The Dish

Jonah nails it again in his new review of “The Two Towers,” where he saves us from any more lugubrious commentary in favor of making fun of others, especially those who see, say, Orcs as a disturbingly racist fantasy:

One is tempted to ask who is the real racist here? On the one hand we have people – like me – who see horrific, flesh-eating, dull-witted creatures with jagged feral teeth, venomous mouths, pointed devilish ears, and reptilian skin, and say, “Cool, Orcs!” On the other hand we have people, like Mr. Yatt, who see the same repugnant creatures and righteously exclaim “black people!”

I must say whenever I think of Jonah in future, the phrase, “Cool, Orcs!”, will hover genially in my frontal lobe. Read the whole piece.

“[T]he South African archbishop added that, while al-Qaeda was a terrorist organisation, many of its followers were ‘not lunatic fringe, many of them are quite intelligent’, and that leaders had to ask why such people ‘should be willing to pilot a plane and go to their deaths’.” – Archbishop Desmond Tutu, quoted in today’s Guardian.

“[Art Spiegelman] described his current endeavor as ‘recollections of Sept. 11, 2001, and the feeling of imminent death that it brought with it seen from further and further spiraling distances as we move towards a present where we’re equally threatened by Al Qaeda and my President.'” – from the New York Observer.

BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: “Populated by such real-life characters as William Marcy “Boss” Tweed (Jim Broadbent), the venal Tammany Hall politico and vote buyer, and set against the backdrop of a Civil War that no one seems to want to fight, “Gangs” has the look, feel and sound of authentic history. Still, it makes it clear that the past is ever prologue to a today that is only superficially less wicked. “Remember the first rule of politics,” says Tweed after an underling informs him that the polls have run out of ballots. “The ballots don’t make the votes. The counters make the votes. Keep counting.” To be sure, former Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris never threw a meat cleaver into anyone’s back (one of Bill the Butcher’s milder political “fixes”), but if images of Florida and hanging chads don’t come to mind, then you’re not paying attention.” – Michael O’Sullivan, the Washington Post.

Paul Krugman just gave an interview to Der Spiegel. It’s a festival of German-pleasing anti-Americanism and Bush-bashing. Here are a couple of choice quotes, worthy of Michael Moore:

No one expects the President to be a saint. … But it is pretty amazing the distance that this administration will go in trying to fool the public. Sometimes I have the feeling that I no longer live in one of the world’s oldest democracies, but in the Philippines under a new Marcos.

Useful to know that a columnist at the New York Times believes that president Bush is indistinguishable from an unelected tyrant. Then there’s this piece of naked pandering to European prejudice against America:

Instead [of writing a column about the New Economy], I now find myself once again as the lonely voice of truth in a sea of corruption. Sometimes I think that one of these days I’ll end up in one of those cages on Guantanamo Bay (laughs). But I can still seek asylum in Germany. I hope you’d accept me in an emergency.

The poor beleaguered martyr for truth. So persecuted by the government he gets to write twice weekly for the New York Times and have the media establishment gush constantly about him. So pure you’d never know he once served on Enron’s Advisory Board and still hasn’t returned his $50,000 sinecure. Asylum? Lonely voice of truth? The vanity is almost as gob-smacking as the self-righteousness.

D.C.’s vaunted cops apparently missed an entire corpse under a bed in a recent search of an apartment. A foot was even poking out from under the bed. “Poor lighting” was the excuse. A second search recovered the body. And we thought they’d find Chandra?

“Before this election the Bush administration had taken every opportunity to give the extreme right-wing of his party what they’ve wanted on social issues, but they were doing it quietly. Now they’ll be more out front. I think there will be steamroller in January that will attempt to crush reproductive freedom. We’re talking about sending women back to a time when they were barefoot and pregnant.” – Gloria Feldt, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, in an absurdly crude and out-of-touch piece in Salon.

It seems former British prime minister, Harold MacMillan, slept. Here’s part of the letter he wrote to the Queen, about a major summit meeting with French, German and American leaders in 1959. It has just been released for public consumption:

After lunch, which was extremely good, Dr Adenauer delivered for nearly an hour a lecture on the dangers of communism and the best way to deal with it in the schools, in the factories and in the homes. I regret to inform Your Majesty that I fell asleep during the latter part of this oration.

A classic. Nice assessment of Eisenhower too.

That appears to be the new Bob Forehead term deployed by the Democrats. John Edwards, in particular, seems to have retired the “Working Families” mantra in favor of the “Regular People” formula. Maybe these things work. But the way in which these focus-group locutions deaden the language, rob it of any life or meaning or specificity is truly depressing. No “regular people” talk about “regular people.” My other problem with Edwards is that he’s a Southerner. For the Democrats to nominate a Southerner for the fourth time in four election cycles may make electoral college sense, but it still slights the parts of the country that are more dependably Democratic. Still, I like his politics – they seem sanely to the right of, say, Al Gore. And he has a touch of the Tony Blair about him: the slick yet somehow earnest combination. Hard to pull off.

WILL BLOGGING PAY? The prospects are looking brighter. John Scalzi just got a book contract because of a blog serialization. And my first pay check (thanks to you) comes in two weeks. Woohoo.

GREEN BUSH: Belated recognition of this administration’s tight diesel fuel emission standards. The news got some play, but we’re still a long way from denting the reflexive Bush-is-anti-environment chorus. The administration bears some responsibility for this. The diesel fuel decision is a real pro-environment call – not just blather – that the president should have gotten real credit for. It should have been announced in dramatic, news-making fashion, by the president himself. Instead, it was buried in turn-of-the-year blahs. A lost opportunity. If I were Mr Rove, I’d be planning several pro-green initiatives for the next two years, with major presidential backing for them. Get Matthew Scully to write the speech. Show why responsible conservatism cares about the natural world, its conservation, its health. There’s a record here. Trumpet it. And force the lazy hacks to change their script.

SCHEER ILLOGIC: Here’s a classic from Robert Scheer in the Nation:

In fact, the Shiite fundamentalists must be high-fiving in Tehran over the costly American makeover of Central Asia. These fundamentalists would be the biggest benefactors of any takedown of neighboring Iraq, as they were when the United States installed Iran’s longtime puppets, the Northern Alliance, as top dogs in Afghanistan.

Does Scheer really believe that the fundamentalist tyrants clinging to power in Tehran want a successful regime change next door? And yet he’s the one accusing the Bush administration of illogic.

Here’s the Advocate story about Herb Ritts’ early death. He died because his immune system was severely compromised by HIV. And here’s a German version of the same story. Odd that this should be restricted to the gay press. Or are we now headed back to the early 1980s?

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “K-Lo: So DC’s first baby of the year was born to a lesbian couple. New York’s seems to have been to a black single mother. Don’t you sometimes feel like giving in to despair?” – John Derbyshire, National Review Online. I guess I’m used to Derb’s dismay at homosexuals, and you could explain this comment by saying he’s merely depressed by the absence of two-parent male-female families. But why the gratuitous mention of the race of the single mother? Once again, you get the impression that Derb would be happier if this country had fewer blacks and gays in it. No surprise he sympathized with Trent Lott.

A new blog on the scene. Written daily in the seventeenth century. Quite a talent.

BLAIR’S WELL-FOUNDED SOBRIETY: The British tabloids have had some fun mocking Tony Blair’s New Year’s Message about the terrible potential of the coming year. But Blair – again – is doing the right thing. Leadership means telling people what they don’t want to hear. It’s not just possible there will be a terrorist attack this coming year that is equal to or greater than the horror of 9/11/01. It’s probable. It’s not just possible that Saddam will unleash the vilest weapons in his arsenal in the coming war. It’s probable. My own view is that this year is probably going to be an awful one: full of death and conflict and struggle and because of them, economic distress. I think the era of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of evil, stateless men is imminent; and that things will likely get a lot worse before they get better. I sure hope I’m wrong, and that in a year’s time I’ll look back on this and wince. But Blair is right to have said what he did. Preparing people for the worst is what leadership sometimes means. And what should we do about it? I’ll defer to a piece in today’s Daily Telegraph on the vision of J.R.R. Tolkien:

The moral is the motto of the British redcoat: “Look to your front.” Don’t think about what other people are doing: you’ll get it wrong and it’s disheartening. Or, to quote Gandalf again – and Jackson picked out just these words to repeat in the first movie, varying the pronouns cunningly – “That [the future] is not for us to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

MUGABE’S NEW LOW: The only newspaper independent of the Zimbabwean regime hasn’t been printed in ten days.

BLAMING THE JEWS: Fascinating detail from the British government’s release of 30-year-old classified documents in the Telegraph yesterday. The British Foreign Office – like the State Department, a center of elite Arabophilia – blamed Israel for the deaths of its athletes at the Munich Olympics. A despatch from Jerusalem tried to explain why there had been almost no Arab condemnation of the killing of Jews:

Gayford Woodrow, the consul general in Jerusalem, sent a dispatch to the Foreign Office on Sept 12, six days after the attack, saying: “Before we reproach the Arabs too much, perhaps we might try to put ourselves in their shoes. “They are, after all, human beings with normal human failings. The Palestinians in particular have seen their land taken away from them by a group of mainly European invaders equipped with superior armed force and modern technology. Whatever one’s moral criticism, it must be agreed that the Munich operation was well planned and that the Arabs there carried it out to the bitter end. It is said that lives were really lost because of Israel and West German bungling incompetence.”

Ah those plucky terrorists. Not their fault if a few pushy Jews got killed.

“COMPLICATIONS OF PNEUMONIA”: I’m intrigued by the weird locution used by every single newspaper obit to describe the cause of photographer Herb Ritts’ death. The phrase is “complications of pneumonia.” Now I have no way of knowing for sure what killed Herb Ritts at 50, but it seems highly unlikely that it was pneumonia alone. Very, very few people with access to decent healthcare die of pneumonia alone any more. But the phrase is very reminiscent of the euphemisms first used a decade or two ago with regard to AIDS. With AIDS, the precipitant cause of death is often some kind of opportunistic infection, and in the beginning of the plague, pneumonia was a leading infection. Hence people could get around saying they had AIDS by stating some subsequent illness as the cause of death. So the question is: was the openly gay Ritt’s pneumonia a freak and dangerous strain that is newsworthy in its own right (like Jim Henson’s) or was it HIV-related? And do newspapers have some responsibility to tell us which? It seems to me that when an openly gay guy dies at 50 of pneumonia, any decent editor would ask a simple follow-up. Or are they still colluding in the shame that some still attach to an HIV diagnosis?

BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: “The New York Times continues down the path laid down personally by crazed war-hawk Howell Raines to agitate for a war against Iraq.” – Eric Alterman, finally losing it, at Altercation.

A NEW YEAR’S BABY: This one has two mothers. And some would like to give this child almost no legal protection as the legitimate daughter of two women in a committed legal relationship. Wouldn’t it be better for the kids if their parents had the legal protection of marriage? Social policy from some conservatives: let’s increase illegitimacy and family instability if it helps us stigmatize gays. Or put another way: leave every child with gay parents behind.