The Dish

Know hope. Some civil society is emerging.

On the lecture circuit, I have heard many stories in Coulter’s wake of her actual charm, nervousness, politeness, civility, reasonableness in person. Now we’re all a little different in print than in person. People who meet me often say I’m much mellower and, er, nicer in person than I sometimes come off in pixels or print. That’s defensible, I think. Writing is sometimes about provoking, and it’s fine for a man or woman to have slightly different persona in reality than in print or even TV. But Coulter seems to have taken this to a bizarre extreme. Another reader comments:

Just wanted to add my little bit of insight to the Ann Coulter discussion.  While interning at a cable news show a year ago, I was responsible for guest relations on a day when Ann Coulter was being interviewed in the studio.  I had to meet Ann Coulter in the lobby, take her to the green room, prep her and bring her to the set.  We chatted for a bit during that time, despite my intense dislike of her crude politics and television personality.  I was shocked by how pleasant she was, even when I told her where I go to school (a favorite target of Fox News, one of the maligned Northeastern "bastions of the liberal elite").  She had spoken there recently and received the typical poor reception that she thrives on, but despite that she had nothing but great things to say about my college and all the "bright students" and their "brilliant questions."  If she had been talking about my school in the media, however, there is no question that the only words out of Ann Coulter’s mouth would have been "liberal elite", "New England", "brainwashing professors", "traitors", etc.

I came away from our conversation with the distinct impression that her television personality is exaggerated and largely manufactured, and that she doesn’t believe many of the ludicrous things she says.  She’s not a radical of any sort, she’s just a coniving businesswoman.  The woman has simply figured out how to market herself and make cold, hard cash, and will say any controversial thing she deems necessary to do so.  That has become obvious after her outrageous attacks on the 9/11 widows, which have caused her book to shoot to the top of the Amazon charts.

What Ann Coulter does is worse than other media personalities who actually believe the vileness that they spew, because she does it solely for the money and notoriety, despite her hypocritical claims to the mantles of Christianity and patriotism.  Her actions show that she is devoted to just one thing: the church of the American dollar.  To borrow a line from Jon Stewart, cheap hacks like her are hurting America.

And hurting some people who lost their own families in a terrorist atrocity. I take Coulter as seriously as I take a fictional character. Except most fictional characters do not make millions by assassinating the characters and wounding the souls of other real human beings.

(Photo: Platon)

Our redirect server went down again. My apologies. We will soon be moving to a new company and server so this won’t happen again. As it is, I’ve spent the morning listening to some fascinating papers on Oakeshott, right, left, Idealism, Gehrke, and the "precautionary principle". An Oakeshott conference also brings together a wonderfully idiosyncratic and smart bunch of people. The company has been quite invigorating, even inspiring. Blogging will be sparser than usual. But I’ll be back as soon as I can. Money quote from lunch: "You are not an idea of mine. You’re eating lunch." Ah. Philosophy in a deli.

Can I second this comment?

My only answer about what the effect of Zarqawi’s death might be is to say with Tom Friedman, ‘the next six months will be crucial.’ When his repetition of that phrase over and over was pointed out in The Corner, I said I would have agreed with him every time he said it. Some readers asked why. Because every time Friedman said it, it was true. It was and is true because Iraq has never decisively tilted one way or the other. It has seemed at times that it was on the verge of doing so (I thought it was when I wrote, ‘We’re Winning’), but it never has.
This is why people are wrong to say that Iraq is lost and wrong to say victory is inevitable. It is still very fluid. Events matter, leadership matters, policy matters. All of them interact in a dynamic way.

I take flak for my intermittent optimism and pessimism on Iraq. Mickey Kaus, whose own clairvoyance is not exactly renowned, has ridiculed me for it. But Rich is right. This is what wars are like; and this is what history is like. On a blog, you reflect what you see at the time. The word "journalism" is rooted in the idea of something that is true for the day. You try and get everything right, not to jump too far ahead, not to give up too soon, and so on. But the world will foil you. All you can do is your best to make sense of a deeply opaque and difficult time. Or as I just emailed to one reader:

Try being right ten times a day for six years.

The good news is: sometimes we learn more by getting things wrong. All I can say is: I sure want to win this war and defeat this enemy. And everything I write and every criticism I make about the war is related to that overwhelming imperative.

A reader comments:

I heard Ann Coulter speak in Minnesota at our small, nice, liberal arts college. When she first walked in there was some heckling and boos. But then she began to talk and everything got quiet. You could visibly see her falter and rush in the silence. There were no outraged audience members, no yelling or protesting, just… boredom. She was terrible! It was like seeing WWF on TV and then getting a lecture from one of them. On politics. Just silly. In fact, the audience started to chuckle softly at points and then louder at others. But people do believe her and love her for the hate she spews. The college Republican leadership had "I heart Ann" and "Marry me Ann!" on their home made t-shirts. Like the WWF. Sad.

Actually, she’s sad. No core convictions; no arguments; ad-copy prose; pure partisan circus. And she now claims the mantle of Christianity. You can indeed imagine Jesus speaking of widows the way Coulter does, can’t you? May she one day forgive herself. No one else will.

From the Malkin Screamfest’s coverage of YearlyKos, a moment of terrible deflation:

People here are largely, disappointingly, golf-shirted, short-haired, and white bread. Grooming and hygiene are up to western business standards.

Where are the white people with dreadlocks?? For my part, I’m at a kind of unKos: the annual meeting of the Michael Oakeshott Association. I’m in the hotel in Colorado Springs. Tomorrow will be a series of seminars and papers. The three readers of this blog who care can find more details here.

One caveat about the Zarqawi killing. For a while now, various sources knowledgeable about Iraq have warned me not to take some claims made about Zarqawi too seriously. He was never a close or comfortable ally with Osama bin Laden, and the Atlantic profile has a fascinating account of the two monsters’ first meeting:

As they sat facing each other across the receiving room, a former Israeli intelligence official told me, ‘it was loathing at first sight.’

According to several different accounts of the meeting, bin Laden distrusted and disliked al-Zarqawi immediately. He suspected that the group of Jordanian prisoners with whom al-Zarqawi had been granted amnesty earlier in the year had been infiltrated by Jordanian intelligence; something similar had occurred not long before with a Jordanian jihadist cell that had come to Afghanistan. Bin Laden also disliked al-Zarqawi’s swagger and the green tattoos on his left hand, which he reportedly considered un-Islamic. Al-Zarqawi came across to bin Laden as aggressively ambitious, abrasive, and overbearing. His hatred of Shiites also seemed to bin Laden to be potentially divisive‚Äîwhich, of course, it was.

Zarqawi made a name for himself among the Sunni insurgency in the first few months after the liberation because of the sheer brutality and sectarian nature of his religiously-inspired violence. But he wasn’t the central figure in that insurgency, and had recently alienated many. His former mentor broke with him after the hotel bombings in Jordan. The Bush administration often hyped Zarqawi, many say, in order to retain the notion that al Qaeda and Saddam were joined at the hip, and to connect the struggle in Iraq more directly with 9/11 in the eyes of the American public. But the truth was more complicated than that. Again from Mary Ann Weaver’s profile:

"Even then — and even more so now — Zarqawi was not the main force in the insurgency," the former Jordanian intelligence official, who has studied al-Zarqawi for a decade, told me. "To establish himself, he carried out the Muhammad Hakim operation, and the attack against the UN. Both of them gained a lot of support for him—with the tribes, with Saddam’s army and other remnants of his regime. They made Zarqawi the symbol of the resistance in Iraq, but not the leader. And he never has been."

He continued, "The Americans have been patently stupid in all of this. They’ve blown Zarqawi so out of proportion that, of course, his prestige has grown. And as a result, sleeper cells from all over Europe are coming to join him now."

They’re still there. Perhaps the biggest reason to rejoice at his demise is not that he represented the core of the Sunni insurgency, but that his strategy of fomenting sectarian mayhem helped unleash the most destructive force in the nascent state. Maybe his removal will help abate that force. Or maybe it now has a momentum all its own. We’ll see.

The Atlantic scores for timing too – with this just released profile of Zarqawi.

I don’t want to de accused of being excitable, but Maliki’s sense of timing really does show a sure political touch. The announcement today of the completion of the Iraqi cabinet is in some ways more significant than the killing of Zarqawi. The combo is an energizing jolt to morale:

Bolani, a Shi’ite, and Jassim, a Sunni who until now served as Iraqi ground forces commander, pledged to improve security for all Iraqis.
The legislature also endorsed a Minister for National Security – Shi’ite Sherwan Waeli.
The new defense and interior ministers — who both worked in the armed forces during Saddam’s rule — will be under pressure to start tackling the kind of bombings that brought more death and mayhem to the Iraqi capital on Thursday.

And how not to be delighted by the al Jazeera spin? Money quote:

Reacting to the killing of Abu Mus’ab al Zarqawi in Iraq, pro-Jihadi commentators on al Jazeera rushed to assert that the "death of Zarqawi won’t weaken al Qaida but will actually unify the organization." Abdelbari Atwan, the editor of al Quds al Arabi accused Jordanian and US intelligence of penetrating the inner circles of Zarqawi and were successful in getting to him." He added that the killing of Zarqawi was coordinated with the appointment of the ministers of defense and interior in Baghdad.

Coordinated? The only thing that seems to have been coordinated in Iraq for a while have been murders and bombings. That just changed. We shouldn’t get our hopes up too high, because the murders continue, the sectarian bitterness lingers, the government has only just been formed. But the end of Zarqawi and the beginning of the first truly national government are signs of great hope, just when it apppeared there might be none. Courage. Patience. Criticism.

(Photo: Ceerwan Aziz/Reuters.)

Holt, Missouri, 7 pm.