The Dish

Read the entire interview. She certainly cannot be dismissed as a Bush-hating anti-American. Her argument, I think, is that war could inflame the Middle East and spawn even more Islamic fundamentalist terror. I think she’s wrong. My own belief is that terror relies on Western passivity, and is galvanized by Western weakness. That’s what the 1990s showed. But of course, war is awful, unpredictable and deeply dangerous. Her preferred option – giving inspectors months more time in order to get a global consensus – strikes me as naive. It assumes the good will of countries like France and Russia. I don’t. And it assumes that we can somehow dampen Islamist extremism by inaction or soothing words. Sorry, but the 90s proved that strategy wrong. We ducked and weaved and appeased – and the threat merely grew. A climb-down now would do more to strengthen the Islamo-fascists than any war. In fact, it would unleash a wave of terror the like of which we have not yet seen.

I assumed most readers would have recognized some of the most famous lines of poetry written in the last fifty years in my little squib on Jacko. But in case you didn’t, I should hasten to add that “Man hands on misery to man/It deepens like a coastal shelf” refer to Philip Larkin’s treasure of a poem, “This Be The Verse.” If you don’t know his poetry, you really really should. Here’s a link to his collected work. Buy it.

“U.S. Economy in Worst Hiring Slump in 20 Years” – NYT, February 6.
“Unemployment Rate Falls to 5.7% as Job Growth Surges” – NYT, February 7.
D’oh!

Update on my 2002 Man of the Year. Best detail: he has declined all media interviews.

“At a recent NATO meeting, France and Germany expressed reluctance to lend military support to the U.S. if it invades Iraq. What do you think?
‘Has it been explained to the Germans that the Iraqis are Semites?’, Paul Ryback, Delivery Driver.” – from – where else? – the Onion.

BAD LINK: Sorry. Here’s the right link for the pro-war Hollywood story. My bad.

Sorry, but I couldn’t stop myself. What to say of that horrifying documentary? I feel about Jackson the same deeply conflicted feelings I have about most disturbed people. Half of me feels a terrible sympathy for him, for the brutalized childhood, the clearly arrested psychological development, his desperate loneliness and sociopathic tendencies. The other half feels nothing but horror – not just at the damage he has done to his once beautiful face and body, but to the children he surrounds himself with and to the children he has allegedly spawned. Watching his complete self-absorption while his children are clearly traumatized by crowds of fans and photographers was almost too painful to endure. I dont buy the notion that he’s sexually abusing children. But abuse need not be sexual to be abuse, as Jackson’s own vile father showed. Man hands on misery to man, I guess. It deepens like a coastal shelf. But there is something also compelling about a man clearly determined to defy nature itself, to alter his physical appearance as one would change clothes, to insist that age is arbitrary, to see happiness as indistinguishable from denial and escapism, to see death as a choice as well. In all these, he is perhaps just an extreme incarnation of tendencies almost endemic in our culture. Which is why we cannot keep our eyes off his rapidly crumbling face. He is the man in our mirror.

The emergence of solid support for freedom from terror and support for the United States among so many Eastern European countries has clearly rattled some elements of the European left. It has taken a while for them to come up with some way to undermine this development, to smear it, or simply sneer at it, but we now have the new line. Here it is:

After all, eastern Europe’s elites had spent 40 years accommodating themselves to superior power. Neither the reform movement in Czechoslovakia in 1968 nor Solidarity in Poland in 1981 challenged their countries’ links with Moscow. It was only when Mikhail Gorbachev told them in 1987 that they need not follow the Soviet lead that they began to break loose. It was therefore inevitable that after the USSR collapsed these countries would sense the new reality that Europe belongs to the US. The fact that ex-communist leaders such as Aleksander Kwasniewski, Gyula Horn and Ion Iliescu led the way is not a paradox so much as proof that the survival instinct usually trumps vision or principle.

This is as historically inaccurate as it is morally foul. The writer, a Guardian columnist called Jonathan Steele, seems to forget that the reason that Eastern European countries were vassals of the Soviets is because such subservience was enforced by tanks in the streets. No such tanks now exist. And maybe – just maybe – the Eastern Europeans have a better appreciation of what tyranny is and therefore a deeper loathing for Saddam than, say, columnists for the Guardian.

“Just imagine if every potential cheating husband in the world had to consider facing such consequences for their actions. Do you think it might change their behavior? Do you think more husbands might forgo a few moments of pleasure for the sake of their own lives? Do you think more families might actually stay together? That’s why I say: Free Clara Harris now and let her rebuild a life with her poor children – who have been victimized enough by the trauma instigated by the dead creep. Free her and let her be an example to every cheating husband and wife in America. Send a message far and wide – no cheating husband is safe from the wrath of his angry wife. And, vice versa, no cheating wife is safe from the wrath of an angry husband. There is a price to pay. Sometimes it’s the ultimate price.” – Joseph Farah, celebrating the murder of an adulterous husband.

NOT EVERYONE IN HOLLYWOOD IS PRO-SADDAM: Just most.

SOULLESS ROBOT BLOWFISH: Yep, that’s how someone just described Bob Kuttner. And it wasn’t even written by Mickey Kaus.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “A nation grieves because it is trying to put out of its mind the fact that it is about to be involved in the killing of up to 80,000 civilians in Iraq. This is an occasion that allows people to contemplate this in a displaced way.” – Professor Jacqueline Rose, the Guardian.

Another just mind-blowing development. Here is the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, coming out against the war against terror. Not just war against Saddam, but against the entire panoply of brutally homophobic tyrannies in the Middle East that actively support terrorism and just as actively persecute gays. Again, this is a gay group concerned with human rights. Here’s part of their rationale:

Our position is guided by our sense of solidarity with and accountability to the activists we work with all over the world, and especially those in regions which are greatly impacted by US foreign policies. The US policies of military aggression have served to render those who deviate from sexual and gender norms and people living with HIV/AIDS especially vulnerable to state-sanctioned violence and discrimination.

Better, in other words, for gay people in, say, Afghanistan to be punished by being crushed under rocks than to be liberated by the evil of America. These gay activists are simply depraved.

SECULAR SADDAM VERSUS FANATICAL ISLAMISM?: One more email delineating why this alliance is not implausible:

Note also that Kaiser Wilhelm was positive that reactionary absolutist Russia could not possibly ally itself with regicide-honoring, radical post-Dreyfus France. Wrong. Note also that his Catholic Majesty of France found it easy enough to ally himself with Suleiman the Magnficent against the Catholic Habsburgs. Note also that Cardinal Richelieu found it expedient to aid Protestant Gustavus Adolphus against Catholic Ferdinand. Note also that Adolf Hitler was positive that the capitalist powers’ alliance with Josef Stalin could not positively endure.

Well, it endured long enough, didn’t it? And why do none of these epxerts mention the explicitly Islamist rhetoric that Saddam now constantly uses and has deployed for more than a decade? Oh, and one more word of reader wisdom:

If an accountant is sent to scrutinize the books of someone believed to be involved in fiscal highjinx, and finds $80,000 in an account that the books say has $100,000 in it, said accountant is not then asked to go find the other 20 grand. The discrepancy ITSELF is the “smoking gun”. So, too, with the glaring omissions between Iraq’s last document dump, and the inventory of prohibited material already in hand from past inspections.

More sharp feedback – including a complaint that I was far too nice to Mary McGrory – on the Letters Page, edited by the one and only Reihan Salam.

That’s TNR’s view. Now they tell us? This is the guy who recently said that if Bush remained president, girls would soon be barred from going to school.