The Dish

The debate sharpens:

The defense of W would have been more persuasive if your reader didn’t violate his own advice in the text of the message. Your emailer wrote:

Readers’ purported "psychoanalyses" are not the musings of intelligent adults, but those of peevish adolescents… Any mature adult should realize that, nearly every time one tries to guess at a person’s agenda or motivations, one ends up embarrassingly far from the mark … all this brilliant "psychoanalyzing" is simply an attempt to belatedly jump on the Bush-bashing bandwagon that has been rolling on for years …

How does he know that your other readers are "attempting to jump on the bandwagon?" Is he a brilliant psychoanalyst or a peevish adolescent?

Just a peevish psychoanalyst, I’d say.

Brian Anderson is officially a geek now.

The vehemence of the denunciation of the conduct of American troops in Iraq by the new Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is a big deal, is it not? There are several ways to look at it. One is how the NYT spun it, which is that it is one more rivet in the coffin of the Iraq venture, another sign of the centrifugal chaos and loss of morale that has now become routine in this war. It seems to me more interesting than that. Maliki just went to Basra to brow-beat local tribes and militias into holding fire and giving the new government a chance. The next day, he harnesses pent-up Iraqi anger and distress at the way in which understandably jumpy coalition soldiers sometimes interact with an Iraqi public among whom murderers and terrorists hide. It seems to me that Maliki believes he has more to gain by attacking the Americans than by defending or ignoring them. Why? Maybe because if a national Iraqi leader emerges who can express frustration at American soldiers, he can leverage that and build the popular support to face down local militias or even recalcitrant factions in the new parliament. It’s just a theory. But for the first time, I’ve read a story in which an Iraqi politician seems to be expressing national Iraqi sentiment, and distancing himself from the occupation. In some ways, isn’t that what we want?

The patient has been on life support for three years. Removing the dictatorship and allowing anarchy to spread essentially killed off the Iraqi nation for a while. Did we just see the first spasm of an entity coming back to life? And could Maliki be its spokesman? I can hope, can’t I? It seems to me we should not forget the vast scale of the challenge in Iraq. We have made it worse than it might have been, but it would never have been easy. And the simple achievement of an actual political process, however painfully slow, and now the emergence of a leader who seems capable of articulating a nation’s own feelings are good things. Omar reminds us of this today as well:

The important point here which should be taken into consideration is that we are not forming a government but we are forming a state and a system from scratch so naturally the difficulties we’ll face during each stage will be much bigger than the difficulties that would face other states that are already democratic during similar stages, say after elections.

Patience and hard work are the key to victory and in the same time obstacles, violence and disputes are no excuse for quitting; just like al-Qaeda and its allies concentrate on Iraq and consider it the nucleus for their Islamic state, we and the whole world must unite to rescue Iraq and present our model of freedom and justice.

Iraq is the key to the change and the terrorists realize this so we must show how determined we are if we want to defeat them.

I couldn’t agree more. Iraq is still everything. And we still have everything to win or to lose. Patience. Courage. Criticism. They’re a useful triad.

A reader writes:

It is extraordinarily disappointing to me that this blog has fallen into the sort of vulgar Bush-bashing that the pseudointellectuals in this country have been engaging in for years. Readers’ purported "psychoanalyses" are not the musings of intelligent adults, but those of peevish adolescents; I’ve heard precisely the same drivel (only perhaps stated with slightly fewer bells and whistles) from kids at my high school.

Any mature adult should realize that, nearly every time one tries to guess at a person’s agenda or motivations, one ends up embarrassingly far from the mark. People are extraordinarily complex beings, and the Presidency of our country is an extraordinarily complex position; the idea that anyone can wittily sum up what is going on in the President’s mind in a paragraph or two is presumptuous and na√Øve at best.

In the same spirit, it seems only appropriate that people on the blog have now taken to using information from that brilliant, balanced expose on the Presidency, Fahrenheit 9/11. Yes, indeed, George W. Bush sat for a few minutes after the first planes hit on September 11th. I anxiously anticipate the moment when your readers will share with us the brave and empowered actions that they took when the country that they governed was brutally and unexpectedly attacked.

Until then, at least let us not mask that all this brilliant "psychoanalyzing" is simply an attempt to belatedly jump on the Bush-bashing bandwagon that has been rolling on for years. As for me, while I acknowledge that things have not gone as well as they could have and should have, I am utterly unconvinced that this Presidency will be looked back on negatively in history, or that the next best alternative, John Kerry, would have fared any better.

Did we just have a media war-epiphany?

Here’s a defense of Opus Dei from a single, celibate young man, who joined the sect at the age of 18 at his mother’s urging, who’s now an English professor at a state university, finishing a book titled "Modernist Aesthetics and Consumer Culture in the Writings of Oscar Wilde." He also wears a cilice around his thigh to prompt physical pain, and says he wanted to enjoy "the richness of the secular world" except when it came to sex. The man has "even made a point of wearing shorts around so that people can see that the thigh band, the cilice, leaves no marks." How high the shorts, one wonders? His main area of scholarly interest is "in the area of consumer culture, specifically the fashion world and its impact on art". What to make of this? Let’s just say it’s the gayest op-ed I’ve read in a very, very long time.

The Germans discover bug-chasing.

… against the FMA. This time, that radical lefty, James Q. Wilson, seconded by Wally Olson.

"It is imperative that we journalists state the truth, without fear or favor. We must be prepared to take unconventional, unpopular positions on grave matters of public interest. Accordingly, I would like to leave you with four points to ponder.

(1) We need more Jews in the media. You can never have too many Jews, is my position.

(2) Objectivity is a good thing to strive for in journalism, but not at the expense of failing to confront the obvious. My own newspaper, for example, has written extensively about Vice President Cheney without once pointing out the self-evident fact that he is — and I offer this as a trained professional observer — Satan.

(3) You know that guy, Anderson Cooper, the CNN correspondent with the elegant white hair and the really sincere attitude who manages not only to report the news but also to feel the news resonate deep in his soul? Can’t we put him in jail?" – Gene Weingarten, Washington Post.

You can’t resist. Two responses:

The three postings abut Bush, The President, the Predicament, the Bush Conundrum and Conundrum II are probably some of the best descriptions of this jackass that have been written yet.

The simple fact is that he is very much in over his head, which is a kinder way of saying that he is simply not too bright. It does not take a psychoanalyist to figure this out. All you have to do is look at the picture of him sitting in a schoolroom for 6, 7, 8 minutes after being told that the Trade Center had been attacked and he simply sits there, not reacting with a dumb expression on his face like a deer caught in the headlights. Same thing for the Katrina briefing where he sat in a video conference never making one remark or asking one question. My final example is the fact that after the Trade Center was hit, it took him three days to get his sorry ass to New York. By contrast, when the London subway system was bombed, Tony Blair left Scotland to return to London that very same morning. Now THAT is leadership, something that is very lacking in Bush.

I wish that I could share your enthusiasm for McCain, but I am afraid that he is too much of a loose cannon, bordering on being a nut case for me.

The couch bites back. Then there’s this twelve-step insight:

Christopher Hitchens wrote an article in Vanity Fair in 2004 wherein it was posited that W’s problems stem from being a dry drunk. As someone properly brainwashed by 12-step group thinking, I’ve come to believe this is the case.  So many of Bush‚Äôs thought processes seem to be those of the alcoholic he’s acknowledged himself to be: inability to accept criticism, colossal ego, ‘my way or the highway’ thinking and decision making. 
It’s a common thought in recovery circles that trying to ‘tough out’ sobriety on one’s own can be even more difficult than being a drunk, as one is exceedingly irritable and has all the insecurity baggage that comes with alcoholism without the release of tension that comes with the drink. Surround this kind of thinker with yes men and sycophants and just watch the fireworks.

Moderate drinking and moderate politics. Maybe the president is incapable of both.