The project was a horrendous idea, Judith Regan suffers from grandomania if she expects anyone to believe her statement detailing why she did it, and the whole sordid thing stained many people before before meeting its inglorious end.

Eat the Press has the best postmortem, with lots of links.

That said: I bet the project would have flown in Britain. The American public, however, is Puritanical. I see many critics of the Simpson project demanding “accountability” from those who dared perpetrate it on the public. Criticism turned to hysterical demagoguery at warp speed.
Rupert Murdoch may have just discovered the limits of our tolerance.

Or maybe we’re just being inoculated against worst worse to come. The callousness of this culture is mind-blowing.

In response to drivel from Richard Cohen, Atrios whines 

One thing which has long puzzled me is why Afghanistan wasn’t enough for all the “liberal hawks” and people like Richard Cohen who wanted “therapeutic violence” (Spank them! Spank them!). The Beinarts of the world wanted a war and a grand humanitarian mission. They had one. It was Afghanistan. It was justifiable. We went and kicked some ass. And then we abandoned the grand humanitarian mission and went chasing after a shiny new war.

Why wasn’t Afghanistan enough? Why were people who tried to point out that maybe we should stick around and try to fix that country before we went and busted up another one considered to be unserious dirty fucking hippies?

What Cohen actually said in his column was:

If anything, I was encouraged in my belief [that we had to get rid of the monstrous Saddam] by the offensive opposition to the war — silly arguments about oil or empire or, at bottom, the ineradicable and perpetual rottenness of America.

On the contrary, I thought. We are a good country, attempting to do a good thing. In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic. The United States had the power to change things for the better, and those who would do the changing — the fighting — were, after all, volunteers.

Cohen said nothing about hippies, of course. He was criticizing the mindless anti-war brigade. Surely he must have meant the conscience-stricken perversely self-involved toxically narcissistic Not in Our Name crowd, who wrote in mid-2002.

Let it not be said that people in the United States did nothing when their government declared a war without limit and instituted stark new measures of repression.

The signers of this statement call on the people of the U.S. to resist the policies and overall political direction that have emerged since September 11, 2001, and which pose grave dangers to the people of the world.

So back to Atrios’s question. Why were we hawks not “satisfied” with Afghanistan?

Because this was not tit-for-tat retaliation to squash a few Al Qaeda-flavored bedbugs and cockroaches. 9/11 called for destroying the vermins’ nests and killing the eggs. Which were not in Afghanistan.

The idea was that when we, as a nation, went back to our pleasures and pastimes after exterminating the worst pests, it would be with the knowledge that we have done all we could do to secure “the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”  

It’s that simple. And that complicated.

Deal with it.

Provocative Muslim author Nonie Darwish had been scheduled to appear for a talk at Brown University about her book Now They Call Me Infidel: Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel, and the War on Terror.

Then she was disinvited by the same folks who invited her—Brown’s Hillel (Jewish) organization. You can read a very tendentious version of events here.

Here’s what I think: Whatever. It’s a free country. Invite or disinvite, it’s your business. But then don’t be surprised when the New Inquisition’s spotlight shines on you.

However, I’ll be eagerly awaiting a letter from dozens of American academics and public intellectuals condemning Brown’s Hillel organization for shutting down Darwish’s free speech. I’m sure I’ll see it in the New York Review of Books, just as I saw the letter they wrote when an event featuring Israel critic Tony Judt was canceled some weeks ago.

To me, it looks like the Polish consulate thought maybe it wouldn’t look so good to have a vociferous critic of Israel—the homeland of the Jews—appear on the premises of a consulate of a country that helped the Germans exterminate 3 million of them—half of all the Jews who were persecuted by their neighbors; stripped of rights, property, jobs, bank accounts, and all personal effects; rounded up; transported on cattle cars; and gassed and then cremated in ovens during World War II.

Likewise, it looks like Brown’s Hillel organization, on second thought, decided it would look bad—considering the anti-Semitism in the air—to invite an outspoken critic of Islam speak from a platform associated with Jews.

I wish the organizers of these events had thought about the implications of their actions (invitations) the first time. Maybe other organizers will learn to think ahead.

A while ago, Tina Brown, whose column I used to love to read in the Washington Post, asked of the New York Times after its Judith Miller debacle: “IS THERE ANYBODY HOME”? ***

Sadly, no. The deciders are all out to lunch. I wish they would decide to hold these events. We need to air our differences. What is the point of a fucking democracy with freedom of speech if we don’t talk to one another? Huh?

——–

*** Here is the full, delicious quote:

Don Van Natta’s team-reported narrative included such baffling details as Times Executive Editor Bill Keller blandly noting that, after he took her off the Iraq story because of her lead role in co-authoring the erroneous stories of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, Miller “kept kind of drifting on her own back into the national security realm.” Drifting? On her own? Is the Times after Blair some sort of trackless sea, with lone castaways afloat on rafts? To whom do reporters report? IS THERE ANYBODY HOME?

Oh no! How do we account for this?

According to CNN, six in ten Americans think George H.W. Bush (that’s “41″) is a better president than Dubya (that’s “43″):

 Six in 10 said the elder Bush, who served one term from 1989-1993, did a better job in office, according to a poll conducted by Opinion Research Corporation.

Poppy isn’t having any of it, though. In Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, George Herbert Walker Bush took on his son’s Arab critics. Took them on face-to-face:

“We do not respect your son. We do not respect what he’s doing all over the world,” a woman in the audience bluntly told Bush after his speech.

Bush, 82, appeared stunned as others in the audience whooped and whistled in approval.

A college student told Bush his belief that U.S. wars were aimed at opening markets for American companies and said globalization was contrived for America’s benefit at the expense of the rest of the world. Bush was having none of it.

“I think that’s weird and it’s nuts,” Bush said. “To suggest that everything we do is because we’re hungry for money, I think that’s crazy. I think you need to go back to school.“

For what it’s worth, I agree with Poppy: it is weird and nuts. It’s also, however, what they learn in school.

Not to mention from the American press and American Bush critics. But, hey, who’s paying attention?

aw shucks

Queen Elizabeth meets Daniel Craig at the London premiere of Casino Royale last Tuesday.

It’s been in for a while. In case you had any doubts, Hitchens explains:

The summa of wisdom in [administration] circles is the need for consultation with Iraq’s immediate neighbors in Syria and Iran. Given that these two regimes have recently succeeded in destroying the other most hopeful democratic experiment in the region—the brief emergence of a self-determined Lebanon that was free of foreign occupation—and are busily engaged in promoting their own version of sectarian mayhem there, through the trusty medium of Hezbollah, it looks as if a distinctly unsentimental process is under way.

This will present few difficulties to [James] Baker, who supported the Syrian near-annexation of Lebanon.

Best line:

(You have to admit that it was clever of the president to make it appear that Rumsfeld had been fired by the electorate rather than by him.)

And a reminder that James Baker and Bush 41 are responsible for the misery of Iraq post 1991, when they refused to depose Saddam:

There would never have been a better opportunity to “address the root cause” and to remove a dictator who was a permanent menace to his subjects, his neighbors, and the world beyond. Instead, he was shamefully confirmed in power and a miserable 12-year period of sanctions helped him to enrich himself and to create the immiserated, uneducated, unemployed underclass that is now one of the “root causes” of a new social breakdown in Iraq. It seems a bit much that the man principally responsible for all this should be so pleased with himself and that he should be hailed on all sides as the very model of the statesmanship we now need.