In the immortal words of Richard Nixon, let me make one thing perfectly clear: I strongly approve of "outing" CIA agents and if that's what Karl Rove or Scooter Libby did, well, hell, I'll move 'em up a notch in the Inferno on the strength of it -- maybe hip-deep in the boiling pitch instead of nipple-deep. But what nobody should ever forgive is the Times allowing itself to be used as a conduit for glaringly obvious neocon disinformation, which is just what Judith Miller has been doing for the last few years whenever she's out of jail.
The Times' feeble claim that they were fooled is exceptionally unconvincing. Whatever you may think about these folks, they're not naive -- well, Friedman of course, but he's sui generis. They must have known on 43d Street, right up the chain of command, that Miller was feeding them pure, unadulterated sludge from the Wolfowitz/Bolton/Feith sewage plant. And yet they kept printing her stuff, and they amazingly went balls-to-the-wall to depict her as some kind of freedom-of-the-press martyr when she took her little retreat on the inside.
Reading between the lines of the Times' highly embarrassed hanging out of all this in-house dirty laundry, it seems clear that Miller had protection all the way from the top -- all the way from little Pinch Sulzberger, in fact.
So... Do Ariel Sharon's pilotless drones know something about Pinch that the rest of us would really like to know? Or is Pinch a crypto-Likudnik himself? There's a story to be told here, and I just hope I live to read it someday.
Of course I defer to the lady E. on all matters economic, but even so ... Okay, say the market collapses. Say house values fall by some improbably huge amount -- say two-thirds. What's the net for Joe and Jane Wagearner? Some of them may lose some "equity" when they walk away from their overmortgaged white elephant -- but wasn't that "equity" pretty much an illusion anyway? Won't they end up paying less out of every precious monthly paycheck once the dust settles and prices (and rents) hit more reasonable levels? And isn't that what matters?
Right now a lot of these folks are stretching themselves very thin to make mortagage payments whose sole basis is a prospect of future speculative gain. Who reaps the benefit of that? Not the poor wagenik, I suspect.
'Course, I've always been a renter myself -- never managed to get on the old real-estate escalator -- so perhaps this is affecting my outlook. Sitz im Leben, as they say in Milwaukee.
No sign of this story in any Anglophone medium yet.
I like this guy Ziegler. He's been in trouble before, for talking bluntly about Israel. An AJC front called "UN Watch" has a whole dossier of frothings about Herr Ziegler, which makes diverting reading.
Rough translation of the Corriere item:
Iraq: UN accuses coalition of violating Geneva Convention
Geneva -- The armed forces of the US-led coalition in Iraq have been accused by the UN of violating the Geneva Convention. According to Jean Ziegler, UN special rapporteur on the right to food, the practice of blocking food and water in order to force Iraquis to abandon guerrilla strongholds before an attack is a "gross [palese] violation" of international law because it also causes suffering to innocent civilians who are unable to flee from the war zone.
Credit where it's due, though: the steely Presbyterians are sticking to their guns, as is the Geneva-based World Council of Churches.
The slurry wall, once familiarly known as the Bathtub, is essentially a Gargantuan version of a suburban house's cement basement, complete with sump pump. It was built to keep the Hudson River from re-occupying the monstrous hole dug in Lower Manhattan's sludge to hold the Trade Center towers. Like many artifacts of its epoch, the Bathtub is impressive if unlovely -- though it may well be the least unlovely part of the Trade Center complex; the towers themselves were cheesy, unmitigated eyesores, like Holiday Inns in Brobdingnag, but the Bathtub has at least a certain brutalist straightforwardness.
Thus the Times:
"Now that the slurry wall has been laid bare and infused with meaning," said Stefan Pryor, the president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, "it's our obligation to preserve it and ensure that all who come to the site have the opportunity to view it and pay tribute at it."
Infused with meaning? Pay tribute? Sounds like we've confused this hunk of utilitarian cement with the original Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.
The wonderful Philip Roth -- or rather, his character Carnovsky -- has some reflections on the more venerable and attractive of the two walls in The Counterlife:
"Standing singly at the Wall, some rapidly swaying and rhythmically bobbing as they recited their prayers, others motionless but for the lightning flutter of their mouths, were seventeen of the world's twelve million Jews, communing with the King of the Universe. To me it looked as though they were communing solely with the stones in whose crevices pigeons were roosting some twenty feet above their heads. I thought (as I am predisposed to think), If there is a God who plays a role in our world, I will eat every hat in this town. Nonetheless, I couldn't help but be gripped by the sight of this rock-worship, exemplifying as it did to me the most awesomely retarded aspect of the human mind. Rock is just right, I thought: what on earth could be less responsive? Even the cloud drifting by overhead. . . appeared less indifferent to our encompassed and uncertain existence. I think that I would have felt less detached from seventeen Jews who openly admitted that they were talking to rock than from these seventeen who imagined themselves telexing the Creator directly; had I known for sure it was rock and rock alone that they knew they were addressing, I might even have joined in."
Personally, I'm more sympathetic to the guys at the Wailing Wall than Carnovsky is; but I have no patience with all this dribble about the World Trade Center. Sending a message in a bottle to the hypothethical Melech ha-Olam seems like a very human response to the general rockiness of the world, but making the relics of the Trade Center into objects of veneration is to mourn all the wrong things. It isn't about the people who died there, who are turned into supporting cast by the cement-and-rebar worship of Pryor and his ilk. It's about something vague, cloudy, American, and institutional -- something that I know I loathe even though I'm not quite sure what it is, and neither are all the flag-wavers paying homage to it.
Those people at the Trade Center were New Yorkers who died for America's sins -- which is probably why, as a New Yorker, I find myself getting very annoyed any time an American from anywhere else in this broad land has the temerity to put on a long face and act sorry about what happened to David and Nelson, the twin Rockefeller totem poles. You Americans, go mourn the Pentagon, I feel like saying. Leave lower Manhattan and its dead to those of us who are still trying to live here, in spite of everything America has done over decades to make it impossible.
If it were up to me, I'd fill the Bathtub with sand and let whatever seeds blow in take root. And maybe carve all the names on a wall somewhere nearby. That would be something worth wailing about.
To paraphrase Philip Larkin, they may not want to, but they will. Bush version 2.2 has -- not unexpectedly -- overreached badly, and with a little help from the weather, seems to have blotted its copybook at least as thoroughly as version 1.0 (the "read my lips" release). The Democrats are of course all dead men walking, plus a few women, but come '08 they will look no more dead than the Republicans. It will be "their turn" again, as their slogan in '92 so self-revealingly ran, and to them will fall the honor of hauling down the flag in Iraq, explaining the bust of the insanely overheated housing market, and very likely rationing gasoline.
Contemplating this prospect, the Republicans may find it easier to reconcile themselves to a little R&R in opposition.
After all, they have pretty much accomplished everything they really wanted to do. The lineaments of the police state are firmly in place. Taxation of the rich is derisory, social spending even more so, and the Holy Inquisition of intellectual-property enforcement is poised to insert a tendril into every laptop and iPod. Why not take a well-deserved break?
The original Hunger Chancellor, Heinrich Bruning, reminds me a lot of, well, Hillary Clinton. Like Hillary, he was the quintessential liberal: a pious, moral, diligent man, deeply respectful of institutions, possessed of a certain pallid sympathy for the downtrodden but quite unable to see the world from their angle. Like Hillary's hubby, Bruning was obsessed with balancing the budget. And, of course -- just to close the circle -- the Social Democrats supported him, holding their noses no doubt, as the "lesser evil."
One of the hallmarks of delusional thinking is the way all evidence tends to the same conclusion. For Third Way and other Fromsphere satellites, victory and defeat equally vindicate their views. Clinton's victories show just how right From and Co. were, but then, Gore's and Kerry's defeats also show just how right From and Co. are -- even though Gore and Kerry ran campaigns right out of the From playbook.
Indeed, it's quite difficult to imagine how much more blood the Fromniks could possibly want from the Democratic turnip. What is the point in this ongoing beating of a dead horse, or rather a dead donkey? What more do these people want?
Third Way's middle-class projectionists, as usual, give us little in the way of specifics, apart from a rather clear advocacy of increased militarism -- though here again, with the needle pretty well pegged, how much room is there for improvement, in Third Way's sense of that term?
It's difficult to avoid the impression that Third Way and its ilk are operating very much like management consultants who have been called in by a failing business, desperate to arrest the decline of its fortunes. Anybody who has made his living in the corporate world knows the type. They have a certain glossy technocratic assurance and glib mastery of the buzzword-du-jour, but it's all cheeseburger-cheeseburger and no-Coke-Pepsi: under the bright packaging their stock in trade always amounts to the conventional wisdom of the day. And conventional wisdom is always to copy the market leader, whether it's Wal-Mart or the Republican Party.
The Senate just voted 97-0 to give Mesopotamicus Minor an extra $50 bil to burn in Iraq. Not one Democrat voted against it. Not one.
The Republicans in the Senate were finally in a position to lift this last tattered fig leaf from the unlovely nakedness of the Democrats, and reveal the nullity beneath -- a nullity of power now, as well as principle. But at the last moment something stayed their rapacious hand. Instead, we got a May Surprise sprung on us by a "bipartisan" group of senators apparently led by the wily Republican John McCain, with Loathesome Joe Lieberman heading the ranks on the other side of the looking glass -- er, aisle.
We didn't know, at the time, the exact contours of the deal. Well, now we do, I think.
Bush gets two appointees on the Court, without any fight to speak of; the Democrats, after a bit of obligatory mewling and puking, will roll over and play dead. Bush's appointees will be unideological defenders of corporate interests -- which is what both parties want. Bush will be able to claim two "conservative" appointments, and the Democrats will be able to claim they've saved Roe v. Wade -- which, of course, Bush and Co. were looking for an excuse to leave alone anyway.
It's a thing of beauty, really, how well-oiled it all is. Months of chest-beating and hair-tearing, foot-stamping and flinging of excrement and baring of teeth and all the other old favorites from the simian threat repertoire, and then you get a McCain and Lieberman strolling arm-in-arm into the mist, like Bogart and Rains -- or no, more like Alphonse and Gaston.
Meanwhile, of course, the Nation magazine and moveon.org and their ilk are all taking the whole monkeymachia in dead earnest. With apologies to Lamont Cranston, these poor souls seem to have learned in civics class a secret power to cloud their own minds.
"Otherwise the sound principle of substantial deference to a president's choice of judicial nominees will dissolve into a rationalization for senatorial abdication of the duty to hold presidents to some standards of seriousness that will prevent them from reducing the Supreme Court to a private plaything useful for fulfilling whims on behalf of friends."
Poor man can't even find the period key on his laptop -- with both hands. And it's all like this. Gotta admire the dura ilia of those National Review readers -- they must be made of stern stuff indeed to choke down this mucilage week in and week out.
Here's David Frum, normally, divertingly mad as a hatter, sounding like Ted Koppel:
"A generation of conservative legal intellects of the highest ability have moved to the most distinguished heights in the legal profession. On the nation's appellate courts, in legal academia, in private practice, there are dozens and dozens of principled conservative jurists in their 40s and 50s unassailably qualified for the nation's highest court. [....] The personal and intellectual excellence of these candidates...." -- sorry, I can't go on. This is sad stuff.
Then there's my very favorite, Pat Buchanan:
"She is not a brilliant jurist – indeed, has never been a judge. She is not a scholar of the law. Researchers are hard-pressed to dig up an opinion. She has not had a brilliant career in politics, the academy, the corporate world or the public forum."
Brilliant? Where, for Heaven's sake, is somebody willing to take a whack at this preposterous notion? What normal American, not brainwashed by an advanced degree, imagines that the law is anything like quantum physics, or tensor calculus, or even Celtic philology? What business has a brilliant person being a lawyer, much less a judge? It would be a complete waste, and they'd go nuts from the arid, pettifogging tedium of it all.
Poor Pat seems to have really lost it today -- he actually asks, plaintively, "Where was Karl Rove in all of this?" I think we can all answer that one, Pat: He was right in the middle of it, taking care of the people who pay his salary.
Well, being angry is Buchanan's metier, of course, and since it is mine as well, I feel a certain sympathy with him. More than that, Buchanan's position with respect to the Republican Party is not unlike that of the American left, such as it is, with respect to the Democrats.
Pat is, in his loopy way, a man with real principles. But his party is no more about principles than the other one is.
And this glaringly obvious fact should awaken us at last from the favorite liberal nightmare, the inevitable last ditch reason why you have to hold your nose and vote for a Gore or a Kerry: namely that these wild-eyed barbarians in the Republican Party must be prevented from putting ideologues in control of the all-holy Supreme Court.
Of course they don't want to put ideologues on the court, or not in the sense that the liberals mean. Sure, they want dependable corporate stooges on the Supreme Court (Ms Miers used to do work for Microsoft, for example). But apart from the odd noisy clown like Scalia, they really don't want these guys and gals getting ideas in their heads. That could be bad for business.
Now my man Pat Buchanan is, for better or worse, a man with ideas in his head, and so of course he is disappointed. He is a prisoner of his Lesser Evil party, just as my liberal friends are prisoners of theirs.
It's fear of the Democrats that keeps Pat in the Republican fold, just as it's fear of the Republicans that keeps wankers like moveon[please!].org in the Democratic fold. (I know, the comparison is very unfair to Buchanan.)
So... suppose... just suppose... that some well-placed stick of political dynamite blew the Democratic Party sky-high. I don't know what it would take; sex tapes of Hillary with Karl Rove? No, the liberals would swallow that too. But bear with me here. Let's run with the hypothesis. The Democratic party all of a sudden evaporates, like the Deacon's one-hoss shay. What would happen next?
Is it not plain as day that the Republican party would immediately do the same? Each defines the other; if one breaks up, the other will find that Othello's occupation's gone.
So, ye timorous lefties, let Pat be a lesson to you; the surest way to destroy the Republicans is to destroy the Democrats first.
Personally, I couldn't be more pleased, and I'm not being ironical.
One of the most puzzling deformities of liberalism is its reverence for the Supreme Court, and all the shibboleths of professionalism that come with it: in particular, a reverence for "constitutional scholarship" -- a branch of knowledge on the same order as phrenological scholarship -- and of course that pearl of great price, the "brilliant legal mind." Huh? Isn't it precisely one of our big problems in the US that we have too many brilliant legal minds running around?
Nebraska senator Roman Hruska once defended one of Nixon's nominees with the observation that mediocre people need representation too. He was much mocked for it at the time, but I think he was on to something. One reason liberals venerate the Supreme Court so much is that it is, in a sense, the distilled essence of professional credentialling -- the pinnacle of a long slog through the academic and bureaucratic meritocracies, the ultimate in peer review, and of course and by consequence, the utter antithesis of a democratic institution.
So I hope Ms Miers goes in there like Hiram P Shuckleshoe, or W C Fields, and gives those prim old mummies a hissy fit. I know, I know, it's a long shot, but a guy can dream, right?
