Category: Old Dish

Mike Crowley ponders how far away the president really is from Will Ferrell’s parody.

Not too surprising on French Muslim youths, according to this reader:

Your reference to the Spurs shirts caught my eye … Don’t know if you know but the Spurs have a very culturally diverse team (as much of the NBA is becoming these days – in Europe they teach ’em from an early age the right way to play) and one of their young stars is Tony Parker who was born in Belgium and raised in France … probably the reason those kids chose Spurs t-shirts. That and the fact he scored Eva Longoria.

For some reason, all this background had eluded me until now.

A reader finds a solution for Dick Cheney:

“I’ve figured out a way to solve this. The administration is looking for ways to “physically abuse” prisoners “without intent to to cause permanent injury or loss to vital organs.” I’ve got just the thing:
Sharpened reeds jammed underneath the fingernails. It hurts like a bitch. The nails will turn black and fall off, but they’ll eventually grow back. No permanent injury and no organ failure. In other words, it’s not torture.
Or how about sticking their head in mud for a minute at a time, letting them come up for air for a second, then plunging them back down again, over and over? Our South Vietnamese friends used to do this to captured VC. It’s like water-boarding, only more messy. No permanent injury and no organ failure, unless you mess up and you kill him by mistake. No worries, though. You didn’t *intend* to kill him. In other words, it’s not torture.
Or if you’re not that creative you can always stick with the old standby: breaking the bones in their arms and legs. No permanent injury and no organ failure. Bones eventually heal, and last time I checked bones are not organs.
In other words, it’s not torture.

Repeat after me: “we do not torture.”

“Bassam’s English is pretty good. He had no trouble distinguishing between Americans and their government. The former he liked, the latter he did not. It all had to do with Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, these places of abuse and alleged torture. Here his English started to fail him. The degradation of Muslims — not Iraqis, mind you, but Muslims — appalled him. He started to say why, but he could not. I kept my eyes on the road as he fumbled for the right words. “We are Muslims,” he said haltingly. I looked over. He was visibly upset.” – Richard Cohen, in the WaPo, today.

Dan Drezner writes about Dick Cheney.

“The vice president’s office will never be quite as independent from the White House as it has been. That will end. Cheney never operated without a degree of [presidential] license, but there are people around who cannot believe some of the advice [Bush] has been given.” – a key Bush associate, according to Thomas DeFrank in the Daily News.

The right position, in every respect. Meanwhile, NRO, as a whole, backs Cheney and the current system.

Secret CIA prisons are now licensed to torture detainees in former Soviet camps in Eastern Europe. And Frist and Hastert are more concerned about punishing the leak than stopping the torture? It’s good to know they have their moral priorities straight, isn’t it?

Some distressing similarities between the worldview of a twentieth century German political philosopher, Carl Schmitt, and that of John Yoo, the intellectual who crafted George W. Bush’s detention and torture policies.

Some interesting insights here. Money quote:

For [Olivier] Roy, political Islam is very much a modern phenomenon because it is driven by masses of displaced or deterritorialized Muslims who have left their traditions and are searching for an “essential” Islam. Roy notices a strongly individualistic streak among them. For instance, he observes that 9/11 bomber Mohammad Atta’s suicide note contained significantly more references to himself than to Allah, which he takes signifies a modern obsession with the self. The rioters are indeed Islamists, as evidenced by their frequent chant, “Allahou Akbar!” – “God is great!” Of course, it is difficult if not impossible to identify the “essence” of a 1,500 year old tradition. Ironically, Islamists do what Westerners do when the latter express their “Orientalism” in reducing that complex tradition to a few slogans such as, “Islam is a religion of peace” and “Islam is a religion of war.” Islamists paradoxically, and perversely, treat themselves as “the Other” in reducing their own tradition to some kind of “pure Islam.” Doing so enables them to identify (and destroy) those deemed apostate but also because Muslims can no longer take their religion for granted as something connected with the soil. Their traditions have been uprooted over the past several generations, which contributes to a radicalized sense of identity politics.

This is also related to Paul Berman’s insight that Islamism as a political ideology was born in Europe, not the Middle East.