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"Craven Appeasers!" "Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys!" ...um... "Neutral Voices!"

“Democrats do not speak with a unified voice on Israel anymore,” said [Republican Deputy Majority Whip Eric] Cantor. “The Democrats want to re-inject the United States into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a neutral arbiter and neutral voice.”

And he means that in a pejorative sense. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm all for not injecting the US into the Israel-Palestine deal at all, but to act as though "neutral voice" is a slur? The quote is from an article in today's The Hill on how Republicans are courting Jewish support. I mean, honestly, between Richard "Let's Send NATO Troops To Occupy Palestine" Lugar and Cantor, we might as well just declare war on Hamas and Hizbollah. Is there honestly anybody in America this side of Perle and Frum who thinks that's a good idea? Do large numbers of Jewish people and evangelical Christians so conflate Israel's interest with America's that they want to widen an already daunting war? I mean, cripes, isn't this over the line? If not, what is the line?

They're makin' me miss Howie again...

Hmm. Maybe I'm a Democrat.

"[Bloomberg banned smoking] without considering what it would do to the small bars in the city, particularly the outer boroughs, what it would do to the soul of New York, which to me is libertarianism, the right to live your life without onerous government intervention. I sum it up this way: New York does not want or need Nurse Ratched as mayor."

-Rep. Anthony Weiner (D)

Going Down

I imagine it's horribly unsophisticated to think so, and that a bunch of people who know a hell of a lot more about movies than I do could mount a case that I'm wrong, but Igby Goes Down is a great movie. It's a rare marriage of great screenwriting, great acting, and great direction. The script is obviously influenced by Salinger, with a dash of Ferris-style feel good to temper it, and even a bit of American existentialism, such as it is.

It's the story of a genetically maladjusted prep school boy, Igby, played masterfully by Kieran Culkin (yes, same family). His father has been long hospitalized for schizophrenia, his mother is a pill-popping, sharp witted Cruella de Ville type, his brother is a freshman at Columbia majoring in Republicanism. Igby tries to find his way in life, and he ends up sleeping with his Godfather's mistress, running drugs for a performance artist, and just generally getting the shit beaten out of him, both literally and emotionally. It forces the viewer to look at the twisted, shallow aspects of one's own life, but it isn't abjectly negative. There's a certain balance between despair and hope, and even at the end, the scales haven't tipped. It's definitely a movie for movies' sake: it doesn't tell you anything, but that's sort of the point. If you've got an hour and a half, and you're wondering what the hell you're doing, check it out.

You Know You're on to Something When...

...Donald Rumsfeld answers a question in an incoherent, evasive way. Read:

WALLACE: Clarke makes one other specific charge that I'd like to give you the opportunity to respond to here today.

He says that on September 12th, the day after the attack, that when all of the evidence was pointing to Al Qaeda, that you wanted to hit Iraq. Let's look at this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CLARKE: Rumsfeld said, "There aren't any good targets in Afghanistan, and there are lots of good targets in Iraq." And I said, "Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it."

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WALLACE: Mr. Secretary, true or false?

RUMSFELD: Well, I don't know the context that he said that. I said publicly at one stage during our effort in Afghanistan, which was of course a highly successful effort to deal with the Al Qaeda there and run them out and deny them that haven, that Afghanistan had run out of targets. That is a correct quote. It's out of context here. But it is a correct quote.

If you think about it, the United States government made a decision to go into Afghanistan, not into Iraq, after 9/11. So the implication of what he's saying obviously misunderstands what actually took place.

WALLACE: But specifically, if I may, sir, what he is saying is, on the afternoon of September 12th, when all of the evidence was pointing to afghanistan, that you wanted to hit Iraq. And he compared it to attacking Mexico after the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor.

RUMSFELD: He also quotes me on September 4th, as saying some things in a meeting that I didn't attend. So it's hard for me to explain a person who would characterize a conversation in a meeting that I was not even in the room or the building when it supposedly took place.

The discussion on Iraq — and I think it's important to get this out — is as follows: When I came into office and the president came into office, the only place in the world that the Americans were being shot at was Iraq. Our aircraft and our air crews were flying northern no-fly zones and southern no-fly zone watches, monitoring U.N. resolutions. And almost on a weekly basis, our planes were being shot at.

And the president was concerned about it, I was concerned about it. And we had spent a good deal of time talking about how would we respond in the event one of our planes were shot down and the crew was killed, or what would we do if the crew were captured.

And so, there was discussion of Iraq, and properly so, in my view.

The president's instructions were: What organization, singular or plural, ought to be held accountable for this? And there was discussion of a variety of them. And the decision was made, Afghanistan and Al Qaeda. So it seems to me it's off the mark.

Umm, okay, but could you please answer the question? I think we can take this to be an admission that on 9/12, Rumsfeld was advocating going after Iraq. I've felt that the "Bush dropped the ball" claim of Clarke's charges was weaker than the "Iraq undermined the war on al Qaeda" claim, but if this is true, it may not be. Either way, it's shocking.

I Miss Howard Dean

Don't you, too? If so, Brooke's got a perfect one-liner for ya here.

On Swatting Flies...

Well, I'm back, and nothing's improved. Still plenty of fodder from the administration and the lemmings over at NRO, though, so I figure it's time to come back off hiatus.

One of the points that hasn't been emphasized during the 9/11 hearings/media spectacle is this notion that the president was ahead of the curve in thinking about al Qaeda because he said he was sick of "swatting flies." The story says that he wanted a broad, all-encompassing strategy to go after aQ.

Seems to me this is a rather damning point, not a redeeming one. It belies a certain simplicity of thought, an inability to see shades of grey on the part of the president. The fact is, there was nothing to do but swat flies. Al Qaeda was not the Soviet Union, or Iraq, or some centralized, cohesive body. And we certainly weren't going to go barrelling into Afghanistan and start dropping daisy cutters all over the place. AQ was swarms of flies, all over the globe, buzzing around, waiting to be swatted. What we needed was a correspondingly decentralized, case-by-case-basis strategy to get intel operatives on the ground and take the bastards out wherever and whenever we could. The only overarching strategy, as I think Dick Clarke understood better than anyone, should have been "take them out whenever you get the chance."

One approaches a beehive differently than one approaches a bear, even though both could threaten to do one harm. The fly swatting remark was made in the president's defense. It seems to indicate he couldn't get his head around the fact that we were facing a non-state, loosely coordinated group of maniacs that we had to swat every time we got the chance. That's a pretty bad defense in my book.

Even If It's Just Symbolic -- What a Symbol!

China to Make Private Property a Right

Even a Chinese person who said he was "not too excited" admitted that "[i]t is now clear that as an owner, I have rights and I will use (the) law to protect myself if my rights are infringed in future."

Nice.

Andrew Sullivan Endorses "Divide and Prosper"

Thus blogs Sullivan in response to an email (scroll down to the second one):

"If you take seriously the fact that this country is headed toward fiscal catastrophe in the next decade, then restraining spending and raising some taxes in the next four years is almost as essential as tackling the entitlement crunch. Neither Bush nor Kerry wants to help. They're both cowards (although Kerry seems to have a better grip on fiscal reality than Bush does). So gridlock is the best option."

It's odd how relatively famous, formerly passionate supporters are diving headlong off the Bush bandwagon. If I listened to Howard Stern go on one more time about how the President was the only one who could lead the "War on Terror," I was going to go nuts. I mean, he and Sullivan were as passionate partisans as the White House could have wanted. Now by endorsing FMA and pressuring media companies to crack down on "indecency" (a Stern caller used the "N" word, and as a result he was canceled in six markets by Clear Channel), they've alienated some of their most public, vocal supporters. I'm aware that these two are not exactly the top endorsements a candidate looks for, but it seems to me that this might have an impact...perhaps even more than some have calculated.

Update: Apparently Stern was off the bandwagon before being booted by Clear Channel.

An Annoying Cultural Trend

Does anybody else find this annoying? I mean, laptops keep getting lighter, and unless you have to walk to the Shady Grove Metro from Frederick, shouldn't you be able to carry your friggin laptop? If this goes much further, my wallet's gonna need wheels.

"Click Here for Hot Animal Argument!"

My review of Tibor Machan's "Putting Humans First: Why We Are Nature's Favorite" is up over at Brainwash.