the significance of this, but Iran's hardline President said today that Israel must be "wiped off the map." The New York Times reports

Senior officials had avoided provocative language over the past decade, but Mr. Ahmadinejad appears to be taking a more confrontational tone.
...
France's foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, learning of Mr. Admadinejad's comments, said "I condemn them very forcefully," adding that he will summon Iran's ambassador to Paris to ask for an explanation, Agence France-Presse reported.

Hamas in the Palestinian territories and Hezbollah in Lebanon both have the same goal. Even so, it's good policy to draw them into the democratic, political process in their respective governments, just as it was good to draw the IRA, another terrorist organization, into the political process via Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland. The IRA recently made a historic step by disarming. Hopefully one day, Hamas and Hezbollah will do the same, and change into organizations (or merge with others) that recognize Israel.

The Iranian mullahs' bluster may reflect their growing weakness in Iran itself. (See Timothy Garton Ash's piece in the New York Review of Books.) But this also may be a result of Iran's growing influence in Iraq. Unfortunately, Iran's likely to get nuclear weapons in the near-to-mid term, despite the West's efforts.

Democratizing the Middle East

The NYTimes reports:

Israel began on Sunday to back away from its opposition to participation of the armed Islamic group Hamas in Palestinian elections, having failed to persuade President Bush to offer public support for its stance.
..
Mr. Sharon contends that Mr. Abbas must disarm Hamas immediately. Last month, on a visit to New York, Mr. Sharon said that "we will make every effort not to help" the Palestinians hold elections if Hamas took part.

His comments were interpreted as part of a campaign to get Mr. Bush to side with Israel. But Mr. Abbas told Agence France-Presse that he had persuaded Mr. Bush last week in Washington "that we have a democracy, and the movements of all political colors must be allowed to participate in the elections."

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
-John Kenneth Galbraith

(via Matthew Yglesias)

Sheep go to Heaven, goats go to Hell

Came across this succinct description of Hume and his thought:

As he lay dying at home in his native city of Edinburgh, David Hume entertained a visitor by conjuring up, with characteristic cheerfulness, a scenario in the afterlife. He imagined himself begging the fatal ferryman Charon for a little more time: "Have a little patience, good Charon, I have been endeavoring to open the eyes of the public. If I live a few years longer, I may have the satisfaction of seeing the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition." The "prevailing system" which Hume had become most notorious for attacking was the Christian religion, whose favorite tenets-providence, miracles, the argument from design, the afterlife itself-he had called into question, with increasing audacity, over the course of his work. But he had also done much damage to newer systems of thought, notably Locke's. Locke had regarded personal identity as coherent and continuous, the consequence of lifelong experiences and ideas accumulated in the memory. Hume, in his early, massive Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740), waived all this away as an arrant fiction-though perhaps a necessary one, since empiricism properly pursued reveals so radical an incoherence in mortal minds that empiricists themselves must intermittently abandon philosophy in order to go about their daily lives. Like many of his empiric predecessors, Hume argued that knowledge of the real world "must be founded entirely on experience"; more than any predecessor he was willing to entertain (and to entertain with) the doubts and demolitions arising from that premise. In his own lifetime, his skepticism did not prove as contagious as he had hoped. The Treatise, he recalled wryly, "fell deadborn from the press, without reaching such distinction as even to excite a murmur among the zealots." Though his attempt to recast his chief arguments more succinctly in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) prompted a somewhat livelier response, he eventually made his fortune not as a philosopher but as author of the highly successful History of England (1754-1763). He faced the general indifference or hostility to his arguments as blithely as he later greeted death, continually refining his views and revising his prose. He knew himself out of sync with his times. When, in his fantasy, he forecasts to Charon the imminent downfall of superstition, the ferryman responds, "You loitering rogue, that will not happen these many hundred years. Do you fancy I will grant you a lease for so long a term? Get into the boat this instant, you lazy loitering rogue." More than two hundred years later, the artful mischief of Hume's work has secured him some such lease. His writings, lucid and elusive, forthright and sly, demand (and receive) continual reassessment; his skepticism has proven more powerful than his contemporaries suspected, and he figures as perhaps the wittiest and most self-possessed philosophical troublemaker since Socrates.

Mira Sorvino's two-part series Human Trafficking begins tonight. Her breakout role was as a prostitute in Mighty Aphrodite, but before that she was in Barcelona.

Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's chief of staff at the State Department said at a recent speech:

Well, Saddam Hussein really cared about deterring the Persians – the Iranians – and his own people. He didn’t give a hang about us except on occasion. And so he had to convince those audiences that he still was a powerful man. So who better to do that through than the INC, Ahmad Chalabi and his boys, and by spoofing our eyes in the sky and our little HUMINT, and the Brits and the French and the Germans, too. That’s all I can figure.

The consensus of the intelligence community was overwhelming. I can still hear George Tenet telling me, and telling my boss in the bowels of the CIA, that the information we were delivering – which we had called considerably – we had called it very much – we had thrown whole reams of paper out that the White House had created. But George was convinced, John McLaughlin was convinced that what we were presented was accurate. And contrary to what you were hearing in the papers and other places, one of the best relationships we had in fighting terrorists and in intelligence in general was with guess who? The French. In fact, it was probably the best. And they were right there with us.

In fact, I’ll just cite one more thing. The French came in in the middle of my deliberations at the CIA and said, we have just spun aluminum tubes, and by god, we did it to this RPM, et cetera, et cetera, and it was all, you know, proof positive that the aluminum tubes were not for mortar casings or artillery casings, they were for centrifuges. Otherwise, why would you have such exquisite instruments? We were wrong. We were wrong.

Those demanding a pullout of American troops should read up on the Algerian civil war.

Porn-tastic!
Review of a book on the "pornification" of American youth culture. It's coming not from the right, but from the feminist Left and notes the dialectical aspect of said pornification. Reminds me of some Red Hot Chili Pepper lyrics:

Destruction leads to a very rough road
But it also breeds creation
And earthquakes are to a girl's guitar
They're just another good vibration
And tidal waves couldn't save the world
From Californication

And some lyrics heard today on the radio which gave me a pang:

We went to a shopping mall
And laughed at all the shoppers
And security guards trailed us
To a record shop
We asked for Mojo Nixon
They said "He don't work here"
We said "If you don't got Mojo Nixon
Then your store could use some fixin'"

We got into a car
Away we started rollin'
I said "How much you pay for this?"
She said "Nothing man, it's stolen"

Two of my favorite actors. I recommend Victor Navasky's new book about his life. One can't overestimate how Joseph McCarthy influenced that generation of the Left.

A belated note on the death of Simon Wiesenthal. Some nice quotes to have on your grave, as Royal Tennenbaum might say.

"But clearly Simon Wiesenthal haunted his quarry. One of Mengele's fanatical Nazi protectors in Brazil, Wolfgang Gerhard, said he had dreamed of hitching Mr. Wiesenthal to an automobile and dragging him to his death."

"It was a matter of pride and satisfaction, he said in 1995, as he approached his 87th birthday, that old Nazis who get into quarrels threaten one another with a vow to go to Simon Wiesenthal."

The New York Times reports:

U.S. Says It Has Killed No. 2 Qaeda Operative in Iraq

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 27 - ...

As insurgent attacks continued across Iraq today, American and Iraqi officials offered further details about the killing on Sunday of Abu Azzam, whom they described as the top lieutenant of Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

I'd bet $1,000 "anti-war" "expert"Juan Cole doesn't report the good news on his blog tomorrow. He grudgingly refers to Zarqawi's group as "Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia" apparently slow to give ground to Bush's imagined propaganda efforts.

Also, the Times gives more details on how Sistani is keeping a lid on things:

Also today, the renegade Shiite cleric Moktada al Sadr issued an unusual public request for guidance on how to deal with Mr. Zarqawi, who declared a "full-scale war" on all of Iraq's Shiites two weeks ago.

Days after his declaration of war, Mr. Zarqawi issued a qualifier, exempting certain groups including followers of Mr. Sadr, who has sometimes allied with Sunni fighters in his resistance to the American presence here.

Seemingly embarrassed by that exemption, Mr. Sadr publicly sought guidance on how to fight Mr. Zarqawi's attacks from Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most revered Shiite cleric.

The ayatollah responded in an unusually lengthy statement, in which he repeated his previous counsel to Iraqis to "continue in their self restraint, along with more caution and alertness." Mr. Sistani also said that the insurgents' purpose was to "start the fire of civil war in this beloved country," and that Iraqis must not allow them to succeed. He called on the government to protect Iraqis, and on the courts to speed up their work in trying and sentencing those accused of murder.

I recently corresponded with a Lieutenant in the Marine Corps who mentioned in a neutral, or possibly ironic way, that he had seen General Mattis give a talk at Quantico. Here's what the often inaccurate Wikipedia has to say:

On February 1, 2005, Lieutenant General Mattis, speaking to a forum in San Diego, apparently said "You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." "Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot. It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you, I like brawling." Mattis' remarks sparked controversy, and General Michael W. Hagee, Commandant of the Marine Corps, issued a statement suggesting that Mattis should have chosen his words more carefully, but would not be disciplined.

General Mattis popularized the slogan "no better friend, no worse enemy" among his command. This phrase became central in the investigation into the conduct of Lieutenant Ilario Pantano, a platoon commander serving under General Mattis. Lieutenant Pantano shot a pair of prisoners on April 15, 2004. He said that he thought they represented a threat. Lieutenant Pantano emptied two entire magazines into their bodies, because he wanted "to leave a message". He then scrawled General Mattis's slogan over the bodies.

EDIT: He is portrayed by Robert John Burke in the HBO miniseries Generation Kill.

Warning: Personal Confessional Bullshit
Dear Reader (all 0-2 of you),

Sorry for the sporadic postings. My ego took a beating recently at
the hands of - who else? - the fairer sex. After A. and I dated for a year,
she decided I wasn't The One and promptly dumped me. After I had completely fallen for her.

What happened - I think - can best be illustrated by a Harlon Ellison
science fiction story. The 1975 film A Boy and His Dog, starring a young
Don Jonson, was based on an Ellison short story of the same name. In
the film, a young man and his loyal dog wander a post-Apocalyptic planet
scavenging for food and sex. They finally meet a woman who they share some adventures with and hit it off with. In the end, though, they end up going their separate ways.

The short story is actually much harsher. After hitting it off and making
narrow escapes from danger, the three end up running out of food while
wandering a wasteland. What do you think happens next, dear reader? Wrong, actually the young man and his dog eat the woman to survive.

How does this relate to this blogger's travailles? Well, I'm highly
allergic to dogs and cats, and A. has a dog which she's very attached to.
I guess it's surprising we lasted as long as we did.

Anyhoo, enough about me. I like how Hak Mao, posts random pictures at her
blog without comment, so I plan on doing a bit of that.

A Menace to Society by Peter Bagge

"Who Moved My Ability to Reason?" by Barbara Ehrenreich

From a New York Times review of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory:

The secret of Dahl's charm, and Wonka's, is that neither one seems to be an entirely nice person. Or, rather, neither has much use for the condescending sweetness that some adults adopt in the belief that children will mistake it for niceness. Dahl's sensibility was gleefully punitive; he was a scourge of bullies, brats and scolds, and a champion of unfussy decency against all manner of beastliness.
...
Mr. Depp, in a recent interview, has dropped the name of the Vogue editor Anna Wintour. To me, the lilting, curiously accented voice sounded like an unholy mash-up of Mr. Rogers and Truman Capote, but really, who knows?

An interesting history of Suck.com.

Brad DeLong on the "Celtic Tiger" economy of Ireland.

Tim Cavanaugh on the underwhelming "Downing Street Memo," which Cavanaugh notes some feel is iron-clad proof, as iron-clad as the Massey Prenup, of the "warmongers'" dishonesty.

Bad News Bears

Richard Linklater's remake is due out next month. He did a great job with School of Rock among other films, so there's reason for hope.

Charles Taylor, not the writer from Salon I bet, has a piece on the original
in Slate.

I was born in 1970 and there was something about this 1976 film that resonated. It captures how kids interact, especially in sports. And who can forget Lupus (looking glum yet thoughtful front and center in the photo) and how Tanner (shrimp on the far right) stuck up for him even though the bullies outnumberd Tanner?

Heather Havrilesky writes some more at her blog.

Micchael Young writes about the murdered Lebanese columnist Samir Kassir

Mark Felt, a.k.a. Deep Throat, in
his old-timey FBI action pose.

Ruling Class Revolutionaries
(and nihilistic sectarians)

Maybe you've heard of the band Decemberists whose leader says the name refers to people who feel December is their month. "They're sort of stuck in this month. And I think that sort of speaks to the songs and the characters in the songs: sort of marginalized, sort of on the outskirts, all living in the coldest month." Never realized some people get stuck in a certain month. Seems a little on the self-pitying side.

Anyway, there's also the blog "the Decembrist."

In the June issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Hitchens discusses Mikhail Lermontov, the inheritor of the failed, but noble Decembrist tradition.

Early Russian literature was intimately connected to the Europeanizing and liberal tendency of the "Decembrist" revolution of 1825, which was enthusiastically supported by Pushkin and his inheritor Lermontov. And the debt of those rebels to Byron's inspiration was almost cultish in its depth and degree.

Speaking of cultish worship, Che Guevara is quoted as an authority in a New York Times piece on the peculiar nature of the Iraqi "insurgency":

If the insurgency is trying to overthrow this regime, it is contending with a formidable obstacle that successful rebels of the 20th century generally did not face: A democratically elected government. One of the last century's most celebrated theorists and practitioners of revolution, Che Guevara, called that obstacle insurmountable.

"Where a government has come to power through some form of popular vote, fraudulent or not, and maintains at least an appearance of constitutional legality," he wrote, "the guerrilla outbreak cannot be promoted, since the possibilities of peaceful struggle have not yet been exhausted."

The Decembrists of course weren't facing an elected government and the revolution they fought for wouldn't happen for almost another century. Of Lermontov's death by duel, Hitchens writes,

When Lermontov was brought to the field of honor he apparently declined to fire on the fool who had provoked the duel. Slain on the spot, he never heard the czar's reported comment: "A dog's death for a dog." His unflinching indifferece on the occasion, however, drew on two well-rehearsed nineteenth-century scenarios: The contemptious aristocrat on the scaffold, and the stoic revolutionary in front of the firing squad. The Decembrists, in their way, admired and emulated both models.

The anti-American revolt in Iraq, which mainly targets Iraqis, is a nihilistic, sectarian variation on the unflinching indifference of the classic revolutionary.

Max Sawicky's informative take on the economy.

Canary in the Coalmine
(or I've seen the best minds...)

Neal Pollack's piece on the news that Dave Chappelle has checked himself into a mental-health clinic in South Africa and backed out on the new season of his show sort of annoyed me.

I love Dave Chappelle and even though I don't know him, I'm a little sad about the news. Pollack writes,

Chappelle may be America's most incisive and original comic mind on issues of class and race, but that's not what frat boys are thinking about when they buy his DVDs. It's "I'm Rick James, bitch," all the time. Chappelle made his own choices, and, like the rest of us, he has to live with the consequences, even if he is better funded. It's not our fault.

Pollack does recognize Chappelle's unique talent, but he's hinting that Chappelle is sort of a sell-out and that his current troubles may be a result of that "choice." I don't see Chappelle as a sell-out at all. Anyone who can include "incisive and original" bits on race, class and politics in their comedy in today's America isn't.

Pollack highlights Chappelle's drug humor and assumes drugs are the source of his problems when it's more likely a matter of his fame clashing with his integrity. (The New York Times reports, "Representatives of Mr. Chappelle have vehemently denied that drug use played any role in the suspension of his show.") In other words I give Chappelle more credit than Pollack does. Pollack's main intent is to blame and critique the wider "hipster culture" but by noting that frat boys love Chappelle too - even though he could be merciless about that type of individual - and slamming Chappelle on the fact, he exemplifies the worst tendencies of that culture. (Last season, "Chappelle's Show" averaged more than three million viewers a week, twice as many as Comedy Central's other big draw, "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart." I've read the DVDs are the best-selling for TV DVDs. No doubt Pollack believes the Bush-bashing Daily Show has more "hipster cred.")

I recently finished moving residences so here's a salad of links I've stored up, in random order:

Fareed Zakaria has a new show, Foreign Exchange, which I've set my DVR to record.

Marjane Satrapi has a new book out, titled Embroideries.

Heather Havrilesky manages to write an entire column in "Deadwood"-speak, as only she can do.

Hitchens's book on Jefferson coming soon.

Peter Maass reports from Iraq.

Peter Bagge's Hate Annual #5 out.

"Socialize the risk, privatize the profit" (City government and the sports industry, a metaphor for late capitalism, in my opinion. Matt Welch's entry over at Hit and Run)

Sidney Blumenthal in Salon links to a piece by Brad DeLong over at Salon's competitor Slate.

The devilish Hitchens in the Wall Street Journal editorial pages:

"Thou knowest the commandments, Do not commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Honor thy father and thy mother." And he said, "All these have I kept from my youth up." Now when Jesus heard these things, he said unto him, "Yet lackest thou one thing: sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me." (Luke 18:20-22)

...It turns out that the Eleventh Commandment is not "Thou shalt speak no ill of fellow Republicans," but is, rather, a demand for the most extreme kind of leveling and redistribution.

I have never understood why conservative entrepreneurs are so all-fired pious and Bible-thumping, let alone why so many of them claim Jesus as their best friend and personal savior. The Old Testament is bad enough: The commandments forbid us even to envy or covet our neighbor's goods, and thus condemn the very spirit of emulation and ambition that makes enterprise possible. But the New Testament is worse: It tells us to forget thrift and saving, to take no thought for the morrow, and to throw away our hard-earned wealth on the shiftless and the losers."

I mention Hitchens often because he's so knowledgeable and knows how to think, a potent mixture.
-------------------------------

"It is no accident, then, that the same patch of land on the peninsula south of San Francisco that gave birth to the Grateful Dead was also the site of groundbreaking research leading the way to the personal computer. That the two cultural impulses were linked - positively - is a provocative thesis." From Andrew Leonard's review of John Markoff's book "What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry."

I'd like to read a book on how America's conservative entrepreneurs (see Hitchens above) enabled and profited from both the counterculture industry and the personal computer (i.e. porn-downloading, music-stealing device) industry.

George Scialabba's attack on Hitchens is sloppy at best. First he complains that Hitchens doesn't fight fair, "Even when all the provocations Hitchens has endured are acknowledged (especially the not-infrequent hint that booze has befogged his brain), they don't excuse his zeal not merely to correct his former comrades but to bait, ridicule, and occasionally slander them, caricaturing their arguments and questioning their good faith." And yet Scialabba goes on to attack Hitchens in this manner which undermines his point.

"Besides, if you must discharge such large quantities of remonstrance and sarcasm, shouldn't you consider saving a bit more of them for your disagreements - he must still have some, though they're less and less frequently voiced, these days - with those who control the three branches of government and own the media and other means of production." Here's another common lefty complaint. We may be wrong in our anti-war marches, etc., but we don't have the power of the government. So take it easy on us. Scialabba's off to a poor start.

Scialabba goes on to quote Michael Scheuer on al Qaeda. I doubt Scialabba is fully aware of Scheuer's views on the "war on terror" but no matter, the quote serves its purpose.

Bin Laden and most militant Islamists [are] motivated by . . . their hatred for a few, specific US policies and actions they believe are damaging - and threatening to destroy - the things they love. Theirs is a war against a specific target and for specific, limited purposes. While they will use whatever weapon comes to hand - including weapons of mass destruction - their goal is not to wipe out our secular democracy, but to deter us by military means from attacking the things they love. Bin Laden et al are not eternal warriors; there is no evidence that they are fighting for fighting's sake, or that they would be lost for things to do without a war to wage. . . . To understand the perspective of the [tens or hundreds of millions of] supporters of Bin Laden, we must accept that there are many Muslims in the world who believe that US foreign policy is irretrievably biased in favor of Israel, trigger happy in attacking the poor and ill-defended Muslim countries, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and so forth; rapacious in controlling and consuming the Islamic world's energy resources; blasphemous in allowing Israel to occupy Jerusalem and US troops to be based in Saudi Arabia; and hypocritical and cruel in its denial of Palestinian rights, use of economic sanctions against the Muslim people of Iraq, and support for the Muslim world's absolutist kings and dictators.

This is the mentality Hitchens has been fighting against and why he gets so nasty. As bad as America's foreign policy can be, there are a number of distortions in the seemingly reasonable paragraph above. America's foreign policy should be better for its own sake, not because Al Qaeda hit us and threatens to do worse.

Besides the US has made Iraq safe for Islam. Shouldn't Michael "renditions work" Scheuer and the antiwar left be pleased?

Isn't it odd that the anti-war left should try to use a 22-year CIA veteran who ran the Counterterrorist Center's bin Laden station from 1996 to 1999 against Hitchens? Scheuer main complaint is that his bosses weren't concerned enough about bin Laden and didn't provide him with the resources to fight al Qaeda, which is probably true. But it's also painfully obvious that the CIA is trying to point fingers and at the very least, it is conceivable that 9.11 could have been prevented had someone besides Scheuer been running the bin Laden station from 1996 to 1999.

Does Scialabba realize the manuscript for Imperial Hubris was at first denied release because the CIA's Publications Review Board (PRB) "took issue with the book's brief favorable discussion of Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" theory, which posits that antagonism between Western and Islamic cultures (among others) will drive world conflict in the coming years."?

I though America's foreign policy was the problem. As the Boston Phoenix reported:

One doesn't have to read the manuscript terribly closely to see how it provides some benefit to the CIA. Critical as Anonymous [Scheuer] is of his own organization - as well as of the Bush and Clinton administrations - he absolutely blasts the FBI on pages 185 through 192. Many progressives may not cotton to the broad notion he advances here - namely, that the US should simply dispense with any sort of legalistic, law-enforcement approach to combating Al Qaeda and leave it entirely to the covert operators. But in the context of Washington's political postmortems on 9/11-related intelligence failures, this is stuff that at least makes the FBI look worse than the CIA.

The irony perhaps is that Hitchens has argued strenuously against torture and disregarding what makes the West more defensible in leftists' eyes than, say, the Taliban or Saddam Hussein or the genocidaires of Sudan.

Saul Bellow, 1915-2005

Looking through a book of interviews with Bellow, I found this quote from 1975:

Ten years ago Mayor Daley in a little City Hall ceremony gave me a five hundred dollar check on behalf of the Midland Authors' Society. 'Mr. Mayor, have you read Herzog?' asked one of the reporters standing by. 'I've looked into it.' said Daley, yielding no ground. Art is not the Mayor's dish. But then why should it be? I much prefer his neglect to the sort of interest Stalin took in poetry, phoning Pasternak to chat with him about Mandelstam and, shortly afterwards, sending Mandelstam to die.

Well, yeah. But no doubt this is a reason "Crony Capitalism" outlived "Communism."

As a Chicagoan, I find Bellow's humanism is what resonates most. And it resonates more than all that "We are the world/I'd like to buy the world a Coke" crap usually associated with humanism, because he fully understands what it's up against: nationalisms and anti-Semitism and all the "smelly little orthodoxies" (Orwell); mass society and all of its dehumanizing pressures and regimentations; commerce; and a condescending, for the most part, elite. About Bellow's view of the elite, until his later years, Hitchens writes:

I can't resist adding two more themes from Bellow's triumph in 1953. One is a hatred of workhouse condescension towards the underclass: 'Something in his person argued what the community that contributed the money wanted us poor bastards to be: sober, dutiful, buttoned, clean, sad, moderate.

Hence his appreciation of grifters, conartists, and fixers in all their complexity. (Quote from a Hitchens review of Ravelstein.)

Hitchens in Slate.

Ian McEwan in the New York Times and Guardian.

Audio of Martin Amis and James Wood discussing Bellow.

Chicagoan Tom McBride in OpenDemocracy.

Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times describes how in Bellow's universe, "Intellectuals, men deep in "the profundity game," find themselves facing off against street-smart thugs and business smoothies." Bellow was a master of realism, a materialism that negates the idealism to which most intellectuals succumb. As McBride writes

He believed in the individual's quest for integrity and love, guided by the great writers but not overwhelmed by them, learning from the swindlers but not driven to despair by them.

New York Times piece on Ben Stiller and how he's been working a lot with Jack Black, Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn, and Owen Wilson.

Another piece here on Janeane Garofalo in today's Times. I've always liked Stiller and Garofalo and share their sense of humor. Stiller tries to be cool and "hip" - worst word in the English language - even though he isn't, like most of us, but since he knows he isn't, that makes him cool. Garofalo doesn't seem to care, which makes her cool, and seems to have a thicker skin, but not thick enough for political mudwrestling. You have to be able to take it if you dish it out, but her not-quite-thick-enough skin makes her more sympathetic. Unfortunately, Garofalo was an early opponent of regime change in Iraq:

"She was willing to be one of the earliest and most articulate voices" opposing the administration's policies, Mr. Greenwald said. "Every time I'd call and ask her to do something, whether it was a small radio station in Kansas or a rabid right-wing talk show, she didn't hesitate. She was totally fearless."

And Matt Stone and Trey Parker's movie Team America, drew blood.

Which isn't to say that Ms. Garofalo enjoys being a target. When "Team America: World Police," from the "South Park" creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, hit movie theaters last year, it featured a Janeane Garofalo marionette whose head was blown off. The real Ms. Garofalo, hearing this from a friend, promptly burst into tears.

A year ago, she was a talk-radio novice:

"The first few weeks were pretty awkward," she confessed. They still sputter and stutter a fair amount, and Ms. Garofalo berates herself because "my mind starts racing and I try to fit 15 thoughts into one sentence."

(On the subject of talk radio, see this very interesting Atlantic Monthly cover story by David Foster Wallace.) "An HBO documentary chronicling [Air America's] early tumult, "Left of the Dial," will have its premiere on Thursday.
...
In fact, Ms. Garofalo is taking two weeks off next month to shoot an NBC pilot called "All In," in which she'll co-star as a professional poker player. If the network picks it up - always an iffy proposition - she'll do the comedy series in New York while simultaneously being host of "The Majority Report." Meanwhile, coming months will bring the releases of a TV movie for the Oxygen cable channel, a feature directed by Marc Forster, and the independent "Duane Hopwood," recently shown at Sundance." If you get a chance, check out the last movie Stiller and Garofalo did together, Mystery Men.

A special Easter of the living dead.
(or "Please, don't kill me!")

If Terri Schiavo and a babbling Pope John Paul II showed up at my door step on a dark, foggy night, I'd be nervous and call the cops.

Frank Rich has a good memory.

Within hours [Bush] turned Ms. Schiavo into a slick applause line at a Social Security rally. "It is wise to always err on the side of life," he said, wisdom that apparently had not occurred to him in 1999, when he mocked the failed pleas for clemency of Karla Faye Tucker, the born-again Texas death-row inmate, in a magazine interview with Tucker Carlson.

The Fourth Wave

I was hoping to get to my thoughts on the Left within the context the end of the Cold War, the Vietnam War, "globalization," and domestic American politics but events in Kyrgyzstan, Bahrain, and Belarus have precluded this. Thursday, March 24th Dan Drezner suggested that maybe we're seeing the beginning of another wave of democratization hit the planet.

The good news is that democratic uprisings are hitting autocratic American allies, i.e. countries containing U.S. bases, and not just pariah states. (Proponents of regime change like Hitchens have noted this possibility in the past.) With the Cold War long gone, the U.S. has less incentive to back friendly dictators and oppose nationalist anti-colonial movements like the one in Vietnam back in the 1960s. Kyrgyzstan has an American base and it just overthrew its autocrat. In a new development which must horrify dictators everywhere, looting was directed at the businesses of the ruler's family. (On Central Asia, Ahmed Rashid's Jihad is a must read.) Belarus, Europe's last dictatorship, saw protests from its brave, but outgunned, opposition. The Associate Press writes "The Belarusian Foreign Ministry on Friday harshly assailed the Kyrgyz opposition, warning that its action could destabilize the entire region. 'The unconstitutional overthrow of the government in Kyrgyzstan could have fatal consequences for peace, stability and prosperity in the country, as well as in the Central Asian region as a whole,' it said."

Juan Cole comments on the significance of massive peaceful protests in Bahrain. "The US has a naval base in Bahrain and its king has been a helpful ally. Will George W. Bush support Shaikh Salman or King Hamad?" Would it be petty to note that had Americans chosen to follow the left's advice and Cole's, rather than Bush's, democratic opposition leader - and Shia - Shaikh Salam would have been in a much weaker position to lead his campaign against King Hamdad?

Cole has nothing to say about Kyrgyzstan. Nor does much of the anti-war left. Matthew Yglesias seems to be alone in discussing it.

leftwing first principles and goals

BORING, right? Not when the Left has taken a wrong turn at the crossroads. (Don't they have access to MapQuest, or do they solely rely on leftist magazines and blogs for directions?) Obviously, the left has to respect the truth, especially during these highly-spun, Internet-dominated days. Even if the truth helps the "other side," it can not and should not be denied. For example, in a March 18th editorial reflecting on the second anniversary of the war on/liberation of Iraq, the New York Times wrote:

There were no weapons of mass destruction to destroy. Worse, the specialized machinery and highly lethal conventional weaponry that Saddam Hussein did control was looted during the invasion and is now very likely in the hands of terrorists. As James Glanz and William Broad reported in The Times, among the things missing is high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear arms. The WMD argument was not only wrong, but the invasion might have also created a new threat.

I'm curious as to what Clinton's director of central intelligence George "Slam Dunk" Tenet would make of this paragrah. Did he know about the "high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear arms"? Does the NYTimes's point seem slightly contradictory? The problem is that much of the left believed Saddam Hussein to be "contained" and underestimate how dangerous he was. They can't be proven wrong on this point since now we'll never know what Saddam Hussein would have done had he remained in power. We do know for a fact that after his years of exhorbitant behavior, including the genocide of the Kurds; the annexation of Kuwait; the slaughter of the Shia in the south; the ecological destruction of the Kuwaiti oil-fields and Marsh Arab ecosystem, he was surrounded by no-fly zones in the North and South of Iraq, US army bases to the West in Saudia Arabia and a hostile Iran to the East. With all of this, he still wouldn't come clean about his pursuit and/or possession of WMDs. This is all well-established fact.

Maybe he was encouraged not to come clean because containment was breaking down. The high-cost sanctions weren't effective. Osama bin Laden, we learned, was unhappy about the infidel bases in Saudi Arabia. Bush removed the US bases in Saudi Arabia after the Baathist regime was toppled iin 2003. Was this in acquiescence to bin Laden's 9.11 statement? We'll never know, but for Bush to have withdrawn troops from Saudi Arabia while containment and sanctions were becoming increasingly ineffective would have been the height of irresponsibility. America gave diplomacy and sanctions a try with Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War up until early 2003.

Nor can the idea that the Middle East would have improved anyway with Saddam Hussein left in power be proven wrong. We'll never know. However, we can see that the Middle East is improving and for the left to fail to give the Iraq intervention some credit for this is uncomprehensible.

Antiwar activists are constantly imploring hawks to have empathy for the American and Iraqi dead and their grieving families. War should not be taken lightly. However, when confronted these same activists know little about the history of Iraq, nor how terrible a regime Iraqis were forced to live under. Their lack of knowledge only bolsters my conviction that the hawks are right about removing Saddam Hussein. On this point, this bit from Zoe Heller's NYTimes review of Ian McEwan's new novel Saturday, sums up my thoughts nicely:

Even without such literal intrusions on his privacy, Perowne's right to forget is constantly being assailed by the promptings of his own ethical imagination. His son, Theo, protected by the self-absorption of youth, manages to shut out the large, grim stuff of world affairs through his ability to ''think small'' -- concentrating on the short-range pleasures offered by an upcoming snowboarding trip or a new girlfriend. Perowne's mother, too, is afforded a kind of serenity by old age and senility. But for an able, sentient adult like Perowne, empathetic engagement with the world -- and all the moral confusion that such engagement entails -- is not really a choice. He cannot help seeing things from the viewpoints of others: his children, his mother and his Iraqi patient, whose stories of torture in one of Saddam's prisons have persuaded him that the invasion of Iraq is probably a good idea. Empathy, once granted admission, has a way of multiplying its demands. While buying the ingredients for a fish stew he plans to make for supper, Perowne ponders the latest scientific research indicating that fish have a higher degree of capacity for pain than has previously been assumed. ''This,'' he thinks, ''is the growing complication of the modern condition, the expanding circle of moral sympathy. Not only distant peoples are our brothers and sisters, but foxes too, and laboratory mice, and now the fish.'' If empathy is the antidote to cruelty, the essence of what it is to be human, how far to extend it? To fish? To foxes? To jihadists who wish you dead?

More on the Cold War, Vietnam, and American domestic politics in a bit.

The United Nations is going through them changes

WASHINGTON, March 19 (Reuters) - Secretary General Kofi Annan's expected proposals for sweeping changes to the United Nations will be presented Monday, The Los Angeles Times reported Saturday. The plan will include the expansion of the Security Council and changes to a human rights panel, The paper reported.

Samantha Power writes about Josh Bolton's nomination to be Ambassador to the U.N.

At the State Department, Bolton, a protégé of Vice- President Dick Cheney, has behaved more like a grandstander at a conservative think tank than like a diplomat. Colin Powell endured the collateral damage caused by his outbursts, but Rice made it plain that she would have none of it, and passed over Bolton for Deputy Secretary of State. Cheney reportedly then insisted that Bolton get the U.N. When Madeleine Albright and Richard Holbrooke were appointed U.N. Ambassadors, President Clinton announced the nominations. Bush did the same for his first-term nominees, John Negroponte and John Danforth. Rice, in naming Bolton herself, sent a not so subtle signal that she expects to remain boss.

If it looks like an assassination and smells like an assassination, it probably is one
(or It's the Occam's Razor, Stupid!)

If you are interested in the current events in Lebanon, the NYTimes lengthy, above-the-fold story today on the deteriorating relationship between Bashar al-Assad and Rafiq Hariri before Hariri's assassination is a must-read.

On an unseasonably mild day last August, a small group of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri's closest political allies could tell from his flushed face and subdued manner that something awful had happened in the Syrian capital of Damascus, where he had been summoned to a meeting with President Bashar al-Assad.
...
After a few moments, he leaned forward and described how the Syrian leader had threatened him, curtly ordering him to amend Lebanon's Constitution to give President Émile Lahoud, the man Syria used to block Mr. Hariri's every move, another three years in office.

"Bashar told him, 'Lahoud is me,'" Mr. Jumblatt recalled in an interview. "Bashar told Hariri: 'If you and Chirac want me out of Lebanon, I will break Lebanon.'" He was referring to the French president, Jacques Chirac.

In the month since Mr. Hariri was assassinated, members of Lebanon's anti-Syrian opposition have pointed to that Aug. 26 encounter in Damascus as fateful. Although opposition leaders acknowledge that they lack firm evidence tying Syria or its Lebanese agents directly to Mr. Hariri's assassination, they link that day to his slaying on Feb. 14.
...
Syria is used to acting with impunity in Lebanon.

But by 2004, the Lebanese were expecting something different from Mr. Assad, not least because the United States had signaled by invading Iraq that business as usual was unacceptable.
...
The end for Mr. Hariri as prime minister came in October after the Syrians sent him a message to step aside. He resigned on Oct. 20, somewhat relieved, his aides said.

The next months were consumed mostly with planning for parliamentary elections due in the spring and wrangling over the election law. The Syrians were trying to gerrymander districts around Beirut and the rest of the country to weaken the opposition. But the Christian-Sunni Muslim-Druse coalition appeared to grow ever more formidable.

During this period, while he was planning his comeback, Mr. Hariri seemed to become his old self again, friends and allies said. Mr. Renaud, the European Union ambassador, recalls visiting him at his combined office and mansion right after Christmas and seeing him emerge from behind his desk waving a sheaf of papers and grinning, saying, "We are going to win the elections!"
...
By late January, Mr. Hariri was feeling confident enough that he decided he would not accept any Syrian-nominated members on his election list, his advisers say. His 19-member bloc in Parliament included three men chosen by Rustom Ghazale, the head of Syrian intelligence based in Anjar in the Bekaa region, and the man Lebanese believe really ran their country, his aides said.

Mr. Hariri invited Mr. Ghazale to lunch in late January and told him about the decision.

"They were not happy," said Ghazi Aridi, a former minister of information who resigned in September over the Lahoud extension. He recalls Mr. Ghazale telling Mr. Hariri, "You have to think about it and we have to think about it."

It was beginning to look like the opposition could capture about 60 seats in the 128-seat Parliament, enough to elect a president other than Mr. Lahoud. Around this time, Mr. Hariri and Mr. Jumblatt, the Druse leader, had a meeting. Mr. Hariri's earlier confidence that he would not be assassinated had slipped; the two men figured one or the other would be killed soon.

"Any field where you challenge them, they get mad," Mr. Jumblatt said. "Such totalitarian regimes cannot understand that you can have the freedom to chose your own M.P.'s, or you choose your own local administrators or I don't know what."

Two weeks after that conversation, the huge bomb that rocked all of Beirut struck Mr. Hariri's motorcade. He, along with 18 other people, died.
(emphasis mine)

Assassinations are not unheard of in the Middle East. Israel assassinated leaders of Hamas recently, as well as other members of the resistance. The difference one could argue, is that Hariri was resisting by peaceful means.

Iraq and Religious Law

Leading Left intellectual Juan Cole reports:

Jaafari: Iraq headed toward Religious Law

...Prospective Iraqi prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari has given an interview to Der Spiegel, to appear Tuesday, in which he says his government will press for the implementation of religious law in personal status matters:

'"It's understandable in a country where the majority of people are Muslim . . . Iraq should become a Muslim country but without falling under the influence of Iran or Saudi Arabia . . . Everyone will have the same rights, even members of the many minor religious communities," he said, explaining there would be multiple forms of jurisprudence.'

However the NYTimes reports:

American and Iraqi officials say that in a gesture to the Kurds, leaders of the Shiite alliance, which has 140 seats in the assembly, have signaled that they will not press for Islam to be the central source of power in a new government, but the Kurds are holding out for an independent Kurdish militia and effective control of Kirkuk.

"Jaafari: Iraq headed toward Religious Law in Personal Status Matters" just doesn't have the same ring to it. Are "Personal Status Matters" a central source of power for a government? I'd agree with the pro-choice movement that they are.

American Left Commits Seppuku

Salon gives Juan Cole the lead op-ed today where he discusses the Right's attempt to take credit for the spreading of freedom across the Middle East. Showing what a weak hand he holds, he trots out obnoxious rightwingers like Max Boot and Mark Steyn to put those who differ with him in the worst possible light. It's called guilt by association. He does acknowledge the reality that some liberals and war critics believe prospects for the Middle East have improved: "Even some of the president's detractors and those opposed to the war have issued mea culpas. Richard Gwyn of the Toronto Star, a Bush critic, wrote, "It is time to set down in type the most difficult sentence in the English language. That sentence is short and simple. It is this: Bush was right." But then it's down the memory hole. If you disagree with Cole and Salon, George Bush is your hero and Boot and Steyn are your buddies.

Next, Cole tries to bolster his own authority by giving a little history:

"In fact, regime change in the Middle East has often come about through foreign invasion. Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser intervened militarily to help revolutionaries overthrow the Shiite imam of Yemen in the 1960s. The Israelis expelled the PLO from Lebanon and tried to establish a pro-Israeli government in Beirut in 1982. Saddam Hussein briefly ejected the Kuwaiti monarchy in 1990. The U.S. military's invasion of Iraq and overthrow of Saddam Hussein were therefore nothing new in Middle Eastern history. A peaceful evolution toward democracy would have been an innovation. "

Israel in Beirut sounds more like an *attempted* regime change. There have been many more of those which Cole fails to mention. To take a few, there was the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War. And let's not forget the Iraq-Iran war. Cole's being very selective here, especially by saying Hussein "ejected the Kuwaiti monarchy." Saddam did a bit more than that.

Following his selective history lesson, he comes out and says what appears to be the new pacifist/realist left's line:

"The Baath in Syria shows no sign of ceasing to operate as a one-party regime. When pressured, it has offered up slightly more cooperation in capturing Iraqi Baathists. Its partial withdrawal from Lebanon came about because of local and international pressures, including that of France and the Arab League, and is hardly a unilateral Bush administration triumph. "

A unilateral Bush triumph? Cole starts his polemic with the question "Is George W. Bush right to argue that his war to overthrow Saddam Hussein is democratizing the Middle East?" Did Bush claim the overthrow of Hussein is "unilaterally." I don't even think Boot or Steyn claimed that.

After pointing out Iraq is a mess and disparaging Egyptian and Saudi Arabian electoral reforms as minimal, Cole delivers his money line (shot): "Bush also wants Syria out of Lebanon, in part because such a move would strengthen the hand of his ally, Israel." Again, the strategy is to tarnish by employing guilt by association.

Look to the language and revel in the bias:

"On March 9 the Shiite Hezbollah Party held massive pro-Syrian demonstrations in Beirut that dwarfed the earlier opposition rallies. A majority of Parliament members wanted to bring back Karami. Both the Hezbollah street demonstrations and the elected Parliament's internal consensus produced a pro-Syrian outcome obnoxious to the Bush administration. Since then the opposition has staged its own massive demonstrations, rivaling Hezbollah's."

"Rivaling" Hezbollah's? According to objective news outlets, they "dwarfed" Hezbollah's.

"So far, these demonstrations and counterdemonstrations have been remarkable in their peacefulness and in the frankness of their political aims." Except of course for the Hariri assassination which started the whole ball rolling.

Next Cole contradicts himself by saying, in fact, Beirutis aren't habitually violent:

"Lebanese have been holding lively parliamentary campaigns for decades, and the flawed, anonymous Jan. 30 elections in Iraq would have provoked more pity than admiration in urbane, sophisticated Beirutis. " Excuse my sarcasm, but yes it's such a pity that Iraqis defied the murderous insurgents - those who are making Iraq a basket case - and it's such a pity that Iraqis are no longer voting 99% in favor of murderous thug. I doubt Beirutis pity the fact politics have returned to Iraq. Is Juan Cole just trying to provoke? Is this what Salon and the anti-war left/right have come to?

For instance, towards the end of the piece, Cole writes another remarkable sentence "Arab intellectuals are, however, often coded as mere American and Israeli puppets when they dare speak against authoritarian practices." Didn't Cole do a form of the very same "coding" earlier in this very same piece?

Cole ends with the guerilla war in Iraq and questions if there has been any progress. "The Middle East may open up politically, and no doubt Bush will try to claim credit for any steps in that direction." At the very least, he should decide if the Middle East has opened up politically. The list he provides at the beginning suggests it has:

"In the wake of the Iraq vote, anti-Syrian demonstrations in Lebanon, the Egyptian president's gestures toward open elections, and other recent developments, ..."

I'd give it a 9.0 on the Cognitive Dissonance scale.

Never Follow Bad Money with Good Money

Matt Yglesias reports:

"In what's probably the most important Social Security development of the day, The Washington Post reports, that "The Financial Services Forum, an association of 19 chief executives of large financial services companies, has decided to withdraw from Compass, the group that is leading industry's effort to gin up support for the president's plan outside the Beltway."

Did someone say something about rats and a sinking ship?"

They did win on bankruptcy "reform" however.