The Dish

The contest is in full swing. Check out the clips and the quotes and vote here. Meanwhile, as part of the Dish’s Hollywood week, here’s an archived Atlantic classic by Raymond Chandler on the Oscars in 1948. His sights were set high:

"Not only is the motion picture an art, but it is the one entirely new art that has been evolved on this planet for hundreds of years. It is the only art at which we of this generation have any possible chance to greatly excel."

I’ll be running some classic movie reviews and essays all week on the Dish. Stay tuned.

A reader sends in a different kind of YouTube than that exposing embarrassment with cruelty. It is an embarrassment, but it’s rescued by a moment of kindness. A painfully young girl forgets the national anthem as she sings before the NBA Play-Offs. But a coach and a crowd pick her up, and bring the anthem to life. Gave me goose-bumps actually.

Edward Luttwak dissected Petraeus’ doctrine at length earlier this year in Harper’s. Like almost everything Luttwak writes, it’s a bracingly candid and original argument – and well worth reading at this moment of non-decision. Money quote:

The essentially political advantage of the insurgents in commanding at least the silence of the local population cannot be overcome by technical means no matter how advanced. Nor can the better operational methods and tactics advocated in FM 3-24 DRAFT be of much help. So few of the insurgents ever engage in direct combat, so much of the insurgency takes covert forms, ranging from the infiltration of the government to bombings, sabotage, and assassinations, that the tactical defeats inflicted on the insurgents — including the killing of their top leaders and heroes—have no perceptible impact on the volume of the violence, and of its political consequences.

Nothing will work in Iraq until there is a political settlement. And there won’t be any time in the foreseeable future. The rest is futile.

A dissent:

There’s a big difference between saying that a particular statement has no place in the American political debate and saying that those who made the statement have no place in America.

Reading National Review’s editorial, one looks in vain for any statement of principle about why hundreds of thousands of Americans should be denied the right to vote in the District of Columbia. There are plenty of reasons why Republicans and conservatives might not like it; and some legitimate Constitutional questions. But am I the only person who finds it incongruous that a magazine that wants to spend tens of billions of dollars and thousands of young lives to bring democracy to Iraq is so viscerally opposed to the principle at home?

Three days straight.

A fascinating piece in Ladies Home Journal in 1900, looking forward to "What May Happen In The Next Hunderd Years." Progress report here.

A pretty staggering event: a major television series in Iran on the Holocaust, which clearly concedes that it did take place and sympathizes with its victims. Who knew? Yourish wonders:

I can’t quite figure out why the mullahs did this, either. If they’re doing it to prove that Iran is not anti-Semitic, they’ve unwittingly done just about the best thing they could possibly have done to make Jews more sympathetic in Israel. And that seems to be how the series is affecting Iranians.

More background:

That’s surprising enough in a country where hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has questioned whether the Holocaust even took place. What’s even more surprising is that government media produced the series, and is airing it on state-run television.

Even without Ahmadinejad’s past comments, the series would be a surprise. The Holocaust is rarely mentioned in state media in Iran, school textbooks don’t discuss it and Iranians have little information about it.

Yet the series, titled “Zero Degree Turn,” is clearly sympathetic to the Jews’ plight during World War II. Scenes show men, women and children with yellow stars on their clothes being taken forcibly out of their homes and loaded into trucks by Nazi soldiers.

The series could not have aired without being condoned by Iran’s clerical leadership. The state broadcaster is under the control of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khomenei, who has final say in all matters inside Iran.

[…] The show’s appearance now may reflect an attempt by Iran’s leadership to moderate its image as anti-Semitic and to underline a distinction that Iranian officials often make — that their conflict is with Israel, not with the Jewish people.

What does Michael Ledeen think?