Entries Tagged 'arrogant assholes' ↓

Don’t you hate it when David Brooks uses his New York Times perch to remind his readers that life is full of unexpected turns, expecially ones that reflect well on BushHitler?

Bush is a stubborn man. Well, without that stubbornness, that unwillingness to accept defeat on his watch, he never would have bucked the opposition to the surge.

Bush is an outrageously self-confident man. Well, without that self-confidence he never would have overruled his generals. … The additional fact is that Bush, who made such bad calls early in the war, made a courageous and astute decision in 2006. More than a year on, the surge has produced large, if tenuous, gains. Violence is down sharply. Daily life has improved. Iraqi security forces have been given time to become a more effective fighting force. The Iraqi government is showing signs of strength and even glimmers of impartiality. Iraq has moved from being a failed state to, as Vali Nasr of the Council on Foreign Relations has put it, merely a fragile one.

The whole episode is a reminder that history is a complicated thing. The traits that lead to disaster in certain circumstances are the very ones that come in handy in others. The people who seem so smart at some moments seem incredibly foolish in others.

Yep. (This also applies to Brooks, by the way, who referred to the Iraq war as “a disaster” many times during what he now refers to as “the dark days of 2006.”) He’s not humble enough to acknowledge his own previous cocksureness and foolishness. But he’s out there on the cutting edge of what should be opinion right now. We’ll see how it plays.

Brooks sets the stage:

The cocksure war supporters learned this humbling lesson [about orthodox thinking] during the dark days of 2006. And now the cocksure surge opponents, drunk on their own vindication, will get to enjoy their season of humility. They have already gone through the stages of intellectual denial. First, they simply disbelieved that the surge and the Petraeus strategy was doing any good. Then they accused people who noticed progress in Iraq of duplicity and derangement. Then they acknowledged military, but not political, progress. Lately they have skipped over to the argument that Iraq is progressing so well that the U.S. forces can quickly come home.

But before long, the more honest among the surge opponents will concede that Bush, that supposed dolt, actually got one right. Some brave souls might even concede that if the U.S. had withdrawn in the depths of the chaos, the world would be in worse shape today.

It’s unlikely that there will be many such souls, but count me among those who grudgingly (grudgingly because we are of a certain [anti-Vietnam War] age) admit that Bush’s stubbornness has, on balance, been a good thing for America in the immediate wake of 9/11. Many of America’s cocksure enemies have stood down in the wake of Bush’s cowboy-like cocksure aggressiveness. Bush himself has said he regrets the language he used; I didn’t hear him say that he regrets his “going on offense” against America’s enemies, as indeed he shouldn’t.

Something else has been gained in these long seven years. Brooks doesn’t mention it, but I will:L Islamism now has many respectable enemies—including several of Britain’s most famous public intellectuals and novelists.

The New York Times doesn’t quite approve of such heterodox thoughts as this one expressed by Ian McEwan, the author of Atonement:

“As soon as a writer expresses an opinion against Islamism, immediately someone on the left leaps to his feet and claims that because the majority of Muslims are dark skinned, he who criticizes it is racist.” He added: “This is logically absurd and morally unacceptable. Martin is not a racist. And I myself despise Islamism, because it wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious belief, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality and so on — we know it well.”

The Independent, a British paper, referred to McEwan’s words as

an astonishingly strong attack on Islamism

and pointed out that these words could,

in today’s febrile legalistic climate, lay him open to being investigated for a “hate crime”.

Despite adding to the “febrile” climate surrounding this issue, at least the Independent is honest enough to give a full airing to McEwan’s views, which I reprint here with some emphasis [e.a.]:

McEwan – author of On Chesil Beach and the acclaimed Atonement and Enduring Love – has spoken on the issue of Islamism before, telling The New York Times last December: “All religions make very big claims about the world, and it should be possible in an open society to dispute them. It should be possible to say, ‘I find some ideas in Islam questionable’ without being called a racist.”

But his words in the Corriere interview are far stronger, although they do fall short of the invective deployed by Martin Amis. He has said “the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order”, and told The Independent’s columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a Muslim, in an open letter: “Islamism, in most of its manifestations, not only wants to kill me – it wants to kill you.”

McEwan’s interviewer pointed out that there exist equally hard-line schools of thought within Christianity, for example in the United States. “I find them equally absurd,” McEwan replied. “I don’t like these medieval visions of the world according to which God is coming to save the faithful and to damn the others. But those American Christians don’t want to kill anyone in my city, that’s the difference.”

But McEwan’s specific irritation is reserved for those who find ideological grounds to condemn his and Amis’s views. “When you ask a novelist or a poet about his vision regarding an aspect of the world, you don’t get the response of a politician or a sociologist, but even if you don’t like what he says you have to accept it, you can’t react with defamation. Martin is not a racist, and neither am I.”

Thank you, Ian McEwan. And may others join you in perpetrating the “hate crime” of speaking out in favor of freedom of expression, even (perhaps especially) when your ideas are out of favor with “expert and elite opinion” [Brooks's phrase].

Matthew Yglesias finds himself in the extremely awkward position of having to praise Tim Russert after having damned him mere months ago.

It’s a bit hard to know what to say when an important public figure whose work you didn’t really care for passes. … Nobody can become as important as Russert was without doing some stuff that some people think was bad. [Ooooh, they did "stuff" that "some" people "think" was "bad," so that "bad stuff" warrants articles by pompous whippersnappers titled "The Unbearable Inanity of Tim Russert"?   ---ed.] Thus, when The Atlantic asked me to do a Current item on Russert’s passing, I thought I’d take a mixed approach that doesn’t back down from criticism, while trying to be magnanimous in recognizing his considerable accomplishments.

How very magnanimous from the deep new-media thinker (and, I can’t help but note) supporter of Barack “Mr. New Politics” Obama.

Yglesias’s commenters need to be dressed down, says Ann Althouse, who isn’t normally given to policing.

I think the whippersnapper should produce a respectable body of work before he casually slings arrows at writers whom he attacks as somehow unfairly privileged [e.a.]:

Similarly, given Packer’s dystopian vision of American discourse, it’s hard to understand how Packer’s book, The Assassin’s Gate, sold so many copies and attracted such wide praise or how Packer came to have a job with the most prestigious magazine in the country – a magazine which published a lot of basically pro-war material in 2002 and 2003 and went on to vociferously denounce George W. Bush in 2004.

But there are peasants with pitchforks everywhere we turn these days.

Joseph Epstein was raised in blissful freedom in the Midwest, by parents who tended to their own lives—and to him and his brother—without making much of a fuss:

When I was a boy my parents might go off to New York or to Montreal (my father was born in Canada) for a week or so and leave my brother and me in the care of a woman in the neighborhood, a spinster named Charlotte Smucker–Mrs. Smucker to us–who was a professional childsitter. Sometimes an aunt, my mother’s sister who had no children, would stay with us. We seldom went on vacation as a family. When I was eight years old, my parents sent me off for an eight-week summer camp session in Eagle River, Wisconsin, where I learned all the dirty words if not their precise meanings. None of these things made me unhappy or in any way dampened my spirits. I cannot recall ever thinking of myself as an unhappy kid.

Not surprisingly, little Joseph became quite sturdy and self-sufficient:

After the age of ten, I made every decision about my education on my own. The one I didn’t make, at ten, was to go to Hebrew school in order to be bar-mitzvahed; this was a decision made for me and was nonnegotiable. But my parents felt no need to advise me on what foreign language to take in high school, where I ought to go to college–though my father paid every penny of my tuition and expenses–or what I ought to study once there. …

When I began my modest athletic career, my parents never came to any of my games, and I should have been embarrassed had they done so. My parents never met any of my girlfriends in high school. No photographic or video record exists of my uneven progress through early life. My father never explained about the birds and the bees to me; his entire advice on sex, as I clearly remember, was, “You want to be careful.” …

I did not seek my parents’ approval. All I wished was to avoid their–and particularly my father’s–disapproval, which would have cut into my freedom. Avoiding disapproval meant staying out of trouble, which for the most part I was able to do. Punishment would have meant losing the use of my mother’s car, or having my allowance reduced, or being made to stay home on school or weekend nights, and I cannot remember any of these things ever happening, a testament less to my adolescent virtue than to the generous slack my parents cut me.

Now, having retired from teaching at Northwestern University, Epstein reflects on the “Kindergarchy”—the well-meaning but toxic child-rearing style which has produced the many insufferable students he has known. His (tongue-in-cheek) conclusion? Too much love in the home:

As a teacher at Northwestern University (not long retired), I found the students in my classes in no serious way I could discern much improved for all the intensity of home and classroom attention most of them received under the Kindergarchy. A very small number, those who had somehow found passion for books and the life of the mind, were remarkable, a number proportionally probably little different than in any generation of students; the rest were like students everywhere and at all times: just wanting to get the damn thing called their education over with and get on with life with the best start possible.

The most impressive students I had over my 30 years of university teaching were those I encountered when I first began, in the early 1970s, who almost all turned out to have been put through Catholic schools, during a time when priests and nuns still taught and Catholic education hadn’t become indistinguishable from secular education. Many of these kids resented what they felt was the excessive constraint, with an element of fear added, of their education. Most failed to realize that it was this very constraint–and maybe a touch of the fear, too–that forced them to learn Latin, to acquire and understand grammar, to pick up the rudiments of arguing well, that had made them as smart as they were. [Could this account for the vociferous and influential Irish Catholic "mafia" in the MSM? Just wondering.---ed.]

So often in my literature classes students told me what they “felt” about a novel, or a particular character in a novel. I tried, ever so gently, to tell them that no one cared what they felt; the trick was to discover not one’s feelings but what the author had put into the book, its moral weight and its resultant power. In essay courses, many of these same students turned in papers upon which I wished to–but did not–write: “D-, Too much love in the home.” I knew where they came by their sense of their own deep significance and that this sense was utterly false to any conceivable reality.

Then Epstein lowers the boom [e.a.]:

Despite what their parents had been telling them from the very outset of their lives, they were not significant. Significance has to be earned, and it is earned only through achievement. Besides, one of the first things that people who really are significant seem to know is that, in the grander scheme, they are themselves really quite insignificant.

Uncharitably, I can’t help but think that a lot of whippersnapping Obama lovers are going to learn that lesson in the coming months. And Paul Krugman, for one, isn’t above advising BHO on that score:

Mr. Obama, who has been dismissive of the boomers’ “psychodrama,” might want to give the generation that brought about this change, fought for civil rights and protested the Vietnam War a bit more credit.

We are tough, capable, high-achieving, well-adjusted, and secure baby boomers! Hear us roar!

The vast right-wing conspiracy is dead:

In the old days, those who supported tax cuts for the wealthy worked closely with those who wanted to amend the constitution to ban gay marriage. Those who wanted to grow the size of the military made common cause with those who saw global warming as an environmentalist scare-tactic meant to interfere with free markets. Those who wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade also wanted to overturn campaign finance reform.

McCain, Huckabee and a nation of disconcerted Republican voters now threaten to reformulate that coalition.

Republicans in total, complete disarray—with a frontrunner they loathe and despise. What a crying shame. (I actually grew up among Republicans. I come by my cold-hearted hatred for them honestly.)

Via Mickey Kaus, who is vicious but possibly informative about John “Two Americas” Edwards’s decision to drop out of the race:

When is Rielle Hunter due? Soon, I should think. If her baby’s first words are “I’m the grandson of a mill worker!” that will be a clue.

Hmmm. Is this why he’s not endorsing anyone yet?

Am I obsessed with blasting Walt and Mearsheimer? You betcha.

The Economist ’s review pretty much explains why I’m so obsessed:

FROM the forged “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in the 19th century to the charter of Hamas, the Palestinians’ Islamist movement, a common claim by anti-Semites has been that Jews trick great powers into needless wars. That is why an article published in March 2006 by two American academics, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, caused such outrage. Writing in the London Review of Books, they argued that the activities of Israel and its supporters were the “critical” reason for America’s invasion of Iraq. George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld may have thought that they were acting in America’s interests, but were in fact acting in Israel’s. Like previous American governments, the Bush administration had been turned by clever lobbying into what Lenin would have called Zionism’s useful idiots.

This startling thesis is, to say the least, provocative. Since it implies that American boys are dying in Iraq for the sake of Israel, the authors must have known that it would stir up painful questions about the true loyalties of American Jews and therefore attract fiery criticism. But there is no evidence that Mr Mearsheimer and Mr Walt were motivated by any anti-Jewish prejudice.

It’s a fool’s game to say that the authors were motivated by anti-Jewish prejudice. Their motivation is beside the point, and in any case unprovable (much like the authors’ thesis that the cabal-like not-cabal called the Lobby has “too much” power [how much is too much?] and “undue” influence [how much is due influence]?).

What matters is that in order to attract attention to their cause—which is to separate Americans from their sentimental attachment to Israel—Walt and Mearsheimer were willing, even eager, to bait Jews by making the most foul millennia-old accusations against them. They did this promiscuously, and with defiant disregard for the consequences.

What were they thinking?

Were they clueless? Or did they simply feel confident and optimistic about the friendly reception they would receive from Americans who, like them, think that the power of American Jews is a boil to be lanced?

To be continued, I’m sure … to my regret.

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.

According to Andrew Sullivan, this ignorant opinion-mongering  serves as a “helpful roundup” of the curious incident of the IAF over Syria [e.a.]:

According to this Times article, the strike was directed at a cache of nuclear materials that had recently been delivered to Syria from North Korea.

This didn’t make a lot of sense to me. …

I suppose that the North Koreans could have shipped a completed nuke to Syria, but that seems quite outlandish …

I‘m still pretty skeptical …

I don’t think the Syrians could do anything useful with nuclear material short of a bomb …

I’d be stunned if the North Koreans were willing to actually sell them a completed weapon. …

Who is “I”? Someone named Robert Farley, an “assistant professor at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce, University of Kentucky.” Well, okay. I guess that makes him an expert opinion-monger!

Meanwhile Sullivan, who apparently considers himself a public intellectual—ha ha ha HA—has been delighting in unearthing one-sided details of a four-decade-old dispute between real public intellectuals  (one of whom, a grandfather of neo-condom—which is what this is really about: the hysterical fear of a theory) happens to have the ear of a current presidential contender.

Naturally, Sullivan is siding with onetime wife-stabber Norman Mailer over his former close friend onetime stab-in-the-back theorist Norman Podhoretz.

Unlike (I suspect) most bloggers, I happen to own a copy of Podhoretz’s book Breaking Ranks. I will be delighted to quote it at length. Stay tuned for a real history lesson.

Lesley Chamberlain’s new book Lenin’s Private War should give pause to those in the leftosphere with an urge to purge

Carlin Romano explains:

In 1922, a year of living dictatorishly, Lenin devoted astonishing time to handpicking intellectuals to be exiled from Russia. In missives to underlings, including a go-getter named Joseph Stalin, he railed against these “bourgeoisie and their accomplices, the intellectuals, the lackeys of capital, who think they’re the brains of the nation. In fact, they’re not the brains, they’re the shit.” He told Stalin in a note, “We are going to cleanse Russia once and for all.” An earlier Bolshevik poster already showed Lenin sweeping enemies from the globe over the caption, “Comrade Lenin cleanses the filth from the land.”

Wikipedia illustrates:

Comrade Lenin Cleanses the Filth from the Land

William Grimes, writing in the NYT, elaborates about how it all went down:

She sees the episode as a continuation of the armed conflict between Red and White forces, part of what she calls the “Paper Civil War,” in which the Bolsheviks closed down independent journals, purged universities and took the first steps in creating a new intellectual class of militant Marxist-Leninists.

“Only when Lenin deported the liberal intelligentsia in 1922 did the overall conflict end,” she writes.

Ms. Chamberlain’s narrative divides into three parts. The first, and the most interesting, deals with the Paper Civil War. Relying on archival material that has surfaced in the post-Soviet period, she traces the quiet campaign by Lenin and his underlings to identify dangerous thinkers, round them up, manufacture legal cases against them and expel them permanently. The thinking and the procedures behind the expulsions resonate profoundly. They are the dress rehearsal for Stalinist terror to come.

Meanwhile, inside the Beltway, the ‘Crat Pack ^TM, heady with its great victory in Chicago and as blissfullly ignorant as ever, continues on its merry way, auditioning for positions (any positions!) in the regime of the ‘Crat Who Would Be President—whoever he or she may be. Happy job hunting, all you whippersnappers! (And I hope your parents taught you that you should always have a Plan B.)

Using the royal “we,” Al Sharpton proclaims himself the judge and jury of what will be permissible in and from the American media [e.a.]:

“We will not stop until we make it clear that no one can denigrate based on sex,” said Sharpton, after the CBS announcement. “We need to open up the media world. There are far too many media companies where there are far too much exclusion of women and people of color… We don’t have to be misogynist and racists to be creative in this country.”

Sharpton said he was planning a rally for Saturday, adding that he would sooner go to jail than back down from an issue he felt passionately about.

“We are going to be looking around the television and music industry; there is no one that gets a pass here,” Sharpton continued. “Women should be respected, blacks should be respected, and whites need to be respected.”

Are we all comfortable with that?