Month: August 2006

by David Weigel

Todd Hartman at the Rocky Mountain News has more or less the only interesting story I’ve read in the Jonbenet-Karr story – an interview with Michael Tracey, the tireless media professor who corresponded with "december251996@yahoo.com."

The criticism started ramping up again Monday afternoon. Within a couple hours of reports that charges wouldn’t be filed against Karr, Tracey said he already was hearing flak.

He said he’s prepared for the grief he’ll take from pundits and talk radio hosts who have been bashing him all along.

"What’s new?" he said. "It’s nothing new."

Asked about KHOW radio talk-show host Peter Boyles, who has skewered Tracey almost daily since news of the Karr arrest, Tracey said, "Boyles is professionally and emotionally invested in the Ramseys being guilty. There’s nothing you can do about that. Nothing."

Tracey doesn’t knock the mainstream media for covering the Karr arrest to death, which is refreshing – the only news more tiresome than the Karry story is the post-Karr media hairshirt festival.

By Michael J. Totten

JERUSALEM – Israeli reserve soldiers have joined civilians in the push to oust Prime Minister Ehud Olmert after the inconclusive war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hundreds, perhaps as many as a thousand, marched to Mount Herzl, where Israel’s deceased former leaders are buried, and addressed Olmert while standing over the grave of Golda Meir.

Moshe Muskal, the father of fallen soldier Refanel Muskal who was killed in Lebanon and one of the organizers of the protest movement that was established following the war, said that they chose to march to Golda’s tomb so that "Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will learn from her (since she resigned following the Yom Kippur War). The disapproval of the public, that is currently so rampant in the country, will shamefully dismiss him following his failure."

I, too, visited Mount Herzl with Yaacov Lozowick, archivist at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum and author of Right to Exist: A Moral Defense of Israel’s Wars.

“There’s no such thing in the Jewish tradition of having a protest in a cemetery,” he told me. “They had this demonstration on Friday. And as far as I know, it was people from the left and the right together.”

Arab tyrants and terrorists have set an absurdly low bar for themselves when it comes to defining victory in a war. Simple survival is good enough for most of them. Saddam Hussein claims he “won” the 1991 Gulf War that ousted him from Kuwait because he lived fight (and lose) again. The Egyptian government built a gigantic war memorial to the “victory” against Israel in 1973, even though they lost, because they managed to surprise the Israelis and had a few tactical victories before later losing decisively. Hassan Nasrallah boasted that he, too, won the war against Israel before later admitting that he never would have started the war if he knew how it would turn out.

The Israeli definition of victory could not be more different. Israelis are, perhaps, the world’s premier perfectionists on this question. Anything less than an instant and overwhelming victory to them is a horror. This comes from the fact that if they ever decisively lose a war against eliminationist enemies, the country might cease to exist.

Lozowick explained what this means for Olmert.

“Golda Meir was the first Israeli prime minister that got thrown out,” he told me. “She got thrown out because of the 1973 war. I wouldn’t say she was a scapegoat, because if she’s prime minister she’s not a scapegoat. But the trauma of the 1973 war so so deep because for the first time we had a war that we didn’t really win. By the time it was over there was a decisive military victory. But it wasn’t a resoundingly decisive military victory. Which in retrospect was good because it enabled [Egyptian President Anwar] Sadat to say I didn’t lose and now we can make peace. So history works in strange ways.

“There are parallels between what’s going on right now, but what’s going on right now is nowhere near as traumatic as that. That was a major major trauma. And it took six months. She won an election. The war was in October, there was an election at the end of December, she won that election. But the pent-up anger was building and by May 1974 she had to resign. She is remembered by American Jewry until today as This is Golda! Because she was American and they like her. But Israelis have ranked her near the bottom of the list of prime ministers.

“So they came and demonstrated here, calling upon Olmert to do what she had done. She got up and left. And Olmert is sticking to his job. And they said to Olmert: We didn’t like Golda. But she gets our respect for at least having picked up and left. If you don’t pick up and leave, you’re going to be even more mud than Golda.”

I asked him how many people attended the protest. It was just up some steps from his office.

“A thousand or so,” he said. “It was a Friday afternoon. Nobody knew about it in advance. This whole movement is being invented as it goes.”

by David Weigel

Good news for of you fine readers e-mailing us and asking – in only the most respectful tones – "Where’s Andrew?" If you have a Times Select membership you can read John Tierney’s report from Amsterdam, where Andrew attended and spoke at a Reason magazine conference. A sneak peak:

“We’re the long-suffering, battered spouse in a dysfunctional political marriage of convenience,” said Nick Gillespie, the editor in chief of Reason. “Most of the libertarians I know have given up on the G.O.P. The odds that we’ll stick around for the midterm election are about as good as the odds that Rick Santorum will join the Village People.”

Andrew Sullivan, the blogger who coined “South Park Republican,” was at the conference with a preview of “The Conservative Soul,” his new book on the spiritual corruption of Republicans. He said he now prefers to call himself a South Park conservative, not Republican.

“The Republicans have got to be punished for destroying conservatism,” he said, explaining why he’s rooting against the party this November. “If it requires an idiotic Democratic House to stop these people from doing what they’re doing, then good.”

by David Weigel

The smart guys at Congressional Quarterly, never ones to miss salt being rubbed into a politician’s wound, predict that Republicans will lose Tom DeLay’s House seat.

The Texas Republican Party establishment has rallied around a single candidate, Houston City Councilwoman Shelley Sekula-Gibbs, in their unusual write-in campaign to salvage the 22nd Congressional District seat vacated in June by Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader. But the extreme rarity of successful write-in campaigns for Congress and the presence of a solid Democratic nominee on the ballot in former Rep. Nick Lampson has prompted CQPolitics.com to change its rating on the 22nd District race to Leans Democratic from No Clear Favorite.

This is crushing news for a GOP that can only afford losing 14 seats before it loses the House. But perhaps it’s good for the mental health of the Democratic party. Not since the Republican shellackings of the Kennedy-Johnson era (1960, 1962, 1964) has a party suffered as many consecutive, no-upside losses as the modern Democrats. But on election night 2006, they’re increasingly likely to see concession speeches from 2000 arch-foe Katherine Harris and 2004 arch-foe Ken Blackwell alongside the humiliation of their enemy from-time-immemorial, Thomas Dale DeLay. All three events can unfold without power actually transferring from the GOP, but a meltdown trifecta like this will go far in healing the wounds that ripped Americans apart and inspired terrible David Brooks articles back in 2000.

by Michael J. Totten

Hezbollah may have been hit harder than most of us thought. They weren‚Äôt soundly defeated or disarmed, to be sure. But the most recent development in Hezbollah‚Äôs post-war saga is frankly humiliating. 

Hizbullah has dismantled 14 outposts on the Israel-Lebanon border near the Shaba Farms, Lebanese security sources said Monday.

Reportedly, the group evacuated the posts using trucks to carry artillery, other weapons and military equipment, while bulldozers blocked access to tunnels and bunkers.

Witnesses said that the vehicles laden with weapons and other military equipment were headed northward.

A French news agency reported that the Lebanese army had deployed troops along the border with Syria and that its soldiers had blocked routes used by weapons smugglers.

“Liberating” the Israeli-occupied Shebaa Farms was Hezbollah’s main excuse for holding onto its weapons after other militias in Lebanon disarmed after the civil war. Many, if not most, Lebanese recognized this as the bogus propaganda it was. Hezbollah needed to find some way to justify maintaining a militarily powerful state-within-a-state that refuses to answer to the government or the democratic majority. “Because we feel like it” just wouldn’t do.

When Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak withdrew his country‚Äôs occupation forces from Southern Lebanon in 2000, the United Nations painstakingly demarcated the border between Israel and Lebanon — for the first time ever — in consultation with authorities on both sides. Hezbollah did not raise the issue of Shebaa Farms, not even once, until after this process was finished, until after Israel, Lebanon, and Hezbollah agreed that the border had been properly defined.

The United Nations, and all the rest of the world, insists the microscopic Shebaa Farms area belongs to Syria and is part of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Syria refuses to say whether the land belongs to them or to Lebanon. That would ruin everything. If Syria formally cedes the Shebaa Farms to Lebanon, Israel will simply hand it over to Lebanon and undermine Hezbollah’s excuse to exist. If Syria says the Shebaa Farms is part of the Golan Heights, Hezbollah’s excuse to exist will simply be undermined by one of their own patrons and armorers.

So the charade continued for years. Hezbollah screamed, Syria dithered, Lebanon shrugged, and Israel scoffed. Now Hezbollah is being forced by the Lebanese government to dismantle their own military outposts along the border with Shebaa. Their “resistance” may not be finished. But it’s even less credible now than it recently was.

by David Weigel

From a Marine:

Wonder why the press is ignoring what has been going with operations in Baghdad?  There were literally thousands dying there in June and July, but almost none now. If you read the New York Times or Washington Post and even the WSJ, you would think your experience here in Iraq is all an illusion.

I don’t want to paint any overly rosy picture of things here as I never have indulged in that practice before, but we have control everywhere now (up to a point). They are still capable of launching small attacks against our forces, still able to blow up Iraqi Police in large numbers sometimes, and yes, they can still murder each other in Baghdad in sectarian violence. But, we are waging our war right now almost completely on our terms.

Where are Thomas Ricks and Max Boot on these events?  Even if short-lived and part of an ever changing chain of events in Iraq, news-worthy events are happening that are not all blood and guts.

by David Weigel

Stanley Kurtz, I hate to say this, but: Jack D. Ripper called. He wants his brain back. This incredibly long excursion into the fever swamps of nuclear eschatology starts with the premise that when Iran (which has "terrorist agents in the United States, with instructions to retaliate against civilian targets in the event of war") goes nuclear, it will push Turkey and Saudi Arabia to go nuclear, and then even the Middle Eastern nations that we recognize and trade with will become deadly enemies, or something. And therefore, of course, we need to preemptively strike Iran.

What if a nuclear missile is launched at the United States from somewhere in a fully nuclearized Middle East, in the middle of a war in which, say, Saudi Arabia and Iran are already lobbing conventional missiles at one another? Would we know who had attacked us?

I have trouble believing that one missile could make the 6000-mile journey from the Middle East to New York City and we 1)wouldn’t know where it came from and 2)wouldn’t be able to stop it. And is it even a question whether Saudi Arabia or Iran would be more likely to launch an attack? This is like asking "What if a missile is launched at the United States from somewhere in the Korean peninsula? Would we know who had attacked us?"

If you’re still in danger of taking Kurtz seriously, take in these two deep thoughts. One:

Given the Soviets’ overwhelmingly large nuclear arsenal — capable of turning the entire United States to dust in the event of a major nuclear exchange — fallout shelters came to seem like a joke.

Two:

…The revitalized George McGovern-Howard Dean wing of the Democratic party cannot survive much past the moment when Iran gets the bomb. As soon as that happens, we‚Äôre going to plunged into a proliferation crisis and a new Cold War, at least as dangerous as the first Cold War (arguably more so).

Yes, the Soviet Union had the capability to "turn the entire United States to dust," but Middle Eastern states could send one nuke over the ocean, which is far more dangerous.

Some very smart people are actually taking this column seriously. Am I missing something?

Manhattan, Upper West Side, 2 pm.

by David Weigel

This column by Jed Babbin isn’t satire, is it? His frustrated wail about the media (the "527 media") trying to elect Democrats makes a few points (Republicans are wrong to whine about the media’s culpablity in American opinion on Iraq, but probably right to complain about the endless "GOP in trouble" stories) but his prescriptions for a Republican pushback are… different.

· Produce a series of television ads going after the "527 Media." Expose who they are and show how the typical newsroom is more like a dysfunctional, liberal family than a business run by adults.

¬∑ It’s time for the Vice President to give a speech taking the press to task. He should name names. If Pinch Sulzberger wants to be a political activist instead of a publisher, why not call him on it?

¬∑ Organize a group called the Swift Veteran Reporters for the Truth. Every time one of those contrived stories comes out, make sure your team, experienced reporters all, can access the facts and get them out — fast — on blogs, talk radio and everywhere else.

And so on. What Babbin is suggesting is an overt, 21st century version of the Nixon administration’s campaign against the press. Its point man in the campaign, remember, was Spiro Agnew. Please tell me Republicans aren’t ready to knick pages from the Nixon-Agnew playbook.

A good two-part video of Agnew’s press assault is archived on – where else? – YouTube. See if it sounds familiar.

The genius of Michel Gondry – in a sublime Air France commercial.