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…from a former student, not to say disciple, of Walt’s

When I left Princeton, you recommended MIT’s political science Ph.D. program to me — and me to them. While I deferred my entry there (and later opted for law school instead), you and I spent countless hours together in Washington, D.C., during your sabbatical engaged in a running critique of the Reagan administration’s ideologically driven foreign policy initiatives.

who is now deeply disappointed in his mentor:

If I had to distill the many lessons you taught me about international political analysis over the years, they would come down to this — be rational. Focus on interests, not ideology. Be logical, and don’t be swayed by partisanship, emotions or hidden agendas.

It was thus with great dismay that I read your and professor Mearsheimer’s paper.

And not only for the shoddy “scholarship” of their notorious paper “The Israel Lobby” but for its thuggish anti-Semitic overtones [emphasis mine]:

I was still considering filing all of these academic differences under the category of “let’s agree to disagree” — until last month, when you made it personal.

According to the Washington Post, you and professor Mearsheimer headlined an event last month sponsored by a Muslim group with a spotty record for objectivity. The Post noted that you singled out Jewish administration officials for having “attachments” that drive their views on American foreign policy. Steve, I want you to understand what a tremendous insult this is. With your strong personal encouragement, I have gone on to a career in our nation’s service. In 20 years, I have served in each of the three branches of the federal government, at times in sensitive positions, and have twice been elected locally. I have continued my focus on national security issues and now devote much of my efforts to homeland security and local preparedness.

Do I, as an American Jew, have to look over my shoulder at you the rest of my career, wondering when the day will come when you question my loyalty? When will I say or do something that you will determine emanates from my “attachments” and not from the skill sets you helped me develop?

Steve, just what academic rigor do you employ before leveling charges of disloyalty against fellow Americans?

This is a devastating critique. Read the whole thing.

It’s hard to remember; it’s hard to forget.

I left my building at 9:05. Oddly, there were a lot of people on the sidewalk—way more than usual. It was strange. The first plane had hit, and I could see the thick cloud of black smoke billowing madly against the brilliant blue sky, although I couldn’t see the World Trade Center tower itself. We lived too far—a little over a mile away. A couple of my neighbors were standing outside our building. A plane had crashed into one of the towers, one of them said. He’d heard it on the radio just before leaving the house. We looked at each other. It was a rare perfect late- summer day in New York: crisp and sparkling. Indeed it would be one of the most magificent autumns, weather-wise, that I can recall in more than 30 years of living in New York City.

How could a plane crash into one of the towers, with this visibility?

We looked at each other, and did not ask that question out loud. But it passed between us before we went our separate ways.

I headed for the drugstore around the corner, where it took them fifteen minutes to fill my prescription. The pharmacist was listening to the radio. Yes, a plane had crashed into the tower; it was confirmed. I remember no details about the broadcast, only that it sank in that this was deliberate.

Still, it had happened before, and that attack on the World Trade Center turned out to be not that big a deal. At least that’s how I thought of it. When I did think of it. Which was never. And I’m someone who has alwas read up on politics and news—local and global. The politically informed and sophisticated people I knew never talked about it either. Ever. Not once.

When the attack happened, we said: “Oh shit.” And then we simply forgot about it.

We did not pay attention. The quest to become a player in the New Gilded Age had overtaken everyone. I wasn’t competing in that arena, but just a few days earlier we’d put the finishing touches on our renovated kitchen. Many times since then I’ve thought of how grateful I am to the fates that I worked up the courage to go through with that nightmare project in the 105-degree heat of August 2001, because I don’t think I’d have had it in me afterward. Not that I haven’t been nesting, along with the rest of America—that is a discernible trend: nesting, and sheltering, and all the goodies that go with them.

Anyway, I went back home with the prescription medicine and gave it to my daughter, who wasn’t feeling well. She should stay home, I told her. I was going to the office.

Many times since then I have wondered what got into me that I instructed her to stay home while I left for midtown. She was 16, and feeling under the weather. Her father had just reported for jury duty—downtown at the courthouse, not far away from the Twin Towers. I figured he’d be let out, and would be home soon. (All would be well at home: home was home. And our son, a senior in college, was upstate.) She should stay home and wait for her father. I had things to do at the office.

What things? What was I thinking?

What was I thinking when I left her at home, walked a few blocks to buy a magazine I’d been looking for, heard on the radio that the Pentagon had been hit, and still went downstairs into the subway station, rode uptown, walked into my office, only to learn that the first tower had collapsed.

I was not thinking.

I was in denial.

Denial is your ticket to the future, as a wise man once said.

To be continued…maybe.

Peace out.

This story gets stupider and stupider by the minute. The folks at Democratic Underground are so afraid that ABC’s 9/11 miniseries could have a negative impact on Democrats at the polls that one of them proposes a Google-bombing for the morning after.

To counteract the effects the ABC 9-11 movie could have on the midterm elections, I recommend this course of action:

The night of, and the morning after, people will be hitting the internet looking for information on the events as depicted in this movie.

Our biggest opportunity will be to have nearly identical blog posts waiting, then submit them to be found internet wide the morning after the movie. Google and Technorati will pick up on these posts quickly. We can make these entries dominate the first several pages of the search engines.

MAKE SURE THE POST TITLE HAS THE TITLE OF THE MOVIE IN IT!

Get every Democratic friendly blog on board as possible… you e-mail the ones you know, they’ll e-mail the ones they know, etc. Make SURE these blogs are on the Technorati network and have also been submitted to Google’s blog search.

For one day, change the title of your blog to the title of the movie.

Agree on a clear, detailed, and sourced body of information — I’ve seen several examples on DU lately disputing what is in the movie. Media Matters has one. One was posted today on DU by Richard Clarke.

Everyone post it. Right after the movie is over or the next morning at the latest.

Television anchors cannot—and do not—report “the news” in “half an hour” (which is 20 minutes plus 10 minutes of commercials). Their function is to be the public face of a given entertainment conglomerate.
In case you think differently, read Howard Kurtz’s blow-by-blow of Katie Couric’s debut on the CBS News.

I’m sure some will say there wasn’t enough news in the “Evening News.” And they will have a point. But that’s the tradeoff if you’re going to do longer, more textured pieces and new features on a half-hour broadcast.

The first block said it all. Couric led with a three-minute news feature by Lara Logan in Afghanistan, with striking footage of Taliban fighters with their weapons. It was not a hard-news “scoop,” and therefore an unusual lead story, but an eye-opening look at America’s other war.

This was followed by the only this-happened-today story, a Jim Axelrod report on President Bush’s latest speech on the war on terror. The innovation here was cable-style graphics: As Bush mentiond Lenin, Hitler and Osama, their images were put up in a split-screen.

And then part of a taped Couric interview with the New York Times’s Tom Friedman, sitting on facing chairs, about Afghanistan and Iraq. This ran longer than the typical two- and three-question chats that generally pass for interviews on the nightly news.

What about events of the day? The second block led off with a “Briefing,” and it was, well, brief: A study on lung problems among Ground Zero workers, Bill Ford quitting the family automaker, and mourning for croc hunter Steve Irwin. Each got two sentences.

The evening broadcasts still have viewers, so they’re not going anywhere, irrelevant though they may be from a news-making and -reporting point of view. But they should stop calling it the evening news.

They should call it the evening summary of some of the day’s events, plus some other things that may or may not interest you, presented by our public face of seriousness.

Literally.

China is getting fat.

Today about 15 percent of adults, or 200 million Chinese, are reportedly overweight.

Of these, 90 million—about 7 percent—are obese (though China uses a slightly lower threshold for both designations than the UN’s World Health Organization does).

Diet and sedentary life style are the culprits.

Those are the four adjectives to choose from if you’re trying to explain the MSM’s peddling of the story of the Red Cross ambulance that was allegedly struck by an Israeli missile—the story that was spread around the world by the global media and which became the basis of the claim that Israel committed “war crimes” in Lebanon.

Read the entire story here, at Zombietime.

+ What Supposedly Happened: The Media Accuses Israel of War Crimes+ The Ambulance With a Hole in Its Roof: Dismantling the Evidence

+ Possible Rebuttals and Explanations of the Apparent Fraud

+ Conclusion: How a Hoax Became News

———–

And then read about how things might have been a little bit different if journalists had been doing their job instead of merely peddling their suspicions of what happened, based on what they thought was plausible (that Israel routinely commits war crimes).

There is no weapon that would deliver terminal effects consistent with the pictures, the alleged story and the reputed damage done to ambulance and people.

Here are some hard facts easily locatable on the internet via globalsecurity.org which is an invaluable open source free intelligence site.

The Israeli Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV or “drone”) index is here. As you can see Israel fields 10 UAV types. Of the ones with technical specifications only the Harpy deploys a weapon payload. However as it is designed to support suppression of enemy air defence it would deploy a radar seeking missile capable of destroying a hardened air defence radar station. Clearly a Harpy wasn’t deployed.

A weapon deploying UAV would be one of the remaining three without technical specifications. Let’s assume it is similar to the US Predator an armed UAV. Here are its specifications and some photos. As you can see from the front page it deploys a Hellfire missile. Here are the hellfire missile specs and some photos. The missile itself is 64 inches or about 1.5m long, weighs around 100lb and has an explosive payload of around 35 lbs.

The polar bears of east Greenland have a size problem.

via Moonbat Media 

Before books go to bookstores to die, someone’s got to try to sell them. One way to do that is to talk about ‘em on TV (well, not on the BookTV channel). It helps make them (some of them, anyway) bestsellers—we all know that.

No one explains the phenomenon quite so well as Amanda Ross, head of the Richard & Judy book club (Britain’s equivalent of the Oprah book club):

“Becoming the nation’s books arbiter was a happy accident,” says Ross, “and my choices are largely instinctive. They come from having produced entertainment shows for years and knowing that a good story is a good story, no matter if it’s fiction or non-fiction, or even what style it’s told in.”

Literary purists may blanch at this, but Ross doesn’t care. She’s not a great fan of theirs either, and if her success proves anything, it’s that fiction has been reclaimed from the literati.

“I would never, ever have a book critic or someone who wants to be esoteric or wordy about literature come and review on the show,” she says.

The New York Times takes a different tack in hyping what American publishers hope will be their big fall sensations:

Jed Rubenfeld, a law professor and a first-time novelist, has peppered “The Interpretation of Murder,” his forthcoming book, with references to Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex and a complicated analysis of the “To be or not to be” soliloquy in “Hamlet.”

“I was taking a risk in doing that,” Mr. Rubenfeld said over lunch at, fittingly, a bookstore cafe near the Yale campus, where he teaches. “I don’t know if a very large readership is going to be interested in the kind of intellectual ideas I have tried to write into my book.”

Mr. Rubenfeld’s publisher, Henry Holt & Company, begs to differ — and in a big way. After paying him a high six-figure advance for the manuscript last fall, the company is spending $500,000 to market the novel. So far it has printed 185,000 copies for the book’s release on Sept. 5.

Curiously, what seems to impress the buyers at the chains isn’t story but rather the publisher’s marketing budget.

At Barnes & Noble, Sessalee Hensley, the fiction buyer, said the book “got some really strong, passionate reads” from store managers. And the big marketing campaign undeniably sparked her interest. “If a publisher is fully committed to a title, that’s what we need to see,” she said. “When it comes to looking at if the book did better or worse, a lot of times it comes down to marketing.”

Publishers are smarter than that, however:

“In the end you can throw as much hype and as much hope as you want,” said Irwyn Applebaum, president and publisher of Bantam Dell. “But it’s still about when the reader sits down with that book and says, ‘Wow, I’ve got to keep turning the pages.’ ”

A great story won’t always become a bestseller. Nevertheless: it’s always about the story.