The Irate Codger (Ned Paynter)

Finis

2007-07-31T15:05:00.001-07:00

On August 1, 2007 the Irate Codger’s sister Diane wrote,

Ned died on Sunday morning in hospital. He was taken by ambulance on Friday evening as he was having difficulty breathing and was put on life support. By Sunday he told me to take him off everything—he wanted to go. The doctor explained to him the process and it went very fast. He was given morphine in a drip and when he felt very comfortable the meds keeping his blood pressure up were removed and he just slipped away.

It had been a long hard road. This is from a letter he wrote on February 8, 1995:

Last fall I heard an interview with the writer Reynolds Price on PBS concerning his book about his own spinal cancer, paralysis, and ten years of pain. He was asked, ‘Do you ever ask, “Why me?”’ He said, ‘That’s one thing in all this about which I feel some pride. I never waste my time asking that question. Why not me?’ Well, I’ve never wasted time on it either. It’s rotten luck, but some people have rotten luck, that’s all. It’s made me despair often, but I don’t feel any grievance. It was nothing personal.

The Irate Codger Remembers When He Almost Met I. F. Stone

2007-02-26T16:44:00.000-08:00

When thirteen years ago my happy home was sundered by cancer and my wife deposited me on my mom's doorstep, I was compelled to sell off about fifteen hundred books. Some were particularly hard to part with--Roger Angell's baseball books, Whitney Balliet's jazz criticism, and especially I. F. Stone's journalism of the sixties and early seventies collected in In a Time of Torment and Polemics and Prophecies. So it was like welcoming back a revered mentor when last Fall I bought The Best of I. F. Stone, an anthology of Stone's reportage of forty years in The Nation, PM, I. F. Stone's Weekly, and The New York Review of Books, a generous 340 pages of his "best" work as adjudged by Karl Weber.

I've no grounds at all to quarrel with Weber's selections, but I was disappointed to find that only fifty of the 340 pages were given to Stone's Vietnam War pieces, for it was in those polemics, written at the flush tide of his influence, when the circulation of the Weekly rose to 70,000, that his razor-sharp analyses of Johnson and Nixon administration stratagems, blunders, follies and hubris were most desperately needed. Stone and Noam Chomsky, Walter Lippmann, J. William Fullbright, and George F. Kennan saved sanity from near death in those berserk years and kept alive hope that she might eventually be resuscitated and restored to something like full health. (As indeed she was, until 9/11/01 when 89% of the nation decided it was time to go completely nuts again.)

Specifically, I missed in The Best of I. F. Stone a piece Stone wrote in 1969 or 1970 about the monstrous technological advantage the most advanced industrial power on earth enjoyed over its adversary, an Asian nation of thirty million. We had by then dropped a greater tonnage of high explosives on North and South Vietnam and Cambodia than on all theaters in World War II, each bomb making a crater twenty yards across and five deep; we'd sprayed millions of acres in the highlands and marshlands of the Camau peninsula alike with Agent Orange; and then there were the "daisy-cutter" bombs, the Rome plows, the napalm, the Cluster Bomb Units, and even scent-locators dropped over the Ho Chih Minh trail said to be able to discriminate between human and animal urine, so that if an NLF soldier put down a mortar base-plate to take a leak, beep beep, you could phone in an air strike! And despite all that, these scrawny peasants in black pajamas with their MK-47s, their mortars, light artillery, ponji sticks, tunnels, and land mines were undeniably kicking our asses and in the end would certainly win. The title of that piece was "More Than Steel and Chrome Can Bear."

Included in the anthology, however, was an essay I had all but forgotten and which suddenly--as we say--"took me back," "Goldwater and His Tribe," July, 1964. Rather, it seized me by the collar and yanked me back. Gosh, did I ever remember. In July, 1964, I had another month and a half to go as news director at KPFA. It was all settled: I was going back to Berkeley for a Ph.D., I had a teaching assistantship assured me, and Scott Keech would succeed me as news director. But one unsettling fact loomed in the immediate foreground: across the bay at the Cow Palace the Republicans would soon nominate a candidate for president. How should we at KPFA cover this thing? A silly idea, really, a news department with one salaried member, me, attempting to "cover" an event given, in those days, saturation "gavel to gavel" coverage by three giant TV networks. And yet attention ought to be paid. What sort of gesture might suffice to establish that our little lefty news operation was not rudely ignoring the Republicans in their jubilation at having at last, as they said, "a choice, not an echo" in their candidate. The station's relationship to that party was all but nonexistent. There was one Republican on Public Affairs Director Elsa Knight Thompson's "rota" of fourteen or so commentators, Casper Weinberger, then chairman of the California Republican Committee, and much, much later Reagan's Secretary of Defense. Good old Cap would come to the studio twice a month to record his talk, which would always begin, "Good evening. This is Cap Weinberger with your regular Republican commentary..." He was the only Republican in the Bay Area who did not shun KPFA, and he was therefore precious to us.

It seemed to me that we might assemble a panel of four or five newsies for a one hour wrap-up and analysis of the convention on the evening of its last day. Not competing with the networks, mind, which by then would have returned to their regular prime-time programing. Perfect. Then, too, the station had recently acquired a studio, a recording space, in San Francisco, not far from the Cow Palace. Who covering the convention might we be able to lure to so convenient a place? Station Manager Trevor Thomas lightly threw in that I. F. Stone was coming to the convention, that Izzy was a friend of his, and might be persuaded to appear on our show. My God! To meet I. F. Stone! To have him on my show!!

I must have left Scott to tend the newsroom one afternoon, for I remember taking a cable car on a chilly, gray day to Nob Hill, walking into the lobby of the Fairmount, and seeing TV lights, more brilliant than anything I'd imagined, trained, like guard tower searchlights at a stalag, on the elevator bank. Then an elevator door opened and out came the candidate, grimly waving to the cheering throng, his jutting jaw like Dick Tracy's, a nimbus of phosphorescence around his gray head. What was I doing there? Soaking up "color"? Hopeful of interviewing someone? I can't remember.

Then I am interviewing someone, the campaign manager for the dark horse compromise candidate, Governor William Scranton of Pennsylvania. The campaign manager is the state attorney general and I'm trying to stammer out cogent, seemingly well informed questions about this impossible candidacy and I'm failing; my ego has experienced vertigo and has plummeted, I feel utterly fraudulent, there's a quaver in my voice and a nerve is pulsing so insistently in my left cheek that I fear it is visible. I'm so obviously unready for this role of crack reporter that the campaign manager, a kindly man, says softly, "Take it easy, son."

In the aftermath of my humiliating failure of nerve with the AG I resolve to maintain a bold, aggressive front at whatever cost, and my ambition has soared to frightening heights. If I. F. Stone, why not Norman Mailer? Mailer is my hero. I've read everything he's written (in high school I delivered a "book report" on The Naked and the Dead, for which my English teacher prudently required I furnish written permission from my mother) and I think "Superman at the Supermarket," his 1960 Esquire essay on JFK is the most profound piece ever written on contemporary American culture and politics. I write a note to Mailer at the Saint Francis Hotel desk.

At the press lounge in the Saint Francis mezzanine I find myself sitting next to a genial gent who introduces himself as Hiram Johnson III. What, grandson of TR's running mate in the Bull Moose campaign of 1912, progressive Republican governor then long-time senator from California? The very same. III lives comfortably in his bachelor quarters in Belvedere and is a non-practicing attorney at law. Although a member of the California delegation, he's more an amused spectator of the mob scene than a participant. Think of Burl Ives and you have him, in manner if not appearance. I like him immensely; he's my Virgil in this Purgatorio, providing owlish asides about bigshots in the passing parade. I confide to him my audacious hope of getting Mailer for my radio show.

The next afternoon I again encounter Johnson, who says, "Guess who I ran into yesterday? Mailer. Fine fellow, we had a few drinks, and he told me he wants to be on your show." Through the roof! (A troubling note, however: Trevor Thomas has not yet succeeded in contacting his friend Izzy.) If Mailer, why not William F. Buckley? They've debated one another. How could Buckley resist appearing in this venue with his old antagonist? I leave a message for Buckley at the Saint Francis desk.

There's another reason I want to get Buckley. In 1962 he appeared at Berkeley in a room on the north side of Wahrenbrock auditorium before about sixty students, mainly admiring undergraduates, and I was there. He began by sliding his tongue over his lips and saying with a sneer, "Is there anyone at this late date who still denies that Owen Lattimore was a Russian spy?" Silence. I wanted to say, "Yes, there is. I deny that Lattimore was a Russian spy." Hell, I knew this was a McCarthyite lie. I had read Lattimore's Ordeal by Slander in high school and knew that Lattimore was still at Johns Hopkins. So why didn't I speak? Because Buckley must know something I didn't, otherwise why would he say this without fear of refutation? Of course it was a lie, as I soon learned to my hot shame. In the studio, I fantasized, I'd compel him to own up.

Next memory. I have somehow secured a floor pass to the Cow Palace and am out on the left aisle making my way past the California delegation. There, midway down one row, are Ronnie and Nancy, she gravely beautiful with startling blue eyes, and he with head cocked to the right, perhaps favoring a hearing aid in his left ear, a half-smile, half-grin on his face, gazing into the middle distance, perhaps pleased by the oratory or perhaps tuned out, in either case prepared to beam at an admirer should one suddenly appear.

(That this man should in two years become governor, burying Pat Brown in a landslide, the same Pat Brown who in 1962 had defeated Richard Nixon by two million votes, is as yet beyond imagining, as would be the circumstances permitting such an outcome, namely the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley which would commence in two months when the UC regents discovered that the southern boundary of the campus extended across the "Bancroft bricks" to the street's gutter, and that the card tables set up by YPSL, YSA, CORE, Snick, etc. were therefore in violation of the "Kerr Directives" forbidding political advocacy on campus. Then would follow in May, 1965, the first march against the war, fifteen thousand students parading down Telegraph Avenue before being halted by the Oakland cops and DA Ed Meese at the Oakland city line. The lesson to the voters of California in 1966 was clear: the hapless Governor Pat Brown simply couldn't control those campus radicals. Well by God Roanld Reagan would! Ah, the painful ironies of history! We activists won the fight for free speech [Mario Savio's great speech on the Sproul Hall steps in December, '64, was just last year, in 2006, included in a Library of America volume of great American orations] but we also unwittingly elected Reagan and made possible his presidency. And did all those years of anti-war marches shorten the Vietnam War by a single day? I fear not. It was a decade from the first march in May, '65, that the war ended in May, 1975.)

But my quarry this day is not in the California delegation, but forty or so yards farther along the aisle, in the New York delegation. He is John V. Lindsay, the celebrated congressman from the upper east side Manhattan "silk stocking district," and there will be no repeat of my collapse before the Pennsylvania attorney general. I am determined to talk some fast shit to get Lindsay as the fourth in my august on-air panel. Think of it, Stone, Mailer, Buckley, and Lindsay, and me as David Susskind, the knowledgeable and witty host. There is Lindsay standing in front of me, the most handsome man I've ever met; he's leaning forward listening intently against the booming oratory from the poldium, looking down at our shoes as I speak, and as I plunge ahead with this impossible sales talk, his eyes rise slowly from our shoes to my face, and register--what? Polite incredulity, I think.

The rest is quickly told. Lindsay won't be able to make it; he has an early flight. I. F. Stone is far too busy (boy, was that the truth. As Stone's account revealed, he was all over the place, the Fairmount, the Mark Hopkins, the Saint Francis, and especially the appalling Jack Tar on Van Ness where most of the redneck delegations were lodged. I get Mailer on the phone. "Yeah, I told Johnson I wanted to be on your show, and I'd really like to do it, but I've thought it over and decided I'd better not. I might say things I shouldn't." I, the fan, helpfully supplied the rest: "Because you're under contract to Esquire and it wouldn't do to say things over the air that might later appear in print?" "Yeah, that's right." Buckley said he was intrigued by the idea of appearing on my show, but circumstances wouldn't permit. However, might he suggest an excellent replacement, namely the president of campus Young Americans for Freedom? Thanks Bill, but no thanks.

So, whom did I get? It was all very much "below the battle," as Randolph Bourne would say, some fascinated lefty political junkies sitting around a table in a darkened studio chatting far beneath all that Republican oratorical thunder filling the skies. Gene Marine, former KPFA news director, now free-lancer; Sid Roger, editor of the United Longshoreman's and Warehouseman's Union Dispatcher; a Canadian journalist I'd run into from the Ottawa magazine Fortnight, much bemused by the ferocity of American politics, especially as manifested by the lynch mob that shouted down Nelson Rockefeller, and a fourth I can't now remember. It was a lot of fun. And I later heard from a few listeners, all KPFA diehards, of course, that it was an excellent show. I simply wasn't destined to play David Suskind. I'd tried, it hadn't come off, and I had no regrets. But one thing I think of now: that fourth, so insignificant I can't remember him: why didn't I pick Hiram Johnson III?

The Irate Codger remembers

2006-12-21T01:10:00.000-08:00

If Barbara Tuchman were still with us she would now be completing a second and much expanded edition of The March of Folly. And what a grand cavalcade of fools it is, following haltingly and with mounting panic in the footsteps--nay, strides--of our Lunatic-in-Chief as he leads us over a cliff! At this rate, how many months can it be before the Baghdad Green Zone becomes our own Dien Bien Phu?

Since 9/11 I've felt increasingly like Tiresias, Sophocles's blind seer in the Theban plays, cursed with foreknowledge of all horrors but powerless to avert them. When I saw those airplanes flying into the Twin Towers, the immediate certainty that froze my blood was "Now this country is going to go nuts." An orgy of patriotism. Everywhere, large Old Glory decals on the rear windows of sports-utility vehicles. A nation in arms. America, it was said, "has never been this united since Pearl Harbor."

And then the Senate vote for war in October, 2002, every Republican and a majority of Democrats voting to give George W. carte blanche to wage war at a time of his choosing while pretending they didn't know what they were doing. Biden, Rockefeller, Clinton, Edwards, Dodd, and, most disgracefully, Kerry, getting out of the way of the super-nationalist juggernaut, saving their own political hides for a more favorable day when reason might come back into fashion.

I remember a Republican senator taunting Robert Byrd with the reminder that he had voted for the Tonkin Gulf resolution in 1964, and Byrd responding that, yes, he had voted for that resolution and it was the worst he had ever cast in forty years in the Senate, the one he rued more than any other, and now his colleagues had the opportunity to redeem that wrong by not giving Bush the same power he had so heedlessly handed to LBJ.

The Tonkin Gulf resolution. I was 28 then, the news director at KPFA, and I was stunned by that vote. Four hundred and twenty to nothing in the House, 98 to 2 in the Senate, Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska the only dissenters. I wrote for broadcast a fifteen minute "Special Report" about the North Vietnamese "aggression" the resolution granted LBJ all power to "repel." The story was that two destroyers, the Maddox and the Turner Joy, were on "routine patrol" in "international waters" in the Gulf when, in the middle of the night, they were suddenly and without provocation attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. I had read a story three or four weeks before in the back pages of the New York Times about U.S. Navy SEALS training South Vietnamese counterparts to stage hit and run raids on North Vietnamese coastal installations. There was a North Vietnamese oil refinery on the coast that had been hit and burned. Could it be, as Morse had suggested, that those destroyers were standing offshore to receive South Vietnamese saboteurs returned from such a mission?

Of course it was all so murky. Much later it would be said that there had been no such PT boat attack at all, that a radar man on one of the destroyers had seen some "snow" on his screen and there had been panic firing upon nothing. Whatever the case, Johnson and McNamara had lied to William Fullbright about the circumstances of the case, and the duped senator from Arkansas had floor-managed the resolution to the final vote after almost no debate.

So, in 2002, Tiresias asked himself, "Have we no memory at all? Must we learn all over again the lesson of Tonkin, and again pay in years of treasure and blood, only in the end to face inevitable ruin and boundless humiliation?" And by degrees the recognition dawned on him that many, perhaps most, of the "liberal hawks" so eager for war in 2002-2003 were not even born in 1964! Think of Martin Peretz's stable of hardnosed young smart-alecs at the New Republic---Jonathan Chait, Franklin Foer, Peter Beinert--or George Packer at the New Yorker, all under forty. Two weeks after 9/11 Packer wrote a piece in the New York Times Magazine titled "C'mon in Liberals, the Water's Fine!" It was an appeal to chronic worry-warts on the left to get over their aversion to patriotism and join the rest of the nation in celebrating our new-found unity and resolve. One knew that if given the opportunity to take it to Saddam Hussein, this guy would be all for it, as he was. (And not only that. Packer in 2006 would write in the New Yorker that yes, he'd been wrong about the decision to go to war, but wrong for the right reasons, whereas many of those who had been right had been so for the wrong reasons. They'd been "simplistic" in their opposition to the war, blind to the real danger posed by Saddam; his position had been "nuanced," attentive to ambiguities they'd ignored. Rather like Scott Fitzgerald's saying that the mark of a first-rate mind as its ability to hold dialectically opposed ideas in equipoise.)

Old Tiresias's mind goes back again and again to a moment in January, 1964, a little more than a month after Kennedy was shot. I had the idea for an on-air panel discussion. We have a new president. What direction should Johnson's Viet Nam policy take? The Berkeley professoriat was rich in both hawks and doves. The most notable hawk was Robert Scalapino, the chairman of the Political Science department. I phoned him and asked if he'd care to take part. He had other pressing engagements, but recommended a junior member of the department, Chalmers Johnson. Johnson agreed to appear. Among the doves, perhaps the most qualified was the sinologist Franz Schurmann from Sociology. He too agreed to participate. I can't remember how I got the third--I suppose he was recommended by either Johnson or Schurmann--anyway, he was a young graduate student from Vietnam named Huynh Kim Khanh.

I, of course, was in no doubt about what Johnson's policy should be: get out while the getting was good. Of course, too, I knew he wouldn't. Here some perhaps tedious background. When I went up to Berkeley in 1961 to pursue an MA, my first contact was Peggy McCormack, a pal who had gone to Berkeley a year earlier to get an MA, but instead had got pregnant, married, and during her pregnancy had immersed herself in a study of Vietnam since 1946 and the gradual involvement in it of the U.S. She'd gone through NY Times microfilm back to 1953 and the Geneva accords and had read every story Homer Bigart, the Times's Saigon correspondent, had filed since, along with a great deal else.

Her lover, now husband, was Bill Plosser, assistant to Gene Marine, the news director at KPFA. I fell in with that lot immediately. I remember a small group of us at a corner booth of Edy's Coffee Shop, downstairs from the KPFA studios on Schattuck, Marine the picture of the hardbitten newsman (he'd become famous a year two before for his exclusive radio interview with Caryll Chessman, the accused "Lover's Lane Killer," weeks before Chessman's execution at San Quentin). I'd never heard of KPFA, the first listener-supported, non-commercial station in the U.S. and the forerunner of NPR. before going up to Berkeley. I began volunteering in the news department almost immediately. In 1962, Chris Koch of KPFA worked up Peg's researches into broadcast form, and that three or four part series was almost certainly the first serious treatment of Vietnam to be featured on any American radio or television station.

In the meantime, Gene Marine left the station to freelance, Plosser succeeded him for a year or so to be followed briefly by John Ohliger, and in January, 1963, weeks after getting my M.A., I became news director. Things were already in a bad way in Vietnam, as anyone could see who had been reading the reportage from Saigon by David Halberstam of the New York Times, Malcolm Browne of the AP, and Neil Sullivan of UPI. Buddhist bonzes were immolating themselves in protest against the rule of Ngo Dinh Diem, "free fire zones" were proclaimed covering vast areas of the countryside over which US aircraft and helicopters bombed or fired on anyone in sight, and "Sunrise Hamlets" were being constructed as containment pens for peasants supporting the National Liberation Front. The week I became news director, the NLF breached the security perimeter at Tan Son Nhut airbase just outside of Saigon and blew up six American fighter jets on the tarmac. Evidently, the ARVN weren't the most reliable guards, weren't, indeed, very good at anything, while "Charlie," the NLF, or Viet Cong, seemed to consist of very determined soldiers.

In February, the State Department put on a public information show for the media at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, and Marshall Windmiller and I went. Marshall, a professor of international relations at San Francisco State, broadcast a ten or fifteen minute program every week on KPFA, also available as a news letter, and he was simply invaluable, as keen and skeptical an observer as I. F. Stone. So there we were in this banquet room at the St. Francis listening to an array of speakers before the star of the show appeared, David Bell, the administrator of the Agency for International Development. A little more than a year ago, Bell said, he'd visited a village in Vietnam where security was frightfully bad and the peasants demoralized and deeply unsure of their government in Saigon. "I again visited that village a few weeks ago," Bell said, "and you would rub your eyes at the recovery of morale of these people, thanks to the security now being provided them." And this was the story wherever you looked in the countryside. Marshall and I rolled our eyes at one another.

A year later, things were much worse. Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, the defense minister, Ngo Dinh Nhu, had been murdered in an ARVN coup (and Mme. Nhu, a Roman Catholic who had scoffed at the "bonze barbecues," had fled to the Riviera with her lovely daughter), and the country was now being run by a general known as Big Minh. My view of the conflict was by then at bottom pretty simple: in a civil war between urban absentee landlords and rural peasants in an overwhelmingly rural country, put your money on the peasants every time.

This was the situation the evening Chalmers Johnson, Franz Schurmann, and Huynh Kim Khanh came to the KPFA studios. During the week before, I'd scouted out Johnson in the library. His credentials were formidable. His doctoral dissertation at Berkeley had been published two years earlier (Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937-1945, Stanford University Press, 1962). I read it. Brilliant. On the strength of it and his obvious promise, Scalapino had not only hired him, but advanced him to a tenured associate professorship. This young man, only 32 or 33, had as a student mastered not only Mandarin, but Japanese as well. So the question for me was how a guy as intelligent as he could be so deluded.

I have no memory now of the points debated in that stimulating hour, although I do remember feeling some disappointment in Khanh, who seemed to me excessively deferential to the two antagonists. As I remember, his family was from Hanoi and had moved south after the division of Vietnam in 1954 to Saigon, and I wanted to know what he, who had seen both sides of the conflict, thought of it all. But discretion was his watchword, understandably, given his delicate position. (Twenty years later, watching an episode of PBS's 20-part documentary on the Viet Nam War, I was surprised suddenly to see Khanh, now in Paris at the Sorbonne, commenting on Vietnamese Communism.)

Schurmann had a rather easier time of it than Johnson because--well, because he was right and Johnson was wrong, but Johnson very ably argued for the view that the expansion of the "Communist bloc" must be stopped in Vietnam, and that it was America's duty to do so. But at the very end of the discussion, his earnestness became intense, agitated, and in the face of Schurmann's increasingly persuasive case that in the end "pacification" in Vietnam was a lost cause, Johnson's voice rose as he said, "I simply cannot believe, I refuse to believe, that with the caliber of our forces there, some of the best trained, most disciplined, and prepared officers and men we have ever sent into conflict anywhere, that victory is not achievable. I just don't believe it." I looked at him, and behind his horn-rimmed glasses, his eyes were almost imploring. All I could make of it afterward was, "He must be CIA."

Twenty years later, Chalmers Johnson moved from Berkeley to the University of California at San Diego, where he had his own Asian Studies department, and he poured out a series of books on Japanese economic history and East Asian politics. Then in 2000 he published Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, a repudiation of everything he had believed thirty-six years before. Everything. In the prologue, forthrightly titled "A Spear-Carrier For Empire," he described how he had become that, first as a young Naval officer in the last year of the Korean conflict, and later, unwittingly, as an academic. "I believed," he wrote, "that the United States could not afford to lose in Vietnam. In that, I was distinctly a man of my times. It proved to be a disastrously wrong position."

When the student protest against the war erupted at Berkeley in the Spring of 1965, Johnson was outraged by the ignorance of student protesters who simply knew nothing of Asian communism and didn't care that they knew nothing. "As it turned out, however, they understood far better than I did the impulses of a Robert McNamara, a McGeorge Bundy, or a Walt Rostow....In retrospect, I wish I had stood with the antiwar protest movement. For all its naivete and unruliness, it was right and American policy wrong."

I won't bother describing what a brilliant, impassioned, and necessary book Blowback is--and its sequel, The Sorrows of Empire. The point I want to make at the end of this very long letter is that Johnson's firmly anti-imperialist stance is so far out of the "mainstream" of legitimate American discourse that Blowback went unreviewed by most of the press, including the New York Times, and was dismissed by Foreign Affairs as "reading like a comic book." You won't find op-ed pieces by Chalmers Johnson anywhere (he used to appear in the LA Times, but that fine newspaper is no more; it was replaced by an imposter when the Chicago Tribune Company acquired it). His utterly disqualifying fault is that he opposed the invasion of Iraq from the outset and years ago described accurately its inevitable consequences.

Molly Ivins, Paul Krugman, and Bob Somerby of the Daily Howler blog have all noted the ruthless exclusion of premature naysayers from the "where do we go from here?" discussion. Whom did Tim Rutten invite to discuss our Iraqi predicament on "Meet the Press" last Sunday? Tom Friedman and Davids Brooks. Yesterday on NPR's ATC, the sought-out expert was Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution, whose book of 2002 was titled The Case For War. And everywhere one sees and hears Michael O'Hanlon, also of the Brookings Institution, a hawk from the outset--but, as he always notes, a liberal hawk, a Democratic hawk. O'Hanlon is listened to with such grave respect by Scott Simon of Saturday Weekend Edition, Leanne Hansen of Sunday Weekend Edition, and Neal Conan of Talk of the Nation that you'd think he was a revered parish priest, the beloved Faddah Mike.

The two most-consulted military experts appearing on the TV networks are General Barry McCaffrey and Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, both of whom affect a blunt, even somber realism, but both of whom surely know that if they ever were to utter the obvious, namely that the jig's up, their usefulness as consultants would immediately come to an end. Thus, Cordesman wrote an op-ed for the NYT last wednesday titled "One War We Can Still Win," the tag of which was "The situation in Afghanistan is dire, but not yet hopeless." Keep your chin up, Tony.

In the Sunday Week in Review section for December 10, the Times produced a smorgasbord of twelve expert views of the Iraq Study Group's report that it thought "worth considering." The second was by Richard Perle. The fifth was by Fouad Ajami, whitey's favorite Ay-rab, who wrote a heads-up in the NYTimes Magazine in the early days of Al Jazeera warning that although that network posed as moderate, it was in fact a nest of sinister Islamists to be shunned at all costs, and on The News Hour With Jim Lehrer just before the invasion told us not to worry about a negative Arab reaction; actually, the Arabs favored the invasion, they just couldn't say so openly for fear of the Arab street. The only voice among the twelve who opposed the invasion at the outset (at least, I assume he did; it would be consistent with his sober German skepticism concerning US policies) was Josef Joffe of Die Zeit.

No Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment, who wrote on the eve of the invasion that if Vietnam had been a quagmire, Iraq would be a maelstrom. No General Joseph Hoar, USMC Ret., head of Centcom from 1988 to 1993, who said before the invasion that Donald Rumsfeld was deranged and the venture bound to fail. No Chalmers Johnson, and certainly no Scott Ritter, who is about as far from the mainstream as Pluto is from the Sun, who warned beforehand that the grounds for war were utterly baseless, and who recently reaffirmed his extremism for all to see by publishing a book warning of Bush plans to bomb or invade Iran. Such views as theirs are definitely not "worth considering." Only certified spear-carriers for empire need be heeded.

Donald Rumsfeld and the Uses of Historical Analogy

2006-09-07T22:29:00.000-07:00

Last week, in an attempt to firm up the national will for the titanic struggle for democracy in Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld invoked the specter of appeasement at Munich in 1938, noting the catastrophic results of the failure of the world's democracies to stand up to Fascism then, a tragic mistake we dare not repeat in Iraq. Many before him had invoked that dreadful parallel. Forty years ago, Dean Rusk, Secretary of State to JFK and LBJ, again and again summoned the memory of Munich and 1938 in urging the US to stay the course in Vietnam, even throwing in Santayana's hoary warning that those who fail to learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them. As Rusk's unhappy experience reminds us, historical analogies are always fraught with the possibility of error.

The Irate Codger very recently encountered a gentleman in full agreement with Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld on what is at stake in Iraq who, while agreeing with them on the saliency of Munich, proposed another, strikingly different, analogy which he insisted was even more compelling. This chap's analogy seems to the I.C. bizarre in many respects. Still, it does possess a certain logic of its own, especially if two or three of its premises are granted, even provisionally, a degree of plausibility. My animated friend, in a distinctly central European accent, spoke so heatedly and with such conviction that I was almost persuaded that he had a serious case. He eagerly accepted my offer to post his essay, but insisted on retaining his anonymity, for reasons which can perhaps be guessed at once his essay has been read. For the consideration of the curious, and as a fascinating exercise in the employment of historical analogy, I reprint it in full:

THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS: 1918 AND 2006.

BY MR. Z.

In the past week, three world-historical figures, President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and their intrepid, indominatable Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, have summoned the nation and the entire civilized world unflinchingly to gird ourselves for a showdown with Islamo-Fascism in Iraq in what is no mere military conflict but--in the President's stirring words--"the decisive ideological conflict of the 21st Century." Although the century still has ninety-four years to run, there can be no doubt that our President is right. As our gallant British ally Tony Blair said a few weeks ago, there is an "arc of Islamic extremism" stretching half way around the world, from Indonesia in the east to Morroco in the west, if not, as yet, to the Pyrenees, which is the deadly enemy of all that is decent, and all that we cherish. We have before us an unavoidable clash of civilizations.

As President Bush so eloquently said, "If we give up the fight in the streets of Baghdad, we will face the terrorists in the streets of our own cities." How true that is. Are we willing to do what it takes to destroy the Mahdi Army of Muktada al Sadr in Basra and Baghdad, or do we want to face this Mad Mullah's hordes in Hamtramk and Dearborn? Our very survival is at stake.

Addressing the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Secretary Rumsfeld reminded his listeners of the fate of those weak-willed democracies that so ingloriously failed to stand up to Hitler at Munich. Will we go the way of the disgraced Neville Chamberlain, or will we follow the defiant example of Winston Churchill?

As Mr. Rumsfeld said, the signs are not at all reassuring that the United States possesses the requisite will to endure and prevail. Although victory over Islamo-Fascism is within our grasp, the counsels of the cut-and-runners erode and undercut our patriotism. In his speech, Mr. Rumsfeld rightly ignored the timorous clamorings of a gaggle of Army and Marine generals who, from the safety of retirement, have called for his resignation, but he did take note of the sad fact that our defeatist media are focused on the alleged abuses at Abu Ghraib, while virtually ignoring the fact that Sgt. 1st Class Paul Ray Smith has become "the first recipient of the Medal of Honor in the global war on terror." And now critics are emboldened to call the facility at Guantanamo a "gulag," when in fact the prisoners have been given a library in which their favorite reading is Harry Potter. "Can we truly afford," the Secretary pointedly asked, "to return to the destructive view that America--not the enemy--is the real source of the world's troubles?" The consequences of such self-doubt are too severe, he said, to allow a "blame America first" mentality to overwhelm us.

Mr. Rumsfeld made it starkly clear: on the very threshold of victory over a deadly enemy in a struggle which will determine the fate of civilization for the remainder of this century and beyond, the only thing that stands in the way of our triumph is our own irresolution, our own doubts of America's greatness. The magnificent achievements of the Bush administration in Iraq through three costly years of war must not be thrown away by Qaeda-type Democrats. Failure now is not an option.

And so it was with Imperial Germany in the summer of 1918. "What?," the reader will ask. "Germany at the threshold of victory in the Summer of 1918?" Yes, yes, anyone familiar with the History of World War I "knows" that in the spring of 1918, General Erich Ludendorff, by now the virtual dictator of Germany and a megalomaniacal super-annexationist, gambled all on a last-chance spring offensive and lost, and then in September resigned and cynically threw to the politicians the responsibility for dealing with the ruinous consequences of his policies. Germany's defeat, we are told, was then assured. This, at any rate, is the established consensus of triumphalist English and American historians, concurred in, I fear, by not a few German historians who should have known better.

But the truth is precisely the opposite! Consider Germany's position that summer. On the Eastern Front, the hordes of now-Bolshevized Slavs had been vanquished the year before after three years of hard fighting. On the Western Front, the Gauls and Anglo-Saxons were in their last throes. The Americans had learned to their cost that singing "Let's hang Kaiser Bill" is one thing, and facing determined German steel is quite another. Germany had everything to fight for. The Allies had vilified Germans as "the Hun" for applying a firm hand in Belgium, and dared to call the people which had given the world Goethe and Schiller, Beethoven and Wagner, "barbarians." Germans knew the very survival of their culture was now at stake.

Furthermore, Germany had more men under arms in 1918 than ever before! And finally there is the irrefutable fact that even on the day of the Armistice, not a single hectare of the Fatherland had been trodden by the boots of the "victors"! The army was still in Belgium and France. The Wehrmacht had not been defeated!

How, then, came Germany's humiliation? First, there were the media, specifically the Berlin press, dominated by press lords who were, shall we say, distinctly "cosmopolitan," not to say Orientalized, and who carried in their "sophistication" the virus of defeatism. Second, circling the skies, the vultures of international finance, sprung from their crags and lairs in London, Paris, and Zurich, eager to feed on the financial carrion that was the German people. And finally, the German Social Democratic Party, which had for years been eager for a peace on Allied terms and finally got one. This combination of enemies foreign and domestic in the end prevailed.

In view of what I am now about to say, let me make it perfectly clear at the outset that I carry no brief for Adolf Hitler. As events in the 1930s and forties would prove, he was a wicked man who did many, many bad things. But this was a Hitler shattered after four years of fighting in the trenches by the Great Betrayal, demoralized by Germany's undeserved defeat, as were millions of his countrymen. The young Hitler of 1918 was an idealist, a patriot of the purest type whose love for the Fatherland was bottomless. And it was this fiery young idealist, not yet the master orator he would become, who in a moment of pure inspiration, addressing a meeting of the Wehrverein, found voice to shout, "I say to the wall to those traitors who tell us that Germany--not the enemy--is the source of our troubles! I say the firing squad is but a mercy to those who would blame Germany first!"

Now recall the pride taken by Donald Rumsfeld in the Medal of Honor bestowed on Sergeant Smith. Young Hitler was awarded the Iron Cross for conspicuous bravery in the face of the enemy in 1918. Is it far fetched to think that Herr Rumsfeld, had he been there, might have taken equal pride in pinning the Iron Cross to the dusty gray tunic of young Corporal Hitler with a husky, "Well done, soldier"?

Hmmm... Now that I've re-read and entirely absorbed Mr. Z's words, I think he's almost as far gone in fantasy, almost as much a nut case, as Donald Rumsfeld.

Saving Corporal Shalit, Part Two

2006-08-21T14:45:00.000-07:00

"Disproportionate Response"

The question as to whether Israel's response to the abduction of two soldiers by Hezbollah and the deaths of eight others had been "disproportionate" arose when it was confirmed that the ratio of deaths had reached ten Lebanese for each Israeli ("With Israeli Use of Force, Debate Over Proportion," NYT, front page, July 19), but it might well have been raised over "Operation Summer Rain" in Gaza weeks earlier.

"Operation Summer Rain," which still proceeds and which has resulted in the deaths of at least 165 Palestinians and one Israeli soldier killed by friendly fire, was commenced in response to two things, the abduction of Corporal Shalit, and the rain of several hundred Qassam rockets on Israeli territory, mainly in and around the town of Sderot, since January. The firing of these rockets by Hamas from northern Gaza has constituted an unendurable and even maddening provocation in the eyes of Israelis and their allies. Thus David Remnick, the New Yorker editor, writes (July 31), "Palestinian fighters, with the encouragement of the new Hamas government, lobbed more than seven hundred rockets into Sderot and other towns in southwestern Israel. Olmert had to respond." The American Israeli Michael B. Oren, the historian of the Six-Day War, wrote in the LA Times ("Israel: One Nation Under Attack," July 26) that "The attacks from Lebanon coincided with aggression from Gaza, where Hamas terrorists fired about 1000 Kassam rockets at Israeli towns and farms." These assaults from both Lebanon and Gaza imperil Israel's very existence, Oren wrote. "Israel's purpose is not retribution but survival." An outraged Yossi Klein Halevi--the sulfurous Halevi is always outraged--wrote, "No Israeli town within the 1967 borders has experienced the kind of relentless attacks Sderot has suffered." (TNR, July 30)

Usually the Qassam rockets have a range of about three miles, but on July 4, one landed on an empty high school in Ashkelon, six miles from the border. Olmert called this "an escalation of unprecedented gravity in the campaign of terror waged by Hamas..."

One thing that is hardly ever mentioned about the Qassam rockets, however, is the number of Israelis who have been killed by them since January, when the firing began. Whether the number of Qassams fired is 700 or 1000, the fact is that no Israeli has been killed by one. I believe four have been injured. This is remarkable, indeed astonishing, is it not? At least 700 rockets launched and not a single fatality. The futility is almost perfect.

What accounts for it? The rockets are home-made. This Spring a BBC reporter with a cameraman interviewed three or four Hamas "fighters" making the rockets, guys in black ski masks with green Hamas scarves. The rockets looked lethal enough: machined steel pipe, rocket fins, shiny black warheads. But they don't work. Moreover, the Israelis often seem to know the locations of the "factories" in which they're made, so these guys are far more likely to be bombed to bits than to kill an Israeli. Yet the rocket launchings enjoy wide support among Gazans. Why? Because, as a New York Times story reported, what with their power knocked out, sonic booms shattering their sleep every night, huge Israeli tanks roaring through daily, bulldozers destroying their orchards, and Gaza City being bombed nightly, Gazans figure that with the rockets being fired, a few thousand Israelis are losing their sleep every night too.

Here is an example of the weak and powerless finding refuge from their helplessness in purely symbolic retribution. Al Jazeera reported last month that "the resistance" had been just at the point of calling off the Qassams. Hamas was for it, also the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, but a third group--I forget which--said "No," that would be a humiliating capitulation to the Zionist entity, and so the others, not wanting to be branded traitors, reluctantly agreed to the continuation of the "campaign." Here, then, is one of the dire threats to Israel's very existence.

Oh yes, the debate in the American media over Israel's possibly disproportionate response to Hezbollah "aggression." There was hardly any debate, really; you might almost call the response of Israel's supporters "preemptive," so quick out of the box were they. Jonathan Chait, Martin Peretz's most promising young man at the New Republic (Chait's not even thirty), struck a pose of lofty and contemptuous amusement in his LA Times column. The charge of disproportionate force, he said, "is just silly." True, "Israel has taken the lives of several hundred Lebanese civilians (many entirely innocent, others who sheltered Hezbollah rockets)," and true too that "Every innocent death is a tragedy," but look at the big picture and the issue of Israeli intent: "Where Israel has bombed civilian areas, it has been in an attempt to strike Hezbollah's rockets." Anyway, "The brutal fact is that civilian deaths are Hezbollah's strongest weapon." Boy, has young Mr. Chait ever earned his Peretz stripes! Promote that lad to captain.

The Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen ("...No, It's Survival," Tuesday July 21) said calls for "proportion" "rankle." "Israel is, as I have often said,..gentrifying a pretty bad neighborhood." (So Cohen likes to think of Israelis as middle class urban pioneers buying up abandoned Victorians in a ghetto, gamely sprucing them up, dry-walling interiors and restoring their original color schemes, while trying to live with the drug-dealing openly going on down at the corner and the pimpmobiles cruising insolently by.) As Cohen notes, these protests against allegedly disproportionate Israeli force mainly came from "a whole lot of European newspapers" (they certainly didn't appear in American ones) and, he said, "they fall on my ears not as genteel expressions of fairness, some ditzy Marquess of Queensberry idea of war, but as ugly sentiments pregnant with antipathy toward the only democratic state in the Middle East." In other words--must one spell it out?--Anti-Semitism!

I read no columnist in an American newspaper who called the month-long bombing of south Beirut what it surely was, a war crime. I read today that the number of "homes" lost to the Lebanese in this war is 15,000. Would it be a fair guess that perhaps 10,000 of these were in Beirut? Contrary to the opinion of young Mr. Chait, there were no Hezbollah rockets fired from there. This atrocity was masked by the American networks' and NPR's quite routine description of south Beirut as a "Shiah stronghold."

My Concise Oxford provides two meanings for stronghold: a fortified place, or a "center of support for a cause, etc." Thus, for example, "the South Bronx has long been a Democratic Party stronghold." South Beirut is a Shiah stronghold only in that sense, but the repeated use of the word "stronghold" implied that the area was a legitimate military target.

One journalist/columnist who has been simply magnificent through the whole month of the war is Gideon Levy, the leftwing columnist of Ha'aretz who Sunday after Sunday has denounced Israel's prosecution of the war, and who called for a cessation even while Condolleeza Rice was using diplomacy to sabotage diplomacy. "Israel is sinking into a strident, nationalist atmosphere and darkness is beginning to cover everything," he wrote on July 30. "The insensitivity and blindness that has characterized Israel in recent years is intensifying."

"The devastation we are sowing in Lebanon doesn't touch anyone here and most of it is not even shown to Israelis. Those who want to learn what Tyre looks like now have to turn to foreign channels." "Lebanon, which has never fought Israel..is being detroyed by our planes and cannons and nobody is taking into account the amount of hatred we are sowing." "Maariv, which has turned into the Fox News of Israel, fills its pages with chauvinist slogans reminiscent of particularly inferior propaganda machines..." And on he went.

Even in peacetime, Israel has had, as Joel Beinin of Stanford has written, "a hypermilitarized political culture," but it has been at floodtide for the last month, and it ran over Levy. Ha'aretz attaches "blogs" to its columns--responses from readers--and those attached to Levy's have been savage. The first one I read said, "How do you spell 'Gideon Levy'? Y*E*L*L*O*W." Subsequent ones were pretty much in that spirit.

Human Shields

It has often been said in American media that Hezbollah, such is its indifference to the loss of innocent life, has employed human shields to protect its fighters. Thus, David Remnick of the New Yorker, while deploring the recklessness of Israel's bombing of Lebanon, felt it necessary to balance this with the observation that, "The Party of God, for its part, uses civilians as both shields and targets, and boasts of its own escape." Dan Gillerman, the Israeli ambassador to the UN, said, in the NY Times' paraphrase, "Hezbollah had used Lebanese civilians as human shields and had deliberately exposed them to danger in the hopes of stirring expressions of outrage against Israel." (Times, Mon July 31) Then as we have seen, Jonathan Chait, while regretting the loss of "innocent" civilian life, said an indeterminate number of civilians were "sheltering" rockets (I suppose we must call these people voluntary human shields).

So routine were such allegations that NPR anchors felt obliged with some frequency to ask correspondent Ivan Watson, who was in the thick of it in southern Lebanon, if he had witnessed such activity. And Watson wearily replied again and again that he had not. Few Hezbollah were to be seen in the destroyed villages and towns he reported from. The rockets, he said, always seemed to be fired from the next ridge, or from the valley beyond. On one occasion near the end of the conflict he did say he'd spoken to a man in a Christian village who said the Hezbollah had commandeered his house the night before and fired rockets from the second floor. But that was it.

Human Rights Watch's "Summary" of its findings regarding violations of human rights noted (hrw.org/reports, 8/9/06) "The Israeli government claims that it targets only Hezbollah and that fighters from the group are using civilians as human shields, thereby placing them at risk. Human Rights Watch found no cases in which Hezbollah deliberately used civilians as shields to protect them from retaliatory IDF attacks." Further, "In none of the cases of civilian deaths documented in this report is there evidence to suggest that Hezbollah forces or weapons were in or near the area that the IDF targeted during or just prior to the attack."

None of which deterred Dubya from saying on August 15 that "Hezbollah terrorists used Lebanese civilians as human shields, sacrificing the innocent in an effort to protect themselves from Israeli response."

The full absurdity of such allegations can only be understood if you try to imagine how a Hezbollah fighter with a couple of Katyushas would endeavor to protect himself from an airstrike with a human shield. "Holy shit, here comes an F-16! I'll just have to grab this woman and hold her in front of me! The kid, too--I'll be safe behind two."

So, no use of human shields in Middle Eastern conflict? Wrong. Ask yourself in what circumstances a soldier might find a human shield a handy thing to have. Say when he's a member of an infantry squad. Patrolling a rubble-strewn bombed out hostile town. A town in which a guy with a Kalashnikov might be drawing a bead on him right now from behind one of any number of dark windows. If that soldier grabs a local man or woman to walk in front of him....

B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories reports "20 July 2006: Israeli Soldiers Use Civilians as Human Shields in Beit Hanun, Northern Gaza." The soldiers seized six people, two of them minors, on 17 July, and had them stand at the entrances of rooms in a house where the soldiers had stationed themselves, and made their captives stay there for six hours, during which time there were intense exchanges of gunfire between the soldiers and armed Palestinians outside.

This sort of thing has been routine in the West Bank and Gaza since the beginning of the second Intifada in 2000.

Saving Corporal Shalit and Other Episodes of Sheer Madness

2006-08-19T22:34:00.000-07:00

Two Sundays ago, taking refuge from the lethal craziness in Lebanon on the front page and in the Week in Review section of the Times, I turned to the Book Review for relief and came upon an essay by Nick Tosches on yet another try at translating the Iliad. With all its darkness and bloodshed, Tosches wrote, its insistence upon remarking "dismal death" and "vile destiny," Homer's epic is "more knowing in its awareness of humanity's distinguishing trait--its inhumanity--than literature of later ages."

Boy, you can say that again, I thought. Not in a long time has irrational fury in all its forms and guises been so spectacularly on display as it has in the last six weeks or so in the Middle East, and all these fireworks of human viciousness, this epic of collosal folly, presented on so compressed and visible a stage, too! It's only about 160 miles from Gaza to Beirut, about the distance from San Diego to Thousand Oaks on the Ventura freeway, about a three-hour drive including a coffee stop at Denny's. The Israeli Air Force flew 9,000 missions into Lebanon between July 12 and the cease-fire, and dropped who knows how many tons of ordnance. Hezbollah fired 8,000 Katyushas into the Galilee in the same period, burning up 16,000 acres of forest and grazing lands. Whoopee, Destruction Derby time! All mad, quite, quite mad.

Begin with Corporal Gilad Shalit, captured by Hamas gunmen who tunneled from Gaza into Israel and snatched the unfortunate youth on June 25. Israel is well known for prizing the life of every young man and woman who serves in the IDF, an admirable national trait. How to get the corporal out? His father pleaded for a prisoner exchange, showing he simply didn't have the right sabra stuff. Instead of betraying weakness, Ehud Olmert launched "Operation Summer Rain," a military rampage through Gaza which so far has killed at least 165 Gazans, most civilians, and shows no sign of abating even today.

I was oddly reminded by this of a book I read in high school, James Michener's "Tales of the South Pacific." The "tale" I remembered was, I believe, the last, of a downed carrier pilot in a one-man inflatable, sitting out there somewhere in the vast Pacific. The Navy commenced a search operation to recover the pilot. A carrier battle group was diverted. An enormous grid of ten thousand square miles, or some such number, was created, and planes flew back and forth day after day, coursing the entire grid, until one day an Avenger or a PBY spotted this human speck floating on the blue ocean, and he was rescued. Michener counted up how many man-hours had been devoted to the search, how much aviation fuel. The point of the story, which deeply impressed me (well, it must have: I was 17 then and I'm 70 now, and it still sticks with me) was this: never before in history had there been a military force so committed to saving a single human life, or a nation so wealthy as to afford to indulge such a value.

Compare the rescue of that pilot to the attempted "rescue" of Corporal Shalit. Yossi Klein Halevi of the Jerusalem Post and the New Republic writes movingly of the plight of Shalit, "An Israeli soldier held hostage is a taunt against the Zionist promise of self-defense, an unbearable reminder of Jewish helplessness." (TNR Online, 6/26/06). To which one must say Oh please. Jews are not helpless in Gaza, Palestinians are. The lesson of Israel's response to Shalit's capture is not that he is precious to Israel, but that the lives of Palestinians are as nothing to Israel. They are dirt. Human detritus.

(A Reuters dispatch of yesterday reports that Qatar has stepped in to arrange a prisoner exchange, and that a senior Palestinian official said that "Israel has made new offers to Hamas via the Qataris in return for Shalit." Stay tuned.)

Hezbollah's Glorious Victory.

On Monday, August 14, the day the truce went into effect, tens of thousands of Lebanese refugees from Israel's pitiless bombing streamed south across the Litani River, to discover what was left of their towns, villages, and homes, if anything, and were greeted by Hezbollah fighters who, as Ivan Watson of NPR reported, handed out pink leaflets congratulating them on their glorious, strategic, historic victory over the Israelis. Everyone, including most Israelis, it seems, agrees that this was a debacle for the IDF, that the "myth of Israeli invincibility" has been shattered, and on the Arab side that Hezbollah has at long last restored "the nation's" honor. The Hezbollah fighters now join the Minutemen at Lexington and the Spartans at Thermopylae standing off the Persian hordes in the glorious annals of battle. "We won, we won!"

But this is madness. Much of Lebanon has been destroyed. The cost of re-building is reckoned to be $5 billion, I hear, and where is it to come from? Iran, it seems. Hezbollah is handing out $1,500 American, fistsfull of bills, to householders, courtesy of their Iranian benefactors, to cover start up costs. That's not going to go very far. Blocks and blocks of highrise apartment buildings in Beirut are rubble. Highways and bridges everywhere smashed. Two weeks into the war I heard Neal Conan of NPR's Talk of the Nation solemnly announce, "Israel and Lebanon are burning." (This was to maintain the American media pretense that "the suffering" was about equal on both sides.) "Wrong," I thought, "Lebanon has been destroyed, and Israel got its hair mussed." Hezbollah's victory is wholly symbolic; the destruction of Lebanon is real.

The "root cause" of this gulf between symbol and reality is Hezbollah's main weapon, the Katyusha rocket, which is itself all symbol (symbol of defiance, of boldness, of endurance---why, on Sunday, the last day before the cease-fire, Hezbollah fired off more Katyushas than during any previous day--how's that for endurance!). The trouble is that the Katyusha, this symbol of Hezbollah, is of no military value whatsoever. It's useless as a defensive weapon, obviously. It served the Red Army well on the Eastern Front, racks and racks of them mounted on flatbed trucks, fired in massive salvos at Wehrmacht infantry three or four miles in front, short on accuracy, maybe, but with a fifty-pound explosive charge in each they packed a hell of a punch when they landed on a column, or infantry spread out in defensive formation. But Hezbollah is not the Red Army, and this isn't 1944.

No, the Katyusha is good for one thing only: driving Israelis nuts. Hezbollah has been using them for that for years. Kiryat Shemona, that Israeli town about three miles from Lebanon, was finally evacuated last week--again. For twenty years Kiryat Shemona has been to Katyushas what Buffalo is to blizzards. Israel and the United States bellow that Hezbollah "deliberately targets civilians," but you can't deliberately target a Katyusha at anything. Where it falls depends on propellant, trajectory, and windage. Obviously, the Hezbollah sought to kill as many Israelis as they could, and whether the dead or wounded were military or civilian was of no consequence. The point is that they were able to kill so few. Eight thousand rockets fired, and what was it, 40 civilians killed? The Israelis killed almost as many Lebanese civilians with one 3,000 lb. bomb dropped on a house in Qana.

Tom Friedman usually has more than one screw loose, but he is capable of writing a trenchant paragraph on rare occasions, and I think he got it right on August 11 when he said the Lebanese, including Shiites, must ask themselves, "What was this war all about? What did we get from this and at what price? Israel has some roofs to repair and some dead to bury. But its economy and state are fully intact, and it will recover quickly. We Lebanese have been set back by a decade. Our economy and our democracy lie in ruins, like our homes. For what? For a one-week boost in 'Arab honor'?"

What will Hezbollah do now? Almost certainly get more rockets, as fast as they become available from Iran, and since Hezbollah already has a few capable of reaching Haifa, and soon if not now some able to strike Tel Aviv, if we are to believe Nasrallah's boasts, they'll acquire those too. They'll be really awesome symbols. But these will be suicide weapons. Even one hitting Tel Aviv is bound to bring destruction on Lebanon again. So there sits southern Lebanon, in the hands of the Party of God, whose head-of-state, prophet and leader answers only to his God (rather like George W. Bush of the other party of God, the Republican Party) and to hell, as Nasrallah as a Shia visionary must literally say, with the notion of a "multi-confessional" Lebanese nation. More, much more, fanaticism and unreason to come.

Apologies, but to be continued....

Bush is Right, Critics Wrong, Polls show: They Hate Freedom

2006-08-11T15:42:00.000-07:00

PARODY ALERT PARODY ALERT PARODY ALERT

News Analysis

Bush is Right, Critics Wrong, Polls show:
They Hate Freedom

by Edward Paynter

August 11, '06

For years President George W. Bush has tirelessly and passionately insisted that the only reason Muslim terrorists hate America is that we are a free people. Again and again he has asserted that the terrorists are nothing more than evildoers who have been driven to madness by their love of darkness and tyranny and their hatred for all the things our nation stands for: freedom, justice, and a love of liberty.

Thus, responding to the British roundup of terror suspects plotting to blow up three or more U.S.-bound airliners yesterday, the President said, "This is a stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom."

But for just as long, critics have insisted that the President is half right at best, and have berated him for trying to distract the world's attention from the "real" causes of Muslim terror, the policies of this nation toward the Muslim world, especially over the last six years, that are rightly or wrongly perceived by Muslims as being hostile to their civilization. Such critics cite especially the Bush administration's unfailing support for Israel's expansion into the West Bank and its building of a "separation barrier" running deep into Palestinian-settled territory. Israel's bombing of Gaza, and now of Lebanon, they say, certainly haven't helped.

Now, an amazingly comprehensive poll of Muslim terrorist prisoners conducted by the CIA and the intelligence agencies of several U.S. allies seems to confirm that the President has it at least half right. These captives do hate the United States for other reasons, the poll finds, but again and again, across the Muslim world from Morroco to Malaysia, results show that what they consistently hate about us above all is our freedom.

Captives were interrogated and given questionnaires everywhere: Morrocans in Spanish prisons, Algerians in French, Muslims of several nations in prisons in German and Italy, Muslim Brotherhood members imprisoned in Egypt, al Qaeda members in Saudi jails, Malayasian and Indonesian al Qaeda terrorists in the jails of those nations, the thousands of Iraqi prisoners in American jails in Iraq, and finally, an especially rich source, the 10,000 Palestinians languishing in confinement in Israeli facilities.

It is true that specific policies of the Bush administration are condemned by these terrorists. For example, 100% of Palestinians interned in Israel said the chief reason they hated the United States was that "America finances, arms, and encourages Israel to take land from the Palestinian people." But what will surprise the President's critics is the second grievance of the Palestinians, shared by 65%: they hate the Bill of Rights.

Similarly, while 80% of al Qaeda inmates held in Saudi Arabia said the chief reason they hate America is that "the infidels defiled the sands of the Land of the Prophet with their filthy presence," 70% said the next worst thing about America was the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures guaranteed in the Fourth Amendment. Sixty per cent also detested habeas corpus.

And so it went across the Muslim world. Iraqi prisoners overwhelmingly said they hated the United States for invading their country, but a surprising percentage, 45, said they specifically loathed the Fifth Amendment guarantee of trial by jury in all criminal cases.

Indeed, it was the First Amendment to the Constitution, with its several guarantees of freedom of religion, speech, the press, assembly and the right of petition which was most deeply reviled from Morroco to the Philippines. Among Iraqi prisoners there was an intriguing split between Shia and Sunni over which was the more hateful of the religion clauses, the establishment or free exercise ("Congress shall make no law affecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"), Shia, perhaps reflecting their now dominant status, now hating the first most, while Sunnis especially detest the second.*

President Bush may have been "thinking with his gut" when he concluded that they hate us for our freedom and for no other conceivable reason, but it seems he got it essentially right. But how, quite unknown to Bush, did these Muslims become so well acquainted with the Constitution of the nation they hate? It seems that in madrases from Riyadh to Rawalpindi it is not only the Koran that is taught. Pupils in these academies are also drilled endlessly in the U.S. Constitution, in Arabic, of course, as a sort of "evil writ" which their masters call "The Protocols of the Elders of the Great Satan." Madrasa graduates, then, have a knowledge of the Constitution that our law graduates well might envy, although from a diametrically opposed perspective. What we revere, they hold to be filth.

It will come as no surprise to learn that the person most detested by madrassa masters, one who is almost a stand-in for the Tempter himself, is Thomas Jefferson. Not because he was a slave owner, but because he was the world's most renowned gospeler of Natural Rights. "Jefferson is beneath camel dung," they will say. "Camel dung at least makes for a cheery campfire."

_________________________________________
*One Abu Ghraib prisoner who holds a doctorate in Islamic studies from Baghdad University said he actually agreed with the free exercise clause, but that it had been wrongly interpreted. The Constitution guarantees "freedom of religion," he said, "but not freedom from religion." He said he was in perfect agreement with Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.

The Irate Codger mulls the fate of Ariel Sharon

2006-08-07T21:57:00.000-07:00

My mind reeling from all the madness let loose by some Gazans snatching Corporal Shalit in late June, I was caught off guard by a bulletin the other day concerning the state of Ariel Sharon. It was like a flashback from another time. "Gee, that's right," I thought, "the old boy's still alive, isn't he?" It seemed from the news brief that there had been worrisome signs of organ impairment; the liver, I think it was. Think of it, it's been eight months since he suffered a massive stroke that sent him into an almost certainly irreversible coma. Doctors at the receiving hospital confided at the time that if the victim had been anyone but Sharon, they'd have let him go. The chances of his ever recovering, they said, were remote indeed.

You'd think that long ago, his widow--sorry, wife--would have said, "Please, let my husband depart in peace." Or that his sons would say, "Unplug Dad, OK? He'd have wanted it that way." One thing is certain: Sharon did not leave a living will.

Isn't this rather looking like emperor worship? His thousands of fanatical supporters among West Bank settlers when he was housing minister did acclaim him "Arik, King of the Jews," didn't they? I begin to think that if the doctors can keep him alive long enough, Israel might carve out of the living rock at Yad Vashem a gloom-shrouded Sharon Memorial lit by candlelight but with one strong ceiling beacon shining upon Sharon lying in a glass enclosed bed in a permanent vegetative state---a sort of combination of Lenin's Tomb and a Terri Schiavo vigil-- white-garbed doctors twiddling knobs of life-support systems and gravely studying dials while endless streams of Jews and visiting gentile dignitaries silently pass by, paying their respects between 10 AM and 5 PM daily, forever and ever.

Resolution 1559.

Before Israel began bombing Beirut three weeks ago, who had ever heard of UN Security Council Resolution 1559? As we have been endlessly reminded ever since, it was passed in 2004 and requires the disarming of Hezbollah. As I understand it, France had sponsored a resolution calling for the departure from Lebanon of Syrian military forces, and the United States--that would be then ambassador John Negroponte--urged the addition of language requiring the disarming of all non-state Lebanese militias, meaning, of course, Hezbollah, and the resolution was duly adopted.

Now you never hear the end of 1559. Just today, Bush mentioned it three times as being absolutely mandatory. It's a solemn responsibility of the international community to enforce it. It cannot be shirked. Not just Bush, but Martin Peretz and his Israeli claque at the New Republic, the Israelis, and every neocon in sight, have been shouting "1559!" That is to say, all those pro-Israeli voices who in the past expressed bottomless contempt for the UN, Kofi Annan, the Secretariat, and every damned Security Council resolution to restrain Israeli territorial aggrandizement ever passed. (And, of course, those forty resolutions since 1970 that failed because of a US veto, all of them "one-sided.") I wonder, has Bush ever mentioned 242 or 338 (that is, land for peace and a negotiated withdrawal by Israel from the Golan)? Well, he did allude to 242 a couple of years ago, calling it "unrealistic." These resolutions have been there since 1967 and 1973. Why are those damned Syrians being so mulish?

My Linda Gradstein problem and ours.

It will be wondered why the Irate Codger has been obsessed for so long by NPR's lady correspondent in Jerusalem. A week ago I said she was bone lazy, seldom produced any news pieces at all, and completely blew off the Palestinians. As if to disprove the first charge, Gradstein last week produced no fewer than three pieces, which must be a record for her. Here they are:

Lat Monday, she did four or five minutes on "Day by Day" about the striking differences between the Israeli public's response to Sharon's Operation Peace in Galilee in 1982 and its feelings about the current Lebanon war. In 1982, there were huge divisions. Tens of thousands protested the invasion and condemned the massacre of Palestinians in the Shia and Shatillah refugee camps in south Beirut by Israel's proxy Falange militia. Now, however, there is almost universal support for Israel's war (except, presumably, among Israeli Arabs). Why? Three prominent Israeli political scientists and military historians explained that it was because this time Israel's very survival is at stake, and the public grasps this fact. There was a fourth voice at the end, that of Gershon Gorenberg of the American Prospect and Mother Jones, who said that Israelis hadn't begun to think through the implications of this invasion.

On Tueday, on Morning Edition, she produced a story on the economic effects of the war. She talked to an American couple who ran a bed and breakfast resort in the northern Galilean town of Nazareth (not the one in which Jesus is said to have been born, but the other, which is still a Christian shrine destination with an ancient Orthodox church---I read about this in a recent issue of Archeology). The couple said summer was usually their most profitable season, but this year, thanks to the rockets, business was almost down to zero. But so far for all of Israel, Gradstein said reassuringly, the economic impact had been quite manageable.

For her third story, on Thursday, on All Things Considered, she took a tape recorder to a shopping mall and asked passers-by if they supported the war. All did.

Pretty hard-hitting stuff, eh?

Friday on All Things Considered, there was a report on the "forgotten war" in Gaza, not by Gradstein, of course, but by Anne Garrels. It was horrible. Since the abduction of Corporal Shalit and the beginning of "Operation Summer Rain," the Israeli rampage through Gaza, about 190 Gazans had been killed (and one Israeli: a soldier killed by friendly fire). All the crossing points out of Gaza have been closed since June, there is no power or light, no refrigeration, produce rots, and the Israeli navy prevents Gazan fishermen from going out to where there are fish. One man told of receiving a call on his cell phone in the middle of the night--the Israeli caller used his nickname--telling him to clear his family out of his house because it would be destroyed in ten minutes. It was. Others said they had received similar calls, fled their homes, and then...nothing happened. But they were afraid to venture back in and were sleeping out of doors. Gritty, resolute, heroic Anne. Not the same as taking your tape recorder to a shopping mall, is it?

So why didn't NPR fire the useless Gradstein years ago? I think I know why. Remember Kenneth Tomlinson, the Bush zealot who was compelled to resign as chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting last November for his crazed overreaching in seeking to bring PBS firmly into the Bush camp? He cracked down on Bill Moyers, promoted a "Wall Street Journal Editors' Report," charged "Frontline" with being a fount of anti-Bush propaganda, and even said that the News Hour with Jim Lehrer was left wing. (While compelled to resign from the CPB, Tomlinson continues to chair the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which runs the Voice of America.) Well, one of his charges was that NPR was biased against Israel and pro-Palestinian.

As a firewall against such assaults, who better than Linda Gradstein? She's NPR's hole card. "We're pro-Palestinian? Don't you know our correspondent in Jerusalem for the last seventeen years has been Linda Gradstein? When she occasionally lectures on US campuses, it's under the sponsorship of Hillel! She is clearly described in the literature as a Zionist! Check out her history and see if you can find anything biased toward the Palestinians." (Actually, years ago, Richard Pipes--or was it Daniel Pipes, I get them confused--did so charge Gradstein, but that would apply to anyone left of Yitzak Shamir.)

Nor is it just the Bush administration and the right. If Gradstein were fired, imagine the shit storm that AIPAC, the ADL, and Democrats like James Wexler, Jerrold Nadler, Nancy Pelosi, and Howard Berman might churn up.

All this being so, perhaps it's for the best that this woman continue to enjoy her sinecure.

How Our Media Analyze News of the Middle East

2006-08-02T18:01:00.000-07:00

The Codger awoke at 7:30 this morning feeling not at all irate. Weeks ago he'd felt too beaten up, kicked around, and pummeled to work up real indignation over it. Do you get angry when you're hit by a truck? He turned on NPR. Ivan Watson was reporting from Tyre.

I'm stepping over the corpse of a small girl right now. There are rows of caskets before me, some of them for tiny infants. This is the third mass burial this town has had since the beginning of the war. There are about ninety bodies this time. For all of Lebanon, the death toll is now well above 600.

Ten thousand Israeli soldiers poured into southern Lebanon overnight.

A Katyusha rocket killed an Israeli, raising the civilian death toll in the Galilee to 19. Or is it 20?

The BBC reports that the oil spill into the sea as the result of an Israeli air strike on a power station south of Beirut may be much larger than was first thought, perhaps as much as 35,000 tons. For purposes of comparison, the Exxon Valdez spill totaled 40,000 tons. The damage done is incalculable. Tuna spawning grounds will be gravely affected. Efforts to contain the spill are feeble.

I think, "And all this because some Hezbollah guys made a raid into Israel, killed three guys, and snatched two? All this?" So the Codger turns to another matter he's been tracking in his compulsive news junkie-ex news director way, the analyzes of the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict (shall we now call it, for brevity, the Lebanon War?) provided American viewers by their television and radio news outlets. Nothing exhaustive, obviously, just what I've been watching on the evening news shows and listening to on NPR.

CBS Evening News, Friday, July 14. Bob Schieffer:

For perspective on what all this means, we turn to veteran diplomat Martin Indyk, director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. Dr. Indyk is a former US ambassador to Israel. Welcome, Dr. Indyk.

Dr. Indyk explains that at this stage of the conflict there is very little the United States is able to do. It is imperative that U.N. Security Council resolution 1559 be enforced, requiring the disarming of Hezbollah, and Hezbollah has shown no willingness to cooperate. Quite the reverse, in fact. That's about the size of it. Events will just have to play themselves out. "Thank you, Dr. Indyk."

Saturday Weekend Edition, NPR, Saturday morning, July 15. Scott Simon:

And now, to analyze these events, we call upon veteran diplomat Martin Indyk, director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy of the Brookings Institution and former US ambassador to Israel. Dr. Indyk, what do you make of these developments?

Dr. Indyk explains that at this stage there is not much the United States can do. All depends eventually on the enforcement of UN Security Council resolution 1559, which requires the disarming of Hezbollah. Events have shown that that is absolutely critical to Israel's security.

The News Hour With Jim Lehrer, PBS, Monday, July 17. Jim Lehrer:

And now, to analyze events over the weekend, we call upon veteran diplomat Martin Indyk. Dr. Indyk was US ambassador to Israel under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. He is now director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. Dr. Indyk, what do you make of all this, as of now?

Dr. Indyk explains that there is little that the United States can do while Hezbollah and its Syrian and Iranian masters continue to resist pressure from the world to stop the mayhem produced by their Katyushas. Of course, the disarming of Hezbollah, as called for by UN Security Council resolution 1559, is crucial to any lasting peace.

BBC Nightly News (TV, not radio), Tuesday, July 18. News reader:

And now, for perspective on these events, we call upon a former American ambassador to Israel, Dr. Martin Indyk, now director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Welcome, Dr, Indyk.

Well, you know the rest. But wait. Unlike Schieffer, Simon, and Lehrer, the BBC announcer provides another perspective. Alongside Indyk, we have Robert Haass, (that's how his name is spelled), Rhodes Scholar, D. Phil., Oxford, eight published books, and former director of the State Department Policy Planning Staff under Colin Powell. Was he called on for "balance"? He's in full agreement with Indyk.

[Martin Indyk was born in Britain, raised and educated in Australia (Ph.D. in Political Science U. of Adelaide) and twenty years ago was the founder and first director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a spin-off from the Israel-America Public Affairs Committee. Although there are few gentiles among its members, the Institute has always been an Israeli talk shop (its present Senior Military Analyst, for example, is a former commander of the IDF), although it is never identified as such when one of its "senior fellows" appears on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, as one invariably does when discussion turns to Israeli matters. I do wonder, however, about "Near East"--that's the Mahgreb, isn't it--Morocco, Algeria, Libya? The Saban Center was created in 2003 with a grant from Haim Saban, an Egyptian-born Jew raised in Israel who is a Hollywood mogul and billionaire (he created the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers) who is now in a spot of trouble with the IRS (he's identified as one of the "superrich Americans evading taxes using offshore accounts that law enforcement cannot control"---"Tax Cheats Called Out of Control," David Cay Johnston, NY Times, Tueday, Aug. 1). I suspect Saban created the Center and named Indyk as director to give the good doctor an institutional base of unquestionable eminence.]

NPR, "All Things Considered," Tuesday, July 25. Host Robert Segal:

And now for perspective on this, we turn to Dennis Ross, former diplomat for the first Bush and Clinton administrations and now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Ross says there's going to have to be a "strategic convergence" if we--the world's nations, that is--are to get out of this, and I can't begin to make out what he means by strategic convergence. A convergence of Israel and Syria?

Well, we all know the indefatigable Dennis, the "go to" guy for authoritative comment on the Middle East for Neal Conan of NPR's "Talk of the Nation," and for years now a senior foreign affairs analyst for Fox TV News. But not only is he the Director and Ziegler Distinguished Fellow at WINEP, he's also the first chairman of the newly created Institute for Jewish People Policy Planning, founded and funded by the Jewish Agency, a part of the Israeli government since 1948, and which since the Six Day War has been tasked with "carrying out settlement activities in the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Gaza Strip." (Wikipedia). You can't get much more authoritative than that, can you?

The News Hour With Jim Lehrer, Tuesday, July 25. For analysis of the latest developments surrounding the Lebanon War, Ray Suarez calls upon two guys: veteran reporter Ari Nir of the Forward, a century ago the fabled Jewish Daily Forward of Abraham Cahan, but now read by...retirement community oldsters in Miami? The other guy is Robert Alterman, formerly of the State Department Policy Planning staff under Bush. They got along just great.

The News Hour With Jim Lehrer, Wed., July 26. Full circle: Martin Indyk again! But this time there is--for once!--an opposing view, Robert Malley, with the National Security Council under Clinton, who has been dueling for years, it seems, with Dennis Ross over whether Yasir Arafat really "walked away from an unprecedentedly generous settlement offer" by Ehud Barak in 2000 in the pages of the New York Review of Books and on this show said the Bush-Olmert policy is an absolute disaster. Gosh it was refreshing to see some sanity flood into this heretofore hermetically sealed chamber of denial! Still, the all-time prize for deadly hypocrisy goes to Indyk. When asked what must now be done, he said, "First, we must deal with the humanitarian crisis." While of course resisting a cease-fire until enduring grounds for peace are achieved.

NPR's "Day to Day" with Alec Chadwick, Tuesday, August 2. Chadwick: "And now, for what this all means, we turn to....[didn't get his name] of the Israel Policy Forum, an independent and non-partisan organization seeking peace in the Middle East." Jesus, I thought, what is that? Of course I Googled it---thank God for Google. A press release: "Israel Policy Forum Commends House and Senate for 'Steadfast' Support for Israel." Blah, blah, blah. The president of the Israel Policy Forum, formed in 1993 to fight the Oslo accords, is Seymour D. Reich, twice chairman of the Conference of Major Jewish Organizations, and of Bnai Brith International, etc. etc. How can Chadwick, how can NPR, present this slop propaganda as analysis?

That brings us up to this afternoon. I must close by saying that despite Conan, despite his dumb wife Liane Hansen on Sunday Weekend Edition, despite Chadwick, I still need and deeply respect NPR. While Scott Simon was cringe-makingly deferential to Martin Indyk, he's also had on Rami Khouri of the Beirut Daily Star, that wary, hard-bitten "I've seen it all" observer of the insanities of the Middle East on all sides, and that NPR reporters in this conflict and everywhere around the world are doing journalism of the highest quality day in and day out (which is why I donate at least 300 bucks a year to NPR) and that since the sainted Joan Kroc bequeathed all those millions to public broadcasting, NPR has been the equal of the BBC (and I listen to BBC radio news at least a half hour and often an hour every evening (courtesy NPR, of course).

There is one exception to this rule of excellence: my bete noir, NPR's lady in Jerusalem for seventeen years, Linda Gradstein. This woman is bone lazy. She rarely produces anything. I mean go out, interview a bunch of people, edit the stuff, write continuity, tell a story. She has an MA in Middle East Studies from George Washington University and presumably reads Arabic, but I imagine her telling the people in Washington, "Look, I DON'T DO PALESTINIANS, okay? I just DON'T." So whenever a story necessarily involves having a Palestinian voice or two in it, they send in someone: the superb Deborah Amos, or Julie McCarthy, or Eric Westerveld, or Mike Schuster, or even Robert Segal. All Gradstein does is read press releases from the Israeli public affairs office. They should fire her and get an Associated Press ticker. It would save a lot of money. Besides, I can't stand her damned droning voice!

Midwife Condi

2006-07-31T23:40:00.000-07:00

I was backing my car into the garage last Friday, July 21, and as usual my radio was tuned to NPR's "All Things Considered." Condoleezza Rice was explaining to a news conference the purpose of her forthcoming visits to Tel Aviv and Rome. She was firm on her central point: her purpose was not to obtain any old cease-fire that might come undone in a week or two. No, it must be a "permanent" cease-fire that addressed, dealt with, and eliminated the "root causes" of violence in the region "so that a real and endurable peace can be established." Nothing less was really worth discussing.

What stopped me from switching off the ignition key and getting out of the car was her next sentence. "What we're witnessing here is, in a sense, the birth pangs of the new Middle East, and whatever we do, we have to be certain that we're pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back to the old Middle East."

Up to that moment, I had wondered for a week how fully Ehud Olmert had briefed Bush about the scale of his astonishingly ferocious response to a cross border raid by Hezbollah that had resulted in the death of three Israeli soldiers and the capture of two (some reports said eight dead, but the other five were tank crewmen who had been blown up by a mine when they crossed into Lebanon in hot pursuit). Had Bush said, "OK, Ehud, whatever you say"? Had he had some misgivings in the seven days following during which much of Lebanon was destroyed?

I sat stunned by Rice's statement. No past utterance by this woman had quite prepared me for this one. What the rest of the world saw as a horrific problem to be addressed urgently, the destruction of much of Lebanon by the Israel Air Force, Rice saw as an essential step toward the solution of the underlying problem, which was, of course, Hezbollah's possession of Katyusha rockets. Destroy Hezbollah by the application of overwhelming Israeli firepower and the delivery of that new Middle East, that smiling baby of hope, would be well underway. The deaths of three hundred Lebanese, and now, a week later, five hundred? Birth pangs. Really unfortunate. As Dubya always says, "Our hearts and prayers go out to those who have lost loved ones."

Anyone, I thought, could see that the birth pangs statement was dynamite. It gave it all away. Neo-con fanaticism was unmasking itself for all the world to see. Three years of war in Iraq leading to debacle and more than fifty thousand Iraqi deaths had done absolutely nothing to diminish the Bushite faith in shock and awe, victory through firepower, benevolent ends achieved through Blitzkrieg.

Well, here's what stunned me. In the next two days, scarcely anyone paid any attention to that statement! The Saturday New York Times in its lead story on Rice's press conference and diplomatic mission omitted mention of the birth pangs statement. So did the Los Angeles Times in its otherwise detailed coverage of the press conference. So did the Saturday Guardian. I thought perhaps the Guardian had gone to press before the news conference, but wait, they always update their web page, don't they? (seconds after a World Cup victory, full coverage of the match appears). Nor did the statement make the Observer, forty hours or more after she'd uttered it.

I said "scarcely" anyone mentioned it. All honors, then, to Maureen Dowd, who did in her Saturday column, "Condi's Flying Dutchman," which quoted Rice and commented, "Yet everything in the Middle East seems to be reeling backward, and neocons are once more mocking W. as a wimp who should blow off the State Department and blow up Syria and Iran."

If it hadn't been for Maureen, I might have persuaded myself that I had been deluded in thinking I'd heard what I did hear.

The first journalist other than Dowd to take note of it was the superb Rami Khouri, editor of the Beirut Daily Star, who began his Monday commentary by noting that Rice had "described the massive destruction, dislocation, and human suffering in Lebanon as an inevitable part of the 'birth pangs of a new Middle East.'"

"From my perspective here in Beirut," he went on, "watching American-supplied Israeli jets smash this country to smithereens, what she describes as 'birth pangs' look much more like a wicked hangover from a decades-old American orgy of diplomatic intoxication with the enticements of pro-Israeli politics."

Then came good old Fred Kaplan of Slate, who zeroed in on the birth pangs statement on Monday as "the killer sentence, the statement that explains so much about what's gone wrong with American diplomacy and not just in the Middle East." He was stunned not just by the "blithe arrogance" of the statement, but the "stunning confidence in this belief--held so deeply that they're willing to push ahead with their vision even at great sacrifice of political stability and human life."

Then on Monday, Condi made a surprise visit to Beirut (two days after the NY Times reported "U.S. Speeds Up Bomb Delivery For the Israelis; Request Is Seen as Sign of Longer Campaign"), and the nice lady brought with her a gift of $30 million in humanitarian aid and medical supplies. (This reminded me of something forty years ago. Vietnamese hospitals were full of burn victims as a result of massive napalm raids on villages. Lyndon Johnson proudly announced that the U.S. was sending a crack team of plastic surgeons to Vietnam, witness to the "big heart of America".)

On Wednesday, the Philadelphia Inquirer cartoonist Phil Auth depicted midwife Condi in her blood-spattered Middle East delivery clinic.

On Friday, at the ASEAN conference, Condi played a Brahms sonata and called it a "prayer for peace."

Lest anyone should think for a moment that the American intoxication with pro-Israeli politics is in any sense partisan, the House of Representatives a week ago passed a resolution fully supporting anything Israel should think to do, 410-8. It was said to be to Nancy Pelosi's credit that before the Democrats signed on to it, she insisted that it include language condemning excessive loss of life. Here's how the resolution did that: The House "recognizes Israel's longstanding commitment to minimizing civilian loss and welcomes Israel's continued efforts to prevent civilian casualties."

And does anyone suppose that Hillary Rodham Clinton would be less adamant than Condoleezza Rice in defending Israel's right to defend itself? Perhaps Dick Morris's dream match for 2008 will happen. Mujer a mujer: Condi against Hillary. The black witch versus the blond bitch.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
POSTSCRIPT: I didn't end my Midwife Condi tirade in quite the manner I'd intended to. In my impatience to get to a conclusion (and to my mean joke about Condi and Hillary---oh, did I chortle over "the black witch and the blond bitch"!), I omitted the last delicious bit about "birth pangs." While responsible journalists of the Western World seemed to think it no more than an embarrassing slip of the tongue best ignored, the Arab media saw it for what it was.

Thus Monday's Times reported that in its coverage of the 3,000 lb. bomb dropped on that house that killed sixty people inside, Al Jazeera simply panned its cameras over the carnage minute after minute after minute, silently. Then a reporter doing a standup "sarcastically" said, "Welcome to the new Middle East."

That's as good as Ed Bradley's last stand up from Saigon in 1975. On the top floor of the American embassy, the stairs to the roof and the waiting helicopter behind him, lit from behind by the door open to the sky, Bradley said, "Behind me...at last, the light at the end of the tunnel."

One last comment on birth pangs. In his Times column last Friday, July 28, Tom Friedman wrote, "Condoleezza Rice must have been severely jet-lagged when she said that what's going on in Lebanon and Iraq today were the 'birth pangs of a new Middle East.'" Actually, she said it of Lebanon, not of Iraq. That she might have been jet-lagged makes no sense since she said it forty hours before stepping on a jet. How typical of this frivolous man to blow it off with a stupid joke!

I wanted to get to Hillary because of the way she "swift-boated" Jonathan Tasini (his term, fully justified) her challenger in the New York primary who has no chance and gets very little ink (one piece in the NY Times this summer), an utterly decent guy who denounced her for her full-throated support for Olmert's savage war, and called for a cease-fire. Her spokesman called Tasini's criticisms "Outrageous" and "beyond the pale." Interesting metaphor to employ against an Israeli-born American Jew, don't you think?

Social Security and Medicare D

2006-05-26T21:58:00.000-07:00

GOVERNMENT HEALTH WARNING: MAY CONTAIN SATIRE!

For weeks, I've been mulling over the profound differences in approach to government-provided insurance between the Social Security Act of 1935 and Medicare D, the program to provide prescription drug coverage to seniors which passed in 2003 and went into effect this spring, with it's enrollment deadline occurring only a few days ago. Why these striking differences? Is Medicare D a case of learning lessons from the evident failures and shortcomings of an obsolescent program passed seventy years ago and correcting them? Or, on the other hand, does Medicare D represent a reckless disregard for the bases for Social Security's stunning success, a willful repudiation of the tried-and-true? Should the Bush administration have consulted the New Deal "brains trust" in formulating its prescription drug program, or might FDR, Frances Perkins, Harry Hopkins, and Henry Mogenthau have benefited from the counsel of modern-day policy analysts at the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, and produced something significantly better than Social Security, conceded even by its admirers, then and now, to have its very real flaws?

Let's begin by placing Social Security in its most favorable light. At a stroke, it provided unemployment compensation, old-age insurance, and aid to families with dependent children, among other things. As glowingly described by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in his classic The Coming of the New Deal,

"Facing an administrative challenge of staggering complexity, [Social Security] operated with steady intelligence and competence. No New Deal agency solved such bewildering problems with such self-effacing smoothness. The old-age insurance program went into quick effect... No government bureau ever directly touched the lives of so many millions of Americans---the old, the jobless, the sick, the needy, the blind, the mothers, the children---with so little confusion or complaint. And the overhead costs for this far-flung and extraordinary operation were considerably less than those of private insurance."

This estimate, of course, ignores what we nowadays call "the downside" of social security, of which more toward the end of this essay, but it is on the whole a just assessment, and we cannot but note the comparatively unfavorable light in which it seems to place the Bush drug prescription program. Medicare D is much more complex than Social Security because of the public sector-private sector collaboration upon which it is based. Why, critics ask, not make the whole thing single-payer and leave the insurance industry out of it, just as it is left out of Medicare itself? Why not make the administration of the program entirely in-house? Why not give Medicare the power to negotiate the terms of drug purchases directly with Big Pharma?

These are all good questions, and they deserve persuasive answers. At first glance, and even at second, it must be said, the Bush approach seems to carry with it severe disadvantages. It seems, to put it bluntly, to be no more than a giveaway program for the insurance industry, a program by which industry profits are needlessly subsidized by the government, and hence by the the taxpayer, and a program, too, through which enormous profits are simply guaranteed to the pharmaceutical industry for the lifetime of Medicare D.

Isn't it the case, critics ask, that every dollar of profit realized by the insurance industry, its managers and shareholders, represents one dollar less available to the beneficiaries in drugs? Then, too, we must reflect that with as many as eighty insurers offering 1,400 plans competing for sign-ups (the current estimate), a good many of them are bound to fail, for, after all, one purpose of free market competition, and its certain result, is the ruthless weeding out of the less fit. Beyond that, there is the inevitability of fraud, for the temptation to cut corners and line pockets can never be completely suppressed in the best regulated of markets. Realistically, the overhead costs must be immense. The regulatory bureaucracy in Medicare, Health and Human Services, and the Justice Department--the paperwork examiners, auditors, and attorneys--will run into the many thousands if there is to be any chance of maintaining even rudimentary standards of honesty and competence.

What possible benefit, it will be asked, can justify the risks and hazards outlined above? And how can seniors possibly make any sense of the myriad plans proferred them, as many as forty in each state, with differing and sliding monthly fees, co-pays, deductibles, and pharmacopoeias? President Bush faced these issues squarely recently and gave his blunt response: "We have changed Medicare for the better," he said, "but sometimes change creates anxieties. The more choices you have, the more likely it is you'd be able to find a program that suits your specific needs. In other words, one size fits all is not a consumer-friendly program."

There you have it. Choice. It is, as one might say, the First Amendment of the Consumer's Bill of Rights. It is the American way. I recently visited a supermarket and wandered into the oral hygiene aisle, and there on the shelves I counted thirty different brands, flavors, and sizes of mouthwash! This gloriously varying array of products jostling one another for my dollar raised this question in my mind: would any of us really want a world in which we all had to buy Listerine?

This brings us to the notorious "doughnut," or more precisely the doughnut hole, the gap in coverage between the first $2250 and $5100 of drug purchases. What could have possessed Congress to do this, many wonder. The doughnut metaphor is particularly apt, suggesting as it does that the missing portion consists of nothing but empty calories, trans fats, and sugar. Just as the Bush plan offers consumer choice, so it promotes personal responsibility. As she gobbles her way through six or seven generics a day and closes in on that $2250 deadline, the patient must stop and ask herself, "Do I really need 7 and a half milligrams a day of Coumedin, or could I get by on five? Is this Cipro really necessary? Do I have to take all this Ditropan, or might I produce the same results with a change of diet?" She must, in other words, face the fact that in this world there is no such thing as a completely free lunch. It's a timely lesson, even--or perhaps especially--for the over-65s.

As to the profits assured to Big Pharma by Congress's act of forbidding Medicare to negotiate drug prices, which some darkly attribute to the pharmaceutical industry's "clout" in Washington, well, here the story is more complex than some newspaper columnists would have you believe. For one thing, while Medicare may not bargain with the pharmaceutical giants, the insurers are perfectly free to seek whatever discounts they're able to pry loose from the drug companies, and I, for one, wish them all the luck in the world, although, realistically, the heavy hitters like UnitedHealth, Humana, WellPoint, and Blue Cross/ Blue Shield are bound to have better luck here than the small fry.

But the underlying issue is this: are those 18 to 20% profit margins enjoyed by the pharmaceutical giants really "exorbitant," as some critics charge? It is often pointed out that most industries reap far less in profits. Car manufacturers, for example, settle for 5%, when they make any profits at all. But this is to ignore the billions that Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Merck and the rest have poured into research over the last quarter century or so to produce the cornucopia of drugs which have extended and enhanced our lives. Critics allege that the Bush plan puts the drug industry first, the insurers a close second, and the beneficiaries a distant third, but the truth is that in assuring steady high profits for the drug giants, it also assures better health for all of us.

In the U.K. they think otherwise. There, Parliament imposed ceilings on pharmaceuticals' profits, and you may be sure they are far below 18%. What has been the result? That the Brits are a whole lot sicker than we Yanks, in spite of whatever junk science propaganda you may have heard to the contrary from the likes of the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, or Paul Krugman.

Drug industry breakthroughs in treatment are occuring all the time. Just recently, research by three companies--Merck, Novartis, and Sankyo--established that 57 million more Americans than we had supposed are at risk from high blood pressure. The New York Times reports (Saturday, May 20) that the three spent $700,000 to "wine and dine doctors last year at steakhouses around the country and brief them on the latest news about high blood pressure." A few disgruntled physicians sharply protested this expanded definition of high blood pressure and accused the drug industry of wanting only to "increase the number of persons taking drugs." One recklessly charged that the medical profession was as addicted to drug industry money as Americans are to oil. But the real news here is surely that if not for this industry "heads up," many millions of Americans might have died in their sleep from high blood pressure without even knowing they had it!

Research is not the only drain on drug industry profits. Advertising costs in this highly competitive industry are also very substantial, and were greatly increased when Congress in 1997 for some reason passed and Bill Clinton signed into law a bill permitting the advertising of prescription drugs on television. The salvo of commercials began with Pfizer's introduction of its new anti-arthritic drug Celebrex, and the jingle "Celebrex, Celebrex, come on and celebrate!" quickly became inescapable. The promotion produced at least one indisputable if unintended public good: overnight, the network evening news shows were turned from loss leaders into sources of high profits. Merck soon responded to Pfizer by promoting its own anti-arthritic miracle drug, Vioxx, with the lovely ice-skating champion Dorothy Hamill, thirty years on from her Olympic gold medal but seemingly ageless, thanks to Vioxx, gliding across a pond trailing children to the accompaniment of a reggae-beat "It's a beautiful...MORNING!..."

One oddity of such commercials is that they promoted the announcing careers of fast speakers--those able to read their way through the required warnings with astonishing speed:

"Sideeffectsmayincludemenstrualcrampingimpotencearrhythmiavertigo-
genitalsorenessandmildintermittentsphincterspasms. Donotuseifpregnant."

OK, it turned out that all those millions who were prescribed Vioxx would have been a lot better off taking aspirin, but who knew? Not the FDA. Although the aesthetics of these commercials are sometimes pleasant, their clear purpose is to educate and inform, which is why they always end with "Ask your doctor if X is right for you." Sarcastic spirits interpret this to mean "pester your doctor to prescribe X and don't take no for an answer." But really this is quite unnecessary because your doctor or a colleague in the same practice very likely was flown last year to an all-expenses-paid seminar at a thirty-six hole championship class golfing resort on Maui where he learned of the wondrous results achieved by X in five years of exhaustive testing.

In summary, what might the drafters of Social Security have learned if they'd had the privilege of consulting Bush plan advisers? First, choice. It somehow mattered not to FDR's inner circle whether the recipients of Social Security were single or married or were homeowners or renters. They all got the same check. Uncle Sam knew best. Social Security thus clearly failed the Bush litmus test: "One size fits all is not a consumer-friendly program." Second, no requiring of responsibility. If there'd been a doughnut, if, for example, Social Security checks had only arrived nine months of the year rather than in all twelve, it would have been brought home to recipients that they were damned lucky to get anything, and for part of the year would be on their own. Third, Social Security cut out altogether the hard-hit private insurance industry. If recipients had received their checks from Mutual of Omaha, Metropolitan Life, Fireman's Fund, etc., business confidence might have recovered far faster than it did, promoting a more speedy prosperity for all Americans.

Yes, Social Security flourished---in the short run (well, for seventy-plus years). But we have been warned by our president. After winning re-election in 2004, he memorably said, "I've earned capital in this election--political capital--and now I intend to spend it. That's my style." And he spent it telling us that Social Security would be bankrupt by 2018 and that even now all the guarantees of future payments stored in some filing cabinet in Erie, Pennsylvania, were nothing more than a collection of worthless IOUs. We ignored him, and continue to ignore him, at our peril.

J'Accuse Le Parti Democratique

2006-05-22T15:42:00.000-07:00

The Irate Codger, the Hermit of 4032, emerges from his cave once more to hurl his imprecations into the wind, raving like Lear on the heath, and it matters not to him whether anyone hears or replies! He will have his say, curse the heavens! He speaks, of course, of the Democratic Party. Just the other day, when the price of gas hit three dollars a gallon and a jubilant Senator Charles Schumer (I refuse to call him "Chuck") crowed that now at last the Democrats had Bush on the ropes, I asked myself, "Is this the nadir? Have we now bumped the bottom, or is it possible to go even lower in cynicism, opportunism, pandering, and the craven abandonment of scruple?"

Can the Democratic Party ever produce a presidential candidate with guts, conviction, and eloquence? Well, here are two guys who in one case might and in the other definitely does want your support, and two party wonk journals seriously proposing that this time they deserve your admiration and perhaps your support. The April edition of American Prospect proposes "The New New Gore," in a breathless essay by one Ezra Klein. This new, new Gore made a thundering speech before a select audience last November, and if you hadn't been there you'd scarcely believe the transformation. Freed from hack consultants and ignored by the media, "Al Gore as presented by Al Gore is infinitely more electric and attractive than the anodyne stiff the media popularized and the voters remembered." He has evolved into "the most articulate, animated, and forceful critic of the Bush administration" we have. Why, in 2002 the guy even came out for single-payer health insurance! And his new movie about global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth," is a real eye-opener and shows him in an entirely new light. Gore now views global warming as "the biggest challenge this species ever faced."

Hey, wait a minute. Gore published "Earth in the Balance" in 1992, remember, fourteen years ago, and it was all about global warming. He headed the American delegation that negotiated the Kyoto protocols to the Rio treaty in 1997. He ran for president in 2000 and, between Labor Day and November 7 of that campaign season, never once uttered the word "environment," let alone "climate change" or--gasp--the unthinkable, "global warming." An inconvenient truth indeed; so inconvenient that in a presidential campaign it couldn't even be whispered, lest his opponent ape his father and pin on hapless Al the jeering epithet "Ozone Man."

What accounts for the emergence of the new, new Gore? His epiphany came with Howard Dean's campaign in 2003. Hell for leather, no holds barred, fuck the consultants, comfortable in his own skin and all that. Joe Trippi, Dean's..ahem..consultant (fired, as I remember, after the Iowa caucus) tells the wide-eyed Klein that Gore "looked and saw that, Holy Shit, those guys are running the kind of campaign I wanted to run." (I bet he wasn't so vulgar as to say "Holy Shit" around Tipper.) "Wanted to run," note. What prevented him? Oh, yeah, those consultants, Joe Klein's whipping boys. So, unleash the real Al Gore!

Not persuaded? Well, the Nation has another suggestion. How about "The New Kerry"? (May 29 issue, page 5. In an anti-war address at Faneuil Hall in April, writes an admiration-addled Ari Berman, on "the thirty-fifth anniversary of his stirring testimony before Congress as a representative of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Kerry was invoking a theme downplayed throughout his 2004 campaign and confronting the issue that bedeviled his candidacy: the war in Iraq." "Downplayed." He didn't downplay it; he stifled, strangled, and buried it. He said, "Just as I defended my country as a young man, I will defend it as president." He murdered his younger, braver self, the coward. Of course it was futile.

And his support of Bush's war and his vote for it, a vote he "stood by" not only through the campaign, but for a year and a half afterward? "After years of vacillation, he has found his voice on Iraq....Of all the votes he's cast in the Senate, Kerry told Tim Russert on Meet the Press, his Iraq vote is the one he'd most like to take back." Pity he didn't say that in August 2004 in Boston in his acceptance speech. Imagine how those delegates, eighty per cent of whom were anti-war and dying for words of courageous defiance, would have greeted that! It would have been like TR in Chicago at the Progressive Party convention in 1912: "We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord." Pandemonium. Instead he gave them that ghastly, phony Swift Boat Veterans patriotic love-in. Oh, and he's now for "healthcare for all Americans." Maybe that means single-payer, but very probably not. "The presidency is never very far from his mind," Berman tells us. For the definitive word on all this, see Ellen Goodman's "Don't Run, John Kerry," in the Boston Globe, April 28.

New Gore, new Kerry. Those with very long memories may recall the origins of that. In 1960, a hack journalist named Earl Mazo wrote a famous piece in the New Republic, and a book, called "The New Nixon." In the next decade and a half, the term became an endlessly repeated joke. Ezra Klein and Ari Berman remind me of Lucy holding the football; they must think we're all Charlie Brown.

And then there's Hillary. Gore and Kerry are far from being tragic figures, for their defeats were cowardly, but there was pathos in the downfall of each. They are decent, thoughtful, principled men who went into politics to do good, and their models, Albert Gore Sr. and JFK, were worthy of emulation. It's just that when it came to it, courage failed them, and they'll spend the rest of their lives living with that bitter truth. HRC is different. There are no--that awful term--"core convictions" there. She's moved from Lani Guinier, Marion Wright Edelman and the Children's Defense Fund to Bill Bennett and Sam Brownback, from "It Takes a Village" to "The Book of Virtues." Every position taken is discardable. In 1997 she went to the West Bank, "prematurely" called for the creation of a Palestinian state, and decorously bussed Mrs. Arafat on or near the cheek. When she ran for the Senate in 2000, she knew what had to be done. She kissed the ring fingers of the New York rabbinate (figuratively, of course, as in "kow tow"), proclaimed her belief that Jerusalem was the eternal and indivisible capital of the Jews whatever the Oslo accords might say to the contrary, and ever since has been elbowing Charles Schumer over which of them is AIPAC's most dependable champion in the Senate.

And of course she's been famously "reaching out" to the Republican right, assuring the pro-lifers that she hates abortion almost as much as they, siding with the Republicans, along with Joe Lieberman, on Terri Schiavo, teaming up with Robert Bennett of Utah on a bill to make a crime of flag-burning when the intention is to "intimidate" someone (she compared it to the Klan burning a cross on a black couple's lawn), and joining Rick Santorum and Sam Brownback in a bill to crack down on the violence and sexism of video games. Santorum is a reactionary Catholic. Brownback, formerly a Southern Baptist, was recently converted to the faith of Mother Church by the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus (misidentified in my last missive as Neustadt--sorry). Santorum, along with Justices Scalia and Alito, is rumored to be a member of Opus Dei. Watch out for Hillary to condemn "The da Vinci Code" in no uncertain terms!

The other day she addressed the Chamber of Commerce and scolded young people nowadays who seem to think that work is a "four-letter word." Well, it is. She thought it was high time "we started to think some very old-fashioned thoughts." The pandering was so risably blatant that both John Stewart and Stephen Colbert ran clips on their satirical shows, alongside John McCain in cap and gown at Fallwell's Liberty University.

What else is there to say of this woman? She has been unflinching and unyielding in her support of the war she voted for without a qualm or moment of reflection in 2002; tried to get to Bush's right by going to Baghdad to rally the troops, seize a mess tray, and get in the chow line; and proposed a year ago that the active duty armed forces be increased by 80,000, in increments. Other pro-war Dems then in the Senate have dropped by the wayside: Rockefeller, Biden, Edwards, Kerry. She never will. If she becomes president, our stratospheric defense budget will go even higher. And, oh yes, health insurance. Al Franken, on his talk show on Air America Radio asked her if she would now endorse single-payer. Dumb question perhaps to the woman who with Ira Magaziner concocted that success-proof scheme thirteen years ago, but anyway, for the record, she replied, "No, we require a uniquely American solution."

But, we are told, the nomination of HRC is almost a done deal. Unheard of heaps of campaign cash. No real opposition. Steely resolve. But something funny is going on. Most of the people talking this way seem to be Republicans. "Hillary Clinton's political future is both unpredictable and unlimited. She has..a political network second to none. And money will never be a problem. Senator Clinton would be a formidable opponent for Republicans in 2008 as the nation remains closely divided." Who said that? Why, the aw-shucks boy-Senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, in an appreciation of HRC in Time ("I have found common ground with her on improving health-care benefits for members of the National Guard and Reserve.") Yes, the former boy-Representative who in 1999 was one of the six Republican "impeachment managers" who framed the articles to bring down Hill's hubby. Ah yes, politics and strange bedfellows.

Who says she can't be stopped? Dick Morris, for one, that endearingly brazen Machiavel (I loved the bit about phoning Bill in the White House from a hotel bedroom in downtown Washington, talking hardball politics while sucking a prostitute's toes), Morris, that Inside the Beltway Iago who might as well wear a smiley-face sign saying "Treachery is My Middle Name." And now, bankrolling a fundraiser for her is Rupert Murdoch ("He is a constituent of mine," she pointed out.) Why are all these Republicans so interested in giving Hill a shot at the Big Prize? Because they salivate at the prospect of having that huge balloon of a target floating lazily over their heavy artillery in 2008. I think the Hillary Clinton campaign is a vast right-wing conspiracy.

Even with Bush's approval ratings in the low thirties (and in one poll, 29), the Democrats are almost bereft of "campaign themes." Rahm Emanuel, the chairman of the Congressional Democratic Campaign Committee, is about to come out with a book called "The Plan--Big Ideas for America's Future," and Ted Kennedy has written something called "America Back on Track," but these big ideas for getting America back on track are exceedingly feeble: increase the minimum wage, tuition tax credits for college students, increased federal contributions to public schools, promotion of "energy independence" by cracking down on big oil company price gouging, and the creation of a Homeland Security system second to none, in which every container entering the United States would be inspected. Currently, 95% of them are not. For why inspecting all containers is a very dumb idea, see below. And Iraq? Here it's the Basil Fawlty strategy: Whatever you do, don't mention the war. Nothing on the Republican theft from middle and low income earners to reward the rich, nothing on higher CAFE standards for motor vehicles, nothing on lowering carbon emissions, and. of course, nothing on averting global warming. The Bush-created hysteria over Iran's "nuclear ambitions"? We don't go there.

The only Democratic forays of late have consisted of demagogic lunges to Bush's right. In February it was the Dubai Ports World furor, begun by Schumer and HRC, equally horrified at the prospect of kaffiyeh-wearing Ayrabs complete with beards and sunglasses taking over our ports. It was pointed out that two of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers came from the United Arab Emirates! Schumer and Clinton introduced a Senate bill to prohibit any foreign country from managing any fraction of a US port. Awkward that China and Singapore have for years owned companies that manage loading and unloading from Long Beach to Oakland. The UAE owning anything in the US was "utterly unacceptable," Schumer said.

Bush was blindsided and bewildered. He threatened to veto any legislation repealing the Dubai deal. Schumer knew he was bluffing. "I smell the scent of victory," he said. But were he and Clinton and Barbara Boxer, who also took up the hue and cry (she feared for Israel's security) so dumb as not to know that if they got to Bush's right, the Republicans--Hastert, Frist, Duncan Hunter, James Sensenbrenner et al-- would get to their right quick as a flash, as they did? When it comes to playing upon American credulity, chauvinism, and Islamohysteria, they're the masters. It's their franchise, goddammit. Nevertheless, Howard Dean trumpeted the repeal of the deal as a Democratic success. In the Democrat's weekly radio address on Saturday, March 11, Dean said, "America had a great victory this week in the war on terror" thanks to the alert action of "key Democratic senators and representatives."

There were two prominent Democrats who distanced themselves from this triumph, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, both of whom said Dubai ownership of the former Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company posed no threat whatsoever to American security (Clinton had earned a nice chunk of change from an address in Dubai stressing Arab-American cooperation). I bet Bill was commanded to sleep on the couch the night after he said there was nothing to the whole scare.

[Oh, as to why inspecting every container to enter an American port makes no sense: Here is Edward S. Walker, Jr., president of the Middle East Institute and former U.S. ambassador to Israel, Egypt, and the UAE. "By the time a container has entered one of our ports and been off-loaded for further processing, it is probably too late to avert a nuclear or biological attack.... The Container Security Initiative is the critical piece in the port security puzzle. The UAE was the first Middle Eastern state to join this U.S.-sponsored initiative. Under its provisions, customs and border protection officers are permanently located in UAE ports to inspect containers before shipment to the United States... In short, we already depend on the cooperation of the UAE and its management company to ensure the security of U.S. ports, regardless of this proposed contract." "Ports Deal Fearmongering," March 6, Tom Paine.Common Sense.]

In February, Dubai, in April, the price of gas. Man, was Schumer in his glory now! On Thursday, April 28, he and Emanuel "stood in front of a mock service station price sign to denounce high gas prices---'High gas prices are going to be the final nail in the GOP coffin,' Mr. Schumer predicted cheerfully---while endorsing an amorphous 'Manhattan Project' to reduce United States dependence on foreign oil." (NY Times, Sunday, April 30)

Whenever there's a spike in gas prices, the out-party is sure to blame it on the administration. In the Spring of 1996, gas went up forty cents a gallon and Bob Dole went to a gas station in Virginia, put on a hard hat and posed filling a tank to make the point that Americans were being crushed by high gas prices. His target was the three and a half cent a gallon uptick in the tax passed by the Democrats in 1993. "Mr. President, repeal that tax!" he said, with all the fervor of Reagan's "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

At the time, this struck me as so fatuous that I mapped out a GOP ad campaign along the lines of the insurance industry's "Harry and Louise" commercials aimed at the Clinton health insurance plan. A worried guy sitting at the kitchen table, coffee cups and crumpled pieces of paper in front of him. His wife enters and brightly asks "Why so glum, honey?" He shakes his head and answers "I've just been doing the math, Marge, and what with this Clinton gas tax there's just no way we can afford that trip to Yellowstone this summer." "Oh, Jim," she says, "the kids will be so disappointed!"

Well, Dole was a piker compared to the Democrats last month. Three and a half cents? They proposed that the whole federal tax on gas be repealed for sixty days. It was to fend this off that the Republicans brought up their instantly derided idea of a $100 tax rebate to ease motorist through this crisis. But that was paltry compared to Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan's proposal for a $500 rebate, a figure she said was more commensurate with how much gas prices will cost the average motorist this year.

We are at the nadir; we must be! High gasoline prices are, in fact, our salvation, for nothing else will save us from our national addiction to huge fuel-gulping and polluting SUV's. And, as Daniel Gross of the NY Times wrote in "Why Prices at the Pump May Have Little Bite" (Sunday, May 7, Business section, p. 3) only about four cents of every American consumer dollar goes to gas, and this level has been more or less constant for years. The recent spike adds about a penny to that total.

No one in the congressional Democratic Party has the guts to speak the truth. Our national predicament, our global predicament can only grow worse with a leadership such as this. Molly Ivins speaks for all of us: "I don't know about you, but I have had it with the D.C. Democrats, had it with the DLC Democrats, had it with every calculating, equivocating, triangulating, straddling, hair-splitting son of a bitch up there, and that includes Hillary Rodham Clinton." (The Progressive, March 2006)

The Bushite Way of Death

2006-05-01T00:30:00.000-07:00

As we await the jury's verdict in the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui--will the jurors decide on death, or life imprisonment without the possiblilty of parole?--I brood over an incident at the trial two or three weeks ago. Despite specific instructions from Judge Leonie Brinkema never to do so, a lawyer on the prosecution team had coached four potential witnesses--air-traffic controllers, I believe--on how they should testify in order to ease the jurors' path to a death verdict. So outraged was the judge, it was thought that she might dismiss the case altogether (never fear: she'd been reversed by the Bushite majority on the appellate court before in her attempts to curb prosecutorial misconduct, and wasn't about to be humiliated a second time).

The widow of a man killed at the Pentagon was distraught at the thought that Moussaoui now might escape with his life. She was furious with the prosecution. "I feel as if they've ripped my guts out," she said. "It's as if the government killed my husband all over again." She, of course, yearned for "closure." (When did that awful word take on the meaning it now has? My twenty-five year old Concise Oxford has only one meaning, as in "there's been a closure on Route 99 North due to an overturned semi." But since then the word has spread like kudzu in the world of grief and healing. Oddly enough, however, my 2001 New Oxford American Dictionary affords no sanction to its modern pop usage either ((catharsis? abreaction? delight in another's well-deserved death?))). Whatever, death as closure is what is required. After a parade of prosecution witnesses in the penalty phase of the trial, people who wept describing the horrible deaths of loved ones, Moussaoui was asked if he felt any remorse at all, and--out of the mouth of a madman--came a reply which in its trenchancy and mordant wit might have been uttered by Gore Vidal: "I find it disgusting that people will unburden their grief in order to obtain the death of another."

All this reminded me of an indisputable truth. If the Bush/Ashcroft/Gonzalez Justice Department had been willing to settle for a life sentence, Moussaoui would have been convicted almost five years ago. Think of the money we'd have saved! We'd have almost forgotten him by now, as we have the would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid, or Sirhan Sirhan, or George Wallace's would-be assassin, or Squeaky From. But this president, his first A.G. and the current A.G. believe in death. It's the appropriate end for evildoers of all sorts. Death must be served at whatever cost.

Thus, John Aschcroft at first hoped for death for that traitor John Walker Lindh, the "American Taliban." Poor Lindh, that luckless truth-seeker, who found himself swept up in events and then down in an earthen celler for days as Northern Alliance fedayeen poured water down there to drown Taliban fighters like rats. Lindh had never even picked up a weapon! He reminds me of Thomas Berger's Jack Crabbe in Little Big Man finding himself with the hubris-crazed Custer at Little Big Horn, or George Macdonald Fraser's Sir Harry Flashman somehow winding up in the company of John Brown's desperadoes at Harper's Ferry. In the end, Lindh's attorneys talked him into copping a plea, knowing the temper of northern Virginia jurors. Twenty years for aiding the enemy (a statute previously construed to apply to financial aid of some sort; Lindh's aid consisted in his being there).

The first victim of the D.C. snipers was shot in Maryland, I believe. Ashcroft intervened to transfer the culprits to Virginia, where they had also killed. Maryland has no death penalty. Virginia does.
Bush, as governor of Texas, signed off on the executions of hundreds. Alberto Gonzalez, as his AG, never found grounds for reducing a death sentence to life. Remember Karla Faye Tucker? At age twenty and high on meth, angel dust and God knows what else, she participated with her biker boyfriend in a horrendous double murder. Eighteen years later, facing death by lethal injection, she was a wholly changed woman. Model prisoner. Sweet counselor to her fellow inmates, even an inspiration to them. And, of course, like George W. Bush, a born-again Christian. Surely, here was an instance of redemption. He put her to death. Tucker Carlson asked Bush what Karla Faye had said to him. Bush grinned, and, mimicking a whimpering female voice, said, "Please don't kill me."

In their belief in the death penalty the Bushies are wholly in accord with their favorite Supreme Court justice, Antonin Scalia. In a talk a few years ago at the University of Chicago law school, reprinted in the Rev. Richard John Neustadt's reactionary Catholic journal, Last Things, Scalia explained why Europeans were opposed to the death penalty. It's because European culture is now irredeemably "secular." That is to say Europeans are atheists. They think this life is all there is. But if you are a believing Christian, convinced of the existence of an after-life, then death is "no big deal."

Nor is it a big deal for our newly-found Shiite allies in Iraq. After another Sunni mosque-bombing atrocity, Maj. Gen. Muhammad Neima of the Interior Ministry, surveying the wreckage, said, "The people of this country have grown accustomed to being slaughtered, and we feel proud that we're sacrificing ourselves and getting closer to God." He added, "The suicide bombers have turned themselves into gate-keepers of heaven." (NY Times, Sat Apr 8, '06) Well, that's one way of looking at it.

The new Shiite prime minister, deemed quite acceptable by Condi Rice, Jawad al-Maliki, is even more fervent than Dubya in his belief in death. "In contrast to more moderate Iraqi leaders who have sought to bring insurgents into the political process, Mr. Maliki pushed proposals aimed at the Sunni-dominated insurgency that called for the death penalty not only for those who commit murder but also for anyone, he said last year, found to 'finance, propagate, cover up, support or provide shelter for the terrorists, no matter how involved they are.'" (Times, 4/22/06) Hmm... Come to think of it, that's why Bush wants Moussaoui dead, isn't it, for covering up a crime in which he took no part?

The Bushies are in perfect accord with Scalia not only in their enthusiasm for the death penalty but also in their contempt for international law, which our ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, says doesn't even exist. Say "international norms of jurisprudence" within Scalia's hearing and you'll get a shower of verbal buckshot. When the Supreme Court recently decided that executing people for crimes committed under the age of 18 was unconstitutional in part because other nations no longer countenanced it, Scalia, the originalist, was scathing in his dissent. What were we, a sovereign power, doing seeking to align our practices with those of bunch of foreigners?? "Evolving standards," he said in another venue, are believed in only by idiots.

If you combine the two, belief in death and contempt for international law, you get the trial of Saddam Hussein. Did anyone in the Bush administration ever consider for a moment that the prudent course might be to hand Saddam over to some competent international tribunal for trial? Say the International Criminal Court in the Hague? Of course not. For one thing that would have precluded the death penalty. Bush and the Shiites want Saddam dead. More than that, it would have meant recognition of the ICC's legitimacy, a court which Bush and all right-thinking Republicans detest because the first thing it would do would be to indict Henry Kissinger--or so they fear.

So, in Iraq, a nation with no judiciary, no tradition of judicial independence, no law but for the inevitable imposition of Sharia, and few lawyers, the Coalition Provisional Authority creates a court out of wholecloth specifically to try, convict, and hang Saddam Hussein. Thus the farcical on-and-off spectacle the world now witnesses. There's another consideration in play here: Dead men tell no tales. The US was his enabler in the Iran-Iraq war. (Note that the present court will never prosecute him for beginning that preventive war.) If Saddam were to be tried by the ICC, and it got to the gassing of Kurds, which this show trial will never get to, and I were a lawyer for the defense, I'd say, "May it please the Court, the Defense now calls its first witness. Will Donald Rumsfeld approach the witness box?"

One day last November I was listening to "Talk of the Nation" on NPR and the subject was the impending trial of Saddam. There was a glib law professor who had been the CPA's lead guy in establishing this special court and an American attorney on the defense team with Ramsey Clark. This guy was understandably rather testy; the professsor was smooth as silk. Neal Conan clearly didn't like the defense guy's manners and seemed deeply impressed by the cogency of the law professor's assurances that the whole thing was on the up-and-up. But Conan, that lickspittle, never asked the professor the obvious question: why not turn Saddam over to an international body? What has the US got against international law?

Maddened by Conan's studied incuriosity, I thought of the summer of 2003 and Charles Taylor, the monster of Liberia. Now, thanks to a miraculous confluence of events and lucky accidents, Taylor is at last in custody in the Hague. How is it that Taylor eluded capture two and a half years ago? A New York Times editorial (Tues, Mar 26, '06) explains that when "Taylor was under siege by rebel forces in 2003, the United States, Britain, and Nigeria arranged for him to get asylum in Nigeria, under the correct assumption that his quick exile would reduce the bloodshed." At some point, if one is to believe the Times, Bush changed his mind about the sufficiency of Nigerian exile for Taylor. Lydia Polgreen writes in the Times of Thursday, March 30, "The loudest calls for Mr. Taylor's arrest came not from his victims but from the United States, which has backed the international court here [in Sierra Leone] financially and diplomatically."

It makes one's head whirl. I remember the summer of 2003, and it wasn't like that. Taylor's forces were under siege by rebel kids wearing Nikes and shooting Kalashnikovs, and all in Monrovia was in chaos for weeks. More and more dead. Liberians pleading for intervention. Bush, grotesquely, was on a whirlwind tour of Africa. He utterly ignored the Liberian mess. I wondered if he, with a BA in history from Yale, was even aware that Liberia was a creation of the American Colonization Society, conceived by Henry Clay and Daniel Webster among others, with President James Monroe as its honorary chairman, and that it might be argued the United States had a special responsibility for what might occur there.

Finally, Bush acted. He ordered an LHA (Landing-Helicopter-Assault) on station in the Indian Ocean to proceed to the Red Sea, Suez, the Med, then the Atlantic and Liberia. I thought at the time, "You mean there's no LHA nearer than that?" More than twenty years ago I taught aboard an LHA, the Belleau Wood. We went round and round in the IO and once put into Berbera, Somalia, but that's another story. LHAs are like aircraft carriers but their flight decks are about 800 feet in length rather than 1100. They carry Chinook helicopters, and several hundred marines (they're all named after battles in which marines fought).

So, this LHA is coming to the rescue of the Liberians. Except it isn't. When it's within about twenty naughts of Monrovia, it parks. And doesn't move for two weeks or more. God, did I feel for those marines! Life for a marine aboard an LHA is lectures, squad tactics, stripping and reassembling weapons, and running and running on the flight deck. When that ship was ordered to Liberia those guys had to be excited. Some action! And in a noble humanitarian cause! For black marines, especially, this must have seemed a godsend, going in there, kicking some ass, and saving the brothers from the bad guys! And there their ship sat, day after day, while Bush mulled his next move.

So as the LHA sat half an hour from shore, things got worse and worse in Monrovia. People were at the US Embassy pleading for the marines to come in. They began stacking their dead at the embassy gates as marine guards looked on, powerless to do anything. Why this cowardly delay, this waste of lives? Because Bush said Taylor must leave before the US would intervene, and then only after the Nigerians had gone in. Why must Taylor leave? Only one answer made any sense at all. If he were still there when the Americans came ashore, they'd have had to arrest him, and that would have meant turning him over to a UN- commissioned court. The Times story that Bush insisted on Taylor's exile first to reduce the bloodshed is the veriest bullshit. The marines were poised to go in weeks earlier, and would have done a hell of a lot better job of it than the Nigerians. Plus, this was one American armed intervention that would have been greeted with flowers and sweets, if the Liberians had had any. Think of the publicity: Bush for once does something decent! All of which raises the question: when and why was Bush suddenly hot for Taylor being delivered up to an international tribunal? I've read nothing in the Times that provides any clues.

At 11:12 PM, the Irate Codger rests. Cheers, all!

The I. C. Fumes Again

2006-02-26T00:51:00.000-08:00

The Irate Codger still marvels after all these years at the knavery, deviousness, and, when it suits his purposes, the unctuousness of George W. Bush. E.g., on the blowing up of a golden-domed Shiite shrine in Samara. This despicable act was, he said yesterday, "an affront to people of faith throughout the world." Who does he suppose blew the thing up, atheists? In Bush's fantasy world, the Great Divide of the modern age lies between People of Faith (good) and the Unbelievers (degenerate, cynical amoralists). On one side the God-fearing; on the other those who sneer at the Almighty. On one side, Family Values; on the other, perverts and deviants, and those who embrace their sick "lifestyles."

So it simply can't be that those who blew the shrine's roof off were Sunni fanatics for whom the shrine was a detestable symbol of "idol-worship"--i.e. the Shiite veneration of "imams" descended from the offspring of the marriage of Ali, Mohammad's son-in-law, and the Prophet's daughter Fatima--- veneration for which, Sunnis believe, there is no justification in the Koran. Or so I gather.

Bush can never acknowledge that fanaticism and intolerance are inseperable from religious belief. Thus his pathetic mantra--not heard in some time, actually--that Islam is a "peaceful" religion, when in fact it is the most militant of the three great monotheistic faiths and by far the most insistent proselytizer. Muhammad's stern command: Submit or Die (I've been reading the Koran of late, 150 pages so far in the Penguin edition, so don't try to tell me I've misunderstood.)

It's not just Muslims, of course. I remember the Serb bombardment of Dubrovnik fourteen years ago. That unbelievably beautiful city, the creation of the Venetian Republic during its centuries of glory, was being slowly smashed up by Serb artillery, and the churches, monestaries, and basilicas seemed unusually unfortunate. It was almost as if the Serbs were aiming at them. As indeed they were. Those buildings were Catholic and the Serbs are Orthodox. Nuff said. Of course, in Bosnia-Herzegovina the Serbs were just as systematic in destroying mosques and synagogues.

Then there were the religious Zionist fanatics in Jerusalem who plotted to tunnel under the Temple Mount (or Abode of the Faithful, is it?) to blow up the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa mosque in one glorious detonation, thus bringing to an end an affront to the Jews and their Yahweh of fourteen centuries duration. And who can forget the Taliban zealots who could no longer endure the affront to Allah of those two giant Buhddas carved into a mountainside in northern Afghanistan fifteen centuries ago, and so, in an act of profound piety, blew them up?

No, George, we atheists have no enthusiasm whatever for barbaric acts such as these. In fact, we tend to be cultured folk who venerate such buildings of whatever faith, who come to admire them, to sit silently in them for some minutes meditating, and before stepping out into the daylight again, to drop a few bucks in the collection boxes for the preservation and restoration of them.

What did Bush say at the end of his 2003 State of the Union address, just before invading Iraq? "Freedom is not America's gift to the world. Freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man, woman, and child on earth." I think that was it. So Bush, the Almighty's modest "messenger," as he styled himself to Bob Woodward, brought the Almighty's gift to Iraq. The trouble was, there was already an Almighty there. In fact, two of them. So you had the Texas Almighty, and then the Sunni, and the Shiite. The Sunnis and Shiites, after fourteen centuries of mainly living and letting live, are now ready to Get It On! Let's r-r-r-Rumble!! The curtain is about to rise on Bush's most extravagent production yet, "War of the Gods: The Final Showdown." Or perhaps, "The Mother of all Civil Wars."

The Shoe Bomb Plot

2006-02-12T00:20:00.000-08:00

The horrors mount daily. The mendacity, hubris, folly, and incompetence of this administration are boundless. Maureen Dowd speaks for all of us in her column in this morning's New York Times, "Smoking Dutch Cleanser," while from the Letters columns arise cries of justified anguish: "I have never been more outraged by my government than I am right now;" "The captains, it seems, are asleep at the helm, and it is every man, woman and child for himself and herself;" and "This administration is not to be trusted. Not ever."

But every once in a while there comes something so preposterous, so stupid, so over the top, that it's funny, deeply, blissfully funny. Thus Thursday morning when Dubya, speaking to the National Guard Association (which presented him with a bronze bust of himself for his gallant service in the Texas Air National Guard---did you know that?), Dubya, I say, revealed for a second or third time that four years ago an al Qaeda plot was foiled in the nick of time to fly an airliner into the tallest building in Los Angeles, a plot in which a shoe bomb was to be used to "breach the cockpit door." I was listening to Al Franken's show on Air America Radio later that morning, and Al had Tom Oliphant of the Boston Globe on the line. Franken asked, "How would you use a shoe bomb to breach the cockpit door? I mean, at the least it would blow your legs off, wouldn't it?" Oliphant was laughing helplessly. "I can't wait," he said, "for Scott McClellan to try to explain this one tomorrow morning." Remember, people, that Richard Reid, the original shoe bomber, had only to light the fuse to blow himself and the airplane to kingdom come. A shoe bomb explosion to breach a door within the airplane would have to be a /very carefully /controlled one, wouldn't it? They went to a commercial break, and during those three minutes or so, Franken figured it all out.

Here's how Franken explained it. "The bomber buys a first class ticket, and gets a seat about five rows back from the cockpit. He takes his shoes off and beckons to a cabin attendant. He explains that he's been travelling for some time and hasn't had time to change, and that his feet are smelly because he forgot to put odor eaters in his shoes. He doesn't want to offend, so would she please put his shoes somewhere well away from the other passengers? Say at the cockpit door?"

In the forty-eight hours since, I haven't seen anyone comment on the collossal silliness of this claim, not even--or not yet--mediamatters.org, usually so quick to nail the media's blunders and ommisions.

A glum note. Does anyone know Donald E. Powell? I thought not. He's the guy who is the administration's "Gulf Coast recovery czar." Remember when in September Bush pledged to "spend whatever it takes" to bring back New Orleans "bigger and better than ever"? Well, Powell was appointed to do that in early November, so quietly that I missed it for three weeks (no Rose Garden announcement, you may be sure). The minimally acceptable response would have been to create something akin to the Tennessee Valley Authority, or at least to Senator Joseph Lieberman's idiotic brainstorm, the Department of Homeland Security, with a highly qualified hydrologist/ engineer/ environmentalist, given sweeping administrative authority, at its head. Who is Powell? I googled him. Before his appointment as "czar," he was chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, appointed by Bush in 2001. And before that? CEO and chairman of the Boatman's First National Bank of Amarillo, Texas. And head of the Board of Regents of Texas A&M University, where he established the George Bush School of Business Administration. And a member of the board of the Texas Cattle Feeders Association. And, oh yes, a Bush-Cheney 2000 "Pioneer," named so for bundling at least $100,000 in campaign contributions. I have seen no mention of this background anywhere in the media. "Don, you're doin' one heckuva job."

Let's hear it for blasphemy!

2006-02-05T00:03:00.000-08:00

The Irate Codger finds himself so mad he could spit. He hasn't been this disgusted since the Senate voted 99-0 to condemn the two judges of the Ninth Circuit Court who held that the words "under God" in the Pledge contravened the establishment clause of the Constitution, inasmuch as compelling children to affirm a belief in a supreme being in a patriotic ritual made true patriotism and monotheism inseparable. If that didn't establish religion, what did? This utterly sane and constitutionally impeccable decision was deemed "deeply offensive," an "unforgivable insult" to the vast majority of Americans for whom this is a Christian--whoops, Judeo-Christian--nation. Impiety makes the great majority bolt and flee like panicked sheep.

So with this stir over the blasphemous cartoons of the Prophet--blessedness be upon Him--published in an obscure Danish newspaper. It's not so much that the whole Islamic world appears to have gone nuts over it (although, intriguingly, Al Jazeera Magazine Online has downplayed the story almost to the point of censorship) as that the Blair government and the Bush administration have opportunistically sided with Muslim outrage, as no other NATO governments have, and that the press in both the UK and the US have gone along with their governments in blacking out the offending cartoons. They've been printed everywhere else in Europe, apparently in the curious belief that the public has a right to know what provoked the furor, and the press has an obligation to inform it. But Jack Straw [Do you know, when I was teaching at East Anglia in 1968-69, Jack Straw was a "student radical," quite a firebrand, one heard---who could forget that name, right out of the 14th century Peasants' Revolt?], speaking for Her Majesty's Government, denounced republication as "insulting...insensitive...disrespectful...and wrong."

The Guardian editorial for today ties itself in knots from the outset. "The Guardian believes uncompromisingly in freedom of expression," it asserts, yet it would be "senselessly provocative" to reproduce these images, "of no intrinsic value, which pander to the worst prejudices about Muslims." After all, we're speaking here of the founder of "one of the world's three great monotheistic religions." Ah, yes, the three great monotheistic religions--how could any sensitive person possibly accuse any of them of having been or being fanatical, murderous, and bigoted? "Even if the intention was satirical and not blasphemous," the Guardian says, publishing these cartoons in the first place was "wrong." So even if the intent was satirical--as it obviously was--the result is clearly blasphemy, and that is absolutely out of bounds.

To which Le Nouvel Observateur editor Jean-Marcel Bougereau replies, "Blasphemy is Authorized." "In France," he writes, "everyone has the right to criticize religions. Blasphemy is even authorized. It is perfectly legal...to dump on religions, to judge them to be lying, soul-destroying, mind-numbing. Unless we want to re-establish the crime of blasphemy?" He notes that many of the most glorious names in the French literary canon blasphemed, beginning with Voltaire [but doesn't mention my favorite, Denis Diderot, who wrote that "mankind will not be truly free until the last king is strangled with the guts of the last priest"]. The German home minister refused to apologize for the printing of the offending cartoons in four papers. "Why should the German government apologize?" he asked. "This is an expression of press freedom." Quite.

The US is just as bad as the Brits. A spokesman for the State Department said of the cartoons, "We find them offensive, and we certainly understand why Muslims would find them offensive." Muslims of the world, we feel your pain. If George W. Bush really wanted to apologize to Muslims, it might have been more to the point to fire Gen. Jerry Boykin for standing in evangelical pulpits in uniform and calling Muslims idol-worshippers, or to condemn the Rev. Franklin Graham, "chaplain to the Pentagon," for calling Islam a false religion. Or, even, to express some doubt about his being the Almighty's servant and messenger in bringing freedom to Iraq and utterly crushing the "Islamists," so contradictory to his idiotic mantra that Islam is a "peaceful" religion.

Why would the US and the UK grovel so, when, so far, no other nation except poor Denmark has? Would the following have anything to do with it? "The United States has been trying to improve its image in the Muslim world, badly damaged by the Iraq war and American support for Israel." (this morning's NY Times) And who is our ally in Iraq? Why, it's Tony Blair!

That every US newspaper has censored the cartoons, and all the TV networks, save for one brief exposure of one on ABC, is contemptible. What are they afraid of, that we'll all turn to stone if we glance at one? The Washington Post editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt, explained on NPR this afternoon that it was sufficient to describe the cartoons and that actually printing any of them would provide no real furthering of understanding of the issue and would be "gratuitously offensive." So, for our own good, evidently, we must accept that big editor knows that it's best for us that we never see these awful things..

What is laughable about all this, of course, is that anyone with a computer can find these cartoons in a minute. I did, and I wasn't horrified. In fact, the one of Muhammad stopping suicide bombers at the gates of Paradise and saying, "Hold it, we're all out of virgins!" made me laugh briefly. I remembered one young Palestinian "martyr" in the mid-nineties who made a video before blowing up himself and eleven Israelis at a busstop, a video in which he said, "I will enter heaven wearing a necklace of the skulls of the Sons of Zion." Gee, I almost forgot that this is a vicious distortion of Islam, one of those stereotypes perpetrated by anti-Muslim bigots.

One argument in the Arab press is that we in the West would never print such cartoons if they had been aimed at Jews rather than Muslims. They have a point. Were there any cartoons in the West ridiculing religious Zionist fanaticism and condemning its results after Dr. Baruch Goldberg of Brooklyn machine-gunned twenty-eight Palestinians at the Cave of the Patriarchs in 1993? Perhaps there were in Europe, but not here. If there had been, you may be sure that Abraham Foxman would have had a letter published in the NY Times the next morning, if not a column, condemning such gross insensitivity and--of course--blatant anti-Semitism. After the good doctor's martyrdom, there was erected a memorial to him with an eternal flame in the east Jerusalem settlement of Kiryat Arba which stood until Ehud Barak ordered its dismantlement in 2000. The Hassidic rabbis of Hebron and Jerusalem still give as good as they get in trading curses and anathemas with the mullahs of Jerusalem, Nablus, and Gaza.

What we need is more blasphemy, not less. Did any American cartoonist have the cheek upon the death of Pope John Paul II to point out that he cleaned up on priests professing anything like liberation theology; that he kicked Fr. Jean-Bertrand Aristide out of the church for standing up to the heirs of Baby Doc Duvalier in Haiti (so good to MotherTheresa had the junior Duvalier been); that he stifled Archbishop Romero of San Salvador, that peasants' priest, before the ARENA gunmen assassinated him; that his "abstinance only" no-condoms HIV/AIDS campaign in sub-Saharan Africa, so faithfully carried out by the Bush administration, has condemned millions to an early death; that he ignored priestly molestation of boys and gave a sinecure in Rome to Bernard Cardinal Law of Boston, the predator's enabler; that he condemned perhaps half his priesthood for manifesting the "grave spiritual disorder" of homosexuality; and that he laid it down as immutable that women must not be admitted to the priesthood because all of Jesus's disciples were men? If anyone was ripe for the scorn of humanity, it was this mean, bitter old man at his death. Yet, everywhere was reverence.

The only essay about this rudeness of Danish cartoonists to the Prophet I've seen with which I'm in full agreement is Christopher Hitchens's in today's Slate. It's good to see him back in vintage Hitchens form. One minor disagreement. Hitchens accepts that any depiction of the Prophet is and always has been absolutely verboten to Muslims. Well, I have seen reproductions of sixteenth century Persian and Mughal illuminated manuscripts depicting all manner of scenes, including Muhammad teaching his disciples, sitting, in a turban and with a neat little van Dyke, on a carpet, right forefinger up and pointing for emphasis.

Finally, all this reminds me of one of the funniest editorial cartoons I've ever seen. It was by Jeff Danziger at the time of the Ayatollah Khomenei's fatwa against Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses. We see Rushdie in the foreground running toward us in terror, pursued by a phalanx of Muslims brandishing scimitars led by the Ayatollah. And running along beside Rushdie is an agent holding his fedora on his head with one hand and clutching a briefcase with the other, turning to the writer smilingly and saying, "Rushdie, I tell you you can't buy publicity like this!"

The hesitant return of the Irate Codger

2006-01-26T00:48:00.000-08:00

It's been six months since the Irate Codger last bestirred himself to rant, bellow, hector, and shriek in distress at the state of the world, his lot in it, and the fact that bestriding the globe and looming over all of us from the moment we awaken every morning and turn on NPR or the BBC is that malignant collosus, George W. Bush, whose presidency still has just a few days short of /three years /to go. And it's been more than a year since the old complainer was last in the habit of sounding off every few weeks. I'm out of voice and, after all the horrors of the last year, not so much irate as deeply miserable and terribly pessimistic. Rocks seem to fall on our heads and stun us anew every day.

I offer as an example the news that Bush, Rove, and most of the GOP are convinced that Bush's flouting of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act's requirement that a warrant be sought from the secret surveillance court for a domestic wiretap, and the Democrats' protest that this is illegal and unconstitutional, establish grounds for a big win for the administration and the Republican party, and, what's more, that early polls seem to show that they're probably right! Stupid me, I was dumbstruck when David Brooks blithely asserted this on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer a week or two ago. "Sure, the coastal blue states will holler," he said, "but in the red heartland, folks care a lot more about security than 'civil liberties,' and the president's stand will resonate with them." "Surely not!" I thought. Then, remembering Homeland Security and Max Cleland, "Damn, can it be that this smirkiing sonofabitch is not just spinning; that he's /right? /Yes, it can."

When the /Nation/ arrives in the mail, I always first turn to Katha Pollitt for principled and sober yet lively good sense and reassurance. The week after Kerry's defeat, for example, Katha advised against ganging up on the hapless Kerry. He'd run a dispirited but "honorable" campaign, she said (well, "honorable" only in the sense, I thought, that he hadn't demagogued) and, anyway, whom would we have preferred? Dennis Kucinich? "I admire Howard Dean," she said, "but face it, the Bush spin machine would have shredded him in a week," and one had glumnly to admit that she was right. So, in the Nation of Jan 9/16 '06, Katha looks back at 2005 in a column titled "It Wasn't All Bad." "Keeping you cheerful is part of my job," the dear woman writes. Let's look at the bright side: the Bush administration is on the defensive, the Republicans are mired in corruption and cronyism, the media are waking up [are they indeed?], Evo Morales won in Bolivia, Schwarzenegger's ballot initiatives went down in flames...

OK, but we still have three more years of Bush, and Roberts and Alito are going to take the Supreme Court all the way right, trashing the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment and the establishment clause of the First, turning the commerce clause of Article One, Sec. 8 back to 1935, dooming environmental law, expanding the "takings' clause of the Fifth, and what's that silly stuff in Article 2 about the executive having to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed" among friends? Think of it, we're going to have five Catholics, a majority, on the Court, and these are not Catholics like Ted Kennedy, Leahy, and Durbin, but Cardinal Ratzinger Catholics, with the possible exception of the sometimes sane Anthony Kennedy, Catholics for whom Paul's epistle to the Romans forms the bedrock foundation of our jurisprudence!

Let's think for a moment (the subject is too frightful to linger over) about the "legacy" of the George W. Bush administration. This is not just the worst administration in the history of this republic, it's the worst by miles. What other even begins to compare to it? Harding's? Not even close. Harding, after all, appointed two distinguished men to his cabinet, Herbert Hoover and Charles Evans Hughes, and he not only pardoned Gene Debs, but invited him to the White House.(One feels sympathy for the garrulous old boy, banging Nan Britton in a White House broom closet.) Herbert Hoover? He looks bad only in comparison to FDR. I doubt that any of his predecessors would have done as much to combat the Great Depression as he did (RFC, the Commodity Stabilization Boards, "pump priming" on public works). You can go through the unlucky and unhappy ones (John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren, Hoover) and the nullities (Fillmore, Arthur, Ford), the wicked one (Nixon), and who rivals Dubya? I'd say Reagan, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan, the latter two servile copperhead Democrats in the pocket of the Slave Power whose treachery contributed hugely to the coming of the Civil War.

But presidents a century and a half ago, however bad they might be, had very limited powers to do wrong. Now, the mischief a low, cunning, lying rascal in the White House can accomplish is, as we see, world-dooming. Everything this administration touches---Afghanistan, Iraq, the IRS, NASA, the EPA, the FDA, Medicare, /everything/---/ /turns to shit, and it touches almost everything.

Change of subject and hasty conclusion. I'm made glum every time I see in the /New York Times Book Review/ that Tom Friedman's /The World is Flat/ has been holding its own at number three or four in the Best Sellers list for almost a year. It seems it will be around as long as /The Bridges of Madison County/ or /A Boy Called It./ Who reads it? I imagine they're business executives who turn to it on long flights when they tire of their desktops, getting the inside dope on how to stay abreast or even ahead of those bright boys in Bangalore, Singapore, and Shanghai. Tom the hot tipster. The unchallenged master of the perfectly fatuous epiphany. In today's paper his column is "Osama at the Kit Kat Club." Why is it so titled? Because Tom's "gut reaction" to bin Laden's latest statement is that he sounds like a "burned-out rock star" recycling his greatest hits in some seedy club. "If I seem to be taking this a tad lightly, it is because I'm certain that bin Laden is hurting right now." See, the guy is now almost irrelevant, "and while he still has some following, I don't think so many Arabs and Muslims are naming their sons 'Osama' anymore." Man, those crazy Arabs are/ hurting/, dig? History's on our side, see, if only Bush doesn't screw things up!

Malcolm Gladwell produced the /profound insight/ of 2005 in his best-selling book /Blink/, that, as I gather, "studies have shown"--as the phrase has it--that our first thought upon any subject is often uncannily accurate, and that further cogitation is likely to lead us away from the truth rather than closer to it. This would seem to confirm the rightness of Friedman's abiding faith in his "gut instinct" or "gut reaction" in response to almost anything. Except that Friedman's gut is as unpredictable, even to himself, as random, as wayward as the I-Ching or a Ouija board. And these brainstorms are so evanescent! He has at least one a week, and each of them in turn erases the last. Whatever happened, for example, to his nomination a few months ago of the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani for the Nobel Peace Prize?

I think it's better to write this stuff down, put it in a bottle, and cast it into the current from my desert island at 4032 Crown Point Drive, than simply to fume silently every day.

Cheers, whoever might read this. Ned

Ned and John's London adventure

2005-08-09T16:38:00.000-07:00

For years I've written nothing but political rants to friends. There's a reason for that. My own life was uneventful and depressing. I also found that I didn't want to phone friends because at some point the question would come, "So...um...how are you doing?"

Well, at last I've got something pretty super to relate: two weeks spent mainly in London, but with an overnight motor trip to Oxford, Blenheim, and the Cotswolds, the towns and villages of which I'd wanted to see for thirty years or more. The weather was lovely, not a day without sunshine---and during most days there was plenty of it--until the last two days, by which time I'd taken pictures of most of the places I'd gone to London to see.

None of this would have been possible without the aid and companionship provided by John Polhamus. He was superb. Having lived in London for ten years, he's a walking London A to Zed, and insisted on pushing me everywhere. After having had to push myself for twelve years, it was really cushy to be whisked from Trafalgar Square to Whitehall in a jiffy by a fellow who knew the shortest route and took it at good speed. One welcome fact: London, during the mayoralty of Ken Livingstone, has done a splendid job of providing curb-cuts at intersections and of re-grading cobblestones at alley entrances and such to accomodate wheelchairs. Even so, many occasions arose when John had to hoist me over curbs, and did so just like that. We also discovered that all city busses now have extendable wheelchair ramps amidships and space inside for wheelchair parking. Moreover, wheelchair passengers ride for free, as do their assistants. The tube is mainly off-limits, but the new Jubilee Line out to Sratford north of West Ham is wheelchair accessible, as is the Docklands Light Rail.

Me and London: When I was at Oxford in 1960-61 I think I got to London only twice, mainly because I simply couldn't afford to go there. I became acquainted with the city when I was teaching at East Anglia in 1968-69 and Beth and I would get down there once every month or so. It was the Scots architectural critic Ian Nairn who really introduced me to the city in his quirky, droll, and profound Nairn's London (Penguin, 1968), which I still have and took with me on this trip. I remember one lovely spring day in 1969 when Beth, my mom, and I took a Nairn-guided walking tour of the south embankment from the Royal Festival Hall all the way east to Bermondsey, with our destination being the Mayflower pub at the wharf from which the Pilgrims departed for America in 1620. Nairn said it had a fine porch from which to view the river, and so it had. In 1969 such a walk was for the determined architectural pilgrim, for as Nairn said of that whole sweep of the river, "apart from some half-finished and mediocre work, the area is in a chaotic muddle." Of the frontage between London Bridge and Tower Bridge, "Plenty of roads run down to the river, but a connected walk is impossible until Tower Bridge." And of the area farther on, he acknowledged the hazards but urged, "But try and follow the thread, however thin, because it is the city's real lifeline."

Now all is transformed. (Well, it was fourteen years ago when I took that same tour with my wife Mary, but now it's complete.) As London's Contemporary Architecture: A Visitor's Guide (purchased at the bookshop of the Tate Modern, and one of the few really first-rate things to be found in that monument to artistic bankruptrcy in the early twenty-first century) says, "The southern embankment of the Thames has become a promenade." What forty years ago was a tour only for the physically fit and the intrepid is now, but for sixty yards or so of the whole three miles, easily done in a wheelchair(and even that sixty yards John got me over lickety-split, up onto a narrow pavement, down onto cobbles over which shock-absorbers would have been handy, up on pavement again). London's back was turned to the Thames for centuries. Now the riverfront is a sort of urban riviera, what with the London Eye (the great ferris wheel) the new pedestrian bridges flanking the Hungerford railway bridge, the new Millenium pedestrian bridge connecting St. Paul's and the Tate Modern, and the continuous promenade from Vauxhall Bridge to Tower Bridge.

So, I wanted to take in all this stuff; I'd been dying to for fourteen years. In 1992 my life changed drastically and perpetually for the worse. London had been my oyster, mainly because John and Mary Whiting lived in the Hampstead Garden Suburb, and I'd always had free lodgings there. When I was teaching at Frankfurt, 1978-1980, it was Christmas at the Whitings, dining on Mary's cookery, drinking John's wines, and sipping whisky from the Channel ferry duty-free. Jaunts to Bath and Bristol, football matches at West Ham, Chelsea, and Tottenham, museum going, pub crawling, the theater...

In 1987 my not-yet wife Mary and I spent two weeks with them. I treated to tea at the Palm Court of the Ritz! My Mary and I went to a matinee at the Haymarket of Simon Gray's made-for-Alan Bates play Melon (not up to his much earlier Butley), but it was Alan Bates, Mary's heartthrob, and she was thrilled. She and I came back for another two weeks in January 1991, taking advantage of low off-season airfares. I shot rolls of film of the new Docklands developments. She and I went to see a comedy by Corneille, forget the title, at the Old Vic directed by Jonathan Miller, quite enchanting. After that, Mary and I would joke about winning ten million from the Publisher's Clearing House sweepstakes and buying a condo at Butler's Wharf, just east of Tower Bridge, then being developed by Terence Conran. And we four would be friends forever.

That spring or fall I put on a slideshow of London architecture for the San Diego Friends of Architecture, an organization formed a few years earlier by the redoubtable Harriet Gill, an elderly woman I had met when we both had commentary slots at KPBS-FM, the San Diego NPR affiliate. One Saturday morning every month between September and May, a slideshow-talk by some prominent architect or town planner. I persuaded Harriet to give me one, and it went over very well and seemed in my mind to quite justify my going to London for two weeks in January.

Then disaster of course: my spinal cancer, Mary's breast cancers---different strains in each breast!--all confirmed in the same week, dual mastectomy for her, paralysis for me, unsupportable grief, estrangement, separation, divorce. Finis.

For years London seemed impossibly far away. No kipping at the Whitings' for one thing; lodgings a fortune. For another, no tube. No taking the bus to Golder's Green, hopping on the Northern Line train, getting off at Tottenham Court Road and taking the stairs three at a time up to Oxford Street and Charing Cross, and browsing bookshops. John visited San Diego for a few days in '95; we wrote, John phoned me every birthday, urged me to for God's sake to get on the internet.

This Spring I thought, "I'm going to be seventy in September. It's now or never." I had it in my bonnet that if Harriet Gill would give me a slot in the Friends of Architecture schedule for 2005-2006 then by God I'd find a way to get to London. I phoned her. She said, "Of course, you'll have a companion?" I said no, I'd be going by myself. She, sensible woman, rather doubted the feasibility of this project. I am not on the FOA calender for 2005-2006. Then my sister said, "Look, if you can get Bob Kiwala or John Polhamus to go with you, I'll pay his airfare." Kiwala couldn't go (as it developed, this was fortunate: it would have been Laurel and Hardy in London, us taking turns saying, "Well, what a fine mess you got us into this time!"). And it turned out that Polhamus could; no scheduling conflicts after July 8! Done.

Di cautioned me about planning thoroughly; type out an exhaustive list of everything to be packed, and tick them of as you pack. No repeat of my 1996 trip to St. Louis when I forgot my meds and she had to send my coumedin by express mail. Not to mention other misadventures. So I did that: everything going into a suitcase was included. What did not go into a suitcase, however, was my commode. It's lightweight, aluminum, but absolutely necessary. You see, not having legs, I have no way of lifting my butt to finger and stimulate the anus and then to wipe my ass. There has to be room between the seat and the top of the toilet for me to put my arm and hand underneath myself. In fact it was that commode that made a companion absolutely necessary, for how would I get it from the baggage carousel at the airport to the taxi stand without someone to carry it? We were on the airport shuttle when it dawned on me that the commode was still sitting in the bathroom. John said, "There's still time to go back for it," and there was, really, but I made the totally dumb decision to press on without it. When we finally got to the Premier Motor Inn in London it was instantly obvious that without a commode, I'd have to take a return flight pronto or go without a bowel movement for two weeks.

John was not discouraged. He spent about four hours racing around London and finally came back with a servicable commode that cost sixty quid. There remained the problem of bathing. In this "fully accessible" room there was a bathtub. No wheel-in shower stall, something unheard of, evidently, in England. So John had to hoist me from the wheelchair to the top of the bathtub and I'd lower myself into the tub. But how to wash my ass? This duty fell to my companion. I'd hoist myself by my elbows, and John would wash underneath. Through all of this he kept up a running commentary in the voice of a Pathe newsreel or BBC git (John is a wonderful mimic), jaunty and fatuous, who always at some point in the narration said, "Once again, Britain leads the way in" whatever it was. For this service, it was, "Regent's Ass Cleaners', keeping the British anus spotless for five genertations." I added, "By appointment to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II."

When we were driving through Oxfordshire, we came upon a direction sign, "Idbury-Foscot, 2 miles," and John had the perfect name for his announcer, Nigel Idbury-Foscot. Of the west Oxfordshire Idbury-Foscots. His other persona was my man Branston, after Crosse and Blackwell's Branston pickle, our favorite relish. An ordinary cheese and onion sandwich from Tesco's becomes a fine dinner with some Branston pickle on it, accompanied by a decent claret. Whenever he did something extraordinary for me, as he did all the time, I'd say, "I say, Branston, you're a man in a million," and he'd gravely reply, "Just doing my duty, sir."

My favorite Polhamus inspiration, though, came at Blenheim. Here we were in the forecourt, this stupifying elevation in front of us, flanked by wings with collonades, finials, towers, and I wanted to take a wide-angle lens shot of it. But there were three people in conversation in front of us. I waited for a while, they continued to converse, and I was almost at the point of asking if they'd mind steeping aside for a moment. Branston was inclined to be rather harsh with them. Branston would have said, "See here, you lot, the mahster is taking a picture of that building and you don't need me to tell you you're not in it! Now be off with you." Fortunately this was not said.

I might go on and on, regaling you with the splendid dinner we had with the Whitings at Rule's, London's oldest restaurant (same location in Maiden Lane since 1795) which was to be my treat until Mary Whiting grabbed the check. I'd been there once before, when a friend of Beth's took us in 1969; John Whiting hadn't been in fifty years, Mary Whiting never. John Polhamus had passed it many times but had never looked inside. It reminds me of Sir John Soane's Museum, all walls crammed with oils and prints (directly over our table a large oil of the Thames and the city near dusk, around 1870, in the manner of Turner, very fine). Sublime dinner. With dear friends I'd feared I'd never see again. All of this seemed to me something worth writing about.

On entering the blogosphere

2005-08-06T10:23:00.000-07:00

The third editorial down in Friday's NY Times is headed "Measuring the Blogosphere." "Nearly 80,000 new blogs are created every day, and there are some 14.2 million in existence already, 55 per cent of which remain active... The blogosphere..doubles in size every five and a half months. ...[A]t this rate, every person who has Internet access will be a blogger before long."

Irate Codger, who so often feels a beleaguered minority of one, is pleased to learn that he's part of an irresistable, world-sweeping trend of frustrated, deluded egomaniacs, each determined to have his say, to contribute his own squeak, trill, or milisecond bass note to the ever-swelling cacaphonous din. There's another name for McLuhan's Global Village. Bedlam.

Further Rants by the Hermit of 4032

2005-08-02T10:30:00.000-07:00

From the archives: May 31, 2005

So I pour a cup of coffee, put aside the front page and the Week in Review sections of the Sunday New York Times and turn to the Book Review. I'm confronted by a cover review (it goes on for five long paragraphs on the cover before being continued over to p. 11). I don't remember ever seeing such a thing before. The editors must have considered the book under review to be a matter of the highest import, and so the review of or sermon upon it is: no less than the Gospels as interpreted in the vivid style of Father Andrew Sullivan, the de-frocked priest.

"The Saint and the Satirist; A Monk Brought God's Love to Tony Hendra." This Hendra chap was the worst sort of reprobate imaginable. He was into "serial sex and drugs and rock and irony," sort of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse Lite. But what we learn in reading Hendra's Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul is that "these ideas of sin..are not really sin." Wait a minute, irony is sin? Perhaps it became sinful on 9/11/01; remember how the conventional wisdom instantly became that after such horrors, irony would forever be in poor taste?

"These ideas of sin that we have are not really sin," Sullivan writes. "Or rather: they are the symptoms of sin, not its essence. And its essence is our withdrawal---our willful withdrawal---from God's love." (italics added)

So that's why the world is in such an infernal mess! Reading this on the cover of the Book Review, a publication of the supposedly secular (or at least ecumenical) New York Times, was stunning, sort of like being bonked forcefully over the head by a bishop's crozier, and just two sips into your morning coffee at that.

Does this triumphalist Catholic screed---"oh ye sinners, come home to Jesus before it is too late!"--appearing on the cover of the Times Book Review mark one of those "watershed" events in the cultural history of this nation?

Yet more from the inimitable Friedman in this morning's paper. You remember the Golden Arches Doctrine of Conflict Resolution, and, of course, the Wal-Mart Corollary (wait, that was mine, wasn't it? I think I'll e-mail it to Tom, it's his, gratis, and the column will write itself.) Anyway, this morning he announces, "I have a 'Tilt Theory of History.'" Why the distancing quotation marks, Tom? Surely irony isn't intended? No, the quotation marks indicate only that the Theory hasn't been fully fleshed out as yet. The book will follow eventually; in the meantime, just off the top of Tom's head, it serves to make a point. The Tilt Theory "states" that countries don't change by sudden transformations. Instead, they undergo a process of gradual internal transformation, possibily lasting a generation (a quibble: why a generation? Why not five generations, or even ten? Oh never mind). The point is that the Wolfowitz timetable for Iraqi democratization may have been, as we see from the vantage point of hindsight, badly off. Revised timetable? We can "tilt in a better direction, so over a generation Iraqis can transform and liberate themselves, if they want." Brace up, Americans; imperialism is no game for the faint of heart! Tom Friedman is in this for the long haul.

Did we all read Friedman's "Dancing Alone" column of Thur., May 13, in which he admitted that on some stuff concerning the invasion of Iraq, "I'll admit it, I'm a little slow," to which one disgusted letter-writer replied, "Tens of thousands of us were away ahead of you all the way, Mr. Friedman." What was spared scrutiny in the letters published was the manner of the confession. Where had Tom gone wrong? "My mistake was thinking that the Bush team," like Friedman himself, believed that it must rise above politics and do the right thing in Iraq "because surely this was the most important thing for the president and the country. But I was wrong." Further, "Because I tried to think about something as deadly serious as Iraq..in a non-partisan fashion...I assumed the Bush officials were doing the same. I was wrong."

See, because Tom is a thoroughly decent guy, a gentleman, above politics, he assumed that Bush, Rummy, Karl Rove, et al. were equally high-minded and could be counted on to do the right thing, always. But he was wrong. Still, how can you fault a guy for simply thinking well of people?

Wait, the Irate Codger isn't quite finished. "When I hear the word 'culture,''' Hermann Goering famously said, "I reach for my gun." I confess to feeling the same vicious urge often when I spot the by-line of Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof. Last Saturday I had only to glimpse the title of the column, "Sticking Up For Rumsfeld," and my right hand was twitching to unholster my Luger--if only I'd had one. I should be more patient with Nick, I know. In many ways he's the anti-Friedman of the opinion page. Tom doesn't give a fig for the great unwashed. Nick lives among them, sharing their hardships, shouting their plight to an indifferent world. Tom lives the life befitting a gentleman journalist fortunate enough to possess the world's most generous expense account. Nick is likely to be found kneeling at the ancestral wok of his in-laws (his wife is Chinese) partaking of a humble meal no different from that of a billion other rural Chinese. Tom is a shit---he really is--and Nick is transparently decent. Albeit at times a little over the top in the Christian charity department. Remember his determination in Thailand to save two pubescent sex slaves from Bankok whorehouses, and hang the expence? I think in the end, he'd fairly rescued one while the other slipped back into her former life. As Katha Pollitt said, this did seem a little weird, considering the prostitute population of Bankok. I thought so to. It reminded me of William Gladstone, when prime minister, trolling among the harlots of Haymarket at night, cajoling a few into returning with him to his house for a good cup of hot soup from the missus, a sermon, and some elevating tracts. And, as Katha noted, Nick got four columns out of his noble rescue missions.

What gets me about Nick, however, are his scolding sermons to out-of-it liberals. In late April we were urged (column title) to "Hug an Evangelical." Let's do try to get over those easy liberal stereotypes--Tom DeLay and Jerry Fallwell are representative of evangelicals. Not so. Why,.did you know that there are plenty of evangelicals who aren't even fundamentalists? Well, no, I guess I didn't. On the other hand, did you know that while only 23% of Americans profess to "believe in" biological evolution, eighty per cent believe in the existence of angels? What the hell am I supposed to do with that? We must all endeavor to respect such convictions because they're the majority. So try to be more circumspect, less arrogant. What would a spirit of amity and concord require of us? Suggest that only the First Five Commandments be posted in American classrooms on a trial basis, to see if teen pregnancy rates and violent crime go down?

Stop talking down to people through your noses. Using fancy words. When Howard Dean observed that there'd been a contratemps over his rednecks with Reb flag decals remark, Nick wrote, "I very seriously doubt that anyone who uses the word 'contratemps' can ever be elected president of the United States." Then he advised Dean that he'd better learn to be "comfortable" talking about his "faith," advice Dean disastrously followed in confessing that he prayed every day and that his "favorite" book of the Old Testament was Revelation (which, as Mark Twain observed, was far the nuttiest thing in Scripture).

Nick then got on the environmentalists' case over snowmobiles in Yellowstone. Loosen up, he advised them: the new snowmobiles with four-cycle engines are ninety per cent less polluting than the old two-cycle engines, rapidly being phased out, and noise levels? The new ones purr like kittens. He ended with an account of how he recently took his two sons out on a nature trip on snowmobiles at Yellowstone, and how inspiring it all was for the three of them. Tender moment. Who would begrudge a father introducing his boys to the magic of the wild? Then I read an NRDC warning about these new snowmobiles: the "90 % reduction" figure comes from the Snowmobiles Manufacturing Association of America and is absolute bullshit; as for the noise levels, they're down, but not by much. Anyway, couldn't Nick and his boys walk?

But this last, rescuing Donald Rumsfeld from the liberal lynch mob, is the most Quixotic--to be kind--yet. "Frankly," Kristof writes, "I'm astonished to be speaking up for Mr. Rumsfeld." Well, I'm not astonished. It's entirely consistent. I can imagine Kristof agonizing over it: "Will no other liberal do the decent thing and cry for justice for Rumsfeld as Christ did for mercy even for the least among us?" No, none would. As so often in the past, it was up to Kristof to take the stand righteousness required. "Tis a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done before," etc. Noble Nick. I say put a bullet through his brain and be done with it.

God and Man at the New York Times

2005-08-02T10:19:00.000-07:00

From the archives: May 31, 2004

So I pour a cup of coffee, put aside the front page and the Week in Review sections of the Sunday New York Times and turn to the Book Review. I'm confronted by a cover review (it goes on for five long paragraphs on the cover before being continued over to p. 11). I don't remember ever seeing such a thing before. The editors must have considered the book under review to be a matter of the highest import, and so the review of or sermon upon it is: no less than the Gospels as interpreted in the vivid style of Father Andrew Sullivan, the de-frocked priest.

Tom Friedman again

2005-08-02T10:05:00.000-07:00

From the archives: September 5, 2004

It was vintage Friedman in Tom's column of May 6. Perhaps you will recall those times in the nineties when the robustly confident Friedman was forever imagining himself to be a confidential advisor to some world statesman or other, and would dash off "memos" to Yeltsin or the president of China. The champ of that genre came when Clinton, Netanyahu, and Arafat were huddled at the Wye River Plantation and Tom wrote a "Memo to Bill, Bibi, and Yassir."

The column of May 6 isn't formally titled a memo, but that's what it is, this one to George W. Bush. However, from the sharp tone taken with the president, it might better be called a "Marching Order." Bush must fire Rumsfeld "today, not tomorrow or next month, today." Next, he needs to invite to Camp David the five permanent members of the Security Council (whether heads of government must show up, or foreign ministers would do is not specified), heads of both NATO and the UN, and Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. Whew! One's mind goes back to 1979, when Jimmy Carter got Sadat and Begin to cabins in that leafy retreat and pushed through the Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai (Sadat and Begin got Peace Prizes, and Carter the back of the Nobel Committee's hand).

But Tom's plan is much more ambitious. Imagine the logistics of it, the protocol problems! All there at Camp David at once: the president of China, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schroeder, Jacques Chirac, Vladimir Putin, Lord Robertson, Kofi Annan, Mubarak of Egypt, Assad of Syria, Crown Prince whoever of Arabia, and King Abdullah of Jordan. Camp David's capacity stretched beyond any conceivable limit! It would be like the stateroom scene in "A Night at the Opera"! And what a security nightmare for the Secret Service ("Mr. President, I must warn you, sir, that one well-placed bomb...").

One oddity here: How come Ariel Sharon hasn't been invited? Is Tom hinting that Bush needs to go behind Sharon's back and make some sort of deal with the Arabs? Or is Tom implying that Israel has played no role in creating the current Middle East mess we find ourselves in? Or is it simply that Tom, writing at fever pitch, just forgot about Israel? Likely the last, scrupulous care in composition not being Friedman's strong point.

Now that he's gathered them all in one room, what must the president do? Simple. "He needs to eat crow, apologize for our mistakes..." What mistakes would those be, Tom? Friedman really doesn't specify (one suddenly recalls that he's been none too attentive to Iraq for months, instead positioning himself ahead of everyone else's curve by focusing in a dozen columns on what a bang-up job India is doing globalizationwise). But you may be sure those mistakes don't include invading Iraq in the first place. Above all, whatever rough patches we encounter in the next few weeks, Bush must keep uppermost in mind that "America's aspirations for Iraq and those of the Iraqi silent majority..are still aligned." So there.

But what would be the reaction to such good news of all those summoned to Camp David? I very much fear it would be, "That's what you called us here to say, you silly fuck-head?"

Another Friedman column that might better have gone in the waste basket. There have been so many.

The Wrongdoers of Abu Ghraib

2005-08-02T10:00:00.000-07:00

From the archives: August 5, 2004

How appalling, how tragic, how deeply infuriating to all Americans of conscience and fair-minded, freedom-loving persons everywhere it must seem that a perverted few in an MP company at Abu Ghraib prison should have brought disgrace upon America's noble mission in Iraq! Oh, how we seethe when we look upon the despicable images of degradation staged by these ghouls for their own amusement, presumably as "snaps" to be taken home as souvenirs! The president rightly denounced them as "wrongdoers" (an epithet only slightly less powerful than "evildoers," which, of course, the president reserves for foreigners, especially the hordes of invisible Arabs it is our bounden duty mercilessly to crush). And Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld spoke for us all this morning when he concluded his denunciation by calling down the worst curse on their heads our vocabulary provides us. What they did was "un-American."

No one has more eloquently expressed the disgust we all must feel than Christopher Hitchens. (Slate, May 4) Look, he writes, at what "this bunch of giggling sadists has done." They "defiled one of the memorials of regime change," Saddam's chamber of horrors, Abu Ghraib prison. They have "profaned the idea of women in the military." Worst of all, what they did was "like a shot in the back to the many soldiers..who fought selectively and carefully," always seeking to spare the innocent while stamping out terrorism in the streets of Iraq.

What, then, should be done with these goons? Perhaps, Hitchens writes, they were "acting on someone's authority." But if they were acting on their own, "they are the equivalent of mutineers, deserters, or traitors in the field. This is why one asks wistfully if there is no provision in the procedures of military justice for them to be taken out and shot."

To which one can only respond with a soft but heartfelt "hear, hear."

Perhaps the most shocking aspect of this whole dreadful business is the fact that the central figure (at least in the pictures) should be a fiend in petite female form, the infamous piece of trailer-park trash, Pfc. Lynndie R. England, a five-foot mighty-mite of evil, an instant symbol of wickedness as surely as Pvt. Jessica Lynch is of heroism. Taken out and shot? That would almost be too kind. Let this pregnant little whore and her paramour Gaynor be stoned to death by an Iraqi mob!

Would not such a salutary spectacle establish in the minds of the most hardened of Iraqi skeptics the truth of the president's words, "They didn't act for America"?

It would also do much to remove the moral stain of Abu Ghaib from the tens of thousands of soldiers and marines in Iraq who have lived up to America's highest standards of humanity and heroism. The men of the First Marine Division, for example, who went into Fallujah to avenge the murder of four innocent mercenaries and in doing so killed as many as seven hundred thugs and assassins. The brave Air Force pilots of F-16 fighters and F-14 and F-18 fighter-bombers who flew over Fallujah raining down on the city three dozen laser-guided 500-pound bombs in 48 hours. The courageous crews of the huge, slow-moving AC-130 gunships (fat targets for shoulder-launched missiles fired from holes by rat-like killers) avenging America's dead with the overwhelming firepower of their howitzers, turning cars and trucks into so many crushed beer cans with--it is to be hoped--burned corpses in them. And finally, the nerveless, steely-eyed pilots and gunners of Army Super Cobra helicopters blasting apartment blocks into bricks and dust with Hellfire missiles.

Yes, it is brave men and women like these whose honor would be restored by the sacrifice of the wicked few in their midst. Kill the Abu Ghraib wrongdoers!

John Hess and James Reston

2005-08-02T09:55:00.000-07:00

From the archives: February 2, 2004

Reading John L. Hess's My Times: A Memoir of Dissent is abundantly gratifying. Nothing more gratifying, because bias-affirming, than his memories of James Reston (I can't call him "Scotty," for I didn't know him). Reston, the ultimate insider and toady, LBJ's useful Polonius ("LBJ occasionally consulted Reston on how his Vietnam policy would play and found him 'quietly approving' ((see Robert Dallek's Flawed Giant))," Reston, who was unfailingly able to deceive himself that he'd always opposed American policy in Vietnam, right from the very start.

"I do not question Scotty's sincerity," Hess writes, "That is how Scotty remembered it now." Then, "Scotty's writings contradict his recollection."

How was Reston able to do this, to write one thing, and to believe he was writing another? That's a question I was asking forty years ago. I wrote the following satire in the Spring of 1965. It was after reading yet another of Reston's "the mood in Washington" pieces:

From the Berliner Zeitung

April 14, 1942

"The Mood in Berlin"

by Reinhold Restonschmidt

There is a strange mood in Berlin these bright Spring days. Although the skies are blue, and the trees and flowerbanks along the Kurfurstendam are blossoming, the beer gardens are all but deserted, and strollers talk in hushed undertones. Indeed, there is an unseasonal bleakness in the air, and one hears phrases like "the winter of our discontent." Nor is it just the appearance of RAF bombers in our skies---in itself an ill omen. It goes much deeper than that, and is difficult to express, this new mood of the capital. It was put in a phrase, superficial but succinct, by a Hamburg reporter a few days ago. "People here have lost their old confidence," he said. The bright promises and the astonishing victories of three years ago are things of the past. Moscow, which only a year ago seemed within our grasp, is more distant than ever. And the recent entry of the Americans into the war, degenerate though they undoubtedly are, must give the seasoned observer pause. This chastened mood pervades the Reichschancellory itself, and is shared even by the Fuhrer. His old ready optimism is gone.

The average German citizen, spared the agonies of decision-making, cannot really begin to imagine the pressures that have been placed on the Fuhrer by events both at home and abroad in the past few weeks. Whether Adolf Hitler spends his days in the bustling offices of the Reichschancellory, or tries to find a few hours of peace and quiet in the mountain fastness of his beloved Bavaria, decisions must be made, new problems confronted daily, opposing counsels listened to. And finally, in the quiet of his nights, the bitter truth must be faced: he, Adolf Hitler, and he alone, must decide. No wonder then that the Fuhrer has been irritable and somewhat short of temper with the Berlin press corps.

Among the many problems confronting him is the pace of the Final Solution. Some advisers, particularly those in the S.S. under the determined Heinrich Himmler, have been openly critical of what they regard as the slow pace of F.S. They have charged that Zyklon B gas is simply not being produced in suffricient quantities to be effective. Some officers charge openly that they are being hamstrung, and these complaints are being echoed in the Reichstag. Not content with the liquidation of Jews, Gypsies, and elements hostile to the Reich, they are now demanding in increasingly strident tones that the Solution be extended to the degenerate Slav race as a whole. The eastern front, they assert, will not be safe until all traces of this blot have been eliminated.

On the other hand, the Fuhrer is assaulted by pleas that liquidation be sharply curtailed. Some high officials, particularly those in the Ministry for War Production and Forced Labor, charge that the Final Solution, while perhaps noble in conception and lofty in aim, is proving counter-productive. They cite statistics, some of them very persuasive, showing that labor battalion quotas simply cannot be fulfilled unless the Final Solution is slowed down. One harassed labor official expressed his exasperation to me recently. It was all very well, he said, for S.S. General Kurt von May to speak of "gassing the Slavs into eternity," but the general was not responsible for wartime production. Moreover, many officers on the Eastern Front privately express their disgruntlement with the zeal of S.S. Kommandanten in their areas. How are peasants th to be won over to a new life, a new loyalty, they ask, when great numbers of them are being shot, hanged, or gassed in the name of Race Purity?

Thus the Fuhrer is being assaulted by sharply conflicting advice, and with every day that passes, the lines of care seem to be etched ever more deeply in his face. He betrayed his apprehension last week in a meeting of the Weestphalia mayors' conference when he lashed out against "defeatists" and "those who would doubt the Reich." "We have no use," he said, with obvious anger, "for the man who panics at the sight of the first bomber in the sky."

But there is no doubt that a decision must be made, and made soon, regarding the Final Solution, and no one understands that fact better than the Fuhrer himself. Few quarrel with the ultimate objectives of F.S. But an increasing number wonder openly if it is not being pushed too quickly and if the Fuhrer, with his well-known impetuosity, is not the victim of his own high intentions. Thus Berlin waits in suspense. Only when he decides one way or the other will the old confidence return.

What liberal media?

2005-08-02T09:49:00.000-07:00

From the archives: January 19, 2004
Last night I finished Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media?, an indispensable book, brilliantly and--given the provocations--temperately argued, exhaustively researched and scrupulously documented. I'm sure Al Franken's Lying Liars is a lot more fun, but this is the one "every well-informed person," that mythical being, should read.

So I open this morning's Times, and how does America's newspaper of record choose to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday? Why, by honoring Ronald Reagan.
The essay, by one Kiron Skinnner, an assistant professor of political science at Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh, co-editor of "Reagan: A Life in Letters," and, oddly, "member of the Defense Policy Board" (hhmmm, how was it, I wonder, that an assistant professor of political science attracted the eyes of Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz to share space around that august table with the likes of Newt Gingrich and Richard Perle? Interesting, but no matter...) is titled "The Odd Couple." Odd, indeed. Skinner's essay is about how it was that Reagan signed the bill making King's birthday a national holidy. Was it just politics? No, "something else was at work." Skinner, who has gone through all of Reagan's "writings" (God, what a task to undertake! All those speeches for General Electric, written in his own hand), now has read King as well, and endorses the finding of a Reagan speechwriter that "I kept finding passage after passage in King's work that Reagan might almost have written himself."

"Indeed," writes Skinner, "when one looks closely at each man's writings, it's clear that they shared an unswerving commitment to democracy, liberty and equality."

Totally in sync. Amazing, isn't it? Of course, what Skinner cannot acknowledge, what anyone then alive immediately remembers, is that four years before signing that bill into law, Reagan kicked off his 1980 campaign for the presidency at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, infamous as the place where sheriff Lawrence Rainey, deputy sheriff Cecil Price, and four or five other Klu Kluxers murdered Mickey Schwerner, James Cheney and Andrew Goodman just sixteen years before Reagan spoke there and uttered the words "I believe in states' rights." I remember Schwerner's widow and Andy Goodman's mother speaking of their horror at what Reagan had done.

So now the Times gives this sedulous Reagan legend-builder editorial space on King's birthday just to show how impartial it is--no liberal bias here, by God!

Then in the same edition I find a full-page color ad for MSNBC, "Battle for the White House," full coverage of the Iowa Caucuses by "the team of pros who know politics from the inside out." MSNBC, "the network of record' (cheeky theft that, isn't it?), and the "pros" are Norah O'Donnell (never heard of her), Pat Buchanan, Keith Olberman (last I knew, a sports journalist at Sports Illustrated and ESPN), Chris Matthews ($2 million a year rightwing hatchet man and Hillary hater), Joe Scarborough (former Republican congressman from Arkansas, now talk-show ranter), Peggy Noonan (former Reagan and Bush speechwriter, coiner of "thousand points of light" and "the lift of a driving dream" ((which sounds like a luxury car commercial)), Wall Street Journal attack blonde--her latest, "Howard's End," on how the Democratic pros must stop Dean in Iowa, and author, most recently, of A Heart, a Cross, and a Flag: America Today (2003), and, oh yeah, one real journalist, Howard Fineman of Newsweek (who, come to think of it, nailed an exclusive interview with George W. and Laura on how they stood up to the crushing pressures after 9/11 and the way their Faith got them through it all, three pages in Newsweek).

Think of it, the "network of record," a line-up that might have been chosen by Roger Ailes or--what the hell--Karl Rove himself! Four rightwing hatchet swingers and three eunuchs. Well, at least they don"t say "fair and balanced."

The Imitable David Brooks

2005-08-02T03:08:00.000-07:00

From the archives: January 21, 2004

A friend forwarded this to Alexander Cockburn for possible inclusion in Counterpunch. This was his reply: "Astonishing crap. Brooks is a total asshole. I'm shocked that you liked this." He didn't know it was a satire!

Conservative Columnist Brooks Takes Dead Aim at Neocon Conspiracy Myth

It seems the disarmingly impish, droll, often self-deprecating but always razor-sharp conservative columnist David Brooks is to be found everywhere in the media these days. More often than not the irrepressible Brooks will pop up in some liberal bastion, always looking cheerfully at home. Brooks' engaging columns appear twice a week in the op-ed pages of the leftist New York Times; he's seen every Friday night on PBS's "News Hour with Jim Lehrer," genially goading the grimly dogged Mark Shields; and he's heard every Thursday afternoon on NPR's "All Things Considered," merrily slicing through the liberal banalities of the oh-so-serious E. J. Dionne.

Last week, in a Times column aptly titled "The Era of Distortion," Brooks wittily skewered what is perhaps the biggest peacenik-left shibboleth of our era, the notion that somehow a conspiratorial league of neoconservatives has hi-jacked American foreign policy by taking us into an unnecessary war with Iraq, partly, it is darkly hinted, to serve the interests of the expansionist Israeli government of Ariel Sharon.

"Do you ever get the feeling that the whole world is becoming unhinged from reality?" the bemused Brooks began the column. "I started feeling that way awhile ago, when..all these articles began appearing about how Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Doug Feith..and a bunch of 'neoconservatives'..had taken over U.S. foreign policy." Every day, it seemed, "Le Monde or some deep-thinking German paper would have an expose on the neocon cabal, complete with charts connecting all the conspirators." The usually good-natured but now more than a little ticked columnist had never heard of anything so wacky.

Brooks, speaking as a former staffer at William Kristol's Weekly Standard, where this conspiracy was allegedly nurtured with the formation of the Project for the New American Century in 1997, candidly tells us that "we'd sit around the magazine guffawing at the ludicrous stories that kept spouting" about the PNAC's sinister influence.

Take, for example, the one about arch neocon Richard Perle's insidious power over Bush administration policy towards Iraq and Israel. Brooks---surely aware that this will give the knee-jerk "hate Bush" crowd apoplexy---boldly denies that Perle has any influence at all!

This may give us pause. It does seem a bit, well, counter-intuitive. Richard Perle not influential?

Wasn't he, as Assistant Secretary of Defense under Reagan twenty years ago, called the "Prince of Darkness" for his unyielding hostility to any treaties with the Soviets and his tireless advocacy of the Strategic Defense Initiative, now morphed under Bush II into the National Missile Defense system? Didn't Perle create the nexus between the American Enterprise Institute and the Department of Defense which led to the vacuuming up of a dozen or more AEI hawks to key positions in today's DOD? Didn't Perle's aide in the Reagan years, Douglas Feith, once he was appointed Undersecretary of Defense for Policy by Bush, turn around and appoint Perle chairman of the Defense Policy Board, over, among others, Newt Gingrich and former CIA Director James Woolsey? Wasn't Perle's protege at the Pentagon in the 80s, Abram Shulsky, moved into the Paul Wolfowitz's super-secret Office of Special Plans to generate "intelligence data" supporting a war with Iraq, data the hapless CIA wasn't able to provide? Didn't Perle handpick Natan Sharansky, Israeli cabinet minister and settler advocate, to give the keynote address to the AEI 2002 annual conference, an address in which Sharansky laid down the "Arafat Must Go" line which Bush then obligingly made Stop One on the Road Map to Peace? Wasn't it Perle who pushed his old pal Ahmad Chalabi forward as the guy to head up the DOD-financed Iraqi National Congress, Wolfowitz's Iraqi government-in-waiting? And hasn't Perle been conspicuous for two years as Don Rumsfeld's point man roundly and very publicly dissing such DOD enemies as the CIA, the State Department, Schroder of Germany, Chirac of France, and Kofi Annan?

Perhaps. But now Brooks drops this bombshell: "I've been told by senior administration officials that Perle has had no significant meetings with Bush or Cheney since they assumed office." Period. End of story. With that astonishing revelation and a flick of his finger, Brooks collapses Perle the Menace like the liberal house of cards it always was.

Having disposed of that bogey, Brooks goes on to assert that while "the people labeled neocons agree that Saddam Hussein represented a unique threat to world peace...they disagree vitpuratively on just about everything else. (If you ever read a story that starts with 'Neocons believe,' there is a 99.44 percent chance that everything else in that story will be false.)"

At first blush this would seem almost stunningly dubious. Skeptics must be forgiven for muttering "Well, you gotta give it to the guy for chutzpah."

But it is a testable assertion. Is Brooks simply "blowing smoke"? After an exhaustive Lexis and Google search through the usual neoconservative venues over the last several years--occasional publications from the AEI, the Cato Institute, and the Heritage Foundation, articles in Commentary, the National Review, the New Republic, and the Weekly Standard, op-ed pieces in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, etc., and the listed publications over the same years of the fifty or so leading neocons, ranging from prominent government officials to academics, columnists, and institute fellows, a tentative conclusion suggests itself, and, as they say in those teasers before commercial breaks on local TV news shows, the results may surprise you.

Here is a review of our examination of neocon views regarding major foreign policy issues which Brooks would surely include in that category "just about everything else."

Israel and the Palestinians. Here is the issue about which Brooks is most sensitive, and naturally so (anticipating the usual charges, he jokes that "con is short for 'conservative' and neo is short for 'Jewish'"). Commentary and The New Republic, both under Jewish editorship, have for decades been staunch defenders not only of Israel's "right to exist," but of Israel's right to hold onto and to expand settlements in what they call "the disputed territories." Then too, Richard Perle (him again) is only one of several neocons who have served as advisers to the Likud party. Douglas Feith is not only Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, but also a fierce Zionist and sworn enemy of the Oslo Accords. And so forth.

But if you examine the record more closely, you will find that, just as Brooks says, far from being an ideological Flying V Wedge on the subject of Israel and the Palestinians, neocons are all over the lot, some thorough Israeli hawks, some considerably more dovish, and many openly sympathetic to the Palestinian plight. William Safire, for example, long typecast as a savage Likudnik, has written some impassioned columns over the years championing the right of Palestinian farmers to their ground water, and sternly indicting successive Israeli governments for slanting wells into aquifers under Palestinian land. Charles Krauthammer, although perceived as an unyielding Israeli hawk, fully ten years ago called for the recognition of an independent Palestinian state and has never retreated from that early---and at the time deeply unpopular---stand. Book editor Adam Bellow, son of the novelist Saul, recently joined the board of Americans for Peace Now. The list of neocon "renegades" from the pro-Israel camp is in fact a rather lengthy one.

American Unilateralism and the United Nations It is said that if anything unites neocons, it's their contempt for the United Nations and all its works, and their anger, particularly, with the Security Council and the member states within it that blocked the war resolution in 2002, France and Germany. It was during the fateful autumn of that year that neocon columnists--Thomas J. Friedman, Jim Hoagland, William Safire, on and on--fired broadside after broadside at those craven, pampered idiots in New York. Richard Perle, in a notorious column in the London Guardian, of all places, gleefully anticipated the imminent collapse of the entire damnable institution.

Yet, again, a closer look reveals a rather different picture. While it is true that some neocons openly call for the destruction of the U.N., others just as passionately insist that the U.N. is merely irrelevant and should simply be by-passed.

The Abrogation of the ABM Treaty and the Building of NMD It has been said since the days of Senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson and the Committee for the Present Danger thirty years ago that if anything characterizes the true neocon, it is his hatred for the late ABM Treaty and his fanatical determination to prevent that "space Pearl Harbor" so feared by Donald Rumsfeld. On the necessity of getting a Star Wars capability up there, we know, all neocons are as one. Well, it's simply not true. The guys at the Weekly Standard may all join in the guffaws at conspiracy theories, but they are bitterly, yes vituperatively, divided into warring camps over this issue, and have been for years.

One might go on to consider other foreign policy matters, the unratified Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, for example, over which some neocons are not on speaking terms with one another, but the point has been made: just as David Brooks insists, there is a plurality of opinions on all important issues within the neocon community---if, in view of these deep divisions, it can be called a "community" at all.

If we look to domestic issues, the same "let it all hang out" debates over fundamentals are to be found, in no small measure because the American Enterprise Institute has always pursued a "big tent" philosophy of inclusiveness, welcoming the contributions of free marketers and Keynesians alike. Arguments over the wisdom of President Bush's 2.5 trillion dollar tax cuts within the AEI have been known to descend into raw shouting matches. And who would guess that the Weekly Standard staff, bankrolled though the journal may be by far-right mogul Rupert Murdoch, is deeply divided over this crucial issue too?

`Finally, if there were any danger of the neocons forming a "cabal," it would be obviated by the fact that they are, truth to tell, simply not very good at networking. As David Brooks says, they "travel in widely different circles and don't actually have much contact with one another." It will probably amaze conspiracy theorists to learn, for example, that Midge Decter and Gertrude Himmelfarb, the two ur-matriarchs of neoconservatism, have in fact never laid eyes on one another. Elliott Abrams probably wouldn't know William Kristol if he walked into him.

As the amazed Brooks asked, "Do you ever get the sense the whole world is becoming unhinged from reality?" I hear you, buddy. Tell me about it. I know where you're coming from.

Addendum

2005-08-01T16:13:00.000-07:00

Irate Codger here again with some after-thoughts. The lead editorial in the NY Times this morning is "Constitutional Countdown in Iraq." I'll say. The first thing they can't agree on is what to call the country. I read in the Independent last week that the religious party of which the present prime minister is a member favors the Islamic Republic of Iraq, much to the exasperation of Donald Rumsfeld. Leading Sunni politicians like the sound of the Arab Republic of Iraq. For some reason the Kurds are holding out for the Federal Republic of Iraq.

One thing that seems almost certain if Tom Friedman's candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize has his way is that for half the population in the non-Kurdish areas of the country it's back to purdah. In the latest, amended, version of the constitution, according to the Times, "family law would still be subjected to clerical authority, with each family permitted to choose which religious sect's teachings governed their female members' lives." "The right solution," the Times sternly admonishes, "is to maintain all women's access to the civil law in these matters, as has been the practice in Iraq since 1959."

Since 1959. That is, ahem, since the Ba'athists seized power. Did you know that under the evil Saddam Hussein there was actually a thriving state-funded program of women's athletics? In the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, there was an Iraqi entrant in the women's 110 m. high hurdles. No such flagrant immodesty under the Ayatollah al-Sistani, you may be sure. You can't run the high hurdles in a chador!

Bad News and Worse News

2005-08-01T16:04:00.000-07:00

The Irate Codger has not been in voice for many months, but a couple of pieces scanned today really got to him. The first is Judge Richard Posner's survey of the right-left media wars featured on the cover of the NYT Book Review, "Bad News." First, the introduction by "the editors," under the title "Up Front": "How does Richard A. Posner do it?" He's "inhumanly prolific, but he is neither formulaic nor superficial." In this review, he "weaves his way through the arguments of left and right with his predictable unpredictability, providing a surprisingly nonpolitical perspective on a very political subject."

Yeah, sure. You'd never guess that this Republican judge would have written a book finding that Bill Clinton was deservedly impeached and another making the case that the five members of the Supreme Court who made George W. Bush president in 2000 actually made the right decision, would you? Insofar as Posner bothers to notice the "Books Discussed in This Essay," here's what he has to say about them.

"It is hyperbole for Eric Alterman to claim in 'What Liberal Media?' that "liberals are fighting a nearly hopeless battle in which they are enormously outmatched by most measures' by the conservative media, or for Bill Moyers to say that 'the market place of political ideas'" is dominated by media ideologically linked to "an authoritarian administration.'"

On the other hand, "The bias in some of the reporting in the liberal media [NYT, Washington Post, CBS], acknowledged by [Daniel] Okrent, is well documented by William McGowan, as well as by Bernard Goldberg in 'Bias,' and L. Brent Bozell III in "Weapons of Mass Distortion.'"

Well documented by Bernard Goldberg. He's best known for his shrill accusation that the media almost always label conservative political figures as "conservative" while rarely describing well-known liberals as "liberal." Separate Lexis word-searches by the Daily Howler blog and Geoffrey Nunberg of Stanford revealed that Goldberg had it exactly wrong. Ted Kennedy was almost always described as "liberal," while Trent Lott, Strom Thurmond, and Phil Gramm got passes. I saw an ad for Goldberg's new book, titled something like "The 100 Worst Americans," which says on the cover, "Hint: Al Franken is Number 67."

The "liberal" NY Times has a set policy in its Book Review. A book on global warming by Jared Diamond is reviewed by...that good-news global warming skeptic and hack, Gregg Easterbrook. A puff biography of George W. by David Shrum is reviewed by David Brooks. And so it goes.

The other piece that got my goat was in the Nation. David Rieff of the New York Times magazine reviews Squandered Victory: The American Occupation and the Bungled Effort to Bring Democracy to Iraq by Larry Diamond (published, I notice, by Times Books). Right off, I'm suspicious. Those liberal hawks at the Times magazine who were for the war in the first place--Rieff, Michael Ignatieff, George Packer--have no credibility with me. I heard Larry Diamond last year on TOTN interviewed by that lickspittle Neal Conan. Diamond, who had been a consultant/advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority, was then earnestly hopeful that the occupation might still be pulled off if some tactical errors were rectified. He was identified by Conan as a professor of political science at Stanford. Dubious, I Googled him and found that he was a "Senior Research Fellow" or somesuch at the Hoover Institution. While the Institution is wholly independent of the University, its "fellows" are "by courtesy" listed as Stanford professors, much to the displeasure of Stanford faculty. Rieff describes Diamond as "a professor of political scence and sociology at Stanford and a leading figure in the academic subdiscipline of 'democracy building'..." Nuff said.

So how are things going in Iraq? Well, Rieff tells us, some on the right---Dick Cheney, Max Boot of the LA Times and Weekly Standard--have been wildly overconfident, while much of the "hard left, or what passes for it in the United States and Britain, has not been much better." For example, a woman writing in the New Left Review called Baghdad "Vichy on the Tigris." Hey, out of bounds! Despite the predictions of left-wing doomsayers, Rieff observes, there has as yet been no civil war between Shiites and Sunnis, "in no small measure thanks to the Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani." (Rieff here seems to be in synch with Tom Friedman, who in April suggested the Ayatollah as a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. "I'm serious," Tom said. Right. "Cover thyself, sister, and get thee home to thy husband, thou whore!")

So, how are things really going in Iraq? "The fact is, no one really knows how things are going to turn out in Iraq," Rieff says. I do. It's going to be the biggest debacle of American foreing policy ever, not excluding Vietnam. There, after killing three million Vietnamese in fifteen years, we at least got out, and now, thirty years later, relations between the two states are eerily amicable. The entire Islamic world is now arrayed against us, and will be for decades as a result of this. In the end, Rieff is disquieted that although Diamond "clearly has a fine mind and has written a serious and valuable book," he seems to have overlooked "the problem of empire." Oh. Rieff nowhere addresses the central problem--well, perhaps he alludes to it in speaking of Diamond's "kind of senior common room utopianism"---which is that the premise of the book, that there was a victory in Iraq to be squandered, is rubbish. I think Katrina vanden Heuvel is going to be hearing from more than a few readers about this one.