Month: August 2007

For some unfathomable reason, the Wall Street Journal has run columns by Ted Nugent on several occasions. Why they would want to give the author of songs like "Wang Dang Sweet Poontang*" a platform to complain about hippies and their "cowardly, irresponsible lifestyle of random sex" is a mystery. But then, there’s a lot about the Journal’s opinion page that I don’t quite understand.

I’ll be interested to see whether they continue to publish him after his rant at a concert a few days ago. He was walking up and down the stage holding two machine guns, and he said:

"I was in Chicago last week, I said, "Hey Obama, you might want to suck on one of these, you punk!" Obama, he’s a piece of sh*t and I told him to suck on my machine gun! Let’s hear it for them. I was in New York and I said, "Hey Hillary, you might want to ride one of these into the sunset, you worthless bitch. And since I’m in California, how about Barbara Boxer? She might want to suck on my machine gun!  Hey, Dianne Feinstein, ride one of these, you worthless whore!""

Here’s the YouTube video (not safe for work; not safe for anyone who minds gratuitous hatred offered to wild applause):

It’s not as though the Journal had no way of knowing about Nugent’s hatefulness before now: his last column on their opinion page ran last July, over a year after he said, about Iraq: "Our failure has been not to Nagasaki them." But perhaps telling four sitting Senators, two of whom are running for President, to suck on his machine guns will transcend even their limits.

Come on, Wall Street Journal opinion page: surprise me.

***

* Song title: H/t Mark Kleiman.

Best wishes to Andrew on his marriage, and thanks for the chance to guest blog, especially with other bloggers I admire so much. This is cross-posted to Obsidian Wings, my home blog.

Max Blumenthal, son of Sid, sits down with the Forward to discuss the work that has made him relatively famous with the left-wing blogosphere: crashing crazy right-wing events and making the participants look dumb. It’s not so hard to do, and this type of gotcha "journalism" is lazy and cuts both ways. A writer for National Review could just as easily attend an anti-war rally and find some wingnuts to lampoon. Come to think of it, it’s been done.

Portraying himself as a truth-telling hero for capturing the wignuttery of Christian Zionists, this part of the interview is particularly laughable:

That’s partly why I produced it, to break out of the liberal intellectual bubble that I’ve been working in and that audience that I’ve been writing for. And I think I’ve really broken through.

Because as we all know The Nation and The Huffington Post are bastions of objectivity and politically diverse readerships.

On this subject, it’s well worth going back and re-reading Andrew’s review of Blumenthal père’s hagiography of the Clintons. An excerpt:

It has the tone and manner and piety of one of those "Lives of the Saints" books most Catholic school kids were once forced to read at some point or other. It’s not a memoir, or a history. It’s a Gospel. Its facts are assembled, as the facts in the Gospels were assembled, for one purpose only: to affirm the faith, to rally the flock, to spread the further glory of the Church.

Mike O’Hanlon is under siege from many corners.  He’s a smart, prolific guy — and I wish he had not co-written the oped that got George Bush to finally read the New York Times.

But he and his co-author Ken Pollack have written a piece that has empowered those who believe in devoting more lives and treasure for a flawed and illegitimate war and occupation — and they’ve set themselves up for this onslaught. 

I still don’t understand how O’Hanlon could have co-written with James Steinberg one of the very first major articles calling for US troop withdrawals from Iraq and then have written "A War We Might Just Win."

I recently communicated with Steinberg and then encouraged The Nation’s Ari Berman to follow up, and as Berman makes clear, Steinberg has not changed his views even a nanometer.

I’ve also recently learned that Mike O’Hanlon is under contract with the US government’s propaganda network, Alhurra.  I’m not quite sure what I think about that yet — but it’s something that ought to be in the open.

(Many thanks to Andrew for the guest-blogging perch this week along with blogger-stars Hillary Bok, James Kirchick, and Gregory Djerejian.  Here’s a short piece I wrote recently about Andrew’s Monday nuptials with the pleasantly startling Aaron Tone.  You can catch my regular political and foreign policy commentary at The Washington Note.)

Did you know that Mike Huckabee’s FairTax–a national retail tax that would replace the current federal income tax–was devised by Scientologists? Bruce Bartlett, erstwhile blogger on this site, explains why that’s not the only reason one should be skeptical about it.

First off, many thanks to Andrew for letting Hilary, Greg, Steve and me post on his blog this week. I’m honored to be included amongst such an impressive cast of writers. I’ve been reading Andrew’s blog  since I was in high school and its surreal to be posting on his site. I work for The New Republic (where you should read the best political blog, The Plank) and write a column for The Washington Blade. Hopefully, we will be able to keep your attention while Andrew delivers his matrimonial vows and takes a much-deserved honeymoon.

While we’re discussing such good tidings, what to make of the prospects for murdering Robert Mugabe? That’s what the British human rights activist Peter Tatchell thinks ought to be done. Tatchell has suffered beatings from Mugabe’s bodyguards on multiple occasions for attempting to perform "citizens’ arrests" on the Hooligan of Harare. Now, he says, the murder of Mugabe may be justified:

The prospects for democratic, peaceful change seem to be closed, in the same way as in Nazi-occupied Europe," he says. "In all normal circumstances, I’m against violence. All violence. But in the extreme situation of a dictatorship where tens of thousands, if not millions, of lives are at stake, there may be a moral and ethical case for the people of Zimbabwe to kill Mugabe."

Tatchell’s right that the Zimbabwean people "may" have a "moral and ethical case" to kill Mugabe. But given how long Mugabe has been ruining his own country and how loyal the military is to him, this will not happen anytime soon. Last month, I weighed the pros and cons of foreign intervention to remove Mugabe, which a Zimbabwean Catholic archbishop recommended.

P.S.: As an umpteenth example of the United Nation’s utter fecklessness, the world body has decided that the millions of Zimbabweans who have fled to neighboring South Africa over the past several years are not entitled to refugee status, and thus won’t receive any of the U.N.’s enormous largesse. Apparently because only a limited number have applied for political asylum (a limited number due to the fear of being caught and deported to a land where they will starve and/or be tortured) these poor people will continue to languish in penury, ignored by the international community. Meanwhile, the grandchildren of Palestinians who fled during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence have a unique status–conferred upon them by the U.N.–among the world’s refugees.

Remind me, again, why the U.N. matters?

Well, a garden, actually, but the same idea. I’ll be back after Labor Day, and a brief honeymoon. Once again, I’ve been more than lucky to persuade four of my favorite bloggers to fill in for me. They are Hilary Bok, aka Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings; Jamie Kirchick of TNR; my friend Steve Clemons of the Washington Note; and Greg Djerejian of Belgravia Dispatch. They don’t agree on everything, especially foreign policy, which should make for some fun. In the new year – by which I mean September (yes, I’m still a grad student in my soul) – we’ll launch the Best Movie Line Ever poll. In the meantime, wish me luck. I’ll see you on the other side of matrimony. And be nice to our guests.

A classic:

June 25, 2002

Stonewall Veterans’ Association 70-A Greenwich Ave. New York, NY 10011

Dear Friends:

I wish to extend my warmest congratulations to you on the occasion of the 33rd anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion. The work of the Stonewall Veterans’ Association keeps the spirit of the rebellion alive. The Rebellion was a triumph at a time when the struggle for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Civil Rights was just beginning.

Over the past several decades, S.V.A. has preserved the spirit of the original rebellion and continues to work tirelessly for the cause of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender and Human Rights in general. Your educational program is exceptional in helping others to learn about the cause, the history and to fight prejudice.

Again, I would like to extend my congratulations and commend you on a job well done.

Sincerely,

Rudolph W. Giuliani

More here.

The crutch of uninspired magazine editors everywhere is perhaps more ubiquitous than it seems:

Even blogs, in their traditional form, are essentially lists. Some bloggers even turn the form back on itself, working their way through other people’s canons: The New York writer Christopher R. Beha is writing a book about reading the Harvard Classics; a fundraiser for the University of Virginia named Tara Saylor is making every recipe in The Joy of Cooking; I’m watching all the movies in the Criterion Collection. And all of us have blogs.

And what are the Ten Commandments but a list?

Orono, Minnesota, 9.30 am.