As usual, a really sharp comment from Virginia Postrel on Gore’s speech. She cites the passage where Gore says
that we ought to be focusing our efforts first and foremost against those who attacked us on September 11th and who have thus far gotten away with it … I don’t think we should allow anything to diminish our focus on the necessity for avenging the 3,000 Americans who were murdered and dismantling the network of terrorists that we know were responsible for it. [Emphasis added.]
Virginia comments:
This is a very interesting way of framing the task at hand: not to prevent future attacks on Americans but to avenge the deaths on September 11. Now there’s no question that many Americans, myself included, have entertained the desire for vengeance. But the only reason to act on that impulse is to make it clear that future attacks will be costly for the attackers. Vengeance for vengeance’s sake is just blood lust. It might feel good, but (leaving aside any humanitarian considerations) it doesn’t solve the fundamental problem. Vengeance may even make matters worse, by escalating blood feuds without eliminating threats. Gore’s pooh-poohing of the administration’s Iraq policy depends in large measure on his definition of the problem. If you want to prevent further attacks, you have to worry about state-sponsored weapons programs. If you just want to get revenge, you don’t.
I think that’s a brilliant insight. In his pathetic attempt to find a way to attack his nemesis, Gore has actually reverted to the kind of bellicose hysteria we usually associate with the far right. In fact, I think Gore’s speech is essentially what happens when a man takes his emotion and tries to find reasons – any reasons – for it. If the Democrats follow him, it will be into a political wilderness.
THE ANTI-SEMITIC ATTACK IN L.A.: More results from AS.com. My reference to an anti-Semitic assault in West Hollywood finally got a report in the L.A. Times and now the Forward. The Forward adds some new details:
Jimmy Delshad, an Iranian Jew and former president of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, which has many Iranian Jewish members, said the two communities have enjoyed a warm relationship. Even so, some Iranian Muslim youngsters have lately fallen under the influence of “Palestinian-like propaganda, which makes Jews responsible for everything,” he said. “Youth – especially at universities, who are very much against Israel and Jews – are very influenced and take things upon themselves,” said Delshad, who added that he believes these misguided youth were not targeting Iranian Jews specifically, but Jews in general.
My italics. Notice how our universities are now becoming incubators for anti-Semitic hate. Another triumph for the pomo-Left.
“A MENACE TO ITSELF AND TO MANKIND”: The Carnegie Endowment’s Anatol Lieven laments the emergence of a radical right-wing clique in combination with a moronic and solipsistic electorate to make America a threat to peace and democracy everywhere. If you want to read an unfettered and clarifying account of what many on the Left now believe, check out his essay in the current London Review of Books. Here’s his equation of today’s Americans with the war-frenzied Germans on the eve of the First World War:
[T]he intense solipsism of [the American] people, its general ignorance of the world beyond America’s shores, coupled with the effects of 11 September, have left tremendous political spaces in which groups possessed by the fantasies and ambitions sketched out here can seek their objectives. Or to put it another way: the great majority of the American people are not nearly as militarist, imperialist or aggressive as their German equivalents in 1914; but most German people in 1914 would at least have been able to find France on a map.
At some point, I’d better get a deeper understanding of why some find American power so deeply deeply frightening. Even to the extent that they’d prefer to uphold the tyranny in Iraq than invoke the forces that could end it. I don’t get it; and perhaps I never will.
WHO ARE YOU CALLING POODLE? An irate reader objects to Tony Blair’s being compared to a certain breed of dog:
While I enjoy the rhetoric – “So-and-so is someone’s poodle” – my poodle, black, seventy pounds and large of fang, is not amused. He asked me to inform you of all the domestic dogs, poodles are the closest to wolves by DNA analysis.
Point taken, ok?
The Dish 