Category: Old Dish

Clive James is a very smart and funny man, but I never knew he was this clear-headed as well. In the Guardian, yes, the Guardian, he lays into the Fisks and the Pilgers and Australia’s allegedly liberal media honchos for just not getting it. His epiphany is yet another milestone on the gradual and perhaps accelerating maturation of the left:

The consensus will die hard in Australia, just as it is dying hard here in Britain. On Monday morning, the Independent carried an editorial headed: “Unless there is more justice in the world, Bali will be repeated.” Towards the end of the editorial, it was explained that the chief injustice was “the failure of the US to use its influence to secure a fair settlement between Israelis and Palestinians.” I count the editor of the Independent as a friend, so the main reason I hesitate to say that he is out to lunch on this issue is that I was out to dinner with him last night. But after hesitating, say it I must, and add a sharper criticism: that his editorial writer sounds like an unreconstructed Australian intellectual, one who can still believe, even after his prepared text was charred in the nightclub, that the militant fundamentalists are students of history.
But surely the reverse is true: they are students of the opposite of history, which is theocratic fanaticism. Especially, they are dedicated to knowing as little as possible about the history of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. A typical terrorist expert on the subject believes that Hitler had the right idea, that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a true story, and that the obliteration of the state of Israel is a religious requirement. In furthering that end, the sufferings of the Palestinians are instrumental, and thus better exacerbated than diminished. To the extent that they are concerned with the matter at all, the terrorists epitomise the extremist pressure that had been so sadly effective in ensuring the continued efforts of the Arab states to persuade the Palestinians against accepting any settlement, no matter how good, that recognises Israel’s right to exist. But one is free to doubt by now – forced to doubt by now – that Palestine is the main concern.

Hope springs again.

I’ve been reluctant to say this till now, but it’s my belief that what the D.C. sniper is now doing is terrorism. I don’t mean he’s a member of any specific group necessarily or even a person who might call himself a terrorist. I mean someone – a criminal – whose goal, whose purpose, is purely terror. I can see no other pattern to the shootings. The crazy Tarot card business and the fact that the sniper seems to be getting bolder point in the direction of a more typical serial killer. But other things don’t. I’m struck by how these killings are public murders. They’re designed to make the citizenry feel unsafe in its outdoor activities, its public life. I’m also struck by the lack of pattern. In fact, I think the pattern is that there is no pattern. No one is therefore safe. Isn’t that what terrorists rather than crooks try to accomplish? And then there are things like this:

One difference this time was the added touch of cruelty of shooting Ms. Franklin as her husband was a step away, unseeing and powerless to help. They were in a mundane, off-guard moment – another of the sniper’s now-clear preferences – putting purchases in their red convertible, shelving to be used in a move they were planning this month from the Washington area.

That’s an attack on our simple normality, the ease in even the most harrried life, the snatches of freedom that we all enjoy in a free society. That’s his target; that’s what he wants to kill. Again, I’m not saying we have al Qaeda or some other group here. I have no idea. I mean merely that the method is terrorism. The motive could be nihilism, or craziness or fanaticism. It could be some new hybrid of a serial killer mimicking terrorists. But its method is terror nonetheless. And it’s aimed directly at all of us.

In Britain, a big surge in pro-war sentiment: up ten points in a week. Here’s what the Guardian says:

The Guardian/ICM poll shows that 41% of voters agree with the prime minister that it is not a choice between fighting either Iraq or al-Qaida. Fewer – 35% – disagreed and said they believed the United States had “taken its eye off the ball”. The level of support for a military attack on Iraq is now at its highest level since the Guardian started a weekly tracker poll on the question in August. Opposition to a war against Iraq reached a peak in the last week of August when it touched 50% and has now fallen to its lowest level at 37%. Support for a war against Iraq is strongest amongst men – 51% approve as opposed to only 34% of women – and among 25- 34-year-olds who approve by 52% to 25%. Opposition to war is strongest among women – 41% of whom disapprove compared with 33% of men.

I’m fascinated by the generation-gap. The big difference between the anti-war movement during Vietnam and now is that this time, the young are pro-war. Or rather today’s anti-war movement is essentially your father’s: it’s the same boomer peaceniks, unable to let go. I’ve long believed that 9/11 could reshape an entire generation’s attitude toward foreign policy. Slowly, the polls are supporting that possibility.

AUSSIE SONTAGS: Yep, they exist there as well, and are guaranteed special placement in the letters pages of the major liberal broadsheet newspapers. Here’s a selection. Try not to be drinking coffee as you read this extract from The Age:

I distinctly remember both John Howard and Alexander Downer being warned that their policies in support of America in Afghanistan and Iraq were likely to endanger Australian lives and lead to direct attacks that would kill innocent Australian citizens. And they tritely brushed these warnings aside because they didn’t fit their myopic policies.
Now it has happened, and I explicitly place the responsibility at the feet of Howard and Downer. They may as well have pushed the button themselves.
Carlo Canteri, Northcote

We are paying in blood for John Howard’s arse-licking, ignorance and xenophobic bigotry.
The Governor-General should sack him and ask a less tainted figure – Costello, Downer, Beazley, Rudd – to head a government of national emergency sworn in for, say, six months. Someone of some civilised understanding of human difference. Someone less likely to lead us, yawning and prattling vacuously, into the bloodstained front line of an unwinnable world war and conscript our children to fight in it.
Bob Ellis, Palm Beach, NSW

John Howard’s enthusiastic running as a lapdog of the US, promoting George Bush’s strategic interests on the other side of the planet, has brought terrorism to our doorstep, as sensible thinkers have been warning it would.
So, not only do we have to anticipate combat troops returning in body bags – but suffer the present reality of innocent civilians being slaughtered anywhere. Where next – the Australian mainland?
Prime Minister, I blame you.
Judith Maher, Elwood

These are obviously not the only letters; and they do not seem to represent anything but a fringe of Australian opinion. But the logic of Fisk and Pilger is quite clear. Either the West surrenders now – or worse will follow.

GOVERNORS AND DEMS: John Ellis (friend and donor) thinks his cousin, Jeb, is in trouble. And if the governorships keep going to the Dems, so is W in 2004.

FISKING MCGRORY: (Try singing that to the tune of “Waltzing, Matilda.”) I didn’t think it was worth the effort. But Volokh takes just a few sentences to illuminate, well, the abyss below. (By the way, she was vacationing in Florence not Venice. My bad.)

A REPORTING NOSE-DIVE: So says yet another critical piece about the Times’ new management. Don’t expect Romenesko to link. Meanwhile an insignificant but still funny correction a few days ago: “A chart yesterday showing the European Union’s steps to expand by 10 nations in 2004 and by two more in 2007 misstated the current population of member nations. It is 378.7 million, not billion.” 400 billion, 7 degrees Fahrenheit: we get their point, don’t we?

THE IRONY OF APPEASEMENT: Responding to my latest Salon “Idiocy Of The Week”, a few have alleged that I completely mistook the meaning of Harold Meyerson’s recent piece on why we shouldn’t go to war with Iraq. They claim he didn’t mean that Reagan’s policy toward the Soviet Union was actually containment and appeasement (although he used both those words), he was just kidding! What Meyerson really meant, they argue, was that Reagan’s policy toward the Soviets was the same as the left’s policy toward Iraq today and that if we call that Iraq policy containment and appeasement, we have to say the same thing about Reagan. If I missed that ironic pirouette, I can’t have been the only one. But even reading his word use that way, I think my argument just got stronger. What distinguished Reagan’s policy – what differentiated it from Nixon Republicans and Carter Democrats and most of the foreign policy establishment of the time – was that he broke from containment, let alone appeasement. As I summarized his policy in Salon, it included

a rhetorical and diplomatic break in 1980 with the detente of the 1970s; a huge and costly defense buildup; financing and military support of counter-Soviet insurgencies from Nicaragua to Afghanistan; the pursuit of Star Wars; the refusal at Reykjavik to accept any deceleration in space defense spending; the description in London of the Soviet Union as destined for the “ash-heap of history”; the call on Gorbachev in Berlin to “tear down this wall”; the insistence on autonomy for the member states of the Soviet empire (yes, that one was an empire); the establishment of a united Germany in NATO; NATO membership all the way to Russia’s borders; and on and on.

I’m sorry but I fail to see how anyone can construe that as containment, let alone appeasement, which is why Meyerson didn’t support it at the time. Sure, we didn’t actually try to invade the Soviet Union the way we are with Iraq. But guess why not? They had nukes! That’s precisely what we’re trying to prevent in Iraq. And the prevention is not simply to stop Saddam using such weapons against his neighbors, but his funneling such weapons to pliant terrorists from the inviolable security of a nuclear-protected terrorist state. It seems to me that in those circumstances, even a Nixonian like Kissinger would shift position, as indeed he has. Meyerson’s piece may or may not have been in parts ironic. But, on any reading, it was still idiotic.

Amazing sentence in a new Reuters story: “The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were blamed by Washington on Saudi-born militant Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda group.” Has Reuters seen the tape of Osama boasting about his crime? Or even now are they tryng to deflect blame away from the terrorists?

GOT MILK? New evidence of a wonderful new generation. Trust me. Read this. It will make your day. (Via Iain Murray’s blog.)

Is Iran coordinating al Qaeda attacks today? Much circumstantial evidence says yes.

RAINES AWARD NOMINEE: “His personal magnetism is still powerful, his presence is still commanding. Fidel Castro at 76 is a force to be reckoned with: the leader of Cuba for 43 years, he is one of the longest-reigning heads of government in the world… Although Cuba is still struggling to recover from the collapse of the Soviet Union, Castro insists socialism is working. But things are changing. The U.S. dollar is no longer illegal, and some Americans are defying the U.S. travel ban to enjoy the dollar’s power here. Private restaurants are now allowed. Budding capitalists are opening shops and bars. Education is Castro’s mantra for the new Cuba. For Castro, freedom starts with education. If literacy alone were the yardstick, Cuba would be among the most liberated nations on Earth. Cuba’s literacy rate hovers around an impressive 96 percent, and university students pay no tuition.” – ABCnews.com. Throughout the piece, Castro is referred to as a legitimate head of government, his system a “socialist” one as if it were a democratic social democracy, and there’s not a single quote from an opponent. The piece even spins the Elian saga Castro’s way. (First noticed by Carthaginian Peace.)

NOW THE BEAGLE IS PISSED: The mullahs crack down on doggies.

Here’s a picture of two parents whose 19 year-old daughter was just murdered by Islamists. This story from the Sydney Morning Herald makes for more gut-wrenching reading:

At 2pm yesterday, Craig Salvatori put his two young daughters on a plane at Bali airport, telling them he had to stay “to look for mummy”. Three hours later he found her body in a morgue. Kathy, who would have turned 38 yesterday, was barely recognisable, except for some jewellery, her body so badly charred, her blonde hair blackened… The president of the Maroubra Lions rugby league club, John Costa, said seven families had immediate members missing. “We look like we’ve lost five mothers, a father and two children … missing this long after the event, it’s not looking good.”

Read the story. This is Australia’s September 11. Meanwhile, we’re told to debate whether we should go to war. This isn’t war? (Found via Tim Blair, who is must-reading right now.)

THE CASE FOR WAR: Thank God (and Marty Peretz, Roger Hertog and Michael Steinhardt) for the New Republic. No I’m not just sucking up. The maintenance of a robust domestic liberalism with foreign policy toughness and moralism is a public service. I say this as someone who dissents from some of their redistributionist economic policy. In this tradition, Jon Chait – one of the magazine’s most impassioned opponents of George Bush’s domestic agenda – seems to me to have nailed a couple of vital weaknesses in the liberal case against war. First, the notion that this war is somehow uniquely unilateralist or threatening to international law. On the contrary, Chait argues:

The more persuasive justification for war is that Iraq has violated a series of U.N. resolutions requiring its disarmament and compliance with weapons inspections. Yes, lots of countries violate U.N. resolutions. What makes Iraq’s violation a casus belli is that it agreed to disarm as a condition of ending the Gulf war. War with Iraq does not require trashing international law. Just the opposite: Sustaining international law is central to its very rationale.

Put like that, it’s obvious. Besides, do you recall all these internationalists getting uptight about the bombing of Kosovo, done despite no U.N. approval? But Chait’s better point is the way in which Bush’s threat of force has made inspections more rather than less viable:

If forced to choose between tough inspections and nothing, the allies have shown they prefer nothing. If forced to choose between tough inspections and unilateral war, it now looks as though they will choose inspections. Had Bush foresworn unilateral action, as liberals have implored, the prospects for the tough U.N. inspections they now urge would be nonexistent.

I wish Jon hadn’t engaged in some gratuitous Bush-bashing in the piece. But maybe it’s as well he did. He proves that you can be a Bush-hater and still support the war. Would that more liberals had the courage to overlook their dislike of the president and get to the point.

ANTI-WAR MOMENTUM?: What to believe – Evelyn Nieves’ breathless, Rainesian poem to resistance in the Washington Post; or this more sober account from the Chicago Tribune? One obvious point, noticed by Glenn Reynolds, is that the Post piece relies entirely on the anti-war movement’s own assessment of its numbers and strength.

MUST-READ: Alas, it’s not online, but Jeffrey Goldberg’s report on Hezbollah in the current New Yorker is yet another superb piece of reporting from him. It left me with an even grimmer feeling in my stomach than usual: and certainly the expectation that a new war in Lebanon will likely soon follow war on Iraq. I think what Jeffrey has seen with his own eyes – which is what has led him to take a robust pro-war stance – is the emergence of another Nazi-like ideology in the Middle East. Here’s how he puts it in the online interview on the New Yorker site:

[S]omething new is happening in the Arab world-namely, the melding of Arab nationalist-based anti-Zionism, anti-Jewish rhetoric from the Koran, and, most disturbingly, the antique anti-Semitic beliefs and conspiracy theories of European Fascism. Add Holocaust denial, which is also becoming popular in the Arab world, and you have a dangerous new ideology, an ideology that Hezbollah, despite its assertions that it has nothing against Jews as Jews, propounds quite vigorously.

Reading the article, I’m even more convinced that these fanatics interpret any weakness or conciliation on the part of the West as an invitation for more terror. That’s why they have to be defeated. And sooner rather than later.

NEED A SMOKE? Here’s a place where it’s still legal.

I wonder what Glenda Gilmore thinks when she absorbs the fact that her nativist, isolationist “Blame-America-First” ideology now has a new magazine. And it’s edited by Pat Buchanan! Ron Radosh has a typically astute piece in Alex Star’s Ideas Section at the Boston Globe on the new red-brown coalition. Of course, the critical glue uniting far left and right these days is anti-Semitism. My favorite moment in “The American Conservative” is Pat Buchanan’s support for what he calls Albert M. Nixon. I think the Gore-Nixon comparison is closer than others might think. But then I’ve long loathed Nixon.

If you were the p.r. spokesman for al Qaeda, what would you have to say about the Bali massacre? I think you’d say it was payback for Australians’ support for president Bush’s war on terror. Funny, that’s just what Robert Fisk has just written. Fisk goes on to warn the Brits that they’re next, among others, if they don’t stop backing Bush:

Our support for the United States – an infinitely closer alliance than any support from France – makes Britain the most likely candidate for attack after the US. Then there are the small, more vulnerable nations that give quiet assistance to the American military; Belgium, which hosts Nato HQ; Canada, whose special forces have also been operating in Afghanistan; Ireland, which allows US military aircraft to refuel at Shannon.

Dear Osama. Don’t forget to murder the Irish. They’ve been nice to the Great Satan. (I found this excrescence via Tim Blair’s superb blog from Australia. Don’t miss it in the coming days.) This turn in Fisk’s argument was perhaps inevitable. Fisk bemoaned the massacre of September 11, but now that the West has responded, he will interpret every terrorist attack as self-defense on their part, and every ally of the United States as a sucker for more punishment. He’ll express sadness. And after every new atrocity, he’ll say he told us so.

I’ve been to Bali, with my old friend Max Kennedy, almost fifteen years ago. It’s a blessed little place – about as quiet and secluded and out of it as any place on earth. A mixture of Hindu culture, ancient animism, stoners from Australia, and skinny, pale Euro-hikers, it was a little bohemia all its own. Now these monsters have struck again, incinerating innocents in their murderous religious rage. There is no good here. And although Mike Kinsley will scoff at me for saying it, there is much evil. The target is not accidental. Having fun, mixing cultures, partying till dawn are all wonderful human activities that these dour murderers loathe. They hope that by targeting the “sinful,” they might even be excused by less extreme Muslims. The only good news is that Indonesia may now better understand what it’s up against; and the full inclusion of a moderate Muslim country against these Islamofascists will help greatly. The Brits and Australians, who were again among the dead, have already been spectacular in the war on terror. But perhaps now that more Germans have been murdered, Chancellor Schroder will rethink his hostility to confronting Saddam and his terrorist allies.

THE ANTI-WAR SPIN: Yes, the spin from the anti-war crowd will be that this event means we have to forget about pressuring Saddam. We’re losing “focus,” they’ll cry. Hooey. The administration has been urging Indonesia to crack down for months. Even the Guardian conceded this morning that “there was no immediate evidence that the Bush administration’s current concentration on Iraq had diminished its efforts against al-Qaida and its supporters in Indonesia. During a visit to Jakarta in August, the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, announced the renewal of US military assistance, a $50m package over three years.” More may well be needed. In fact, I think the “focus on al Qaeda” argument gets it exactly the wrong way round. It’s partly because we’re aiming at Iraq that the Islamists will try to wrest our attention away. They tried in Israel in the spring. They will throw more at us in the coming weeks and months. They know that a nuclear Iraq could be their safe and inviolable haven for decades in waging a terror war on the West; and they therefore understand the long-term stakes in the next few months. So, mercifully, does president Bush.

A FATHER’S LAMENT: The chicken-hawk argument – this time a defensible form, from the Palestinian father of a boy who killed himself under the influence of the terrorist death cult. It’s not an easy piece to read:

I ask, on my behalf and on behalf of every father and mother informed that their son has blown himself up: ‘By what right do these leaders send the young people, even young boys in the flower of their youth, to their deaths?’ Who gave them religious or any other legitimacy to tempt our children and urge them to their deaths?”
Yes, I say ‘death,’ not ‘martyrdom.’ Changing and beautifying the term, or paying a few thousand dollars to the family of the young man who has gone and will never return, does not ease the shock or alter the irrevocable end. The sums of money [paid] to the martyrs’ families cause pain more than they heal; they make the families feel that they are being rewarded for the lives of their children.
Do the children’s lives have a price? Has death become the only way to restore the rights and liberate the land? And if this be the case, why doesn’t a single one of all the sheikhs who compete amongst themselves in issuing fiery religious rulings, send his son?

Wrenching. There is and will be a silent majority of Palestinians and Arabs who will eventually turn against their manipulative despots and terrorist mob-bosses. Iraq will be the first opportunity to prove this. Others will surely follow.

FRIEDMAN’S PANDERING: Just what was Tom Friedman trying to say yesterday? Here’s his peroration: “Frankly, I don’t want to hear another word about Iraq right now. I want to hear that my president and my Congress are taking the real steps needed in this country – starting with sane gun control and sane economic policy – to stop this slide into over here becoming like over there.” Huh? Has he suddenly morphed into Bill O’Reilly? Does Friedman really think that gun control would have stopped the DC sniper – a man so skilled he could easily have gotten a license in any state, and killed in a state, Maryland, with some of the strictest gun laws in the country? Does he really think we should stop discussing Iraq? And what does he mean by a “sane” economic policy? This is just populist grandstanding. That’s the thing with Tom’s columns. He makes so much sense and then he plays to the Upper East Side choir. How disappointing.

THE MIRROR CRACKS: Remember the British tabloid that runs John Pilger on the cover, lionizes Bill Clinton and has largely given itself over to an anti-American anti-war agenda? The good news is that the Daily Mirror has seen its circulation drop 6.2 percent since last September, while its chief rival, Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun has seen a gain of 4.7 percent. The anti-war left makes a lot of noise, but that doesn’t mean it’s all that popular. Even in Europe. Even on the left.

THE CASE AGAINST WAR: It could spoil Mary McGrory’s Venice vacations. No, this column is not a parody.

THE GILMORE AWARD: I didn’t invent it, but Erin O’Connor did.

ANTI-SEMITISM WATCH: Reading through the Yale Daily News can be a truly eye-opening experience. An article by a freshman concerned about rising anti-Semitism in the world and on campus prompted some responses I honestly thought I’d never read on a college website. Yes, I know all sorts of loonies can log on and post things on a free-floating comment board, and there’s no way to know who’s behind some of the comments. But who would be reading the Yale Daily News so closely in the first place? Anyway, make your own mind up by clicking on the comment section. Here’s one response from a Lissa Russo:

I recently attended a forum focusing on the Israeli/Palestinian issue. Both sides made very valid points but there was a moment of heated exchange when the pro-Israel side initiated the “anti-semite” slur and completely ended it for me. I am sick and tired of Jewish people always smearing those that merely disagree with their views as “evil”. I never thought I’d say this but alot of what the so-called “white supremacists” are saying are proving to be more accurate than I feel comfortable admitting.

Agreement with white supremacists? At Yale? Then there’s this:

I guess so many people are anti-semitic because the charge *anti-semitism* has been used so often it’s no longer considered as horrid as it once was – I mean, even Billy Graham wasn’t safe! I think *anti-semitism* isn’t so much a term for *people who hate Jews* as much as it’s come to mean *someone whom Jews hate*.

Nice touch that. Then this:

… [E]very d
ay, more of the world is made aware of JEWISH manipulation of politics, money markets and media and deflecting criticism by shrilling about ‘anti- Semitism’ is beginning to get old. We see how influential Jews have gotten the mere criticism of the so-called ‘Holocaust’ turned into a felony crime in Europe. We see how the politician who merely HINTS at easing foreign aid to Israel losing all hope of re-election. Every nation that opens its doors to Jews invariably finds themselves wracked with a tribe that works tirelessly to legitimize homosexuality, race-mixing, the importation of Third World immigrants and similar filth inherent in the Jewish agenda. And as usual, when discovered they run behind their Star of David and screech that we don’t like them because of their RELIGION!!! HAH!! It’s not working anymore, James!

These are posted on the Yale Daily news site. They should be. They tell us what’s out there – even at the most elite universities. or perhaps I should say especially at the most elite universities.

AT THE BARBER’S: Brent Staples gets the “Barber Shop” controversy exactly right.

SOUTH DAKOTA SHENANIGANS: Josh Marshall doesn’t think the Taylor ad was homophobic; and he doesn’t think that the Democrats are up to no good in South Dakota. “Absent more evidence of anything really widespread,” Josh writes, “this looks to me like a Republican effort to snuff out or throw a wet blanket over the Democrats’ effort to register a lot of new voters. They have a long history of this.” I guess he hasn’t read about the forging of voter registration cards yet. Democrats wouldn’t do anything like that, would they? They’re the good guys.

THE SAINTLY INQUISITOR: “Escriva’s motto was ‘compelle intrare’: ‘force them to enter’. In my experience, and in the experience of many others, that might just as appropriately be translated as ‘trick ’em into joining’ – and, in some cases, ‘terrify ’em into staying’. He and his followers believe that they are forcing people to be saved, pursuing the highest of motives with all the means at their disposal.” – a man who nearly got sucked into Opus Dei recounts his experiences.

Not even an apology if people perceived it to be anti-gay, the usual formula for an embarrassed pol. Put this together with the gay groups’ insouciance, and you’ve just given Republicans carte blanche to gay-bait opponents at any opportunity. Still not a peep from the far-left National Gay Lesbian Task Force or from GLAAD, the gay thought-police. I just found a first edition of “Animal Farm.” Never felt more relevant.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: Worth passing along, I think:

Just a short note of thanks. Christopher Hitchens’ unswerving dedication to his conscience reinvigorated my own sense of purpose, long dormant through disillusionment. Thanks for honoring, if not the specifics of his stand, the courage he displayed in severing ties with The Nation. I served as a weapons specialist, of sorts, in the US Navy during Desert Storm/Shield. At the time, I truly believed in what we were doing; it seemed we could only be right. Then, as we returned to the States, and the post-deployment culture shock only further alienated us from our families and friends, we found, to our horror, that the war effort wasn’t so monolithically supported as we’d thought. We’d had no clue that, while we were fighting, and some of our friends were dying, others picketed and rallied against us. At least it seemed they were against us. It was our blood, wasn’t it? I first heard the phrase, “Blood for oil,” after I’d already served my time in the Gulf. And as attrition and time chipped away my certainty, I began to lose that spark of patriotism that had been my impetus for serving my country at all. The last three years of my six year enlistment were hell. I didn’t have anything to prop me up when things got hairy. America, and especially American politicians, just didn’t seem worth dying for. I didn’t want to bleed for oil anymore. I received my Honorable discharge in 1996. I’m sure my supervisors, not the same men who knew me during the Gulf War, breathed a deep sigh of relief and wrote me off as another one-hitch loser. Fine by me. I started a business. I raised a family. I stayed away from politics. Then came September, 11th 2001. Fanatical men shattered what small buffer of ignorant bliss I’d managed to maintain around myself and my family. Men no different than those we’d fought and beaten ten years earlier. And I once again felt I had to do something. I’m now in the hiring pools for both the Federal Air Marshal program and the Transportation Safety Administration’s Airport Security Screener. That’s my stand, and people like Hitchens remind me why I took it then, and why I do it now. Thanks.

GLENDA RESPONDS:

Dear Mr. Sullivan, I am delighted to accept the Sontag Award. I have disagreed with you since you were a boy wonder. In fact, I cancelled my subscription to The New Republic when you hijacked it, and I have watched your downwardly mobile career path with interest. Are you a U.S. citizen yet? Thank you for bringing a small part of my essay to a larger audience. Glenda Gilmore

Charming, isn’t she? Meanwhile, check out the website where her vacuous essay was first printed. Click on the link to the responses. They’re amazing. My favorite is as below:

Daily Dish Readers: Welcome to American Studies at Yale—check your brain at the door Posted at: 10/12/02 5:18:29 AM Posted by: HGS Dissident (as entered by poster)

What you have seen on display here in this article are the consequences of letting race-and-gender airheads infiltrate and then eventually take over a once a stellar department. Can you imagine what it is like for a graduate student like myself, who labored for seven years in a remote part of the world to learn a non-Indo-European language, to find himself under the thumb of parochial know-nothings like Glenda Gilmore? Yale History has unfortunately become the province of such America Studies apparatchiks and their partisan agendas. These so-called scholars are a profoundly petty, unworldly and intellectually average lot. Though they preen themselves with a fashionable thirdworldism, few if any have seriously ventured beyond the confines of comfy academic settings in America and Western Europe. They have risen to where they are by figuring out, way back during their undergraduate days, that honors and riches are available to those who can make themselves adept at uncovering yet more evidence confirming how our dastardly American society at one time in its past failed to live up to the standards of egaliltarian utopianism (that no society from time immemorial has ever lived up to these unrealizable ideals is not up for discussion…). This ongoing activity of unearthing fresh layers of American evil sets the boundaries of their intellectual universe. They are absolutely unable and unwilling to entertain the possibility that there have been or could be non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual perpetrators of violence and oppression.

When they are confronted with scholarship like my own, which concentrates on the imperial history of a non-Western power, their response is either knee-jerk moral equivalence which changes the topic to American crimes against underprivileged groups, or the contrivance of contorted causal chains which attempt to blame anything and everything that goes wrong in any part of the world on Washington or corporate America. They simply will not acknowledge that someone like Saddam or Bin Laden is possible. The only truly bad people on this planet are Christian Conservatives—and oil men. Gilmore’s article is the worst example I have seen yet of this moral and intellectual myopia at Yale.

The news is not all bad however. For the past several semesters I have worked as a teacher’s assistant and, what do you know, but the message is not taking. Most undergrads are savvy enough to have figured out that their profs are people who could not handle life in the real world—and they are simply waiting them out. It comes as a profound shock to these students when, after a few weeks in my section, they discover that I share their contempt for the naive, hyperbolic posturings of the faculty. The fact that Gilmore included in her piece a plea to Yalies to stand up to Bush shows how out of touch many professors are with the student body. Sorry, Glenda, but your students actually approve of the job the president is doing (wish I could say the same for your teaching….). They prefer his sober reckoning with geopolitical realities to your melodramatic verbage. The only way in which this situation resembles your vaunted sixties is that the young people are rebelling against authority—which at today’s Yale means rejecting the nihilistic rantings of tenured hyenas in favor of a level-headed appreciation of America’s security needs.

Get that person a blog!

A TASTE OF SADDAM: John Burns, a superb New York Times reporter, gets the run-around from Saddam:

But whatever Al Furat may be these days, the Iraqis certainly knew that the tour for at least 200 scrambling, sweating reporters would not settle the matter conclusively, and not just because none of the visitors were experts in nuclear physics. The tour left no time to visit all of the dozen or more buildings on the site, and no opportunity to descend into the underground bunkers that appeared to be accessible from steel-sided entranceways with rusting doorways that were dotted about. The result, mostly, was confusion and befuddlement – whether that was the intention of the tour’s organizers in the Ministry of Military Industrialization,
or an inevitability given the complexity of the issue and the chaotic circumstances. What was certain, however, was that tours like these for reporters are unlikely to add very much to the world’s knowledge of what Iraq’s secretive leadership has been up to.

And you think inspectors would fare much better?

DATA: Here are two stills from the ad for those of without internet connections. Judge for yourself. The reach for the guy’s crotch at the end of the ad is particularly subtle.