Month: August 2006

Courtney Love crashes an MTV interview with Madonna, and they compare shoes. Yes, I’m gay. And it’s Madonna’s birthday week.

by David Weigel

Two polls showing the unbearable Joe Lieberman handily winning re-election as an independent have forced liberal bloggers into a pow-wow on their favorite subject: Liberal bloggers. Josh Marshall mulls:

Should progressives shift their money and attention from the Connecticut Senate race to more important contests?  Absolutely.
…
I am all for multi-tasking: pay passing attention to the Connecticut race, while focusing with laser intensity on the races that will actually determine control of the Senate…. Rove may be goading Democrats into fighting like hell amongst themselves in Connecticut, but that doesn’t mean we have to take the bait.

No self-respecting liberal wants to think he’s abetting Karl Rove, but Atrios – who almost single-handedly created Lamont’s buzz among liberal blogs outside the Nutmeg State – completely disagrees: "I’d like more of that advice going to, say, the people who gave money so that Hillary Clinton could have $22 million cash-on-hand."

It’s tough to say goodbye; it’ll be tough for bloggers to stop shovelling bucks at the first candidate they actually sorta-elected. But how much support does Lamont really need? The man is worth at least $100 million. Now that he’s built his political cred and a successful campaign team, he’s probably gotten all the blog help he needs.

And is a donation to Hillary Clinton’s slam-dunk Senate campaign really counterproductive? I’m sure every donor thinks he’s filling out Line 1 of the 2009 White House staff application.

South Portland, Maine, 8 pm.

By Michael J. Totten

Lebanon is not yet a mature liberal democracy. Syria still has agents in many high places. Iran all but dictates its foreign policy. Lebanon is partly, if not mostly, democratic even so. And now that the country has been torn apart by the unilateral actions of a warmongering street gang, the predictable backlash has begun.

Abu Kais at From Beirut to the Beltway calls Hassan Nasrallah The Decapitator. Raja at the Lebanese bloggers says ENOUGH. Rampurple goes further and tells Hassan Nasrallah to eff off. Opinion page editor Michael Young at Beirut’s Daily Star says Nasrallah is trying to turn Lebanon into a “gigantic Hizbullah barracks.” Druze chief Walid Jumblatt darkly suggests the civil war may ignite again if Hezbollah does not comply with the wishes of Lebanon.

The mood here in Tel Aviv is pretty grim, too. The Olmert government looks like it could collapse under pressure at any time. Hardly anyone in this country seems to think the air war over Lebanon was a good idea anymore. Hassan Nasrallah’s claim of “victory” sounds almost plausible after a month of hard fighting failed to produce many of the tangible promised results.

Yossi Klein Halevi at the New Republic says many of the last month’s disasters were self-inflicted and that the reckoning is already beginning. (Subscription required.) Yoel Marcus says “Never has a new government with a line-up of fresh faces and ambitious goals been entangled in so many foolish affairs within such a short span of time as the government of Ehud Olmert.” Haaretz published an absolutely devastating indictment of the government by Ari Shavit who said 2006 is “the most embarrassing year of Israeli defense since the establishment of the State of Israel.”

Israelis are far quicker to criticize their government during and immediately after a war than Americans are. Perhaps this is natural since Israel’s parliamentary system allows the people to change the political leadership without having to wait for the next scheduled election that could be years away. Maybe George W. Bush would no longer be president if Americans were able to pick someone else before 2008. It’s also possible that Israelis are just more self-critical for cultural reasons.

An even starker contrast is noticeable between Israel-supporters in Israel and Israel-supporters in America. Israel’s partisans in the U.S. often talk as though Israel rarely makes any mistakes, that because Israel is a democracy with a right to defend itself it can do no or little wrong. Israelis themselves rarely do this.

by David Weigel

Hi, everybody; I’m the third of Andrew’s replacements in age, eminence, and good will. (He’s spending some of his "fishing trip" in Amsterdam with my magazine and the creators of South Park. Jealousy is my right.) Heartfelt thanks to Andrew for giving me the chance to help fill in here. I’ve been reading his blog since its original design, that dark blue mass so opaque you could break a cornea trying to grok the text. It was always worth the pain.

I’m a creature of mainstream media in the worst way — I did four years at a mainstream j-school and a year and a half at the editorial page of USA Today. My stint there began with the death of Ronald Reagan and ended, more or less, with the death of John Paul II. It overlapped with the 2004 conventions and the columnist stints of Michael Moore and Ann Coulter. In other words, I’m very happy to be here.

The Philosophers’ Drinking Song from Monty Python. From the Australian outback. It never gets old.

by Ana Marie Cox

Hello gentle readers, I’m another one of the Andrew manques tasked with creating trouble while he frolics with the beagles or cruises Amsterdam or whatever excuse he gave. (He’s really campaigning for Lamont, right?) I’m the former proprietor of Wonkette and the author of Dog Days; these days I hang out around the Time DC bureau and wait for someone to tell me it’s all been a horrible, horrible mistake.

I’m pleased to see that Andrew broke the Jonbenet ice on the blog a few days ago, as that is the subject that’s occupied my fleeting coherent thoughts of late. At first, a false confession seemed about as likely as Rove getting Karr to confess as a distraction from the war. (Though I haven’t checked Democratic Underground yet…) Now the Rove theory seems more credible than Karr does — the man is a pedophile, sure, but an UNUSUALLY CRAZY pedophile. It will make a truly awesome movie of the week.

Now, where were we?

By Michael J. Totten

Hello to my fellow guest-bloggers Ana-Marie Cox and David Weigel. And thanks to Andrew Sullivan for inviting the three of us to keep the blog warm while he’s away.

I flew to Tel Aviv to cover the Israeli side of the Hezbollah war, and I’ll be sticking around here for a little while longer to cover the aftermath, the political fallout, the ongoing trouble in Gaza, and whatever else happens in this country that never lacks for a story.

War coverage from the Israel/Lebanon border is still fresh on the main page at my own blog. More will be posted here shortly. Thanks for reading.

Good news for Mickey Kaus: I’m taking a vacation for two weeks starting tonight. Better news for you guys: my guest-bloggers will be three in number. They’re Ana-Marie Cox, the former star of Wonkette and now the Washington editor of Time.com; Michael Totten, who’ll be blogging directly from the Middle East; and David Weigel, one of the sharpest young bloggers in the libertarian universe. This trio will be a blogging ensemble until Labor Day, when I hope to return all rested up. Give them a warm welcome.

It goes to Heather Mac Donald, whose dogged refusal to acquiesce to the usual juvenile nonsense from JPod earns her some cred. Here’s part of her latest attempt to disentangle conservatism from the fundamentalist vines now strangling it:

I agree with Jonah that the truth claims of religion are “slippery.” Yet I hear them made all the time. A recent article on The Da Vinci Code in The American Spectator stated that it was a matter of “historical fact” that Jesus was born of a virgin and ascended to heaven after the crucifixion. I simply don’t know what to make of that statement or its appearance in a powerful, justly respected journal of conservative opinion. It does not conform to what I thought was a common understanding of “historical facts.” Ditto when the president claims that freedom is God’s gift to humanity. He is not talking here about free will. I see little evidence in the Bible that God advocated the democratic government that we are bringing to (or imposing on) Iraq, not to mention the gender quotas that we fixed for the Iraqi National Assembly. The Bible seems to be relatively easy about slavery, patriarchy, and despotic tribal leadership; its concerns lie elsewhere. And if the freedom that we have created in the West is indeed God’s gift, it sure took a long time for us to open it. If it turns out that our conception of political freedom is in fact a human creation growing out of very specific cultural soil, that may explain why it is not blossoming forth as we expected it to following the invasion of Iraq.

Ouch.