Saturday, June 10, 2006

10 Jun 2006 12:49 pm

Mary Cheney's Book

There are flops, almighty flops and then there are books by Mary Cheney. Despite saturation media coverage, network interviews, cable interviews, blanket newspaper profiles, blog support, podcast interviews, the book "My Turn" had a very low first week's sales of 2,445. Last week, a grand total of 574 books were sold. Not too shabby for a first author with not a huge amount to say. But recall that this manuscript cost its publishers a cool $1 million. The publisher therefore spent around $170 for every book sold without even counting the marketing budget. In Mary Matalin's case, it just confirms what we already know about Bush Republicans. Their greatest skill is in spending vast amounts of other people's money on relatives or cronies.

10 Jun 2006 12:37 pm

Murtha-Pelosi

Mike Crowley sees an anti-Iraq war alliance.

10 Jun 2006 10:39 am

Quote for the Day

From "Under the Net" by Iris Murdoch, one of Michael Oakeshott's many, many lovers. In the dialogue, Hugo is widely regarded as a fictional version of the great philosopher I've spent these last two days conversing about:

"There's something fishy about describing people's feelings," said Hugo. "All these descriptions are so dramatic."

"What's wrong with that?" I said.

"Only," said Hugo, "that it means that things are falsified from the start. If I say afterwards that I felt such and such, say that I felt "apprehensive" – well, this just isn't true."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"I didn't feel this," said Hugo. "I didn't feel anything of that kind at the time at all. This is just something I say afterwards."

"But suppose I try hard to be accurate," I said.

"One can't be," said Hugo. "The only hope is to avoid saying it. As soon as I start to describe, I'm done for. Try describing anything, our conversation for instance, and see how absolutely instinctively you..."

"Touch it up?" I suggested.

"It's deeper than that," said Hugo. "The language just won't let you present it as it really was..."

I was puzzled by this myself. I felt that there was something wrong in what Hugo said, and yet I couldn't see what it was. We discussed the matter a bit further, and then I told him, "But at this rate almost everything one says, except things like "Pass the marmalade" or "There's a cat on the roof", turns out to be a sort of lie."

Hugo pondered this. "I think it is so," he said with seriousness.

"In that case one oughtn't to talk," I said.

"I think perhaps one oughtn't to," said Hugo, and he was deadly serious.

Then I caught his eye, and we both laughed enormously, thinking of how we had been doing nothing else for days on end...

10 Jun 2006 04:59 am

World Cup Footer

I want England to win, of course. But my longstanding policy every four years is only to watch matches after the quarter-finals, or matches where England is against Germany or and France. Especially Germany. Couldn't give a toss about the rest. So let Frankie Foer be your guide. He cares, he scores, he gives you the impact on globalization and CO2 emissions. (Look, it's about as butch as TNR can be. For the longest time in the back of the book, there was a very strict policy on reviewing sports books. As Leon once elegantly explained:  "if there's a ball in it, we won't run it." But Leon doesn't run the blogs. He just hates them.)

Friday, June 9, 2006

09 Jun 2006 09:08 pm

The View From Your Window

Bellingham, Washington State, 4 pm.

09 Jun 2006 07:04 pm

Email from the Front

One of my most trsuted sources in Iraq is a soldier actually commanding troops and filling me in occasionally (and taking me to task). Here's his latest comment on the post-Zarqawi situation:

I really liked what you said today about being right (and wrong) on your views about the war. I fly about fifty hours a month in these Al Anbar skies and the first thing you realize here is that you have to be right 100% of the time. You must always correctly estimate the risks of the weather, the enemy threat and altitudes/airspeeds to fly. Now if you can multiply that by over fifty, you'll understand what command is like. So, if you feel a bit of pressure to be correct, imagine if you were supremely responsible for fifty other bloggers who, if wrong, could lose their lives. Not complaining at all, really want to help you with some perspective as I would guess you have taken some very tough criticism recently (some from me).

I would say if I was to recommend anything to someone with a good amount of pressure, it would be the same as I recommend to my pilots. BALANCE! Embrace the pressure and the risk and go with it and at all costs, don't let fear and emotions cloud your judgment.

You know as well as I do that Zarqawi's death will not change things dramatically here as that is seriously a micro-event. The financial incentive to keep this war going - illegal corruption in the oil sector under the cover of chaos - is a macro-event that is so much larger that it trumps any desire to end this thing. The intensity, which most think has increased has dramatically decreased against US forces and turned toward the easiest means to keep this going, which is to have the Iraqis kill each other. Zarqawi was a master at stoking those flames so it will (already has) get very interesting.

More reason to hope, and to doubt. BALANCE!

09 Jun 2006 05:59 pm

More Good News From Iraq

Know hope. Some civil society is emerging.

09 Jun 2006 05:56 pm

Cracking The Da Bitchy Code

On the lecture circuit, I have heard many stories in Coulter's wake of her actual charm, nervousness, politeness, civility, reasonableness in person. Now we're all a little different in print than in person. People who meet me often say I'm much mellower and, er, nicer in person than I sometimes come off in pixels or print. That's defensible, I think. Writing is sometimes about provoking, and it's fine for a man or woman to have slightly different persona in reality than in print or even TV. But Coulter seems to have taken this to a bizarre extreme. Another reader comments:

Just wanted to add my little bit of insight to the Ann Coulter discussion.  While interning at a cable news show a year ago, I was responsible for guest relations on a day when Ann Coulter was being interviewed in the studio.  I had to meet Ann Coulter in the lobby, take her to the green room, prep her and bring her to the set.  We chatted for a bit during that time, despite my intense dislike of her crude politics and television personality.  I was shocked by how pleasant she was, even when I told her where I go to school (a favorite target of Fox News, one of the maligned Northeastern "bastions of the liberal elite").  She had spoken there recently and received the typical poor reception that she thrives on, but despite that she had nothing but great things to say about my college and all the "bright students" and their "brilliant questions."  If she had been talking about my school in the media, however, there is no question that the only words out of Ann Coulter's mouth would have been "liberal elite", "New England", "brainwashing professors", "traitors", etc.

I came away from our conversation with the distinct impression that her television personality is exaggerated and largely manufactured, and that she doesn't believe many of the ludicrous things she says.  She's not a radical of any sort, she's just a coniving businesswoman.  The woman has simply figured out how to market herself and make cold, hard cash, and will say any controversial thing she deems necessary to do so.  That has become obvious after her outrageous attacks on the 9/11 widows, which have caused her book to shoot to the top of the Amazon charts.

What Ann Coulter does is worse than other media personalities who actually believe the vileness that they spew, because she does it solely for the money and notoriety, despite her hypocritical claims to the mantles of Christianity and patriotism.  Her actions show that she is devoted to just one thing: the church of the American dollar.  To borrow a line from Jon Stewart, cheap hacks like her are hurting America.

And hurting some people who lost their own families in a terrorist atrocity. I take Coulter as seriously as I take a fictional character. Except most fictional characters do not make millions by assassinating the characters and wounding the souls of other real human beings.

(Photo: Platon)

09 Jun 2006 05:37 pm

Sorry Again

Our redirect server went down again. My apologies. We will soon be moving to a new company and server so this won't happen again. As it is, I've spent the morning listening to some fascinating papers on Oakeshott, right, left, Idealism, Gehrke, and the "precautionary principle". An Oakeshott conference also brings together a wonderfully idiosyncratic and smart bunch of people. The company has been quite invigorating, even inspiring. Blogging will be sparser than usual. But I'll be back as soon as I can. Money quote from lunch: "You are not an idea of mine. You're eating lunch." Ah. Philosophy in a deli.

09 Jun 2006 12:33 pm

Lowry on the War

Can I second this comment?

My only answer about what the effect of Zarqawi's death might be is to say with Tom Friedman, 'the next six months will be crucial.' When his repetition of that phrase over and over was pointed out in The Corner, I said I would have agreed with him every time he said it. Some readers asked why. Because every time Friedman said it, it was true. It was and is true because Iraq has never decisively tilted one way or the other. It has seemed at times that it was on the verge of doing so (I thought it was when I wrote, 'We're Winning'), but it never has.
This is why people are wrong to say that Iraq is lost and wrong to say victory is inevitable. It is still very fluid. Events matter, leadership matters, policy matters. All of them interact in a dynamic way.

I take flak for my intermittent optimism and pessimism on Iraq. Mickey Kaus, whose own clairvoyance is not exactly renowned, has ridiculed me for it. But Rich is right. This is what wars are like; and this is what history is like. On a blog, you reflect what you see at the time. The word "journalism" is rooted in the idea of something that is true for the day. You try and get everything right, not to jump too far ahead, not to give up too soon, and so on. But the world will foil you. All you can do is your best to make sense of a deeply opaque and difficult time. Or as I just emailed to one reader:

Try being right ten times a day for six years.

The good news is: sometimes we learn more by getting things wrong. All I can say is: I sure want to win this war and defeat this enemy. And everything I write and every criticism I make about the war is related to that overwhelming imperative.

09 Jun 2006 08:58 am

Coulter Camp

A reader comments:

I heard Ann Coulter speak in Minnesota at our small, nice, liberal arts college. When she first walked in there was some heckling and boos. But then she began to talk and everything got quiet. You could visibly see her falter and rush in the silence. There were no outraged audience members, no yelling or protesting, just... boredom. She was terrible! It was like seeing WWF on TV and then getting a lecture from one of them. On politics. Just silly. In fact, the audience started to chuckle softly at points and then louder at others. But people do believe her and love her for the hate she spews. The college Republican leadership had "I heart Ann" and "Marry me Ann!" on their home made t-shirts. Like the WWF. Sad.

Actually, she's sad. No core convictions; no arguments; ad-copy prose; pure partisan circus. And she now claims the mantle of Christianity. You can indeed imagine Jesus speaking of widows the way Coulter does, can't you? May she one day forgive herself. No one else will.

Thursday, June 8, 2006

08 Jun 2006 10:50 pm

Hot Air Leaking ...

From the Malkin Screamfest's coverage of YearlyKos, a moment of terrible deflation:

People here are largely, disappointingly, golf-shirted, short-haired, and white bread. Grooming and hygiene are up to western business standards.

Where are the white people with dreadlocks?? For my part, I'm at a kind of unKos: the annual meeting of the Michael Oakeshott Association. I'm in the hotel in Colorado Springs. Tomorrow will be a series of seminars and papers. The three readers of this blog who care can find more details here.

08 Jun 2006 08:36 pm

The Zarqawi Mythology

One caveat about the Zarqawi killing. For a while now, various sources knowledgeable about Iraq have warned me not to take some claims made about Zarqawi too seriously. He was never a close or comfortable ally with Osama bin Laden, and the Atlantic profile has a fascinating account of the two monsters' first meeting:

As they sat facing each other across the receiving room, a former Israeli intelligence official told me, 'it was loathing at first sight.'

According to several different accounts of the meeting, bin Laden distrusted and disliked al-Zarqawi immediately. He suspected that the group of Jordanian prisoners with whom al-Zarqawi had been granted amnesty earlier in the year had been infiltrated by Jordanian intelligence; something similar had occurred not long before with a Jordanian jihadist cell that had come to Afghanistan. Bin Laden also disliked al-Zarqawi's swagger and the green tattoos on his left hand, which he reportedly considered un-Islamic. Al-Zarqawi came across to bin Laden as aggressively ambitious, abrasive, and overbearing. His hatred of Shiites also seemed to bin Laden to be potentially divisive—which, of course, it was.

Zarqawi made a name for himself among the Sunni insurgency in the first few months after the liberation because of the sheer brutality and sectarian nature of his religiously-inspired violence. But he wasn't the central figure in that insurgency, and had recently alienated many. His former mentor broke with him after the hotel bombings in Jordan. The Bush administration often hyped Zarqawi, many say, in order to retain the notion that al Qaeda and Saddam were joined at the hip, and to connect the struggle in Iraq more directly with 9/11 in the eyes of the American public. But the truth was more complicated than that. Again from Mary Ann Weaver's profile:

"Even then — and even more so now — Zarqawi was not the main force in the insurgency," the former Jordanian intelligence official, who has studied al-Zarqawi for a decade, told me. "To establish himself, he carried out the Muhammad Hakim operation, and the attack against the UN. Both of them gained a lot of support for him—with the tribes, with Saddam’s army and other remnants of his regime. They made Zarqawi the symbol of the resistance in Iraq, but not the leader. And he never has been."

He continued, "The Americans have been patently stupid in all of this. They’ve blown Zarqawi so out of proportion that, of course, his prestige has grown. And as a result, sleeper cells from all over Europe are coming to join him now."

They're still there. Perhaps the biggest reason to rejoice at his demise is not that he represented the core of the Sunni insurgency, but that his strategy of fomenting sectarian mayhem helped unleash the most destructive force in the nascent state. Maybe his removal will help abate that force. Or maybe it now has a momentum all its own. We'll see.

08 Jun 2006 07:45 pm

Life of a Fundamentalist Psychopath

The Atlantic scores for timing too - with this just released profile of Zarqawi.

08 Jun 2006 07:37 pm

A Double-Whammy

I don't want to de accused of being excitable, but Maliki's sense of timing really does show a sure political touch. The announcement today of the completion of the Iraqi cabinet is in some ways more significant than the killing of Zarqawi. The combo is an energizing jolt to morale:

Bolani, a Shi'ite, and Jassim, a Sunni who until now served as Iraqi ground forces commander, pledged to improve security for all Iraqis.
The legislature also endorsed a Minister for National Security - Shi'ite Sherwan Waeli.
The new defense and interior ministers -- who both worked in the armed forces during Saddam's rule -- will be under pressure to start tackling the kind of bombings that brought more death and mayhem to the Iraqi capital on Thursday.

And how not to be delighted by the al Jazeera spin? Money quote:

Reacting to the killing of Abu Mus'ab al Zarqawi in Iraq, pro-Jihadi commentators on al Jazeera rushed to assert that the "death of Zarqawi won't weaken al Qaida but will actually unify the organization." Abdelbari Atwan, the editor of al Quds al Arabi accused Jordanian and US intelligence of penetrating the inner circles of Zarqawi and were successful in getting to him." He added that the killing of Zarqawi was coordinated with the appointment of the ministers of defense and interior in Baghdad.

Coordinated? The only thing that seems to have been coordinated in Iraq for a while have been murders and bombings. That just changed. We shouldn't get our hopes up too high, because the murders continue, the sectarian bitterness lingers, the government has only just been formed. But the end of Zarqawi and the beginning of the first truly national government are signs of great hope, just when it apppeared there might be none. Courage. Patience. Criticism.

(Photo: Ceerwan Aziz/Reuters.)

08 Jun 2006 06:56 pm

The View From Your Window

Holt, Missouri, 7 pm.

08 Jun 2006 05:29 pm

Making English Official

Dr K makes the case. I find it completely persuasive.

08 Jun 2006 04:43 pm

From a Pastor

A reader writes:

This email is in response to Rush Limbaugh's remarks posted on your site, about "gleeful" war-critics who are concerned about Haditha. It is of course in Limbaugh's own interests to stoke the fires, but he needs to know that those who oppose this war are not monolithic.

There has been no glee in my heart since my son-in-law was killed by an IED on Feb. 3, 2004 in Iraq. For those who need a chronological framework, that is after "Misson Accomplished" and "Bring it on" and when the deaths were still in the low 500 range. To this day, we have absolutely no idea who planted that bomb: Saddam dead-enders?; Shiite militants? (it was in a Shia dominated area); Al-Qaeda terrorists? Renegade army or police elements?

From the start, I did not support the Iraq invasion. Poorly conceived, poorly planned and poorly implemented at the highest levels of government, it was a mistake. Still, with my son-in-law in the service, I resolved that I would direct my anger at the policy to where it belonged and not blame the soldiers.

Since my son-in-law's death, I have also spoken out from my pulpit about the moral failure of an administration which did not give clear, moral guidelines to the troops who were expected to carry out a dangerous counterinsurgency mission.

Which brings us to Haditha. I have had a long standing interest in military history, and no, I am not shocked that some Americans may - may - have committed atrocities. It is in our human nature. There is no glee in my heart. Instead, there is a profound sadness that our soldiers are led by a civilian administration that thinks the moral high ground is forbidding loving couples from pledging their love to one another forever, while the administration itself has abandoned conventions, treaties and policies prohibiting mistreatment and torture.

Fortunately, there are many, many soldiers who send the right messages. During the funeral and for many months beyond, I came to know the leadership of my son-in-law's unit and found them to be honorable men committed to doing a thankless job in a humane way. My son in law was a 2nd Lt., loved and respected by his men. He led from the front, and would never ask another soldier to do anything he himself wouldn't do. So it was that he discovered an IED, warned others to get away, and was killed instantly when "the bad guys" exploded it.

Just a few weeks after his death, while the platoon was on patrol, they caught red-handed several men who were planting IEDs. Out on patrol, away from the base, a lot of nasty things might happen to such prisoners, especially when you are grieving your leader's death. "Sorry, Captain, but Ahmed here fell off the truck (wink, wink)." I can still recall the pride in the voice of our son in law's Captain as he told me the story. He said, "My boys did the right thing. They captured the prisoners, and had to take them along for the rest of the patrol. They fed them, gave them water, and returned them safely to the base. They did what they were supposed to do."

Wherever we train men (and women) to kill, we risk the possibility that our sinful human nature will lead to atrocities. But if a clear message is given to the troops, with clear expectations, clear boundaries - and clear punishment for violators - we can expect the vast majority of them to do the right thing. I still believe that in my heart.

Even when their civilian leaders have not done the right thing.

08 Jun 2006 03:30 pm

Quote for the Day II

"I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel I owe anybody an explanation," - president George W. Bush.

(Photo: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters.)

08 Jun 2006 03:16 pm

"Bigots"

The latest protestation from those who favor amending the federal constitution to ban civil marriage for gay couples is that they are not bigots. Some have a good point. Sincerely believing that it's better for society that only heterosexual couples should have the right to marry is not inherently bigoted. There's an argument there, not just a prejudice or feeling. In Virtually Normal, I take pains to take this argument seriously, as it should be taken. Calling someone a bigot because she disagrees with you is not an argument. It's just an insult - like calling someone a pervert.

Nevertheless, when opponents of marriage rights for gays never even mention gays in their arguments, never address some of the legitimate concerns that many gay couples have, and refuse even to allow minimal domestic partnerships that allow us to visit one another in hospital without the threat of other family members intervening, then I think we're onto territory where complete uninterest in the fate of gay people blurs into bigotry. To have no social policy toward gays, except that they should repent or be cured or shut up, is a function of profound disrespect, intelligible only through the prism of prejudice. The same might be said of a blanket ban on all gay seminarians, regardless of their qualifications for the priesthood, the quality of their vocations, or their adherence to celibacy. Sometimes a bigot really is a bigot. Even when he's the Pope.

08 Jun 2006 02:54 pm

Coulter Kampf

The Anchoress, whom I fondly remember from years back when we were just email friends, unloads on Pajama Media's big current advertizer. So does Rick Moran. Their comments are fair, it seems to me, and a good sign of how lively and internecine conservative debate now is. (Check out the Ramesh-Derb-Jonah cluster-cluck for another leading indicator.) But the problem with Coulter is that she is a form of camp, is she not? The minute you take her seriously, you lose grip on her reality. She's not a social or political commentator. She's a drag queen impersonating a fascist. I don't even begin to believe she actually believes this stuff. It's post-modern performance-art. I think of Coulter in that sense as more at home on the pomo-left than the Christianist right (which is why the joke, ultimately, is on the Republicans who like her). Devoid of sincerity, detached from any value but performance, juggling rhetoric for its own sake, she is Stanley Fish's model student. Half the time, I tend to think that a Hannity or O'Reilly or Malkin actually believes their own rhetoric. With Coulter, I don't believe it for a second. And so her vileness cannot be taken seriously. She is worse than vile. She is just empty.

08 Jun 2006 02:08 pm

Quote for the Day

From the Times of London, reflecting on Haditha:

The more vulnerable that Europeans feel, the more liable they are to shift blame across the Atlantic. The strength of disdain is a measure of Europe's weakness. Smugness is one of Europe's great contemporary exports. We may all think that we know America, its music, its culture, its self-confident exceptionalism. We tend to forget that Americans fight only with extreme reluctance. We overlook their penchant for agonised self-criticism; everything bad we know about the US, we know because Americans inexhaustibly rehearse their society's shortcomings. There has never been greater transparency, whether on the battlefield or the boondocks, and there has never been more open debate about the country’s virtues and vices — the internet has transformed the quantity and, at times, the quality of the conversation.

This is worth repeating. There is no moral equivalence between the occasional snap of soldiers stretched beyond most human limits and the evil that hides terrorists among civilians, foments sectarian hatred, and bombs and murders for the sake of a religious or sectarian fanaticism. Haditha must be investigated and its culprits punished. America must return to the standards of the Geneva Conventions. But even an America that has abandoned Geneva is preferable to the Jihadists and sectarian murderers who now terrorize Iraq. We feel shame; they know no such thing. Which is why it is so desperately depressing to watch us so badly bungle a war against them.

08 Jun 2006 01:12 pm

Cool Cole

The good professor urges sobriety:

There is no evidence of operational links between [Zarqawi's] Salafi Jihadis in Iraq and the real al-Qaeda; it was just a sort of branding that suited everyone, including the US. Official US spokesmen have all along over-estimated his importance. Leaders are significant and not always easily replaced. But Zarqawi has in my view has been less important than local Iraqi leaders and groups. I don't expect the guerrilla war to subside any time soon.

Bummer - but predictable, I guess. Cole's informative Zarqawi files are here.

08 Jun 2006 01:04 pm

Even Better News

Omar reports that one reason Zarqawi was killed is that locals turned him in. The beheadings and brutality backfired, finally persuading the locals to give real intelligence - the best kind:

It was quite visible lately that Hibhib became a place for intense terror activity, especially after the phenomenon of severed heads appeared. Severed heads of civilian Iraqis were found twice in fruit boxes in and around Hibhib; a terrible crime that shocked Iraqis.
Also a few days ago 19 passengers, mostly students were murdered in cold blood just north of Hibhib which indicated that a seriously bloody terror cell was in this area.
There had been several reports about Zarqawi fleeing Anbar to Diyala after the tribes in Ramadi turned against al-Qaeda but obviously, Diyala and its suburbs and Iraqi tribes were not willing to endorse the head chopping criminal.

Excellent. Jordan may also have helped kill their former resident:

In the first official confirmation, PM al-Maliki said that Jordan has provided intelligence that was used in the raid on Zaraqwi's hiding place but he also stressed that tips from locals were the primary lead to Zarqawi's exact location and these were the information according to which the missiles were guided.

As Margaret Thatcher once said: "Rejoice!"

08 Jun 2006 11:29 am

What the Troops Are Emailing Around

A friend serving his country in Iraq just got this rapidly-generated email JPG, and forwarded it to me. If you're looking for a sign of higher morale post-Zarqawi among coalition forces, look no further:

08 Jun 2006 11:17 am

From the Jaws of Near-Defeat

It remains to be seen, of course, what effect the killing of Zarqawi will mean for the future of Iraq. The insurgency, alas, is more than him; but he was a critical, central part of the Jihadist element that has wrought some of the most appalling violence. This then cannot be a bad thing on the ground. And it is a simply transformative moment in terms of morale. This man has murdered and tortured and ravaged his way through the Middle East, most devastatingly in Iraq where his campaign of savagery and mayhem has helped undermine the extremely fragile underpinnings of a future normal society. In a culture where strength is respected, his resilience helped sustain the morale of the nihilist, Jihadist and Sunni insurgencies. If Maliki can use the momentum of this victory against evil to fill the last key security posts in his cabinet, then perhaps we can begin to reverse the hideous slide toward anarchy we have been witnessing.

These are still hopes. But sometimes wars are won by hope, even in the darkest of times. As I wrote a few months back, "the certainty of some today that we have failed is as dubious as the callow triumphalism of yesterday. War is always, in the end, a matter of flexibility and will. And sometimes the darkest days are inevitable - even necessary - before the sky ultimately clears."

The temptation to despair, especially given the ineptness of the administration's policies, has been great lately. Now it lifts a little, as one source of enormous evil is finally removed. It will be a particular boost to the coalition troops, whose endurance in an unimaginably tense and brutalizing mission is humbling to watch. The only response to this, as it was when Saddam was captured, is joy. As the Israelis say: Know hope.

08 Jun 2006 08:34 am

Mantropy

Maxim magazine fights back against shaved arms and faux-hawks.

Wednesday, June 7, 2006

07 Jun 2006 10:28 pm

The Unraveling

Along with Rich Lowry, I have found that I cannot get this David Ignatius piece out of my head. This doesn't help either.

07 Jun 2006 09:02 pm

Self-Scrubbing Hatch

Mike Crowley nails some retroactive editing by the senator from Utah.

07 Jun 2006 08:11 pm

An Iranian Dissident's Credo

Akbar Ganji was jailed by the mullahs in Tehran for six years for his political beliefs, and demonstrated his commitment by hunger strikes. What are those beliefs? Here is a new translation of a speech he once gave (link now fixed). It's really a statement of classical liberalism, what Neil Tennant called "dear old, dreary liberal rights." By "liberal" I do not mean the infantilization of people under a cloying and growing welfare state. I mean the liberalism of the founding fathers, of John Locke, of the American Constitution. And part of that liberalism, according to Ganji, is as follows:

Liberals always accept religion in the private sphere. They protested the unity of the institutions of religion and government and still do. They are not anti-religion. Freedom of religion is a basic principle of liberalism. Contrary to orthodox Marxists who completely reject religion, even from the private sphere of individuals (since they considered it the opium of the masses), liberals believe that everyone must have the right to set up his life according to his religious beliefs. But the civic code must not be based on any particular religious teachings. It should guarantee the freedom of religion in the personal life and morality. Incidentally, a law based on the teachings of a particular religion is unable to guarantee the freedom of all religions.

Sometimes it takes a man living in an actual theocracy to remind us to be on guard against it, even with the blessing of the First Amendment. It gives me great hope to realize that for years, in some vile Iranian jail, someone knew his John Locke. Even while too many Americans have found it so easy to forget him.

07 Jun 2006 07:20 pm

Bush and the Base

Professor Bainbridge writes:

I see no reason why the MPA ought to energize the GOP base. If anything, it ought to make the base even more skeptical of the bona fides of the GOP Washington elite, whose sole remaining principle appears to be the will to cling to power.

Maybe that was their sole principle in the first place. I have to say I'm extremely heartened by this week. The hollow, ruthless cynicism of Karl Rove has finally dawned on the very people he has been manipulating for decades. This is a very good thing.

07 Jun 2006 06:20 pm

Gutting the McCain Amendment

Greg Djerejian explains how ruthless Cheney can be in keeping the United States out of the Geneva protocols. There's no mistake he will not compound.

07 Jun 2006 05:31 pm

FMA Going Backward

Just to note that Senators Gregg and Specter turned against the FMA this time in the cloture vote. The Senate is more Republican than last time around, and the vote barely budged. If the Senate shifts to the Dems this fall - a likely scenario - this amendment will be pining for the fjords. That's a victory for conservatism and federalism against fundamentalism and hysteria. One more time: Let the states decide.

07 Jun 2006 05:07 pm

How Serious Is Bush About Iraq?

Not so serious that he hasn't diverted $1.6 billion out of the equipment funds for the military in Iraq to finance his Potemkin border patrol. Money quote:

The Marine Corps has seen nearly 3,500 pieces of ground equipment destroyed so far, and it has lost at least 27 aircraft in the Middle East. Every day in Iraq, trucks and Humvees age four to nine times faster than they do in peacetime because of the heat, road conditions, weight of the armor, and constant use, to say nothing of roadside bombs.
For the last three years, the Marine Corps has been cannibalizing its vehicles and weapons used in training, and draining its war reserves to keep deployed troops fully outfitted.

But they can wait. Karl Rove needs to appease the base before the election.

07 Jun 2006 03:34 pm

Benedict at Auschwitz

Commonweal editorializes. Money quote:

In his public meditation at Auschwitz, Benedict put forward a perplexing and unsatisfactory explanation of the Holocaust. He informed the world that the Nazi aim 'deep down' was not to exterminate the Jews, but to kill God. 'By destroying Israel,' the pope said, '[the Nazis] ultimately wanted to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith and to replace it with a faith of their own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful.'
Ostensibly designed to draw attention to the church's Jewish origins, and to embrace the two faiths' shared love for God, Benedict's remarks may have the opposite effect. It seems unlikely that many Jews will take consolation from the theological assertion that the systematic murder of 6 million — murders carried out in nearly every instance by baptized, and in many cases even believing, Christians — was 'ultimately' an assault on Christian faith. The Holocaust was a desecration of many things, surely; but first and last it was about the slaughter of the Jews.

Maybe it's hard for a Bavarian pope to see that.

(Photo: Gianni Giansanti/Polaris.)

07 Jun 2006 02:12 pm

Bill Bennett, Medium-Rare

He was fileted and sauteed last night by Jon Stewart. If you didn't see it (we were watching the new Criterion Collection DVD edition of "Dazed and Confused" and I fell asleep around 11 pm) the clip is available here.

07 Jun 2006 02:07 pm

PodFisk Feedback

The response to the first podfisk has been extremely positive, with some advice and caveats:

I must admit, the first minute or so of it did not instill great confidence. Commenting on whether or not the President is bored sets a tone that conveys an inclination to reject whatever he says. Certainly, you are completely justified in doing so at this point in the Administration's history, but I still think it's unnecessary.

However, once the speech got rolling, you did well, and I found your commentary to be excellent. More broadly, by doing this for an entire speech (as opposed to the one-off line analysis typically found on Russert and the others), you are simply unable to take a line out of context and truly get away with it, because such a stunt would easily be exposed as the speech continued. Finally, through your podfisk, you made me do something I never thought possible - I actually listened to an entire radio broadcast by the President.

Yes, my other half said the same thing about the snarky beginning and edited some of it out. He was right. He tends to be. Another reader notices something:

Could I make a suggestion if you do what you call "podfisking" again? Don't be drinking or smoking or whatever it was you were doing when you recorded that - very distracting.

They're suppressed belches, alas. I'd just eaten three sloppy joes and knocked back a Jager shot. I'll do the next one on an empty stomach. Meanwhile, on the substance, a recently married gay reader writes:

Marriage is absolutely nothing like being partners/boyfriends/lovers. It is so incredibly richer than I ever imagined it could be. Even though our marriage is Canadian and isn't recognized in the U.S., it is recognized by our families and friends and coworkers, and most importantly by us. You have no idea the treasure that has been kept from gays and lesbians because we haven't been able to marry. It isn't just a one-time act in front of an audience, it is a life-altering event joining two people as one.

Having attended one last year and basically bawled through the whole thing, I know. It is life-altering; it is ennobling; it's experientially more intense than anything most gay people have ever experienced. It heals emotional wounds many gay people don't even know we bear. And that's why some want to keep it from us. They want to keep us from those feelings of being one with our own families; they want to keep us outside the society we grew up in; they want to deny us the love and support heterosexuals take for granted. Marriage humanizes gay people and shows us in the context of love and commitment, rather than merely sex. This corrodes the far right's attempt to portray us as "subhuman" or "objectively disordered" or "sinners". That's why they are so adamant on keeping us as second class citizens. But we have to trust the good sense and ultimate tolerance of most Americans. They have every right to be leery of such a change; and we have a duty to explain and argue and persuade them why they're wrong. Person by person, state by state. But it's great, I might add, to be getting so much support from so many straight people as well. Thanks, Jon Stewart. We won't forget who stood with us in this.

07 Jun 2006 01:56 pm

49 - 48

The Federal Marriage Amendment fails again in the Senate - miserably.

07 Jun 2006 03:27 am

PodFisked!

No, podfisking not some bizarre sexual practice indulged by Norm and Midge. It's just a podcast version of a fisking. A fisking - a term derived from the many times bloggers have dissected the deranged writing of Robert Fisk - is a genre that takes a text by someone else, and responds to it sentence by sentence, point by point. As I listened to the president's radio address this week on the proposed constitutional ban on gay marriage, I got the idea. Who better to be my first podfisk subject? Why not fisk via audio? So I spliced his speech with my responses on Apple's GarageBand program. Voila: a podfisk. It's my first attempt so forgive any rough edges. All suggestions for future podfisks welcome.

Listen to it here

(Photo: Mandel Ngana/AFP/Getty. Artwork by Aaron Tone.)

Tuesday, June 6, 2006

06 Jun 2006 11:37 pm

Apologies

As many of you must be aware, our redirect server from andrewsullivan.com failed again this afternoon. What's left of my hair has now been torn out. But we're back now.

06 Jun 2006 07:53 pm

The Gospel According to Rocco

The 23-year-old blogger behind the Vatican's version of Wonkette has now been profiled. And about time too. Money quote from Rocco, reminiscing about an encounter with a cardinal at the age of eight:

[Cardinal Bevilacqua] asked me, 'Well, do you want to be a priest?' And I had never thought of it. I thought about it for a long time and decided it wasn't what I wanted. But he told me a lot of the ways things work because I was so curious. So there was an intellectual thing. But that led to faith, to trust, to love, to the living encounter with Christ, which is the core of the work, but I don't talk about that all the time. So much of what I do stems from that, to share that with people and give them a sense of what I learned. To pull them in intellectually and with the sensual. The beautiful thing about Catholicism is that it is a faith of the senses. It isn't puritanical – or at least it shouldn't be. It is in a lot of quarters today, but it's a faith that rejoices in every part of reality. It's just the greatest allure in the world and when it calls you, it's very tough to not take that.

What a beautiful expression of Catholicism at its best. Rocco's blog, Whispers In The Loggia, is a real gem. I've linked to it before. And he needs financial support. So go there and donate. He's got student loans to pay off. And he's doing amazing work.

06 Jun 2006 06:43 pm

Steyn and Torture

Mark Steyn prides himself on being a realist, on seeing through various hackneyed templates of events, and calling the world like it is. But, of course, he has his own exhausted templates, rooted in his own tired ideology. And so we come across this particular idiocy from his latest column:

Anyone who supports the launching of a war should be clear-sighted enough to know that, when the troops go in, a few of them will kill civilians, bomb schools, torture prisoners. It happens in every war in human history, even the good ones. Individual Americans, Britons, Canadians, Australians did bad things in World War II and World War I. These aren't stunning surprises, they're inevitable: It might be a bombed mosque or a gunned-down pregnant woman or a slaughtered wedding party, but it will certainly be something.

This is true, so far as it goes. But Steyn does not grapple with the massive elephant in his living room. These kinds of atrocities happen even when a country commits itself to moral standards in warfare, even when its leaders at every level insist on following the Geneva Conventions. How much worse is war going to be when a country's own leaders openly flout the Geneva Conventions, express contempt for them, and proudly violate the law of their own countries and the U.N. Convention against torture? Has this distinction between this war and every other war in American history been lost on Steyn? In Vietnam, American soldiers were court-martialed for "waterboarding" a detainee. In Bush's administration, CIA officials are trained to do it, and medical professionals monitor the victims to ensure they are kept healthy enough for further torture. These facts are no longer in any dispute. When the president treats the enemy as animals, even when they are off the battlefield and can harm no one, why should his troops be held to a higher standard in the thick of grinding urban warfare, where the enemy is still at large?

And spare me this nonsense about knowing that torture will follow every war. If I had been informed in early 2003 that the liberation of Iraq would be conducted outside the Geneva Conventions, I could not have supported what would have been an unjust war in its execution. Period. If the president had been candid and explained that this war would require America to jettison its long history of humane detention policies and become a nation that practices and outsources torture, I would have been unable to support the war. Those of us who believe in the American tradition of humane warfare and in the moral boundaries of just warfare are not fair-weather hawks. We simply expected America to retain its honor in warfare. We were duped.

06 Jun 2006 05:58 pm

Malkin Award Nominee

"This Haditha story, this Haditha incident, whatever, this is it folks, this is the final big push on behalf of the Democratic Party, the American left, and the Drive-By Media to destroy our effort to win the war in Iraq. That's what Haditha represents — and they are going about it gleefully. They are ecstatic about it ... Folks, let me just put it in graphic terms. It is going to be a gang rape. There is going to be a gang rape by the Democratic Party, the American left and the Drive-By Media, to finally take us out in the war against Iraq. Make no bones about it," - Rush Limbaugh, yesterday.

06 Jun 2006 05:25 pm

Quote for the Day II

"I think that it is perfectly fitting for us to use the United States Constitution, a document that is dedicated to the preservation of our inalienable rights, to tell a certain specific group of people what they cannot do, rather than tell the government what it cannot do.
We don't need tax reform. We don't need an end to earmark pork spending in Congress. We don't need smaller government and school choice. We don't need real reform that would put medical care back into the competitive marketplace. We need none of those things. All is fine! What we need is a Constitutional Amendment that will keep two people who love each other, but who we don't consider to be normal - not by our standards anyway - to marry.
I know I'll sleep better tonight." - Neal Boortz, yesterday.

06 Jun 2006 04:03 pm

Quote for the Day

"If you interpret the Constitution's saying that the president is commander in chief to mean that the president can do anything he wants and can ignore the laws you don't have a constitution: you have a king ... They're not trying to change the law; they're saying that they're above the law and in the case of the NSA wiretaps they break it," - Republican activist, Grover Norquist, in the New York Review of Books.

06 Jun 2006 03:49 pm

"Traitor"

When I get a bunch of emails with the word 'traitor" in the contents line, I usually check James Taranto's blog to see what he's saying about me now. He selects three citations from my blog in chronological order in order to insinuate that I always assume the worst about American soldiers and rush to judgment as to alleged war-crimes. He calls his item "selectively excitable." In fact, I held off comment on Haditha for weeks because we had no firm details, and my first reference, last May 31, offered context that spoke well of the soldiers in the unit. My reference to Ishaqi was also very careful:

Investigations continue, and exactly what happened has not been established. But the omens are grim. And these pictures of infants with bullet holes in their skulls simply defy my comprehension of what has happened to this country.

Given verified images of children with neat bullet holes in their skulls, it was indeed hard to believe the official U.S. version of the event, which was that the victims were killed by a collapsing house under fire. I did indeed find the military investigation a little dubious, but when they subsequently added the detail of a possible gun-ship being involved, I noted that new fact as soon as I discovered it, a few hours after my first mention. But I also absorbed the lesson of a reader:

As you said, we still need to find out more information about Ishaqi. But an AC-130 gunship obviously would have torn bodies apart, not put neat holes in the middle of foreheads.

My response to that was: "I don't know what to think at this point." I still don't - and that was my last statement on the matter, something Taranto selectively omits. My response on an hourly basis to new allegations and information inevitably means a changing judgment, based on new facts. But the notion that I have jumped the gun on these incidents, that I am selectively citing them because I am interested in impugning the integrity of the vast majority of servicemembers, and that I haven't presented a wide array of views on them and cited the evidence in full, is patently unfair. If you selectively Dowdify anyone's blog, you can insinuate anything. But the record shows I am only interested in finding out what happened, and making sure those responsible are held to account. It is tiresome to have to respond to allegations of being anti-American, but I've learned you have to answer, because over time, the smears can stick. And Taranto does very little but sneer and smear.

06 Jun 2006 03:38 pm

Colbertizing O'Reilly

Some genius decided to do to O'Reilly's "Talking Points Memo" what Stephen Colbert does to his own commentaries on "The Word." A little uneven at times, but occasionally a bull's eye. Enjoy.

06 Jun 2006 03:16 pm

Stuff Happens Watch

From the NYT this morning:

Security in the capital has deteriorated precipitously in recent months. Increasingly brazen assassinations torment neighborhoods and no longer seem to follow any obvious patterns. In May, the Baghdad morgue recorded the highest number of bodies received since the beginning of the war: 1,375, approximately double the toll of May 2005.

This isn't spin. There's no data as hard as corpses. And by that measure, Baghdad is half as secure as it was a year ago. Rumsfeld's strategy has unleashed spiraling anarchy.

(Photo: Franco Pagetti for Time.)

06 Jun 2006 02:14 pm

AIDS At 25

The anniversary is American - and a little arbitrary. It was 25 years ago yesterday that the CDC reported two deaths from a form of pneumocystis that turned out to be a consequence of HIV. What has happened since cannot be summarized, because there are, in fact, dozens of HIV epidemics around the world today, each with distinctive patterns, populations, cultures, and prognoses. The world of HIV even within the gay male Western world is complex enough, which is why prevention efforts and drug regimens now have to be carefully recallibrated all the time to deal with a constantly moving target. One thing we can say, though. There was a turning point in 1996, when a critical mass of treatments turned the plague in America into something else. I wrote the first big essay celebrating and analyzing this - and nothing I have ever written prompted more hostility or anger from my gay brothers. It's the first chapter in my book, "Love Undetectable," my own attempt to absorb what plague had taught. Now, the 1996 Rubicon is taken as a premise of most AIDS journalism. From a subtle and truthful account in the NYT today:

Twenty-five years ago, treading water in that black sea of untreatable illness, we had only one answer to give. Only a lunatic would look back to those days with nostalgia, but certain parts of them have, inevitably, taken on that glow tricks of memory can sometimes confer on the terrible past. With no possibility of saving our patients, life was sadder but far simpler. The big war was already lost, so we could concentrate on small victories instead.

Now, a complete rundown of all the news from the front would take hours. Risk of death from AIDS: way down. Risk of death from other things: going up. Risk of drug reaction: depends. Risk of fatal drug reaction: low but not zero. Risk of drug resistance: gets higher every year. The statistics change almost hourly as new treatments appear. It is all too cold, too mathematical, too scary to dump on the head of a sick, frightened person. So we simplify. "We have good treatments now," we say. "You should do fine."

Most do. My last bloodwork came back with undetectable levels of virus, and an immune system stronger than at any time in the thirteen years I have lived with HIV. It is both great news that this has occurred for me and so many others, but it makes the tragedy of continuing death and suffering in the developing world more poignant and terrible. We are making progress in many ways. But the path toward brighter years is strewn with pockets of deep darkness. The demonized drug companies did a lot of this work, and have never received their fair share of praise; the Bush administration too has done much more than its critics will ever concede; the private charitable sector - you only have to think of Bill Gates' work - has been astonishing; the efforts of gay men, lesbians and countless heterosexuals as well have made lives with HIV easier, better, more hopeful.

And yet AIDS exhaustion is also real. The first words of my book are the following: "First, the resistance to memory." I knew I would one day want to block it out, that one day, I would forget most of it, especially the terror of it, and so I made myself write it out at the time. Now I find myself with little new to say, or, rather, nothing to say, except the obvious. I survived. Others I loved didn't. There was no fairness in this. None. Countless more are dying - and surviving - with the same senseless randomness. In this sense, AIDS and HIV are just more intense experiences of life itself. Except death, once encountered, becomes always more real; and life never again resumes the ease and oblivion it once contained. HIV is a crash-course in being human. And everyone passes.

06 Jun 2006 11:05 am

Iraq's Resurgent Taliban

Zeyad offers news of what is happening to the Iraqi capital:

Baghdadis are reporting that radical Islamists have taken control over the Dora, Amiriya and Ghazaliya districts of Baghdad, where they operate in broad daylight. They have near full control of Saidiya, Jihad, Jami’a, Khadhraa’ and Adil. And their area of influence has spread over the last few weeks to Mansour, Yarmouk, Harthiya, and very recently, to Adhamiya.

All of these districts, with the exception of Adhamiya, are more or less mixed or Sunni majority areas. They make up the western part of the capital, or what is known as the Karkh sector (the eastern half of Baghdad is called Rusafa)...

So far, enforcing the hijab for women and a ban on shorts for men are consistent in most districts of western Baghdad. In other areas, women are not allowed to drive, to go out without a chaperone, and to use cell phones in public; men are not allowed to dress in jeans, shave their beards, wear goatees, put styling hair gel, or to wear necklaces; it is forbidden to sell ice, to sell cigarettes at street stands, to sell Iranian merchandise, to sell newspapers, and to sell ring tones, CDs, and DVDs. Butchers are not allowed to slaughter during certain religious anniversaries. Municipality workers will be killed if they try to collect garbage from certain areas...

According to their sick creed, it is not against Islam to detonate a car bomb at a bustling market or to shoot a kid twice in the head because he had gel on his hair. No, that is okay in Islam.

Zeyad links to many other Iraqi bloggers seeing the same thing. I don't think they're biased members of the MSM.