Category: Keepers

Noah Millman outlines the "psychic benefits" of the American-Israeli relationship:

Israel has been a particular friend to America in one respect. When we want to assert our exceptionalism, Israel has consistently supported that assertion. Much of the rest of the world wants to subject American power to something resembling a system of laws and norms through institutions like the International Criminal Court. America, for understandable reasons, has resisted this, even when parts of the system were our own creations, designed to legitimate our own supremacy by limiting its absolute scope. We can debate whether our resistance is wise or not, but my point is that Israel has been consistently supportive of our resistance – again for obvious reasons. The psychological component of this comraderie is that we are simultaneously able to maintain our sense of ourselves as boundless and universal, and relieved of some of the burden of our solitude in such a position.

Nicely put. But I would not discount the religious themes underpinning this, which are very potent in the current GOP. Evangelicals view Israel and America as uniquely sacred entities, united in an eschatological struggle between good and evil. Each country is thereby exempted from the usual international laws and rules, because G-d himself has anointed both of them in a pre-ordained battle of existential power.

When Romney preposterously declares that Obama has thrown Israel under the bus, he is sending a message to evangelicals. Allegedly betraying Israel at this pre-apocalyptic hour is the work of Satan. Any partition of the chosen land is the goal of the anti-Christ – hence the incomprehension and shock at any mention of the 1967 borders. Just as the early Puritans saw their new land as a new Zion, so did the first Zionists in Israel. And you cannot rationally negotiate with these kinds of convictions. Alas, in Israel, the pre-existing population didn't die en masse by unwitting biological warfare. Hence the need, as Palin and Huckabee have urged, for a much more aggressive Jewish settlement of Judea and Samaria.

These are profound psychological affinities and beliefs. They were deepened by 9/11 and the rise of Jihadism. The American and Israeli Zionists are flummoxed and terrified by the Arab Spring because it scrambles this Manichean dichotomy. The whole idea that the US should make strategic decisions about its worldly self-interest, when an other-wordly imperative demands a different approach, strikes them as bizarre. Like the settlers in Judea and Samaria, these American theocratic exceptionalists are not a majority; but, like the settlers, they are redefining one political party and thereby redefining America.

I fear this apocalyptic thinking is self-fulfilling. Which is why it chills me. And why a Palin presidency which would unleash this dynamic into a vortex of religious global warfare terrifies me.

Goldblog takes stock:

Their greatest achievement … is in the interconnected realms of ideology and propaganda. The settlement movement, its supporters, and its apologists (in Israel and in America) have successfully conflated support for their movement with support for Israel and for Zionism itself. They have created a reality in which criticism of the settlement movement has come to equal criticism of Israel. … It is astonishing that what was once so small a movement now defines what it means to be a supporter of Israel.

That is one of the lessons I have learned from the latest round of grinding conflict on this. Israel now means for a critical mass of Israelis a state from the Mediterranean to the River Jordan. Borders they defended with brilliance and vigor and ease in 1967 are now "indefensible" – but the vulnerable spaghetti of settlements on the West Bank are allegedly integral to security. But they are obviously very vulnerable as is. And it seems very likely that the only way to defend them permanently is annexation of the whole West Bank. What scales were left have therefore dropped from my eyes. Israel has moved past a two-state solution, and has done so through these cumulative facts on the ground and the rise of Jewish fundamentalism and American Christianism. I do not see how this will be easily reversed, and with every day, this new reality gets set in the concrete and stones of new settlements.

It is a different country now. The UN vote will be bitterly isolating and destabilizing, but a country with 150 nuclear warheads, the best military in the region by far, and a willingness to kill countless civilians as collateral damage in a war with Hamas is not going anywhere. The question is whether the US wants to jeopardize its global standing, destroy the promise of the Obama presidency, and betray the nascent Arab democracies in favor of a staunch, impenetrable, inviolable defense of Greater Israel. Any other question is becoming delusional, alas.

A reader writes:

Andrew, please: one word makes all the difference.  Some gay leftists believe.  Or many gay leftists believe, if you prefer.  Twice you fail to make this crucial distinction in your post, and so twice you make a sweeping and thus ridiculous statement about what “gay leftists” believe.

Another writes:

Could you explain more specifically who you’re referring to when you write “the gay left”? As a liberal-minded, twenty-something gay myself, I can assure you that I do not hold those views you ascribe to me. As one who associates with other liberal-minded gays (and several conservative ones as well), I can assure you that none of my friends holds those views either. Maybe by “gay left” you mean something different than liberal gays, but what that could be, I don’t know.

By “left” I do not mean gay liberals, like, say, the HRC. They opposed marriage rights for so long for pragmatic and tactical reasons – because it embarrassed their Democratic Party pay-masters. By left, I mean those who opposed the push for military service and marriage rights from the get-go as a surrender to bourgeois conservatism. They wanted all gays to have no choice but to be associated with the New Left and, like many ideologues, spent a great deal of energy purging and demonizing those gays who dissented.

Much of the gay left, mercifully, has now abandoned their stance (but not Michael Bronski, it appears). I wish I could claim some credit but most of it goes to George W Bush, who unified the gay movement around marriage rights in a way no gay writer or leader could. But among those who once virulently opposed gay civil equality in these areas: leftists like Bronski, Paula Ettelbrick, Peter Tatchell, Richard Goldstein, Michael Warner and a whole slew of others whom the late and great gay journalist, Randy Shilts, called the Lavender Fascists. Evan Wolfson, the real hero of the marriage equality movement (and a hardcore liberal himself) recently noted:

”[Marriage equality] was the subject of big divisions within the movement, within the legal groups and within Lambda,” he says, noting there were two distinct approaches from opponents. ”There was the ideological opposition, and the strategic or tactical or timing opposition… That was the biggest dividing line, the biggest source of arguing amongst a group that might quibble or haggle over a particular legal idea but basically agreed over a whole range of things,” says Wolfson. ”The one thing that people would argue about more than any other was marriage.”

”Nobody was going to challenge that we needed to get rid of sodomy laws,” Ettelbrick explains. “No one was going to challenge that we needed antidiscrimination laws to deal with everything from HIV to sexual orientation.” But marriage ”was hotly debated.” She adds, ”I think it was a really important part of our movement that’s seldom been fully addressed, to tell you the truth.” …

A ”defense of sexual freedom” was provided during the debate by people like Michael Warner, who countered Sullivan’s book, Virtually Normal, with his own book published in 2000, The Trouble With Normal. ”At a time when the largest gay organizations are pushing for same-sex marriage,” Warner writes in his preface, “I argue that this strategy is a mistake and represents a widespread loss of vision in the movement.”

This is what and who I mean by the gay left. (For a glimpse into the internal struggle within the gay rights movement, this piece – rare in the gay press – is very helpful.) It was once extremely powerful and to oppose its victimology argument and its insistence that all gays be corralled into one far left political positions was to go through a political wood-chipper. I know it seems bizarre today, and with Bush, the left might have retained more power for longer. But it was the defeat of the arguments of the gay left that allowed for the emergence of a movement for civil equality in marriage and military service. Bronski’s attempt to rewrite history represents the final gasp of that dead end.

(Photo Illustration by Todd Franson for Metro Weekly. Original cake photo by James Steidl/iStockphoto)

Bernard-Henri Levy goes another round. Self-parody:

I maintain that those who are surprised that one doesn’t take the side of the “poor, immigrant woman” as a matter of principle against the “rich and arrogant white man” who supposedly has raped her are reinventing a kind of class justice in reverse. It’s no longer, as before, “poor bastards, the rich are always right” but “rich bastards, the word of the poor is sacred.” This prejudice is as disgusting, no more, no less, than the precedent, and this reversal recalls—at least in France—the notorious affair of Bruay-en-Artois of the early ‘70s, when, because he was a bourgeois, a notary was decreed guilty of a crime, one which, it was later determined, once the winds of hysteria had died down and his existence was already a shambles, he had not, in reality, committed. And thinking about it makes a shiver go down one’s spine.

Good God. He's now in Ben Stein territory. Yes, of course, the courts will and should determine this. Yes, of course, tabloids are tabloids – although I retain a grain of deep Fleet Street respect for the New York Post headline "Frog Legs It." Yes, I agree, the perp walk is de trop. But are we not supposed to notice the reports of the alleged victim after the alleged rape? That she was barely able to speak, kept spitting out of her mouth, had DSK's sperm on her dress, and was clearly traumatized? How does BHL explain that, after a mere romantic interlude in a hotel room? Did she come on to him? Seriously? And even if she did, her trauma does not seem as if consent continued in the violent encounter. Can you even imagine what Strauss-Kahn looks like naked? Does he actually think that could be attractive to anyone – if you were not attracted to his personality or power?

Now we read reports that he is trying to bribe her impoverished family in Guinea and this:

Meanwhile, in another development yesterday, it emerged that Strauss-Kahn allegedly shouted, "Do you know who I am?" as he assaulted the victim, according to a new report. "Don't you know who I am? Don't you know who I am?" Strauss- Kahn repeatedly inquired during the incident, according to Fox News.

"Please, please stop. No!" she cried as he pinned her to the bed, law-enforcement sources said. "Please stop. I need my job, I can't lose my job, don't do this. I will lose my job. Please, please stop!"

In a heartless reply, Strauss-Kahn, allegedly told her, "No, baby. Don't worry, you're not going to lose your job," sources said, adding that he again repeated, "Don't you know who I am?" While she begged him to stop, he allegedly pressed the attack, dragging her down the hall and forcing her to perform oral sex.

The maid finally escaped by pushing him into a piece of furniture in the $3,000-a-night Sofitel suite, she said. Sources said that the Frenchman has a gash on his back where he hit the armoire and that blood was found on the sheets. Investigators also confirmed a DNA match between Strauss-Kahn and a semen sample found on the maid's shirt.

The core of sexual abuse is an abuse of power: power of physical strength or social standing. It is a violation of a core human freedom and a way to enforce the subjugation of women to men. In many ways, the power differential matters more here than in many other crimes. That is why I refused to dismiss the credible claims of Paula Jones and Anita Hill who were treated as a social inferior told to "suck it" in a hotel room, and an employee for whom sexual abuse was part of the deal. It revealed something ugly in the souls of Bill Clinton and Clarence Thomas.

The woman here, more to the point, is apparently an asylum case from West Africa. Can you imagine what she escaped? To come to America and allegedly be raped by the head of the IMF is almost a parody of a power-differential. I have no interest in pursuing people's consensual adult sex lives. But this – judging merely from the victim's traumatized reaction and the physical evidence – was not that. Maybe there is something we do not yet know. Maybe DSK has a thing for armoires and blood to turn him on. But from what we do know, DSK is already a molesting brute.

Earlier thoughts here and here.

Witness the Democratic Majority Leader in the Senate directly attack his own president over a critical foreign policy stance to appease the pro-Israel lobby. Inconceivable on any other foreign policy issue. Meanwhile, AIPAC’s control of the US Congress will be demonstrated more powerfully than ever today, as Netanyahu, fresh after a contemptuous and furious meeting with the president, will now attempt to cut an American president off at the knees, by interfering in another country’s affairs. Again: can you think of any other analogy to this kind of thing?

And remember what this is about: not cutting off aid, not imposing any solution, not reassessing loan guarantees, not putting the UN veto in question. Just saying the words “1967 borders” is such an affront to the pro-Israel lobby it must rally the entire US Congress against its own president, and threaten to cut off donations to the Democrats. And recall that this statement was issued by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs just November 11. Money quote:

‪‪The Prime Minister and the Secretary agreed on the importance of continuing direct negotiations to achieve our goals. The Secretary reiterated that “the United States believes that through good-faith negotiations, the parties can mutually agree on an outcome which ends the conflict and reconciles the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state, based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps, and the Israeli goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders that reflect subsequent developments and meet Israeli security requirements.” Those requirements will be fully taken into account in any future peace agreement.

My italics. Now that’s lobby power. What was once an idea the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs deemed anodine is now a radical break designed to weaken Israel. But, of course, the pro-Israel lobby doesn’t exist, and mere mention of it makes one an anti-Semite. But without the power of that lobby, how do you make any empirical sense of last week’s events at all?

(Photo: Young Jewish settlers stack rocks in an attempt to build a new outpost on a hilltop, on May 23, 2011 near the West Bank Jewish settlement of Maale Adumim, West Bank. Tensions between Israel and United States remain high over the growing Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Last week President Obama called for a return to Israel’s 1967 borders with landswaps. By Uriel Sinai/Getty Images.)

Johann Hari examines the gay left's version of American history. In this narrative, there's much to be admired by gay Americans' resistance to brutal oppression from the very get-go … until it comes to the last fifty years, and especially the last twenty (those dreadful years in which gays finally made legal and political progress):

This is the best I can figure out his position. He does finally explicitly say that the gay movement should have fought instead to "eliminate" all concept of marriage under the law, a cause that would have kept gay people marginalized for centuries, if not forever. Of course some gay people hold revolutionary views against the social structures of marriage and the family—and so do some straight people. But they are small minorities in both groups. If you want to set yourself against these trends in the culture, that's fine. Just don't equate it with your homosexuality. When Bronski suggests gay marriage "works against another unrealized American ideal: individual freedom and autonomy," he is bizarrely missing the point. Nobody is saying gay people have to get married—only that it should be a legal option if they want it. If you disagree with marriage, don't get married. Whose freedom does that restrict?

It has always seemed chilling to me that gay leftists – when pushed to say what they really believe -  want to keep gays in some sort of glorious, oppressed, marginalized position, until the majority agrees with the gay left's view of human nature, and revolutionizes straight society as well. This will never happen (and in my view, shouldn't).

Until then, the gay left focuses on demonizing those gays who argue for those who want to belong to their own families as equals, serve their country or commit to one another for life. In this, in my view, the gay left mirrors the Christianist right: they insist that otherness define the minority, even though most members of that minority are born and grow up in the heart of the American family, in all its variations, and of American culture, in all its permutations. No one should be marginalized for seeking otherness. But we are fighting for it to be a choice, not a fate.

Goldblog is on fire:

I was … taken aback when I read a statement from Prime Minister Netanyahu yesterday that he "expects to hear a reaffirmation from President Obama of U.S. commitments made to Israel in 2004, which were overwhelmingly supported by both House of Congress."

So Netanyahu "expects" to hear this from the President of the United States? And if President Obama doesn't walk back the speech, what will Netanyahu do? Will he cut off Israeli military aid to the U.S.? Will he cease to fight for the U.S. in the United Nations, and in the many  international forums that treat Israel as a pariah?

I don't like this word, "expect." Even if there weren't an imbalance between these two countries — Israel depends on the U.S. for its survival, while America, I imagine, would continue to exist even if Israel ceased to exist — I would find myself feeling resentful about the way Netanyahu speaks about our President.

My hope, for what it's worth, is to protect the possibility of a majority Jewish state to survive with its capital in Jerusalem for ever. I'm a Zionist. Always have been. And strongly so. I think Obama is doing his best to bring it about, primarily because it is America's interest, but also because it is in Israel's. And despite the hysteria from the Fox-Likud fringe, Obama's words yesterday toward the Palestinians were stark, essentially putting Abbas on the spot on the Hamas charter, for example. And yet this leader of a foreign government thinks he can essentially dictate terms for an American president and attempt to corral the US Congress to side explicitly with a foreign leader over the American president in foreign policy.

Don't push your luck, Bibi. Others have with Obama and they have learned that he is often more canny than they are with political jujitsu. Obama's usual tactic: gently and subtly prompting his foes to self-destruct. I just hope that in this critical juncture in the Middle East, Netanyahu doesn't take his country with him.

We've been subjected to wave after wave of MSM journalists insisting that no conspiracy theory is ever correct and that inquiring into them is a sign of derangement and professional disgrace. And then we hit two stories which suggest otherwise. DSK, we now discover, had a serious pattern of sexual abuse that remained rumor and was never subjected to MSM scrutiny in France until now. But that's France. America is not like that, right?

Well: how does someone as prominent as Arnold Schwarzenegger keep a now 14-year-old son a secret until now? That beats John Edwards' double life by a long shot (and Edwards was also accorded MSM immunity). We don't yet know how this story broke, and perhaps we never will. But we do know that the MSM believes that anything elaborate or conspiratorial about the lives of public figures is disgraceful conspiracy-mongering and that any journalist who inquires should be ostracized by his or her peers.

How many people are required to be in on a conspiracy to conceal an out-of-wedlock 14-year-old child for a decade and a half? Wouldn't child support have traces? Wouldn't a birth certificate have to be filed, health insurance paid, etc? How do you bring a child up thinking someone who was not his father was actually his father, without involving more than the actual biological parents? I don't know and would welcome reader suggestions.

But it seems to me that this proves that when a small group of people all have a powerful incentive to lie, it's amazing what can be done. And this is not the governor of a small-population state far away from the national spotlight. This is the governor of the biggest state, a global super-star, a man known across the planet, subject to massive press exposure, married to a Kennedy. And he got away with it.

How? Wouldn't you like to know? Or is that a tawdry disgraceful piece of conspiracy-mongering that really is beneath a "serious" journalist's reputation?

The WaPo's fact-checker rules largely in favor of McCain.

We do not have enough information to make a definitive judgment. But it appears that Mukasey is straining to make a connection between the killing of bin Laden and the harsh interrogation techniques [sic] that appears, at best, tangential. Otherwise, he would not have had to resort to verbal sleight of hand to make his case. McCain, by contrast, appears to clearly connect the dots from the courier to bin Laden, citing information derived from conventional techniques. At the same time, while the enhanced techniques [sic] may not have provided the Rosetta stone to bin Laden’s whereabouts, Mukasey may be right when he asserts that valuable leads in the broader war against al-Qaeda were derived through these techniques.

Mukasey has now conceded that the name of OBL's courier did not initially come from torture, just that KSM's lies about the courier alerted the CIA to the significance of the name.

What I find interesting is Thiessen's assertion about the nature of the torture program. He claims it was not torture because the torture was not designed to elicit direct answers; it was designed to break the will of prisoners to lie by destroying their psyches and souls through physical and psychological terror. So they'd be tortured unti they broke down as human beings; then, after they had recovered from the repeated drowning, freezing, beating etc., they would become "compliant". Here's Thiessen's explanation:

McCain was briefed in detail more than once on enhanced interrogation [sic], so he knows full well that enhanced techniques [sic] were not used to gain intelligence from detainees — they were used to compel their cooperation. While applying enhanced techniques [sic], interrogators would ask detainees questions to which the interrogators already knew the answers, so they could judge when the detainees had made the decision to begin cooperating. Once they did so, the techniques stopped and the detainees moved into noncoercive debriefing.

One supposes this is designed to avoid the obvious point that prisoners tortured to give information often tell lies to get the torture to stop. But what Thiessen articulates is, in many ways, more disturbing.

What we are talking about is a system of violence and torture against whole swathes of prisoners to turn them into wreckages lacking human autonomy. The idea is that this makes them more likely to tell the truth because they have lost the will to resist. So Gitmo is really a camp designed to destroy human beings, not merely detain them, which was what Abu Ghraib revealed. Those techniques were not torture because the victims were not interrogated by Lynndie England. But she knew they were part of a process of human psychological destruction that would lead to interrogation. The point is that if you insert a period of time between the destruction of a person's soul and interrogation, you are not torturing even if you use established torture techniques used by barbaric regimes throughout the ages.

Questions immediately arise. Are all detainees at, say, Gitmo subject to these techniques routinely? That would be the natural inference. If this is how torture was used, isn't it light years' away from the initial "ticking time bomb" scenario – in fact, a complete rebuke to such a scenario? Thiessen, moreover, argues that you can tell when the prisoner is broken when you ask him questions to which you know the answers and he gives the correct response. So let's apply this to KSM, whose torture we have more specific evidence of than many. At what point during his 183 drownings did he give the right answer? Or was he never asked during the actual torture sessions, as Thiessen implies? In which case, why did they drown-and-rescue him 183 times and not, say, 150? And if the torture creates a broken soul that cannot lie, why do the torture defenders acknowledge that KSM lied to them long after the torture – which is what allegedly tipped them off to the salience of previous intelligence about the alleged courier? If he had been broken into compliance, why on earth did they believe he was lying?

If you think this is a moral and logical maze, you are correct. If this sounds like semantic word play against the clear evidence of what was done to human beings, you are correct. And if you believe that the US's reputation for torture spread far and wide among Jihadists and created many more would-be Jihadists than before, you are correct. Thiessen even brags about it:

The story of one senior al-Qaeda terrorist, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, illustrates the point. When Abd al-Hadi was brought to a CIA black site, agency officials told him, “We’re the CIA.” He replied, “I’ve heard of you guys. I’ll tell you anything you need to know.” And he did. Detainees like Abd al-Hadi cooperated without enhanced techniques because they feared enhanced techniques.

How is that not an admission of torture? What would be capable of instilling that kind of fear in a senior Qaeda terrorist if not torture? If "verschaerfte Vernehmung" only work through a relatively benign, non-criminal breakdown of a prisoner's psyche, rather than through the terror of the torture chamber, why was Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi so afraid?

It seems to me Thiessen is arguing one thing for domestic audiences and another thing for al Qaeda. Only one can be correct. I'd bet on the one he's bragging so disgustingly about.

Bernard-Henri Levy rallies to defend his class of people:

[W]hat I know even more is that the Strauss-Kahn I know, who has been my friend for 20 years and who will remain my friend, bears no resemblance to this monster, this caveman, this insatiable and malevolent beast now being described nearly everywhere. Charming, seductive, yes, certainly; a friend to women and, first of all, to his own woman, naturally, but this brutal and violent individual, this wild animal, this primate, obviously no, it’s absurd.

I leave it in the capable rhetorical hands of Matt Welch to let loose on the “narcissist millionaire shirt-unbuttoner.” But, for my part, I’m reminded of Richard John Neuhaus’s emphatic defense of his close friend, the serial rapist, fraud and reactionary, Marciel Macial:

I can only say why, after a scrupulous examination of the claims and counterclaims, I have arrived at moral certainty that the charges are false and malicious. I cannot know with cognitive certainty what did or did not happen forty, fifty, or sixty years ago. No means are available to reach legal certainty (beyond a reasonable doubt). Moral certainty, on the other hand, is achieved by considering the evidence in light of the Eighth Commandment, ‘You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.’ On that basis, I believe the charges against Fr. Maciel and the Legion are false and malicious and should be given no credence whatsoever.

Neuhaus was more contemptible, because the evidence against Maciel at that point was overwhelming, whereas we do not know all the facts about the alleged rape at the Sofitel. But we certainly know this much: the police found the claims and evidence for them credible, and treated Strauss-Kahn the way they would anyone accused of such a thing. I find that refreshing, and a statement that men and women are equally under the rule of law. Rape and sexual assault are not peccadilloes or forgivable victimless sins. They are not merely adultery or philandering or horniness. They are serious crimes against other human beings. But elites find it hard to believe the worst of our own – just as families do members of their kin. Some of this is due to the nature of sociopaths – they con even the most skeptical (I always think of the hard-nosed skeptic, Hanna Rosin, who defended the fabulist, Stephen Glass, out of loyalty and friendship and disbelief at the extent of his ethical vandalism). But some is due surely to our refusal to believe we can have long associated with people capable of such acts. Rather than question our own judgment, we rush to defend or ignore the indefensible. I think of my own initial refusal to believe that someone I knew and liked and whose hospitality I had enjoyed – Don Rumsfeld – could have approved freezing human beings to near-death or drowning them to near-death repeatedly or slamming them against walls or contorting their bodies into soul-breaking stress positions, honed by the Gestapo. But the evidence is clear: he approved these things.

Even now, one wants to believe he didn’t really understand what he was doing. But friendship – and an elite’s sense of its own decency – distorts the judgment.

I find the perp-walk theatrics and the public humiliation of someone merely accused of a crime to be troubling, which is the grain of truth in BHL’s defense of DSK. But this closing of elite ranks remains as repulsive to me as it did when Sid Blumenthal spread malicious word that Monica Lewinsky was a lying slut or when Barbra Streisand dismissed Paula Jones in a conversation with me as a kurva (that was a fun Washington dinner party). Neither instance, however, is anywhere near as damning as the Washington elite’s refusal to accept and internalize that their friends are and were war criminals, who authorized acts of barbarism against prisoners that require prosecution under the rule of law. Even now, these criminals are not only not ostracized but embraced. Why else does Marc Thiessen have a column at the Washington Post except for his embrace of torture? Similarly, for AEI’s fellows to have grappled with the fact that some of their colleagues are war criminals is too much. It would have meant far too deep a social breach, far too profound an admission of guilt by association. It would have implied a long failure of judgment about the decency of these men and women. And so they double down. 

Like BHL.

(Photo: Bernard Henri Levy and Arielle Dombasle attend Yves Saint Laurent’s funeral service on June 5, 2008 at Eglise Saint-Roch in Paris, France. The designer, who dramaticaly changed the face of fashion when he became Chief Designer at Christian Dior, died on June 1, 2008 at the age of 71. By Francois Durand/Getty Images)