(Note to literalists: the Watched column presently contains only a smattering of 'warblogs' because the facilitator of the template-change--Dr. Menlo--is not very familiar with them, and will be adding more as they are sent to him. Also, this blog may contain areas of allusion, satire, subtext, context and possibly even a dash of the surreal: wannabe lit-crits beware.)
Control
[Watch this space for: Pentagon and Petroleum, The Media is only as Liberal as the Corporations Who Own Them, Wash Down With, and Recalcify]
WARBLOGGER WATCH
Tuesday, June 25, 2002
Andrew Sullivan runs a survey, finds his readership is "skewed right." Correct on both counts, I'm sure.
He also finds the Sullivanians are "overwhelmingly male (85 percent) and heterosexual (87 percent)," which fact he believes "will drive Richard Goldstein and others nuts." I doubt Goldstein, or anyone other sentient being, will be in the least surprised.
But the money shot is this observation:
"I was also struck by the fact that California is our biggest state; and that we're very blue-state heavy. I guess the site attracts blue-state dissidents or simple skeptics, or it reflects the often ignored fact that large numbers of people in the blue states are not knee-jerk liberals."
"Often ignored" by whom? Sullivan, preeminently. First there was his oft-quoted fear that the Blue States would "mount a fifth column" against the War on Whatchamacallit. Later, when John Walker rolled in with the Afghan tide, he was moved to compare Walker with war casualty John Spann, and the Blueness of the former's home state with the Redness of the latter's, opining:
"The thing that stood out most starkly is the blue-red split... Both [men] are almost absurd stereotypes of each part of America... One is from Alabama; the other is from Marin County, California. One is a national hero, the first American casualty at the hands of the enemy. The other is the enemy. Does it get any starker than that?"
Now Sullivan discovers (via SurveyMonkey) a divergence of opinion among residents of the Republic of Blue. Will someone please tell him that such divergences have been found even in Red States? And that it's rather unseemly to decry ignorance of which he himself has been a leading promulgator? posted by roy edroso11:39 PM
• • • • •
At the height of the last Australian Federal Election, and unsurprisingly the one before that, there were two massively overused terms, one was "racist", the other "un-Australian".
To put this in context - during the first of these two Federal Elections there was a political wildcard and idiot, Pauline Hanson, whose views (now oddly adhered to by John Howard) were labelled "racist", and anyone who so-much as expressed the opinion that some things she said might be right was called a racist as well. If you thought there should be less immigrants coming into Australia, you were racist. If you you thought there should be an inquiry into how the Aboriginal community was spending the $1 billion in funding they were receiving to no effect, you were racist. If you thought multiculturalism might not be the best way forward for the community, you were racist. If you agreed investigation into the rise in youth crime of various ethnic communities was warranted, you were racist.
Last election is was un-Australian. If you agreed with mandatory detention, you were un-Australian. If you thought we should review the immigration policies, you were un-Australian. If you felt that the Government shouldn't rush into a military effort in Afghanistan, you were un-Australian. An so on and so forth.
Now, unsurprisingly, there is a reoccurance of this pattern in America, though the new term is "anti-American" & "anti-Israel". Believe that the "War on Terror" is a shambles lead by an inconsistant and ill-defined strategy - why, that's anti-American. Believe the last American elections were a complete mess and the wrong guy won - hey, that's anti-American! Believe that the American calls for unilateralism on the war effort while screwing it's supporters on the World Trade Market is hypocritical - damn you, you anti-American bastard! The same goes for "anti-Israel". Think that the Palestinians have a ligitimate cause in wanting their own state, bingo! you're anti-Israel. Believe that Israel & American intervention is as much to blame for the current situation in the middle-east as anyone else? Why then you're both anti-American and anti-Israel. Think that the current Israeli effort to build a "fence" around the West Bank is a little to remenicent of the rounding up and systematic killing of Jews in Poland - then shut the fuck up, you anti-Israeli Nazi facist pig.
Over the next few weeks I'll be tracking the usage of the terms "anti-American" and "anti-Israel" across the warbloggers to illustrate this point. For instance, warblogger watch is anti-American because of this post by Grady Oliver.
Media Minded uses the word to describe the Left because, well, they're the Left. They must be anti-American.
Broken Images uses it to describe The Guardian becuase, well, it too leans to the Left.
If you should happen to spot any rampant overuse of either terms, feel free to contact the warbloggerwatch and tell us. But be careful to conceal who you are - you wouldn't want to be labelled anti-American. posted by wrongwaygoback7:43 PM
• • • • •
Oh dear---Li'l Scotty "Trustfund" Ganz has finally snapped. Apparently he has lost what little mind he had left, been driven into a frenzy of blood lust, and threatened our own Grady Olivier with unconscionable violence. Scotty imagines himself going to Grady's house and "kick[ing] his fucking teeth down his lie-clogged throat." The Warblogging worldview appears to have affected the inner depths of Scott's psyche and caused him to become a violence crazed madman---OK, he already was violence crazed, but now his violent thoughts are not directed only at the Muslim world, but at a peaceful, hard-working Maori-American. Snotty Scotty goes on to attack the parents of the various Warblogger Watchers in the same sort of high-pitched, screeching, hysterical tone that characterizes all of his writings, whether on political matters, his new Hello Kitty lunch box, or his oh-so-difficult job driving a mid-level/sub-talent movie director around Hollywood.
What's worse, Ganz has received several comments applauding his efforts, some which refer to Mr. Olivier as a bully---Snott threatens to assault Grady, and it's Grady who is the bully? Shame on you folks. You should know better---doesn't coming out on the side of violence for violence's sake support what we at Warblogger Watch have been saying about all of you Warbloggers all along?
So shaken is Grady that he has retained experienced legal counsel to see if Scott Ganz's comments are actionable; in addition, Mr. Olivier has hired personal protection, so you better not try anything, Ganz!
As to Snott's claim that all the Warblogger Watch contributors (wise Menlo, brave Edroso, sage Olivier, et al) are the same person, I can only say the idea is absurd; come to think of it, however, I have never seen Papa Lowell and Unkie Babaloo in the same place... posted by Brad3:14 PM
Of course, some never stop rattling. Quoth the Central Scutinizer, commenting on a different article in a different context (but expressing a POV all too familiar to his readership):
"Is it just me, or is keeping the United States from feeling good about, well, anything, but especially itself the main consistent theme of The Nation crowd? And why is that, exactly?"
A possible answer may be found in the abovementioned Pluchinsky item. Many recent attempts to feed (or, rather, force-feed) our nation's self-esteem (or, rather, its esteem for the current Administration) have been just plain ridiculous, and therefore counterproductive. It's not just "keeping the United States from feeling good" to say so. In fact, given the current shut-up-and-wave-your-flag environment, I'd say it's really a public service.
Brendan O'Neill doesn't support human rights, because "Human rights has become a byword for Western governments getting rid of regimes they don't like and installing pro-Western, pro-human rights regimes in their place." Brendan declares that human rights are less important than political and democratic rights.
"All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."
Brendan O'Neill does not support this.
"Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty"
Brendan O'Neill does not support this.
"Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person."
Brendan O'Neill does not support this.
"No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms."
Brendan O'Neill does not support this.
"Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law."
Brendan O'Neill does not support this.
"No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile."
Brendan O'Neill does not support this.
"Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him."
Brendan O'Neill does not support this.
"Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance."
Brendan O'Neill does not support this.
"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
Brendan O'Neill does not support this either - even though his govenment, country and fellow citizens do, which is why he has the ability to espouse his point of view on the Internet. posted by wrongwaygoback6:15 PM
• • • • •
Saturday, June 22, 2002
Glenn Reynolds is coming around to the idea that we need neo-colonialism to prevent the Saudis and Egypt from getting nukes. As I see it, colonialism is the one thing that will insure they get them. No one in Washington seems to care about nukes possessed by our client states, after all. posted by Franklin6:56 PM
• • • • •
Quoted approvingly by somewarbloggers is this jeremiad from State Department terrorism expert Dennis Pluchinsky, claiming that published discussions of any subject germane to national security abets terrorism. "Al Qaeda terrorists now know to pay a speeding ticket promptly," he writes. "They now know not to pay for things with large amounts of cash." The power of Big Media is apparently greater than previously suspected; never in their wildest imaginings have conservatives before imputed to BM the power to impart common sense.
"The president and Congress," suggests Pluchinsky, "should pass laws temporarily restricting the media from publishing any security information that can be used by our enemies."
As this Administration is famously inattentive to matters of Constitutional law, why should they wait? There are companies that every day provide information of use to our enemies, and swift action could easily be taken against them.
Take Berlitz, for example. As of now, any terrorist can walk in off the street and learn sufficient English to read our treasonous newspapers, or find nuclear recipes on the Internet.
Or Web MD. At this website, one can learn how to deal with anthrax poisoning. Given that the terrorists are notoriously clumsy with their biocontaminants, might not this advice be used to improve their methods?
There are also many sites where national security matters are discussed in detail on a near-daily basis. These very loose cannons provide a treasure-trove of strategic insights, albeit of a highly fanciful kind, and could give some Berlitz-educated Al Qaedan dangerous ideas. The Feds should be on these outlets like white on couscous. They might begin here.
Despite yesterday's promise to limit my warblogger-watching, I am moved to offer the following, much like someone downing a large quantity of ipecacuanha is moved to vomit all over the fucking place.
I have caught this blissful idiot dispensing some ill-informed opinion. Employing that most shopworn of rhetorical devices, he asks himself several questions. Allow me to answer here them in sequence:
1) How will a Palestinian state come about?
Answer: Likely through international fiat, much like Israel did. Amazing that Israel, which owes its existence to the affirmation of international opinion, operates in complete indifference to the same.
2) Will the Palestinians get everything they want in their state?
Answer: Of course not. A demilitarization of the PA is not just likely, it is already largely achieved, what with Sharon's longstanding efforts to undermine and destabilize the Palestinians by targeting their security forces. You are again correct re: the right of return. The Palestinians will of course be told, "no, you can't go back to the house in Jaffa which you fled over 50 years ago." Such rights are reserved for wealthy former inhabitants of the Baltic republics of the Soviet Union and their even wealthier offspring. Your point about the larger settlements standing is again largely correct.
Incorrect, however, are your conclusions from the recent Palestinian Jerusalem Media and Communication Center poll that, as has been parroted everywhere by everybody, purports to show that the "Majority [of] Palestinians See Israel's Elimination as Goal." A quibble that handily shows that the poll, if it is to demonstrate a majority falling this way or the other, is wildly inconclusive is evident in the very text so often linked to by the warbloggers: "Fifty-one percent of people surveyed said the end result of the uprising should be 'liberating all of historic Palestine,' referring to British-mandate Palestine, part of which was recognized as Israel in 1948." The piece also noted "The poll had a three percent margin of error." A quibble, true, but the poll cannot be said to demonstrate a majority.
Interestingly enough, the previous poll gauging the same attitudes (conducted March 2002) asked the question with greater precision and in a manner that did not corral respondents into endorsing the "pushing of the Jews into the sea" as the worn saw puts it. In that poll, a full 41.6 per cent favored a "Two state solution: an Israeli and a Palestinian." A further 31.6 per cent reported wanting a "Bi-national state on all of historic Palestine." The possible response that demanded the Jews be pushed into the sea, a "Palestinian state on all of historic Palestine and return of refugees," was selected by a meager 12.5 per cent of those polled. I have no doubts that the Palestinians have been further radicalized by the intervening three-odd months, though the methodological poverty of the most recent JMCC poll undermines the results to the such an extent that they cannot be regarded seriously.
3) How will the Palestinians rationalize the fact that their state does not match their expectations (fantasies)?
How touching that you parenthetically and snidely deride them as "fantasies." Your question can be answered in tandem with the one that follows:
4) What will be the result of that rationalization?
Answer: Probably a general acceptance of their lot, much like they have generally accepted their current wretched lot. B'Tselem shows that 354 Israeli civilians and security personnel were killed by Palestinians in the 15 years ending January 2002. The intensification of the violence since then is, of course, noted, though the historically minded will of course recognize it as an aberration. This works out to an annualized 24 Israelis killed by Palestinians. Nearly 4,300 people were murdered in New York City in 1990-1991.
5) What will be the near-term result of creating a Palestinian state under anything resembling current conditions?
Answer: Again, I do not know, but I see no basis whatsoever for your assertion that "The creation of a Palestinian state under current conditions will lead to increased terrorism - certainly against Israel and quite probably against America." This seems only an odd expectation (fantasy) on your part that justifies the continued immiseration of the Palestinians.
PENIS WARS CONTINUED: Steve, I'm not obsesessed with Reynolds traffic - twoposts hardly an obsession makes. Hell, I wouldn't give it a passing thought if Reynolds didn't insist on going on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on about it. posted by wrongwaygoback8:32 PM
• • • • •
Warblogger watching is harder on the ocular faculties than I had imagined, though the stomach upset it often occasions is far less surprising. I can now understand why the wonderful Mr. Eric Blair posts so seldom to this forum - he's no longer up to the task. Repeated confrontation with the obnoxious bilge discharged by the warbloggers frays the nerves and withers the spirits. Warblogger watching is, at bottom, an auto-administration of the Ludovico Technique, though it has none of the associated ameliorative upshots on character.
Actually, it works the other way. Having realized the deleterious effects on my psyche and my person, I am forced to limit my output on these pages. Having to suffer through another of Lowell Ganz's Rosemary Kennedy-like embarrassment of a son's shameful fulminations would surely reduce me to David Brock levels.
Before I take my leave for the next few days, allow me to offer a few notes for that most objectionable of warblogging sissies. "The Franchise" puts forward the following this afternoon: "ISLAMIKAZES: How's that for a new name for suicide bombers? A reader suggested it." Quite an indication as to who is reading your running display of prejudices, Sully! Warbloggers have been tossing that one around since April, at least. The more scrupulous employing the term cited this Jerusalem Post article crediting the term to professor Rafi Israeli, himself as much a remorseless thief of verbiage as your "reader."
The piece in which Prof. Israeli is credited bears a December 20 dateline (he used the term again in a March 21, 2002 piece, the likely location of the warbloggers' initial encounter with the "neologism"). Sadly for the learned professor, the term appeared first in a New Statesman piece. Worse, the issue of the Statesman from which the term was lifted was current when the Post wrongly credited him. The coincidence in dates strongly suggests Israeli merely repeated something he had read first in the Statesman. That he appears to have not issued a letter correcting the misattribution, which, given his later use of the term - in scare quotes and again without assigning the term to James - seems to suggest deliberate theft. A perusal of the professor's "scholarship," furnished no reason to believe he regards prevailing standards in academic discourse with anything above contempt.
I mention all this merely to register a miniscule correction in the historical record. I know how big you warbloggers are on accurate attribution ("Yes, I invented the term Paleostinians." Good for you, sugar!). As some guy/girl wrote, "this is the something or other, and we can do something your whatsitcalled." Or something. posted by Grady2:25 PM
• • • • •
Joshua Treviño has responded (June 17) to me responding to him, to which I will (briefly) respond. (Is the Blogosphere the Forum Romanum, or a hall of mirrors? We disport, you decide.)
In the previous edition, Joshua cited three American Muslim belligerents, and has now added more (along with a few British ringers), to say something about Islamic Westerners -- I'm still not sure what, as his argument is larded with demurrers ("I've no doubt that one can be Muslim and American"), but it still sounds bad. For example, from his follow-up:
"It's unfortunate but true that alone among immigrant and minority communities, it is the Muslims of the West who tolerate and often abet prominent strains of hostility toward their host cultures."
Here's an account of a party held in Chicago three years back, when Clinton pardoned some Puerto Rican terrorists who had helped blow up some Americans (their fellow Americans, one might say) in the 1970s:
"Last night, several hundred members of Chicago's Puerto Rican community celebrated the release of the prisoners with music and speeches before ex-prisoner Ricardo Jimenez took the stage to wild cheers. Speaking in Spanish, Jimenez called for a 'Puerto Rico libre' and said he would not stop the fight until Oscar Lopez Rivera and the other prisoners are free."
A lot of people, regrettably, feel some measure of cultural sympathy for terrorist movements within their own countries. But I don't recall anyone suggesting that selected Puerto Rican nationalists be detained without charges lest we get a repeat of the Truman shootout. Charging, trying, and jailing the perpetrators seemed to work fine.
It's no defense of hostile Islamic fundamentalism to say that their stateside sympathizers have the right to believe what they will, and say what they will, and that the government should only lock them up for actual crimes. That's long been America's secret weapon against totalitarian ideas -- kill 'em with Constitutionalism. I still think it could work.
PENIS WARS CONTINUE: Richard Hailey has taken on my mathematic analysis. Let's take a look at it.
Firstly, remember hits are a different issue to Unique Viewers. Hits are the number of times a page is visited. Unique Viewers are the number of people who visit the site. The number of Unique Viewers is ALWAYS lower than the number of hits (for obvious reasons).
Secondly, all the figures came from the Extreme Tracking figures:
The main reason Richard's numbers differ so greatly from mine is that he is taking the current month's project figures, whereas I'm using the average figures. This month seems to be an exception (due to some major referrers (who will be one-hit-wonders), and will eventually affect the average. As he noted, my estimates were very rough and didn't exactly match the averages.
However, my very good friend Jeff pointed something else out to me.
"The flaws in Extreme Tracking have a lot to do with the etremely inflated unique monthly visitors count. As you note, unique visitors and unique IP addresses are 2 very different things. But look at his daily & weekly #s for this week (12:20 pm):
5,389 + 17,130 = 22,519. Not accounting for dynamic IP addresses, the only way those could be 22,519 different individuals is if none of the 17,130 from Monday returned on Tuesday. Not likely. Extreme shows 427,260 uniques over the past 29 days. That works out to about 14,733 per day over the course of a month. Given that his daily average is shown as 14,733, it seems quite obvious that Extreme Tracking doesn't count monthly uniques - it takes the daily uniques across the entire month and adds them together to arrive at the monthly unique total. The only way that 427,260 number could be accurate was if each day 14,733 new visitors came to his site once and never came back again. Jeff"
In other words, the weekly and monthly figures are COMPLETELY FLAWED.
This makes it nigh-on impossible to find how many repeaters there really are.
But...
Using Richard's maths, Insnayapundit gets on average 225691 hits on average per month. So 225691/30 should equal 7523 hits a day. Why doesn't that match the average uniques? Why is it less? Isn't that a sheer impossibility?
But nevermind... We'll keep going.
7523 multiplied by 8% gives 602 for AOL users. Applying the AOL factor of 3, we can assume that 1805 (Richard multiplied wrong on his page, multiplying by 2). 7523-1805 = 5718. At the upper AOL level of 14% that leaves 4363.
So those figures show 4363 - 5718, well within my 3000-8000 range.
PENIS WARS CONTINUE: Glenn Reynolds continues to discuss the length of his cock, despite his constant remarks that he doesn't care about it. Glenn has this latest gem:
Extreme Tracker, which counts only the main page, reports 226,916 unique visitors so far this month, for whatever that's worth.
So, what is it worth?
According to the quoted figures, Instapundit gets about 15,000 unique visitors each weak. Of these we need to work out how many are one-hit-wonders there are [floaters] and how many regular visitors there are [repeaters]. The big problem is that floaters will use several IPs over the course of a day, with the impact growing over the period of a month. For instance, an AOL user who logs on the internet and surfs to Instapundit twice a day will show up as two unique visitors on one day, 14 across a week, and 60 unique visitors across a month because of the roaming AOL IP addresses. In other words, the Instapundit unique figures get worse and worse as time goes on.
So let's mess with the maths as an example.
Assuming the figures are correct, if Reynolds is getting ~211,000 uniques a month, then about 6,800 of his 15,000 average visitors/week are floaters, with the remaining 8,200 his actual loyal audience ((6,800[floaters] x 30[days]) + 8,200[repeaters] = 212,200). This, of course, is only accurate if the repeaters only count once. The problem is, they don't.
So looking at the weekly figure, the breakout is more like 11,500 of the 15,000 are floaters, with the remaining 3,500 repeaters ((11,500[floaters] x 7[days]) + 3,500[repeaters] = 84,000). This, again, is only accurate if the repeaters only count once.
This is radically different - the monthly figures showing 8,200 repeaters, the weekly figures showing only 3,500. The fact of the matter is that the repeaters have a massive impact on the unique figures due to changing IP addresses.
Which figures are more accurate? It's hard to say. At best we can say that the loyal Instapundit audience is somewhere between 3,500 and 8,200 loyal readers, with the remaining views borne of people floating in on referral, web searches or simple spidering and never come back to Instapundit.
With 8,200 loyal readers at best, the New York Times need not fear Reynolds just yet. posted by wrongwaygoback12:04 AM
• • • • •
Monday, June 17, 2002
Though no formal alliance has been concluded, we learned last week that the mighty Max Sawicky, one of our go-to guys for stats and studies over at Like Father Like Sun, was referring readers of his Weblog to this very site. Noted and appreciated. The man today tosses his hat into the Warblogger-watching ring along with this entry, the first of five promised necropsies of a corpse interred down Tennessee way. Our enterprise acquires further dignity. How about yours? posted by Grady3:54 PM
• • • • •
I hate to harsh on Joshua Treviño, since he has been a respectful opponent (May 29), but there's something in his current edition (June 10) that begs to be addressed:
"A John Walker Lindh makes for a freak case. A Richard Reid makes for a disturbing coincidence. A Jose Padilla makes for a trend. What will it take to shut them down? At what point does an ideology, a belief, or a faith become incompatible with the very idea of our America?" [italics mine]
While the headcount on Muslims in America is notoriously fungible (so much so that the State Department would rather talk about the number of mosques in America than the number of Muslims stateside), it's safe to say there are at least a million Mecca-facers hereabouts.
Is three out of a million a trend? If you think so, consider that there are about 45,000 Catholic priests in the United States, and at least 70 Holy Fathers have been caught molesting children over the past ten years in the Boston archidocese alone.
If three per million is, by JT's logic, a trend, what's (numbering conservatively) 1,556 per million? A tipping point? And should we not then carpet-bomb the Vatican?
Does WorldNetDaily fall within WBW's bailiwick? Well, we do monitor National Review Online and OpinionJournal and other lunacy disseminators that are not technically warblogs. If you need a McGuffin, RightWingNews (prominent on the linkbar of the Central Scrutinizerhimself) has spoken favorably of the WorldNetDaily item in question. In any case, this one is too good to miss.
Referring to a Zogby poll that claims most Mexicans believe their country is entitled to take back parts of the U.S., WorldNetDaily columnist Joseph Farah sees stateside Mexicans as "America's Palestinians." "The leaders of this movement are meeting continuously with extremists from the Islamic world," says Farah, and bolsters his claim with quotes from the website of the Aztlan movement.
"This is a story about a movement to create a new state within the borders of the continental United States," warns Farah. "It is a column designed to alert you and your elected officials to vital national security issues."
I've seen the Aztlan site, whose members indeed believe that they have been gypped out of their birthright. And I've seen FreeRepublic, many of whose members... well, let's hear them tell it:
Regarding the "South Carolina Sovereignty Flag" (sic till further notice): "I don't see why all South Carolinians do not embrace this flag - it a sovereign flag of freedom."
Freepers on other recent topics:
"I wouldnt call the souths attempts to secede 'treasonous rebellion'. Nor would i call it a 'civil war'. It truly was a war for 'Southern Independance.'"
Add to these Freepers' many loving references to Jeb Davis, Confederate anthems, Confederate flags, and such like, and you'll notice that Aztlan isn't the only, or even the most troublesome, bellwether of secessionism in our country today.
When will Joseph Farah "alert you and your elected officials to vital national security issues" regarding these folks? When will he report that they are "meeting continuously" with like-minded Southrons while Homeland Security sleeps?
If John Ashcroft can arrest somebody for planning something--and by planning meaning allegedly not having gotten past the looking-it-up-on-the-internet-stage (no physical materials attained, etc.)--and file them away into military jail whilst simultaneously stripping away their constitutional rights as American Citizens (at first it was just the 'them'--the non-American citizens, and civil liberties groups warned . . . ), and stage and orchestrate the release of this information just so to really get the American public going--that is, AFRAID . . . who's to say it can't happen to you? I mean: in a totally trumped-up way--is what we think.
. . . further FEAR.
Remember, this is the Frog Boil here, as propagated by Bush & Co., and if we look at the direction of things, who's to say that the remaining dissenting voices in America (larger than advertised?) won't get clipped? Filed away?
To further my potentially future legal (political) case, I plan to append my email with this:
ATTN: ECHELON, CARNIVORE, AND OTHER CURIOUS SOURCES: I, DR. MENLO, DO SOLEMNLY SWEAR TO CURRENTLY BELIEVE--AND DO ESPOUSE BY LIVING--IN THE VALUE OF PEACE. MEANING PHYSICAL . . . PEACE/NO WAR. NO VIOLENCE. NO BLOWING THINGS UP. NO LETTING PEOPLE GO HUNGRY. NO LETTING THE TOP ONE PERCENT OF THE POPULATION OWN NINETY-NINE PERCENT OF EVERYTHING, AND I PLAN TO PROPAGATE THESE MEMES: THRU ART, THRU VERSE, THRU BEAUTY, AND YOUR PROGIT-LESSNESS. NO VIOLENCE. NO WAR. PRO-HUMAN. PRO-BRAIN. PRO-BODY. PRO-TRUTH. ANTI-HELPLESSNESS. GET YOURS NOW-->DRMENLO.COM
While retailing some of his experiences during the much ballyhooed "Operation Anaconda," [Army Private Matt] Guckenheimer artlessly spilled what was surely meant to be a secret order from his superiors.
"We were told there were no friendly forces," Guckenheimer said. "If there was anybody there, they were the enemy. We were told specifically that if there were women and children to kill them."
Let that sink in for a moment: American soldiers were told to kill women and children. "Specifically." To kill a child. To put a bullet in the brain of, let's say, a two-year old girl. To hold the barrel of a rifle to her tiny temple and pull the trigger. To watch as the tender plate of her skull, the delicate bones of her face, her large bright inquisitive eyes were all obliterated in a burst of red mist. "We were told specifically to kill them." "Women and children." "To kill them."
So that's the kind of warfare being waged by those notorious two cowards, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. When their own generation was on the firing line, in Vietnam, both men ardently supported the war--but disdained to fight in it. For his part, Cheney was too busy with his long bootlicking rise to power: "I had other priorities," he has loftily proclaimed.
Meanwhile, Bush's daddy got his drink-addled little boy a cushy stateside berth in the Texas National Guard--but even then, Junior couldn't stick it. He bugged out for an entire year of his duty--desertion in wartime, a capital offense, if you're not rich and well-connected. Fortunately, his service records for that period were "scrubbed" by General Daniel James, former head of the Texas National Guard, who is now head of the entire nation's Air National Guard -- courtesy of his appointment by a grateful George W. Bush.
Now these two armchair warriors, Bush and Cheney, ensconced safely behind the greatest phalanx of personal protection ever seen in history, are sending out a new generation of young people to kill and die. Like their predecessors in the Vietnam War, they are twisting the faith and idealism of patriotic young soldiers and turning them into instruments of murder.
And the Warbloggers cheer them on! "Go Georgie! Go Dickie! You can do it! Kill Babies! Go Georgie! Go Dickie . . . " posted by Dr. Menlo7:41 PM
• • • • •
Friday, June 14, 2002
Warblogger-watching grows tiresome. The lummoxes at OpinionJournal are hauling off on the Lebanese, insufficiently outraged journalists, and a poor Ukrainian fellow for not raising an appropriate furor over the Lebanese Daily Star's failure to include the IHT as an insert, as is customary. The reason? The IHT "had an ad from the American Jewish Committee deploring anti-Semitic incidents around the world." As Taranto explains (partly) "Under Lebanese law, a foreign publication distributing in the country cannot publish items deemed propaganda for Israel." He cribbed that explanation from the AP, but neglected to include the sentence that followed: "Lebanon and Israel are technically at war."
Despite an earlier court case occasioned by the Daily Star's inclusion of an IHT insert which carried an ADL insert, Taranto's characterization of the Star's decision not to sell the IHT as "censorship in the Arab world" is questionable. The IHT's agreement with the Star provides the IHT be included without modification. It is curious indeed that an advocate of businessmen's rights of the more rebarbative sorts calls a publisher's decision not to accept an advertisement (with the unfortunate extension being his contractual obligation to refuse the remainder of the paper) "censorship."
Jonah Goldberg is at it again. He admits that "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla's rights are being violated, but he just doesn't care.
He writes:
[T]he issue isn't "can" Padilla's rights be violated, but should they be violated. I ask two questions to come to my conclusion. What does Padilla deserve? And, what should Americans expect their government to do?
As for what Padilla deserves, the short answer is nothing. Al-Qaida rejects the Geneva Convention and the rules of war because its aim is mass murder for mass-murder's sake. Its operatives are all essentially plain-clothes spies and saboteurs (who can be executed according to the Geneva convention, by the way). Those who say Padilla should get a civilian trial are essentially saying that if you reject the rules of civilized nations, like those inscribed in the Geneva Convention, you therefore deserve to be treated better, not worse, than those rules require.
Goldberg has tried this argument before, when he admitted that he is "not a well-versed student of the Geneva Convention." He doesn't know, I guess, that even accused spies and saboteurs get trials. So, need we remind Jonah that the accused dirty bomber isn't getting a trial at all, military or civilian? Ah, but he probably doesn't care about that, either. Nor, it appears, does he care about the notion of the United States being better than the terrorists. posted by Franklin9:29 AM
• • • • •
Thursday, June 13, 2002
I offer two hastily typed notes forthwith and hope that you will pardon the lack of connection between them:
1. I feel bad for poor Andrew Sullivan in that history has already laid claim to the title "Sullivanians," robbing him of one of the more euphonious terms with which he could describe his devotees. A loss for Andy, but a gain for Warblogger Watch. The similarities between the original Sullivanians and the new crop are remarkable: a shared belief in the fundamental evil of maternal love (manifested in the warblogging Sullivanians as a determination to prevent the Palestinians from realizing a Motherland, or, in a corrupt form, as indifference to dead Iraqi children); a common organizational form with a collection of pathetic followers arrayed around a megalomaniacal leader who fancies himself infallible; the theater figures in both movements, though information supplied Warblogger Watch has it that Andy's turn as Benedick was even less enjoyable than the dismal stagings of the Fourth Wall Reperatory Company. "I'll be back Monday with guns blazing. See you then." We can't wait, little Andy.
2. Lileks delights over his own graceless bangings on the keyboard today. He introduces his daily Bleat, an apt word for so enthusiastic an adherent of prevailing orthodoxies, by saying "Having reread today's bleat, that's all I can say: hooooboy. I bring this up just because I think it's . . . unusual, and reveals a different aspect to a place I pass daily and patronize once a week. It's an interesting story you might have heard, but I've not seen it discussed anywhere in blogland." You can almost hear the blood rushing to and engorging his penis.
He has found that a director of an Islamic investment concern whose U.S. arm holds Lileks's local coffee chain in its portfolio is a wild fundamentalist. He makes much of a now deleted webpage (though, supersleuth he is, he tracked down its Google cache) that lists the members and mission of the Shari'ah compliance board on which the director in question serves. It states the company is "committed to providing financial products that conform to Shari'ah, as well as ensuring that all of the Bank's operations conform to Shari'ah." Lileks apparently misunderstood this as stating the company's U.S. holdings must accept the Koran or something (the financial product would be the fund, not the portfolio company), as he then dredges up some of the writings of the director in question that expand on some of the Koran's nuttier and more misogynistic passages. It seems he's saying First Islamic Investment Bank would like to force Shari'ah on us stateside.
Lileks grants Muslims their "right in America" to proselytize, and he indulges his similar right to ridicule them. I hope Lileks would permit us an exercise of our not-yet-taken-away American right to follow his lead. I could have guessed by his narrow-mindedness that Lileks is a Christian, though he allows in his current column that he is a Lutheran. Of course Lutheranism, whose founder wrote that "the Jews deserve to be hanged on gallows seven times higher than ordinary thieves," and that "we ought to take revenge on the Jews and kill them," is a wholly sensible body of doctrine. Lileks, a man who seconds Ariel Sharon's realistic fear that the Palestinians are threatening to push the Israelis into the sea, is merely following Church precedent in abiding the campaign against the Palestinians, just like Luther abided the German Peasant War with such brio: "They [the peasants] should be knocked to pieces, strangled and stabbed, secretly and openly, by everybody who can do it, just as one must kill a mad dog...Therefore, dear gentlemen, hearken here, save there, stab, knock, strangle them at will, and if thou diest, thou art blessed; no better death canst thou ever attain." Man, is that ever some nutty shit my American ass is completely incapable of relating to.
InsideEuropeIberianNotes (June 9) writes "We had a look at Warblogger Watch. It's actually rather well-written (better than at least 75% of blogs) and pretty funny, though we think the contributors are a bunch of jerks..." There's the pull-quote! Call our agents!
The remainder of the entry slams WBW (a collective entity in IEIN's reckoning -- crikey, does that make us anarcho-syndicalists?) for being "anti-Jingoes," then goes on to defend the jingo nomenclature with thoroughly expected quotes from George Orwell.
One could argue the etymological point, but why bother? Between WWI and WWs II through whatever, IEIN draws a distinction that is, in this case, truly without a difference. The word in question has retained, through various conflicts, an unambiguous meaning. While conservatives have become pretty good at trifling with neologisms, older usages are harder to manipulate.
In my own postings (pushing aside here the groupthink attributed to my colleagues and myself by IEIN), I have concerned myself with online lunacies inspired by the present conflict. As I am not an exalted thinker, I have been content to call certain malefactors on breaches of common sense and logic, not ideological deviation. Thanks to the high volume of gibberish polluting the Internet these days, I haven't wanted for targets.
We can always debate the sanity of certain actions and ideas, and IEIN, which is better-written than at least 76% of blogs, has a place at that table. But let's not waste everyone's time with patriotic word-games. (P.S.: "The Band Played Waltzing Matilda" predates the Pogues' version.) posted by roy edroso11:31 PM
the new york times article on blogs. 'inherently political'. hmmmph. a rift? if the warbloggers believe they were the first to look 'outward', then yes, there's a rift ... or maybe a reaganesque 'common sense gap.' surely they must realize that political discussion has been a constant thread even in tech and diary weblogs. the journalists who write these articles have no history with weblogging, and neither the journalists nor the newer 'pundit-style' [to use their terminology] bloggers seem to read archives or old discussion group postings ... and that, my friends, is a crying shame. even webloggers must take in their own history. at american samizdat, it's instructive to go back in the archives of each site of the the alliance of world-weary webloggers to read about september 11, and the approaching war. the alliance page was set up ten days after the attack, pointing to weblogs who had shelved their 'normal' postings to cover this crisis ... and our power as aggregators of varied news sources in association with first-person accounts, and off-the-cuff emotion is staggering. it would also be instructive to go back and read postings from these same folks in the pre-2000 election season, because everyone needs to understand that punditry has been no stranger to weblogging. the clinton impeachment was before my time [early 1999], but search scripting news for 'impeachment,' and that will probably lead you to other weblogs discussing the issue. you might even try some 'o.j. simpson' searches on the older blogs. these are only a few examples. i really don't understand, i guess, what 'warblogs' are supposed to be doing that's 'new' or 'different,' other than having their narrow classification being portrayed by the media as a divisive element in the weblogging world. "we're new! we're great!" how many times have we 'older' webloggers heard that one? we smile, remember our time in the sun, and let the youngsters have their fun. more will come, replacing these in the limelight. divisive, my foot. we all learn some things, and life goes on. -permalink-
A few inaccuracies on your part to address, shouldn't take long. First, when I stated that the majority of the big names remained unaccounted for, I was referring to our inability to put a dent of significant size in the list of 22 Most Wanted Terrorists, a high priority of any War Against Terror worthy of the name. You write "as of 15 January, one third of Pentagon's 36-odd Taliban most wanted, and 8 of its 20 Taliban most wanted, had been reported dead or captured, according to Carl Conetta." Ignoring the doubling-up of "Taliban most wanted" (you meant to type al Qaeda in the second instance), 8 of 20 works out to less than 50%, at least according to my abacus. You also stated that Abu Zubaydah's capture, which "was only possible once the war had rendered him a fugitive." This ignores both American suspicions against him for his part in the thwarted Millennium Attacks as well as his March 27, 2000 indictment by the Jordanians.
You also took issue with my statement that an undetermined number of Afghan civilians had died. True, the Los Angeles Times piece did reckon the number ("conclusively" in your telling) at 1,200, though theirs was just one of a number of estimates. Even ignoring the work of Marc Herold, the warblogger's go-to guy for dubious stats just a few days back gave a range of "between 600 and 1,500," which suggests that the statistics are anything but conclusive.
You further state that the Shlomo Ben Ami quote is off topic. Please re-read the piece, this time noting that Ben Ami's words are reproduced immediately after a sentence stating Arafat "never turned down '97 percent of the West Bank' at Taba." "The pressure of Israeli public opinion against the [Taba] talks could not be resisted" can be readily translated as "No such offer was made." Sadly for you and others unable to comprehend the import of so matter-of-fact a statement by an Israeli official, the times did not include any helpful onomatopoeia at the conculsion of Ben Ami's quote.
If you tabulate my score as "0 for 3 on his factual challenges" your innumeracy rivals your illiteracy in its severity.
"...failed and failing states which have served as terrorist sanctuaries will be conquered and occupied by a friendly country (us if necessary) with the means and ruthlessness to root out terrorist infrastructure. This is a fundamental change in the post World War II order. Borders will change and whole countries cease to exist."
We all know what this means: watch out, terror havenCanada! You hoseheads have already come under fire from the American Association of Concerned Taxpayers. ("The days of Americans rolling their eyes at the angry angst of our maple leaf neighbors are over. Listen up Canada: Either you are with them, or us. You decide.") Now Mark Steyn has inserted the thin edge of the wedge, proposing the annexation of Alberta ("The Albertans would be up for it, and, to be honest, they’re the only assimilable Canadian province, at least from a Republican standpoint"). Soon we will come for the whole shebang.
One wonders if the old dream of a U.S.-Canada-Mexico common market will someday be obviated by a North American superstate. Tom Ridge is worried about Mexico. Why not just annex it? The concept is already has its earlyadopters.
Think of the benefits. Goodbye border patrol! Southerly security issues could be treated by whatever measures Homeland Security has in store for the rest of the U.S. And annexation will make it easier for Vicente Fox to prosecute his own local troublemakers without having to split hairs over whether they're really terrorists or not.
Cross-referencing our terrorist list with Mexico's might prove a little dicey -- theirs includes Taiwan, for one thing -- but that's nothing a crack team of negotiators couldn't work out.
In time we could start working our way further down the map. We could make Venezuela the new Texas, and without resort to the politically unpopular means heretofore used to pacify our fractious hemispheric homies.
We can't let this get out of hand, of course. Some nations must remain independent, so that U.S. corporations might retain their convenient tax havens.
But the idea has promise. Since we're not too good at making friends, let's eliminate the middleman and make other countries parts of us. Then we can go back to our pre-9/11 pastime -- squabbling among ourselves -- but on a much grander scale.
"Attention Warbloggers! You are condemned. Did you know that? The instant the terrorists you support took over our government, you sentenced yourselves to death. Warblogger Watch is here to seek justice for our dead. Highly trained soldiers are coming to shut down once and for all Glenn Reynolds's ring of terrorism, and the Taliban that supports them and their actions.
"Our forces are armed with state of the art military equipment. What are you using, obsolete and ineffective weaponry? Our Brad Olson will rain fire down upon your camps before you detect him on your radar. Roy Edroso's bombs are so accurate he can drop them right through your windows. Our infantry is trained for any climate and terrain on earth. Warblogger Watch soldiers fire with superior marksmanship and are armed with superior weapons.
"You have only one choice ... Surrender now and we will give you a second chance. We will let you live. If you surrender no harm will come to you. When you decide to surrender, approach Warblogger Watch forces with your hands in the air. Sling your weapon across your back muzzle towards the ground. Remove your magazine and expel any rounds. Doing this is your only chance of survival."
The War Street Journal, as usual, thinks that Washington isn't hawkish enough. Assistant to the Publisher Richard J. Tofel wants the Democrats to out-hawk the Republicans: "The Pearl Harbor of our time -- the moment that truly changes everything -- was not last Sept. 11, I fear. It lies ahead. And that looming threat requires us to choose between becoming the America Firsters of the 21st Century and returning to being the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John Kennedy."
It isn't enough that the GOP has abandoned its anti-war (i.e., "America First") history and become, on foreign policy, the party of Roosevelt, Truman and JFK that Tofel wants. There must be no opposition party whatsoever. And if Democrats like Joe Lieberman get their way, the Democrats will try to out-hawk the Republicans. posted by Franklin11:13 AM
• • • • •
Friday, June 07, 2002
The earliest manifestations of Peggy Noonan's war-related madness were chronicled here and here. Shortly thereafter she settled back into her usual, less troubled hagiographic state. But on Friday she relapsed horribly.
"I think of the comment of a friend whose sister lives in an ashram in Washington state," Ms. Noonan writes. "Her swami, a follower of an Indian form of astrology, has announced that June 10 and 11 will be cataclysmic for the world. She called her brother, my friend, to tell him that she loved him. My friend tells me all this and we look at each other and know what the other is thinking: I don't believe in swamis and I don't believe in Indian astrology, but June 11 is nine months after 9/11, and the enemy seems to like nines. We both sort of breathed in and out again. Should we avoid cities on those dates?"
Her previous Catholic mysticism was weird enough, but now Noonan is attending numerology and followers of swamis.
What has caused this relapse? Perhaps it was precipitated by Bush's new Homeland Security initiative -- or the security fiasco that (one could be excused for suspecting) led to it; Noonan does warn, late in her ravings, that "The longer we obsess on the systems failure that contributed to Sept. 11, the more we contribute to the next systems failure."
The latter explanation would offer some hope for Noonan's sanity. Once a Republican operative, always a Republican operative, and it would be less worrisome to imagine that the Riefenstahl of Reaganism is merely pulling a Cheney in the service of the Administration's approval ratings.
Alas, her column offers further evidence that Noonan has indeed flipped:
"As you read this I want you to do something. If you think that another bigger, more terrible shoe will not drop in our time, stand up right now.
"You're still sitting. Because just about every sane and sentient adult knows that more shoes will drop, some with a deadening thud.
"If you think New York City will not be a target, or the target, of the next big shoe or shoes, stand up.
"You're still sitting..."
This reverse-Howard Beale exhortation goes on for a while, and one imagines Noonan typing it out and envisioning millions of readers proving her psychic powers by dutifully remaining in their seats.
Her real call to action, though, is to "Think dark... be dire... We are living in a time when it is one's patriotic duty to be imaginative." And what must we imagine? "On the same day, New York and Washington are, say, dirty-nuked."
And what must be done to prevent this? Scrutinize Arabs and Muslims, she says (at least as carefully as she did last October). But above all, we must fear. "Why isn't our government telling people, through television and pamphlets and speeches and announcements, what they need to do to survive a potential nuclear attack?" asks Noonan. "What should mom and dad in the suburbs do if they see a flash of light and a two mile high cloud in the city 22 miles away?"
For some, the answer will always (or in times of psychological distress) be to live in terror. Me, I live in an apartment in Brooklyn. I have no backyard in which to build a bomb shelter, and no inclination (or money) to purchase one. If a nuclear device strikes New York, I figure, I'm screwed. More to the point, if the combined might of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies can't prevent such devices from striking, we're all screwed, and all the preparedness plans in the world won't unscrew us.
Rather than bunker ourselves, how about we find a better way to deal with the rest of the world?
And now for something completely different part two: A nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan. Or: The Larch.
What’s that? Liberals don’t know how to respond to the nuclear exchange according to Victor Davis Hanson? Actually, the prospect of a possible nuclear exchange highlights quite graphically the limitations of bombing and terror campaigns. It also highlights how incredibly banal your average Warblogger’s position on war is. Does it encourage or deter nuclear exchange when the US announces that it will initiate first strikes on its alleged enemies on its own? Does it encourage or deter nuclear exchange when we act unilaterally and kill civilians and then declare victory? Does it encourage or deter nuclear exchange when we withdraw from the World Court (Please explain how this gets Pakistan and India back to the negotiating table?)? In fact, what I’ve found is that the average Warblogger hasn’t commented on this too much because if Pakistan and India were to follow the Warblogger’s mantra—
(Those mantras are, in no particular order: Your opponent is evil and evil only and nothing rational could describe their evil evil evil acts of evil , negotiation is useless (they are, afterall, subhuman and quite evil), there are no root causes to disputes, force works and people don’t mind our civilian casualties because we’re the good guys, blowback doesn’t exist and my favorite: We don’t care what the world thinks. Bombs away and that Ted Rall/Noam Chomsky/Mike Moore he’s no good…)
--then a nuclear war is inevitable. We have to hope that both sides in this dispute are more intelligent and more sensible than Americans and the sillier monarchy worshiping Warbloggers (Figures. During a particulary nasty debate over at Plastic that we had some time back I wondered aloud whether his family was allied with the Shah. I’m still wondering…) amongst us. Of course they can’t quite bear to face up to their own logic, that is: if our policies are encouraging nuclear holocaust wouldn’t it be better for us to change our policies? If, sigh, there was only a Decent Right as Mike Walzer might say. That would mean doing the opposite of what I mentioned earlier and I’ve probably said this before but what could the United States do to prevent nuclear war? Well we could join the World Court enthusiastically and propose an arbitration process for nations if it doesn’t already have one. We could ask that Israel and the PLO immediately join that process and then turn around and ask Pakistan and India to do the same. That would be consistent. We could also ask for United Nations troops in both Kashmir and the Mideast. That would also be consistent.
Speaking of Israel, I have been accused of being anti-semitic because I didn’t approve of the IDF using tanks to roll over homes. To be honest, the reason I don’t approve the Israeli tactics is that I’m firmly of the belief that their use of force creates more problems for them than it solves. But here’s another question for you Warbloggers: is it in the interest of Israel for there to be a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan? I’ve looked at those dispersal patterns and they look like they’re coming awfully close to Israel. Of course, these are wildly optimistic dispersal patterns that don’t include either side developing hydrogen bombs or stores of chemical weapons or what happens when you have multiple nuclear plant explosions or what if China or the Stan countries decide to intervene with their own weapons or in the confusion al-Qaeda gets its hands on a couple of nuclear weapons and aims a plane toward Israel…Well, to me, it just seems a lot simpler to work toward peace.
You could even make a capitalist argument for peace efforts. I know the prospect of 20 million brown people (They're justiable causalties they'll bravely intone.) does nothing to move the hearts of the hardened Warblogger, allegedly safe in his or her comfy chair. (How many of you have enlisted for this noble and just war effort? You’re only 30 Pejman “Never Takes an Israeli War Crime/Atrocity Seriously” Yousefzadeh. When will you sign up?). So try to think of it this way. Nuclear war could be bad for Israel, in that a there may be a Pakistani bomb with their name on it. Nuclear War could turn the mideast oil reserve into a radioactive wasteland—but, in an optimistic silver lining behind every radioactive cloud Glenn Reynolds moment (“I’ll be fine after the nuclear exchange,” sez my strawman Instapundit. “A fellow blogger told me I’d be okay and…Ted Rall sucks!”), I guess we would move toward alternative fuels at last. And, last but not least, nuclear war could be bad for the stock market and that could even hurt the economy."How dreadful" as Andy Sullivan might say in a fit of manly exasperation.
Afterall, what’s more important: choking on your war lust or doing everything you can to prevent the deaths of 20 million people? Wouldn't it be better if the War on Terror, whatever it is these days, be put on hold not just for Israel but for the world? Better not ask the Warbloggers. They’re probably busy stocking up on Iodine and thanks to their administration cohorts we probably should too….
Just a minor correction to Grady Olivier's entry below: The Chicago School of economics has nothing to do with the Austrian School, aside from both tending to be free-market, the latter more so than the former. Austrians, in fact, are critical of the Chicagoites for the very reason Grady cites, i.e., because the Chicago School "examine[s] equations instead of actually existing economies." Furthermore, most Austrians are firmly anti-war. posted by Franklin11:11 AM
• • • • •
At National Review Online, Victor Davis Hanson says liberals are unserious about the burgeoning India-Pakistan crisis. Why would that be? Because they can't use it as a stick to beat Israel.
"While our elites can vent the full range of their anger and self-righteousness at Israel -- as the symbol of Western 'colonialism' using its superior power and wealth to 'oppress' the 'other' -- Kashmir offers no such romance or glorification of the noble, indigenous anti-Westerner, and almost no opportunity for the political correctness of the morning latte or the evening seminar," he says.
Reverend Al Sharpton does say he's going to the region -- or, as links site RightWingNews puts it, "Sharpton Copies Jessie Jackson's Useless Trip To Israel And Decides To Try Draw Press By Going To India/Pakistan." But I suppose this doesn't count.
"Kashmir is very deadly business," Hanson goes on, "where the lives of millions may well hang in the balance -- and where easy and smug proclamations pale beside the specter of vast cities in ashes."
So one would assume the warblogbrethren -- no Jenin obsessives, they -- would have brought a Hansonian seriousness to the discussion. Here's Instapundit on the latest developments:
"JOE KATZMAN has a linkfest of resources on the impact of an India/Pakistan nuclear war. He also has an extended analysis of Al Qaeda's likely reasons for actually wanting a nuclear war between the two. Sadly, he's pretty persuasive. Of course, if there are nukes flying around, an extra nuke or two in the right place might go unnoticed..."
If I'm reading this right, the Professor thinks nuclear war in South Asia would make an excellent cover for nuclear strikes against Al Qaeda. Is this a joke, or a "ha ha only serious?" Perhaps Hanson knows.
(Instapundit's Katzman link is more serious, but equally fanciful, offering scenarios for Al Qaeda mischief in the region, including the assassination of Donald Rumsfield.)
Later, same page: "UPDATED FALLOUT MAPS for an India / Pakistan nuclear war are available through Shoutin' Across the Pacific. As long as it's not 'irradiating across the Pacific.' Actually, the fallout generated by Hiroshima-size nuclear weapons appears to be relatively minor anyway..."
Other recent examples of warblogger high seriousness on this subject:
"In the meantime, looking for a fair fight in Lakers-Nets, Tyson-Lewis ... and India-Pakistan?" (LagTime)
"Like nine other people who watched the news over the sleepy post-Memorial Day week, I noticed those Pakistanis and Indians
are still real excited about having a war.... Will you people quit this garbage? It's 2002. You all need to work on your image, right?... Turns out it's more fun to be alive than to be crisped by a crude nuke due to some jackalope's big idea about national pride." (Ken Layne, at FoxNews)
I hardly blame them. Given the high noise level emanating from the War on Whatchamacallit, it's hard to focus on this new threat. Even good sources such as Indian Lieutenant General Satish Nambiar don't give us much to go on ("We have convinced ourselves that we are a nice set of people. Nice guys have no place in this world today. I am not saying that we must all be bad guys...") So why wouldn't a weary warblogger prefer to scan pictures of Hollywood starlets?
Still, there are places you can go to get more informed analysis on the subject. Here is one. You can also read papers situated nearer the hot zone and get other angles, like this interesting Pakistani POV.
But let's not pretend a lack of seriousness on such subjects is a liberal phenomenon. Why, I bet some of Hanson's colleagues even take morning lattes.
Warblogger Watch has come under fire from a woman reporting "Live from the World Trade Center." An unemployed MBA alumna of the University of Chicago - that place where interned academics examine equations instead of actually existing economies, and enjoy their Austrian fantasies in cognitive dissonance-free comfort - takes us to task endlessly. Allow me to register a few words in our defense from my station beneath the "slush pile at a third-rate college newspaper."
"Jane Galt's" principal complaint against us is our juvenile refusal to give proper hearing to the arguments of our opponents. Given that nearly every posting is deals with a specific instance of warmongering on someone else's behalf, I find this assertion curious. If we don't engage the quote thoroughly - and for my part, I emphatically do not - it is likely because the words before us are from a yabbering ass, offered at maximum volume and with minimum acquaintance with both fact and logic. How, I wonder, did those encountering Lee Perry respond when they found him walking backward and striking the ground with a hammer?
She is spot on re: some of her other charges. My shop teacher told me back in 1976 that I was perhaps the most competent builder of strawmen he had ever seen in practice, and I feel I owe very little the way of courtesy to someone who delights in other peoples' sufferings and indulges in the truly scatological. If admirable conduct these days demands quiet deference before the perpetrators of one of the grossest crimes against public discourse since the enactment of the Sedition Act, I proudly inscribe myself among the uncivilized.
Though insufficient to land her a paying job, Galt seems to have read all the required management texts and Paul Samuelson books. She's got the telltale arrogance. Noam Chomsky and Edward Said et al., she says, have been saying the same thing for thirty years, and have been overtaken by history in the interim. If she had actually familiarized herself with either the works of Chomsky and Said or with history itself, she would probably not have ventured this statement. But then again, the disdain required by the boardroom impressed upon her sputtering brain by Chicago, she probably would have. Chomsky is profoundly anti-theoretical, and what he has been doing for the past thirty years (in addition to that little side job he's got redefining linguistics and dethroning the behaviorism that so enamored conservatives) is cataloging the misdeeds of the American government. If your appreciation of history is so minimal as to not apprehend the fact that we have put down almost every secular, progressive indigenous movement to rise, then it seems pointless to continue. Likewise, if Said has been saying the same thing for thirty years, perhaps he was writing in response to an unchanged constant, viz. the unremedied wronging of the Palestinians.
Galt, while projecting a reasonable enough persona at times (though wrong nearly always), is just as flawed as her warblogging brethren. Convinced of her own heroism in defending the status quo, she is best left alone to contemplate the perfection of markets and the moral beauty of Richard Perle.
In one of the more commonsensical judgments rendered by the warbloggers recently, a gentleman styling himself "Max Power" asks why collaborative "blogs" such as the present Warblogger Watch aren't more popular. He cites "Volokh" and "Oxblog" as demonstrations of the strategy's validity. We didn't need convincing, and we believe Power's recommendations to be so correct as to be patent. Contemplating the warbloggers as a whole, it is certainly obvious that they should consolidate operations to reduce redundancy. There are also issues of synergy and ready relief; Power allows that with amalgamation, the newly allied warbloggers "can feed off of each others' ideas," and when sheer battle fatigue overtakes a heroic combatant, "one blogger can pick up another blogger's slack." Lord knows, there's slack aplenty! posted by Grady11:47 AM
• • • • •
Wednesday, June 05, 2002
The kudos keep rollin' in. Now La Blogatrice is mad at me for some of my comments at this venue:
Roy, being concerned about terrorism DOES NOT equal being cowed. It is common sense. When a bunch of vicious America-hating killers say that there might be an attack on something, WE PAY ATTENTION, for the very simple reason that we have already been attacked. Does that mean we are giving in? No! We just don't particularly care to die that day. Ellis Island can wait until the threat is reduced. And the more Al-Qaeda we capture, the more information we will get and the safer we can all be.
You go ahead, Roy. Be macho and "refuse to be cowed." Then take a walk to the giant pit at the corner of Cortlandt and Church streets. Take a good long look.
THAT is why we are more careful now.
Some observations: first, Mademoiselle Blogatrice, there's no telling where or when or if terrorists will strike. Planning one's daily itinerary around possible terror attacks seems like a short route to madness. I mean, we keep begging tourists to come to New York and sample attractions like Ellis Island, even though they'd be much safer (by your logic) staying away. Is that "macho"? Should we instead tell them, "Don't come here -- you might get blown up. Stay in Topeka"?
Recall the London Blitz. Those folks were being shelled constantly. Yet heed this first-person account:
But I found that people that were attending dance halls and theatres did not become as scared during the air raids as those individual families sheltering in their back gardens. Even if they were ushered into the theatre's basement shelter they remained happy and entertained themselves and often joked about any 'close hit,' and the same was to apply to shoppers that were suddenly moved down to the basement until the air raid had passed.
Given their valor in the face of daily attacks, I grow weary at being lectured sententiously on "the giant pit at the corner of Cortlandt and Church streets." Citing the World Trade Center does not give instant moral authority to your message, especially when it boils down to "stay scared."
It's irritating enough to hear this kind of thing from rubes, but to get it from a fellow citizen is just depressing.
A&D isn't the only venue to consider this plan. The Libertarian Party of Hawaii floats such a proposal as well, though without that coarse, preemptive derision of opposing viewpoints ("The anti-gun bien pensants of the world wet their pants at the thought of flying airplanes containing hundreds of armed civilians") typical of warbloggers and adopted by A&D.
I am sympathetic toward the People of the Gun on Constitutional grounds, as I have previously written. But universal gun suffrage would not, even in a perfect world, mean universal gun presence. Even Wild West saloon-keepers required that firearms be checked at the door, and airlines are within their rights to do the same.
A&D says guns were once upon a time considered less of a problem on passenger flights. Once upon a time, we could also get into nightclubs and concerts without being frisked or routed through metal detectors, as we are now. But times have changed, and more people in more situations now seem inclined to express their dissatisfaction with services, restrictions, or glances at girlfriends with explosive violence than in days gone by. Given the uptick in non-terrorist-related violence on passenger aircraft, I would think twice (at least) about sharing a small, sealed space several thousand feet in the air with a lot of strangers holding loaded guns.
Quite often, after having beset upon a hapless warblogger with what seems to them fury disproportionate to their journalistic crimes, my mailbox fills with denunciations, calls for apology, and demands to know exactly why I was so damn mean. It amazes me as a delete their messages en masse that never have they realized that their graceless bangings away offend Enlightened folk endlessly. One appearance in blackface was enough for the remarkably boorish Ted Danson. The warbloggers, however, don't seem to get it. They continue to show up, Beta Theta Pi membership cards in hand and stage makeup on face, to wonder why polite society shuns them.
On balance we here at warblogger watch are neither overly excitable nor quicker than most to indignation. Why Roy Edroso has been giggling over James Lileks's idiocy for what seem to be years, and I myself continued to read The New Republic long after gold-digger Marty Peretz spent his wife's money to convert it into an anti-Arab brickbat. Brad Olson helped someone in George Wallace's motorcade change a flat tire circa 1968. But what we cannot abide are uninformed idiots setting up shop as "pundits" and discharging the most obnoxious opinions imaginable. And with the belief that they deserve an audience.
When you take on one, whether over the demonstrable dissimilarity of their preferred version of events to authentic history or over the poverty of their "thought," you end up taking on the whole lot. They may be different individuals working independently of one another but we see no reason to believe this is so. Why, give them a nominal democracy under which to operate, some of the most generous lending libraries anywhere, and uncensored access to the Internet, and the best they can do is the homogenous and fetid baygall we have before us. The idiots are only able to differentiate themselves from the mass by venturing increasingly idiotic statements, a trend that if not stanched will certainly carry Rich Lowry to the White House or Reichschancellery by decade's end.
Today one of the more asinine warbloggers, Stephen Green, links to Laurence Simon, possibly the only man rivaling him in the stupidity stakes. Simon had rejoiced after reading this BBC story on a failed Syrian dam. I reproduce his glee-finding below:
I don't know what Yahweh has in the back of his vicious mind for you scumbags, but I'm sure that the last one'll be a bitch. You can count on it. With all new Modern Plagues of Jehovah, folks, people will be asking "Syria? What's a Syria? Is that some sort of new breakfast food or something? Wasn't that a boy-band in 2010?"
Now quit fucking with Israel through the Hizbollah in Lebanon. God can see through your middlemen as easily as he can see through the hair in your noses. Go back to killing your own resident minorities and you might just earn a lukewarm pit in Hell instead of an endless field of rotating spits. Sure, you earn 72 virgins in the afterlife when you martyr yourselves in attacks on the Tribe... they rotate on flaming spits and sear for all time as well!
Think about that seriously as you paddle around your pathetic pool of tears.
Man, is that ever rich! Green calls Simon's site funny and characterizes the above as "righteous rage." How delight at the imperiling of a civilian population is at all righteous Green does not say. He seems to be doing nothing so much as claiming the role of Andrew "Dice" Clay for himself. Absent talent, wit, significant neural horsepower, self-confidence, and simple decency, the only way he can attract page views is by turning up the ill-bred amperage. Could he have picked a more shopworn formula? Isn't this what you're doing?
It appears that libertarian and open source software advocate Eric Raymond has jumped on the warblogging bandwagon. With all the pro-gun blabbing that happens around the warbloggersphere the forty-something gun nut fits right in. Eric has a brilliant solution on how to deal with making planes safe from terrorists and hijackers: don't bother increasing airport security or giving the pilots guns, you should arm the passengers instead:
"Now, as a terrorist, you would be facing an unknown number of guns potentially pointed at you from all directions. Go ahead; take that flight attendant hostage. You can't use her to make people give up weapons neither you nor she knows they have. You have to assume you're outnumbered, and you dare not turn your back on anyone, because you don't know who might be packing."
Of course there might be a few problems, like shooting holes in the plane. But don't worry, the plane with crash slowly:
"And, about that stray-bullet thing. Airplanes aren't balloons. They don't pop when you put a round through the fuselage. A handful of bullet holes simply cannot leak air fast enough to be dangerous; there would be plenty of time to drop the plane into the troposphere. To sidestep the problem, encourage air travelers to carry fragmenting ammunition like Glaser rounds."
And of course some passengers will get caught in the crossfire, but no biggie, it's all for the greater good:
"The worst realistic case from arming passengers is that some gang of terrorist pukes tries to bust a move anyway, and innocent bystanders get killed by stray bullets while the passengers are taking out the terrorists. That would be bad -- but, post-9/11, the major aim of air security can no longer be saving passenger lives."
Just think how cool that would be!:
"Think of it. No more mile-long security lines, no more obnoxious baggage searches, no more women getting groped by bored security guards, no more police-state requirement that you show an ID before boarding, no more flimsy plastic tableware. Simpler, safer, faster air travel with a bullet through the head reserved for terrorists."
Sounds great! And if granny gets her head blown off in the crossfire because a couple air rage jerks have had one too many drinks, well, that's the price you pay for efficiency!
- Eric A. Blair
And my name is "Captain Scott," aka Scott Ganz! I host Captain Scott's Electric Love Bunker! Isn't that a great name! It kind of says that I'm wacky (I'm so nutty, if you asked me what my nickname was, I'd probably say something funny like, "My name is not Nick"!), but also that I'm kind of kitschy and hip, like a lava lamp! I'm not a big fan of ragheads! Also, like I say on my site, I'm not gay! That doesn't make me a homophobe, I just want to preemptively defend myself against charges that I'm a gay! Life is rough since Sept. 11--I've even been forced to work for a C-grade director! Why can't dad get me work with someone good, like Uncle Ron? Jesus, even Uncle Garry would be better than this! Maybe I should call UncleBabaloo. posted by Brad2:26 PM
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Tuesday, June 04, 2002
A kindly reader was both diligent enough to ferret out this lesser virtuoso and possessed of large enough a stock of promethazine to get through a couple dozen of the man's (self-doniminated "The Commander" and shown here exhibiting his many war faces; you can almost make out the faux wood paneling in the furnished basement in which he no doubt lives in the pictures' background) postings (called poepjes in the native tongue of The Commander's progenitors).
The Commander provides his biography for inspection and we accept heartily. He is, it seems, an unemployed dropout, making him far from alone in warblogging circles, and was at some point - he does not give a precise date - promoted from Dungeon Master to full Commander. A lifetime spent shunning real learning and pursuing fantasy behind him, the Commander presumes to tell the people of Palestine what they deserve and why.
In one of his most recent entries, The Commander nearly catches light after working himself into a frenzy over Hosni Mubarak's suggestion that, just maybe, the suicide attacks undertaken against the Israelis have something to do with Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. "Yeah, right. It's all about the occupation; it has nothing at all to do with the fact that the Palestinian militants want to push all the Jews into the sea," he tells us. Perhaps this is what those filthy Arabs want, though it's little more than the pathetic and wholly unrealistic longing of a people dispossessed and repeatedly humiliated.
In the earlier days of the Zionist project, when honest confrontation of reality was both possible and desirable, it was acknowledged by most that if the Arabs wanted to push the Jews into the sea, the Jews wanted to push the Arabs into the desert. Moshe Shertok wrote "We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from a people inhabiting it..." In all likelihood it is not that The Commander has forgotten this (written in 1914) but that he never knew it to begin with.
Commander, are you even able to see that the Jewish state has been achieved, and that the desire to push the Arabs into the desert has been realized? Israel, despite Ariel Sharon's fear- and warmongering, is in no danger of disappearing as an entity. The Arab fantasy remains precisely that: the indulgence of a beat-down people resigned to squalid concrete hovels that is as pregnant with possibility as those hopes of yours for marriage volunteered in your biography. I put you to such rough usage here because I'm still angered by these words you wrote on a timetable for the establishment of a Palestinian state and the cessation of Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people: "How's this for a timetable? After two continuous years without any attacks against Israel and I mean none, or when hell freezes over [My italics]." You go, big guy! I always love to see people put their humanity on conspicuous display.
Between your above suggested timetable and your essential instruction to Palestinians seeking the right of return to go fuck themselves, you are asking the Palestinians to surrender completely and share complicity in their furthered humiliation. Have you considered at all what it is you are saying?
Just took advantage of a free moment to finally visit the most celebrated female warblogger, Asparagirl.
It's a parody, right?
Asparagirl goes to see two wonks discuss globalism:
First things first: Brink Lindsey is a dead ringer for Adam West (minus the Batman cowl but plus glasses). I just had to get that out of the way and mention it, because it was really pretty unnerving to listen to him talk about emerging economies and trade barriers and the like while also constantly imagining him saying "to the Batpole, Robin!"...
Michael Hardt seemed very unsure of himself, almost intimidated to be there... Hardt seemed mostly uncomfortable throughout the hour and a half and wasn't as engaged either with Lindsay or with the audience as one might have thought.... Hardt seemed much more to be responding to Lindsey's opinions and viewpoints than giving much differing ones of his own. It was hard to believe that he is a professor...
One needn't be a devotee of pop gender psychology to guess whose argument Asparagirl finds more compelling.
Asparagirl appears to live in New York, and to be one of those citizens (like Peggy Noonan) constantly worried about terror attacks: This very afternoon, I read on the Drudge Report that New York landmarks were mentioned by prisoners at Guantanamo Bay as being likely targets; so much for Scott and me paying a visit to Ellis Island later this week.
Please, friends, tell the world: many of us who live in the Big Town (as I have for many years, though some analysts affect not to notice this, even when it is plainly mentioned in the texts they are dissecting) have chosen not to be cowed by terrorists foreign or domestic.
Byron York has no less than three articles at National Review Online related to intelligence failures prior to the World Trade Center attacks. One of them focuses on James T. Caruso's Congressional testimony last October, which York's subhead says "appears to be intentionally deceptive." The article's headline is "The Clintonian FBI."
Deception = Clinton, it seems, wherever it is found and to whomever it may be attributed. Making the choice of words doubly ridiculous is a December 2001 article by York highlighting the terrible relationship Clinton had with his FBI Director, Louis Freeh. Cribbed largely from Elsa Walsh's New Yorker article, the relevant section details how Freeh, dissatisfied with the lack of cooperation he was getting from Clinton on the Khobar Towers bombing, passed information on the case to former President George Herbert Walker Bush, who used it in secret discussions with the Saudis. (Freeh then sat on his hands, having "decided to wait for a new Administration.") This bit of diplomatic privateering was indeed "deceptive" on a nearly treasonous scale, but it was Clinton who was being deceived.
York follows up on his own story in this article, which somehow fails to mention Clinton, though the author does suggest in this one that Democrats have a "hypocracy problem" pertaining to terrorism gotchas. They're not the only ones. posted by roy edroso6:36 PM
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Allow me to put forward a corollary to Godwin's Law - call it the Law of Olivier - and postulate that the more indefensible one's position becomes, the more likely one is to try to invest it with decency by associating it with Martin Luther King. Earlier in the day, I found one of the more disreputable hunt-and-peckers posting a quote from The Great Man on Zionism. It has since been removed, though I recall it being the following: "And what is anti-Zionist? It is the denial to the Jewish people of a fundamental right that we justly claim for the people of Africa and freely accord all other nations of the Globe. It is discrimination against Jews, my friend, because they are Jews. In short, it is anti-Semitism."
Reading the above I was moved to consider the other Great Men who have promoted the Zionist cause, and came up with this nowhere near exhaustive list:
Jan Smuts: The Boer are a cheery people fixed tight to their Old Testament. Jan Smuts, colonist, general and South African Prime Minister, supported Zionism hugely. His level of humanity can be gauged by his assertion that the indigenous San were to be "looked upon as vermin and exterminated on contact." Would the warbloggers denigrate those who questioned Boer apartheid as anti-white?
Franklin Roosevelt: The conservatives' favorite president, Roosevelt II urged the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, which "should be for the Jews and no Arabs should be in it."
Claude Pepper: The Florida Senator who though a Democrat presaged Katherine Harris and said of the then (and still) massively disenfranchised blacks in his state that "Whatever may be placed upon the statute books of the Nation, however many soldiers may be stationed about the ballot boxes of the Southland, the colored race will not vote, because in doing so under the present circumstances they endanger the supremacy of a race to which God has committed the destiny of a continent, perhaps of a world."
Richard Meinertzhagen: Whatever energy he didn't expend in his ruthless slaughter of Kenyans he applied to the promotion of Zionism. posted by Grady2:10 PM
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Thanks for the invite to join--at the urging of my boss, the incomparable Grady Olivier, I gladly accept.
Dipping my toe gently into the world of the warblogger, I find myself almost immediately distressed. I stumbled into the world of one Christopher Cross, who ID’s himself as “a soon to be law student in Los Angeles.” That’s all well and good, Chris, and while even that scant description manages somehow to make your life sound slightly more interesting than (judging by the site) it apparently is, you are far too modest---not even one mention on your blog about your previous career. Otherwise, an unimpressive collection of pointless, underwritten crap; a story on gay Afghanis allows Cross to use the term “Al-Gayda” and query, “Do we call them the ‘TaliMAN’ now?” Yo, that’s the funniest thing I’ve heard since the big Jim Teter show at the Prairie Capital Convention Center. For a guy who makes bad gay jokes, Chris also makes a lot of references to his fiancée. I’m not saying he doth protest too much, I’m just saying.
I fear this is all I can take right now. I must rest; further, the lights in one of the tanning beds have burnt out, a situation calling for my immediate attention.
"First out of the gate was, naturally, Andrew Sullivan, whose womanish lament had the ring of my old Auntie exclaiming "Oh dearie me, it's simply dreadful!" "Is Bush surrendering?" he demanded to know, on hearing the "dreadful news" that tens of thousands of living human beings would be spared:
"If true, then those of us who have supported the war on terror need to revise our assessment of this president. He told the German press yesterday that there is no plan to invade on his desk. He said it almost proudly. His military leaders, in a sign of their determination to risk nothing and achieve nothing, are now leaking to the Washington Post that they have all but scotched a serious military option in Iraq."
To have to listen to this puffed-up poofter (and British immigrant) bloviate about the implied cowardice of our military leaders is part of the price we have to pay for our de facto policy of open borders. For all the whining he's doing about being supposedly "banned" from the pages of the New York Times Magazine, imagine how he'd react to bullets whizzing past his ear. Why the poor thing would run shrieking from the battlefield, rationalizing his cowardice every step of the way. The closest Sullivan has ever gotten to the military is Uniform Night at the local gay dive. When did our gay Napoleon ever risk his life for a cause greater than a moment's satisfaction in the dark?”
Justin, who is a hardcore libertarian who logically enough questions the motivations of the wars of nation states, beats up on the left to, but that's consistent. His columns are always eye opening and original.
Breaking News: Occasional Warblogger Godless Capitalist (The Race Elitist Who Has No Name) Notices That Bush is Dumb!: Arguably the most arrogant blogger alive, Godless Capitalist came to a shocking conclusion some time ago, President Bush isn’t a smart man. Imagine that. And yet this is the man who’s leading our war effort, we think. (Who knows really.). I don’t always find myself in agreement with the Original GC, but I do think he’s a good writer, despite between utterly seduced and sodomized by the Dark Side. In fact, if you’ve ever wondered what kind of blogs that Magneto or Dr. Doom or Bond villains or Zod would have, then go right on over to Godless Capitalist’s site. I mean, who knew that Dr. Doom could write well? Recently he came to a conclusion about Bush that I thought has been obvious: that Bush is a bit of a moron. I’ve always wondered how any self-respecting intellectual could support Bush, arguably the most incompetent president that we’ve ever had in our lifetimes. Godless apparently regained his respect and said:
What a moron
Bush is really just a waste of oxygen. Check out this unbelievable piece on his response to a reporter who asked him about anti-Americanism in Europe. Now, it may be that the report is putting Bush in a bad light. But unless this entire exchange is fabricated, I doubt it:
"I wonder why it is you think there are such strong sentiments in Europe against you and against this administration?" the reporter said. "Why, particularly, there's a view that you and your administration are trying to impose America's will on the rest of the world, particularly when it comes to the Middle East and where the war on terrorism goes next?"
Turning to Mr. Chirac, he added in French: "And, Mr. President, would you maybe comment on that?"
"Very good," Mr. Bush said sardonically. "The guy memorizes four words, and he plays like he's intercontinental."
There are two issues here:
1) Bush is an anti-intellectual and an idiot. Yes, the reporter is fluent in French. Is that a reason to make fun of him? It's one thing to be an idiot...it's quite another to be an idiot and disdain others for their accomplishments.
2) The larger issue is that Bush is in denial about anti-Americanism in Europe! As my mouth dropped to the floor, the only thing I could think of was Ford's infamous declaration that "Eastern Europe is not under Soviet domination". I mean, how ridiculously, moronically blind can Bush be?
There are some of you who think that he said such things for diplomatic reasons, and that Bush actually believes that anti-Americanism is a problem but cannot say it out loud. If true, Bush is a rank coward who has sacrificed whatever moral clarity he had in his Axis of Evil speech. But I don't think that Bush is quite so sophisticated...certainly the tone of his response indicated that he was genuinely annoyed with the questioner.
Thank the heavens that we are halfway through Bush's term. The sooner he's replaced, the better.
Well, darn it all, GC. I agree 100 percent. But why won’t he share his name with us. Now, we know that he’s a student at Southern Cal. We also know that’s he probably a higher level grad student in biology and he’s hinted that he’s Eurasian. There is a way to figure out who he is. Or at least his department heads could probably figure it out. Simply take what GC has written on his blog and compare it to term papers that have been turned in by using David Foster’s writer recognition software. Foster is the person who figured out that the author of Primary Colors was in fact Joe Klein. The software could also be used to determine who in fact Godless happens to be. I might point out that the reason for anonymity that Godless has given us are kind of weak. I think he mentioned tenure, which any self-respecting competent capitalist shouldn’t want anyway. That’s like being in a union for God’s sake…
Where's it all going to end, I ask of Lileks's impossibly hypocritical gym buddy. In linking to a "fantastic column" by Peter Hitchens's brother. Hitchens the Elder closes that column by referencing "a ridiculous recent book titled The Clash of Fundamentalisms" in which author "Tariq Ali begins by saying that 'there exists no exact, incontrovertible evidence about who ordered the hits on New York and Washington,' and then goes on to state, exactly and incontrovertibly enough, that with these hits, 'the subjects of the Empire had struck back.' Wrong. Wrong twice. As wrong as could be. These attacks came from the servants and satraps of the Empire, and the Empire's managers are culpable for a little bit more than their failure to foresee them." Putting aside the fact that Hitchens here states some of the very same things he so loudly took the "Chomsky-Zinn-Finkelstein quarter" to task for last autumn when he was of the belief that "murder was their only motive," you can say what you will about or against Hitchens (his simian appearance and fondess for rain coats more often seen on exhibitionists and child molesters, his numerous attempts at drinking dry well-stocked taverns, etc.), but the man's appetite for work must be acknoledged as colossal, and any opinion he puts forward, no matter how contentious, is thoroughly informed. Sadly, this cannot be said for his barebacking compatriot.
The Hitchens piece that enthuses Sullivan the Magnificent (in his own self-conception, anyway) so merely points out the venality and incompetence of two of our nominal allies, as well as our leadership's refusal to acknowledge the same publicly. And what does Sully take away from it? He asks the crazily worded question, "Is there a consensus building that we cannot win the war on terror until we have secured regime change in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan?" and then to proceeds to answer it in the affirmative: "Not before Iraq, but surely after." I'm sure many Pakistanis and Saudis are thirsting for a regime change in their respective lands, though I doubt they would endorse the means Sully has in mind to effect it. His appetite for war rival's Hitchens's for work.
Musharraf may not be the wunderkind that you'd like him to be, Andy, but you seem to have an understanding of his Pakistan that is tending toward nil. In being refashioned as a marionette in The War Against Terror, Musharraf had to unceremoniously betray the extreme Islamist element, which we ourselves supported when convenient to our heroic war on global communism. The Islamists are now resentful in the extreme and Musharraf is reduced insane games of appearance management to demonstrate his (actually non-existent) independence. You may certainly get your regime change, Sully, and it might come at the expense of several hundred thousand Pakistanis - which probably wouldn't trouble you all that much. And with regard to Saudi Arabia, only fringe loons have advocated war (what Sullivan means by his "regime change" euphemism) against the land of Mecca and Medina, though after Sharon's siege of the Church of the Nativity, the world seems more receptive to the idea of using someone else's holy land as a war theater.
Sullivan would do good to acknowledge the complete and total failure of the war(s) to date. As the news trickles out (much like the urine trickles down James Lileks's pasty leg when he contemplates Saddam Hussein) that the violence perpetrated against America on September 11 was due to massive systemic failures in our own intelligence services, conscientious onlookers will be forced to conclude our brave President - focused on harvesting campaign dollars and abetting fraud down Houston way - is unable to protect his constituency from terror. At least as long as he keeps fighting the war with the limited and antiquated weaponry he insists upon.
The bombing in Afghanistan was successful in killing dozens of shepherds, many of whom, if pressed, would likely have voiced some sort of anti-American sentiment, thus justifying their slaughter. An undetermined number of civilians lie - blown apart, actually - dead. Bin Laden is nowhere in evidence. Ayman al-Zawahri similarly found non est when troops searched caves after first bombing the area. Nearly all the bigger names still unaccounted for, and the bulk of the foot soldiers dispersed into surrounding countries. Orange alerts, increased anxiety, and Bono assuring us of our righteousness during halftime back at home. Innumerable warbloggers knelt in reverence before a Daisy Cutter. Frenchmen insulting us with impunity. With such success in our present operations, Andy, why not expand this thing endlessly!
What is the biggest victory in The War Against Terror to date? Probably the thus far prevention of additional attacks, a victory most attributable to heightened awareness and better policing. Similarly, the biggest victory abroad was a police action on the part of the Pakistanis, the capture and capitulation of Abu Zubaydah, later named a Time person of the week for spilling the beans in so satisfactory a manner. Understandably, many here wanted a campaign of vengeance fought against someone; less understandably they simultaneously ridiculed lawful police actions abroad to mitigate the terrorist threat. The bombs that fell failed objectively, and the mundane and maligned police action triumphed. We won't bother waiting for an apology from Sullivan and his allied mimics, as that would presuppose a revelation on their part, namely that decreeing the slaughter of untold persons was ineffective and is likely to be ineffective in the future. They seem unlikely to achieve it any time soon.
Has Daddy Warblogs gone wobbly? First, he tells us not to take James Lileks seriously. Well, who does, really?
Second, and more importantly, he questions the invade-the-world mentality adopted by the rest of the warbloggers, Andrew Sullivan in particular: "There's some kind of weird moral slippage going on here, whereby just because it was right to oust the Taleban it's now right to oust anyone and everyone." Well, that's the problem with the War on Terror, isn't it? It's a "new kind of war" with no defined enemy, no timetable and no territorial constraints. Slippage is inevitable.
And while I'm at it, I agree with Daddy Warblogs on all that annoying "rope-a-dope" talk. There is nothing more pathetic than warbloggers inventing excuses for why President Bush said there is no plan to invade Iraq. Lying about an invasion of Iraq in order to lull Saddam into a false sense of security is absurd. Any such invasion would take weeks, if not months, to mount. Saddam would see it coming.
A classic Reynoldism today (Reynoldism, verb: To say one thing then do the complete opposite) as he tries to prove to the other warbloggers just how big his cock is. When talking about traffic he states, "I'm not going to get into the meat of this argument any more", before spending the next 277 words telling everyone just how large he is, and that others should be pulling down their pants for a good comparison.
I agree! I'm in favour of open pants as well! And measuring each others' phallus and pissing contests! I think Reynolds should display his penis more often, and I really can't see why this sort of thing should be secret. posted by wrongwaygoback8:59 PM
• • • • •
Let me introduce you to a merchant of all the right thoughts. He has set up shop in understated quarters, though, in the manner of all people wildly overvaluing their importance to humanity, his books - too profound for most visitors to comprehend - are left in conspicuous view. This latest genius places his copy of Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard on the coffee table just past the foyer so as to register an impression upon guests immediately on entering: no matter how many times you've heard these third-hand ideas recycled on O'Reilly or by the belligerent on the barstool next to you, my readings in this book and others invest my tired thoughts with a wisdom inaccessible to you; your conclusion that I'm just another quarter-wit offering the same assertions as everybody else is proof that my brilliance is lost on you. The man under present consideration calls himself, "Chocolate Salty Balz," after what I believe is the Austrian confection of the same name.
Balz's very choice in books is telling. Zbigniew Brzezinski, after all is the former National Security Advisor to Billy Carter's brother. He is an important and dignified man whose great works include, according to Tariq Ali, single-handedly reviving the concept of jihad - then several hundred years in desuetude - in Afghanistan by standing at the border and assuring a group of proto Taliban that "God is on your side" (while wearing a turban in this telling). Balz, historian, certainly knows that bin Laden was an early and prized recruit to the anti-communist effort lavishly supported by America and Teddy Forstmann. Asked in a recent interview if he at all regretted arming and funding the very people who we later felt compelled to betray and then bomb, Brzezinski asked of the interviewer "What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?"
Brzezinski wants to distance himself from his monstrous creations and clearly does not want to have his role in enabling current events exposed. For whatever reason, Balz is very receptive to such exercises.
A recent outflow from the Balz artesian well of deep thought treats us to yet another display of derision of the Palestinians, this time by dismissively saying of their performance at Olso that they acted as if they "made all the concessions that we had any right to expect from them by merely showing up." What Balz is fuming over is a Guardian reprint of a response to Benny Morris's recent interview with Ehud Barak, in which Barak "laid the blame squarely on Yasser Arafat for the breakdown of the peace process." The issue is contentious, of course, though Balz has no problem at all arriving at an accurate history. When in ten years time the qualified historians reach the finish line, their foot-noted tomes and first-hand sourced accounts in hand, they'll find Balz, a decade done and a finger up his nose.
Or maybe not. Balz pauses for some head-scratching over this line in the Guardian response: "Palestinians believed they had made their historic concessions at Oslo, when they agreed to cede 78% of mandatory Palestine to Israel." He then betrays his total lack of familiarity with basic chronology and terminology - and, hence, his total lack of qualification to offer an opinion - by admitting that he is "not sure which mandate the authors are talking about, but the 78% can only refer to pre-1967 Israeli territory." Balz's Internet service provider is apparently based in mainland China, and has blocked his access to Google. Click here, genius. He also appears to never have read a book on the matter. When he's done with his Brzezinski, he would do well to read the above Benny Morris's latest, though I cannot picture him reading Righteous Victims's 694 pages, very few of which would flatter his preconceptions and bigotries the way Matt Welch and James Lileks do.
While talking stats, Balz parrots the non-entities in his recommended links and repeats the assertion that Arafat rejected the Israeli "good faith overture that would have given Arafat 97%" of the West Bank. This figure is ridiculous and thoroughly discredited. Even then former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami laughed at it.
Not content to just insult Israeli magnanimity, Balz says, the Palestinians would then "turn their backs" and "walk away." We are not dealing with remote antiquity here. Balz has shown his unwillingness to read a book, though even the laziest of men doesn't find television too demanding. I guess Balz was too busy to catch "Meet the Press" this past April 21, a great shame. I doubt he could be bothered to read the transcript in its glorious entirety, so I'll excerpt the choicest bit, this from Saudi policy advisor Adel Al-Jubeir:
At the Taba talks, which adjourned on the 27 of January, the Israelis and the Palestinians came very close to an agreement. They issued a joint statement, which incidentally is posted on the Web site of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, that said that they were very pleased with the progress and the seriousness of the negotiations, and they felt very comfortable that they can arrive at an agreement and they looked forward to resuming the talks after the Israeli elections. After the Israeli elections, Prime Minister Sharon chose not to come back to the negotiating table.
That joint statement referred to by the rag-head, Balz, is still available for inspection. Again, as it sort of gives the impression that Ariel Sharon, a man whose life has been dedicated to the murderous persecution of Palestinians, kind of walked away, creating much of the current insanity, I doubt you'll read it. When Sharon writes his memoirs Balz will certainly have a photo of its cover somewhere on his site.
Most inexcusable is Balz's "religious following" of the Cardinals. Is there an underdog this lunatic won't root against?
Two days back, I concluded from extensive reading in the James Lileks archives that the man was profoundly disturbed and prone to violence (well, so long as someone else did the fighting and stood to be hit or shot in exchange). In reporting my findings, I noted that Lileks had derogated Russian males for their habit of hugging one another. What kind of name, I wondered at the time, was Lileks? It ends with an s, perhaps making it Lithuanian or Latvian - which would explain the man's hostility to the Russians as well as his amply demonstrated authoritarianism.
Searches at several Mormon and non-Mormon genealogy sites proved as worthless as Lileks himself. The earliest record of a Lileks was of Vernon Alvin Lileks, who, as his parentage and place of birth are unrecorded, was spontaneously generated in parts unknown on January 26, 1920. This early Lileks was recalled by the Almighty in 1985, luckily sparing him James Lileks first outing, filed 68 years nearly to the day after the First Lileks emerged from beneath a stone.
The above sites of little use, I had to go elsewhere. I entered Lileks's surname into a form on a page maintained by one Lore Sjoberg, and was returned information that substantiated my opinion of the Minnesota ghoul while simultaneously explaining the impossibility of tracing the his ancestry. Lileks, you see, is inhuman. Yes, I hear you say, we knew that already, having read his cries for blood, blood and more blood. Mr. Sjoberg indicates that this is a different type of inhumanity. Lileks is actually neither human nor animal. He is a workshop construction, specifically a Lifelike Intelligent Lifeform Engineered for Killing and Sabotage. The man is a droid, which, absent the yet-to-be-perfected neural net processor, explains both his inability to learn from error (and fuck me if he doesn't make a lot of them) and his wholesale lack of remorse for those who would endure the bombs he promotes with mechanical regularity and impossible vigor.
Sorry Neale. Former warblogger bogeyman Neale Talbot is the man behind the blog wrongwaygoback. posted by War9:35 AM
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Friday, May 31, 2002
Shoutout for some of the best anti-war bloggers:
dack: Links articles from wire feeds and mainstream news organizations to point out how pointless the war is.
Brendan O'Neill: Intelligent articles from an intelligent guy. The fact that he's continuously under fire from Gland Reynolds
Blowback: Although a YABB (Yet Another Blogspot Blogger), the minimal commentary and maximum links makes this a blog an information mine of the best kind.
isntapundit.com: Warbloggers like this are anti-warbloggers best friends. With the mixed up instapundit.com domain name, expect a porn site here shortly. posted by wrongwaygoback6:28 PM
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Hey fucker, you forgot me. Not that I've posted anything yet, I've just had a hard time finding anything written by warbloggers wasting the bandwidth to comment on. posted by wrongwaygoback5:46 PM
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"The new thing is to care passionately, and be right-wing." -- ad executive to George Harrison, A Hard Day's Night.
I seem to be walking in rhythm, as the Blackbirds used to say, with the Zeitgeist. Right after I began to notice the tendency of warbloggers to respond to their elders and betters with childish insults, Michael Kelly migrated the annoying habit to the traditional pundit press:
"Susan Sontag and Noam Chomsky and Edward Said and Harold Pinter got their names in the papers again... You're still here? You're still talking? Why? The most obvious fact about the people who bravely -- oh, so bravely, so bravely -- dared to tell truth to power in the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and the Cosmic Review of Blah-Blah, was how old they were... Old, old, old. Also tired, tired, tired. These people -- precisely these people -- have been saying these things -- precisely these things -- since, in many cases, the early Dylan years (Bob, mostly, although in some cases Thomas)... How interesting, gramps, how interesting; did you really know John Reed..."
This is a little wordier than the adolescent flip-offs used by the blogbrethren (e.g., Matt Welch to Gore Vidal: "Whatever, freak!"), but the animating spirit is the same: we are the New, you are the Old, so let's not even bother with you, gramps.
This can be an amusing approach when you're talking about fashion faux pas and such like. But if you're talking about war and peace, I should think that age and achievement would warrant more respectful attention.
I mean, Pinter wrote several of the 20th Century's best plays; Kelly wrote this stuff. You tell me who's irrelevant.
Today you will learn to watch your mouth . . . If you want to leap to unfounded conclusions, if you want to slander the good names of my copatriots. Because I will call you on it, Jimmy. Me.
Now you listen good ole boy, ‘cuz I’m going to tell you how it’s going to be: I am the voice of the future, and you are the voice of the past. When it comes to war, and peace, the peacemongers will not lessen your fall.
You think that loudly calling for war makes you a man? It makes you a pea. Your boosters are peas. Real men know the value of peace. Real men know the horror of war.
What man or woman alive out there today can cast their eyes upon that Capa pic and not shiver inside? What does it say about you if you can’t?
In a move apparently too elegant for you to construe, I said “avoid getting shot/avoid the horrors of war.” I did not say, “Avoid being a loyalist soldier circa. ‘30’s Spain.”
I did not say anything about Bush. I did not say anything about 9-11. What voices in your head are you listening to?
And furthermore, Jimmy, what makes you think you can be so goddamn obnoxious? What makes you think your opinion is worth the possible expulsion of hundreds or thousands of lives? Who the hell do you think you are?
You wanna play God, midwest-boy, go and whip out a game of D & D. Nestled safe inside Minnesota, do you look upon the land to the right and left as nothing more than convenient slabs of protective fat from which to lob out your sophomoric blood-cries to the delight of every man-child everywhere?
Last Friday, I put forward this idiot as the most repulsive and least informed of the active warbloggers. Alas, I did so incognizant of the existence and output of James Lileks. Fortune decreed that I should live elsewhere than Minnesota, largely sparing me exposure to the dullard. The Washington Post, which I do read, has in the past run Lileks's column. I certainly read it somewhere along the line, though it made so little an impression on me I cannot recall the occasion. I've done some reading - midway between cursory and comprehensive - this afternoon, and have concluded that it wasn't merely the case that the Post (and, by extension, myself) caught the Minnesotan on a bad day. The man's output is comprehensively bad, and never does he cut a figure that is anything more than futile.
He was always a bad writer, but he was not always the war mongering, cave-scouringscaredy-cat he is at present - at least not fully. The earliest Lileks offering catalogued by Nexis is an overwritten January 28, 1988 paean to football and male bonding. The piece sounds innocuous enough, and it in fact is, though troubling signs of what was later to come can be divined. Lileks says that male bonding shares little with bonding as conceived by campus feminists, and that only "drunk" or "Russian" men hug. Real men like Lileks, who later tells us he brings croissants to the gathering when he and his manly men buddies assemble to watch football, are content to "fist fight" and "hit one another." Any third-year psych major could tell you that someone so profoundly alienated from his fellow men and so uncomfortable with his sexuality as to eschew all non-violent interpersonal contact with other males is in for serious trouble at a later date. Why even in that very piece Lileks allowed that recently "some random drill bit in [his] psyche hit a gusher of testosterone." That testosterone would continue to gush, occasioning Lilek's aggravated male-pattern balding and war mongering fury in later years.
By May 9, 1990, Lileks was filing pieces on his feats in the weight room, perhaps readying himself for "the Iraqi dustup" at that remote date. He mostly offered advice to prospective gym members, though he did spend a few paragraphs pondering "The allure of muscle men." Inoffensive material on the face of it, though a closer reading and the boon of hindsight again find suggestions of the rage that would characterize Lilek's later career. "A couple of years ago," he allows, "I spent every day at the gym," though he tells the readers he has lapsed. "When I stopped going to the gym, I began to feel myself shrinking." His physique no longer impressive and his strength departed, the columnist's sense of personal impotence mounts. It's impotence of that sort, as Edward Said has noted, that drives those damn towel heads to detonate themselves outside Israeli discothèques, though Lileks is no Israel Shahak, and the obvious goes unrecognized.
I must remind my readers here that the above symptoms presaging Lileks later homicidal mania were evident only in certain writings. He was able to repress his various psychoses against outward detection, and was even able to commit several wholly sane - if remarkably dull - thoughts to paper. It must be stressed that he was not the twisted psychopath he is today. This, after all, is a man who spent the years immediately before and after the Gulf War wowing readers with such non-bloodthirsty pieces as "WHEN IT COMES TO THE CHOICE FOR TIES, WIDER IS BACK 'IN'" and "TOPPERS: RECALLING AGE OF HATS." A patient fully yielding to dementia would be unable to meditate at any length on these pedestrian subjects, though a classical Freudian would no doubt rub their hands over Lileks's admission in the hats-themed piece that he finds his "small feet lost in Dad's big shoes." Not a Freudian myself, I will let that pass without comment.
By 1993, though, Lileks had grown markedly deranged. In an August 15 Plain Dealer article he bitterly denounced Texas authorities for forbidding patriots in and around Austin to own "spud guns," improvised weapons that use potatoes as ammunition. He was just a few short years away, as will be seen, from discoursing on Black Helicopters.
Later that same year the Newhouse News Service which syndicates Lileks would foist upon the innocents of the Times-Picayune one of Lileks's more Unabomber-like efforts. In "BEGINNING TO LOOK A LOT LIKE HITLER," Lileks breaks into song, modifying the words to a popular Christmas carol to instead describe Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Lileks does more than that though. Thinking deep, he explains the appeal of Zhirinovsky to the Russian electorate (called, in part, "certified idiots"), and in doing so anticipates his own post-September 11 persona: "Like any country that has had its keister whipped to the consistency of frothed milk, Russia is full of people convinced that some innate national greatness has been thwarted by the cruel trick of history. They cry DADDY MAKE THEM STOP BEING MEAN [emphasis in the original] until some cozening swine crawls out of the sewers and kisses the national owwie." The line between prophet and madmen has seldom been as blurred as it is here.
On October 13, 1994 Lileks came out of the closet as an advocate of the casual slaughter of sand niggers. In wondering "WHAT CAN BE DONE ABOUT IRAQ?," Lileks tells us in the most direct fashion what was "central failure of the Bush administration: insufficient bloodlust." He would pen additional pieces in the same vein that year, including a notable one in which he slipped into Strangelove mode and explained Yugoslavian indifference to American opinion on how their country should be ordered by saying that less-than-total war was irresponsible and that "the only way to send a message is not to leave anyone alive to hear it."
As promised, the Black Helicopters began appearing in Lileks column on June 1, 1995. Lileks pondered Bosnia's plight and NATO's stubborn refusal to kick ass, as well as the question "WHERE'S A BLACK HELICOPTER WHEN YOU REALLY NEED ONE?," which is also the piece's headline. Even the most conservative clinician can see the development of dementia praecox, and continued monitoring of Lileks until 1997 would certainly have resulted in his institutionalization on filing November 13's "SADDAM MAY BE PREPOSTEROUS BUT HE'S DEADLY, NOT LAUGHABLE." Lileks stages an extended telephone conversation therein between George Bush I and the Iraqi strongman, at the conclusion of which Hussein would "laugh, hang up, and get back to thinking of names for his chemical-weapon bomber. EBOLA GAY [I wish Lileks hadn't provided the emphasis himself, but he did]." This would disturb the hospital wardens supervising Lileks endlessly, as it not only demonstrates his morbid contemplation of the grotesque and fantastic, but also because he introduces the word "gay" in so curious a context. Anyone else and it would have been an obvious play on words. For Lileks - he who bonds with his fellow man by "hitting" them as noted above - the name is telling.
My readings in the Lileks canon took me only as far as April 1, 1999. The man should go back and re-read the piece, though his demonstrated inability to make proper sense of an unambiguous photograph leads me to believe that the task is beyond him. Other morons practicing the ignoble art of the warblogger may want to have a go at "ORIGINALITY IS THE FIRST CASUALTY OF WAR," which despite its dateline seems to be anything but an April fool's joke. Lileks, the least original warblogger in active practice, chastises his fellow members of "the chattering class" (how novel!) for endlessly invoking Hitler, questioning the virtues of isolationism, their general ignorance of history, and their unwillingness to send American ground troops in to be shot full of bullets. I trust that when Lileks says he is saving himself for the coming skirmish in Iraq that he intends to land his ridiculous ass in Baghdad to practice what he has been preaching for years.
Andrew Sullivan has taken it upon himself to add Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to the Axis of Evil: "It seems to me Pakistan is slowly moving toward the axis of evil" and "Is there a consensus building that we cannot win the war on terror until we have secured regime change in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan?" (Sorry, I can't link to his specific blog entries. Sullivan hasn't fixed his permalink problem yet.) posted by Franklin10:31 AM
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If the purpose of the captioned photo below was to uncork some warblogger rage, mission accomplished; see the May 30 Lileks bleat. I have to confess that the graphic confused me a little, too, but my reaction was simply to shrug and move on, while Lileks' was to emit blasts of white-hot, incoherent rage spectacular by even his standards of intemperance.
According to him we all posted the (clearly bylined) photo, we all suck Chomsky's feet (who's this Chomsky fellow, anyway?), we think Bush "masterminded" 9-11, etc. Normally I try and parse Lileks' prose and find the through-line, if only for laughs, but his latest tangle of stinkweeds is just too tough to sort out.
Lileks says, "I’m saving myself for the Iraqi dustup." If this is his idea of marshalling his strength between bouts, he'd better have a serious talk with his trainer. posted by roy edroso12:57 AM
HELP WANTED: I have conceived of a project that seems at first through third blushes highly feasible. On reviewing the Web logs maintained by those who are regularly fallen upon Warblogger Watch, my Marxist sympathies were excited and I could not but marvel over the increasing misapplication of human effort. Why there must be several hundred persons now responding in real time to the same articles, linking to one another, and proffering the same point of view. It is redundancy of this very type, I suspect, that has prevented the country from undertaking any of the grand scale public works projects that are so conspicuous abroad but so embarrassingly absent stateside. The purpose of my plan, in the simplest of terms, is to free up labor, returning those presently engaged in Web-based war mongering to the unskilled manual labor which they are better suited to by birth. Here is a moron asking for help with his homework; Here's another, admitting that her underpowered brain finds itself taxed to the point of failure in attempting to apprehend the day's newspaper; Here is a third, this one adhering to the "Cubs are going all the way" mode of prophesy, and telling us we must attack Iraq because Saddam Hussein is going to try to derail our God-granted right to USPS delivery of Christmas presents. Can any man who has given the labor marketplace unbiased study tell me with a straight face that these people wouldn't better serve society by manually transporting cut stone overland?
As for the plan itself, it can be summarized thusly: I require someone versed in computer science to modify the Dada Engine and write a script that would scan the AP wire for items of concern to our political leadership, compare those items against a list of regimes our leadership has previously assured us are some seriously bad mo-fos, and then, finding a concern-worthy item that mentions an unpopular state, recommend sanctions or massive preemptory bombing (weighting heavily toward the latter) against the country mentioned. Like the monomaniacs, the program would be steered solely by the force of circumstance, and as it would yield essentially the same output issued by the above three, it would largely obviate their needs to tire us with their interminable repetition of the same solution to every conceivable problem.
Interested parties are encouraged to contact me via the editor.
John O'Sullivan over at The National Review thinks the warbloggers are getting worried over nothing re: President Bush's recent statements hinting that an invasion of Iraq isn't going to happen any time soon, if at all. Alas, he may be right, but not for the reason he gives. O'Sullivan says Bush "will not be reelected if Saddam Hussein is still ruling in Baghdad in 2004." I doubt most voters are as obsessed with Iraq as the neocons and warbloggers are. posted by Franklin10:40 AM
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The Watchers
WBW: Keeping track of the war exhortations of the warbloggers.
