Richard Just, writing in the Globe and Mail, gets to the core of what so irritates Walt and Mearsheimer that they’ve mounted a campaign to denounce it as a conspiracy—America’s natural sympathy for Israel:

Israel appeals to different Americans in different ways, including some theological ones that are obviously absurd, not to mention offensive. But at root, most Americans like Israel for two reasons: first, because they sense correctly that, whatever the country’s imperfections, the moral claim of Jewish statehood is fundamentally just; and second, because, in ways large and small, in ways salutary and occasionally troubling, Israeli society accentuates, even exaggerates, the traits Americans most admire in themselves. We take pride in our vibrant democracy; Israel’s democracy is more than vibrant, it is spirited and contentious to the point of near-dysfunction. The U.S. psyche was strongly influenced by the frontier; Israel is nothing but frontier, and its national psyche has been defined by it. Americans like to think of themselves as tough; Israelis - well, you know.

Groups that support Israel skillfully exploit these similarities. On my 2004 trip, in order to be shown that Israel, like the United States, is a vibrant democracy, we spent a lot of time talking to politicians with competing viewpoints. To show us that Israel, like the United States, is a frontier society, we spent time on various borders. To show us that Israelis are tough, we did tough-seeming things, such as ride around in an armoured vehicle.

Some of this was heavy-handed, and some of the affinities Israel sought to exploit struck me as less appealing than others. For instance, the conservatives on my trip, all men, were quite taken with the frontier machismo of Israeli culture, a mentality to which my own reaction is much more complicated.

But whatever the merits of these various affinities, the point is that it doesn’t take a lot of trickery to sell Israel to Americans. In Israel, Americans see a country whose underlying rationale is just and whose instincts, aspirations and even foibles overlap more than a little with their own. They also understand what Mearsheimer and Walt ludicrously deny: that the threats to Israel’s existence have always been real, and remain so. [e.a.]

Indeed.

The New York Times wonders if candidates are giving us too much information. Then the paper lets a surrogate act as its mouthpiece:

“I’m all for democratizing dialogue, but this is just much too much information,” Mr. Begala said. “It’s appalling, really.”

Hmmm. Appalling? I wouldn’t go that far. I see all public figures—from politicians to CEOs to movie stars to sports sensations to news anchors to talking heads—as self-conscious performers. They’re in front of the camera—of course they’re performers! Plus, no one can create a public profile in today’s world unless s/he’s got good visuals.

Bottom line: they’re not my cuppa, but they’re here to stay, because as long as there are public figures and cameras, there will be performers

Here’s what I had to say back in February:

Gawker reports on a “Firm Potent Leader with Plenty of Stamina”:

The Post ruined all our breakfasts with their cover this morning (seriously: “Judi gushes as Rudi rushes in”?? Ewwwww!!!)

Check out the placement of her hand on his cheek. And her hair, cascading just so. I’m going to throw up.

I also once posted a picture of The Kiss:

And for a while I was obsessed with making fun of the PDAs of the Chief Monkey of Iran:

 

the many loves of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

July 31, 2006

June 2006

As regular readers know, I’m on vacation. Till mid-October, posting will be irregular, infrequent, and not pegged to up-to-the minute events.

If you’re in need of sustenance, check out some of these links:

Back Talk, where the casualty count in Iraq is measured scrupulously as a means of determining the results of the surge—and where Engram provides the logical evidence that Al Qaeda in Iraq is a huge factor in our troubles there (contrary to what you hear from the intellectually lazy and/or politically insecure members of the MSM).

Martin Kramer on the Middle East, a treasure trove of up-to-the minute geopolitical/political news links, among other valuable links and essays.

Arts and Letters Daily—the website I cannot do without.

The NYT’s Virginia Heffernan once came close to understanding (though she didn’t use these words) that one category of infotainment—in this case, celebrity photography—isn’t all bad.

Jennifer Aniston looking pensive occasioned a headline on her misery since her divorce from Brad Pitt. The caption drew me to Ms. Aniston’s eyes. Interesting: those part-Greek eyes, darkened by experience. What was Ms. Aniston thinking, now that she’d been left for Mr. Pitt’s costar in an action movie, the tattooed siren Angelina Jolie? So human, her hurt and expression. And so recent, I thought. I bought the magazine. …

Nevertheless, Heffernan proclaimed her guilt about indulging in what she considered a lowly pastime: gawking at celebrities.

Weakly I have hoped reading portraits in this way might strengthen some evolutionary skill, the way gossiping is said to make you better at forging allegiances.

I wouldn’t want to get all meta or postmodernist on her, but in fact Heffernan is strengthening certain skills. Media savviness may be the quintessential skill of our era. The people enjoying its advantages, if indeed they are advantages, are those who learn to manipulate the media the better to please audiences. Surely this cannot come as a surprise to Heffernan.

I also find it curious that Heffernan continues to flog her own guilt over her terminal lowbrow-ness while Perez Hilton, “the reigning online gossip maven,” one of Heffernan’s interview subjects, explains exactly how, as a practitioner, he ensnares her in the guilt trap [e.a.]:

“I took several art history classes in school, and photography,” he said in a telephone interview. “When you pay attention, you see some things that somebody else might miss, so it behooves you to try and find that special thing in an image. Then your intepretation will stand out more.”

He recognizes too that analyzing a photograph also often means embellishing it: “When I look at a picture, I go through the same process as when I look at a news story. How can I process this image to make this as entertaining as possible to my readers? I’m looking at it, cropping it, resizing it, drawing on it, making it my own.”

Despite even this acknowledgment that the photographs are shrewdly manipulated in order tap into exactly that place where Heffernan responds to the endeavor as deep play, Heffernan continues to feel guilty about her secret—until she meets another high-minded person like herself slumming at a certain online site:

[L]ast summer … I spoke to a lawyer I met on a “Lonelygirl15” message board. He and I were both obsessed with figuring out whether she was an actress or an ordinary girl.

“What do you do with your time when you’re not studying Web images?” I asked him in an e-mail message.

“I usually stick to stuff like Rathergate or the doctored Reuters photographs,” he wrote back, …“But this is fascinating.”

And that’s when it occurred to me: there is an undeniable pleasure in inferring stories from pieces of data, whether the story is trivial — “Lonelygirl15” — or substantial, like the military service of the president. Isn’t the discovery of that pleasure, in some sense, what drives science and all manner of detective work? We’re all on the Web, weighing various kinds of data we get — eBay listings, blog posts, Craigslist solicitations — and trying to read between some pixels, and connect others.

Sure, I don’t expect we’ll break any big news reading PerezHilton.com. But maybe we’re not entirely wasting our time; we’re practicing interpreting images from the new close-range, high-def magazines and Web sites. [e.a.]

Yes indeedy, we are.

Also, Heffernan should get a clue: there’s an entire area of cultural studies populated by “aca-fans,” like the MIT professor Henry Jenkins, who’s apparently being referred to as the Marshall McLuhan of the 21st century.

You can check out the confessions of other aca-fans Deborah Kaplan and Alan McKee on Jenkins’s blog, beginning here:

[Kaplan]: I consume vast amounts of highly denigrated popular culture: children’s and young adult literature, fan fiction, science fiction and fantasy, chick lit, science fiction television, romance novels, comics. Really, aside from the fact that I don’t watch reality television, my consumption patterns are (like many people’s) heavily lowbrow. With the exception of a few authors, I don’t read highbrow literature for pleasure, and even those highbrow authors I do read are often denigrated by the establishment for writing women’s literature, or are slotted carefully into the multicultural space available on a reading list (Jeanette Winterson, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ishmael Reed, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Kazuo Ishiguro). When I was a child I watched PBS and A&E with my parents; now I’m fond of PBS pretty much only as the network that brought me Doctor Who throughout my childhood. I don’t listen to NPR; I listen to folk or classic rock or pop stations.

And yet I am constantly being told my tastes are too highbrow.

Hussein Ibish, of the American Taskforce on Palestine, lays out the situation in Israel-Palestine:

The catastrophic division that has recently developed in Palestine, with the national leadership split between two fiefdoms and in a state of open conflict, has left Palestinians and their allies around the world dismayed, and struggling to reformulate a viable strategy for ending the occupation. As people search for guidance and try to make sense of a shocking turn of events, misleading and overwrought polemics have become more prevalent than sober analysis.

In the United States, a small but vocal and influential group of left-wing commentators, taking their lead from others in the Middle East, has reacted by defending the conduct of Hamas and heaping vitriol on Fateh and the PLO. Of course the Muslim religious right has its direct supporters, although in the United States for legal and other reasons straightforward identification with Hamas tends to be more subterranean and muted than overt. As a result, this small faction of leftist writers, who cannot in any sense be accused of being Islamists themselves, has emerged as the principal public defenders of Hamas’ actions and its struggle to seize power in Palestine. However sincere or well-intentioned, this rhetoric could have a decidedly negative influence and, if taken seriously by enough people, might significantly undermine efforts to help to end the occupation.

One cannot simply support any and every party or organization just because they are Palestinians, even though this is the understandable instinct of a great many friends of Palestine.*** Instincts, however genuine, are no substitute for an informed and effective political strategy designed to achieve specific goals – in this case, to end the occupation. To work effectively towards ending the occupation, there is no need for supporters of Palestine to become partisans of Fateh, defenders of all of their actions and methods, or fans of their personalities. However, important choices need to be made and there are serious consequences to all of our words and deeds. The stakes could hardly be higher.

Four vital questions need to be addressed. What explains the counter-intuitive phenomenon of Arabs nominally on the left coming to the defense of the Muslim far-right? What exactly have these left-wing sympathizers with the far-right been saying in recent months? What actually happened in Gaza and the West Bank? And, most importantly, what should friends of Palestine in the United States do now?

Read the whole thing. It’s worth your time.

———————-

*** I’ve quoted him before, but I’ll quote him again—the British journalist Nick Cohen, that is, who once made a very shrewd and sharp assertion along the same lines to his left-wing cohort:

It’s not radical, it’s barely political, to turn a blind eye and say you are for the Palestinian cause. Political seriousness lies in stating which Palestine you are for and which Palestinians you support. The Palestinian fight is at once an anti-colonial struggle and a clash between modernity and reaction. The confusion of our times comes from the failure to grasp that it is possible to have an anti-colonialism of the far right.

While we’re at it, don’t excuse Hamas and Islamic Jihad and all the rest by saying the foundation of Israel and the defeat of all the Arab attempts to destroy it made them that way. Anti-Semitism isn’t a local side effect of a dirty war over a patch of land smaller than Wales. It’s everywhere from Malaysia to Morocco, and it has arrived here. When the BBC showed a Panorama documentary about the ideological roots of the Muslim Council of Britain in the Pakistani religious right, the first reaction of the Council was to accuse it of following an “Israeli agenda”. The other day the Telegraph reported that Ahmad Thomson, a Muslim lawyer who advises the Prime Minister on community relations of all things, had declared that a “sinister” group of Jews and Freemasons was behind the invasion of Iraq.

To explain away a global phenomenon as a rational reaction to Israeli oppression, you have once again to turn the Jew into a supernatural figure whose existence is the cause of discontents throughout the earth. You have to revive anti-Semitism.

Something’s gonna have to be done about Tina Fey, who was profiled in the NYT about her surprising hit show 30 Rock. She admitted that America’s Mayor is her weakness:

In writing for Liz, Ms. Fey said, she drew somewhat on her own experiences in television. In one episode Liz is called a vulgar name by a subordinate, an incident that Ms. Fey said was based on something that happened to her.

In another episode, in which Liz reflects on things about herself that others wouldn’t know, she says, “There is an 80 percent chance” that she will “tell all my friends I’m voting for Barack Obama, but I will secretly vote for John McCain.”

Ms. Fey, who wrote that line, said it was semi-autobiographical, a way of “admitting I have a lot of liberal feelings, but I also live in New York, and I want to feel safe, and I secretly kind of want Giuliani.”

As I was saying just recently …

The Democrats in general, and MoveOn specifically, seem not to realize that in order to deliver politically correct votes, you need to do a lot more than kneecap people into spouting politically correct attitudes in the public square. You can lead a horse to water, etc.

My point about Rudy Giuliani was that he knows a lot about the kind of public political correctness that elects a “fascist” to a second term in a huge victory in decidedly not-”fascist” New York City.

Anybody paying attention?
Nah, I didn’t think so.

This message has been approved by Committee to Clarify That We Have Identified the Enemy:

Philip Weiss has read Walt and Mearsheimer’s book [emphasis in the title is in the original]:

‘The Jungle,’ ‘Silent Spring,’ ‘Unsafe at Any Speed’–And Now, ‘The Israel Lobby’

Walt and Mearsheimer’s book on the Israel Lobby is being published today. I finished it last night. I said before that it was historic, but I did not realize quite what it was till I put it down: a great work of American muckraking in the tradition of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (the meatpacking industry), Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (pesticides), and Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed (Detroit). An overkill moral beauty aimed at an outrage, some day this book will be legendary and dated. [e.a.]

Legendary And dated? As in superseded by even greater works of moral beauty by the same authors, something like, say, Our Kampf? or perhaps Our Jihad?

But that’s putting the cart before the horse. Meanwhile, Wess dares to dream:

So [The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy] will be passed around, it will be taught. Serious people will press it on other serious people. Political aides will hand it to other political aides. It may have to wear brown-paper covers in Congress, at the State Department and at Hillels, but it will be read hungrily. Young progressive Jews will read it. Arabs will translate it into Arabic. It will go like lightning around Europe. Israelis will snap it up (the book is actually very respectful of Israel; it’s America that has the big problem), and someday it will come out in Hebrew. It will work on people. It will show what independent people ought to do when they form ideas, and others will chime in. A politician will finally speak out, with Walt and Mearsheimer as his or her role model.

I can hardly wait. And I’m not alone.

Michael Gerson had a few choice words for Walt and Mearsheimer:

Walt and Mearsheimer are careful to say they are not anti-Semitic or conspiracy-minded. But their main inference [sic]– that Israel, the Israel lobby and Jewish neoconservatives called the shots for Bush, Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld — is not only rubbish, it is dangerous rubbish. As “mainstream” scholars, Walt and Mearsheimer cannot avoid the historical pedigree of this kind of charge. Every generation has seen accusations that Jews have dual loyalties, promote war and secretly control political structures.

These academics may not follow their claims all the way to anti-Semitism. But this is the way it begins. This is the way it always begins.

Ron Rosenbaum called bullshit on Walt and Mearsheimer’s alleged “realism”:

To me, the real problem is not whether The Israel Lobby pleases this Grand Kleagle or that, or the one-sidedness of its depiction of Israel and its supporters, so much as the profound failure of the moral imagination that the book reflects. A failure to connect with the historical experience of Jews that motivates their support of Israel. A failure to empathize with the real danger the 6 million Jews of Israel face: the threat of a second Holocaust.

Leslie Gelb excoriated them for roiling the waters purely to gain vindication for their views about Iraq:

The inevitable last question is this: Why have two such serious students of United States foreign policy written so weak a book and added fuel, inadvertently, to the fires of anti-Semitism? The answer lies in their treatment of the Iraq war.

Mearsheimer and Walt should feel very proud, indeed, for their foresight in opposing the Iraq war. Their writings were more on target than anyone’s, and they are justifiably mystified about how the United States could have been so stupid and self-destructive. They appear to have reasoned that a mistake of this magnitude could have been fostered only by some irresistible force. And the only such force they can conjure from the landscape of the powerful is the Israel lobby, as embodied by neoconservative gladiators like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. In the authors’ words, “the lobby did not cause the war by itself. … But absent the lobby’s influence, there almost certainly would not have been a war. The lobby was a necessary but not sufficient condition for a war that is a strategic disaster for the United States and a boon for Iran, Israel’s most serious regional adversary.”

Their vitriol about the Iraq war — about being so right while others were so wrong — is so overwhelming that they minimize two key facts. First, America’s foreign policy community, including many Democrats as well as Republicans, supported the war for the very same reasons that Wolfowitz and the lobby did — namely, the fact that Hussein seemed to pose a present or future threat to American national interests. Second, the real play-callers behind the war were President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. They hardly have a history of being in the pockets of the Jewish lobby (more like the oil lobby’s), and they aren’t remotely neoconservatives. The more we know, the clearer it is that the White House went to war primarily to erase the “blunder” of the elder Bush in not finishing off Saddam Hussein during the Persian Gulf war of 1991.

The authors, however, are feeling so satisfied with themselves, if their remarks to the Los Angeles Times editorial board are any indication, that Walt now blames the limitations of language—”lobby” is a “crude” term, Walt admits—for their inability to get their point across.

In this formulation, it’s not their intemperate blanket condemnation of anyone who supports Israel that’s to blame for the hostile reaction to their so-called “argument”; rather, Walt suggests, Americans have been so thoroughly brainwashed by Israel supporters that we no longer have the language to describe such a magical group as the “lobby”—or, more precisely, “the Lobby,” as it was forever imprinted on the minds of those who follow such arcane debates.

What’s crude here is not just the insult “Lobby.” It’s Walt and Mearsheimer’s continued slippery reluctance to define this amoeba-like group that they claim has “too much power” (by what measure?) and is asserting undue influence over American policy against the national interest. This group, they say under skeptical questioning by the L.A. Times’s editorial board, is forever changing its shape and its dimensions to include this person or that; this organization or that; this group of people or that. And all the while, Walt and Mearsheimer keep insisting, they’re not talking about a “cabal,” so what’s the problem?

Here’s the problem: when you describe a group with the mystical powers of a “cabal” but keep insisting that it isn’t a cabal because you’re not referring to it as a “cabal,” it gives off the unmistakable odor of skunk, and weasel.

Read this exchange and see if you don’t agree [e.a.]

Mearsheimer: … if you have a policy of unconditional aid, if you have a policy where you can’t criticize Israel in the United States without getting smeared, you’re going to give that state a lot of room to get itself in trouble. And our argument again is that it would be better if that aid were conditional and we were allowed to have an open debate about Israeli policy and the Israeli-U.S. relationship.

Walt: That is, something similar to the debate that happens in Israel itself, where you have a very wide-open debate about what their policies are and whether they make sense, and where you find lots more people willing to take positions similar to ours than you would here in the United States.

Tim: Then why is the book called The Israel Lobby and not The Pro-Settlement Lobby or The Likudnik Lobby?

Mearsheimer: For the very simple reason that the lobby is not monolithic or homogeneous. There are groups inside the lobby that are opposed to settlements; there are groups inside the lobby that are in favor of settlements. Also you want to remember, we’re not arguing that this is a Jewish lobby. Despite our best efforts to make the case clear that this is the Israel lobby and not the Jewish lobby, people continue to talk as if we’re only talking about Jews.

Who’s in the lobby?

Tim: You mentioned the uh, the non…mono…lithicism of the lobby. And looking through the book, it’s weird to me to think that there’s some team that comprises Martin Indyk, Daniel Pipes, you know, I’m trying to think of a third…I mean, this is really a wide-ranging group of, you know, Abe…

Mearsheimer: Henry Siegman. Do you know Henry Siegman? He was head of the American Jewish Congress. But again, there’s no reason why people inside the lobby can’t be very critical of Israel. Let me give you an example: One of the best reviews of our book, one of the most favorable reactions inside the United States, came from M.J. Rosenberg, who used to work for AIPAC. He said very nice things about the book.

Nick: My, one of my, one of the things that confuses me as I read the book is that you are, you talk in these, often about the lobby. The lobby does this, the lobby does that. The lobby seems so broad as you’ve defined it that it’s hard for me to, to know if that’s a meaningful group that you’re talking about. The differences go broader than Martin Indyk…

Walt: Martin got his start working for AIPAC. He helped found the Institute for Near East Policy.

Nick: He falls clearly in the…

Walt: And that’s not to say that he hasn’t advocated positions, both in his official capacity and outside it, that John and I would agree with. He’s a two-state-solution person; he understands that getting this thing shut down is in everybody’s interest. We might disagree on some other issues. That said, he’s not someone who would ever say the United States should make its support for Israel conditional on ending the settlements. He’s never advocated that, he… [e.a.]

im: So that’s what defines your presence in the lobby, is unconditional support?

Susan Brenneman: Yeah, and not just support but by support you mean aid?

Stephen: Aid and diplomatic support. And again, you’ve got, the way we define it… I think we laid this out as clearly as… You’ve got to be actively working. It’s not just somebody who has an attitude toward Israel. You’ve got to spend some part of your daily life trying to advance that particular goal. I’d also point out, like all other interest groups, these are fuzzy groups, right? I mean, there are people who are clearly in the core: Abraham Foxman, nobody’s really going to argue whether he’s a member. But you’re going to have some people who are further out, to where you get to people who are clearly not in the lobby. And there are going to be some cases in between where you can argue back and forth, and they might change their minds. I acknowledge that the term “lobby” has a certain crude quality to it, but almost due to the limitations of language. One of the things we did was we often used phrases like “groups within the lobby,” “organizations in the lobby,” “organizations and individuals in the lobby…” Trying to underscore to the reader that this is not a monolith. This is not a Comintern that gives orders to the followers. That there are issues where they genuinely disagree.

These two still cannot explain what they mean by “the lobby,” and they blame the constraints of language. Get this: The phenomenon they discern is so unique that language cannot even properly describe it. But they know it when they see it, and they know it’s very bad for America!

And Philip Weiss is eager to spread the seed of these “scholars.”

The mind reels.

David Brooks announces the marginalization of the netroots:

In the beginning of August, liberal bloggers met at the YearlyKos convention while centrist Democrats met at the Democratic Leadership Council’s National Conversation. Almost every Democratic presidential candidate attended YearlyKos, and none visited the D.L.C. …

Now it’s evident that if you want to understand the future of the Democratic Party you can learn almost nothing from the bloggers, billionaires and activists on the left who make up the “netroots.” …

In the first place, the netroots candidates are losing. …

Second, Clinton is drawing her support from the other demographic end of the party. …

Third, Clinton has established this lead by repudiating the netroots theory of politics. …In a series of D.L.C. memos with titles like “The Decisive Center,” Penn has preached that while Republicans can win by appealing only to conservatives, Democrats must appeal to centrists as well as liberals. …

Fourth, the netroots are losing the policy battles. …

The fact is, many Democratic politicians privately detest the netroots’ self-righteousness and bullying. They also know their party has a historic opportunity to pick up disaffected Republicans and moderates, so long as they don’t blow it by drifting into cuckoo land. They also know that a Democratic president is going to face challenges from Iran and elsewhere that are going to require hard-line, hawkish responses. …

Finally, these Democrats understand their victory formula is not brain surgery. You have to be moderate on social issues, activist but not statist on domestic issues and hawkish on foreign policy.

Brooks, who sniffs the winds of Washington for a living, may be on to something. If so, however, the leftosphere remains embarrassingly far behind the curve.

Josh Marshall:

Am I the only one embarrassed by the dingbat brouhaha over Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s attempt to visit Ground Zero to lay a wreath? …

So what’s the problem exactly? Presumably we can be frank enough to acknowledge that the real issue here is that while Ahmadinejad is not Arab to most of us he looks pretty Arab. And he is Muslim certainly — and pretty up in arms about it at that. And we officially don’t like him. And we classify the country he runs as a state sponsor of terrorism. So even though he has absolutely nothing to do with 9/11, when you put all these key facts together, he might as well have done it himself. And what business does anyone with the blood of the victims of 9/11 on his hands have going to Ground Zero?

That’s basically it and don’t tell me it’s not.

Alternatively I guess it’s that he’s a very mean guy, said bad things about Israel or questioned the Holocaust? Is this man any worse than the various Soviet dignitaries who we feted and hosted around our country? Or is it simply that we’ve grown increasingly infantile as a country since the end of the Cold War, more and more obsessed and histrionic about minor powers like Iran and Iraq?

If we’ve grown “infantile as a country,” Josh Marshall, who’s hardly part of the “netroots” (he’s a Zionist, so he’s not invited to the party) and who holds a Ph.D., is exhibit number one.

His unwillingness to grapple with the moral, tactical, political, strategic issues surrounding Ahmadinejad’s provocations—denying that there are any such quandaries involved—is the mark of a deeply unserious person.

If the writers on the left want me in their corner, they’d better be prepared to give me passionate arguments about why, for example, we should “dialogue” with Ahmadinejad in New York. They should lay out for me a believable scenario in which such graciousness from America leads to a good result for the United States in its obviously ultra-tense relationship with Iran. Instead, Marshall tells me that I’m a racist and a wuss.

And he’s one of the smartest writers in the leftosphere. This is beyond pitiful.

The New York Times wants to make sure you know, however, that some of the protesters were bused in for the occasion.

Protesters, including students bused in from other schools, swarmed Columbia University to demonstrate against the speech.

This is the same New York Times which claims:

U.S. Focus on Ahmadinejad Puzzles Iranians

Q&A highlight: Bollinger, having graciously offered AJad a platform, denounced him to his face as a “petty and cruel dictator.”

Biggest laugh line from AJad: “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country.”

Right. Maybe this has something to do with it:

Der Spiegel features recently discovered photos of Auschwitz employees enjoying their off-hours:

Twelve SS auxiliaries sit happily on a fence railing eating blueberries given to them by an SS officer. The photo was taken in 1944 in Solahütte, a recreation home located near Auschwitz for the SS team in charge of running the concentration camp. …

The photos were taken between May and December 1944, and they show the officers and guards relaxing and enjoying themselves — as countless people were being murdered and cremated at the nearby death camp.

Spiegel reports that Germans were “shocked” to see these photographs. Why? Did they not understand that their forebears’ continued to live their lives through the war years—falling in love, getting married, having children, having affairs, working, doing whatever it is that people do— while their nation (and in many cases these same forebears) created unimaginable suffering for The Other?

A gift especially for you, from the New York Times:

I wonder how much “they” paid for the ad, and who “they” are.

I just realized that I can program WordPress to publish posts in the future, like while I’m away on vacation for the next weeks. Instead of timeliness, look for—well, not exactly timelessness (I’m not that good, or ambitious) but, well, let’s call it not-time-sensitiveness.

Oops!

Joe Klein:

This is uninformed [but politically correct; see here  --ed.] speculation, BUT…I wouldn’t be surprised if the Israeli strike on Syria two weeks ago had nothing at all to do with nuclear material. [e.a.]

The Times (London):

Israelis seized nuclear material in Syrian raid

Israeli commandos seized nuclear material of North Korean origin during a daring raid on a secret military site in Syria before Israel bombed it this month, according to informed sources in Washington and Jerusalem.

The attack was launched with American approval on September 6 after Washington was shown evidence the material was nuclear related, the well-placed sources say.

The plot thickens.

Your faithful blogger is leaving on vacation. She’ll be unplugged and pretty much incommunicado. She tends to fly solo, so there will be no blogging buddies filling in for her.

Suck it up, folks—she’ll be back. Meanwhile, there’s always the hope that when she resumes full-time blogging in a few weeks’ time, she’ll be less grouchy and gloomy and more infotaining.

Never say never!

Niall Ferguson, in a fascinating review of Ian Kershaw’s Ten Decisions That Changed the World in 1940-1941, faults Kershaw somewhat for “hindsight bias” and for offering readers only “an apparently inexorable and often teleological narrative.”

It’s an interesting argument, a quibble between historians about whose method of scholarship works best. If you’re a history nerd, you’ll want to read the whole thing.

What struck me, though, was this passage, because it speaks so much to our own times [e.a.]:

Churchill did ultimately prevail over more pusillanimous Tories in the crisis of May 1940, when Halifax and Chamberlain were urging that no diplomatic stone be left unturned to end the war. But that he should have emerged strengthened from the debacle at Dunkirk did not appear likely at the time. What Kershaw fails to do is to spell out what people in Britain thought peace with Germany would have meant at that juncture. The reason Britain fought on was not just because Churchill decided to. It was because he was articulating a collective popular aversion to the alternative of French-style subjugation to the Third Reich. That is a reminder of something that the erstwhile practitioner of societal history appears to have forgotten. It was not just the decisions of dictators, emperors, presidents and prime ministers that determined the character of the Second World War. It was the decisions of hundreds of millions of people: decisions to acquiesce in conscription rather than defy the authorities; decisions to kill not just enemy soldiers but civilians, whether in death camps or from the air; decisions to keep fighting rather than to surrender or flee (and vice versa).

An interesting image: Hitler’s willing executioners versus Churchill’s willing conscripts, to whom he had effectively articulated a collective popular aversion to subjugation by the Third Reich.

A wartime leader has to persuade, cajole, beg, plead, and explain again and again and again. He or she must lead. In this as in so many things, Bush is a complete and utter failure. A disaster.

This commenter to Ann Althouse’s post about the Jena 6 *** gets at what I was trying to say earlier about MoveOn’s revolting tactics:

My own interest has remained subdued for other reasons. White men are by definition now oppressors, so having any other opinion than that white people are evil is condemned. Any comment contrary to this prescription is also, by definition, racist. So why bother saying anything at all?

Like 100% of Soviets voted for Brezhnev and 100% of Cubans vote for Castro, when I am asked, I say that I vote for jailing every white person involved in this event.

But generally I do what folks in the sixties did when over-the-top leftists and demonstrators and race-baiters made endless demands: I’ll stay quiet, and vote for Nixon. [e.a.]

The Democrats in general, and MoveOn specifically, seem not to realize that in order to deliver politically correct votes, you need to do a lot more than kneecap people into spouting politically correct attitudes in the public square. You can lead a horse to water, etc.
My point about Rudy Giuliani was that he knows a lot about the kind of public political correctness that elects a “fascist” to a second term in a huge victory in decidedly not-”fascist” New York City.

THE 1997 ELECTIONS: THE OVERVIEW; GIULIANI SWEEPS TO SECOND TERM AS MAYOR

Rudolph W. Giuliani last night [November 4, 1997] became the second Republican in 60 years to be elected to a second term as Mayor of New York City, defeating Ruth W. Messinger, a fixture of Manhattan’s [liberal] Upper West Side …

[A] survey of voters leaving polling sites showed that his support crossed party lines…

He won the support of 4 out of 10 Democrats and people who identified themselves as liberal, better than he did against Mr. Dinkins four years ago. He also won the support of about half the women who voted. And he won the support of one in five black voters, the survey found — about four times better than he did against Mr. Dinkins four years ago.

And in what was an unpleasant coda to this election for Ms. Messinger, Mr. Giuliani even won in one of the Assembly districts that make up what has been her political base for 25 years: the Upper West Side district now represented by Scott M. Stringer.

Several political analysts suggested that Mr. Giuliani’s victory over Ms. Messinger was a final verdict by voters on the status of liberalism in New York City, a school of thought with which she has been identified since she first ran for a local school board in 1974. [e.a.]

That 1997 obituary to liberalism in New York City was more than a bit premature. Certainly, political correctness rules here. But to say that liberalism is thriving here—or anywhere in America except the blogosphere and the commentariat—would be a gross overstatement. It is political apathy that thrives here, as elsewhere in America.

Giuliani isn’t Nixon, but it is dangerous for Democrats to underestimate his appeal to disaffected liberals, more of which MoveOn and its ilk are creating every day.

————-

***(a case I knew virtually nothing about before reading the informative comments to Althouse’s post, and about which I still do not consider myself informed enough about to comment, except that I shudder to hear about nooses hanging from trees in the South just as I shuddered when Bonnie Prince Harry dressed up in Nazi garb for a costume party)

The latest Pew poll indicates that the needle has not moved on Iraq.

Last week’s congressional testimony by General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, followed by President Bush’s address to the nation, has not changed bottom-line public attitudes toward the war in Iraq.

But

there has been a modest increase in positive views about the U.S. military effort, accompanied by largely positive public reactions to General Petraeus’ recommendations.

Most Americans (57%) who heard at least something about Petraeus’ report say they approve of his recommendations for troop withdrawals,

And this despite the fact that they despair his recommendations will not bring about victory:

[J]ust 16% say Petraeus’ statements have made them more optimistic about the war, while 67% say their views were unchanged by the general’s report.

I don’t know what this tells you. Here’s what it tells me—that Americans trust our military commander in Iraq to give his best professional recommendations, but that they have their own ideas about what is likely to happen in Iraq and what course of action we should pursue there.

In other words, the public is not quite so stupid and star-struck as MoveOn and the hysterical Dem base think it is, or so easily swayed by op-ed columns, either, as the leftosphere seemed to think it was when Ken Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon published their piece last month. The hysterical attempts to shut down debate by smearing anyone who appears dangerous to will not pay dividends.

The Dems should learn to pay a little respect to the electorate, which is not comprised entirely of drooling idiots, Islamophobes, immigrant haters, Jesus freaks, and war-loving neocons. Among the people trying to figure out where they stand and whom they should support in 2008 are many who are genuinely aggrieved by the Bush administration’s hideous incompetence, smug arrogance, and paranoid politics; heartbroken about this war and America’s loss of stature; furious that al Qaeda has flourished under Bush’s watch as surely as our international alliances have been strained; sickened by the coarseness of public and political life, which daily threatens to turn old friends into new enemies; anxious about the rough waters ahead for their families as society is roiled by technological, social, and economic changes; and worried about unexpected geopolitical turbulence from every corner of the globe—from Russia to China to the Middle East to South America to Thailand.

The thing is: No matter how much the New Left Mob tries to intimidate some of us into toeing some fantasy “progressive” party line by calling us names, many of us are not conservatives and we are not Republicans. Some of us are in fact liberals and Democrats. And a vocal, restive subset of us are angry at our party’s dismal performance post-9/11 in articulating an effective American response to a new totalitarian political movement that challenges not only America but its Western allies—political Islam aka Islamic fascism aka Islamism.

MoveOn, instead of trying to forge a consensus among the Democrats—who still have no vision or blueprint or narrative to offer their constituents—is trying to beat its own side (which it takes entirely for granted) into submissive, deaf, dumb, and blind partisanship. Sorry to say, but I feel abused and molested and violated by this crew. I know I am not alone.

Now, in its stupidest move yet, MoveOn has just handed the Dems’ most formidable opponent a culture-war issue much, much more potent than abortion, gun control, and same-sex marriage rolled into one: namely, the seemingly unshakeable post-Vietnam “liberal” mind-set and narrative in which the American military is either hopelessly evil (see Murtha on Haditha; Scott Thomas, the “Baghdad Diarist,” in The New Republic; and Brian DePalma in Redacted) or now endlessly “stuck in Iraq” (the new MoveOn talking point).

Giuliani, for one, is positively gleeful at the prospect of making a huge issue of our sick Vietnam hangover:

He bought a newspaper ad in the [New York] Times to counter MoveOn’s ad describing Gen. David H. Petraeus as “General Betray Us.” He taunted Clinton to denounce the group and attacked Clinton for her questioning of Petraeus during his appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week.

When MoveOn then pounced on Giuliani, the former mayor said, in essence, bring it on. “Frankly, I wish MoveOn.org would do several more commercials attacking because if they do it could get me nominated,” he told CNN’s John King while in London.

Dear Democrats, please give me a reason to vote for one of you. I don’t agree with most of what Drew Westen says in this TNR essay, but I do agree with this part:

The way to win the center on national security is not to try to craft centrist positions on national security. Particularly in the post-9/11 era, Americans want leaders who will decisively pull the trigger. But “pulling the trigger” today doesn’t mean rattling our sabers …. The way to project strength on national security …  is to exude strength, particularly in the face of aggression, whether that aggression is from al Qaeda or from a bully in his bully pulpit.

Oh, and it would also help if you would also project the vision of a strong, self-confident, but humbled America.

Today’s NYT describes the result of “legislative quagmire” in the Senate and the “impasse” in the “war debate” in Congress—more, and more fervent, partisanship [e.a.]:

[L]awmakers and their allies are shifting to what has proved to be more solid ground when it comes to the war: political recriminations.

Every twist and turn of this week’s grinding Senate stalemate was accompanied by a new round of political advertisements and accusations. Republicans were portrayed as putting loyalty to President Bush before support for strained troops, while Democrats were characterized as being beholden to the ultra-left, as embodied by MoveOn.org. The partisan clamor will grow louder as the policy fight recedes.

Indeed, and that’s because empty barrels make the most noise, as reflected by today’s letters to the editor. Five out of six correspondents to the Times, in a section the paper calls “Is There Any Way to Support the Troops?,” lambast the Dems as “feckless,” “pusillanimous,” etc. and Reps for “blindly supporting” Bush and his “neocon cohorts” in the “continuing catastrophe” of Iraq. Blah blah blah.

The sixth letter, however, makes an important point that I believe Dems will need to take into account sooner or later [e.a.]:

When will the Democrats learn that the ordinary person on the street wants the Iraq mission to be a success, not the failure that they are hungry to heap on this administration?

While there is seemingly no end in sight to the blundered Iraq crisis, the one thing that is clear is the will of people to see this struggle through to a better day.

There is no doubt at all that we Americans have come to hate this war and that we are sick of it, and heartsick about it (those of us who have hearts, that is—and I have my doubts about the new breed of “progressives”). However, there is no evidence—none at all—which suggests that Americans want to turn tail in Iraq and call it a day.

It is a fundamental characteristic of American society at every level that we idolize winners and despise losers. Moreover, everything in our social culture—from college sports to high school cheerleading to the Oscars to the Pulitzer Prize to the Miss America pageant to the Fortune 500 to Little League to National Merit Scholarships to Eagle Scouts to the 4H-Club to the bestseller list to the box office to employee-of-the-month awards to the 100 Most Powerful People in Hollywood issue of Entertainment Weekly, to name just a few American institutions and endeavors—is a contest in which the screamingly obvious goal is to win.

Partisan Democrats who fail to grapple with this reality—that Americans want to win in Iraq, just like they want to win everywhere else in life, and not go down to a humiliating, ignominious, and disgraceful defeat—are, I believe, not only misreading the political landscape. They’re also misreading Americans.

In fact, these political partisans themselves want so badly to win against Bush that they’re trying to convince Americans that we’re going to lose in Iraq no matter what, and furthermore that it’s okay to lose in Iraq, that there’s no dishonor in losing, that there’s no cost to America if we lose, that the best way to support the troops is to get them home, that we shouldn’t care about refereeing someone else’s civil war, that washing our hands of the mess we made and leaving others to resolve it is fine and dandy.

Call me crazy, but I don’t think these clearly defeatist, wrong-headed, and juvenile—not to mention immoral—”arguments” are going to win the day.

Where is the famous “can-do American spirit” in these arguments?

Where is America stumbling badly and then redeeming itself in these arguments?

MoveOn is selling a narrative of American defeat in Iraq—with no possibility of redemption.

This will not only not win over centrist, moderate, swing-voting Americans. It will alienate them. I can’t prove it, of course, but I can read it in the culture, as could anyone who bothers to look at America with a sociological rather than a strictly partisan political eye: Americans are not anti-war. They are anti-losing.

I wasn’t the only one to notice (duh!) Rudy’s swing through London the other day.

Dan Balz notes that and more:

Rudy Giuliani has adopted a creative strategy for his presidential campaign. By acting like a president, he hopes to turn himself into the presumptive Republican nominee. His rivals have other ideas but so far lack the will to stop him.

For the past two weeks, Giuliani has been waging what amounts to a general election campaign, meeting with foreign dignitaries while smacking around the Democratic front-runner, Hillary Clinton, as well as the most prominent symbol of the Democratic left, MoveOn.org.

In London this week, he chatted with former prime minister Tony Blair and posed for smiling photos with Blair’s successor, Prime Minister Gordon Brown. He also paid a courtesy call on another former prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, who remains an iconic figure to American conservatives, and received an award in her name from the Iron Lady at a glittery dinner.

How did it go over across the Pond? I’m sure it depends on whom you ask, but the Telegraph’s Toby Harnden was duly impressed:

Rudy Giuliani scored a coup in his White House campaign yesterday by meeting Gordon Brown at No 10, conferring with Tony Blair, receiving an award from Baroness Thatcher and wrapping himself in the legacy of Winston Churchill.

The unprecedented feat of staging a show of genuine closeness to four British prime ministers – three of whom evoke degrees of veneration in America – placed the former New York mayor firmly on the global stage and cemented his claim to be a world leader.

Balz adds some analysis [e.a.]:

A Republican strategist who is not part of the former mayor’s circle of supporters marveled at the images beaming back from Giuliani’s trip. What they conveyed to GOP voters, he said, was the first image of “the post-Bush era with another Republican standing on the world stage.”

In the absence of an argument against his candidacy by his rivals, that could turn Giuliani into the dominant figure in the race. “Time is getting very short for the Romney and Thompson campaigns,” the strategist said.

That sounds right to me: images are of course very politically potent (an argument I’ve made often on this blog about iconography as it relates to our current geopolitical situation and information war). In the absence of a potent countervailing argument (or image), images can stick for good—a point underscored by today’s NYT, which, coincidentally, gave Giuliani the front-page treatment today for his exemplary leadership on 9/11 (they must be kicking themselves, because their timing only underscores Giuliani’s currently excellent PR):

Mr. Giuliani was led through a basement and out onto Church Street, his head and shoulders dusted white with ash. He walked north into the surreal brightness of that day, comforting a police officer and dragooning reporters.

He would walk north two miles, pausing in the bay of a deserted fire station in Greenwich Village to call a television station and urge calm. Three hours later he stepped into a press conference with Gov. George E. Pataki.

“Today is obviously one of the most difficult days in the history of the city,” he said softly. “The tragedy that we are undergoing right now is something that we’ve had nightmares about. My heart goes out to all the innocent victims of this horrible and vicious act of terrorism. And our focus now has to be to save as many lives as possible.”

Inevitably the question arose: How many lost? The mayor looked up through his glasses, aware that among the viewers of this live broadcast were the mothers, fathers, spouses, lovers and children of those who labored in the smashed towers.

“The number of casualties,” he said, “will be more than any of us can bear ultimately.”

That walk north, the spareness of his words and his passion became the founding stones in the reconstruction of the mayor’s reputation, transforming him from a grouchy pol slip-sliding into irrelevancy to the Republican presidential candidate introduced as America’s mayor. The former mayor has made this day the centerpiece of his presidential campaign, aware that millions of Americans hold that heroic view in their collective mind’s eye.

Love Giuliani or hate him or fear him, it’s hard not to marvel at the effectiveness of his photo-op swing through swinging London on this leg of his PRopaganda ^TM campaign (”You know me; I’m the best.”). His opponents and detractors can sputter about it all they want. Unless they can top it, they will get nowhere.

I’m not saying it’s fair. I’m saying that’s the way it is, and that it’s better to try to face reality so as to be able to oppose him effectively. I also note, glumly, that of the Democratic candidates, Hillary is the only one who will be able to marshall the aura of a world leader (aided as she will be, of course, by her rock star husband).

NAYs —25

Akaka (D-HI)
Bingaman (D-NM)
Boxer (D-CA)
Brown (D-OH)
Byrd (D-WV)
Clinton (D-NY)
Dodd (D-CT)
Durbin (D-IL)
Feingold (D-WI)
Harkin (D-IA)
Inouye (D-HI)
Kennedy (D-MA)
Kerry (D-MA)
Lautenberg (D-NJ)
Levin (D-MI)
Menendez (D-NJ)
Murray (D-WA)
Reed (D-RI)
Reid (D-NV)
Rockefeller (D-WV)
Sanders (I-VT)
Schumer (D-NY)
Stabenow (D-MI)
Whitehouse (D-RI)
Wyden (D-OR)

Obama, walking the razor’s edge, manages somehow to stay above it all.

Advantage, Obama.

William Kristol on Columbia University:

Ahmadinejad Yes, ROTC No
Lee Bollinger’s choice

Unlike Kristol, I think that this is in fact an excruciatingly difficult decision for Bollinger and that the exercise of freedom of speech certainly is involved. For that reason, I say: let the monkey speak.

Kristol does make one crucial point, however—the one that gives this situation such a nasty edge:

In fact, the introduction with “sharp challenges” by Bollinger makes the situation even more of a disgrace. Now there will be the appearance of real dialogue, of Ahmadinejad answering challenges, which further legitimizes the notion that Holocaust denial, say, is a subject of legitimate and reasonable debate.

This is the sick-making part—that an American naif like Bollinger will be conducting the “dialogue.” Bollinger is fine for the American audience. but Ahmadinejad will be playing to the audience at home, and across the Muslim world, too. For that reason, he should be confronted with questioners who understand how he thinks.

Sophisticated Iranian American expats should have at Ahmadinejad. That would be a sight to behold.

Jules Crittenden unloads on Columbia University’s Lee Bollinger for inviting the monkey to ape some words. Then he comes up with a brilliant idea:

I think the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum or maybe the Simon Wiesenthal Center should invite Ahmadinejad to speak.  Pack the hall with Auschwitz survivors … Encourage them to show up in stripes and shaved heads. Entitle the forum, “This Is What We’re Talking About.”

Then Crittenden gets down to talking about his favorite newspaper:

Every morning I get down on my knees and thank Allah I don’t work at the New York Times, and don’t have to call terrorists and murderers “Mr.” Supposedly the pinnacle of my profession.  Never mind the shoddy reporting and shameful editorial positions. It’s hard to pinpoint any one thing, but all the ass-kissing kowtowing to convention has to really suck the brains and the soul right out of you. …

I am blessed to work at one of the last great American newspapers [the Boston Herald].  Every day, we fight for our very existence in shoddy digs.  We don’t have the resources to do the things we used to do. …  They call us hacks and sneer at our sensational headlines.  That’s OK.  Let them.  At least we’re honest.

Indeed.

Marvin Kitman does Keith Olbermann as he calls for  all-entertainment-all-the-time “newscasts”:

[W]hat CBS (and all the others) need is a new Ed Murrow. Good news! There’s already one out there on the launchpad who has demonstrated his qualifications. I’m talking about Keith Olbermann of MSNBC. He has the journalistic chops and the mind, heart, instincts and courage. …

Olbermann, who looks more like a high school teacher than a glitzy TV anchor, is the one who cuts and dices the news of the day into five segments, what he and his staff consider the day’s top stories, illustrated with news reports from NBC News correspondents, interviews with newsmakers, whom he treats courteously, interspersed with signature witty interjections (calling 9/11 Rudolph “Giuliani’s red badge of courage”), further interrupted by new ways to look at the news.

What are these new ways of looking at the news [e.a.]?

Olbermann does news quizzes and a puppet theater … he created comedic puppet “re-enactments” of news stories, using printed photographs glued to popsicle sticks, hand-held in front of a blue screen. Olbermann did the voiceovers himself. …

What I like about Olbermann as a newscaster is that he makes the evening news look like life itself, very absurd but serious, very angry, very stupid, very silly, very snarky, very much about pop culture. 

Kitman was once the media critic of Newsday.

Matthew Yglesias has it bad:

Obviously, expressing willingness to hold diplomatic discussions with Iran’s leaders is a political blunder whereas running around the world threatening to attack them like Rudy Giuliani is politically savvy toughness.

How bad?

Pot-kettle-black bad. Beyond-ignorant-whippersnapper bad. Blindly-striking-out-with-any-weapon-at-hand bad [e.a.]:

So I suppose that by the same token, promising to expand NATO to include Israel — thus committing the United States to the armed defense of the borders of a country that lacks internationally recognized borders — also reflects the politically savvy toughness rather than, say, a dangerous ignorance of what NATO is or how it works or international relations more broadly.

His commenters call him out:

What’s this, is Mr. Yglesias now claiming that Israel doesn’t have internationally recognized borders? If Israel doesn’t have internationally recognized borders, how can Mr. Yglesias complain about Israeli settlements? Has Mr. Yglesias finally come to recognize that the so-called green line is a cease fire line, not a border? If the green line is not a border, as Mr. Yglesias is now claiming, then the settlements East of the green line are not illegal but subject to negotiation as to the final borders.

…

There have been hints in your posts all along, but with your statement that Israel is “a country that lacks internationally recognized borders” you have fully and finally revealed yourself: as someone who basically questions Israel’s very right to exist. Instead of reacting to the NATO proposal on the merits, you dismiss the entire country as a worthless aberration…

Commenter SoCalJustice provides evidence, through links, that the movement to ease Israel into NATO has been going on for a long time (as has the metamorphosis of NATO itself):

From a year and a half ago:

Italian Defense Minister Antonio Martino recently announced that in his opinion, the time has come to include Israel in NATO as a regular member, and he intends to raise the issue at the meeting of NATO defense ministers next week.

From last April:

Israel, NATO conduct Red Sea naval exercise

And from June:

Israel moves closer to NATO missions

Assistant NATO Sec.-Gen. John Colston sounds dangerously ignorant of what NATO is or or it works or international relations more broadly.

But, so far all I’ve seen is a nut (Friedman) and an Italian defense minister.

Here’s another one:

Admit Israel to  NATO

Ronald Asums, executive director of the German Marshall Fund’s Transatlantic Center in Brussels, served as deputy assistant secretary of state for European affairs from 1997 to 2000

Here’s NATO’s Deputy Assistant Secretary-General for Political Affairs and Security Policy Dr. Patrick Hardouin calling for expanded Israel-NATO ties about a year ago:

NATO: Israel ties must remain strong

Here’s Czech Deputy Prime Minister Alexandr Vondra and former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar calling for Israel (and Australia and Japan) to join NATO:

European leaders suggest Israel join NATO

There are several countries not exactly near the North Atlantic in NATO.

http://www.nato.int/structur/countries.htm

Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania - all closer to the Middle East than the Atlantic.

I’ve got a link of my own, from March 2007:

Supreme U.S. commander in Europe calls Israel ‘model state’

Gee, what’s going on here? I thought everybody knows that slavish, unconditional support of Israel such as (supposedly) Hillary Clinton’s is, “obviously, a disaster.” 

Well, whaddaya know? It turns out that there are people out there—people who play an active role in our national defense, foreign allies, people like that—who don’t consider Israel a liability. What a surprise, eh?

Some people need to get out more. Rudy Giuliani isn’t one of them.

Ladies and gentlemen of the world, meet Rudy Giuliani.

Republican presidential candidate Rudolph W. Giuliani said Wednesday that if Iran got close to building a nuclear weapon, “we will prevent them or we’ll set them back five or 10 years.”

“That is not said as a threat,” Giuliani said during a visit to London. “That should be said as a promise.” …

He contends that threatening the use of force reduces the likelihood of having to use it:

“The policy of the United States of America should be very, very clear that we will use any option we believe is in our best interest to stop them from becoming a nuclear power, and that we’re not going to allow that to happen,” Giuliani said.

If Iranian leaders grasp the firmness of U.S. resolve to block their nuclear ambitions, he said, “there is a better chance that we will never have to use military options in dealing with it.”

We New Yorkers grew quite accustomed to hearing these homilies during his reign … because he grabbed the microphone every chance he got. I see he hasn’t lost his taste for headline-grabbing, either.

It’s slightly surreal to see the ease and self-confidence with which he has assumed a place on the world stage …

 Modernity threatens Britain as a movement to get rid of these getups (which date from the 1660s) gathers steam

While final results of the survey won’t be tallied until mid- to late October, an informal poll by the Bar Council suggests barristers are split down the middle about whether to shed their trappings.

Those who support getting rid of these sartorial holdovers think the court has to get with the times, saying wigs and gowns make them look positively colonial next to their wig-less counterparts in the US and elsewhere. But others say they are proud to be different: The uniform sets them apart from the other court staff, they feel, and establishes a proper, serious tone for court proceedings.

According to Andrew Sullivan, this ignorant opinion-mongering