He’s agin ’em:
One by one, Marshall McLuhan’s wackiest-seeming predictions come true. Forty years ago, he said that modern communications technology would turn the young into tribal primitives who pay attention not to objective "news" reports but only to what the drums say, i.e., rumors.
And there you have blogs. The universe of blogs is a universe of rumors, and the tribe likes it that way.
Want a handle on the foreign powers actually intervening in Iraq? Fascinating data from the LA Times:
Although Bush administration officials have frequently lashed out at Syria and Iran, accusing it of helping insurgents and militias here, the largest number of foreign fighters and suicide bombers in Iraq come from a third neighbor, Saudi Arabia, according to a senior U.S. military officer and Iraqi lawmakers.
About 45% of all foreign militants targeting U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians and security forces are from Saudi Arabia; 15% are from Syria and Lebanon; and 10% are from North Africa, according to official U.S. military figures made available to The Times by the senior officer. Nearly half of the 135 foreigners in U.S. detention facilities in Iraq are Saudis, he said.
Fighters from Saudi Arabia are thought to have carried out more suicide bombings than those of any other nationality, said the senior U.S. officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the subject’s sensitivity. It is apparently the first time a U.S. official has given such a breakdown on the role played by Saudi nationals in Iraq’s Sunni Arab insurgency.
He said 50% of all Saudi fighters in Iraq come here as suicide bombers. In the last six months, such bombings have killed or injured 4,000 Iraqis.
The Saudis, of course, are among the Bush family’s closest friends, so we neither mention nor tackle this. The gulf between the reality in the Middle East and the president’s account of it grows wider and wider.
Portland, Oregon, 7.55 pm.
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The Stephen Hayes fellatio of King Dick is a classic of the genre. Think of some low-level party functionary writing a glorious history of Andropov in the 1980s. Or think, at a lower level of apparatchikery, of Blumenthal and Clinton. But I don’t think even Sid was infatuated with Clinton’s furniture:
Cheney’s office is quite spacious – longer than it is wide, with high ceilings – particularly for the cramped West Wing. His large, mahogany desk sits opposite the entrance to the room, beneath a map depicting the Battle of Chickamauga, one of several Civil War battles that his great-great grandfather survived. In the far left corner of the room is a small television perched on a walnut-stained stand that matches the desk. Four flags sit on either side of a thin table behind Cheney’s chair: the American flag and the Wyoming state flag on the left; the secretary of defense’s flag and the vice president’s flag on the right. The table is filled with photographs of Cheney’s wife, his children and their partners, and his grandchildren. The white walls are spare, with only two gold-framed oil paintings–portraits of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams–and a map of the world as decorations. Two windows on the left side of the room provide light, and the royal blue sofa in front of Cheney’s desk matches the carpet exactly. Two chairs on each side of the sofa form a semicircle. Sewn into the carpeting directly in front of the fireplace is the seal of the vice president of the United States.
The general who was tasked to investigate Abu Ghraib but not to investigate the chain of command talks in California. A podcast.
With respect to this post on English leftist Terry Eagleton’s vicious attack on Salman Rushdie, a useful reminder from Oliver Kamm.
"I voted for Bush twice. I backed this war from the beginning, but I don’t think I can look my kids in the eyes anymore, if my husband comes home in a wooden box, and tell them he died for a good reason," – Beth Pyritz, 27, a military wife, whose husband is on his third deployment to Iraq.
"How lonely the white men are. They are not the grain that goes with the grain, nor can they bring themselves to dye their hair green. They thought they would have both things: the flow of history, because they knew history; and the edge, because they had talent. But history belongs to children, and the edge belongs to adolescents, so they have neither. What they have is a kind of superior whining, and the one freedom they have been able to make use of is the freedom carved out by certain adolescents to make an aesthetic out of complaint. So this is what they inhabit now: a tiny space where they struggle toward a sense of history and a sense of edge by refining their whimpers," – George W.S. Trow "Within the Context of No Context."
(Photo: Evan Agostini/Getty.)
"I am a university student, and we are bored of you. Hitchens is our hero. Orwell is our hero. Paine is our hero. Dostoevsky is our hero. We are humanitarians, and The Left is dead to us," – a commenter responding to a piece by leftist Terry Eagleton in the Guardian. Eagleton regards the genocide-backing, America-hating Harold Pinter as a progressive mentor.
Many more favored toppling Saddam Hussein than would now acknowledge.
