Today, Mr. Greenspan is indignant and chagrined about his role in the Bush tax cuts. “I’d have given the same testimony if Al Gore had been president,” he writes, complaining that his words had been distorted by supporters and opponents of the cuts.Dear Alan Greenspan,
-A note on Greenspan's new book in the Times
Let me just say, contra Victor Davis Illium Pelopponesus Agadore Spartacus Hanson, that I have not witnessed any "absolutely insane, suicidal Democratic attacks against the best in our military."
That having been said, let me add: Out of the trenches, boys. Charge!
Hey, maybe it's true. Maybe Iraq has made "satisfactory progress" toward 9 of 18 benchmarks. I'm not there. Who am I to quibble?
But here's the thing. And I've been out of school a while, so maybe this has all changed. Back when I was a wee lad in short pants, itchy wool coat pulled tightly 'bout my scrawny neck, fingers stained with ink, 50% was still a muthafuckin F, bitches.
Dragon tongue beans are very cool-looking, purple-flecked snap beans. Slightly bitter but less waxy than other beans of the type, they make for this bright little contorno, which is a great accompaniment for grilled fish. You can find them at most farmer's markets, it seems. Or substitute another snap bean.
Dragon tongue beans sauteed in unfiltered olive oil with lemon and tarragon
If you have a good Italian importer, now is the time to find unfiltered extra virgin olive oil. It's cloudy rather than clear, and its flavors are extremely piquant and bright. Because of the sediments in it, you have to be especially careful about controlling heat--it scalds easily. It's really not for cooking--it's for raw dressings and such--but no guts, no glory.
1 lb. dragon tongue beans
1 large shallot
4-5 cloves garlic
juice of 1 lemon, freshly squeezed
1 bunch fresh tarragon
unfiltered extra virgin olive oil
sea salt
white pepper
Cut the tips off the beans and then cut the beans into 3/4" sections. Rinse and set aside. Dice the shallots and mince the garlic. Remove the whole leaves from the tarragon stems.
Coat the bottom of a saute pan generously with oil, add the garlic, and gradually bring to heat. Whenthe oil is hot, add shallots and a dash of salt to help them sweat. Cook over medium-high heat until they begin to caremalize and stick to the bottom of the pan. Deglaze the pan with the lemon juice. When the juice mostly evaporates (it should be thick and syrupy on the pan bottom) add the beans. Toss over a medium-high heat until they just begin to soften. At the last second add the tarragon. Toss a few more times, then serve immediately.
Our president has two modes of address. When he tries to speak somberly, he looks like a Stalin-era dissident confessing to a thought crime while a pistol tracks the spot between his eyes just beyond the camera's frame. When he's pleased with himself, he looks like someone is tickling his perineum. There's no order to or reason for the shifts from one tone to the other. He will giggle at casualty statistics and grimace through a joke. In either mode he annunciates poorly, and he has trouble with the letter S.
Although it's popular to mock the president as a moron, there's a broad consensus that in fact he is not. Thirty-seconds after recycling month-old Letterman-Leno material, your drinking buddies will pivot on a conjunction and tell you that obviously, despite his manifest failure as a higher mammal, George W. Bush is really a "political genius," or some version thereof, and that however stupid he may appear on the teevee, no one that dumb could ever get himself elected president, let alone cram six terms of executive consolidation and constitutional demolition into a mere two. Scratch the surface of most disdainers, and you'll find a secret groupie. Democrats who crow about The Media's poor treatment of their boy Clinton and comparative ease with Bush are good examples of that sort of envy. DailyKos, for instance, is full of loudmouth Bush-haters who, though they won't admit it even to themselves, secretly imagine Bush throwing them across the bed and ravishing them like an Ayn Rand architect. The personality cult of their wispy keystroke kommandant is mere displacement. They are all authoritarians.
In any event, the notion that Bush isn't a moron is a form of national self-flattery. At its root is the belief that he can't be a moron because if he were, that would mean that the American people, our government and institutions, allowed ourselves to be conquered by a moron. It would mean that the whole edifice of Western Democracy, centuries in the making, is cheaper than a backlot set. It would mean that the fruits of the political Enlightenment were finally plucked and chucked onto the compost heap with no more effort than it takes to nickname some reporters, shamble around, talk with an aw-shucks accent, and produce some decent war pornography. It would mean that the founders were right to fear democracy and their descendents wrong to give it to us.
I for one am fully converted to this latter view. Plato, the House of Capet, and James Madison have been vindicated at last by the man whose favorite philosopher was a platitudinous itinerant Jew who couldn't even keep his closest homeboy from snitchin.
“Something that controversial should have been discussed,” Ms. Stepnowski said. The children “shouldn’t learn questionable things in school that they’re not ready for and don’t understand.”I entirely agree. I, for one, never learned anything in school that I wasn't ready for and didn't already understand, and look how well I turned out.
"Film With Same-Sex Parents Splits School District" in the Times
It is absolutely amazing that whenever there is a major US domestic political event that requires the vapors of 'progress' to be present in Iraq in order to buy the President another FU or two, progress occurs. And it is even more amazing that as soon as the political inflection point passes, the progress dissipates.Of note: the "carefully constructed compromise on a draft law governing Iraq’s rich oil fields . . . appears to have collapsed" and "the leader of local Sunni tribes in Iraq who have joined American and Iraqi forces . . . was killed by a bomb today." In the latter article, the Times observes:
-fester at The Newshoggers
The progress in Anbar has been one of the rare bright spots for the American military. Just last year some senior military officers had all but given up on bringing security to Anbar. But since then, the Sunni sheiks banded together to fight militants loyal to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and supply young men to the police, an effort that brought a significant turnabout and has allowed the American military to claim some success.As you consider that, consider this passage from George Orwell's essay, "Shooting an Elephant." Orwell, then a young British imperial official--a police officer--in Burma, has been called upon to shoot an elephant that escaped while untended. Orwell goes and observes the elephant. He's never done anything like killing the beast before, and he doesn't want to do it now. After watching the elephant for some time, he comes to the conclusion that it is calm and that it would probably be harmless simply to wait for its handler to return. But when he turns to a native crowd now numbering in the thousands, who hate him but who also expect him to do what he came to do, he realizes that he has to kill it.
And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd--seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the "natives," and so in every crisis he has got to do what the "natives" expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing--no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man's life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.The United States is now that "absurd puppet pushed to and fro." Our great power--or at least our perception of our great power--blinds us to the the elementary truth that we are also servants of circumstance, and not its masters.
[CHARLIE] ROSE: All right, here is our last question. It comes on video from Los Angeles, Calif. Here is Bill Maher with a question for you. "Sen. Gravel, since 1980, the percentage of Americans who are obese has risen steadily to an all-time high, and a recent report by Trust for America's Health said things were getting worse. In addition, SAT scores have declined and 38 percent of fourth-graders aren't able to read at a basic level. If the definition of a friend is someone who tells you the truth, would you be willing to tell Americans that they're getting fatter and dumber, and if not, why aren't you my friend?""I am prepared to tell you that the American People are getting fatter and dumber." Oh, the dulcent strains . . .
GRAVEL: Well, first off, I am prepared to tell you that Americans are getting fatter and dumber. I have no problem saying that. I've said that essentially on your program, and I've also said that the Americans are going to get the government they deserve. And so, if things are going bad, just remember who put these people in power.
-Slate
Robert Farley of LG&M asks why he can't stop lying in order to avoid paying a sales tax.
Clearly, the answer is that Robert Farley is a libertarian, and like all libertarians, he only cares about tax cuts.
Petraeus and his team understand, too, that this war is about people.You know, there are a lot of bloody and stupid things to say about war, but I'm not sure I've ever heard a second-rate brokerage-house slogan applied as a measure of martial understanding.
-David Ignatius
John DoeNow over to you, Michelle Malkin:
–noun
1. an anonymous, average man.
2. a fictitious name used in legal proceedings for a male party whose true name is not known. Compare Jane Doe, Richard Roe.
3. of or for an unknown person; using the name John Doe to stand for an unknown person: The judge issued a John Doe warrant so the police could arrest the culprit when they identified him.
4. an unidentified man: The police were looking for a John Doe.
They are John Does like Brian Morgenstern.Also, props for the coinage "antiwar goons." Look on in terror, Malkin:
The New York Times has interviewed "more than 20 Iraqis of different sects and ethnicities," and thus concludes that the Iraqis, though they hate us, want us to stay for the indefinite future.
"More than 20" Like, 21? 27? 5,000? I've always found the newspaper "more than [round number]" locution decidedly odd. But let's assume that more than 20 also means less than 30 and so what we're talking about is extrapolating a national mood not from what is occuring daily but rather from the brief verbal responses of what amounts to 1/10,000 of a percent of the Iraqi population. The science of sampling is a marvel, I have no doubt, but "more than 20"?
The plural of anecdote is bullshit.
Libertarians come in many flavors, of course, but they share certain enthusiasms beyond free-market economics. They are often great consumers of science fiction, with an avid interest in space travel. And they have an almost unlimited enthusiasm for biotechnology, especially for advances that might allow us to manipulate our natures and extend our lives. Taken together, these elements constitute what might be called the libertarian dream--the dream of shaping your own meaning, liberated from family, from the past, from tradition, from biology, and perhaps even from the earth itself.Dear Kay,
-Kay S. Hymowitz confusing Space Gigolo Glenn Reynolds for Hayek
Oddly, Christopher Hitchens fairly and almost congenially summarizes the stated beliefs of Tariq Ramadan. These are not beliefs I can endorse, but so far as crazy people believe crazy shit in this world, Ramadan comes off as a model of judiciousness, virtue, and sanity. Hitchens, of course, presents these views while simultaneously declaring that he, only he, Christopher Hitchens, can decode and discern the malevolent intent underlying such straightforward propositions as: no sclerotic Middle Eastern potentate with the typically ragtag Middle Eastern army is going to push a nuclear, America-armed Israel into the Mediterranean, so why talk about whether it's desirable or not?
Now this may fail the test of Podhertzian hysteria, where looking askance at Israel is tantamout to erecting a sign reading Arbeit Macht Frei over your front door, but given prevalent Islamic attitudes toward Israel and the rather miserable legacy of Israel--recall Hitchens once spent a great deal of time calling attention to exactly that--it's not unreasonable to approach the political questions here from a practical standpoint. Just as one must point out to hardline Israelis that there are millions of Palestinians and they are simply not going to go away, one must point out to opponents of Israel that Israel is, at last, a fact. And a fact with warheads. Let the process of accommodation through mutual distrust begin!
I probably find Ramadan's desire to bring Islam into modernity even sillier than Hitchens, but let me say this: it makes a lot more sense than Hitchens' desire to kill all the Muslims.
Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,Norman Podhoretz confesses to something or other in the Wall Street Journal, but I'm not sure what. One too many childhood knocks in the head by the Negroes, one suspects. Anyway, having wiped the milk and porridge from his chin, he concludes:
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons.
Miniver loved the days of old
When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
Would set him dancing.
Miniver sighed for what was not,
And dreamed, and rested from his labors;
He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
And Priam's neighbors.
Miniver mourned the ripe renown
That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
And Art, a vagrant.
Miniver loved the Medici,
Albeit he had never seen one;
He would have sinned incessantly
Could he have been one.
Miniver cursed the commonplace
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the medieval grace
Of iron clothing.
Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
But sore annoyed was he without it;
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
And thought about it.
Minver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.
The Vietnam syndrome is back and it means to have its way. But is it strong enough in its present incarnation to do what it did to the honor of this country in 1975? Well acquainted though I am with its malignant power, I still believe that it will ultimately be overcome by the forces opposed to it in the war at home. Even so, I cannot deny that this question still hangs ominously in the air and will not be answered before more damage is done to the long struggle against Islamofascism into which we were blasted six years ago and that I persist in calling World War IV.Ah, the malignant power of the Vietnam Syndrome. A million more Vietnamese dead. Now that would have been the honorable thing to do.
The central question is whether the Democrats can force a significant reduction of troops from Iraq on Bush's watch, so as to avoid Iraq becoming exclusively their headache when they (as is likely) take over the White House in January of 2009.Dear Professor Cole,
-Juan Cole
Cernig points approvingly to a Guardian article by Michael Tomasky whose thesis is neatly summed up by its subtitle: "US foreign policy experts who got the Iraq war badly wrong are still somehow holding sway." I'm going to suggest that this article contains a serious analytical error arising from the flawed premises of so-called progressive's opposition to this war.
Cynosure though he will be today, Petraeus in fact has only a limited role to play in seeing to it that the US continue its mad engagement. The stars of that dispiriting drama will be the phalanx of foreign policy experts based in Washington, who will, in the wake of the general's testimony, fan out across the cable channels and op-ed pages, arguing that giving the surge one more chance is the only "serious" option.The idea that political leaders take their cues from a monkey-house of Beltway jabberers is almost laughably absurd, and yet here and elsewhere in the sphere of self-identified progressivism it's held as a talismanic truth: That these "serious people" exert undue influence on politicians. The unspoken corollary to such an idea is that political leaders, but for their hoodwinking at the hands of the "experts," would be naturally inclined to a less militant American posture, a quicker extrication of troops from Iraq, a less bellicose foreign policy, etc. This view is precisely backwards. Re-read the last paragraph in the excerpt above. Consider the two criteria: hawkishness and a position within the consensus. But who generates the consensus?
These, you see, are the "serious" foreign policy people. It's good work if you can get it. You may be thinking that you become a serious foreign policy person by often being right about foreign policy. But this just shows how little you know about how these things work.
No--you become a serious foreign-policy person in Washington by dint of meeting two criteria. First, you should adopt the most hawkish position you can plausibly adopt, so that you come across as appropriately "tough-minded". Second, you must note what all the other serious foreign policy people are saying and take care to ensure that your position is sufficiently indistinguishable from theirs for you to be lumped in with them when the time comes for the Washington Post to write a group profile of Washington's serious tough-minded foreign policy people.
Here in America, we're taught that in the realm of ideas, no less than of products of commerce, the free market sorts everything out--it rewards the good ideas and punishes the bad ones, and at the end of the day fairness will obtain.I don't remember being taught any such thing, although I've occasionally heard the idea celebrated on the cable news, but more pointedly, the idea of an invisible hand is no more relevant to the business of government-backed PR than the idea of natural selection to a monoculture. People like Pollack and O'Hanlon work for the government. The government of the United States is their client. The fact that the money passes this way and that before landing in their shell-company accounts is of no relevance. The reason that foreign policy "experts," that "serious people" continue to ratify Washintgon's changeless imperial policy is because that is what they are paid to do.
Well, the famous invisible hand seems to have left the world of foreign policy seriousness untouched, because Pollack and O'Hanlon, far from paying any price for their errors, are just as celebrated as ever.
Having never quite subdued a Gaul,
but popular in Rome,
the General came home
to explicate it all:
Less than everything, but more than none.
The sages of the empire wept with joy
made sweeter with forgetfulness.
A high priest blessed
a high-born family’s baby boy
and then got drunk, and got some rest.
The public wasn’t sure and didn’t care.
The emperor was pleased,
and told his slaves to rest their bloody knees.
He breathed the salty air,
like ruling, just a breeze.
Here, selected at random on DailyKos, is an example of a mindset that I personally find incomprehensible.
John Edwards believes in an America where I count. ME. John Edwards will fight for me. And I need someone in my corner, since I am not a lobbyist.Emphases in the original. This sort of self-flattering sentimentality suggests a number of social and psychological problems. I imagine a middle-aged man still unironically inspired by Stand and Deliver.
I captured some of the General's early testimony on video. Man, that Nancy Pelosi is tall.
Wilmington, N.C.: [...] What makes a withdrawal plan precipitous? Who establishes those standards? Who are the proponents of "precipitous" withdrawal?Dear Shailagh Murray,
Shailagh Murray: Precipitous in this case would be more quickly than military leaders believe is sensible, based on their mission and the situation on the ground. Believe it or not, a lot of Democrats are concerned about withdrawing too many troops too quickly. You can be against the war, but also against mucking it up.
-The Post "Politics Hour"
People continue to express a degree of bemused respect for Candidate-for-Life Benito Giuliani, for he leads his Republican Rivals in the polls despite being a fag-loving, cross-dressing, cosmopolitan pussy hound who, were it revealed that he'd been getting sucked off by dudes in public restrooms, would shrug and tell you that one mouth feels very much like the next when there's a 3/4-height partition between the stalls. As Matt Bai's goofy article in the Times Magazine notes, Giuliani's principle distinction is that among a field of death worshippers, he's managed to turn himself into something like Dr. Strangestlove, orgiastically committed to letting a mind uncluttered by moral philosophy or practical considerations wander into vicious, conspiratorial fantasies about an international hydra as dangerous to the West as the Jews once were before what's-his-name, the German fellow, took care of that one, more or less. Bai notices this, and writes, "What Giuliani hadn’t done by the time I saw him in Iowa, however, was lay out in any detail how he planned to win this supposed new world war." It's a clunky sentence--Bai is among the worst stylists of American long-form journalism--but it's the most important sentence in the article, the point from which Bai launches a long discussion of how Giuliani, he of the protean personality, doesn't have a plan, and doesn't really plan to have a plan, but conceives of himself as a representative of a series of themes, most of them either bloody as hell or transparently crackpot, in a process of perpetual self-presentation to the very people who keep giving him a lead in the polls. In other words, Benito Giuliani, Candidate-for-Life.
In the Giuliani campaign is the clear model for the future disposition of America's democratic institutions. When did this current "election cycle" begin. In 2006? In 2004? Earlier? Who can really tell. Soon, there will be no more elections, but only one singular election, and it will never actually occur. Committees will be formed, funds will be raised, dinners will be held, speeches will be given, candidacies will be officially announced, debates will be held, town halls will be attended, polls will be taken, frontrunners will emerge, former frontrunners will decline, vanity candidates will be asked how they expect to win, the newsmedia will cover it all with a joint feeling of breatheless anticipation and world-weary familiarity. Yet the polls will never open, the voters will never vote, the results will never be tabulated, and no one will win. The inconvenient and frankly extraneous naming of a winner, the hokey solmenity of the inauguration, the actual occupany of the White House--all these things shall pass. Barack Obama will always attack Hillary Clinton; Tom Tancredo will always hate on immigrants; Ron Paul will always talk sensibly and be popular on the internet; Mike Gravel will follow his bliss; Fred Thompson will go on late night. And Candidate-for-Life Benito Giuliani shall outcampaign them all.
The American people will be perfectly happy with the arrangment. Voting is a pain in the ass, anyway, and soon, absolved of any obligation to cast a ballot, they can let their registrations lapse and also absolve themselves of jury duty. Oh, beautiful day. Congress and the Senate will have adopted the same approach, then state legislatures and at last local governments. Within fifty years, the sole driver of the American economy, which will still be the largest in the world, will be the new service industry of campaigning. Three hundred million new offices of the Republic will bloom, like the household gods of Hinduism, one practically for every man, woman, FtM, MtF, and child in America, but none of them will ever be filled, as we'll all simply run for them ceaselessly. We'll borrow the money from China, and spend it all on Chicken Cacciatore or the Seafood Entree at $500/plate. The only other industry, of course, will be military. Fortunately, we all support the troops, whatever our differences on the campaign trail. Since no one will have been elected, no one will have had to decide at long last to bring the army home from Iraq. We will have the freest elections in the world and also be free from elections. Each of us will testily declare that we will not govern according to the polls. According to the polls, this will be a popular position.
See if you can follow the line of this Post Editorial. The surge has not achieved its central goal of permitting political breakthroughs. But wait!--"military results of the past few months have been in some respects undeniably positive." So we should keep it up, n'est-ce pas? Not quite. "Tactical military successes will be unsustainable without political breakthroughs."
Ah, intellectual paralysis. What editorial would be complete without it? You can tell to what extent editorial boards have been overtaken by the upper middle management mentality, which is appropriate. Vaguely aware and thoroughly terrified of their own general irrelevance to the organization's central competency, advertising, pleated trousers in a world of flat-front pants, lace-up oxfords in a time of slip-on loafers, they react with the habitual behavior of a manager facing fear of the office axe: by hemming and hawing through a lot of insufferable jargon before arriving at the stern conclusion that they want results, people, results.
Consider, in any case, the lunacy of the form. A group of men and a token female-American, all of them living lives of rather glorious isolation from the tinkling debt carousel of actual America, uniformly of the privileged class, who speak to Senators and Cabinet officials and the senior leadership of our military with the social ordinariness and ease that you or I speak to our friends and coworkers at the Christmas party, and yet at the same time not at all of the same rentier class as Presidents and generals, but instead puffed-up administrative assistants in big corporate entities, forever drafting letters and then hustling down the hall to get the boss' approval before affixing their signature--they sit down together, choose an issue of the day, conceive a narrow range of responses to it--narrow out of practical neccessity--take a quick vote, and having determined by majority vote their position within the old city wall of consensus, set it all down in huffy, stentorian sentences that proclaim This to be the Way It Is, unless, they always add, It is entirely Otherwise.
The Fred Hiatts and Bill Kellers and Paul Gigots of the world are annoyingly present, but I find it hard to get too worked up over their effluvia because I know they're all going to get fired one of these days. There is a sadistic glee--and anyone who's worked in an office during firings can confirm this--in watching those surest to get one month's severance plus vacation days paid up scramble around so insistently unaware of what's going on. The empire that these gentlemen have cheered as it waddled in has got no use for such pensive chimps. The empire prefers baboons. Red face, red ass, and a propensity for screeching.
