The Dish

A reader reads a revealing extract from my new colleague Mark Bowden’s "Guests of the Ayatollah." It’s set in 1979:

Sheikh-ol-eslam also had one more session with Tom Ahern. The CIA station chief was led into a room where his old interrogator was seated alone behind a desk.  Stretched across the desk was a long piece of cord.

…The best [Ahern] could figure, Sheik-ol-eslam was going to use [the cord] on him again. Instead, Sheik-ol-eslam started explaining that the beatings Ahern had received were really not indicative of his own values or those of Islam.

"As a token of my sincerity in this, I invite you to use this rope to do to me what I did to you."

Ahern looked at the rope and then at Sheik-ol-eslam.

"We don’t do stuff like that," he said.

Those were the days.

Williamsburg, Virginia, 2.19 pm.

A reader counters:

Your previous emailer who tried to minimize Federer’s dominance is missing the point entirely. Quite the contrary to what he claims, Federer’s amazing accomplishments are all the more amazing because of the fact that he doesn’t have a real rival. And the reason he lacks a rival?  Because Federer is so far superior to the rest of the current crop of players that none can emerge.  How that complete dominance can be construed as a negative against him is utterly ridiculous.  Should Federer purposely lose several majors to the same player, in order to provide himself with a rival, thus putting him in the same league as the other greats?

You could easily say the same about Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods. Both, at one point, became so completely dominant in their sport that they had (or have) no real rivalry.  The gap between 1st and 2nd was so massive that neither ever gave another player an opportunity to become a rival, because a rivalry requires a measure of equality.  Does that diminish Michael Jordan and mean he’s not the greatest basketball player of all time, because he didn’t have a Bird to his Magic or a Wilt to his Russell?  Of course not.  It was further proof of how great he was.

What your emailer is arguing is not about the greatness of individual players, but the greatness and entertainment value of eras.  Of course you can argue that the Borg/McEnroe/Connors era was superior to the current one in terms of entertainment.  Or that the Lendl/Becker/Edberg era or the Agassi/Sampras era were better for the game of tennis because of the rivalries.  They were more exciting precisely because no single player dominated and there was always a good chance of one of the rivals beating the other.  Seeing the same player win major after major in dominating fashion may not be exciting, but to claim that it diminishes that player’s accomplishment or reputation is foolish.

Here’s a YouTube of one of the greatest rallies of the modern era: 45 shots between Federer and Hewitt.

Chris DeMuth has produced an internal email dealing with the Guardian’s smear-job. Here’s a pertinent extract:

AEI has published a large volume of books and papers on climate change issues over the past decade and has held numerous conferences on the subject. A wide range of views on the scientific and policy issues have been presented in these publications and conferences.  All of them are posted on our website. Our latest book on the subject, Lee Lane’s Strategic Options for Bush Administration Climate Policy, advocates a carbon tax, which I’m pretty sure ExxonMobil opposes (the book also dares to criticize some of the Bush administration’s climate-change policies!).

Second, attempting to disentangle science from politics on the question of climate change causation, and to fashion policies that take account of the uncertainties concerning causation, are longstanding AEI interests. The new research project that Ken and Steve Hayward have been organizing is a continuation of these interests.  I am attaching the two letters that Steve and Ken have sent out to climate change scientists and policy experts (the first one emphasizing the scientific and climate-modeling issues addressed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; the second, more recent one covering broader policy issues as well)—and invite you to read them and compare them with the characterization in the Guardian article.  The first letter, sent last summer to Professor Steve Schroeder of Texas A&M (and also to his colleague Gerald North), is the one quoted by the Guardian.  Ken and Steve canvassed scholars with a range of views on the scientific and policy issues, with an eye to the intrinsic quality and interest of their work rather than to whether partisans might characterize them as climate change ‘skeptics’ or ‘advocates.’  They certainly did not avoid those with a favorable view of the IPCC reports — such as Professor Schroeder himself.

Third, what the Guardian essentially characterizes as a bribe is the conventional practice of AEI — and Brookings, Harvard, and the University of Manchester — to pay individuals at other research institutions for commissioned work, and to cover their travel expenses when they come to the sponsoring institution to present their papers. The levels of authors’ honoraria vary from case to case, but a $10,000 fee for a research project involving the review of a large amount of dense scientific material, and the synthesis of that material into an original, footnoted and rigorous article is hardly exorbitant or unusual; many academics would call it modest.

Dan Savage has a very well-expressed riposte to Mary Cheney’s latest attempt to duck moral responsibility for her acquiescence to anti-gay bigotry among Republicans. Check it out.

Apologies for the delay. Moving to the Atlantic means mastering a whole new set of tools for blogging, let alone emails, administrative necessities, and the actual process of moving. I’ll post the next epistle Monday – the first post at the Atlantic.com. It’s been a hectic week. Meanwhile, the entire blogalogue can be read here.

Inimitable:

Foucault-worship is an example of what I call the Big Daddy syndrome: Secular humanists, who have drifted from their religious and ethnic roots, have created a new Jehovah out of string and wax. Again and again — in memoirs, for example, by trendy but pedestrian uber-academics like Harvard’s Stephen Greenblatt and Brown’s Robert Scholes — one sees the scenario of Melancholy, Bookish, Passive, Insecure Young Nebbish suddenly electrified and transfigured by the Grand Epiphany of Blindingly Brilliant Foucault. This sappy psychodrama would be comic except for the fact that American students forced to read Foucault have been defrauded of a genuine education in intellectual history and political analysis (a disciplined genre that starts with Thucydides and flows directly to the best of today’s journalism on current events).

American students, forget Foucault! Reverently study the massive primary evidence of world history, and forge your own ideas and systems. Poststructuralism is a corpse. Let it stink in the Parisian trash pit where it belongs!

Yes, I know what truculence means, thank you very much. What I don’t understand is how it makes grammatical sense in the sentence Angelou wrote. I think she meant the walls’ truculent refusal to fall down. But as written, the sentence is ungrammatical. I can forgive the Washington Post’s editors allowing Angelou’s pretentiousness, self-righteousness and lame, exhausted metaphors into their paper. (Joshua? Please.) But I draw the line at patently bad grammar.

A reader dissents:

You’re being a little naive if you think that AEI’s goal is truly to inspire a real debate about the veracity of claims about man-made climate change.  This is right out of the theocon playbook on evolution.  The goal is not to have a real debate, because a real debate is something you can (and in both cases, when talking about scientific evidence, will) lose.  The goal is simply to muddy the waters, try and get the media to portray climate change as a ‘he said, he said’ kind of issue.  The fact is, there are a lot of scientists. You will find contrarians to any position imaginable.  For an ideologically-inspired organization to cherry-pick a few who are willing to say what they want to hear (especially for a fee!!) and publish those reports, instead of those scientists having to go through the peer-review process, reduces the scientific rigor of the debate.

Many people don’t have the time or interest to sift through the actual evidence, so they’ll see one story that says yes, and another that says no, and throw up their hands and say ‘oh well, whatever, who can know?’ That has real-life consequences. So work like this really has a disproportionate effect, in the sense that 5 scientists who say ‘man doesn’t cause climate change’ and are funded by oil companies can counteract the effect of hundreds or thousands of scientists who say ‘man does cause climate change’, but operate through the usual, scientifically-accepted channels. That’s why shenanigans like this have to be see the light of day, so at least everyone knows who’s pushing the pieces around.

Here’s a quote worth reading:

"All the Shiites have to do is tell everyone to lay low, wait for the Americans to leave, then when they leave you have a target list and within a day they’ll kill every Sunni leader in the country. It’ll be called the ‘Day of Death’ or something like that," said 1st Lt. Alain Etienne, 34, of Brooklyn, N.Y. "They say, ‘Wait, and we will be victorious.’ That’s what they preach. And it will be their victory."

Now go read Victor Davis Hanson’s latest partisan screed against the Democrats. If the Republicans had spent half the effort they have devoted to domestic partisanship to winning the war in Iraq, we may not be in the morass we are today.