The Cole Patrol

The Arab Spring Unsprung

2011-11-04T11:27:00.001Z

Dear Dr. Bones,

I suppose the Muses and you and I ought to feel gratified whenever we hear a theorist of Team Zhabotinskiy sayin’ out loud in public [1] what we have long supposed her crew to think in the comfort an’ security of the Secret Sector.

An objector might object that to speak of Pajama Junction NJ as "public" without some fairly elaborate qualification is to ask for trouble down the slippery slope.

_Respondeo_ that this is _in primis_ a problem for the Zhabotiskiyites rather than for us humble. We might be better off the less careful TZh are about distinguishin’ Foxcuckooland from the United States of America.

I only say ‘might’, however, for there *may* (I only say ‘may’) be a happy convergence of morality and policy somewhere in the vicinity of "Always better for everybooby, if everybooby sees the Correlation of Farces as the C. of F. actually is" No cloud comes without a thorn, though: that formula would make foxcuckoos an’ pajamaclads a standin’ --STANDIN’--menace to everybooby in sight, for seein’ things as the kiddiecons (or the Conners of Kiddies) wish they was is, as it were, the active ingredient in pajamatarianism.

To sneak up on the announced topic, if I may, let me suggest a counterfactual pscenario to you, as follows: ¿How if the Arab Republic of Egypt were to grow a Child’s Garden of Foxcuckoes all her own?

Few humanoid events are less likely, I know, but sometimes dotty examples are helpful by virtue of their dottiness. Or look on the flip side of it, sir, which I venture to think is hardly counterfactual at all, namely that Zhabotinskiyanity has scant hope of ever becomin’ the established religionism of central North America by cozyin’ up to our violence pros rather than to Uncle Scrooge an’ Daddy Warbucks _y Tio Ruperto_ an’ all that wing of the national family.

To recur to First Principles, sort of, ’tis "well known in the art" that to be a success at pushin’ the lesser breeds without around, a Natural Master [1] may deploy one of two (and ONLY two) quite distinct Principles: (1a) FORCE, and (1b) fraud.

Here, for example, we find _M. le baron de Roubine_ singin’ the praises of (1a) as applied to the grave problems of Native Management that Egypt undoubtedly poses. All I am doing, really, is, first, to point out that the freelordly incantation is itself an instance of (1b) conducted for the benefit (¿?) of the Kiddie Selfservative Movement here in the _Heimatland G*ttes_, and then, second and finally, add that, although in theory TZh could pull off a sort of double goose-and-gander, rulin’ Cairo UAR by fraud, an’ Cairo IL by ¡FORCE! happily ever after, yet in practice, well, ¡please don’t be dotty!

Though First Principles beckon, I believe I will stick for now to Egyptian Exceptionalism, which is not, I presume, quite altogether first-class, principlewise. For those not ourselves subjects of Pharaoh, anyway.

His freelordship seems not at all interested in Egyptian Exceptionalism, his own preferred sweet Dulcinea bein’ rather "Turkey Exceptionalism," so to call it. His freelordship winds up wonderin’, in effect, why *all* Natives cannot be more like ataturkeys. At the moment, I am not sure _M. le Baron_ would be all that happy if he got his druthers. His freelordship cloudily perceives the problem, I think, when he scribbles "Of course, the army-in-control approach requires some demagoguery . . . ."

Now this ‘demagogy’ of M. de Roubine I take to be mostly a mere verbal alias for what a recurrer-to-firsts would call _impia fraus_ and I myself am unworthily tempted to call ‘Foxcuckoldry’ The violence pros of Neoturkey, his freelordship assumes, are compelled to talk a lot of rot that they do not actually mean. If they did not, the "Turkey Street" would soon rise against them and install a different crew of gobblers who *do* take the rot in question seriously.
His freelordship’s ruminations are, as I said at the outset, of interest because one does not often encounter Zhabotinskiyians barkin’ like this in places where they might be overheard. They are not of any interest from the destructive-creationist angle, however, bein’ half as old as the Neoseemighty hills. Once Guide of All Progressive Revisionism figured out that there is only one language that Natives can be safely counted on to understand, the Roubinite neo-insight was dialectically [2] inevitable.

Just for fun, let us set out the neonegation of the negation fair and square and Hegel-fashion:

(A) Natives only understand ¡FORCE! [V. Ye. Zhabotinskiy]

(B) Some Natives don’t even understand that [common notoriety]

(C) Fortunately, there exists a class of Natives that specialize in ¡FORCE! and can therefore be talked to. [B. X. Rubin _et al._, includin’ Q. E. Demonstrandum]

E. T. Al is Legion, to be sure, but his freelordship is as entitled to his share of the pot as anybooby else.

A pity his freelordship does not discuss what to DO with his pot now that he has won it. We do not even hear any (express) words to the effect that it is the plain duty of all Zhabotinskiydom to support the good Native colonels an’ generals in their eternal stuggle against Turkey Street.

His freelordship also did not *expressly* say ‘eternal’, but I ask you, Dr. Bones, ¿Aren’t you pretty sure that that is what his freelordship has in mind?"

Meanwhile, if I were a Native violence pro, I would be a little uncertain what to make of his freelordship’s gracious endorsement, seeing that it comes without a User Manual. I mean, it must feel nice to learn that _M. le baron de Roubine_ is one’s side one thousand an’ eleven percent (1109.037%), but even nicer would be some advice about how to make sure that one’s own shall be the winnin’ side. Not only does that freelordly insinuation of ‘eternal’ emanate a distinctly dismal pænumbra over the whole _m'gillâ_, there are not any *concrete* suggestions for stayin’ empowered through, say, sunset next Thursday afternoon.

Colonel Zimmî might cheer up a litle, though, if he notices that there may soon be a sequel in store:

At any rate, this dimension must be taken into account. We probably won’t find out more until 2013, when — if all goes as planned — Tunisia and Egypt will elect civilian presidents.

Not Thursday afternoon, perhaps, but ’tis not the _Kalendæ Neohebraïcæ_ either.

I guess the Tank Thinkers figure Zimmî and the b'hoys in uniform can always overthrow President Streetarab if they must using the tanks (and, for that matter, the thoughts) they are already in possession of, and then hold on for six months or so before urgently requiring intellectual reinforcements from Freedame GLORIA . Or less spiritual succour from her effulgent freeladyship’s Stepuncle Sam.

Bomby days.
--JHM

___
[1] For purposes of this discussion, we can prescind from taking notice of that Supernatural Mastery (® & © & ™) with which Team Zhabotinskiy has allegedly been imbued. As often happens with ideoproducts of that class, one can never catch the prefix part at work so clearly as to be entirely unmistakable. In all the ninety-five (95) solar years since Mr. Balfour of Airstrip One first swindled the Judæostatists, nothing has come to pass in the Neolevant that cannot be explained by the invocation of either fraud or ¡FORCE!. Possibly none of these explanations are really whight, possibly ‘Super-’ has been at work on the sly. The political analyst gains nothing analytically useful by so supposing, however.

(( And, to digress briefly, it at least *appears* as if the Dogmatic Mythologist acquires yet another professional perplexity, in that ‘Super-’ has achieved no better results than have the gruesome twosome of ‘F’ words. To be sure, the D.M. gentry can easily win that tie (an’ any other) to their own satisfaction by supposin’ a Supersuccess to lurk in the bosom of the existin’ Neolevantine correlation of farces, a sublime Hyperphænomenon which, exactly like the Supercauses that have produced it, is invisible to those of impure heart. ))

==

[2] The Beast of Berlin was not *always* wrong, Dr. Bones. And least of all about non-Anglophones.

=

[3] "A check or fighter squadron or two would also be not unwelcome. WWNN. As ever, Zim."

South of the Rio Grande del Patxama

2011-02-13T19:35:00.005Z

Dear Dr. Bones,

Sticking as usual to the literary / rhetorical / agitprop[p]er side of the path to allow impatient wingnutettes an’ wingnuts to pass on their way to that funeral they seem always rushin’ to get to in time to make quite sure it can serve as their own, I put it to you, sir, that Don Ricardito de Fernández y Podhòretz throws away most Rio Limbaugh’s -- an’ especially its own -- more promisin’-lookin’ cards in this rubber.

Consider: (A) the Greater Levant and _la América Ibérico-Indocumentada_ are rather dreadfully like one unto another, now as much as ever, and (B) the _nuevoseñorito_’s Daddy, or perhaps its Daddy's Daddy, or . . . probably lived square under the yoke of John Quincy Monroe.

Even if there are no F&P family anecdotes left over from the Banana Grande period, little Ricky could appeal to public-domain fiestaware. ¿How about, say,

Poor Egypt, ¡So far from Father Zeus, so near the Tel ’Avîv statelet!

That Antiseemighty soundbark may seem nothing very special when this coarse and illiterate and semi-Pseltic keyboard clicks it forth, but -- comin’ straight from the armadillo’s kisser, as it were, ’twould sound very different, ¿_no es verdad_?.

Instead of which we get miscellaneous scraps--scraps , I presume, intended to insinuate that the verbal ragpicker might actually know a little somethin’ more ’bout overseas than most of the Party neocomrades-- that are entirely devoid of that heart-warmin’ an’ trust-cadgin’ cor local or regionalismo y nacionalismo which we, being Ice People, very naturally crave.

To be sure, little Ricky F&P has as much right to appropriate boilerplate claptrap like _Après moi, le déluge_ or "carry cole slaw to Newcastle" -- possibly even to the occasional little exuberance of Physics Envy like "some giant unseen gravitational source" -- as anybooby else. What we have here, though, is not a _Rechtsfrage_ nor even a _Machtfrage_, but a question of rhetorical technique. If the _nuevoseñorito_ was not aimin’ at the effect created -- the "rootless cosmopolitanism" effect -- then its competence is questionable.

If, however, you decide that the R. C. savour happened by neodesign, then kindly apply your figurative Y@@ T@@be to Don Jr.’s judgment and to the señoritoly taste.[*]

***

More substantively, . . .

Well, I much prefer to march into ‘substantively’ from a better jumping-off point than the brain-flat terrain around Pajama Junction NJ affords.

Still, it can't hurt to single out the passage in which Don Jr. comes closest to barkin’ somethin’ of real interest for the theory and practice of Native Management:

>“In countries like Serbia and Ukraine direct and indirect U.S. aid helped youth driven opposition movements successfully oust repressive leaders by training them in non-violent civil disobedience, election organizing and other fundamentals of civil society.” [**]

However, that sentence has quotation marks around it that make no sense as a solicitation to shudder or to sneer, so I guess the jackdaw [***] picked that scrap of flash up in a dumpster somewhere an’ pecked off the designer label.

"In my end is my beginning," for ’tis plainly an offense against Comp. Lit. rather than against Mil. Sci. thus to deploy unmarked dumb-dumb neobullets.

_Els desitjo dies feliços_ (like the Natives used to say to St. George Orwell, self-fetched from afar to do them Homage.)
--JHM

___
[*] Forget that silly proverb, please; nobody expects you to ‘dispute’ about or with so dubious a commodity as Party Neocomrade R. X. de Fernández y Podhòretz. All you need to do, sir, is CONDEMN.

Should you have forgotten how to do that less than civil trick, take two aspirins and fifteen minutes of Neocomrade Dr. R. H. Limbaugh in aërial suspension. After that, the technique is bound to come back to you. Like cycling, "¡never apologize, never explain!" denigration, once mastered, is a skill that even Dr. Alzheimer can never deprive us of. Hardly ever.

[**] Though Ukrainia (_¿Quién?_) be more recent, mention of Serbia strikes me as especially good. So think about it carefully, please. Wink, wink; nod, nod.

[***] _"la gravilla" sive "Corbus monediva neoterrorica"_

News from Nowhere

2011-02-11T10:13:00.001Z

Dear Dr. Bones,

Helena means: "The US's neo-colonial relationship with Egypt is at risk. Roll with the punches, and we can restore our relationship to what it was (neo-colonial)." Therefore I don't see how Helena's article is critically different from Obama's speeches.

’Tis fun to find the GeorgeFoxNews account (largely based on e-ja board dispatches from special Cairo correspondent the late Dr. Pangloss) contradicted from even farther out away from Terra than Planet Justworld herself.

Nobooby is going to fool Comrade[ss] ‘Domza' with mere word games, like pretending some newfangle matronisation scheme for Native Management would significantly different from plain old patronizin’.

¡Nurse Cobban is but General McBárak writ large!

Happy daze.
--

(( Paddy says to tell you that, between ’em, McBárak and O'Sulliman are likely to give us Pselts an even more glorious reputation for political mastery.

(( But Dr. Johnson knows best about us wunnerful, ever-immortal pride an’ glory of the Whight Civilisation of the Western Race. ))

"A better way to push for reforms"

2011-02-07T14:56:00.003Z

Dear Dr. Bones,

Any competent admirator must frequently admire the B'nôt Chûtspâ. All the -- ¡far from inconsiderable! -- militancy an’ extremism of our own zimmy-dummy wingnutettes an’ wingnuts can be eclipsed to shame by a single neoperformance in the Path of Hyperzion:

Edelstein wrote Guardian editor Ian Black that he was amazed that his newspaper would agree to publish a letter [*] that calls for the murder of innocent civilians. He demanded that Black print an apology and clarification stating that the newspaper did not condone terrorism in any form and did not consider it a legitimate tool in a struggle for freedom.

“I expect you to make clear to your readers that you believe that terrorism is a violent and despicable act, directed mainly toward innocent civilians with the intent to strike fear and anxiety in a society,” Edelstein wrote. “Certainly this was the goal of those who employed terrorism in the London bombing of July 2005.”

Though the aggressive self-spiritedness of such a thingee be above all praise, yet I betcha our old friend and M. Pascal’s, Ms. Prudentia, is horrified. Horrified, indeed, at more levels than one:

(1) Neufreiherr Minister von Edelstein seems, firstly, not to have computed that there are far more wicked Natives, and fellow-travelers with Wicked Nativism, in the world to address imperious scribbles at the fishwraps of Greater Tel ’Avîv than _vice versâ_. No doubt everybooby all ’round will regularly be tossing such directives in the recycle bin where they so richly belong. Nevertheless, the underlying correlation of farces is gravely asymmetrical: far more Jewish Statist than Nativist personhours are bound to be lost to a very elementary task of housekeeping.

What could be plainer as a matter of strategy / operations / tactics than that the Greatest Demographic™ must ever strive to fight on terrain where numerical superiorities count for as little as possible? Rear-Colonel Prudentia might, it seems to me, very reasonably wish to see the Neukamerad Gefreiter von Edelstein kangaroocourt-martialed for militerrory folly and incompetence.

*

(2) Coming at it from the opposite direction of Ms. Prudence, out of the remoter feverswamps, that is, of practical Y'hûdâ v'Shômrôn and theoretical Ziontology, I guess quite a number of swampsters will deem the Freelord of Edelstein a dement -- or even maybe a witless tool of Nativism -- to be (or even pretend to be) ‘amazed’ that Airstrip One should harbour badmouthers of the GD™ Folk: "¿Can the ziocomrade be really inaware that, like unto Oceania and Eastasia, Old Europe and Altneuland have *always* been at war? And by no means always a cold war: _¡¡Nie wieder Oswiecim!!_"

Whether exposing himself to such criticism involves a genuine imprudence on His Neoëxcelllency's part depends on what audience he panders to, exactly. I fear I never distinctly heard of him till this morning, so I have no clue to the freelordly stance beyond what the junior judæostatist from up the slippery slope at Castle Podhòretz reproduces. That, however, looks distinctly febrile and paludinous to me.

Let me know what you think, please, sir.

*

(3) Then comes the timing of this exuberance, my trump card. What would it profit the GD™ Folk to gain _The Guardian_ of London, but lose Gen. Mubárak of Nile River City, the closest product yet discovered or invented on land or sea to an anti-Nativism Native? [**]

One would have thought -- for what zimmy-dummy ‘thinking’ may be worth -- this a moment for a rather narrow concentration of all the force and frau . . . and _hasbarâ that Judæostatism can bring to bear, not for picking new fights, however ideologically congenial, at or beyond the extreme margin of the Greater Neolevantine Co-Prosperity Sphere.

***

Even the junior birdperson of _Commentary_ seems to allude obliquely to imprudence when she glosses her text with "There is little that the Israeli government can do to bring about changes at _The Guardian_. That most likely means that the freedamsel supposes the Neufreiherr von Edelstein -- a portfolio-carryin’ operative of the Tel ’Avîv government, remember -- is wastin’ his time an’ breath an’ energy -- generally labourin’ in vain.

On the other hand, her freeladyship clearly thinks there is a way to neolabour against the abhominable Guardian NOT altogether in vain:

A better way to push for reforms [2] would be if influential groups within the Jewish community started a campaign against the paper’s obsessively anti-Israel (and at times anti-Semitic) news coverage. Criticizing Israel government policies is one thing; publishing pro-terrorism letters and cartoons of Palestinian leaders dressed as Orthodox Jews is another. Jewish leaders should firmly and publicly condemn the endorsements of violence and outright bigotry that are becoming staples in _The Guardian_.

Two epiglosses on the glossatrix come to mind:

(A) I suspect the alleged "influential groups within the Jewish community" on Airstrip One have been doin’ firmly an’ exactly just that for years an’ years now.

(B) A very tiny point, though perhaps indicative of the JS neomindset: it certainly looks to this keyboard as if cartoonists in the UK would be getting quite a raw deal as compared with what their honourable and neogallant colleagues in Denmark have already been most graciously vouchsafed.

***

By way of hyperepigloss and conclusion: it occurs to me that Party Neocomradess (ninth class) A. X. Goodman may not "get out as much" as a young freedamsel should. I mean, ¿does she really *know* anythin’ much ’bout *any* part of Old Europe? Sheer neoïgnorance would handily account for both the trifling little discrepancies I have pointed to.

¡Happy days!
--JHM

___
[0] "Oddly enough," we are not provided a link to this Letter of Blood. Presuambly the factious tripe an’ bologna laid out on the e-counter at Contentions have a great appeal to persons who have not yet attained the age of reason and need to be protected from overexposure to S*x and V**l*nce.

Yes, that must be the explanation!

Trickier to explain is why I cannot find the L. of B. on the fiends’ own website either.

[1] I knowingly omit the Maronites and ‘Phœnecians’ of the Beirut statelet, who have let their wannabe patrons to the South down so many times that I strike them from the roster of effectives.

[2] ‘Reforms’ is good.

Concerning a Possible Flaw in "Heads We Win, Tails Barry Loses"

2011-01-28T09:27:00.002Z

Dear Dr. Bones,

Don Ricardito de Fernández y Podhòretz takes great pains to establish what any decent political adult would have conceded in a flash -- that he, the apprentice Don, knows little or nothin’ ’bout the inscrutable Neolevant.

Well, but there is no reason why he should, is there?

The puzzle, then, is why such a neospecimen should attempt to fake it, especially considering that Hooverville and Rio Limbaugh/Port Ste. Lucie, even Pajama Junction NJ, are not facin' any shortage of well-credentialized exponents of Native Management for the Neolevant. The jackboot is on the other foot entirely, it seems to me. That is, should weekly standardizers and newcriterionmongers suddenly feel an urge to big-manage any *other* species of Native than the Levantine, they might be in rather deep doo-doo, at least in the preliminary stages of their aggression.

An example: from time to time, some of the more obscure freelords an’ kiddiemasters have suggested that Party & AEIdeology may have to do somethin’, one of these days, ’bout the heathen Chinee, who is now getting distinctly uppity economically, whilst remaining quite as mythologically misguided as ever. They would have a great deal of difficulty makin' a neogo of it, I fear. Their faction possesses several dozen, maybe even several hundred, _Bernielewisschüler_ for every honourable an’ neogallant Party groupie who happens to be learnèd in the lore of distant Cathay as well as the intricacies of trickle-down. [*]

Furthermore, our favorite pajamatarian _señorito_ is here caught behavin’ in a distinctly uncivil way: he is tryin’ to jump to the head of the queue, cuttin’ off many other Party neocomrades who have been toilin’ laboriously in the vineyards of _jihád_ careerism for years and years now. If Pipes Minor and the blessèd Hugh the Simple and Bob, Cardinal Spencer, are not a little miffed, it will only because Don Ricardito is so amateurish a J.C. wannabe as to be beneath the notice of the pros.

Worst of all, at the end of his scribble the junior Don yawns in the face of everybooby who has troubled to read that far, makin’ crystal clear that, over and above not knowin’ refried beans about the Middle East, he isn't even interested in it. The whole m'gillâ turns out to be yet another exercise in obamabashery. Not a happy one, either, because little Donnie wants to blame his POTUS equally for Gen. Mubárak surviving an’ for Gen. Mubárak falling. (¿Why not the Crimean War, while he's at it?)

Considered as a technical difficulty of literature / rhetoric / agitprop, one solution is not far to seek: Don Ricardito might have judiciously chopped his baby in half, publishin' the "Bye, Bye Mubárak" part here at Pajama Junction NJ, an’ "The O’Bama-Mubárak Axis of Tyranny" dingalingery somewhere else. Or _vice versâ_. Presumably he would soon have been wantin’ one or the other to sink without a trace, lest his candidate membership in Club Nostradamus be imperiled. But at least that way he could safely ignore one an’ dredge up the other for "¡I told you so!" purposes.

As it is, little Donnie will just get the worst of everythin’ available, should he ever point back at this thing. ’Twill be obvious, outside the factional monkey house and maybe even to some extent inside it, that Don Ricardito did not have a clue what was gonna come to pass in the Neolevant, but just kindly wanted everybooby to know who is to blame for it, whatever it may be. A complete waste of energy, that, for to come out from under the overcoat of Party Neocomrade R. L. Simon, Freelord an’ Kiddiemaster of Padjaama in the neopeerage of Foxcuckooland [**], has already spoken for itself eloquently, who’s-to-blame-for-everythin’wise.

¡Happy days! (through affordable healthcare)
--JHM

___
[*] Possibly tank-thinkers for the KSM, Kiddie Selfservative Movement, are aware of what seems to me a grave deficiency in their neopreparedness and yet not worried. The reason would be easy enough: that crew and the present humble keyboard disagree radically about the relative importance for Native Management schemes of "area studies" (distant Native lore &c.) and . . .

. . . I am so completely out of sympathy with their neostuff that to find a handy-dandy label for it that will not be all hostile sarcasm and zero fairembalanced information. What it comes to, perhaps one may say, is that when Wingnut City *does* finally resolve to march on Xanadu, their GHQ will not commence by recruitin’ speakers of Xanadese, but rather neocomradesses an’ neocomrades militantly fluent in Powe®Poin™.

(The Señto. de F. y P. appears to be no better qualified in P®P™ than in East-of-Eden Studies, by the way. Though ¿perhaps it is merely that he has never found a suitable occasion to show off that particular neoaccomplishment of his?)

[**] Plus -- ¡never forget!, ¡¡_nunca se olvide de recordar_!! -- the ¡¡¡World’s Greatest YaleoDrama™ist!!!

Concerning a Possible Flaw in "Heads We Win, Tails Barry Loses"

2011-01-28T09:27:00.000Z

Yet Another Letter the Editor Was Spared

2010-10-12T13:15:00.005+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

This patient suffers from a common syndrome, that of Narcissus Dexter supposin’ that the most important place in the world is wherever Master Narky happens to be standin’ at the moment. Other people are not the Hell of M. Sartre, they are just nothin’ at all -- as far as Narky is concerned.

Today is Tuesday, and Narky is "a practicing immigration attorney in Miami and New York," so obviously the Key to All Native Management must have somethin’ to do with immigration law or immigration policy. Obviously.

Accordingly, Narky comes up with a sure cure for Global Tourism an’ the Islamophalangitarian Menace™ that collides head-on with other sorts of laws and policies. What does *he* care, for instance, that Pakistan is officially an Ally of his Uncle Sam in the ongoin’ counter-jeehad? " ‘That’s not my department,’ says Werner von Braun." [1] [2]

Happy days.

___

[1] http://j.mp/aZdQgG

Foggy Bottom in particular seems not to be Narky’s department:

Determination should be decided (sic) by intelligence officials AND NOT THE STATE DEPARTMENT[!]

barks he.

Hard not to wonder if at some point an attorney from State did not signally triumph over the patient in a courtroom.

[2] Mainstream an’ full-time jihád careerists often paint themselves into this same corner, with Sa‘údiyya more often than not the immediate occasion. There is an awful lot to dislike about that joint, no doubt, but nevertheless Riyadh has been a MAJOR Ally for decades. If kiddie selfservatives seriously want to break off the Wahhábí Connection, it is very kiddie of them indeed not to discuss the Big Picture.

Outremer for Dhimmies

2010-06-07T12:41:00.000+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

Look what just discovered Outremer!

To spend ninety minutes or so working up such a theme from scratch for purposes of factious polemic is not unworthy of Don Rossito de Douthát’s chosen faction.

Doubtless, ninety-nine neocomrades in a hundred will stick with their received Party-an’-Ideology line, "History is bunk," yet even they can enjoy hearin’ an illiberal and antidemocratic señorito stickin’ it to what selfservative kiddies call "the Democrat party" and all bicycle-challenged perfessers by condescendin’ to "a mix of amnesia and self-abnegation."

Speaking of self-abnegation, I should say the best part of this, or any, Douthatian joke is that corporate soapbox from which Sir Oracle the quick study gets to condescend. Why, sir, with Don Rossito, ’tis almost as if the late M. de ‘Arafát had been in a position to use the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘our’ with reference to the Tel ’Avîv Parliament!

Genuine TAPsters may worry about drowning suddenly in a tempestuous sea of Natives, but the New York Times Company soars far above such courage-challengedness, setting an admirable example for all decent political grown-ups.

Genuine TAPsters and Hyperzionists generally, not to mention serious historians of Century VI/XII//XLIX, will probably notice that the señorito does not take quite a perfectly tel’avîvocentric view:

[Hyperzion’s] friends can learn something from Outremer as well. Like today’s Jewish republic, the Crusader kingdoms were small states forged by military valor, based in the Middle East but oriented westward, with distant patrons and potential foes just next door. Like Israel, they were magnets for fanatics from east and west alike.

I daresay any ninety-minute analogy whatsoever is likely to be deficient with that sort of deficiency. Your P&I agitpropper wants her neo-analogies for a reason, after all; she is not going to spend lots of time puzzlin’ out wie es eigentlich gewesen when it is so extremely easy to come up with wie es wiedermassagiert werden dürfen, a neoproduct which, as noted, very few marks and dupes can reliably distinguish from the former. Such being the nature of the neoproduct before us, we ought to attend to the analogy that a Don Rossito thinks it has discovered quite without reference to any of its long-ago analogy-fodder. Nothing could be easier: this ‘conservative’ ‘intellectual’ would dearly like to live in a parallel universe where Jewish Statism is "based in the Middle East but oriented westward, with distant patrons and potential foes just next door."

Though perhaps not too far off in the manifold, that is plainly not quite the universe Don Rossito is actually stuck in. As I started to say, though, such Jewish Statists as have taken the trouble to emigrate to the neo-Levant personally and find themselves playing the "Immigrants and Natives" game for high stakes will see as well as the Muses and you and I do that el mondo douthatiense is not quite the Terra which Hyperzionists know and congenitally rise far above.

At any rate, they won’t be liking their little North American fellow traveler’s talk about "distant patrons" one bit. M. le président de Nétanyahou and Gospodin Ministr von Liebermann and the rest may consider that they still need Uncle Sam at least a little, but there can be no question of neo-indigenous Immigrants to Hyperzion accounting their "Jewish republic" any patron’s client.[1]

And I wish you, sir,
Happy days through affordable healthcare.

___
[1] If one may decently draw Miss Clio into a dispute with Fordian bunkists and opportunist señoritos and militant extremist HZ’s at all, then serious value ought to be attached to the mass of evidence that she has assembled to suggest that the words "Jewish Statism" pretty well mean not being anybody’s stinking client ever again.

I conjecture that Don Rossito de Douthát is a tad unreliable on this point due to its personal circumstances. One might say that Cui servire regnare est is the maxim the NYTC neoladdie tacitly goes by: "To be a client of Sam is to enjoy Perfect Freedom™."

That’s all very well in Hackensack, maybe, and when it is thought in English. Thought in neo-S*m*te at, say, Haifa, however, . . . .

To venture on a little ad juvenem, Dr. Bones: I would not be altogether flabbergasted to learn that Don Rossito thinks it really nifty that he (dba as ‘we’) should get to be somebody else’s "distant patron." Quite a number of more adult neowingnuts, some of them actual members of The Greatest Demographic, think like that.

When Mr. Walt and Prof. Mearsheimer start making those distressing noises of theirs about "dual loyalty", I fear they run off the track as regards most of the Little Foreign Friends of the Tel ’Avîv Statelet, missing the not exactly obscure point that pushin’ other folks around is a good in itself, a good thing that does not have to be explained in terms of some comparatively abstract Kiddie Kause like Hyperzionism or Anti-Islamophalangatarianism. To be sure, one almost always finds the practitioners of neoconnery pretendin’ that some Kause makes ’em do the pushin’. And, oddly enough, ’tis always a Kause that the pushy happen to devoutly neobelieve in.

What this flummery signifies, of course, is only that even at Rio Limbaugh and in the neo-Levant, the Spiritual Evolution of the Human Race has not yet progressed far enough for "I just happen to LIKE pushin’ other folks around" to stand alone in splendid isolation and full ethical-intellectual respectability. It looks like we will be sinking to that any day now, but today is definitely not the day. Check back next October, Dr. Bones, why don’t you?

(( A tad more ad juvenem: with RD and the señoritoly element in general it is unquestionably a matter of "JUST happenin’ to like to push." At a loftier level, though, another factor enters in, the factor of Big Management: this señorito’s Daddy Warbucks and its Tio Ruperto and Uncle Scrooge can claim without total absurdity that, over and above and quite distinct from the sheer innocent merriment that libido dominandi affords all its practitioners, some of the practitioners, like for example themselves, have a special flair for around-pushin’. Or make that a special mastery of it credentialised with an M.B.A. from the H*rv*rd Victory School, if you take around-pushin’ to be a science rather than an art.

(( Now obviously Big Management, like Global Tourrorism, is not of itself a Kiddie Kause, but rather a tool or weapon available in principle to any Kiddie Kause that may come down the pike. Yet this obviousness is one easily lost sight of, especially when your HVS MBA’s start goin’ on about ‘efficiency’ or ‘productivity’ or ‘technocrats’ &c. &c. That unwarranted self-esteemin’ could be tolerated if the Big Managers were playin’ at contract bridge or dominos, but the case is rather different when ’tis all us noncorporate organic persons who are to get pushed around, not tiles and cards.

(( BTW, what on G*re’s green earth is more bigmanagerial than WHOSE service is perfect freedumb? And what more laughable than for Don Rossito de Douthát and the Singin’ Señoritos to echo the paternal motion as Nobis servire regnare est?

(( But Mammon knows best. ))

A Traitor to his Faction?

2010-06-03T11:33:00.002+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

Is not Neocomrade R. L. Simon, Freelord & Kiddiemaster Padjaama in the peerage of Foxcuckooland, here sacrificin’ the very essence of his belovèd Party and its AEIdeology for trashy yalodramatic effect and comfy self-chauvinism?

As follows: if The Wicked State be always wrong, and the Secret Sector almost as good as infallible (which is the crux and pith and gist of wingnuttinesss, no?), does it not follow in a flash that all boycotts and blockades, not to mention lesser political tamperin’s with Absolute Freedumb of Trade, are an unclean abomination in the eyes of Lord Mammon?

You may recall that thirty or forty years ago the hard-rightist scribbler of anticommunist potboilers A. S. Drury wrote a book about the former Suid-Afrika in which he seemed generally distressed about this point. One of the reasons why he could not enthuse about the Baní Malan as much as he wished he could was that, although they were forever representing themselves at Washington as a crucial concern of the former Free World, examination of how they actually ran their racket at home made them seem like a ragtag band of quaint backwoods Socialists.

Naturally even neo-Dutch rednecks have their excuses: the S-A Secret Sector of 1967 was all Brits of dubious loyalty to the Pretoria neorégime, not to mention that they (or Brits, anyway) had fed ground glass to the alone Daughters of Virtue & Sons of Wisdom in their concentration camps circa 1900.

Nothing would be easier than to write a yalodrama about all that. And, who knows?, the DVSW of S-A might even have managed to pull the wool over the eyes of Neocomrade A. S. Drury altogether, had he not been (roughly speaking) in the yalodrama business himself.

And I wish you, sir,
Happy days through affordable healthcare

Snoopy at Bay meets The Shadow

2010-06-02T11:34:00.001+01:00

Dear Sir or Madam Bluepearl,

High-falutin’ though your matwood be, I believe I will see it and raise you one evermeule and half a snoop. [0]

The Sea Might Folk of Hyperzion must (or at any rate, ought to) feel that what impends overhead like the sword of Bar Damocles is a good deal more substantial than any mere ‘shadow’. To be sure, an iceberg would do even better than an icicle, substancewise, but what with global warming and all nowadays . . . .

Furthermore, that discrepancy--the fact that the immediate danger is merely ridiculous--was an original part of the Rev. Schultz’s little funny. The esteemed H*rv*rd did not have any use for that angle in elucidating Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry, but happily the courage-challengedness does fall in with the neoëxistential Angst of the self-exceptional, and self-indispensable, and in every conceivable and inconceivable way selfwunnerful and wunnerselfish, Tel ’Avîv statelet.

Happy days.

___
[0] This must be my all-time favorite cartoon -- a judgment that presumably establishes me as a total Palestinian in the killing fields of graphic art. ( Music is much more like it, if you ask me.)

Nevertheless, "Snoopy At Bay" would be striking just as anecdote and ‘narrative’, would it not? Which leaves me amazed that G@@GLE has swiped it only in conjunction with the entire specimen eruditionis I remember it from myself.

"Changes everything"

2010-06-01T12:17:00.004+01:00

"Changes everything"?

An odd estimate, even as coming from the little green gentlebeings of Planet Justworld, zillions of light years removed from Terra, not to mention from the neo-Levant. Possibly an original High Justworldic expression has been mistranslated, one that originlly meant something more like "One just don't see how the earthlings’ world can keep on like this!"

Less remote and aetherial observers may take refuge with the New York Times Company, which almost certainly thinks and writes in North American English and sees fit to write as follows :

Israel’s deadly commando raid on Monday on a flotilla trying to break a blockade of Gaza complicated President Obama’s efforts to move ahead on Middle East peace negotiations and introduced a new strain into an already tense relationship between the United States and Israel.

Rather a fascinating forty-four words, though scarcely because they contain anything utterly unprecedented. Au contraire, the main fascination is to find so much that is stale and trite crammed into so tiny a package. Especially to be relished in this revelation of the NYTC Weltanschauung is how POTUS and Peaceprocess stand in the center of the ring, Natives and Immigrants alike relegated to their proper and peripheral rôles.

Here, in fact, is a tale that can wag two different dogs simultaneously.

But alas, from every perspective but the literary, the performance only narcissism as usual. Narky D. [1] will no doubt be among the last to have his whole day wrecked when "Changes everything" actually takes place some day.[2]

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the good, gray NYTC is trying her [3] best to make quite sure nothing changes. This is a bit of a challenge in light of that organ’s traditional bias in favour of Immigrants as opposed to Natives. Notice how boldly she grasps the obvious and obnoxious nettle: ‘deadly’ comes right up front, word #2 of 44. [4]

Once that's out of the way, the rest can be pre-owned fudge, and that it more or less is, apart from possibly 'break a blockade of Gaza." Without countenancing any Chicken Little exuberances of Planet Justworld, I must admit not having heard much about Gaza being under a blockade before early Monday morning. But of course the NYTC cooked that piece of fudge on the basis of this blockade being the status quo, in place ever since the year 1387/1967/5726. To take a "changes everything" stance would sadly spoil the NYTC confection, which requires that the burden of aggression, or at least of status-quo infringement, fall upon Natives rather than upon Immigrants.

An objector might object that this ploy rather tends to make the neo-Levantine status quo a sort of endless surprise packet: "Who knows what hitherto unknown unknowns," Ms Objector expostulates, "We shall be told next have been the established rule for decades?"

I reply: though naturally each particular surprise must be unanticipated, yet the general surprise-packet shtyk has indeed been going on for decades. I do not pay a great deal of attention to the Palestine Puzzle compared with true fans and passionate groupies of Immigrants or Natives, but even I have learned to expect about a Copernican Revolution in international law that finally and definitively proves that one or the other crew are right -- have been utterly right all along!! -- about every month or six weeks.

‘Fudge’ , I calls that parlour game myself, though you may call it ‘spinach’ if you prefer. "Changes everything" I should never dream of calling it.

More as a curiosity of literature than as substantive agitprop or serious analysis, I notice that the NYTC rather paints herself into a corner: if the blockade is to star in this production by the Surprise Packet Players, then the hapless Natives (or friends of Natives) must have been "a flotilla trying to break" the blocakde. Sort of like at the Dardanelles in 1333/1915/5674, don't you see. (The parallel is especially happy because the Terrible Turks come in on both ends.)

Zeal and chauvinism will stand anything, I know, but it takes a great deal of them to swallow what the NYTC here strives to get swallowed, that a foolish and deplorable publicity stunt is to be classed well up there with the Spanish Armada.

***

The little green viewers from afar write "[Israël] can [not] hope to have this version of events generally accepted-- or at least, accepted by enough of the people in power around the world that they don't need to worry about the real facts getting out. It seems they don't understand the 21st century," -- referring to a ‘version’ in which that the publicity stuntsters "fired first."

I suppose the proposition is likely enough to prove verbally true, but not in such a way as to warrant any tripe and baloney about "changes everything." There is no need at all for the hack pols and violence pros of the Tel ’Avîv government to insist on "people in power around the world" genuinely believing the T. A. version of events. Simply not being laughed at to their faces when they rehearse it will do nicely.

Few human events are less like "changes everything" than a parcel of rogue diplomats solemnly assuring the world of facts that pretty well everybody anywhere near being "people in power" understands to be fictional.

If the Planet Justworld theory be that Terra will abandon old-fashioned insincere diplomacy in Century XV/XXI/LVII and take to something else instead, one cannot rebut without relying on those very tricky "predictions about the future" that the wise have warned us to be wary of. For all I know, "Changes everything" may be lurking just around the very next bend in Ms. Clio’s dark tunnel.

Nevertheless, I detect nothing in this teapot tempest to support so extraterrestrial a conjecture.

Happy days.

___
[1] Strangers refer to my hero as "Master Narcissus Dexter." But come along, gentile reader, who is really a stranger to Narky?

[2] Narky is ubiquitous and unavoidable, yet more so some places than other: “When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Kentucky, because everything there happens twenty years after it happens anywhere else.” – Mark Twain."

(( The NYTC folks oddly classify that as a joke about "the current state of the U.S. economy," when obviously it mocks Paul Minor, the dilbertarian dingaling nominated for the Fedguv Senate by the KY GOP. For practical purposes, Planet Dilbert can be taken to be quite as distant and alien as Planet Justworld herself, only in a polarly opposite direction. ))

[3] The present keyboard’s holy Homeland™ having resolved by a five-to-four vote that corporations are persons once more, it shall loyally do my best to pronominate them accordingly. Fifty-six percent of the time, anyway.

[4] Making it the very first word would be a stiff challenge to an Anglphone stylist, though perhaps not insuperable.

"national paranoia and xenophobia"

2010-05-20T14:54:00.002+01:00

Public opinion in Pakistan is fashioned by the newly independent Pakistani media, which is often cross-owned. The media, made independent during General Musharraf’s era, has a pro-Islamist bias, which is reflected both in its vehement anti-Americanism and in its attacks on the social democratic Pakistan Peoples Party. Some analysts have recently referred to the Pakistani media as feeding national paranoia and xenophobia.

Dear Dr. Bones,

Can Roger, Freelord & Kiddiemaster Padjaama, foremost of yalodramatists[1] quick or dead, seriously suppose that he can sneak this neospecimen in over the border?

But wait! Perhaps we should wonder instead which brand of Kiddie Selfservatism is usin’ which here, for his freelordship could conceivably be the gettin’ the kiddie end of his own shtyk here.

Consider, sir, that Brahmin’stán has ALWAYS been at war with Pákístán , and that in deed and not in Orwell alone. Whereas his freelordship perverted to his neoteric pajamatarian kiddie selfservatism only the other decade. M. Apama de Pande has potentially whole kalpas of wombscholarship and wingnuttiness behind him. M. de Pande may or may not be an individual capable of mustering all the vast Brahmingstání forces, natural and praeter- and supernatural, for agitprop purposes -- that’s his look-out.

As to our own look-out, I fear M. de Pande does kind of appear as if he may not be very good at the agitation-propaganda racket. I cannot make out what he is up to in this scribble -- a situation also explainable, of course, on the hypothesis that he is far too smart to let his games be detected by the likes of me.

Still, I ask you, Dr. Bones, are the base an’ vile of the Party of Grant likely to care about the present state of journalism on Planet Mleccha? And even if Wally Wombschool and Cindy from Wasilla cared passionately enough to get their eyes off their bellybuttons and look towards Karachi ("where?") , what could they do? Write a letter to their neoheartthrob, Kiddiemaster Paul of KY, and then Kentucky Taxpayers United sends an ultimatum to ’Islámábád, which insolence bein’ insolently rejected, a state of war obtains between the High Noncontractin’ Parties, whereupon ... ¡B@@M! ...?

M. de Pande is alleged to be a student of political science, though when PJM does the allegin’, ’tis caveat emptor time at the O.K. Corral. Still, it should not take a degree of any sort from Hillsdale or Wombschool Normal or Pepperdine or St. Dilbert Antistate or George Mason to notice that no pack of aliens, legal or illegal, official or secret-sectorian, criminal or tamely conformist, have ever yet brought our holy Homeland™ riding to their rescue by first stirring up rank-and-file Homelanders™ to put pressure on their elected and representative statespersons at Washington City. An attempt along those lines as recently as the year of religionism 1207/1793/5557 was signally unsuccessful. Nothing much has changed in the interval since, which interval is, for those equipped with the Brahmin’stání sense of time, less than the nanosecond of us unspiritual in Greater Europe .

True, the Party of Grant and Hoover an’ Goldwater ’n’ Atwater has been known to flirt with the occasional "China Lobby" from time to time. It has always been clear in such cases that the Natives addressed themselves to the G.O.P. geniuses, all attempts at mobilizin’ the Wingnut City mob (such unimpressive attempts as there were) bein’ undertaken by the latter.

Hence, Pol. Sci. or not, M. de Pande certainly ought to know that he must apply at Beltway City DC to obtain the kind of public assistance and affirmative action for which he feels himself and his congenitals qualified.

And even then . . . .

Suppose the ideal pscenario from M. de Pande’s point of view, Dr. Bones:

Today is Monday, 2 April 2013 in the revised Christian-Christojudæan calendar. M. de Pande has been invited to make his case in a personal audience with the U.S. Secretary of State (John Freelord Bolton) after a ceremonial handshake or snakehandle with the POTESSA herself (Neocomradess S. L. Heath-Paling, the former Freedame Wasilla) plus more substantial strategy sessions with the Vicepotus (not the aforementioned Neocomrade R. H. Paul, who would likely have a tin ear for Natives, but ... how about Holy Joe, the now Senator from Neoconn.?).

So, then, what relief does M. de Pande petition for, exactly?

’Tis obvious enough that he would like to see the abominable Pákís bashed definitively, bashed so well that they will never make trouble again for Brahmingstán -- so well that that they never CAN make trouble. A thorough course of Hiroshima Therapy (®) would be ideal, I guess, but that is a bit around the neobend even for pscenario purposes.

At the other end of the Shock-an’-Awe scale--and improbably supposing M. de Pande to have no more grievances against the eternal abominables than he here rehearses, perhaps every editor in Pákístán might be required to send all her copy and videotape and audiotape--electronically, of course, nobody is talking donkeys--to be vetted first at Varanasi (for substance and ideology and ‘attitude’) and then at Bangalore (to make sure there are no secret code messages). Only after that process might approved media fodder be promulgated amongst the PK abominables.

A small thing to ask (especially compared to the sort of favour one suspects M. de Pande would like to ask), is it not? Yet how is even a Heath-Paling régime (pardon my Limbaugh) to accomodate this little request, the least of mutual courtesies as between fervent ideobuddies? Would the Party of Grant and Hoover not have to conquer the whole PK joint and then administer it seriously in order to grant M. de Pande what he prays for?

‘Seriously’ means at least "not like PGH rule of the former al-‘Iráq." Recallers may recall how the hogen-mogens of Party an’ AEIdeology dealt with the indigenous media of Postiraq, bribin’ WOG journalists (very paltrily) to praise the Occupation and the Occupyin’ Power, but never crackin’ down in earnest of the sort of incorrigible nogoodniks upon whom M. de Pande wants cracked down. [2]

I daresay M. de Pande could get the Heath-Palin’ites to award him a platinum star for being the very model of a modern Little Foreign Friend of the Republican Party, but when it comes to more substantial assistance, one must hope he does not hold his breath until it eventuates.

Oh, well! Che sarà, sarà and vice versa.

Furthermore, Father Zeus knows best.

And I wish you, sir,
Happy days through affordable healthcare.

___
[1] Let’s try ‘yaleodrama’ minus that obnoxious ‘E’, shall we?, in unsure hope that the inquiring student of neocomradology will take the first syllable to run to the tune of "halo" -- as it certainly ought to run, given that the ‘L’ is not doubled.

"Ought to" is a very treacherous guide to Mandarin English orthography, but what else is there?

[2] ¡¡For G*re’s sake, Dr. Bones, the Busheviki would not even insist that that arrest warrant (¡a warrant for bloody murder!) on the Rev. Señorito al-Sadr be executed!!

Phashism at Los Angeles and elsewhere

2010-05-03T09:54:00.001+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

Should you happen to require more fruit of the wombschool, sir, come and get it while the poop is hot!

I betcha, Bones, that Neocomrade (Sixth Class) J. X. Dunphy of the Party of Grant (& Hoover & Atwater &c. &c.) has never before been called a PoG NC-6 in all its little life to date. Whereas no doubt it gets called a phashist at least six times every workin’ day -- every policin’ day, that is -- by all the beautiful people of ...

(( ... a small technical difficulty arises: at five thousand klicks’ distance, I have no idea where the beautiful people foregather way out there in the Mecca of darkest Schwarzeneggerland. And that despite being quite sure I heard the name of it from Neocomrade (Third Class) Dr. M. X. Weinstein-Savage [1] just a few days ago. Dr. Alzheimer seems to be *IN* of late.

(( Well, we can always make something up, Dr. Bones. That is what they do in Foxcuckooland, and we have it on high authority (and even in the High Tongue!) that fas est et ab hoste doceri. Hmmm. Let’s see, to annoy both plain vanilla kiddie selfservatives and tutti-frutti neokiddies simultaneously, how about we pretend "Laguna [de] Mecca" is the Los Angeles equivalent of Weston (oops!) or Dover or Kennebunkport or Chappaquiddick MA. The philological and ethnohistorical objections are formidable, but no matter, we can feign further that Dr. Dryasdust holds ‘Mecca’ to be a vulgar Yank corruption of some earlier and more Hispanically correct form. That should be close enough for Fedguv work. So, then, where was I? ... ))

No doubt poor, put-upon NC-6 J. X. Dunphy gets called "a [exp. del.] phashist" at least six times every workin’ day -- every policin’ day, that is -- by all the beautiful people of Laguna Mecca, who never policed (or even worked) a day in all their élitist lives, and absolutely never miss a chance to make mock of uniforms that guard them while they sleep , as the bard of Wingnut City hath so memorably barded. [2]

At the aforesaid distance of five thousand kilometres, one feels reasonably safe in spoofing NC6 JXD a little from Zip Code 0213X, in the sure and certain hope that Sgt. Crowley of the local constabulary will afford one protection, should protection be required. ’Not Joe Friday of the LAPD, perhaps, but not bad either.

Less unseriously, and before I digress off the map altogether, it seems to me that NC6 JXD does its cowingnutettes an’ cowingnuts a detectable discourtesy. It solemnly assures Cindy from Wasilla and Wally Wombschool that "When They Call You a Nazi, You’ve Won the Immigration Argument," an assurance which we may here, for purposes of pseudargument, admit to be excellent advice. But if I had the misfortune to be Master Wally or Miss Cindy, I’d be a little miffed that NC6 JXD does not explain where the lottery office is located that I take my lucky ticket to and cash it in for my winnin’s.

The purely moral rewards of bein’ defamed as phashist are all very well in their way, I suppose, but it would be ridiculous to pretend that that almost untravelled byway [3] is the mainstream Path of Party an’ AEIdeology. "If it doesn't pay, it doesn't count" is perhaps a slight exaggeration of the consensus omnium of the neocomradely community, but for practical purposes, it is highly reliable.

And I wish you, Dr. Bones,
Healthy and affordable days.

___
[1] Or perhaps Neocomrade (Third Class) Dr. M. X. Savage-Weinstein? San Francisco may not lie beyond the human event horizon altogether like Los Angeles, but it is a long, long way off all the same, so I fear I did not make a memorandumb of what NC-3 MXS-W (or NC3 MXW-S, as the case may be) identified for some call-in neopatient from Flyoverstan as the tip-top toniest zone of L.A. Except I do remember never having heard of the ’burb before.

[2] Needless to say -- but fun to add -- is that none of los alumbrados de Laguna Mecca either (1) knows more Spanish lingo then is indispenable to direct the servants -- always remember, sir, which language it was that the late fiend Kennedy Tertius had to hire a hand to take for him at H*rv*rd! -- or (2), would ever dream of religionating the Muslim way. Religionation of any sort is, like Cathtilian and Andaloosean, more or less left to the servants at Laguna Mecca. Up the slippery slope at Castle Podhóretz, the neogentry take that line too -- possibly it results from lookin’ down (figurative and political) slippery slopes all the time?

Please tell Dr. Dryasdust not to trouble me about los alumbrados being a laughably bad equivalent for "the beautiful people." Remember your Charles Williams Guideline , sir, and apply it a little: when in Hell (or at Sevilla), one must try to talk like a native speaker of Inaccurate (or of Andaloosean).

[3] "A mighty spoof, but not without a plan," that’s OUR lucky ticket, sir! Did the Muses and you and I not long ago identify the obscure by-way in question, and link it up with Sabbath School and Commencement Day in particular? Of course we did!

So then, 95% of neocomradely misbehaviour can be predicted on the basis of ""If it doesn't pay, it doesn't count." When that fails, perhaps as much as 95% of the oddball five percent is classifiable under the rubric of Sabbath Day and Commencement School, that is to say, lip-service paid by the neogentry to geistlich values that real gentry used to really value. Not altogether by coincidence, this rubric overlaps admirably with the one invoked above as "Servants, Matterss best left to the."

So "at the end of the day," there is only .0475% (one part in about 2,105) of neocomradely misbehaviour that calls for really SPECIAL explanation.

From this I draw two tentative conclusions for ourselves, sir, as follows:

(A) to prepare a tract called Neocomradology for Dummies -- or perhaps "for Dhimmies," or maybe even for both classes of customer? -- would be feasible enough, though it is not a project I care to undertake myself.

(B) Few sentimental/‘ideological’ things on G*re’s green earth are less like brand-name Fascismo than "If it doesn't pay, it doesn't count." And the same applies to the Hitlerism with which the kiddiemasters intend that their kiddies should confuuse the Italian product whenever the dread F-word is mentioned.

Even in High Prussian, Dr. Bones, geistlich is nowhere near synonymous with gut. The Master has taught us, Pol. 1267a, that no man becomes a tyrant in order to keep warm, and the same applies, I think, to devotees of ""If it doesn't pay, it doesn't count." Pushin’ folks around after the neomanner of weekly standardisers and commonterrorists &c. is unedifying in the extreme, yet if one insists on deciding whether it is to be called spiritual or materialistic, there is no doubt that it belongs in the ‘spiritual’ pigeon-hole. As, obviously, do all the contents of the "Sabbath School" and "Commencement Day" pigeon-holes. Q.E.D.

But Father Zeus knows best.

"A Fatwa on your head?"

2010-05-01T16:58:00.002+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

I know your Ph.D. is in Progressive Assyriology, sir, but perhaps you know a trick cyclist or two with a veterinary sideline?

Common sense and general knowledge fail me, I fear, when presented with sweet puppies capable of supposin’ with a straight muzzle that their own 'liberty' -- "(yes, those are sneer quotes)" [0] -- to consist in publicly placardin’ the religionism of others as if it were a communicable disease.[1]

The potential fun side of the latest puppy game is obvious, though, or at least it was great fun for me up to the point at which Paddy knocked me down after noticing the sketches I was preparing for my proposed "You, Too, Can ESCAPE FROM PAPISM!" ad campaign.[2]

Oh, well! I doubt the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority would have taken my doits and sheqels and published my copy in all their buses and trolleys: the VC people are a forty-four percent (44%) plurality up here, according to Big LEW . And by the way, "Isn't that a bit of Destructive ©®eationism™ to set Governor Winthrop revolving in his grave?," I ask you.

Further afield by the way, I walked across Boston Common on a sunny spring afternoon (yesterday’s) and, begorrah, did not hear even a single word of Irish (Gaeilge) ! What does the late Henry Adams make of that, I wonder, down there below where the warming, though global enough, is decidedly ananthropogenic?

Gov. Winthrop, for his part, with a much longer posthumous career already behind him, may (as I conjecture, perhaps a tad wildly) even be somewhat pleased that at least a little something has been snatched from the burning: in A.R. 1431/2010/5770, the bread worshippers of MA mostly worship their bread in "a language understanded of the people."

That was not exactly the main plank of the original reform platform, yet if the Muses and you and I, Dr. Bones, were to concoct something like St. Woodrow’s XIV Point Plan for the salvation of humanity by A. R. 1803/2371/6040 -- as far in the future, that is, as His Worship’s obituary date lies in the past -- would we not, all things considered, be happy if only whichever Point we now original-intent fourtheenth and hindmost were actually instantiated in full?

’Twere a blatantly impar congressus to contrast and compare a Party Neocomradess (Seventh Class) P. X. Geller with a veritable parens patriæ -- so let’s do it! [3]

At any rate, let me point out one seeming resemblance that looks primâ facie plausible to this coarse and illiterate keyboard, namely that, like His Worship, today’s specimen of Chlorella vulgaris in human or pajama form seems to be afraid of the religionism that she craves to badmouth and swiftboat. Furthermore, Gov. Winthrop and the Massachusetts Bay seem, in retrospect at least, to have been in quite as little immediate danger of being overrun by proto-Ratzingerites and Foxites and Laudians (and even Ms. Anne Hutchinson, by G*m!) as is the now Dade County FL by the Baní Ibn Taymiyya.

With NC7 PXG, the Chicken Little shtyk can instantly be put down to bad judgment and courage-challengedness, imprudentia ignaviaque, two qualities very prominent indeed at Rio Limbaugh and Wingnut City and, indeed, up the slippery slope at Castle Podhóretz also.[4]

To present Governor Winthrop as an out-and-out proleptic disciple of Party Neocomradess Ch. X. Little and Party Neocomradess P. X. Geller would be scandalum magnatum to the max. Fortunately there is no need to think it, for His Worship judged by rather different canons of judgment back in Century X/XVI/LIII than those of Dade County FL wingnutettes and wingnuts circâ 2010. Governor Winthrop was not scared of proto-Ratzingerites and Quakers and ‘prelatists’ directly, the way ChXL and PXG cower under their beds in personal terror for the safety of their physical and material hides. Winthrop’s undeniable Enthusiasm having not yet undergone the decerebration process that eventually produced the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, he can have been directly afraid of Father Zeus alone.

As follows: Puritan divines took certain passages of the Uncommon Testament seriously and literaliter after a fashion that I betcha pretty well nobody at all in Dade County does nowadays. Various afflictions that fell of yore upon Palæojerusalem in deed and not in allegory alone were attributed to the anger of Himself at toleration of idolatries and abominations perpetrated upon the High Places. ’Twould be silly to fancy that ’Elîyáhû was afraid of Queen Jezebel as Neocomradess P. X. Geller and her Party base an’ vile are self-terrorised of M. bin Ládin and Dr. Zawáhirí: the problem was simply that if the Elect did not ditch the bitch and stop playing ball with Baal and otherwise change the régime a little, Father Zeus would make sure that it never rained again, so good-bye milk and honey! [Lib. III Reg. cap. 18]

The allegorice of that for the Massachusetts Bay of 1640 was not far to seek, the search being of course conducted upon the inexpugnably sound basis of Enthusiasm in Massachusetts as it was in 1640. It would be extremely unreasonable, Dr. Bones, to subtract even a single point from John Winthrop’s score because, eighteen score years afterwards, an uncharitable painter could, if he chose to, paint His Worship’s short way with dissenters to look like the notions of those evil Qommie ayatollahs who was in the news this week for discovering that female unchastity and impudicity, and missed prayers, and being stingy about charitable giving somehow provoke Father Zeus to harrow the land with earthquakes.[5]

I wish you, Dr. Bones,
Healthy and affordable days.

___
[0] Cf. peanut-gallery Peanut #3.

Final score: singles enclose sneers, doubles mark mere quotation. (( Yet can any 'quotation" ever be really "mere' ? A promising topic for some other day. ))

[1] I had written "COMMUNICABLE disease" but have decided the adjective is unwarrantable.

Neocomradess (Seventh Class) P. X. Geller provides only the one sample of her factionette’s agitation and propaganda -- " ‘Fatwa on your head?’ " &c. &c.--and that one happens to offer relief to victims of the alleged disorder, rather than callin’ upon healthy sheep to quarantine afflicted goats in ‘existential’ self-defense. Though everything we know in general about this less common neobreed of sweet puppy suggests that NC7 PXG would not hesitate a nanosecond to do the latter, still in fact it is not done here.

Accordingly, I withdraw "placard ... as communicable" so as not to fall afoul of the Charles Williams guideline, " Hell is inaccurate. "

And Father Zeus knows best!

(( You may remember Comrade C. R. Dawkins, Oxon., who proposed that all Enthusiasm and Superstition without exception consists of memes , these being feigned entities which, as far as I was ever able to make out, are much the same thing as "communicable diseases." To be sure, when one borrows a term from the High Tongues, or coins one that pretends to be such a borrowing, Wally Wombschool, and Cindy from Wasilla, and (probably) NC7 PXG are not half so likely to notice that one is laughing from them. ))

[2] Cal Luther -- you may remember I introduced you to her once when we were touring Nantes ? -- offered some criticisms that were less trenchant but more weighty, as that simply substituting "Ratzinger" for "Alzheimer" in all sorts of existing scripts would not just "vix dignum ingenii vestri", as Cal neatly put it, but positively tacky.

[3] Like the man said, "Never give a wingnut an even break!" Furthermore, only a genuine blue-state meanie could wish to deprive sweetpuppiedom of their occasions of sweetest self-sorrowin’: "Nobody knows the trouble [they've] seen, nobody knows but G. Suss" -- whoever G. Suss may be.

[4] Hooverville is much more intellectually respectable, perhaps because one can always gauge from casualty insurance rates how afraid of the Islamophalangitarian Menace (Pat. Pend.) Daddy Warbucks and Uncle Scrooge really and objectively are. BFZKB.

[5] Chicken Little and NC7 P. X. Geller et al. might -- but doubtless will not -- reflect that they maybe look just a little silly bein’ existentially autoterrorised by a religionism not yet purged of flagrant Dark Ages stuff like that.

’Tis now to be "war of awesome dimensions," by G*m!

2010-04-26T16:22:00.002+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

Let us invoke the Spirit of Music, shall we, seeing that Bedrich Smetana will be making a guest appearance this morning?

* OVERTURE *

"War of awesome dimensions, a war with a long and bloody history [that] is not the consequence of this or that unpopular policy but above all of beliefs we are not even supposed to pronounce nowadays, the crazed visions of Muslim extremists who are waging jihad against us. And [a war that is the consequence of] the beliefs of radical secular extremists who share the goals of jihad. That war is being waged by people who hate America and Israel, as they hate Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists, and those many Muslims who want to live in peace."

*** INTERMEZZO sive ZWISCHENSPIEL ***

Suppose, sir, that you woke up in your hammock one fine morning to discover that that, presumably either for your sins or for His own entertainment, Father Zeus had transformed you, not into a fat disgusting cockroach like poor Herr Samsa chez Kafka, but into a lean-an’-mean and militant and extreme Hyperzionist. Rather like Grand Ayatollah Mikey Bin Ledeen is, if you know what I mean.

If you prefer, we can leave you out of the game and directly imagine His Eminence wakin’ up and findin’ His own Self-Eminence in the Cartesian plight of literally havin’ "to live [say, the Tuesday of next week, 4 May 2010] as if it were the first day of [His Eminence’s] life." [0]

Well as usual , I don't strictly mean ‘literally’, even as I do not propose to dabble in any philosophy more exalted than the joke Neoëxistentialism of Team Jabotinsky. To refine the hypothesis, then, suppose His scenario-bound Eminence to wake up, recallin’ what Hyperzion is, and more or less able to find it on a map, and--above all--remainin’ militant and extremist that Hyperzion must remain Hyperzion [1], exfoliatin’ all its exotic neobeauties without stint or limit in sæcula sæculorm amen.

What our feigned H.E. does not remember is the correlation of farces in the world: who is a friend to Hyperzion, or at least a useful idiot, who is neutral, and who is not only antimegistodemographical [1a] in sime inherited or religionistic way, but actively and avowedly antihyperzionist, at Turtle Bay or in any other forum that dares to show its head in public.

In short, imagine that my travesty of Mikey Cardinal Ledeen has somehow forgotten who the enemies and friends of the GD™ Folk [1a] are, and must start from scratch to russle ’em up some new ones. [2] How well adapted to that end, in your opinion, Dr. Bones, would be the agitational-propagandistic modus operandi that His Eminence here deploys in "preachin’ to the choir"?

Whether you care to play my parlour game or not, Dr. Bones, please make a memorandumb [3] of this Binledeenian exuberance so we can find it later and use it against the kiddies.

Considered narrowly as choir-preachin’, "We are all Israëlis now" is a damp squib: the sweet birds of neosong would have been given the Frum’s rush [http://j.mp/9a9K9M] out of the Neotemple the instant they were detected to be anythin’ but.

Tthe Cardinal Auxiliary of Jehádkarírestán in partibus infidelium must, one presumes [3], intend His Eminence’s choristers to march forth and proclaim the Neogospel Accordin’ to Mikey unto benighted heathens and perverted heretics proper.

What makes this item memorandumb fodder, Dr. Bones, is how extremely perspicuous His Eminence makes the underlyin’ Common Terror magazine shtyk, which consists in Castle Podhóretz (or other competent neoäuthority) issuin’ a Woodrovian declaration of "War against war." Needless to say, it was THEM that started it, commenced a

"war of awesome dimensions, a war with a long and bloody history [that] is not the consequence of this or that unpopular policy but above all of beliefs we are not even supposed to pronounce nowadays, the crazed visions of Muslim extremists who are waging jihad against us. And [a war that is the consequence of] the beliefs of radical secular extremists who share the goals of jihad. That war is being waged by people who hate America and Israel, as they hate Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists, and those many Muslims who want to live in peace."

Lots and lots of neodingalingism crammed into very few words -- ninety-one, I make it -- that is, Dr. Bones, and therefore memorandumb-worthy to the max.

To be sure, nothin’ human, except of course the GD Folk™, can achieve perfection. Mikey Cardinal Bin Ledeen has not provided us a sort of handy-dandy CliffsNotes™ edition of "Rupert’s List," that conjectural omniumgatherum of all the scattered enemies lists held at Hooverville and Rio Limbaugh and Castle Podhóretz and Port Ste Lucie and Pajama Junction, indeed, anywhere at all in Foxcuckooland from sea to whinin’ sea.

Notably absent are (1) the "Smash Capitalism!" contingent (unless His Eminence’s little word ‘radical’ is read far stronger than I think it can bear), and (2) environmental whackos,

* CODETTA *

"war of awesome dimensions, a war with a long and bloody history [that] is not the consequence of this or that unpopular policy but above all of beliefs we are not even supposed to pronounce nowadays, the crazed visions of Muslim extremists who are waging jihad against us. And [a war that is the consequence of] the beliefs of radical secular extremists who share the goals of jihad. That war is being waged by people who hate America and Israel, as they hate Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists, and those many Muslims who want to live in peace."

I wish you, sir,
Healthy and affordable days

____
[0] Not "the first day of the rest of His Eminence’s life" as the vulgarism runs, but Day One simpliciter, the entire space between the ears of His Eminence contain’ nothin’ but hard vacuum, or call it tabula rasa.

[1] Paddy suggested the slogan ¡Hyperzion go bragh! at this juncture when we were confabulating this little fable. I had to point out to him with some asperity that, like most rules, the rule "A cat may look at a king" has the occasional probative exception, this exception, or one prominent exception, being obviously catus felix Kilarniensis.

[1a] A denier may deny, for the sake of argument or with gusto, that the Greatest Demographic™ is in fact so extraordinarly self-exceptional and self-indispensable and all-’round self-wunnerful as to be out of legitimate range of ALL the slings and arrows of us miserable Lesser Breeds Without, but that certainly does not mean than any Irish need apply as archers or peltasts.

Quelle idée!, like my great-great- ... -grandma used to mutter into her porridge in the Gaeilge, before the villagers lynched her for a witch.

As you and the Muses know, Dr. Bones, my favorite breed amongst the LBW to set up with dhimmian uppitiness against the GD Folk fanatics is the Bohemians, who call themselves ‘Czechs’, but thereby deceive nobody and haven’t for several centuries. Probably Herr Smetana [http://j.mp/bs84On] is the efficient cause of this McWhim: "Would you believe it, Princess, that shixy peasant had the gall to associate our tune with his vlast!"

Whimmed or whimless, I have never set foot nearer the place than Schneeburg (?) in Upper Bavaria, or for practical purposes, say Bayreuth BRG. A notorious hotbed of antimegistodemographical activities was that town, to be sure, when the Serene House of Wagner reigned. This is immaterial, however, because with Bohemia Bayreuth has nothing political to do and never did, beyond being Habsburg subjects.

[2] Like any good pscenario, this one is, I flatter myself, not entirely unconnected with the former Real World. For, in a certain sense, every snake-oil salesman and agitprop artiste that ever lived has been in the situation I conjure up for my pseudo-Mikey. As regards the "swing vote," I mean, those who have not yet taken any definite position on the merits and drawbacks of hula hoops, or Shock-an’-Awe (®), or le surchauvinisme hebraïque, or pet rocks, or . . . -- whatever product or ideoproduct the flogger may be trying to flog.

The analogy is imperfect, I admit, because Team Jabotinsky and the Hyperzionism product have been around since, at very latest, shortly after the war of A. R. 1387/1967/5726, twoscore and two (solar) years ago. His Eminence is bound to be especially concerned with official State enmities and friendships and neutralities and idiocies and utilities, and one can scarcely imagine any foreign ministry on G*re’s green earth where the statespersons have simply never heard of Hyperzionism the way Cindy from Wasilla has (almost certainly) never heard of the blessèd and meaningless hula hoop [http://j.mp/aubixm].

[3] To give you a head start, here’s ... Mikey: http://j.mp/9mGUo4

That is the pajamatarian neopost, but who cares? The PJM title of the thing is right there inside it, even if Mikey called it somethin’ different chez soi.

And by the way, the former chez soi seems to redirect straight to Mikey’s latest pair of pajamas in any case.

"Creativity and Destruction in all about I see / Father Zeus, Who wingnuts not, / Abide with me!"

[4] One may be presuming temerariously, however, for it is not impossible that His Eminence intended no more than to warm up the water a little in that bath of self-wunnerfulness in which his immediate auditors incorrigibly wallow: "O nos felices, who alone actually realize that ‘we’ "are all Israelis now."

A wonderer may wonder, after all, whether Neocomradess Ch. Little entirely likes the idea that others should detect the imminence of skyfall with her own eagle eye and squawk against it with equal volume. Or whether the hack pols and violence pros of the Tel ’Avîv statelet would rejoice singleheartedly and without mental reservation to discover three or four additional and undeniable ‘democracies’ scattered around the neo-Levantine landscape.

Grand Ayatollah Mikey Bin Ledeen bein’ what His Eminence is, the only complete certainty hereabouts is that H. E. would dearly love to see somebody bomb the evil Qommies back into the Stone Age. To "wipe them off the map," you might say, even.

Ray Takieh and the Space Invaders

2010-04-13T07:57:00.002+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

Prescinding from the neo-Levantine politics, wasn‘t that a swell show? [0]

Neocomradess (Fourth Class) R. Solowitz of Boston MA and Masada NL makes for fine entertainment, there can be no doubt at all about it, sir!

Dr. Takieh gets completely eclipsed by the e-Delilah with her Dance of the Seven Veils [1]. That eclipse may even have been a (very) small part of what the producers and directors of the performance intended it to accomplish, although strictly speaking a critic must be only guessing when she takes the on-stage persona "R. T." to be an allusiom to poor Ray.

Ms. Critic must decide for herself, exactly as the slaves of Rupert, Lord Foxcuckoo, keep insistin’ every time we turn on WRKO AM 680 Boston. While she is making up her mind, though, allow me to remind you, Dr. Bones, that we knew poor Ray back when he was only "an Iranian-American Middle East scholar, former United States Department of State official and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations." [2]

Back about breakfast time yesterday, that was. Time sure flies when you are having fun, does it not? Golly!

As I was saying, it is clear enough for Fedguv work that the customer or patient was intended to take "R. T." for Ray Takieh, even though only patients or customers who never heard of the latter can be duped. In context, this point is quite unimportant. The producers and directors of "Rebecca Solowitz" are not really referrin’ to poor Ray in any case, but rather to a previous account of him provided by the management and staff of Planet Justworld, "... nonsensical claim ... gross errors of fact ... extremely tortured ‘reasoning’ ... a very dangerous argument ... bizarre ..." and so on and so forth. You know the drill, Dr. Bones.

Though the Muses and you and I know it well, perhaps we should explain it a little for "those of you at Rio" Limbaugh. The Justworldian account made the literary mistake [3] of telling the reader directly that the villain is a very bad man instead of showing him acting badly. I guess the offender would plead that a link to the URL of bad action was provided. And I guess that there is at least a little something to be said for that notion. But not a great deal, especially not when a little scrap of the supposed badness is in fact provided, and then the lady says, in effect, "Kindly allow me to know best!" Know, that is, that it is ‘nonsensical’ to ‘claim’ that

The notion that the incumbent Arab regimes are reluctant to collaborate with the United States on Iran because of the prevailing impasse in the peace process is a misreading of regional realities.

That unilateral and preëmptive critical aggression won’t do. Poor Ray may be dead wrong, but he is not the least bit nonsensical. Nonsensical would be if he had declared the notion in question to be, say, "a runcible spoon" or, with a different flavour of nonsense, "a round square."

(( It would trespass into talking politics to wonder whether the notion is or is not a misreading, so only inside parentheses dare I editorialize that Dr. Takieh may well be more or less right. ))

On the literary front, though, the upshot is that the customer is being hornswoggled into supposing that Gen. Mubárak and les altesses royales du Ryadh and the rest of the usual crew of heroes really DO put Palestine first. The literary objection to the attempted hornswogglement is not crudely that it ain’t so, but rather that it is not discussed, that the matter is not presented as being discussable. Everybody who is anybody must see that poor Ray might as well be telling us that twice two is five. Period.

Let us have a little argumentum ad verecundiam, Dr. Bones, just to wind things up with, like:

What shocks me is his instantaneous assumption that the question is so simple that there could be no real hesitation about it. It is breaking Aristotle’s canon--to demand in every enquiry that degree of certainty which the subject matter allows. And not on your life to pretend that you see farther than you do.

Naturally to appeal to the Master in that fashion presupposes that it is ‘enquiry’ that one is engaged in, as opposed to, say, agitation-and-propaganda or spectacle. The producers and directors of "Rebecca Solowitz" are spectaclemongers, their "T. R." a phantom fit only for the Yoo Toob, a straw dog that is scarcely even seriously feigned to resemble its supposed original, bein’ obviously trotted out only in order to be rude about somebody else.

The nonsensical and grossly erroneous and bizarrely dangerous (&c.) Dr. Ray Takieh looks a lot like another straw dog to me, and therefore like a tip-off that whatever may have been going on when it was sighted, ‘enquiry’ was not the name for it.

Mais que sçay-je?

Healthy days.

___
[0] So you see, sir, I am NOT the only geezer left who still remembers swellness.

[1] Yes, of course I realize there were only six veils: have you never heard of bloggherary license, sir? I accomodate my facts to a vulgar cliché, as any sensible rhetor would. Give me a break.

[2] Whoever "R.T." may be, if anybody at all, the learnèd elders of Wiki are undoubtedly talking about the same "Ray Takeyh, PhD (born 1966)" to whom the Muses and you and I have been previously introduced.

The article seems harmless enough. I was unaware of "a doctorate from St Antony‘s College, University of (sic) Oxford, in 1997," though, a detail which further lessens the likeness to "R.T." Miss Delilah’s producers and directors presumably missed it as well, St. Anthony’s being to the jihád careerist what Hell is to person of religionism. Here is a short list of fiends and demons.

[3] By low terrestrial standards, this is undoubtedly a literary mistake, though perhaps Planet Justworld is altogether "a foreign country where they do things differently"? Father Zeus knows best.

Be that as it may, we are not cheating when we judge such a product by our own standards rather than attempt to divine how the vendor would prefer his wares to be evaluated. If the human race at large had been silly enough to adopt the latter course, Madison Avenue would have gobbled us all up long ago.

Ardor-Motivated

2010-04-10T08:45:00.002+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

As long as the Old Sinner is up repenting and amending and rewording anyway, perhaps he would consider a little reordering as well?

First thing I thought, looking at the title before reading the article, was, "But surely the O. S. has got it backwards?"

So, then, how about this?

‘Conservative’ Hatred of Arabs Motivated by Ardour for Israël!

Hmm.

Looking at it done my way, I must pronounce that way to be not infallibly sinfree either, even after disallowing weekly standardisers and Common Terror magazine groupies to pass themselves off as the Little Friends of Eddie Burke, LLC. [1]

Things look a little more complicated still, as is often the case in and around the neo-Levant. There is another factor involved here that has to be reckoned with, though doing so produces something that would be grotesque as a headline:

Hyperzionists’ Ardour for Israël Motivates Hatred of Arabs among ‘Conservative’ Non-Jews!

Probably ‘incites’ is the better verb in a case where the motivators are different from the motivated. On the other hand, that language could make it sound almost as if somebody were committing a (hate) crime here. Far be it from!

After that much revision, who will be surprised if Mr. Rosenberg wants to have nothing to do with his own verbal baby?

Indeed, it really is not his baby any more, for what I have just done amounts to changing the subject from (part of) what it is about Commonterrorists that annoys him to (part of) what it is about them that annoys you and me. And these are mostly not the same things, or parts of things. [2]

Up to a point, they *cannot* be the same things, for you and Paddy and I can no more be "self-hating Jews" than Mr. Rosenberg could plausibly set up as Voice of the Shanty Irish. A great deal of the public misbehaviour by Commonterrorists must be almost a personal embarrassment to him. Whereas we are lucky enough to be saddled with nothing much worse than Miss Piggy Noonan over at the Wall Street Jingo.

Truly, sir, our yoke is easy and our burden light!

Healthy days.

___
[1] It is silly game indeed to guess what so-and-so would have said, were he still alive. But don’t you think it at least *posssible*, Dr. Bones, that Mr. Burke might have seen V. Ye. Zhabotínsky [http://tinyurl.com/y36wmz5] , say, or, M. le géneral du Sharon, or ... as, well, as Warren Hastings Writ Large?

I guess the Commonterrorist response to such an affront would be to ask me whether I suppose their ideopal Eddie wanted to hand central North America back to the Iroquois and the Algonquin and the Massachusetts. There is, of course, no sign that Eddie did, despite having been alive at a time when the pertinent facts were available to him.

But at that juncture things would begin to get complicated, for Mr. Burke almost certainly would have thought it pertinent to point out that the East Indians had Sanskrit, whereas the Algonquins had to make do with only Algonquin. Unwritten Algonquin, too!

At which point Commonterrorists would (I guess) have to protest that in 1431/2010/5770 they certainly do not hate the Natives of the neo-Levantine for being woad-painted savages! ... "Though, by the way, did you know that more books have been written and published in Estonian in the last six months alone than have appeared in Arabic in the last three centuries?" (Or whatever -- I misquote from memory.)

[2] One problem with any scribble of the present sort is the risk of giving pointers to the abusers of the world. Still, facts are facts, and it is really is a fact, is it not?, that the biggest problem Hasbara GHQ faces is gettin’ the *commonality* of their neoterrorisin’ exactly right.

The Old Sinner’s own self-correction illustrates what I mean from the flip side. If Castle Podhóretz were addressin’ its agitation and propaganda exclusively to dhimmís like you and me, then definitely ‘Muslims’ rather than ‘Arabs’ ought to appear at the top of their hatelist. If only to their own coreligionists, pious or nominal, then definitely ‘Arabs’ rather than ‘Muslims’ -- though with perhaps a tacit hope that the dupes and marks will forget that the evil Qommies are not Arabs.

But how shall Commonterrorism broadcast to both audiences simultaneously?

Not an easy question! though I probably wouldn’t tell them the answer even if it were.

We can watch ’em tryin’ to cope, though, Dr. Bones. It looks to me as if they waver back and forth between (1) hopin‘ -- surely a bit desperately? -- that hardly anybody dupable makes the Arab/Muslim distinction, or at least that no great importance is attached to so techical a pettifoggery out in Televisionland, and (2) resortin’ to much vaguer language altogether, ‘radical’ and ‘militant’ and ‘extremist’ and -- in first place, naturally -- ‘terrorist’.

Hasbara GHQ and Castle Podhóretz and the jihád careerist community have it easiest when they can borrow straight from the obvious Enemy. If M. Bin Ládin and Dr. Zawáhirí have already lumped together a "World Islamic Front for Jihád against Jews and Crusaders," why should Neocomrade Amb. M. B. Oren or Neocomrade Dr. D. R. Pipes, ’71, or Bob Cardinal Spencer do more than provide their more wombschooled customers with carefully selected titbits about what happened in the brand-name Crusades?

TPM Café (09 April 2010)

2010-04-09T13:03:00.001+01:00

Dear Dr. Bones,

What is the point of signing up for a Ludicrosity Competition? The pig usually wins, and, win or lose, she is *always* going to enjoy it more.

Bint Kh’zîr does put up a remarkable show of un- or anti-erudition with her ‘Quatab’ and her "zionist America circa 1950" [1] Indeed, the show is so remarkable that one is tempted to worry that it may be precisely that -- a performance deliberately staged, as if by one of Dr. Screwtape’s little military friends [2].

Nevertheless, a retaliation such as

Never across the past thousand years of European history has oppression and killing of Jews due to anti-Semitism been more rare than during the past fifty years

won’t do at all. Though the sentence is ludicrous enough to be getting on with, the subject-matter with which it trifles is too grave for trifling.

Moreover, Jewish Statism -- and militant extremist Hyperzionism to boot, as witness the late M. de Jabotinsky, http://tinyurl.com/y8wefwh -- goes back a good deal farther in Old Europe than "fifty years." Quite a lot of the Palestine Puzzle as we know it would look more or less the same even if Auschwitz and a’ that had never come to pass. [3]

If one puts one mind to it a little, Bint Kh’zîr can be taken seriously. Imagine that Hasbara GHQ is deployin’ her with a new secret weapon that works by lurin’ the unwary dhimmí into at least the appearance of an admission that Médînat Yisrá’él possesses some special ‘need’ [4] to exist that nobody sane would ever dream to demand from, or grant to, the Czech Republic, or the Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia, or any other nation-state or -statelet that obviously "just happens" to exist by gracious permission of Time and Tyche. [5]

Regardless of anythin’ B. Kh. in particular is or isn’t up to, such appears to be the T. A. government’s grand agitprop strategy, which I take to be twofold:

(1) the ’dhimmí’s are to be seduced into accepting that M. Y. has "a right to exist as a Jewish State" in some sense not one-tenth as ludicrous as the Czech Republic’s claiming "the right to exist as a Bohemian State" would be. [6]

(2) And then there will never, ever, be any satisfactory elucidation from the direction of T. A. as to exactly what this supposed right comprises. Apart, that is, from its bein’ -- obviously! -- incompatible with any and all offers of peace or ‘peace’ or hudna or whatever from the Natives, for this perpetual incompatibility is the object of the whole exercise. Q.E.D.

It really IS pretty neoclever of them, Dr. Bones, is it not? If there is a weak point, I guess it would be that such a plan can never be frankly admitted without self-destructing on the spot.

Oh, well: no silver lining without a cloud!

Healthy days.

’’’
[1] That lower-case ‘Z’ is a small masterpiece itself. If it happened on Purpose, that is.

The mysterious Monsieur de Qu. almost certainly has at least a little something to do with http://tinyurl.com/ydafh9m . But Father Zeus knows best.

[2] "No doubt you have often practiced transforming yourself into an angel of light as a parade-ground exercise. Now is the time to do it in the face of the Enemy." &c. &c. [ http://tinyurl.com/yba4uq5 ]

Maybe it is a bit paranoid or narcissistic, though, to suppose that Hasbara GHQ has to take TPM Café seriously and send out somebody competent. Mr. Rosenberg they can e-bomb over on J Street, after all, and other than that, why should they bother?

[3] This analysis cuts both ways even-handedly, I believe, inasmuch as the Natives and their apologists often give the impression that the Tel ’Avîv statelet has been gratuitously inflicted upon them by Europe and America solely as a cheap or free form of misdirected reparations for what Germany did in 1933-1945. (( Talk about ‘ludicrous’! ))

[4] Mr. Poster says "Therefore, employing davidai66's form of logic, it is 'ludicrous' to think that now in our period is when Jews of European origin really NEED to have their own special state in the Mideast."

[5] ’Cf.’ http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolivia . Also http://tinyurl.com/z2j4h, but only if you absolutely *must*.

[6] There is nothing particularly self-exceptional or self-indispensible about the Prague government apart from the linguistic accident that English happens to have both ‘Czech’ and ‘Bohemian’ -- which is a fact about us, plainly, and nothing to do with them.

Culture vultures will know at least the Bohemian seacoast of http://tinyurl.com/ycrzg3a . But that, too, is of zero *political* relevance.

"Time for a Persian Sistani," or, Neotourism Unmasked

2009-12-31T12:46:00.002Z

Neocomrade R. Cohen limps along behind the main body of the caravan, no doubt, but he seems to be gettin’ there all the same. And he’s certainly headed in the same general direction that the self-appointed neoguiders of his Demographic have decreed de haut en bas.

Now decrees emanatin’ from weekly standardisers and Wall Street jingos and the august fastnesses of Castle Podhóretz, ever neoresplendent City on a hill that it is, do indeed emit a special whiff. Neocomrade R. Cohen characterizes the Demographic’s neoguiders as "the Iran-as-Nazi-incarnation-of-evil school," which seems to me not altogether accurate, even apart from the NYTC neocomrade’s personal parti pris. Viewing the colourful caravan of the Demographic from very, very far off (and, needless to say, from a position of categorical inferiority), I cannot find the distance between Neocomrade R. Cohen and (say) M. de Nétanyahou or Neocomradess C. Glick of the Jerusalem Post anywhere near as important as these gentlebein’s find it. (Mais que scay-je?)

Still, there it is: viewed from Mars or from Dhimmi Corners, USA, the Demographic as a whole, with only the extremest of Messrs. les prétendues ennemis de soi excluded, have trouble imagin’ any evil whatever that is *not* Nazi-like. On the flip side, that which is good for the Demographic is -- obviously -- good simpliciter. Neocomrade R. Cohen may not altogether hold with the flipped notion, and of course he is probably burstin’ with wrong ideas of what will benefit the Demographic’s caravan most beneficially in the long haul.

Just like everybody else in the caravan. Their Demographical comedians make "tot Hebraïci, tot sententiae--et nonnullae aliae" jokes all the time. To be sure, when the stern Neoguiders get their way unchecked and unbalanced, that sort of humor will probably have to go extinct. Stern neoguidance aims, in effect, at makin’ the Demographic an S.R.H., "sole remainin’ hyperpower," in its own right, a status obviously inconsistent with village curs and bitches bein’ allowed to bark at the caravan as it passes. Oderint dum metuant! has its virtues, no doubt, but to encourage laughter is not among them.

Almost as obviously, stern Neoguidance and stand-alone Hyperpower will (would) not be easy to reconcile with permittin’ much dissent inside the Demographic itself. Anythin’ noncomformist beyond narrow questions of ‘existential’ tactics and neo-expediency will lead to the sort of trouble that Neocomrade R. Cohen is pityin’ himself over already. Fifty or a hundred years hence, the Neoguiders in plenitudine potestatis eorum will have to expunge idiots like him from the Demographic altogether, or else, what is a thousand times more likely in my view, Neocomrade R. Cohen III will just keep his damnfool mouth shut if he can’t get his mind right. A policy conducive to lower life insurance rates, that is, but not good for stand-up comedy.

All of which, not accidentally, sounds rather like Neocomrade R. Cohen’s tourist impressions of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

No better than tourist impressions are they, I fear, unless we suppose that the laggard neocomrade is very imperfectly acquainted with the dhimmí tongue in which he chooses to scribble. For example, if the Rev. Khamene’i and his allies were really "bent, in the name of money and power, on the bludgeoning of the Iranian people," it ought to be a cinch to find official documents headed with In nomine Pecuniae Potestatisque or the like. When native Anglophones act "in the name of So-and-So," we do not (often) hide the authorizing N-me under a bushel and hope nobody notices it. What native speakers of Cohenesque do, though, I must admit that have no idea. [1]

More to the immediate point is the alleged bludgeonin’. Neocomrade R. Cohen may not yet have climbed as far down the slippery slope as Castle Podhóretz, but he is definitely on his way. That is the sort of word that would be resorted to by a Demographic chauvinist who considers nothin’ really evil unless it be Hitleroid. It goes with the ‘existential’ neomindset to assume that enemies of the Demographic act out of sheer malice. R. Cohen is not quite there yet, since the NSDAP itself would not have been truly Hitleroid if it had been acting "in the name" of Geld und Kraft. But there is nothin’ in sight to stop him from ascendin’ to truly Podhorétzian neodepths at any moment, perhaps by askin’ himself exactly how the alleged bludgeonin’ makes the Rev. and his merry men richer and more potent. Sooner or later, it seems to me, even a Neocomrade R. Cohen is bound to notice that in fact Geld und Kraft are very secondary objectives of the veláyet-e faqíh crew. The chances that he will guess their real motives bein’ infinitesimal, it seems safe enough to conjecture that he'll wind up with the C. Glick or A. von Liebermann view of what the Qommie fiends are up to, viz. sheer unmitigated Nazi fiendishness.

***

Another sign of slippage upslopewards is that Neocomrade R. Cohen makes no clear policy recommendation to anybody except the Qommie fiends themselves, who are to shape up at once and wash behind the ears and, above all, get right with History:

It is time for a Persian Sistani. The sons and daughters of disappointed revolutionaries do not seek renewed bloodshed. They seek peaceful change that will give meaning to the word “republic.” Khamenei, bowing to superior learning, in the best tradition of Shiism, should listen to the wisdom of Iran’s late turbulent priest [the Rev. Montazerí]. Iran would thereby preserve its independence, the proudest achievement of the revolution, while better reflecting the will of its people, who overwhelmingly favor normalized relations with the United States. It is time to retire the stale slogans of a bygone era.

It is time for Iran to follow China’s example of 1972 in adapting to survive. Perhaps Khomeini, like Mao in Deng Xiaoping’s famous formula, was 70 percent right — and some brave Iranian leader could say that. He would thereby open the way for one of the Middle East’s most hopeful societies to move forward. (...) "At some point something must give." With the birth of the Green movement, and in the spirit of Montazeri, something has given. The further, critical “giving” has to come in the supreme leader’s office, where the 30 percent error of 1979 has entrenched itself and so denied Iran the governance and society its vibrant population deserves.

Thus sloganises Neotourist R. Cohen, about as ‘stalely’ as can be imagined. That stuff is almost as stale as Neotourist Th. Friedman sloganizes. And Little Tommy with the big moustache sets a very stiff standard.

It is fun, however, to guess what an evil Qommie would make of bein’ lectured by Neotourist R. Cohen that he ought to behave like a wise and virtuous Chicom. Whatever other reactions such a neostimulus provokes, there would probably be a significant element of resentment of the "one size fits all" assumption that seems to be fundamental to neotourism as such. If the fiends pay any attention at all to flat-earthers from the New York Times Company, that is, as presumably they will not.

Meanwhile, I betcha the weekly standardisers, and the Wall Street jingos, and the staff and management and bloggership of Common Terror magazine will pay Neotourist R. Cohen attention enough to render him even more self-pitiful still. Militant extremism bein’ what it is, they are assuredly not goin’ta forgive such a shameless traitor to the Demographic as poor ol’ muddlehead Roger any time soon!

AFZKB.

Healthy days.

___
[1] Again looking forward a century or so, I presume that Telavîvestán will, like India and Belize and doubtless other candidates, have evolved a patois that is nominally still English, but getting pretty distant at points from Westminster and Washin’ton. And Father Zeus knows best!

General Lord George Wont

2009-09-01T13:19:00.000+01:00

Why do thee suppose, Dr. Bones, that General Lord George Will was all gung-ho for aggression into and occupation of the former al-‘Iráq, but now cares not at all about creatin’ the happiness of the former Khorasán?

America's finest are ... in Washington's hands. This city should keep faith with them by rapidly reversing the trajectory of America's involvement in Afghanistan, where, says the Dutch commander of coalition forces in a southern province, walking through the region is "like walking through the Old Testament." U.S. strategy -- protecting the population -- is increasingly troop-intensive while Americans are increasingly impatient about "deteriorating" (says Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) conditions. The war already is nearly 50 percent longer than the combined U.S. involvements in two world wars, and NATO assistance is reluctant and often risible. The U.S. strategy is "clear, hold and build." Clear? Taliban forces can evaporate and then return, confident that U.S. forces will forever be too few to hold gains. Hence nation-building would be impossible even if we knew how, and even if Afghanistan were not the second-worst place to try: [t]he Brookings Institution ranks Somalia as the only nation with a weaker state.

Happy days.

A Word about Power-Affirmin’ Nationalism

2009-07-31T20:30:00.004+01:00

2. The very feature that makes Lieberman distasteful to many Westerners — his power-affirming nationalism — may make him more respected and, frankly, understandable in other parts of the world, especially in places like Russia and Latin America, where strongmen are respected rather than reviled.

Although this commonterrorist (Neocomrade D. Hazony) has nicely delineated the slippery slope down which Jewish Statism has been consistently proceeding for quite a while, I would not venture to estimate exactly how much "strange new respect" for Hyperzion will be forthcoming in the short-term future. [1]

As a purely rhetorical shtyk, the trope about Jewish Statists bein’ impeccable third-worlders themselves, kitted out with a bonä fide National Liberation Movement just like any other, is almost as old as colonialist mendacity itself. "Places like Russia and Latin America, where strongmen are respected rather than reviled" were never the least bit impressed with that self-servicin’ baloney that I noticed.

To be sure, previous strongpersons of colour obviously thought that product baloney even when they were selling it themselves, so perhaps if they become convinced that the J. S. crew have now really converted to their own brand of strongpersondom sincerely and irrevocably, they will reconsider. Neocomrade D. Hazony might worry a little, though, about how prominent, and how off-puttin’ to mainstream strongpersons of colour, the remaining shreds and tatters of liberalism and Aufklärung inside the Tel Avîv statelet actually are. Doubtless such things are only junk left over from yesterday rather than accurate indicators of future performance, but I am not at all sure that "places like Russia and Latin America" pay enough attention to the neo-Levant to abandon all reasonable doubts as to exactly what direction Hyperzion is degeneratin’ in.

Neocomrade D. Hazony and the CommonTerror crew definitely ought to worry about what they are doin’ if, as appears from the rest of today's scribble, commendin’ themselves to global strongpersondom with "power-affirming nationalism" is only half of their nifty new Weltpolitik -- and possibly the smaller half at that. The other half looks like this:

There is something ingenious about Netanyahu’s deployment of his foreign policy assets, from his assignment of Lieberman to places where he is most likely to be respected and his positioning of Michael Oren ... as ambassador to the U.S., to [M. de Nétanyahou's] æown rallying of Israeli public support against Obama’s firm stance on settlements. It is indeed way too simplistic to look at Lieberman as having been swept under the rug for inner political reasons. That this narrative has carried the day is itself one of Netanyahu’s most impressive diplomatic achievements.

Considered purely æsthetically, is that not, Dr. Bones, the sort of Weltpolitik ideally suitable for weekly standardisers? Indeed, it even pushes the TWS envelope a little to assume, in effect, that not all the benighted heathen and poorly illuminated dhimmís of the world are living in the same policy week at any given moment

On the other hand, should you happen not to care for that sort of thing, I daresay you will feel fully warranted to make some rude remark about Hyperzionism talkin’ with forked tongue, presentin’ itself as "power-affirming nationalism" to "places like Russia and Latin America, where strongmen are respected rather than reviled," whilst continuin’ to agitate and propagandise in Old Europe and central North America along the traditional lines -- i.e., by representin’ the Tel Avîv régime as unique in its immediate vicinity because it alone has no time for, or sympathy with, strongpersondom.

Now in theory Jewish Statism could get away with the nifty Liebermann-Hazony approach toWeltpolitik as long as the outright heathens and we dhimmís of the holy Homeland™ and similar abodes of bliss never venture to compare notes. Yet how likely is that nowadays? Surely it is almost impossible for any neocomradess or neocomrade to start agitproppin’ for Hyperzion in one market stall without bein’ overheard by pretty well the whole súq? The practical consequence of the whole world hearing or overhearing the Tel Avîv government's apologists bein’ "all things to all men" simultaneously, St.-Paulin’ it in the common presence of all their separately targeted dupes and marks are . . . well, let's just say these consequences are easy to foresee and unlikely to be of much benefit to the Jewish Statist cause. [2] [3]

Neocomrade D. Hazony really ought to have noticed that M. de Nétanyahou's "something ingenious" is one of those swell ingenuities that should never be let out of the seminar room at a Prussian-style graduate school where it was first hatched.

In this particular case, however, I reckon the hatchin’ will have taken place at one of the Wingnut City or Telavívestání Tanks of Thought. The learnèd wikipædiatricians advise us that

David Hazony is an Israeli writer, and a regular contributor to Contentions, the blog of Commentary Magazine. Until 2007, he was a fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, founded by his older brother Yoram Hazony, and from 2004-2007 served as editor in chief of Azure, its quarterly. He has a B.A. and M.A. from Yeshiva University. He is an expert on the Jewish philosopher Eliezer Berkovits. [4]

Happy days.

___
[1] You will remember, Dr. Bones, how the wingnuttes and wingnuts used to complain that grown-up journalism always says something like "Senator Specter has been viewed with a strange new respect in unlikely quarters of late" whenever some pol whom Hooverville and Rio Limbaugh had thought reliable begins to wobble in the direction of moderation.

[2] If you insist, Dr. Bones, on my not shirking the task of practical consequence formulation, perhaps it may suffice to point out that every heathen and every dhimmí would furnished with an excellent argument for not paying any attention to Hyperzionistical protestations ever again. Or, in the vernacular: "Any fool can plainly see that those clowns at T. A. are willin’ to say just simply anythin’ at all!"

[3] On re-reading, it occurs to me that one might take Neocomrade D. Hazony quite literally when he announces that "power-affirming nationalism — may make [Neocomrade Gospodin Minister A. von Liebermann] more respected and, frankly, understandable in other parts of the world.

That is to say, D. Hazony may be bankin’ on the assumption that even if the marks and dupes in some other market stall than the one immediately targeted were to overhear a Hyperzion agitprop product tailored for quite a different audience, they would not be likely to understand what they overheard well enough to compare notes about it with other heathens and dhimmís in any way practically dangerous to Jewish Statism.

I admit that this hypothesis is more than a little improbable, but I do not know the particular commenterroriser well enough to be quite sure it can be ruled out. To rule it in more clearly, it would have been nice if he had spelled out the vice-versa case, the case in which well-meaning, but dim-witted, holy-Homelanders™ and old Euros dismiss as incredible primâ facie the notion that the Telavívestánís and their fellow-travelers chez nous could really be serious about alignin’ themselves with the two-hundred-proof political heathen on a platform of "power-affirming nationalism."

In the long run this point will not matter, though. that sort of primâ facie incomprehension has a limited shelf life. Once Hyperzion has actually behaved on the basis of "power-affirming nationalism" often enough, it must inevitably face a day of reckonin’, the day when all but the blindest must see what has been goin’ on. At that juncture, if not before, comparison of notes by the various victims or patients of Nétanyahou-Liebermann-Hazony Weltpolitik will be unavoidable.

Even at that point, however, the two-hundred-proof heathen may decide not to admit the Tel Avîv régime to the Strongperson Club. The current membership could easily decide that "power-affirming nationalism" is not, after all, their Club’s only raison d’être. Thus it may be that Neocomrade D. Hazony et al. will end up not gettin’ that mess of pottage no matter how much of the now useless bric-à-brac left over from their previous, their bad and juvenile, Western Sieve period they manage to jettison in pursuit of it.

No real Realpolitiker can, I suppose, find anything very favourable to say about a plan to "sell out" that leaves the seller-out unpaid. But Father Zeus knows best.

[4] OK, sure, Dr. Bones, why not? Even the most useless looking scrap of knowledge might come in handy someday. One can never tell in advance.

The core of his theology [that of Neocomrade Herr Prof. Dr. E. Berkovits, obit anno Christi 1992] is the encounter as an actual meeting of God and human at Mt. Sinai. The encounter is paradoxical in that it transcends human comprehension, yet it demonstrates that God cares about human beings. He teaches that once human beings know God cares for them, they can act in ways that seek meaning, accept responsibility for their actions, and act with righteousness toward others. This implies the keeping of the commandments, ethical concern for others, and building the State of Israel.

It would perhaps not be entirely absurd and arbitrary to link the Berkovitsian theôria with the Nétanyahou-Liebermann-Hazony degeneration in praxi. My understanding, conceivably mistaken, of specifically Hebrew Christojudæanity, as that ideology stood before the late Dr. B. started remodelin’ it, is that to "accept responsibility for [one's] actions and act with righteousness toward others" is mandatory on everybody irrespective of theophanies. That weird word ‘Noahide’ tends to crop up in such discussions.

The Berkovitsian new-modelin’ has what I suppose Castle Podhóretz would regard as the merit of puttin’ the recipients of authentic theophany safely outside the legitimate perimeter of evaluation by heathens and dhimmís.

The bad news (?) is that it is not easy to see how the lucky few could ever be real allies with anybody at all.

But Father Zeus knows best about authentic theophanies.

Appeasing The Jihád Careerists

2009-07-26T13:17:00.003+01:00

... [T]he United States is becoming as culpable as Europe, its liberal news media and college campuses willfully refusing to acknowledge the danger posed by radical Islam and opening their pages and seminars to those who seek the undoing of the very tenets that allow liberals — and everyone else — their freedoms[, and] refusing to highlight the Islamist threat while swallowing the claims of figures like Tariq Ramadan, a supposed moderate who ... is “a habitual practitioner of the Islamic art of taqiyya — which essentially means saying one thing in Arabic and another thing in English or French.

Now although the grandson of M. Hasan al-Banná’ would make a very notable convert to the ’Imámiyya, Dr. Bones, yet somehow it is easier to believe in a Big Management Party neocomrade [1] talkin’ ignorant nonsense rather than in M. le Dr. Ramadán having suddenly detected the infallibility of the Fourteen whilst thinking in either Arabic or Frankish.

The New York Times Company appears to have assigned Neocomrade B. Bawer’s phobic scribble to its ninth-best book reviewer [2]. This ploy is perhaps excusable, considering that B. Bawer despises poor old Aunt Nitsy in lockstep neocomradely fashion: "Bawer devotes much of his book to an attack on The New York Times for refusing to highlight" --and so on as already quoted. Of course it is absurd to suppose it possible to appease militant extremism, so Nitsy really ought to have lowered the heaviest boom available on Master Bruce. That would make quite clear which side she's on, even if it does not actually frustrate any of jihád careerism's knavish tricks. Flying one's true flag is not altogether a matter of expediency and cost-effectiveness, after all! Plus playing this game is a little tough on the customer who just wants to be told what is in the book.

In any case, our ninth-rater does not tell us exactly what the accused has said or written or thought in Indo-Germanic that he won't repeat in Semitic, or vice versa. And it's doubtful, at best, that he (Neocomrade S. Pollard IX) knows the true account of taqiyya to tell it, even if he did not mind embarrassin’ B. Bawer. Oh, well!

You had better read the whole megillah for yourself, Dr. Bones. It's a swell treat, but not quite good enough for me to swipe it in toto.

On the other hand, let me spoil your fun and reveal how it (the ninth-rate review) ends:

“Surrender” is, at times, hard going. In part that is because of the level of detail Bawer offers in support of his argument. But “Surrender” is hard going in another respect as well. Bawer is unquestionably correct, and that fact is quite simply - terrifying.

Happy days.

____
[1] Who says wingnutettes and wingnuts can never insinuate themselves into the ranks of the learnèd wikipædiatricians?

Bruce Bawer (born October 31, 1956 in New York City) is an American literary critic.... (...) His most recent book (2009) is Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom. Eliot Weinberger, one of the board members of the [National Book Critics] Circle, when he presented the list of nominations for the award, stated that Bawer's book was an example of "racism as criticism." Following that, the president of the Circle, John Freeman, declared that "I have never been more embarrassed by a choice than I have been with Bruce Bawer's When Europe Slept. Its hyperventilated rhetoric tips from actual critique into Islamophobia." Comments such as those from Weinberger and Freeman came as no surprise, as Bawer was expecting a considerable amount of criticism from politically correct officials, and responded by pointing out that he never criticized a race, only Islam as a political ideology.

[2] A surname to make one wonder irrelevant things, though its bearer is presumably a Brit:

Stephen Pollard, the editor of The Jewish Chronicle, is the author of Ten Days That Changed the Nation: The Making of Modern Britain.

Welcome to Bernieworld!

2009-07-26T11:44:00.005+01:00

[T]he June 4, 1967, border is not feasible, but the principle of defining a border on the basis of June 4 certainly is. America needs to offer support, and fast, for a 1:1 land swap to insure that territories allotted to Israel and Palestine are equivalent in area to what existed on June 4. It should appoint a Quartet commission, answerable to Senator Mitchell, to suggest a map. Palestine is not Israel's internal affair, nor will Palestinians ever accept the border envisioned by Netanyahu. Only a new "international" map will reconcile the Arab League peace initiative with the difficulties of moving settlers back into Israel. Sketching a border will bring obvious immediate benefits, such as helping government officials, businesspeople and others on both sides to plan and invest. But it will also help prepare the ground to evacuate those who must ultimately be moved.

There are some proper nouns and adjectives in that prose pudding that sound vaguely familiar, Dr. Bones, but naturally the writer cannot be talking about our planet. Political sci-fi, I guess it must be, parallel-universe stuff.

Evidently "George Mitchell" is the Vespasianus or Titus of Planet Avishai, except that instead of a Roman Empire he commands a "Quartet" endowed with superimperial powers to "define borders" and "offer support" and "ensure equivalency" -- and so forth and so on down through "evacuate evacuees."

A positive John Galt of the diplomatic world is the "George Mitchell" action hero! ZAP!!!

With his Tonto-like "Quartet" behind him, "George Mitchell" is unstoppable--unless perchance some other fictionizer grabs the Avishaian keyboard and manages to write the next thrilling chapter on different lines.

Yet perhaps the current narrative management was aiming at Dean Swift rather than at Miss Rand? Maybe this scrumptious piffle is goal-oriented satire rather than idle fantasy?

Perhaps we (the odious human race) are supposed to wonder why it is that we can NOT successfully behave as if all the world were our conquered provinces unless we actually do, very tiresomely and at great expense, march out and conquer them?

What is it about our Terra, as opposed to the feigned Planet Avishai, that prevents a few hundred thousand charter members of "the international community," journalists and pols and PowerPointers and blogmongers and social scientisers and the like, all the usual suspects!, from designing and implementing and enforcing a real-world Mitchellian Quartet that will then let (or say 'make') everybody--natives and locals and international communitarians all alike--live happily ever after? With, needless to say, each living happily in her proper Quartet-specified place?

I mean, what's the actual hold-up, my fellow Yahoos? Don't you guys want to be Galt-and-Mitchell-worthy Houyhnhnms?

Now, if Father Zeus had asked me for advice on Day One, Dr. Bones, why . . . .

Happy days.

"a wind of 18 months to 2 years"

2009-07-17T11:51:00.006+01:00

Headmaster J. C. Manners recently gave us at the Ann Arbour Idiot Academy a stiff pep talk about always washing behind our ears and worrying sufficiently about ‘our’ Afghanistan -- and look what has come of it: no two idiots have a common theory of what ‘we’ are doing wandering about in the wilds of Khorasán in the first place!

The only primâ facie presentable khabar wáhid is second-hand and belongs to Shaykh Pepe Escobar -- not exactly a first-rate transmitter, despite his impeccable tiersmondiste orthodoxy. A second glance at the account indicates it is not the article wanted anyway, though it might do if the unaccountable mucking-about had begun "In the past month." Of course one could always fantasize that ‘we’ knew years and years ago that last month was coming and were trying to get ready. [1] On the other hand, if you believe that, you’d believe anything.

The idiocy about "hell bent on setting back the clock to another epoch, which ... simply should not allowed to happen" has already drawn some fire, so rather than pile on, let’s be perverse and see if we can find a pony in it somewhere.

There certainly do exist folks (off the AAIA campus) who take that line, though possibly it is more a tautology than a profundity, inasmuch as ‘we’ are in Afghanistan (one presumes) because SOMETHING or another "simply should not allowed to happen." The challenge is to think of any one definite ‘something’ that does not apply to forty-six other nations and provinces and administrative districts as well.

This challenge I cannot meet, and, more to the point, as far as I can make out, nobody at Le Club Colonial can meet it either. Take the Commissariat for the New American Innovation™, that liberal, or at any rate bushevik-free, octopus of a thousand tentacles. [2] The violence-professional neocommisars of CNAI go on and on, drearily enough, about their Petræo-McNamaran COIN ("counterinsurgency") product, but they never explain how ‘we’ came to be a Sole Remainin’ Hyperpower awash in a sea of surgency, or spell out why those forty-six other candidates should not get COINed as well. They would rather die than talk policy.

Now it is not only true, but obvious, that ‘we’ can definitely not afford to run the whole world at the same rate per capita of natives and locals that ‘we’ now run [3] Afghanistan and the former al-‘Iráq. The neocommissars, however, are so pluperfectly devoted to Mr. Blake’s notion that "To generalise is to be an idiot," that one will not catch them coming even that close to a statement of High Policy rather than mere strategy and operations and tactics.

Their evasion might pass for humility: violence pros and PowerPointers know their place as hired hands and avoid getting uppity. "Civilian control of the military," don’t you know? Very pretty! -- if only it did not seem so probable that these neogentry are actually making most of the imperial and colonial decisions that get casually attributed to ‘us’ and to poor buck-stopping Mr. Obama. [4]

Our Academy’s esteemed Head has guessed as follows:

Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, cautioned that there is hard fighting ahead in Afghanistan. He sees a wind of 18 months to 2 years during which the US and its NATO allies must reestablish as much security as possible even as it trains tens of thousands of new Afghan troops. The window is probably how long the Obama administration expects there to be support for the Afghan war in the US Congress.

That’s not much better guesswork than kiddies’ own, is it? But here, too, one can always do a pony quest, and take the paragraph to be not really a guess about Afghanistan but a satire on Capitol Hill, where one can always count on a couple years of support for anything at all, as long as one relentlessly refuses to explain it.

(( There was, I believe, an eighteenth-century projector who announced "An Undertaking of the greatest possible Publick Utility, but nobody to know what it is." [5] ))

Happy days.

___
[1] Somebody should command the good and forbid Shaykh Escobar to keep working from those delightful Victorian maps of "the vast network of oil and gas pipelines that crisscross the potential imperial battlefields of the planet" that he finds in his Collected Works of Rudyard Kipling.

Another of us id..., of us Kolean kiddies, that is, offered a YooToob from beautiful downtown Asmar in the Outer Khorasánian province of Kúnar. Folks who seriously project fetching petroleum from the Caspian Sea by that route probably favored the plan, mentioned right before the March 2003 aggression, of placing one of ‘our’ aircraft carriers in the Cap so as to have the Beast of Baghdád surrounded.

And Pepe’s, remember, is the BEST kiddie notion going. Kyrie eleison; Christe eleison; Kyrie eleison!

[2] The tentacle du jour calls itself The Center for a New American Security and is not to be confused with, say, The Center for American Progress . And of course not with The Project For the New American Century -- that one is the bad guys.

There are several more neotentacles -- I keep meaning to take a complete inventory but do not get around to it.

[3] There is a strong case for shudder quotes around ‘run’ too. But God knows best.

[4] It’s no worse than any other AAIA guess to propose that the COINsters chiefly need Afghanistan as a sort of sandbox in which to play their Petræo-McNamaran games. But the guess is no better than the others either, because there is no glimpse in it of why our current neogentry should consider that proficiency at precisely those games is urgent and critical.

With their predecessors, the Yoos and Feiths and von Wolfowitzen and especially Viceroy R. B. Cheney, it was at least easy to know wrong what they were up to, viz. that were doin’ it all for dear old Zion. Or, alternatively, to demonstrate their hereditary flair for Big Management.

Whereas the Commissariat of Innovation is blankly inscrutable. As the current Idiot Academy performance indicates, one can scarcely make even a good wrong guess about their knavish tricks.

[5] Not bad for a quotation from memory at several decades’ distance! The exact wording runs "A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is."

As you may read at URL cit. (p. 65), this intrepid forerunner of the Petræo-McNamaran whizkids seems to have made a success of it.

Harrop et Ramázání Frères S. A.

2009-07-05T13:17:00.004+01:00

The Performers

American and Iranian revolutionary traditions surprisingly have much in common. When Americans celebrate the 4th of July, they often forget that the core purpose of the famous document penned by Thomas Jefferson was to declare independence from Great Britain. Had the colonies failed in that struggle for freedom to govern themselves, the Declaration of Independence's famous "unalienable" rights to equality, liberty, and life would have been rendered not self-evident. Like America, Iran's 1979 Revolution, had much to do with throwing off perceived shackles of foreign domination. One hundred years ago, imperial Britain and Russia strangled Iran's first Constitutional revolution. Similarly, in 1953, the US CIA orchestrated the overthrow of a democratically elected government. Restoring the Shah to his throne caused subsequent repression to be seen as made in America.

(( snip ))

Earlier this year, the Iranian and American presidents both stressed the importance of "mutual respect," of recognizing what independence, equality, regional leadership, and freedom mean to both countries. For Iran, an open question is how will it respect its own people and heal the deep fissures recently opened. This need not be a clash of alien values, of America vs. Iran. One hundred years ago, Howard Baskerville, a 24-year old missionary educator, became Iran's American martyr while trying to help Iranians then struggling for freedom. He's still admired in Iran; in 2005, former President Mohammed Khatami unveiled a sculpture of Baskerville in Tabriz's Constitutional House museum. Before his death, Baskerville explained to skeptical friends that "The only difference between me and these people is my place of birth, and that is not a big difference." He was right.

The Critic

...you have picked up ... the slogans of both countries, rather than the historical and cultural contexts and differences .... ["Posted by JES at July 5, 2009 02:55 AM"]

Indeed, indeed, Mr. Critic, but what else is a decent, self-respecting (not to say "respectability-crazed") ‘you’ to do on a purely ceremonial occasion?

Of course it could be fun to break this flimsy butterfly on a wheel, and fun well short of solemnly doubting that the earnest respectabilitators have any adequate grasp of what went wrong in the early 1860's.

Why, I myself could easily get worked up about how an elegant imported article like M. de Ramázání manages to overestimate the ignorance of the holy-Homelanders™. Wombschoolin’ and Niederdümmung have taken a grave toll, doubtless, but can it really be the case that most Yank sweet puppies are unaware that "the core purpose of the famous document penned (sic) by Thomas Jefferson was to declare independence from Great Britain"? [1]

On the fun side, one should cherish the prominent "Who is buried in Grant’s tomb?" aspect of that attempted mass defamation of poor old Sam’s idiot nieces and nephews: Et vous, M. le Professeur, qu’est-ce que vous gardez dans votre boîte de pain? [2]

Have a nice Silly Season, everybody.

___
[1] Few things are more annoying than that perpetual comfy wallowin’ of U. S. rightists and neorightists in the supposed wonderfulness -- the ‘exceptionalism’, the ‘indispensibility’ -- of Wunnerful US. But there is another side of the horse to fall off as well. Verb. sap.

It's rather a shame that the good folks who would be most irritated by this little exercise in Selbstelitismus are extremely unlikely to encounter it. Certainly anybody who dwells within the penumbrae et emanationes of Planet Justworld is bound to be well washed in the blood of this lamb already.

[2] Very likely it contains the collected addresses of Th. W. Wilson and M. M. Litvinov instead of anything less nutricious from Pepperidge Farm. La paix est indivisible is especially delicious with bologna and fresh aruguletta and mayonnaise.

"As he wrote a couple of weeks ago"

2009-06-28T16:51:00.008+01:00

The most predominant mentality in right-wing discourse finds expression in this form: "I am part of/was born into Group X, and Group X -- my group -- is better than all others yet treated so very unfairly" . . . . Here again we find the same adolescent self-absorption: the group into which I was born and was instructed from childhood to believe is the best [] is, objectively, superior. It is so much better than everyone and everything else that even to suggest that we have flaws comparable to others is to engage in "false moral equivalencies." To do anything other than emphatically proclaim my group's objective superiority is to treat my group unfairly.

And perhaps we ought to have a little of what he wrote only the day before yesterday, Friday 27 June 2009, as well:

UPDATE III: Goldfarb replies ... with the full array of textbook neoconservative platitudes. The only point worth noting is that he agrees with the observation I expressed last night that Goldfarb's views (like those of most neoconservatives) "ultimately come down to nothing more complicated than: what we do is Good and Right because we are superior and because they are inferior." Goldfarb admits he thinks torture is tolerable when we do it to Them but not when They do it to us because -- as he puts it -- "Of Course We Are Superior and They Are Inferior" (that, of course, is the very definition of "moral relativism," which Goldfarb and his allies like to pretend they oppose even as they exemplify its core premise). And -- other than a view that Muslims generally are inferior -- what possible ground is there for claiming moral superiority over the numerous detainees at Guantánamo and elsewhere who, even by the Bush administration's reasoning, were guilty of nothing? (...) Goldfarb's reply is a pure expression of that warped and self-glorifying mentality.

And then there was Señorito Miguelico de Goldfarb

itself. Apart from what Mr. Prosecutor has already been quoted as quoting, there is a little bit of miscellaneous self-wunnerfulness worthy of notice:

... Greenwald thinks I'm guilty of applying a double standard -- concern for the treatment of uniformed hostages and ambivalence toward the treatment of terrorist detainees. Well, guilty as charged. I really don't care about the rough treatment to which men like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were subjected even for the chance of gleaning valuable information. Gilad Shalit, on the other hand, is a uniformed combatant entitled to all the rights and protections afforded by the Geneva Conventions.

Obviously Mr. Greenwald thought and said nothing of the sort. After that ringin’ declaration of self-superiority in its headline, the neocoward chickens out rather remarkably by pretendin’ that the WUNNERFUL US on behalf of whom it self-superioritises is really nothin’ more excitin’ or controversial than WAUC, the World Association of Uniformed Combatants. Sure. Of course. Right!

The señorito elaborates its irrelevant alibi at considerable length:

The United States, Israel, and the rest of the civilized world do not target civilians, do not hide weapons in mosques, do not use our own children as human shields, do not send our own children to their deaths as suicide bombers, do not seek the extermination of an entire race of people. Terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, and the regimes that sponsor them, do. That is why we are morally superior to them, and they are morally inferior to us. And that is also why I'm confident that Gilad Shalit would give anything to have spent the last three years at Gitmo -- playing soccer, watching TV, getting three squares a day -- instead of being a prisoner of Hamas. Because even though they don't deserve it, we still treat our detainees better than terrorists treat theirs.

Everybody must decide for himself, Dr. Bones, but personally I do not feel my pulse rate much stirred by honoris causâ promotion to membership in what a Neocomrade M. Goldfarb is pleased to define as the civilised world. ’Tis a pity, though, that the irrelevant WE into which customers of The Weekly Standard get dragooned on this occasion should be called "the civilised world" and not rather "Western Civilisation." If China and Peru cannot be reliably counted on to care far less for human life than WE do, well, times have certainly changed at Wingnut City! Probably it was just an accident, though: the señorito was, after all, hastily changin’ its standard from a uniformed combatant Wunnerful Us to a civilisation-based Wunnerful US. If suitably cross-questioned, I daresay it would be willin’ enough to include a few Huntin’tonian Clashist™ refinements omitted in the scramble.

’Twas probably a technical misjudgment to stick in "do not target civilians": the Tel Avîv government’s political assassinations are no secret. If this señorito were in a different mood, or in a different polemical pass, very likely it would positively boast thereof. ’That nifty plan is ever so much more cost-effective than bumpin’ off a whole lot of lovely native ladies and cute local kiddies under the rubric of "Damage, Collateral", don’t you know? Anyway, that’s the theory of it at Tel Avîv. And Father Zeus knows best how it works out in practice....

Omitting what the novoseñorito has to say against Jimmy Crater, I arrive at its bottom line:

I wrote that Israeli public opinion was Obama's "best leverage" over Netanyahu. Greenwald may not support Israel, but most Americans still do, which means that withholding or threatening to withhold aid, weapons, or diplomatic support from Israel is lousy politics for an American president, even if it would be a dream come true for Greenwald.

Though it is scarcely a secret that weekly standardisers and commonterrorisers think such threats in private, they do not often actually emit them. Miguelico really ought to have looked at a mirror to make sure it was properly attired to address the Naked Public Square™!

What the specimen actually does in that sentence is rather hard on public opinion in the Tel Avîv statelet, nicht wahr? In what I skipped, it spoke of JC as a ‘dupe’ and "an annoyance to presidents of both parties for decades." A large number of run-of-the-mill Jewish Statists are evidently a Carter-like annoyance to the weekly standardisers: Barák Husáyn Obáma is only too likely to trick them into attitudes and behaviours that must prove counterproductive from the alone true jewishstatist perspective.as promulgated de haut en bas from Castle Podhóretz.

Mr. Greenwald’s "Group X" analysis is admirable as far as it goes, yet when it restricts itself with "into which I was born and was instructed from childhood" it runs off the rails to some extent. Nobody was ever born a militant extremist vanguardite of the Commonterror magazine type. As to instruction, there is no need to assume that Pipes Minor and Kramer Minor and Podhóretz Minor and Kristol Minor and all the rest of the novoseñorito element were deliberately brought up to be what they are like a whole gaggle of John Stuart Mills. No real aristocracy ever worked that way; to suppose it of this sham neoteric crew is perfectly gratuitous.

Indeed, if one were to take "into which I was born and was instructed from childhood" in earnest, the entire Hate-’68 Movement would become unaccountable. The neogentry’s favourite prefix, after all, proclaims that they arrived at their present illiberal and antidemocratic faith precisely by breakin’ with all that sad palæorubbish that they were born into and instructed about. To be sure, now that Hate-’68-ism is into its second or even third degeneration, this is not literally the case with its novoseñorito element. Specimens like M. Goldfarb were presumably born into their self-wunnerful neotericity, but surely they had no need to be specially instructed in it. They will have seen how the servants and the peons defer to their Daddy and drawn the obvious conclusions quite informally and maybe even quite unconsciously, just as (say) a certain Louis de Bourbon had supposedly managed to do by the age of five in 1643. [1]

Happy days.

___
[1]

When young Louis was four, his father fell gravely ill with tuberculosis. Knowing that he was about to die, the king ordered that his eldest son be baptised (which normally would have taken place when the prince was seven). At the ceremony the boy was given the name Louis Dieudonné, or "Gift of God," because his birth had seemed so miraculous. Afterward he was brought to his father's deathbed. "What is your name?" Louis XIII asked.

"Louis XIV," the little boy replied.

"Not yet, not yet," said the king."

The Apotheosis of Princess Neoterica

2009-06-21T15:04:00.003+01:00

Thus we still live in an era in which you have to have been wrong to be respectable. You’re not considered serious about national security unless you were for invading Iraq; you’re not considered a serious political analyst unless you spent the last three years of the Bush administration predicting a Republican comeback; you’re not considered a serious economic analyst unless you dismissed the idea that the Bush Boom, such as it was, rested on a housing bubble.

Thus we still live in an era in which Professor Krugman's principal column for the New York Times Company is very weak whenever it lifts its nose from Lord Mammon’ grindstone. The scribble that quotation comes from is admirable, and admirable as political analysis, but its is squirreled away in mere blogghiatura where not many Homelanders™ will see it, even amongst NYTC customers.

Notice that PK is effectively accusing his dimwit respectables of agreeing to solemnly pretend that they dwell in some holy Homeland™ of militant extremism rather than in the humdrum United States of America. His account of HOW the dimwits behave is excellent, but when it comes to WHY they behave that way, he disappoints:

[M]any people in the news media, especially at the managerial level, decided a long time ago that movement conservatism was The Future — and that the sensible thing, whether or not you yourself were a conservative, was to go with the wave. That meant treating right-wing politicians and media figures with great respect, while ridiculing the opposition as the Incredible Shrinking Democrats or the Incredibly Shrinking Democrats, or whatever. And anyone who didn’t treat the right with great respect, who didn’t get with the program, was a flake, a moonbat.

"The sensible thing [is] to go with the wave" is an impeccably polite way of describing selfish ambition and crude lust for Ehre, Macht, Reichtum, Ruhm und die Liebe der Frauen[1], but if Prof. Krugman does not intend us to make that equation that I just made, then what he did intend is hidden in obscurity. Doubtless he did not care to say very much about motivations when it comes to people he has to live with and market his scribbles to.

More worrisome for me is that one cannot make out Dr. Krugman’s estimate of his dimwits’ sincerity. Can the accused really have believed "that movement conservatism was The Future"? I am not sure what the ‘right’ answer to that question would be, whether the dimwits look dimmer as (1) incompetent, but honest, prognosticators, or as (2) shameless cynics and liars. To the extent, though, that PK has them behaving the same dimwit way even after 4 November 2008, one must suppose that notions like shamelessness and mendacity and cynicism have probably occurred to the private Paul Krugman, whether he writes such fugitive thoughts up for publication or not.

_____

[1] Perhaps it is crude of me to say ‘crude’, though, for Dr. Freud of Vienna attributed these objects of ambition to der Kunstler, not to every Tom, Dick and Harriet that comes down the pike.

The One-Fifth Column Hypothesis

2009-06-14T15:49:00.006+01:00

Exhibit A.

Only ONE IN FIVE Israeli Jews believes a nuclear-armed Iran would try to destroy Israel and most see life continuing as normal should the Islamic Republic get the bomb, an opinion poll published on Sunday found.

The survey, commissioned by a Tel Aviv University think-tank, appeared to challenge the argument of successive Israeli governments that Iran must be denied the means to make atomic weapons lest it threaten Israel's existence.

Asked how a nuclear-armed Iran would affect their lives, 80 percent of respondents said they expected no change. Eleven percent said they would consider emigrating and 9 percent said they would consider relocating inside Israel.

Exhibit B.

Mir Hosain Mousavi was a plausible candidate for the reformists. They were electing people like him with 70 and 80 percent margins just a few years ago. We have not been had by the business families of north Tehran. We've much more likely been had by A HARD LINE CONSTITUENCY OF AT MOST 20% OF THE COUNTRY, who claim to be the only true heirs of the Iranian revolution, and who control which ballots see the light of day.

Exhibit C.

[C1]
Barack Obama Democratic Illinois 69,456,897 52.92%
John McCain Republican Arizona 59,934,814 45.66%

[C2]
The voter turnout for this election was broadly predicted to be very high by American standards, and a record number of votes were cast. The final tally of total votes counted was 131.2 million ... [which] ... could reflect a turnout as high as 63.0% of eligible voters, which would be the highest since 1960. This 63.0% turnout rate is based on an estimated eligible voter population of 208,323,000. Another estimate puts the eligible voter population at 212,720,027, resulting in a turnout rate of 61.7%, which would be the highest turnout rate since 1968.

[C3 (Analysis)]
0.4566 * 0.617 = 0.2817

It is reasonable to assume--is it not, Dr. Bones?--that only twenty McCain voters in every twenty-eight supported the Fabulous Flyboy primarily because of his Party's militant extremism. Some of J. Sidney’s voters lived in Maine, for instance, and there are lots of other reasons to discount that 28% a little.

The alternative would be to decide that militant extremism flourishes here in the holy Homeland™ more than amongst the lesser breeds without -- a conclusion even my own cosmopolitan deracination would not be pleased to have to draw.

Anyhow, sir, there is the conjecture, all set for Popperian refutation:

Let observation with extensive view,
Survey mankind, from China to Peru:
How everywhere doth Wingnut City thrive,
Yet not beyond one faith-crazed part in five.

This Is Why One Laughs At Them

2009-06-12T12:38:00.001+01:00

(B) On religious tolerance, [the President] gently referenced the Christians of Lebanon and Egypt, then lamented that the "divisions between Sunni and Shia have led to tragic violence" (note the use of the passive voice).

No Noah Webster is Neocomrade Ch. Krauthammer! Still, he does let me recycle today's cartoon, because

"Obama Hovers From on High" is how the Washin'ton NeoPost titled the scribble.

Small world!

Happy days.

Gleichschaltung im Morgenland

2009-06-09T10:50:00.010+01:00

I find it impossible, Dr. Bones, to think of the Beirut statelet without recalling Patwell's First Social Law™, "The smaller the teacup, the fiercer the tempest."

That is a teacup insider viewpoint, naturally. Miss Alice and the dormouse and the mad hatter and everybody else at the spread are more like to yawn than to rave when some reveler mentions Lebanon: de minimis non curat grex, don’t you know? [1]

Teacup outsiders are far from models of good judgment, however. The infinitely remote superterrestrials at Planet Justworld have recommended the election analysis by M. Qifâ de Nabkí, which we will get to in a moment. Meanwhile, the superaliens and the local boy who went to H*rv*rd, between them, mention various noteworthy dottinesses from further-outsiders, like (1) Obama made them do it; (2) Joe Biden ("who?") made them do it; (3) "Christian animosity towards Hizbullah [&] Saudi money [&] the Maronite patriarch" made them do it; (4) The God Party not really wanting to win accounts for it . . . . And so on.

You can roll your own, Mr. Bones! Something about sunspots might do? Or how about Cedar Flu?

For its own part, Infinite Remoteness LLC appears to have been sadly disappointed in M. le général de ‘Ayoun:

Hizbullah's allies in the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) apparently lost in a major way to supporters of March 14 who are also members of extremely well-entrenched political "families" and ardent supporters of the present system of Christian political privilege.

Come to think of it, though, that is scarcely an explanation. Did the free patriots lose because of insufficient ardour, or merely because of insufficient entrenchment and not enough relatives and clients and retainers? Out at St. Helena galaxy in the immense inane, bias is freely admitted:

The FPM and its leader, General Michel Aoun, had offered a clear alternative to that system, as well as a strong political platform for this election. For those reasons, despite some other other misgivings I have about Aoun (and about Hizbullah), I wanted their alliance to win. Hizbullah, by the way, also supports a "de-confessionalized", one-person-one-vote system in Lebanon.

But thee know how those superterrestrial folks are, Dr. Bones: the Justworldings doubtless suppose that the only ‘bias’ they suffer from is disinterested zeal for good government, for un état libanais laïque [2] that the Vermont League of Women Voters would be proud to have caused.

Before we call on M. Q. de N., we might try an equal-but-opposite dottiness approach: how if the locals and natives took exactly the VLWV and Planet Justworld view of what was at state, but then arose in horror and protest, resolved as 54% of one ~~man~~ person that the very last thing in all the world that they want is "a 'de-confessionalized', one-person-one-vote system"?

Thee heard it here first, sir!

Was it worthy hearing? Probably not, if thee take it for Pol. Sci. and Comp. Gov., but taken as mere humble political criticism and philosophy, I think there is a little bit to it. The superterrestrials are, in a perhaps subliminal and slightly backhanded way, taking The Master's

side here: far out in the St. Helena Galaxy Cluster they pretend, conciously or unconsciously, to care about the Form of neo-Levantine politics. They accuse their opponents, implicitly, of not givin’ a hoot about forms, but of wallowin’ in mere matters.[3]

In the "One man? It depends which man!" mire do the forces of M-14 wallow like swine! And all because the existin’ LB racket gives them more votes per capita than it gives the God Party and their fellow-travelers! [4] Easy to see how that show might look displeasing at a distance of thirteen godzillion kilometers!

The "back-handed" part that I alluded to is this: infinitely remote supraterrestrials have a tendency to believe that their own pet natives and locals object to such disproportionalities entirely because they constitute injustice in the abstract, quite without reference to the fact that it just happens to be themselves who are getting shafted. A little of that brand of backhandedness goes a long way with the Muses and thee and me, Dr. Bones. After all, what could be in more flagrant violation of

travaillons donc à bien penser? But bear in mind, sir, that although this badly thought attitude makes the native plaintiffs and their alien patrons insufferable, it does not make them wrong about either facts or law. It does not oblige us to decide the case in somebody else's favor.

___
[1] I only say "more likely." The next statelet south along the coast is not much bigger or much less peculiar, yet down there nobody's Social Rules apply, nobody from Emily Post to Mr. Huntin’ton of H*rv*rd legislates socially for that mob!

[2] Ars longa, vita brevis: Who can spare the time to work out the French for ‘deconfessionalised’? (And then only to talk about LB after one finds it!)

[3] Though I should not care to insist on the point, it occurs to me that precisely because the Beirut statelet is such a tiny and contemptible teacup, considered materially, it may be a very suitable jumping-off point for those who aspire to lift their minds to questions of Form. BGKB.

[4] It cannot be that St. Helena, patron saint of the extraterrestrial justworldly, does not admire her own high-mindedness, but I doubt that she conceives of it as an Aristotelian high-mindedness. The Master smacks too much of lowly Terra for that palate, I fear. Yet pretty clearly she wants to be praised for the tenderness of her sentiments rather than for the solidity of her arguments, which means that the Plato and Parmenides crowd cannot wish to be affiliated with her much more than we do.

Nevertheless suum cuique tribuere, Dr. Bones! Give credit where credit is deserved, even when the credit cannot be comprehended, much less reciprocated.

The Only Real Question (!?)

2009-06-04T11:26:00.001+01:00

Q. [R. Fisk] The only real question, perhaps, is whether Obama has asked himself the most important question: does the "Muslim world" actually exist?

A. Easy to see what answer this guy wants! And of course he has to be given it: "NO, there is no publicly known reason to suppose that BHO disbelieves in "the Muslim world."

One must gloss and distinguish a little, though: at the moment, Barák Husáyn XLIV Obáma, Chief Executive Officer of Heimatland Gottes GMBH, mistakenly believes in "the Muslim world." But maybe he will learn the sad Fiskean wisdom of disbelief? Maybe he will even learn it reasonably quickly? After all, the Cook County pol may actually be, say, one-tenth as clever as his campaign contributors and his journalists and his publicists and all the miscellaneous groupies and bottlewashers and hangers-on and hopeful parasites make him out, so it would be foolish to write him off as invincibly ignorant and incorrigible.

But we must start from where we are, and that is, as I say, Cook County. A long, long way from salt water. And we must be moderate in our hopes for amelioration, because one would have to be a writer of trashy rightist thrillers to come up with a scenario in which foreign affairs of any sort (let alone affairs of the neo-Levant or the Palestine Puzzle specifically) become more important to this President than (1) domestic economics and (2) domestic race relations. Give or take (1a) domestic health care and (1b) global greenery. Even if the pupil should eventually get to where he can pass Prof. Fisk's examination with distinction, he would still not consider the nonexistence of "the Muslim world" anything like as important as Prof. Fisk considers it. That must remain at best a third-rank sort of wisdom forever. Or even fifth-rank.

Should Muslims and neo-Muslims and their fellow travelers and their area students become bitter that the nonexistence of IslamWorld never does become hot potato #1 for Barák Husáyn, well, what is a rational animal to do but sigh and remark that Cook County is not the only stronghold of provinciality and parochialism and selfocentricity still going strong? [1]

But I get ahead of myself, because there do exist factors that might prevent BHO from ever mastering the Fiskean curriculum at all. Above all, it would be awfully convenient for BHO if IslamWorld did exist, so convenient that it is not difficult to imagine him spending eight years refusing to see through a mistake that ought to be transparent to the perspicuity of a former editor of H*rv*rd Law Review once he has been compelled to attend to the old neo-Levantine mess and the newer Crusade-Against-Terror mess in detail.

I can even invent a (not very thrilling) leftist scenario about it: "After two and a half years of appealing to IslamWorld in vain, Obama spent five years blaming IslamWorld for the unsatisfactory state of his foreign policy maneuvers, when plainly he would have done far better to blame himself and certain other interested parties." Thus (as I conjecture) might a historian of 2094 scribble if she is uncommited as to the existential status of IslamWorld. [2] Mr. Fisk will be one hundred and fifty years old in 2094; I daresay arthritis and rheumatism and another eighty-five years of the same old same-old will have made him far more judgmental than my Dr. Undecided.

Anyhow, that's the scenario, and it will be no great loss to anybody if it remains only a scenario forever.

Happy days.

__
[1] ’Tis a mystery (Mr. Moralist pretended) why anybody sane would want the holy-Homelandic CEO job. Possession of Sole Remainin’ Hyperpower™ is absolutely guaranteed to bring zillions of "Drop everything else and attend to ME this instant!" fruits and nuts and cranks and shafts running. As wasps to honey, so they to Barák Husáyn XLIV.

(( Rather a suitable coincidence that "Middle East" abbreviates to the pronoun of the first person singular in the Chicagolandese dialect. Might some superintending [P]rovidence really be in charge of the Casino of Human Events despite almost all appearances? ))

[2] I take for granted, possibly mistakenly, that it will never become flatly impossible to believe in the existence of IslamWorld. "Where there is a will, there is a way" -- a way to Santa Claus’ workshop at the North Pole, for example. And though this is no place to discuss it, the attachment of Muslims and neo-Muslims to the fable of IslamWorld is not simply a matter of ‘convenient’ as it is for BHO and the rest of us denizens of Káfirestán and Dhimmístán.

Even the briefest allusion should stress that IslamWorld is not a formal article of Islamic religionism. Certain neo-Muslims may be trying to make it one, perhaps. More certainly, a number of jihád careerists in the former Christojudaeandom are trying to make it one -- for purposes entirely their own and nothin’ to do with the real McCoy whatsoever. But God knows best about jihád careerism!

Traffic Unbearable

2009-06-03T13:08:00.004+01:00

And now! ... Princess Neoterica of Outer Pajamastán will introduce [1] this morning’s principal orator:

Robert Kagan on the new Obama Middle East strategy: “[B]y insisting that the Israeli government not only put a freeze on new settlements but also halt ‘natural growth’ in existing settlements, the administration has set up an unavoidable and possibly unpleasant confrontation with Israel, precisely at the moment it is importuning a truculent Iran. This sets up quite an image: Unclench the fist at a government that daily calls us the Great Satan, while balling up a fist at a longtime ally.” Is is almost incomprehensible, no?

(( Thunderous applause and brachial salutations from the Right ))

The Obama administration is either very courageous or very foolish -- possibly both. I had assumed that in a year in which the administration intended to take a soft approach to Iran, seeking talks, holding out inducements and never discussing penalties, bending over backwards to make accommodations, that it would not simultaneously pursue a confrontational policy with Israel. Such a policy would seem to be more than the political traffic at home could bear. I was wrong.

Instead, by insisting that the Israeli government not only put a freeze on new settlements but also halt “natural growth” in existing settlements, the administration has set up an unavoidable and possibly unpleasant confrontation with Israel, precisely at the moment it is importuning a truculent Iran. This sets up quite an image: unclench the fist at a government that daily calls us the Great Satan, while balling up a fist at a longtime ally.

There must be a brilliant strategy in here somewhere. But from the outside, it isn’t obvious where the confrontation with Israel is supposed to lead. While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can conceivably put a freeze on new settlements, it is unlikely that he can stop “natural growth” of existing settlements and still hold his government together. Indeed, it is questionable whether any Israeli government could. Perhaps the Obama administration is trying to bring the Netanyahu government down. Regime change!

Clearly, this is an effort to shape Arab opinion and show that the Obama administration is more even-handed than its predecessor. But if Israel can’t or won’t deliver, what does the Obama administration do next? If it backs away from its demand, then it proves itself impotent in the face of Israeli intransigence, thus presumably weakening its standing with the Arabs. But if it doesn’t back down, what forms of punishment does it intend to carry out to force Israel’s hand? Will the administration place sanctions on Israel at a time when it is offering to lift sanctions on Iran?

___
[1] There have been some shady doin's up the slippery slope at

Castle Podhóretz, Mr. Bones! For reasons inscrutable, Her Neocomradely and Imperial Highness has decided to withdraw Neocomrade R. Kagan's flot or jet from the public gaze.

Imagine me aghast when I went back to get the URL and found that the gem itself had been stolen!

Horizon of Hyperzion

2009-06-03T12:27:00.002+01:00

Mr. Obama’s dilemma is that no speech, however eloquent, can disentangle U.S.-Muslim relations from the treacherous terrain of current events in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and the Middle East.

As you see, Mr. Bones, former USA Secretary of War M. K. Albright has excluded Iraq and Iran and Afghanistan and Pakistan from her private mental Middle East, although admitting them to be part of some large unchristened zone inside which human events are currently treacherous.

That hunk of mystery meat and terror terrain would probably correspond pretty well to the vulgar or dhimmí notion of the M.E. (minus the Palestine Puzzle).

Meanwhile, back in the holy Homeland™, this far-fetched long-time fellow-traveler with the militant extremist Republican Party may be about ready to become a card-carryin’ neocomradess:

Democracy’s advantage is that it contains the means for its own correction through public accountability and discussion. It also offers a non-violent alternative for the forces of change, whether those forces are progressive OR CONSERVATIVE

That sounds enough like ordinary meanin’less boilerplate that it may actually be ordinary meanin’less boilerplate, but on the other hand, what has ‘progressive’ ever done for Her Excellency?

And Father Zeus knows best about SECWAR M. K. Albright!

Happy days.

Bizonia Not Yet Ruled Out!

2009-05-30T18:46:00.004+01:00

I think two-states is impossible. It's seeming like everyone in Israel agrees. Only Palestinians, and only Palestinians on the US payroll seem to doubt this. But why not begin preparing for the possibility that somehow or other this dream of two states will not happen?

Two states remains a perfectly viable solution of the Palestine Puzzle, as long as one understands "two states" in a hard-nosed and mushfree Wohlstetteter-Rabbîn-‘Inbar [*] kind of way:

[Prof. ‘Inbar] recalled that he had published a book about Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister who concluded the Oslo Agreement with Yasser Arafat’s PLO back in 1993, and said, “Even Rabin’s formula was always ‘land for security’… What Rabin wanted was a tyrant in power in Palestine. But he couldn’t get an effective one.”

Just so. BINGO! Give that gentleman a cigar, Mr. Bones!

Find and install an effective tyrant, and -- hey, presto! there you are. You can have your two states and you can even have one of them be prescriptively Zionistical and democratic (pretty much) simultaneously -- PROVIDED that the other one is a competent dictatorship that can endure.

Empathy fans may not much care for the proviso, but there is no need to agree with them if they cannot get past reciting "Tyranny cannot possibly be competent or endure" as a supposedly self-evident proposition. At the mantra-recitation level, "Sure it can, look at Mubárak!" is response enough. AE calls the Cairo régime "a dictatorship," which is clearly correct, and who can doubt that stamina has been exhibited by it? What a pity for certain interested parties that the good general should not be a native and local of Palestine! (Perhaps there is a cousin or nephew?)

It is plain from the account of the interview that Prof. ‘Inbar thinks that he and M. de Nétanyahou and le parti Lîkoud in general are sitting in the catbird seat at the moment. Not so clear is how he supposes that they will stay there for the next couple of centuries. Still, even an amateur can guess. The easiest and most eligible guess, based on the words here attributed to him, is that Prof. ‘Inbar supposes that sooner or later the strongman candidate that the late Gen. Rabbîn so regrettably failed to discover will turn up and be installed.

Something has to turn up, anyway, if that zillion-times reiterated dichotomy of "Either not a proper Jewish State® or not a proper democracy" is to be evaded. Messrs. les lîkoudiens show every sign of thinking that it can be evaded: could there be something that they know and we kibitzers have overlooked?

Happy days.

___
[*] Is this the same way as that of our holy Homeland’s own Ambassador J. J. Kirkpatrick?

Not quite, because unless I misremember, the GOP neocomradess recommended her ‘authoritarians’ on a temporary basis. Of course as a diplomatic term of art in a suitable context, ‘temporary’ could mean, say, 417 years and eight months, but JJK does seem to have expected her clients, most Latin American, to succumb to liberalism and democracy reasonably quickly.

"Believing they could be led into democracy by example," say the wikipædiatricians , though without specifying any time frame.

(( In the hypothetical two-state Palestine, there would presumably be no pernicious ‘example’ anywhere in the vicinity near enough to become a seriously destabilizing -- that is to say, deauthoritarianizing or tyrannicidal -- factor. But God knows best. ))

O God! O Cæsarea!

2009-05-28T20:24:00.006+01:00

Your HTML cannot be accepted: Must be at most 4,096 characters

O Mars! O Machpelah! What is seven hunded thirty-one (731) between e-friends? And why could they not post their e-property in advance?

Well, Mr. Bones, that Cæsarea won't have it does not mean that the Muses and thee must go without. This way I can stick in a couple of irrelevant goodies for print-challenged MacLuhanoids.

... the title of this op-ed, "Obama in Netanyahu’s Web" ... will necessarily enflame anti-Semitism on the web.

Well, of course no person of prudence dare dispute about such a claim until she gets well up to speed on GPCR peptide ligands. ("Who?")

Turning from future necessities to facts of observation immediately at hand, however, it looks as if the portion of the web immediately adjacent to the New York Times Company has minor inflammation problems already.

This keyboard was reading through the comments on Mr. Cohen’s op-ed in its accustomed way, top to bottom by "Reader Recommendations," and was surprised to find that this scribble, the first of a Hyperzionistical tenor to be encountered, came in no higher than twelfth. (As of 05/28/2009 12:41PM.)

The first eleven were all rooting for Team Cohen, some of them rather witlessly. The state of mind that finds it worthwhile to lift a finger to click approval of an analysis like "I agree with your editorial completely" -- item #3 by popularity, #7 by chronology, here reproduced in full -- eludes me. Enough to make you wonder about "Rochester Hills, Michigan" a little, that is!

Myself, I wonder more about Manhattan Island, New York.

After a certain amount of wondering, I have tentatively concluded that we have here no adequate evidence that the New York Times is not still the local Jewish fishwrap in those parts, only that the finger-click approval artists must be a different crowd almost entirely from hard-copy locals and natives [*].

UPDATE: as of 05/28/2009 02:47PM the NYTC management and staff announce "Comments are no longer being accepted." But an attempt to review the data points by "Editor's Selections" still yields "There are no comments in this view." Furthermore, when the race was called because of I-know-not-what, the "JG, Caesarea" effort, #5 chronologically, had risen to tenth place from twelfth.

Could the track management have been afraid the still pretty dark horse was going to sweep on to victory? It seems improbable.

Happy days.

(( Not to dodge the article’s substance altogether lest one look like a craven appeaser: is it really at all likely that Mr. Cohen was thinking of the electronic ‘web’ when he allegedly ventured into political entymology? Indeed, didn’t the arachnoid web come from some NYTC headline editor rather than from the author? Boo-boos of that type happen all the time nowadays. It must be really tough for the gentry to engage competent and reliable servants nowadays!

(( As an Eng. Dept. or Comp. Lit. conceit to toy with, ‘web’ is admirable and right up the present keyboard’s alley. Yet if I were to set up as toyer-with, Mr. Roger Cohen would get no more credit for my verbal plaything than he deserves -- none at all. ))

___
[*] The NYTC flagship publication has recently started to divide like a peptide-crazed amœba

into a "Global Edition" and a "U. S. Edition." For a while it looked as if Mr. Cohen had been banished -- promoted? -- to the former exclusively. Neocomrade Herr Prof. Dr. M. Peretz of H*rv*rd even mistakenly inferred that he had got the boot altogether.

(( I’d supply the reference, except that the software over at The New Republican seems unable to find anything at all in the archives just now: "Thank you for coming to The New Republic! We are still trying to work out the kinks of our new website and ask for your patience while we move all of our content to the new location." Oh, well. ))

In fact, Mr. Roger is still around, and still around in the neighborhood as well as in the Gesamtganzweltall. The only distinction this keyboard can perceive is that he runs third in the Op-Ed Sweepstakes at the breakfast table of Joe Tweedledumbovitz and Archie Bunker, whereas Mynheer van Tweedledee and Mr. Tony Judt are implicitly solicited to read Roger Cohen first and foremost.

Whether or not that fine shade of difference means anything of any importance must await further research, but meanwhile it would be helpful to amateur social-scientisers like the present keyboard if the NYTC were to indicate which version of the corporate product each finger-clicker is clicking about. For all one knows with complete certainty, poor #7/#3 may be a resident of Beirut or the Bronx irrelevantly marooned in Rochester Hills MI when his one-hoss shay broke down.

"a fact of life because of, well, the Americans"

2009-05-27T11:01:00.001+01:00

Has Señorito S. de Rosnér learned its political metaphysics lesson -- that 'linkage' is not to be reified -- or not?

About half and half, it look like: the pupil concedes that "It’s a fact of life because of, well, the Americans who believe in it."

Thus the substantive point is yielded. But consider the wistful tone of the concession: Oh, that our philosophy pupil lived on some other planet or in some other universe where facts and life are separated with greater ‘seemliness’! [1] [2] A Planet Beulah where facts are FACTS, goddammit!, and utterly cannot be "socially constructed" by low-life North American liberals and democrats and Democrats. Some blessèd Neualtland where non-linkage is an immutable fact as plain as potatoes and Original Sin [3] and not even in the lowest depths of tribal pond scum and ideological trailer trash can anybody so depraved as to attempt to perpetrate a linkage be discovered.

Alternatively, the señorito nuevo might conceivably settle for parity in linkage here on Terra, a correlation of farces such that the Tel Avîv régime pols have as much right and power to join together and put asunder as the pols of Rancho Crawford and Cook County. This, however, is only an off-the-cuff remark by the present keyboard that begins to look dubious only fifteen seconds after I have scribbled it down, for would not native and (non-Zionist) local pols be instantly wanting to play too if any such rules of the game were adopted? A world in which Islamic Resistance Movements and God Parties can link and dissever with impunity scarcely bears thinking about -- not even to mention the evil Qommies . . . .

On the practical rather than speculative level, though, I suspect the señorito and his ideobuddies will manage to cope. The long-term crisis management proposed by their M. de Ya‘alôn looks about as sure-fire and fool-proof as merely human contrivances can reasonably hope to be.

Its only obvious weakness is the fact that a dhimmí like the present keyboard has got wind of it at all. There is bound to be trouble with those linkage-crazed Obamacrat fiends if a policy of "maintain and strengthen (our) interests while managing the conflict, and working towards stabilization in the distant future" is frankly avowed. The fiends have a relatively short time horizon, not located much farther off than January 2017 at the utmost. Still, to let them know in May 2009 that one proposes to stall them for over seven years can scarcely fail to be counterproductive.

If the Hyperzionistical crew would stop printin’ their clever schemes in the newspapers and just DO them in stealth and silence, however, the prospects for success strike me as excellent. [3]

"Softly, softly, catchee monkey!"

If one takes the Ya‘alôn Plan™ as one’s overarchin’ strategy for Jewish Statism, then the metaphysics of ‘linkage’ will be seen in a quite different perspective than the present señorito’s. If a Ya‘alônite, one certainly does not want linkage and nonlinkage to be brute facts -- it would be absurd to want that. What one wants is for them to be talkin’ points. Furthermore, one ought to prep oneself to talk them either way. To talk them anywhich way that conduces to still more prevarication and delay. To run out the clock on Team Obama with linkage chatter, as it were.

A Señorito S. de Rosnér may well find all this philosophically disquietin’, insofar as it lies at the opposite pole from Rosnerian reification. ‘Linkage’ is to mean no more than Tel Avîv's commissar for foreign affairs chooses that it should mean, and there can be no guarantee that she will not change her mind what that meanin’ is between now and sundown on Thursday. "Everything solid melts into air," as Whazzizname used to say. [5] Though, as I began by noting, the neocomrade does admit that linkages and nonlinkages are not really quite as solid as platinum and potatoes, he is not happy about havin’ to make the admission, and therefore seems unlikely to take to ya‘alônicatin’ with blithe abandon.

I suppose the Hyperzionistical crowd in general will be divided in their feelin’s about linkage-as-prevarication versus linkage-as-fact. M. de Ya‘alôn himself speaks of "strategy," and at the strategic level his superiority over reifiers and wannabe reifiers is indisputable. At any rate, I cannot think of any plausible way of disputing it. Consider: if linkages and nonlinkages be socially constructed, if they are entities that can be invented rather than merely sit there and sog ‘objectively’ as they await discovery, the strategist has a powerful weapon at her disposal that would not be available on the alternative hypothesis.

This strikes me as so obvious a good thing that it overwhelms its own reverse, a negative flip side which does exist but amounts to no more than that what has been constructed by man can by man be dismantled. The nonlinkage between Occupied Palestine and neo-Muslim Iran that Neocomrade S. Rosner and many others desiderate cannot be relied upon as permanent. There may exist no particular reason the nonlinkage should melt into air this week or this month or this year, yet it is in principle a meltable-into-air sort of thing. (For us philosophical and critical Ya‘alônites, that is.)

Here in Greater Anglosaxonia, this peculiar class of evanescent entities may be slightly less alarming than it is to alien outsiders. We have been told, after all, that "Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests." Specifically in the Heimatland Gottes, there is Washington's Farewell Address: "[N]othing is more essential, than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular Nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated ...."

Plainly M. le général de Ya‘alôn thinks so too, although, like Lord Palmerstone, he speaks of "interests" rather than of "feelings" -- language which perhaps makes Y. and P. (very) slightly more reificatory than General Washington was. [6] [7]

Happy days.

___
[1] Could the philosophy pupil be an M.I.T. chauvinist or victim of so-called "physics envy"? A neo-Cartesian, in the sense that animals would be much more satisfactory to Neocomrade S. Rosner if they really were made of clockwork instead of meat?

[2] As ever, ‘seemly’ and its verbal cousins are used with the gracious nonpermission of Her Imperial Highness, Jennifer Princess Neoterica of Outer Pajamastán.

[3] "The ancient masters of religion ... began with the fact of sin--a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or no man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing. But certain religious leaders in London, not mere materialists, have begun in our day not to deny the highly disputable water, but to deny the indisputable dirt."

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1909, second paragraph of Chapter Two. (P. 24 of the Googleswipe.)

[4] Mais que sçay-je?

[5] Alle festen eingerosteten Verhältnisse mit ihrem Gefolge von altehrwürdigen Vorstellungen und Anschauungen werden aufgelöst, alle neugebildeten veralten, ehe sie verknöchern können. Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft, alles Heilige wird entweiht, und die Menschen sind endlich gezwungen, ihre Lebensstellung, ihre gegenseitigen Beziehungen mit nüchternen Augen anzusehen. [ p. 465 ]

[6] Considering its date, that Presidential reference to the cultivation of feelings is quite remarkable--almost as improbable as an Encomium to Empathy from the same source would be.

Yet I dare say there is no sound reason to suppose His Excellency had fallen for Jean-Jacques all across the board. Perhaps in Century XVIII feelings were considered somewhat less perishable than they are in 2009? (This is the sort of puzzle that one dearly wishes historians of thought treated better than they seem able to do.)

[7] An objector may object that a ‘linkage’ of issues is not the same thing as an alliance of States. Very true, but I take it that what applies to the latter applies to the former as well a fortiori. An ‘alliance’ or ‘attachment’ looks and sounds much more solidly thinglike than a mere ‘linkage’, does it not? And yet Washington and Palmerstone could contemplated the melting away of alliances and attachments into air with equanimity!

Miller's Tail

2009-05-26T13:12:00.004+01:00

Now here -- down to, but not including the neocomrade’s bottom line -- is a cool, clear steel-claptrap mind at work, Mr. Bones!

Here you will find no sentimental folderol leadin’ to wishful thinkin’ that maybe Uncle Sam (and idiot nephew Barák Husáyn) will suddenly reconsider and start singing "Bomb, bomb, bomb / Bomb, bomb Iran!" along with J. Sidney McCain so that the Tel Avîv statelet need not ~~aggr~~ preëmptively retaliate in isolation.

Better still, and better than their M. de Nétanyahou [1] has been able to manage, is the absence of what we may call the Higher Sentimentalism. Neocomrade A. H. Miller does not waste the time of us insignificant dhimmís with crude mob-appeal stuff like "Western civilization will have failed if Iran is allowed to develop nuclear weapons."

You can’t imagine how much it pleases me, Mr. Bones, to find a Hyperzionist who can actually attempt to make his faction’s case without draggin’ in poor old

Western Sieve! I seem to be a tad immoderate on that particular point, sir: why should I become angry at passionate appeals to what I consider a mere figment of self-servicing agitprop in the first place? The intellectual history of Greater Europe exists and is worthy of study: "Western Civilisation" as it emanates from the mouth of hormone-urged Hyperzionisers, "Western Civilisation" as the name of a cause that anybody sane could ever seriously expected to fight or die for, or even merely to drop a few bombs for occasionally -- well, what could be rubbishier rubbish than that, sir? I guess the reason I get worked up about it is not an impartial distaste for rubbish as such, but rather fear that such stuff might actually appeal to the mob. Oh, well!

In any case, it is a pleasure to have no occasion for annoyance on this score with Neocomrade A. H. Miller, at least.

The severe Millerite steelclaptrapness of mind does falter a little at the end, though. It would have been better to omit "Perhaps President Obama too will one day see the benefits of Israel eliminating the Iranian nuclear threat" and the paragraph that leads up to it.

Though I do not suppose the neocomrade himself pins any wishful thoughts on that passage, yet some of his weaker siblin’s might. That is to say, they may unreflectively turn "Someday Sam will perhaps admit that we were right to retaliate preëmptively" into "Eventually Sam must see that we were right, which means that it will all be OK with the Yanks in the long run, which means why not we go ahead this afternoon?" What began as a mere contingency of future fact for Neocomrade A. H. Miller himself would thus become a positive recommendation for the siblin’s -- and also become a wishful thought that they might conceivably not get their wish about.

Perfect Kirkegaardian purity of heart and steelclaptrapness of mind would therefore proclaim altogether unmistakably that "Israel eliminating the Iranian nuclear threat" is a good thing and will be a good thing forever, no matter who does or does not perceive the goodness of it before, during, or after the perpetration. [2]

But God knows best.

Happy days.

____
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200903u/netanyahu

[2] Is the neocomrade obliged to consider now what position the Tel Avîv pols would find themselves if they go ahead and bomb Natanz &c. this afternoon but subsequently find that Sam never does come to agree that they made the right choice?

This is a rather tricky question, it seems to me, and one that calls for protracted cogitation.

Off-hand my inclination is to say it depends on exactly what sort of goodness A. H. Miller attributes to his pet project -- is it an instrinsic goodness or only a goodness of collateral consequences?

Also it depends on how strictly or loosely he deploys the English verb "to eliminate" in formulatin’ it. If one single preëmptive retaliation ensures that there can never be another nuke-you-larry threat to Jewish Statism again, then obviously Sam and Sam’s Barák can be ignored with impunity. But is that scenario likely to be the real-world case? Myself, I kinda don’t think. Mais que sçay-je?

Finally, one must bear in mind that Sam’s reaction after the perpetration would not be an entirely independent variable. Doubtless the unmentionable W*lt and M**rsh**m*r have spoken of this aspect of such affairs in terms that are far too strong, but surely there would at least a small margin of adjustability, so to call it, after the fact. Within limits that we need not specify precisely at the moment, reaction at Washington would be an object of manipulation for Tel Avîv pols and weekly standardisers and common terrorisers et hoc genus omne.

Attaining unto 100% steelclaptrapness of mind and zero percent of sentimentality and wishful thinkimg becomes a very stiff challenge at this point, Mr. Bones. There are simply no adequate precedents to go by. The Osirak preëmptive retaliation is no doubt pertinent to some extent, but the difference in scale probably makes that extent tiny.

Kirkegaardian perfection would be possible, I think tentatively, only if one could predict the worst possible outcome with a reasonable degree of reliability and then decide that the A. H. Miller caper would be worthwhile even at that price. Unfortunately, such a calculation cannot be made. Or more exactly, I have not the faintest clue how to make it, despite reading hundreds of articles for and against Iran-bombin’. It looks as if nobody knows for sure.

Form trumps matter, the Master has taught us, Mr. Bones, and formally speaking, the upshot seems to be that steelclaptrapness of mind is stymied when it faces a sufficiently high level of uncertainty. But God knows best.

"re-evaluate their culture of hate"

2009-05-21T12:47:00.011+01:00

Does not that nifty Hyperzionistical "culture of hate" remind thee of Neocomrade H. L. Carr,

Mr. Bones, "Emperor of the Empire of Hate"?

Ammá ba‘da, "but seriously,"

A call from Obama for Muslims to re-evaluate their culture of hate against Jews, Israel and America would not be welcomed by its listeners. However it would be not only an act of intellectual honesty but a step toward the honest dialogue that is desperately needed.

I suppose that is the flip side of the recordin’ made by some GOP genius of the 1950's who thought the Palestine Puzzle™ would go away if only natives and Zionists would "just agree to live together like good Christians."

That will have been cornfed Ohio and Iowa Christians, naturally; nothing to do with exotic Maronites or Greek schismatics or Monophysites who unintelligibly demand to be relabeled ‘miaphysites’.

The philosopher will seize this opportunity to think of Professor Kant of Koenigsberg. She will guess, as I conjecture, that Kant would regard perpetual re-evaluation of one's own culture as the sort of thing that is, or ought to be, categorically imperative. Possibly the very sort of thing that separates ‘us’ from Primitive Endarkenment. And from all the neo-endarkeners.

I take it that the fact that ‘we’ do not much enjoy doing self-re-examinations is a plus inside the system. If the Kantian enjoyed self-re-examination, her motives would probably be impure eo ipso. At any rate, it would be difficult for self-re-examination to pin down what its own motives actually are. When it is quite clear that self-re-examiners did go not into that line of business to make bucks or to have fun or to rule the world, it follows (doesn't it?) that they must be doing it only because they think it the right thing to do.

Inside what remains of Western Sieve, that sort of old-fashioned Prod gush is still not uncommon, though no doubt there exist post-whateverists eager to show that poor Professor Kant had a mind full of invincible ignorances and self-servicing provincial druthers. Those of us who cherish the traditional gush would, of course, respond that at least our hero got as far as disapproving of whims and ignorances and parochialism and selfocentric advantage-grabbin' even if never managed to detoxify himself completely. Diagnosis is not the same thing as cure, but nevertheless there is something to be said (is there not?) for having an inaccurate acount of the disease rather than an inaccurate one, or no account at all?

From this seemingly obsolescent standpoint, the trouble with the above quotation is pretty much that identified by the amateur narrow-bore philosopher of Century XVIII who noted that "Most quarrels about religion are as if two gentlemen were to fight a duel over a lady whom neither of them care for." (I quote from memory.)

Like the natives and Zionists of the 1950's, the current crop either never evolved as far as Kantianism or have evolved past it so far that it is now around the bend behind them. Either way, it is out of sight. With the above quotee, it is not altogether out of mind, though: he still expects to score some agitprop points for his team by recommending the self-re-examination product strictly for export. [1] (On those terms, however, perhaps it is not the exact same product?)

The performance puts me in mind of the cigarette manufacturers making up in sales to lesser breeds without what they have lost at home thanks to Surgeons General of the Evil Fedguv. But that analogy will not ultimately answer, because it is not (as I estimate) the case that Kantianism was ever as widely accepted in these parts as recreational nicotine. But God knows best.

Happy days.

___
[1] Discussion of Islám and neo-Islám by the likes of me certainly deserves relegation to a footnote. Que sçay-je de celà? Still, one must do what one can . . . .

With natives, as opposed to Hyperzionists, there were never any very plausible empirical grounds to accuse them of Kantianism. Naturally the Philosopher is free to take the line that Muslims and neo-Muslims, like everybody else, ought to be guilty, that failure to Kantianise is impairs the intellectual honour of the human race. And so on, and so forth! it would be a pleasure to let that tap run until the tub of rhetoric overflows, yet no amount of elegant Prod gush is likely to make any impression on weekly standardisers and common terrorisers who find the above quotation edifyin’. It is mere waste of breath to try to persuade grown-ups that they may not be very good at telling right from wrong. (And I am not so sure about children either.)

Certainly it is a waste of breath with Muslim and neo-Muslim grown-ups. It is not perfectly accurate to distinguish them from Hyperzionists as having never been through the Western Sieve at all, instead of havin’ been winnowed out by it. At a very high educational (and socio-economic) level, the natives of the neo-Levant have heard of Kantianism. They never, so far as I know, rejected it in some great opus refutatorium such as might have been aimed at the Prussian professor himself, but reject it they did. The late M. Hourani wrote a work called Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age 1798-1939; his title dates the rejection plausibly, even though practical ‘liberalism’ incorporates a good deal more than theoretical Kantianism.

When it comes to the reasons for the rejection, I assume they will have been chiefly historical rather than philosophical. Muslims have always had to live with ‘us’ darkening their door at least remotely, and after 1789 often with ‘us’ right on the front porch armed to the teeth and, for the moment, inexpugnable. They never much liked ‘us’ to begin with, so the chances that they would accept a New Liberal West™ that had definitively broken with crusading and Endarkenment were never high. ‘We’ still looked very same old same-old to them, and anybody with even the slightest residual sniffles of Koenigsberg flu should be able to see why they might think so -- as well as why they were in substantial part mistaken so to think.

It does not help that to this day ‘westoxification’ is a very upper-class disease amongst the natives. The way the assassins of the late General as-Sadát reviled him would be a good place to start looking into that side of il gran rifuto. To what extent religionism sensu stricto comes into it is not immediately obvious. My own guess is that, in the absence of theoretical Kantianism and practical ‘liberalism’, neo-Levantine natives lack any vocabulary with which to discuss justice and injustice that is not faith-tainted. *Grossly* faith-tainted, that is, not slightly tinged with Islám or neo-Islám as Kantianism remains coloured by specifically Christian Christojudæanity of the brand that has called itself ‘reformed’ or evangelisch.

Quâ Kantian, I see that this position is likely to annoy a great many interested parties: (1) The militant extremist neocomrades with their jihád careerists prefer to take the natives’ religionizing seriously ("Seventy-two virgins apiece forever! Yippeee!") and dismiss what I take to be a message about justice than about the quality of anybody’s Islám. Or anybody's shirk and kufr either

But (2) the message-senders are required by their medium of expression to get angry too, for what is to be said of this wretched dhimmí who wants to demote Islám (than which there is no whicher!) to the status of a side issue and even has the gall to coin a vicious slur like "neo-Muslim" on the model of "neoconservative"?

I may (or may not) be on roughly the same wavelength with the President of the United States, for what that is worth. Unfortunately at the critical and philosophical level Mr. Obama's sort of credentials are not worth much. Not worth anything at all, really.

Oh, well.

"Obama’s New Linkage"

2009-05-19T11:14:00.004+01:00

Obama’s New Linkage
Noah Pollak - 05.18.2009 - 9:20 PM

The good news from the Obama-Netanyahu press conference today is that the president indicated his engagement with Iran would not be endless, which is nice to hear — but the sense of relief that this has caused indicates a bar that couldn’t be set lower for Obama if it was held off the floor by a couple of Legos.

The bad news is that Obama reiterated his endorsement of “linkage,” or as it’s known around here, the myth of linkage. He said:

If there is a linkage between Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, I personally believe it actually runs the other way. To the extent that we can make peace with the Palestinians — between the Palestinians and the Israelis, then I actually think it strengthens our hand in the international community in dealing with the potential Iranian threat.

This of course gives rise to a predictable set of questions, such as: what if Israeli-Palestinian peace will take many years to accomplish, but the Iranian nuclear bomb will only take a year or two to accomplish? Obama essentially proposes that America will race the Iranians — our peace process versus their nuclear program. Does anyone wonder who will win?

There are lots more problems with all of this, many of which are discussed with great clarity in the myth of linkage link above. But I’d be surprised if Obama himself believes that the kind of cosmetic progress that might be accomplished in the peace process over the next year will actually create leverage on Iran. Rather, I suspect that his invocation of linkage serves a different purpose: to incorporate the peace process into the U.S.’s dealings with Iran, enabling Obama to extract the maximum possible concessions from Israel in the course of his fruitless attempt to talk the Iranians out of nuclear weapons. It won’t work, but it is shrewd. And it is linkage, albeit of a new kind.

"... 'linkage', or as it’s known around here, the myth of linkage. "

That is clearly not the strongest rhetorical ploy ever invented: the señorito's shudder-quoted ‘linkage’ and its mythical-like-unicorns linkage are but one and the same toxic substance, after all.

However the high-and-dry neocomradely crowd do happen to be talkin’ sense for once, be their language skills what they may. "Every tub on its own bottom," and let's not fash ourselves that the Palestine Puzzle™ is the axis of Weltgeschichte, please. Pretty well every ‘us’ in sight ought to drive by that simple rule of the road, and also some ‘us’es that are not immediately visible. Plus, preëminently, the US of poor old Uncle Sam Hyperpower.

Not disagreeing much with the neocomradesses and neocomrades about putting linkage down a peg or six, I have leisure to hyperventilate about their distinctly proäctive notion of "around here." One had thought Zip Code 96127 for weekly standardisers, or possibly some address in London or Kangarústán where the proprietor hangs out.

With common terrorisers it is not so easy to get a snail-mail address, but presumably Area Code 212 must still be the savin’ remnant of what it once was. Beltway City and Manhattan Island, in short.

Imagine one’s surprise to find that "around here" refers to that glorified imitation mobile home [1] over at 1737 Cambridge Street in 02138 / 617, just down the pike from the present keyboard! Golly!! [2]

But seriously, Demosthenes Jr. here has a tin ear as well as pebbles in its mouth, as may be seen by substition of a less emotive noun substantive than ‘linkage’. Who would acclaim Comrade POTUS as a firm supporter of the unicorn community on the basis of a remark beginning "If there are unicorns . . . ."?

Nevertheless, linkage is a bad thing and BHO is a bad thing, so how shall the two not travel together? [3] Si erit malum in civitate quod Dominus non fecit?

The student of neocomradology will notice that the rest of the Presidential assertion is not expressly contradicted. That is to say, N. Pollak does not venture to claim that a solution of the Palestine Puzzle™ would somehow make the evil Qommies *more* formidable than they are at present.

Bein’ a real smart cookie, St. Martin the Less perhaps could pull that neosophistry off successfully, though he does no such thing in the scribble referred to. [4]

Happy days.

___
[1] The charms of the ædifice are such that it is no surprise the pet google could not find a proper snapshot with { Harvard | 1737 | Weatherhead } . There is, however, a not bad icon of St. Martin the Less that comes in thirty-ninth. Not to mention the heraldic device of ¡¡¡MESH!!! itself in position nine.

’Tis not, perhaps, the happiest acronym a pack of linkage-bashers could pick to christen themselves with! And a close examination of the heraldry suggests a somewhat constipated conception of the geographical neo-Levant. But never mind: H*rv*rd remains a private- or secret-sector institution, not a public utility, so these matters are no business of thine or mine. And anyway, God knows best.

[2] I beg your pardon, O pet google! There was this

in eleventh position. Though very overlookable as regards the core monstrosity, this picture does show off that glass pyramid thingee that everybody architectural at Paris must be dying from envy of.

[3] The Pollakian Ploy is what the Comp. Lit. folks used to call "self-referential" -- the señorito practices linkage of its own in the very article of talkin’ ’bout other folks’ ditto.

(Comp. Lit. seems to be relocated to between Lamont and the Faculty Club .)

[4] I hope Ms. Student will not be offended if I point out that the Kramerian neo-ingenuities are eleven months old and were not ‘crafted’ to exploit exactly the present correlation of farces. ¡¡¡MESH!!! seems to have affected the little laddie’s mind for the worse in at least two respects:

(1) It is absurd to make Hyperzionism out the ninth (9th!) most important cause of divisions in the neo-Levant. If Kramer Minor had been content to rank it third or fourth, he might have taken some people in. Similarly if he had stopped countin’ on his fingers and only said vaguely that the whole region might well be a mess even if the Tel Avîv statelet did not exist. (The latter seems to be the line adopted by Neocomrade Prof. Dr. B. Lewis of Princeton, and works much better for the neocomradely cause, me judice.)

(2) Boo-boo (1) is only a special case of a more general brain disease: Kramerides began as an area student, but, havin’ fallen into the ¡¡¡MESH!!!, he has taken to thinkin’ in PowerPoint® like the rest of them rather than in any natural language. Hence a social-scientistic nonsense like "I have called linkage a myth, both in past and present. It is a myth because the Middle East is not a single region."

To reason anti-empirically and _de haut en bas_ on the basis of some stipulative definition of the word ‘region’ may not be completely incapable of ever adding value -- who are we lay sheep to pronounce on so high a question of methodology? Yet we may fairly baaaaaah that Neocomrade Dr. M. H. Kramerovitch in particular comes up with nothin’ worth mentionin’.

Neocomrade N. Pollak does not, as I conjecture, give a hoot about the actual quality of the Kramerite product. The señorito is pretty clearly operatin’ on the " ‘Shut up!,’ she explained " paradigm. The customer is to take one look at that dread H*rv*rd augustness and then just take N. Pollak’s word for it that M. Kramer has refuted ‘linkage’ definitively and forever.

Well, it's a cute whore move, Mr. Bones, but naturally it has no chance of workin’ on thee and me, who notoriously cannot be told much.

Coleological Cross Reference

2009-05-19T02:01:00.001+01:00

Here is the very first time, Mr. Bones, that the neobozos have come up with somethin’ that asks to be filed under both Cole Patrol and Rio Limbaugh. And naturally I run into all sorts of strangenesses on the part of Google!

Still, I suppose thee and the Muses will be able to make out what I decided not to trouble to send off to the common terrorisers.

Happy days.

Democracy and the Neo-Semite Mind™

2009-04-23T09:46:00.003+01:00

April 23, 2009
Money From Abroad Floods Into Lebanon to Buy Votes
By Robert F. Worth

BEIRUT, Lebanon — It is election season in Lebanon, and Hussein H., a jobless 24-year-old from south Beirut, is looking forward to selling his vote to the highest bidder.

“Whoever pays the most will get my vote,” he said. “I won’t accept less than $800.”

He may get more. The parliamentary elections here in June are shaping up to be among the most expensive ever held anywhere, with hundreds of millions of dollars streaming into this small country from around the globe.

O God, O Montreal!

O urbem venalem et mature perituram, si emptorem invenerit!

Happy pays.

The Pronoun Watch

2009-04-18T12:05:00.002+01:00

"WE seem to have given up any pretense that WE take the interrogation process seriously or comprehend the value of keeping OUR options open."

Princess Neoterica will no doubt have thought of Themselves in the plural all Their life, for factional and hierocratic reasons that concern few less loftily exalted.

In the quoted sentence, however, one does not encounter the comparatively commonplace Imperial first person plural, but rather this pedant’s own personal favourite, that mysterious set of ‘we ‘ and ‘us’ and ‘our’ that includes neither the speaker nor the person or persons addressed. [1]

The seriousness with which Their Highness and the Commentariat and the Weekly Standardisers take "the interrogation process" is impeccable. So impeccable as to be positively terrorizin’ -- which is pretty much the whole point, nicht wahr? Palæocomrade T. de Torquemada might take lessons from these gentry.

Thus of the first two instances. The third is not so easy to classify. The ‘options’ are formally those of Uncle Sam, just as the supposed abandonment of ‘seriousness’ was formally Sam’s. The difficulty arises that the Commentariat, bein’ a private-sector conspiracy (once again: formally), is not in a position to possess ‘options’ the same way it possesses ‘seriousness’. [2] A fortiori the neocomradely community is not in a position to "give up" the two on identical terms.

However, Their Highness speaks only of a pretence of abandonment -- and therein lies a pretty puzzle for the schoolmen: Can a legal agent pretend to abandon X, which she actually possesses by tenure T1, in exactly the same way in which she would pretend to abandon Y, which she does not in fact possess, and would possess by tenure T2 rather than T1 if she did? (And would it matter that tenure T2 is not in fact legally available to her?) [3]

***

In a completely different universe of discourse, mark that the neocomradess does not even consider the possibility that her POTUS might be engaged in a little dezinformatsya hereabouts, with the whole "No More Mr. Nasty Guy" shtyk intended only to deceive and "soften up" the implacable fiends. ("Won’t Abú ’Irháb be surprised the next time he gets himself kidnapped!")

But God knows best what this administration is really up to.

Happy days.

___
[1] It might in some contexts be termed "the minority report WE." Imagine Neocomrade Senator M. McConnell and Neocomrade Representative E. Kantor mutterin’ together sadly against "all the money that we [the Congress of the United States of America] have been throwin’ at undeservin’ slackers lately."

[2] In the vernacular this comes to roughly "If Dershowitz, Esq., did it seriously in Harvard Yard, he should go to jail."

[3] In the vernacular perhaps "Would it be impolite to laugh out loud if Princess Neoterica were to solemnly forswear the personal use of nukes?"

"No democrat can sustain the position ...."

2009-04-16T23:53:00.000+01:00

No democrat can sustain the position that the ‘vote’ of a Jewish Israeli in this central matter ought to count more than that of a Palestinian.

Planet Justworld, being intergalactically remote from our humble Terra, naturally makes very short work of terrestrial political philosophy -- so small a mote as that is indistinguishable at the distances involved. Why, one might as well try to see a dime on the surface of the Moon with the naked eye!

However down here where dimes and democracies are visible enough to be getting on with, the position in question could do with some glossing along the lines of "Not so fast!" And one wonders why the alien publicist should festoon the word ‘votes’ with shudder quotes.

To be sure, one would so festoon it oneself, meaning thereby that by the time one could talk about plain vanilla votes with strict legitimacy, "¡Palestine, One and Inseparable, Now and Forever!" would already be in existence. It may seem a shade pedantic to insist that participants in some imagined general plebescite of Arab natives and Jewish Statist locals as to whether ¡POINF! should come to pass at all, would only be "pre-voters," and doubtless this shade, too, is quite indistinguishable from Planet Justworld.

Some of us actually like pedantry, though, at least in moderation. Immoderation in the present case would be to insist that if the hypothetical plebescite were to reject ¡POINF!, then all the inky fingers would not belong even to "pre-voters" but merely to ... (lemme see) ... to "potential but unactualised pre-voters." (I think St. Aristotle would accept that formulation, but do not feel so secure as to be able to offer a money-back guarantee.)

Democracies being at least a little larger than dimes, it appears that the earthgazers of Planet Justworld can make out something to paste the label on. (What’s eighteen billion intellectual light-years between friends, after all?) The extraterrestrial savants even manage to reduce democracy to what I myself consider its single most important trait, namely arithmetical majoritarianism, "one man one vote." Down here, of course, that feature of the product is accompanied by a number of others that are not simply to be dispensed with because they should not come first in a full enumeration.

Whether diluted by sheer disinterested distance or by factious Tendenz, any ‘democracy’ that consists exclusively in arithmetical majoritarianism is not likely to resolve the Palestine Puzzle any century soon. The earthgazers of PJW have evidently been apprised of the Levantine situation through some paratelescopic medium of communication, for they are aware of "around six million Jewish Israelis and more than 10 million ethnic Palestinians." Any schoolboy can work out what sort of a ¡POINF! would arise from that foundation on the dilute-democratic principle. Approximately 5,342,101.6 Jewish Statist locals can work the sum too -- which explains why we find ourselves in beautiful downtown Cloudcuckooland when we talk about it.

(( It is not as if one minds visiting Cloudcuckooland on occasion, of course. How could any tolerator of pedantry rationally object to so similar a product line? ))

"When in Rome, . . .," why not wonder out loud why the Romans, or rather the Cloudcuckoolanders and the best and brightest of Planet Justworld, don’t propose to let twelve or thirteen million non-local Jewish Statists [*] ‘vote’ also.

To be sure, if one were to abandon one's mind in that direction, the (presumably) desired outcome could be restored by allowing all the non-local Arabs to ‘vote’ about ‘their’ Palestine. That card, in turn, would, or might, be trumped by letting the Parahyperzionists of the world (sc., Gentile fellow-travelers with the Tel Avîv statelet) take an effective interest in their Palestine..

But then how if all Muslims were to ‘vote’ about ‘theirs’?

Indeed, why not the whole human race votes the doom of everybody's Palestine?

But all good things must come to an end. That last step looks a bit like a _reductio ad absurdum_, not because of any practical unworkability in the Age of Tweeter, but because a pedant could so easily maintain that the step has already been taken, not directly by a plebescite, perhaps, but representatively under the aegis of the Parliament of Man™ .

Plebescite-mongering about the Palestine Puzzle thus puts one in mind of the familiar trick in which a stage magician creates a humongous knot and then adds one crowning complication, just to make assurance more assured than ever, don't you know? --- and the whole thing falls apart, leaving her no better off than when she started. Oh, well!

Happy days.

___
[*] Undoubtedly some subtractions would have to be made from that off-the-cuff guesstimate, because the authority that it relies on was counting extra-Levantine Jews simpliciter and not only the Jewish Statists amongst them.

Nevertheless, it is extremely improbable that any such adjustment would not hand full benefit of the "one man one vote" gimmick over to the other team in a flash.

"... no one can spell out a good reason...."

2009-04-14T11:59:00.001+01:00

"Why no one can spell out a good reason [for the neocomrades to occupy Afghanistan] beats me."

With so many rear-colonels, and so many electronic armchairs for them to play Hannibal from, a lack of consensus amongst the Commentariat and the Weekly Standardisers could be guessed at two different ways within the first millionth of your average analytical centimetre:

(1) Wingnut City and Tel Avîv lack any STRONG reasons for muckin’ about in Afghanistan, let the quality and quantity of their weak reasons be what it may. [1]

(2) WC and TA (the savin’ remnant, I mean, not out-and-out amateurs) have adequate reasons, but prefer not to disclose them. The reasons might even be such that public disclosure would render them inoperative.

The second guess there comes a little nearer conspiracy-mongering than is pleasing, but on the other hand, Afghanistan and Pakistan are still more or less the neo-Levant, are they not? In light of occupational therapy applied to the former al-‘Iráq, however, it would not hurt to stipulate that "war for oil" is quite impossible, and "war for poppies" extremely improbable. If the neocomrades are in possession of good secret reasons for this branch of their colonial policy, the student can safely assume that these unmentionable reasons will not be economic. [2]

Without venturing into profundity, one may also mention the null hypothesis:

(0) The chief reason why WC and TA insist on their forces stayin’ in Afghanistan has no connection with local conditions but is simply a matter of the neocomrades provin’ that nobody can push them out. If the self-prestige of Narcissus Dexter were to be shaken by an irresponsible withdrawal, why, really dreadful things would eventuate!!! But not necessarily in the vacuum withdrawn from or even its immediate vicinity.

There is a certain affinity between (0) and (2), in the sense that Master Narky would almost certainly not make a good impression on decent political adults by formulatin’ and promulgatin’ the claim that his own self-esteem is chiefly what compels him to create the neo-happiness of Afghanistan.

Despite its stiflin’ subjectivity and hot-house atmosphere, guess (0) does have the --thoroughly objective--merit of explaining why Master Narky abstains from marchin’ on Mogadishu and a long list of other world capitals. Pushin’ oneself in where one is not wanted (but also not present in force already) is, after all, an advanced topic that could easily be omitted from the introductory undergraduate course. [3]

___

Now as to profundity, or new business at any rate, it appears to the present keyboard that none of the above guesses really captures the essence of the neocomrades’ colonial proceedin’s. Each is worthy of being guessed, but even taken together, they fall short analytically.

Rear-Colonel Contender #4, who raised the issue of why there has been no proper spellin’-out, leaves one puzzled as to whether he takes his implicit question to be rhetorical (_sc._ implyin’ that no such spell-out is possible) or real. I take it to be a perfectly genuine question, myself, although some of the answers considered above may seem to #4 to be located at the wrong level. He may not be willin’ to accept accounts of neocomradely behaviour that are not likely to be consciously entertained and advanced by the neocomrades themselves. All three of my own coarse and illiterate guesses are of that type in varying degrees. A strict scrutiniser could complain, fairly enough, that these are (causal) explanations of why Wingnut City and Tel Avîv cannot leave Afghanistan alone without being (argumentative or ‘rational’) reasons for their policy of invasionism and occupational therapy. [4]

In the particular case at hand, and as regards the Kiddie Krusade more broadly, the plot is thickened by the fact that neocomradely violence pros and geopolitical perps insist on puttin’ out various nominal reasons for their invasionism that can only have been designed as boob bait. The gold medal or booby prize in that competition goes, _me judice_, to those factional spinsters who can actually manage to say with a straight face that Qandahár and Quetta and the like are especially good places to conspire against Western Sieve (and/or against Jewish Statism) from. A child of ten could work out that Montreal or ‘Ammán or Mogadishu or Des Moines would be far more comfy and convenient, not to mention safer from detection.

I am tempted to make the Ultimate Guess at this point, namely that even the neocomrades themselves have no idea at all what they are doin’.

Indeed, that is what I actually guess, though it needs to be glossed a little, as follows: their pros and their perps have indeed no idea *in detail* what they are doin’, but the vast mass of unknown and even unknowable details can be comprehended in a summary verbal formula without much difficulty:

(666) In the modern age, nobody can be safe unless the Party of Wisdom and Virtue and Moderation™ (the neocomradely community) possess a veto power over all troublesome natives and non-Zionist locals without exception.

Exactly what things the lesser breeds without must be prevented from doing is unpredictable in advance even in principle. Nevertheless, the Greater Breeds With™ (the neocomradely community) will know wickedness and stop it whenever they encounter a particular instance, even as Mr. Justice Stewart used to do with nonpolitical pornography.

Of course provisional intermediate formulations of native-local misbehaviour that the PWVM / GBW will probably or certainly have to veto and invade against and treat with occupational therapy are not impossible at all, the trouble is only that such formulae look suspiciously verbal and tautological. Should the neocomrades classify acts A through Z as ‘terrorism’, for example, it is at least a plausible hypothesis that the real connectin’ link among the twenty-six different abominations would be rather Narky Dexter’s experienced psychological itch to veto rather than any common and ‘objective’ terroristical character that one could explain to a Martian -- and then sanely expect her to get the right results by application of the announced shibboleth to future cases. But God knows best.

Happy days.

___
[1] This is to look at ‘our’ _libido dominandi_ crew from the outside essentially the same way that Señorito Ottolenghi looks at the evil Qommies: any schoolboy can discover or invent justifications for Iranian gamesmanship both for or against the existin’ neorégime at Kábúl. But none of them can be very plausibly represented as URGENT.

Knowing that they are not in the slightest danger of being hanged in a week, the geopolitical perps feel free to relax and disconcentrate their minds, with the natural (as it were) consequence that all sorts of feebly warranted proposals get offerred and none commands significant support, let alone a majority or consensus.

[2] I see that is worded so as to bring the Huntin’tonian Clashism™ product to mind at once. Though Uncle Sam Jr. and I agree in pooh-poohing economic factors, Harvard Yard Brand ‘civilizational’ neo-baloney is itself useless and worthless.

[3] The Commentariat gentry are sufficiently paracademic / pseudacademic to spot the difficulty with the analogy: obviously Narky Dexter would not be sittin’ at Kábúl or in the Postinternational Zone of the former al-‘Iráq refusin’ to be dislodged unless he had already mastered the contents of Invasionism 3410, the graduate seminar. Or learned how to impose himself on natives and locals from scratch by a course of private study.

[4] Guess (1) is slightly peculiar from this point of view: neocomradely violence pros and geopolitical perps would, as I have conceived their case, be aware of their own secret reasons. The fact that it would be counterproductive for WC and TA to be frank in public has no tendency to demote their rational reasons to causal factors. However, everybody outside the charmed circle of Secret Sharers can have no reliable basis from which to evaluate invasionistical reasons _quâ_ reasons.

Byzantine and neo-Levantine conspiratorialism once again easily seeps in, I fear, should the student attempt to do anything with Guess (1) beyond barely entertain it. Any attempt to speculate _ab externo_ and in detail what Secret Sharers are up to is positively asking for trouble, yet to suppose the SS to be secretly sharin’ some Rumsfeld-worthy "known unknown" that is in effect predestined to remain a known unknowable _in saecula saeculorum amen_ . . . . --well, it is not difficult to see the analytical unsatisfactoriness of that plan!

Maybe Gospodin Minister Liebermann is More Cuddly Than He's Painted?

2009-04-03T15:35:00.001+01:00

The new foreign minister of The Jewish State™ [1] has has been rapturously received in Hyperzionistal circles, with Pipes Minor takin’ the cake, me judice. His title runs "Avigdor Lieberman's Brilliant Debut" and as to the substance ... well, go enjoy it for yourself. "If you can't say anything nice &c."

To be fair, Dr. Pipesides doesn't spend much time gushin’ nicenesses about his new hero, he mostly quotes from His Excellency's inaugural address to TJS™ Foreign Ministry employees, a document which has to be seen to be reviled. Here again you must not let me, or even D. Richardovitch Pipes, tell you what is in it. [2]

That rapture is what one expected. What one (or this keyboard, anyway) did not expect was to discover the existence of what might be termed a moderate wing of Hyperzionism, as opposed to the mad-dog or Pipesovitchian wing. I detect this phenomenon in an account of A. Lieberman offered by a certain R. O. Freedman under an e-banner emblazoned with the Name of H*rv*rd.

Right or wrong about other matters, Prof. Freedman does insist on one point that appears to be merely factual and was unknown to me before just now:

Lieberman’s plan to deal with the Israeli Arabs, which some commentators both in Israel and abroad have called ‘racist’, involves giving the Israeli Arabs a choice. Either they can pledge loyalty to Israel as a Jewish State, or they can leave Israel—with their land."

Did you know about "with their land"? I never heard of it myself, but admittedly I do not follow the Palestine Puzzle with undivided attention. Given the Ivy League credentials, who can doubt that the R. O. Freedman allegation is accurate? Certainly not I!

Though this angle is new to me, I have encountered a number of apologists for Hyperzion who tried to make Gospodin Minister Lieberman look not quite so bad by pointing out that non-Gentile Israëlis who refuse the proposed loyalty oath would be expelled too. If both these mitigations of the Lieberman Plan are true and apply simultaneously, one must wonder whether treacherous soi-disant Jewish expellees would get to take their land along too. (As a practical matter, what land would they take, exactly?)

Prof. R. O. Freedman does not raise that question himself; he does not mention that the shibboleth is to be administered to all of the Tel Avîv government’s subjects. Even more puzzlingly, after introducing that "with their land" as if it made a great deal of difference, he goes on to maintain that, like Gospodin Minister Lieberman, the population transfers of Century XX have been unduly deprecated:

[T]here have been cases of population transfers following wars caused by nationality conflicts. Indeed, compared to the expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia and Poland after World War Two, or even the exchange of Greeks and Turks in 1923 following the failed Greek invasion of Ottoman Anatolia, Lieberman’s idea is far more gentle.

In the cases cited, there was no question of "with their land" in the Lieberman Plan sense. International boundaries may or may not have been readjusted simultaneously, but that process was quite independent of the ethnic cleansings. R. O. Freedman does not indicate whether he supposes that "with their land" is a qualification that makes the Lieberman Plan for the neo-Levant kinder and gentler than the crude and summary proceedings of Old Europe. The first time through his article, I took for granted that ‘gentler’ only meant that the number of patients to be treated would be far smaller. After re-reading, I see that "with their land" might have been intended as well. But it still seems a bit odd that R. O. Freedman does not say this expressly. His general intention of apologizing for the new Tel Avîv government in advance is unmistakable: I should have expected him to dilate at some length on the gentleness of "with their land," that being, as far as I know, a Liebermanian gentleness that has not been publicized widely. (I apologize if it is really the case that everybody has heard of this but me, but I am not so completely inattentive to the Palestine Puzzle as to think that likely.)

Even "with their land" is not the primary attempted mitigation of A. Lieberman, however. I put it first because it more a factual question than is Gentleness Number One, the mitigation that comes first in R. O. Freedman's own enumeration:

There are two major challenges which Lieberman poses to the Netanyahu government. The first is the question of how strongly he will pursue the secularist themes that permeated his campaign. Pushing that agenda could lead either his party, or Shas, with which it has been in conflict over religious issues, to leave the government. The second issue is Lieberman’s call for a transfer of territory [&c. &c.]

From the customer standpoint, this question of secularist themes amounts to this: we are solicited to think of A. Lieberman primarily as a defender of the interests of recent ex-Soviet immigrants to The Jewish State™ and only secondarily of his acccomplishments as a forceful speaker of Arabic, despite the well-known fact that His Excellency and his party campaigned on the basis of the latter. R. O. Freedman elucidates

Issues of conversion and civil marriage are central to Israel’s Russian immigrant community. A reported 300,000 of the one million Russians in Israel are not Jewish according to Jewish law, and Lieberman put their status at the center of his campaign.

Here again I defer to R. O. Freedman and the august presumptive authority of "Middle East Strategy at Harvard" as regards the facts. The non-factual aspect preponderates, however: whether the foreign customer prefers to buy A. Lieberman as a gentle defender of self-displaced ethnic Russians rather than ... well, you must know the hostile account of His Excellency in that ‘Arabophone’ capacity of his! After accepting all the facts as alleged by R. O. Freedman, the question remains which set of facts about A. Lieberman is to be regarded as more important, and that is not itself a factual question

Being myself a thoroughly foreign customer with very little interest in the internal squabbles of The Jewish State™ or of universal Hyperzionism, I take Gospodin Minister Lieberman to be defined rather by his declared international enemies than by his local Israëli clientele. It is, after all, foreign affairs that His Excellency holds the portfolio of, a portfolio that seems unlikely to have been his second or third choice. To buy the product that Prof. R. O. Freedman undertakes to vend therefore strikes me as comparable to reassuring the Tel Avîv pols that Secretary Clinton is not likely to give them much grief, because everybody knows that what Hillary cares about most is establishing universal health care in the US of A. That may actually be the case, but even if it is, professional representatives of foreigners would be mad to attempt to conduct negotiations on such a basis.

But God knows best.

Happy days.

___
[1] That ought to be enough recognition-as to be getting on with, surely?

[2] As Schopenhauer remarked of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, don't you know?

Gospodin Minister Lieberman may not fancy himself to be quite so exalted a link as Prof. Dr. Kant in the Great Chain of Intellect, but His Excellency (or ghostwriters) is definitely takin’ a stab at the gold medal: one treat provided is the 132,809th explanation of how what is conventionally called ‘Westphalian’ sovereignty has finally broken down forever. One does not want to reveal the ending and spoil the fun, but many will be able to work out from general principles and previous agitprop why such a collapse as that might gladden the hearts of Hyperzion.

"Galmud@1232" quotes a certain M. Levy of Ha’aretz as welcoming the Advent of Avigdor rather back-handedly: "the veil will be lifted and the nation's true face revealed to its citizens and the rest of the world." True faces had better be left to the Platonist caucus in the Philosophy Department, I'd say, but in another direction M. Levy seriously underestimates the scope of the Lieberman unveilment. His Excellency (or ghostwriters) seems to me to have vouchsafed us mortals a complete novus ordo sæclorum, a panoramic vision of a Weltordnung fit for Hyperzionists to live in. That is to say, His Excellency (or ghostwriters) has ripped the mask off every other nation’s (true?) face, not that of The Jewish State™ alone. Once demasked, a number of nations turn out not to be proper States at all . . . . But hush, I mustn't spoil your fun!

Introducing the Washin’ton Daily Standard

2009-03-17T15:40:00.009Z

Much Esteemed Comrades!

I think it would encourage so-called ‘transparency’ if

Company were to change its name to suit its new, improved product. Perhaps The Daily Standard for both the medium and its corporation, with daily press summatorials (like Neocomrade D. Politi's present effort) provided by the The Daily Slate?

Neocomrade Politi will have written "that the American public seems to have channeled all its rage about the financial collapse into AIG" because that is what his corporation would like to see happen. Over in some yet-to-be-fredhiattised backwater of the former WaPoCo, older values linger, and thus Comrade Joe_JP can find a lowly reporter lowly reporting in what seems a contradictory vein. However it is clear enough that editorials and op-eds and "Today's Newspapers" indicate the hard line of the newly predominant faction, because the Daily Standardisers can produce that type of neoproduct without consultin’ either Main Street or Wall Street or anybody else but one another.

The Daily Standardisers' own (very chaste and temperate) rage is channeled through an unsigned hiattorial that should be read in conjunction with the other evidence on the table at Slate. Needless to say, the collective voice of Daily Standardisation warns us that would be petty and childish and counterproductive to make any serious effort to get that $165,000,000.00 back from AIG(FP)'s best and brightests. They even venture to announce that Comrade POTUS thinks so too (or damn well oughtta):

Obama observed that "we cannot afford to govern out of anger, or yield to the politics of the moment." Those remain wise words.

Of course even back when the Post was still the Post, there was always some question about whom or what its anonymous editorials and op-ed matter were aimed at. It has been plain for years that various foreign factions who want this or that from Hyperpowerful Sam think it somehow conduces to their getting their druthers to make an appeal through the WaPo.[1] Whether they will still think so now that there are in effect two moonpapers servicin’ DC and USA, who can guess?

On the domestic, and especially the economic, front, I should guess the Washin’ton Daily Standard will not be quite identical with the Washin’ton Times, and of course it is bound to be a carnival of technical ignorance by Jingo standards. Comrade Baker has already set up to be a perpetual pain in the neck for the business spinsters at the WDS. The blog blurb speaks of "commentary on economic reporting" quite generally, but it seems like two-thirds or three-quarters of Prof. Baker's commentary is devoted to attempted correction of Planet Hiatt. Like their Weekly kin, hardcore Daily Standardisers would basically prefer never to have to think about economics when they could be plottin’ the next foreign invasion or occupation instead, but nowadays they are compelled to attend to Lord Mammon's affairs a little and decide how best to misrepresent them.

As Comrade Joe_JP notes, today's misrepresentation, at the comparatibvely low level of Neocomrade D. Politi, is an attempt to deflect attention away from J. Cramer of CNBC. Naturally the Daily Standardisers would prefer other major channels of agitprop to be as far out of the spotlight as possible, even when the product purveyed is indistinguishable from their own. "Two of a trade will never agree" is built into Finanzkapital as we know it, as standardisers are willin’ to defend it when they cannot change the subject. AIG(FP) is not a direct competitor of the WaPoCo and its reputation stinks so bad already in the national nostrils that Neocomrade F. Hiatt and the merry band cannot be much tempted to attempt a last-ditch rehabilitation. So evidently it is quite OK for ignorant lay sheep out in Televisionland and the electorate to revile AIG(FP) -- as long as nothin’ comes of the revilement in Beltway City, that is.

Or anythin’ in Albany either, one presumes, although today’s hiattorial does not deign to mention the Obama-like showboatin’ that Cuomo, Esq., is up to in New York State. Can it be that the neocomrades propose to set daily standards only for the Fedguv and the District of Columbia, allowin’ remote provincial backwaters to carry on as they please without bein’ gleichgeschaltet with full rigour? It is too soon to tell, most likely: F. Hiatt has only perverted to the neocomradely community altogether comparatively recently, possibly only since the 2006 midterm elections, and thus the exact contours of the Brave New Post are not yet altogether distinct as viewed through the twistitorial mists, as concealed by such old-fangle reporting as still goes on to some extent. Rome was not sacked in a day.

Our own analysis assumes that neocomradeliness is militant and extremist by its very nature, which implies at least two concrete and falsifiable predictions: (1) that Neocomrade F. Hiatt is gonna tolerate less and less dissent on his corporation’s opinion pages as time goes by, and (2) that eventually he'll get around to standardisin’ for Albany and Manhattan (and pretty well the rest of the human race), exactly as Kristol Minor has long done over at the Weekly Standard. Time will tell. [2]

Happy days.

___
[1] This morning there is no perfect example of that genre, but "Thomas A. Schweich, a visiting professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, [who] was a special ambassador to Afghanistan during the Bush administration," comes pretty close . That Party scribbler cannot pretend to speak for the régime of M. de Kharzay, but then, M. de Kharzay is not really top banana in Neo-Afghanistan, is he? Given the current interregnum, exactly how the militant extremist GOP is to govern its colonies and protectorates is unclear, but anybody can see that Neocomrade T. A. Schweich is tryin’ to drum up support for the Bushevik Party line. Will the Daily Standard venture to print anybody who disagrees, as of course neither America's Moonpaper nor the Wall Street Jingo would dream of doin’? Please stay tuned!

[2] In light of the origin of neocomradeliness in the stricter sense (i.e., the Hate-’68 factionette, mostly academic, that formerly centered around Kristol Major and The Public Interest) the intellectual intolerance of 2009 neo-neocomrades like F. Hiatt needs to be accounted for as well as deplored. Part of the explanation, I suppose, is the fact that so many of the current Freddies and Billies are second-degeneration cons, mere señoritos restin’ on Daddy's laurels. Pedantically speaking, these hereditary gentry are not neo- at all, havin’ never entertained any opinions significantly different from Daddy's.

A fresh neospecimen like F. Hiatt is extremely unlikely to have apostasised from moderation and liberalism circa 2004-6 because it has just lately come to this specimen's attention what an annus horribilis 1968 was. And to judge from his C.V., Freddie never even began to be an academic. The easy and natural guess, though unedifying and uncharitable, is that F. Hiatt thought he saw which way the world was goin’ and jumped on the bandwagon. If that guess is correct, however, the neocomrade may conceivably turn his coat again, dependin’ on exactly how the aftermath of Mortgagegate 2008 and the Crawford Crash plays out. That is to say, much depends on whether "the world" decides to go some different and less con-friendly way than F. Hiatt calculated back before all the bubbles burst.

Throwin’ AIG(FP) off his sled to the wolves allows Neocomrade F. Hiatt to distance himself a little from two-hundred-proof con-friendliness. At the same time, he has not burned any bridges to individual AIG(FP) con artists inasmuch as he wants the perps to get away with their bonuses even if the big bucks must come to them along with some discouragin’ words of moralism and ‘populism’, even a few somewhat unkind words from the Washin’ton Daily Standard opinion pages. "Sticks and stones can break my bones / But words will never hurt me" looks like being the immediately applicable proverb.

Yet I daresay agitprop artists like Neocomrade F. Hiatt do not much relish that particular proverb, for what does it profit a man to have become chief ideologist for the WaPoCo if the exalted position does not empower him to do some serious bone-breakin’ from time to time? It is not easy to believe that a specimen like F. Hiatt would have jumped on Juggernaut's bandwagon merely for the ride. But I see I have come full circle, since such disbelief is identical with "neocomradeliness is militant and extremist by its very nature." In the absence of a genuine libido dominandi, the diagnosis of neocomradeliness is counterinidicated. Naturally the political woods are full of Big Management Party base-and-vile who echo their betters’ neoslogans without thinkin’ about them enough to be held very culpable. (And God knows best about the Big Party!)

Colonel Blimp’s New Rhetoric

2009-02-21T14:03:00.004Z

Have you noticed how the neocomrades have reacted on the rhetorical front to things finally not goin’ altogether their way?

All of a sudden their stern self-indignation takes the form of apostrophe and ventriloquism; they can scarcely diatribe for more than a couple of minutes before draggin’ in Imaginary Enemies to bark and bellow at, or, as with our old acquaintance Rear-Colonel V. D. H. Blimp

in the scribble at hand, Imaginary Friends on whose behalf they profess to emit pretty much the same noises they used to emit for themselves alone.

This keyboard must infer that the motor-mouth neocomrades feel that their scope would be too limited if they spoke only for themselves and only to the actual audience. That, however, is only supply-side neorhetoric. What, if anythin’ thing, do the rank-and-file base and vile get out of listenin’ to Dr. Limbaugh address General Holder as if he, Holder, were already in the dock at the Rio Limbaugh Kangaroo Court? Or from listenin’ to Col. Blimp set forth the supposed grievances of "Mr. Battered American," a Charlie McCarthy that could scarcely resemble its Edgar Bergen less?

Blimp is (or was) of great interest insofar as scarcely anybody else in all the holy Homeland™ chants the liturgy of Mars and Bellona with that fervently sincere geistlicher Militärismus of his. On the other hand, now that AEI has rotted his brain, most of his scribbles, this one not excluded, could be cranked out by any extremist GOP niece or nephew with time on her hands and factional spirit bubblin’ up from her spleen. A great waste of a rare and precious commodity, is it not? (Yes, it is!)

No cloud without a silver linin’, though: the California pastoral element is new, at least to this keyboard. Previous allusions to the good colonel’s log-cabin background were few and far between and usually targeted the Wetback Menace. Now we get the mus pelosiensis menace. Au moins il est différent, though Blimp stickin’ his new-found antigreen thumb in here and now is a bit odd when there is, after all, Mortgagegate 2008 and the Crawford Crash still remainin’ to talk about. (Later on there is that curious detour to kick Gov. Richardson, which I suppose must also have a CA pastoral sort of explanation.)

But Blimp gets where he’s really headed at last, by way of the Sacramento Menace, so to call it. The æsthetic preferences of a cultivated despiser of the neocomradely community do not count for anythin’ worth mentionin’, obviously, but for what it’s worth, this keyboard would have enjoyed the scribble more if Col. Blimp had taken a leaf out of Dr. Limbaugh’s book and made the whole thing an imaginary speech for the prosecution at the Neopeople’s Court in the case of "Homeland v. Schwartzenegger." His Excellency will have much to answer for, come the Counterrevolution, no doubt about it!

Now of course even before the AEI viruses broke in to wreak havoc between his earphones, V. D. H. Blimp was no economist. It would have been very strange -- impossibly strange, even -- if he were, for who can truly adore and worship Mars and Bellona in the high-and-dry Old Prussian fashion without blaming Lord Mammon and his devotees for a long list of sins and softnesses? Mr. James of Harvard was, at the end of the day, a wimp and a chickenhawk, yet for chronological reasons he could still write up the afterglow of the Blimpian Vision rather well:

Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors. Showing war’s irrationality and horror is of no effect on him. The horrors make the fascination. War is the strong life; it is life in extremis; war taxes are the only ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us.

’Plunder’ of course gives away that the morally-equivalent William James was not 100.0% sound on the AEIdeological side. (Oh, well, nobody’s perfect!)

In his peroration, Blimp piles apostrophe upon ventriloquism and asks the customer to fantasize Mr. Battered America addressin’ his POTUS. Though anythin’ but an economist, Blimp must (?) understand the traditional importance of "the bottom line" for purposes of oratory and sophistry. Blimp’s own B.L. bears repeatin’:

[N]o more of your team’s lecturing me about being patriotic in paying my taxes, and unpatriotic in not wanting to borrow more trillions that my kids’ kids will have to pay back.

The fiend Keynes must speak for himself, because this keyboard is not qualified to defend him or even to attack, but when it comes to lectures on Homelandic patriotism, why, any Homelander may play, nicht wahr? (Ja, richtig!)

There seems a gross disproportion here between stimulus (in the pathologist’s sense, not the economist’s) and response: the MonsterStreamMedia, though doubtless "in the tank" for B. Husáyn XLIV Obáma, do not in fact spend much time preaching that nonresistance to the Internal Revenue Service is right up there with emulation of Nathan Hale and Oliver North. Blimp’s ideological hide must be particularly thin at this point, no? To be sure, VDHB has, or used to have, his own patriotic snake oil to monger, the Spiritual Militarism shtyk. This product, however, was suitable only for a very narrow market niche, and, for that matter, Blimp had pretty well given up floggin’ it even before the Crawford Crash came along.

In these times even an ex- or para- or crypto-Prussian needs an economic gospel to hawk, does she not? (Of course she does!) Blimp does not announce any new product line of his own, but the plain implication of his bottom line is that "fiscal responsibility" constitues the New Patriotism™. "Away with Colonel North! Let’s hear it for the Concord Coalition! Yaaaay!!"

One cannot be certain from the evidence that "fiscal responsibility" is exactly what Rear-Colonel V. D. H. Blimp is up to at the moment, but it would be remarkable if it should turn out that he prefers some completely different brand of snake oil. If so, his most recent neopatriotism at least resembles the old-fashioned sort in callin’ for a certain measure of self-abnegation. If "fiscal responsibility" be where the neocomradely action is at nowadays, Col. Blimp cannot expect to be a major player, not ‘major’ in the way such a bozo as Neocomrade Dr. L. Kudlow is positioned to be major.

It is so rare to find an expensively educated person who does not think that the world secretly revolves around his own professional stuff that one hesitates to look this gift horse in the mouth. Nevertheless, magic amica veritas, and the present keyboard cannot help noticing that Blimp had self-abnegated already, because obviously geistlicher Militärismus has not been the axis of anythin’ in the holy Homeland™ in livin’ memory, not even if memory of 1910, when Mr. James of Harvard passed on, be accounted still alive. Indeed, militarism was traditionally un-Homelandic even then, else James would never have written the famous essay the way he wrote it.

So it becomes a nice problem in ethical adjudication to decide how much credit VDHB deserves for switchin’ from one form of acknowledged self-marginality to another. Off-hand, I’d say the thing to do is award the honourable and gallant no new points, but at the same time to recall with approbation the points formerly earned.

A strict objector might object that switchin’ to "fiscal responsibility" from the Bellona Cult is only more evidence of AEI-induced brain rot, since Blimp is now self-marginalized with thousands and tens of thousands of factional neocomrades instead of bein’ self-marginalized in a pigeon hole all his own. Yet the question is not quite that simple, when it can be taken as a humility on Blimp’s part to be only one small ancillary lemmin’ in the grand march of Fiscal Responsibility.

On the third tentacle, though, how ‘humble’, really, is a rhetor and neosophist who, himself unbattered, pretends to give expression to th inmost thoughts and druthers of "Mr. Battered American"?

But God knows best.

De Ignaviâ

2009-02-20T11:46:00.003Z

(( Read it for theeself, Mr. Bones, I haven't quoted anything because I started out by thinking I'd send this scribble to Aunt Nitsy as a comment. ))

Obviously it is a whole different crew hangin' out 'round here than festoon Krugman and Brooks and Kristoff and Cohen (not to mention the avowed op-ed comedians) with assaults or applause from the port side.

I suppose if General Holder had left out the C-word, he'd have slipped past the Wingnut City radar unnoticed. So the question must be whether whether he *deliberately* set out to vex the sweet puppies of the Right by calling them craven.

The lefty blogger who "found his speech unremarkable and vague" and observed that the C-word was (formally) "a statement about the entire nation" is sound as far as he goes, yet plainly he does not grasp what an offense it is against the toxic self-esteemin’ rampant in certain quarters of the holy Homeland™ [*] that persons of liberalism who support affirmative action, amongst other shockin’ obamanations, should have the insolence to exist. (That one should have the insolence to preside over the Department of Justice -- words fail!)

So my guess is that the General did not quite understand what he is up against and did not expect to make such big waves.

As to the merits, to diagnose cowardice as the great fault of the sweet puppies in matters of race is only warrantable if one construes pretty loosely. If they were indicted on that charge in conjunction with their bein’ so self-terrorized of jihád terrorism, it would be an open-and-shut case. To make it out as regards affirmative action, however, requires noting explicitly that Narcissus Dexter, bein’ quite amazin’ly in love with his saintèd self, naturally decides that so wunnerful a treasure as Narky D. must be preserved at any cost. And then we are home, because to put self-preservation above all else is to be a coward. Everybody knows that.

However that is a rhetorical bridge too far for mass consumption. It would be more effective to attack Master Narky's narcissism head-on and not go after mere peripheral emanationes et pænumbræ thereof. That alternative plan strikes me as especially suitable for an Attorney General picking up Uncle Sam's smashed Rule-of-Law crockery in the wake of Hurricane Dubya. Though Addin’ton, Esq., and Yoo, Esq., and the ineffable Gen. Gonzales undoubtedly could be indicted for cowardice, surely it would be more obvious and straightforward to charge them with shameless self-exceptionalizin’, an offense not mitigated by a sincere belief in their own unique self-exceptionality.

Or even, perhaps, a belief in ‘our’ unique self-exceptionality.

Happy days.

___
[*] Blogger #1 is a prize catch, toxic-selfesteemwise. What a grand show to rewrite "Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I" as she does! Behold:

We have rejected our racist past more thoroughly than any nation ever has and we have done more to atone for it than any ever will. No people have ever afforded people of every race and creed a greater opportunity to attain their dreams and live in freedom than we have right here. None ever will.

Apart from a remarkable thorough knowledge of all future history, we meet once again that formal and phony ‘we’: even Gen. Holder is free to associate himself with Neocomrade Nostradamus Jr.’s political autoeroticism if he likes, though few things are less likely than that such an offer will be taken up. At Rio Limbaugh, though, I daresay few will mind agreein’ with the Attorney-General of the United States about the cowardice of Mr. Eric Holder, if not that of "the nation" more generally.

If Gen. Holder is going to make a regular thing of rattling the bars in the monkey house like this, he ought at least to improve his rhetoric a little. It would be more satisfactory to define his contextual WE in a thoroughly positive way and simply ignore non-correspondence to reality as blithely as Neocomrade Shack does. If he does not care to learn from the enemy, he might look at certain harangues of the late Mr. Lincoln of Illinois.

Annals of the Neocomradely Konstitution (II)

2009-02-18T13:13:00.004Z

America's Moonpaper of 17 February 2009

[P]residential detachment from high policy decision making is dangerous in a White House that has so many czars and other senior players (the West Wing staff is reputed to be more than 130 -- about double the usual number) combined with emissaries and strong-willed Cabinet secretaries. It may well lead to what has been called (regarding another country's government) "the immanent structurelessness to [sic] the running of the state."

Neocomrade A. Blankley , a native of Airstrip One and immigrant to ChristoKorea (the capital of L@@NA), is not a product of the Harvard Victory School. Technically he is a shyster, but Neocomrades Addin’ton, Esq., and Yoo, Esq., and General Gonzales need not fear that little Tony will poach on their legal manors. In practice, he's only a Heritagitarian agitprop artist.

The neocomrade remains cliché-Brit enough to pretend to superior erudition even when he does not have it: that "immanent structurelessness" piffle comes from no source more impressive than here . ’Tis no grand surpise that His Sirship was talking about Chancellor Hitler's methods of government, concerning which it is a cliché not confined to Brits.

Nobody alive has had time enough to figure out what BHO's considered views on immanence and transcendence and structurality may be, so let us assume that Tony mostly just wants to be rude about his political enemies without takin’ responsibility for his rudeness by makin’ a stand-alone argumentum ad Hitlerum of his very own. Not just a brat but a sneak is little Tony.

Still, he would not have swiped that particular swipe if he admired the kaiserliche-und- königliche Schlamperei. One must assume that Tony wishes poor old laid-back Adolf had been rather a cliché-Prussian, more like Frederick the Great. Making a few judicious allowances for time and place, King Frederick II (d. 1786) was about as close as Old Europe can show to Neocomrade R. B. Cheney. Oddly enough, Emperor Frederick II (d. 1250) was rather Blankleyesque as well. Thee can take thee's pick, Mr. Bones, since both Freds were thoroughly in favour of the minimum or CliffsNotes version of the Unitary Executive™, i.e., "My way or the highway!" (MWOTH! is allegedly one of the management secrets of the Rev. Moon

as well, though I don’t suppose little Tony was ever actually admitted to the Cult of Himself.)

With his heart on Airstrip One and his mind in the Holy Roman Empire (or the Third Reich), little Tony's opinions about the Homelandic system of government cannot be worth much. He does, though, in passin’ acknowledge the existence of Mr. Madison’s Legislative Branch, sayin’:

Thus, as [the President] has identified the stimulus as essential to the recovery process, his willingness to let House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid design a bill that, even now that it's passed, Mr. Obama has continued to criticize as needing improvement (on bank executive compensation) leaves one puzzled as to why he didn't use his currently vast political clout with his own party allies to shape a bill more to his liking.

That passage would require some serious glossing if James Madison were expected to grok it: Neocomrade A. Blankley clearly supposes the Parteigemeinschaft of Obama and Pelosi and Reid trumps the formal arrangements laid down by the Gang of ’87.

He further appears to be ignorant of the authentic or Cook County meaning of the technical term ‘clout’: it refers to the extraction (or originally, the extractor) of goodies for constituents from City Hall, not having the whip hand over the rest of one’s own crew. But that error may not be little Tony's fault, since the social scientisers have apparently got their paws on it.

In any case, and no matter whence he dredges up his ideas of colonial self-government and his unattributed swipes, little Tony from Airstrip One plainly thinks the White House ought to be run along Cheneyoid lines, which is all that I am collecting him as an example of.

Annals of the Neocomradely Konstitution

2009-02-17T12:31:00.009Z

The Muses and myself hereby announce, Mr. Bones, that from today we will start collecting evidence of how Hooverville and Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh misconstrue the Fedguv Constitution in that power-grabbin’ direction so dear to the late Neocomrades D. Addin’ton, Esq., and R. B. Cheney, and G. W. Bush, and Gen. A. Gonzales, . . . and J. Yoo, Esq.

This wrong direction one may call "the unitary executive" if one happens to find oneself in a seminar room at some Prussian-style graduate school. For use out of doors, well, thee can look up what America’s Otherparty used to bark and bellow against "King Andrew I" and Mr. Van Buren of NY.

Our first specimen comes straight from the heart (as it were) of Hooverville. It does not altogether "speak for itself," but it does most of the heavy liftin’ involved in specifyin' what makes the neocomrades' Konstitution be neocomradely:

Wall Street Jingo of 17 February 2009

"With the economy in this precarious situation, no one wants to put the automakers into bankruptcy, but can this much restructuring be accomplished without bankruptcy?" said one auto adviser. Ultimately, the government will have to decide how much to subsidize the auto industry, he added. "That's a critical decision that only the president can make."

(( Well, well, so that's what they do with an HTML header! Make a memorandum of it, Mr. Bones! To get the label right on top of the textbox, thee must have no line break following it in thee’s script. ))

But seriously, the essence of Planet Neo, for konstitutional purposes, is that pretty well EVERYTHIN’ of the slightest important becomes "a critical decision that only the President can make." Mr. Madison and the Gang of ’87 spent a lot of time on the legislative and the judicial, but it was wasted as far as neokonstitutionalism goes. Talk about "all sail and no anchor"! [1] The clown at the Jingo manages to collide with Mr. Madison almost head-on, for doth not Holy Writ clearly proclaim that "All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills" [I.7] and "The Congress shall have Power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts...." [I.8] ?

Now part of our purpose in making an anthology of Neocomradely konstitutionalism is to pin down its nature and its causes more exactly than we have yet managed to do without taking notes. However, we have already frequently expressed our preliminary conjecture that the Harvard Victory School MBA classes are the principal vectors of this brain disease.

The jeunesse dorée who have graduated from the former Allston (Massachusetts) College of Barbers and Chirugeons

with an eye to eventually becomin' like unto Neocomrade Ll. Blankfein of Goldman, Sachs [2] have been trained to keep their customers, and their hired hands, and their nominal directors -- and above all, the nominal owners of that ‘your company’ burbled about in the Annual Report -- in their place. How are credentialled Big Managers to bigmanage if they are continally distracted by petty annoyances like these? And of course at GS or GM or Warbucks Industries or ScroogeBank, the HVS MBA will not encounter any obstacles that correspond at all closely to Mr. Madison's Legislative and Judicial.

Thee will, I trust, have noticed a certain "deer in the headlights" look on the patients of that inquisition the other day that starred Mr. Frank of Massachusetts: the Avaricious Eight

simply had never run into that kind of obstacle inside the Sacred Private Sector.

___
[1] Lord Mac was talking about a different question in 1857, actually. He was only knocking popular sovereignty in much the same way that Gen. Hamilton used to like to do.

Naturally as an endarkened Sasenach, he was thoroughly neocomradised avant la parole. The ‘omnicompetence’ of Parliament is worse than Yooianity itself, or would be in the absence of subtle informal signalings amongst the local yokels at Westminster that this outsider does not profess to be able to detect.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd_Blankfein

"and hope no one notices"

2009-02-17T06:28:00.000Z

This is the new GOP outreach. Find black, Jewish (and eventually gay) Republicans, move them up, and hope no one notices that they share none of the political views of their respective groups.

That won’t do. The militant extremist Republicans certainly want their own Party base and vile to notice that a few of them do not look like [R. B. Cheney’s or Judge Baker’s] America. And probably it is OK, even desirable, that swing voters notice the vast sweep of GOP diversity too. It is only incorrigible good guys over whose eyes they would like to pull the wool, but they are only bein’ dumber than usual if they expect to get that: part of being a political good guy is, of course, "dragon watch with unenchanted eye" over the doin’s of the Party of Clarence Thomas.

Mr. Justice Thomas is a much better place to begin the study of GOP tokenism than is Neocomrade Representative E. Cantor. To suppose that George XLI did not want his nominee’s non-WASP features to be noticed would be ridiculous. And similarly with Neocomrade General C. Powell and Neocomrade Secretary Dr. C. Rice (a twofer, tokenwise) and a few other individuals less distinguished.

Such folks of necessity must be few, precisely because "they share none of the political views of their respective groups." Over and above not sharin’ the views that one would expect of them in light of purely zoölogical considerations, the tokens must aggressively repudiate "the views of their respective groups" and do so noticeably, not to say ‘flagrantly’.

The con game is best understood, I believe, from the point of view of the mark or dupe that it is aimed at, who is more or less Archie Bunker, i.e., somebody who looks like the America of DAR and GOP and EiB, but has never got very far on that account and probably never will. The presentable side of the Big Party marketin’ message is "THEY are not all as bad as you think!" But it is the flip side that really matters, even though it cannot often be spelled out, the part where Neocomrade Token says "And let me tell you, as only an insider can, exactly how bad the rest of THEM (of ‘us’) are!"

Given special interests, my own prime example of this sad shtyk is Neocomrade Prof. Dr. Fu’ád ‘Ajamí of the Johns Hopkins University, who establishes (1) that even an Arab and a Muslim can belong to the Party of Grant and Hoover, and, rather more importantly, (2) how really insufferable and impossible (the other) Arabs and Muslims are. Neocomrades Sh. Steele and Th. Sowell play the same hand for African Americans, Neocomradess L. Chávez for Iberian Americans, and there is quite a zoo of self-hatin’ defectors from the ranks of Female Americans.

The whole fandango would make no sense at all if nobody watched the show. What the Big Party hopes to slip by undetected is not the existence and identity of its tokens, but the tendency of its tokenism. It superficially looks as if the militant extremists were reachin’ out when they allow Thomas and Powell and Rice and ‘Ajamí and Sowell and Chávez to carry Party cards "just like anybody else." But the effect, and quite likely the intention, is to keep the Big Party itself lookin’ like America forever: no self-respecting non-WASP is going to sign up with that crew unless she gets something significant in return for declining to share the views of her respective group.

The supply of significant somethin’s for the GOP to hand out to its Pétains and Quislings is pretty limited: only a few can obtain nominations for public office, or acclaim in tertiary education and hack journalism for bein’ that nine-days-wonder, a black (or gay or whatever) Republican. The significance of these rewards is entirely a result of their scarcity, which gives away (as I consider) that the presidin’ GOP geniuses do not seriously expect zillions of humbler folk to walk in the footsteps of Mr. Justice Thomas and Prof. Dr. ‘Ajamí and the rest. It would be nice in their eyes, I suppose, if the lesser brethren and sistern voted Republican on the quislings’ account, but if that was the chief end of the GOP geniuses, they would get rid of the requirement that non-WASP holders of Party cards be twice as militant and extremist about ‘conservatism’ as the rank-and-file base and vile, plus three times as militant and extremist about the supposed deficiencies of whatever lesser breed they personally have broken with and risen above.

The good news, of course, is that if the bozos keep on in that direction, they won’t be winnin’ many future elections. So let us pray that they persevere.

Anyhow, there can be no question of "hope no one notices."

Happy days.

Concerning " ‘Sound’ Liberalism"

2009-02-16T11:06:00.006Z

“Sound” liberalism is a kind of riot and revolution insurance, don’t you think?

Indeed, indeed. And who shall tell thee of Sound Liberalism™ if not the Commentariat, whose parents broke with unsound--no shudder-quotes, please, the neocomrades really believe it!--liberalism amidst the R&R, "riot and revolution," of 1968 and have been gradually degeneratin’ and denaturin’ themselves ever since?

" What went wrong? ", O neocomrades, what the [exp. del.] went wrong? If perchance your esteemed daddies once saved the holy Homeland from H. Horatio Hornblower and from the fiendish George McGovern, what does that avail now, now when ye have delivered us unto President Summers and Mr. Obáma?

Not at the moment to R&R, admittedly, but that will come when the weather gets a bit warmer. "Gonna be a long hot quadrennium, baby, . . . ."

Would the pioneer neocomrades of Richard XXXVII’s reign have been better advised to call themselves "Sound Liberals" instead of ‘neoconservatives’? To object that such a label would have been invidious about the soundness of others is not a neocomradely sort of objection, considering that the Venerable Framers of Kristolianity were far from bein’ such sweet puppies of the Right as one encounters nowadays, always moanin’ and self-sorrowin’ about "tip-toeing from the MSM this soon after the inauguration" or whatever.

For schimpflexikalisch purposes like this keyboard’s present, ‘neo-conservatives’ is almost infinitely superior to "Sound Liberals," one can liberate the prefix and use it to toxify anythin’ that seems to require a touch of, well, neotoxification. [1] If so small a consideration matters at all, I suppose it suggests the neocomrades should have chosen differently. There is not much for Demosthenes Jr. to do with "Sound Liberals" after she has pointed out how it amounts to shameless self-esteemin’ on stilts. But perhaps it is unfair to make such a comparison where one expression has had forty years head start? Even casually off-hand, this keyboard notices that "Sound-and-Fury Liberals" might be kinda fun . . . .

One digresses. One was going to point out that Neocomrade #12 has sagely keyboarded of "a KIND of riot and revolution insurance." What kind is that, exactly? The serious student of AEIdeology and the like must ever aspire to get at the quiddity of things. Also of neothings.

The e-Commentariat are left to read between the lines with their Leo-Strauss-Brand® Magic Decoder Rings that unqualified "riot and revolution insurance" would suggest something decidedly retro- and palæo-. [2] And so it would. Part of the self-degeneratin’ process already complained of above consists in emptyin’ all significance out of the neocomrades’ blessèd and mysterious prefix. You coulda bought "riot and revolution insurance" from the late Palæocomrade R. Kirk , [3] for Pete’s sake! Or mail-order the same product from Eddie Burke direct.

Back in the primitive age of the Kristolian dispensation, "The Public Interest’s golden days / When neocons no harm meant," did "riot and revolution insurance" figure on the Brave New Agenda at all? Well, maybe it did. The present keyboard was not in the holy Homeland during the annus horribilis, so perhaps some of ’em really were cowerin’ under their beds in dread of universal Watts from sea to shinin’ sea. However, working backwards on 1968 from 1970-2009, I have obtained a distinct impression that they were more worried about certain unseemly events in Harvard Yard than in Neocomrade E. Banfield’s "Rioting for fun and profit." It would be laughable to suppose that the neoterics have been a popular or mass phenomenon at any point in their factionette’s career, and even my own well-developed Schimpftreib hesitates to claim they were deliberately makin’ America fit for Archie Bunker to live in.

Still, unless I misremember, there was a distinct panem et circenses element present in Public Interest neoconnery that had already evaporated well before Weekly Standard neoconnery started takin’ money from Citizen Murdoch. The Venerable Framers were ‘neo-’ under Richard XXXVII at least partly because they had learned to live with what Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh and Hooverville would nowadays call ‘entitlements’. Though naturally the less degenerate neocomrades will have rarely or never put it as I do, yet was there not a certain Danegeld aspect to the implicit neotransaction, graciously lettin’ the lower orders retain their New Deal goodies in return for the lower orders not having TOO much fun rioting and revolting?

Nowadays it is clearly "No more Mr. Nice Guy" on that front. Neocomrade #12 evidently feels himself in need of ‘insurance’ of a sort that Neocomrades I. Kristol and D. Bell were never in the market for. Indeed, E. Banfield himself was certainly not scared of the lower orders, bein’ rather a cultivated despiser of them than an alarmist about them. "Change and decay in all around I see ...."

’Tis always a mistake to let the dog detect that you are afraid of, it seems to me. Mais que sçay-je?

Neotericity in general is always around to be dumped on, so perhaps one should focus here on the Washington Post before it becomes mere conventional wisdom that the neocomradely crew have boarded and taken that vessel over.

Neocomrade #0’s little ‘translation’ shtyk gives the impression that she supposes Neocomrade F. Hiatt to be still an outsider to Commentariat and Weekly Standardiser circles. Is that mere Dubya-like misstatement or is it positive dezinformatsya? And there is a third possibility as well, for it may be self-protection, in the sense that once the Post is generally recognized as being what it has sunk to ideologically, it will be, by a vast margin, the most august and resplendent neopublication goin’. Naturally the mom-and-pop outlets of neo- resent a Wal-Mart movin’ into their neighborhood!

F. Hiatt is not yet a name to conjure with, and the biographical information in [3] casts no light on the individual specimen’s Geistesbildung. If one conjectures, for the sake of argument, that it has recently perverted to neotericity, another aspect of ‘neo-’ can be highlighted. Even at very beginnin’ with I. Kristol and D. Bell and E. Banfield, the present keyboard found the standard nomenclature vaguely ludicrous, thinking to myself "Begorrah, and ’tis as if St. Augustine had found it unacceptable to admit that he was just doing what Mommy had been nagging him to do for years and had insisted on calling his final religious preference ecclesia neocatholica! [4]

BGKB.

Happy days.

___
[1] ’Tis almost, but not quite, as good as neoconjugatin’ the militant extremist GOP verb with an apostrophe in honour of Neocomrade Governess S. Heath-Paling of AK and all her pseudopoppy ilk. Absolutely ideal is that ploy! It allows adverse judgment to be pronounced without adding even a single byte to one’s bandwidth abuse.

[2] Unless ‘insurance’ be very strictly construed to signify that the Sound Liberal® steps in to pick up the smashed Powellian crockery afterwards and has nothing to do with tryin’ to keep bulls and bullshit out of the shop in advance.

[3] Rhymes with ‘jerk’. At URL cit., notice that faint, far-off whiff of the neotoxic in "Cultural Revival." R. Kirk himself struck one as assumin’ (1) that all reaction is a mystic organic whole, from which it would be improper to disjoin Kultur in particular, and (2) that omnireaction is a philosophia perennis that no more needs (or admits of) ‘revival’ than peccatum originale does. But God knows best.

[4] One could maintain with a straight face that Gloomy Gus did indeed subsequently invent or discover ‘Neocatholicity’, but that is entirely a different story.

Politics for Popinjays

2009-02-15T13:43:00.009Z

Let us begin, Mr. Bones, with the Washin’ton Neopost summatorial, filed under Slate :

The Los Angeles Times leads with its analysis of the implications of last week's highly partisan vote on the economic stimulus package. (...) The lopsided vote over the economic stimulus package proves Washington isn't ready for post-partisan politics and the LAT says the battle is just getting started. The paper argues that by voting against the stimulus measure, Republicans are betting that either the stimulus package will fail, or it will have significant drawbacks that will dry up its popular support. The article suggests that the fate of the GOP's 2010 comeback bid may rest entirely on whether the party guessed correctly about the stimulus. The paper says the vote sets up a precedent for similar party-line tactics for all of President Barack Obama's policy initiatives.

The summatorial scribbler is Neopostie J[esse] Stanchak, whom we have previously disgnosed as a borderline wingnut, mostly in conjunction with various overseas aggressions. Anyhow, look where the neocomrade got his "significant drawbacks" from:

[T]he Republicans seemed to bet the future on a daring gambit: [b]y unflinchingly opposing a popular president on the issue Americans care most about, they apparently hope to place responsibility for reviving the economy squarely on Obama's back. If his prescriptions fail -- or succeed, but carry unwelcome side effects such as inflation or higher taxes -- the GOP could say "We told you so" and bid for a return to power. If the president succeeds, or if the economy remains mired but voters decide Republicans placed partisan gamesmanship ahead of the public interest, the result could be long-term trouble for the party -- especially its conservative core, which has shaped the present strategy.

It sure looks as if both La-La-Land CA and Beltway City DC are full of hack journalists with incredibly little knowledge of High Mammonology in even its most elementary points. The chances that many customers will look at "inflation or higher taxes" and read the alone tertium quid between the lines are negligible. After a whole long degeneration of wombschoolin’ and neodumbin’, 1968-2008, it is a safe bet that scarcely a single neocomradess will mutter to herself: "Aha! The jackasses could also repudiate the national debt."

If the LAT hackess ("Janet Hook") had thought of repudiation, she would have stuck it in. Obviously she could not think of any less alarmin' alternative, for none exists, and so she leaves her corporation's customers clueless as to how she supposes i diavoli della Pelosi might manage to avoid paying back what we borrow in either real bucks or in Monopoly money. But J. Hook, bless her!, was obviously not sure that no ingenious gimmick exists -- maybe an MBS, or an MBA, or a NAFTA, or how about a G-20? -- that would allow the ungodly to do the impossible, so she keyboarded away blithely with the results exhibited above.

With all their faults, the Big Management Party neocomrades actually in the trenches on Capitol Hill are not plumb ignorant like J. Hook and J. Stanchak. They have consistently been barkin’ and bellowin’ about a pay-back in uninflated currency -- "burdenin' my grandchildren and my grandchildren's grandchildren with" et cetera. Understandin' about inflation may be rather an advanced accomplishment for members of that pack, but I daresay a few of ’em are up to it. Demonstrably a few agitprop neocomrades at Hooverville and Rio Limbaugh are aware, because for about every tenth or twelfth barbaric yawp about the grandkids, there has been one yawp or half a yawp about how the dollar will have ceased to exist well before Sonny Jr. gets mulcted for death tax on the Scrooge family conglomerate trust. It would be safest to assume that Neukamerad Obersturmführer von Cantor knows about the inflation card, but sees no point in playin’ it in the immediate wake of the Crawford Crash, when a few mammonologists are mumbling about deflation. But God knows best.

Moving right along,

Whatever the ultimate outcome, the debate upended many Washington assumptions about what the Obama era would be like. Many political analysts expected Republicans to be cowed by the new president's popularity and loath to oppose him aggressively at a moment of crisis. They were not.

Some Democrats worried that Obama would have trouble keeping his own troops in line, as past Democratic Presidents Carter and Clinton did when Congress was controlled by their own party. He did not.

Some Democrats were also uncertain whether Obama's talk about bipartisanship would keep him from playing hardball. It did not.

Many Washington assumers should have assumed better. They did not.

The stimulus debate gave important hints about how difficult the push for comprehensive healthcare legislation will be. Fights erupted over health provisions in the stimulus bill that had been considered consensus items: creating a nationwide system of electronic medical records, and comparative research about which medical treatments work best. There also was tension -- even among Democrats -- about efforts to expand Medicaid, which critics said was a step toward creating government-run healthcare.

"The lesson here is that in healthcare nothing is easy, simple or widely agreed," said Robert Laszewski, a health policy consultant.

Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), a senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, predicts Democrats will have more success attracting Republican support if their initiatives are presented as individual proposals rather than sweeping packages like the stimulus bill.

He pointed to the January vote to expand children's health insurance coverage, which garnered support from 40 Republicans. He expects a big bipartisan margin in an upcoming vote on a bill to require utilities to generate more electricity from cleaner energy sources.

"As you take out each individual part, you get a response," said Markey. "People hate government but love the programs."

A sudden improvement in quality suggests to me that J. Hatch is actually interested in medicine, unlike economics. As to Representative Markey, I wonder if those sensible remarks can be taken to imply that he disapproves of the "fiscal responsibility summit" that is scheduled for next week (and that goes unmentioned by J. Hook despite its blatant salience.) Oh, well.

Over in the enemy bunker,

GOP leader McConnell left himself and his party an escape hatch, arguing that Republicans' strategy in the future will be dictated by whether Obama and congressional Democrats are more receptive to GOP views than they were on the economic recovery plan. "Obviously the president concluded it was easier to pick off a couple Republicans" rather than make big concessions to Republicans, McConnell said. "If he tries to go down the genuine middle, we're willing to engage."

Where Neukamerad Oberstgruppenführer von McConnell suppose "the genuine middle" to be located, who knows? Most likely he entertains thoroughly fantastic neocomradely and OnePercenterly ideas on the subject. In principle, though, it ought to be possible to line up all the Solons and Congresscritters from left to right and pick out the central fifty or sixty or howevermany percent of them that one desires to isolate for this or that specific purpose, and do it in a reasonably neutral or objective way. (Where are the social-scientizers when one needs them!)

Turning Nitsy On

2009-02-10T12:39:00.011Z

Do the slaves of Sulzberger remember their undergraduate economics better than we humble? Could it be that, like us humble, they never had any undergraduate economics to remember? Oh, well, ignorance of technicalities does not inhibit the Wall Street Jingos and other clans of Baní Rupert, or the Heritagitarians, or the AEIdeologues, or (best monnickered for times like these!) the intrepid Hoovervillains! Not to omit the ever-unomittable Neocomradess J. Daley of the Daily Torygraph.

Aunt NYTC may be quite as clueless a lay sheep as those who bleat and bloviate for the Neocomradely Cause, Mr. Bones, for thee and I are in no position to judge her mammonological qualifications, yet we do know that her heart is on the left where it belongs, unlike . . . . Furthermore, today's unsigned nitsitorial is finally for once written about a situation that a decent political adult might describe as ‘worrisome’ with a straight face. [1]

So, then, what Nitsy likes about the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 is the following:

... adequate increases in unemployment benefits and food stamps — generally the two most-effective forms of stimulus. Those items must not change appreciably. Aid to states is excellent stimulus because the money is funneled quickly (...) the child tax credit ... is robust stimulus because the recipients are likely to spend it quickly ... a $10 billion provision that would allow states to temporarily offer Medicaid coverage to uninsured people who are unemployed (...)

That seems to be about all the reinvestment (sic) measures that get praised unequivocally and do not need to be carefully disentangled from House and Senate alternatives.

On the worrisome hand,

... Tax cuts aren’t the best stimulus ... [like for example] $39 billion in tax credits for anyone and everyone who wants to buy a house ...

Talk about "a short way with dissenters"![2]

Still, it does seem to be really the case that Hooverville and Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh bark and bellow "Tax Cuts or Bust!" -- either for doin' nothin' at all or else for pullin'

a Rahm Emmanuel crisis exploitation caper of their own to get rid of (1) taxes on corporations and (2) capital-gains taxes on individual organisms and (3) "death tax" on the organisms’ offspring -- not temporarily for purposes of reinvestment, but in sæcula sæculorum amen. Yuck.

When it comes to political strategy, neither Nitsy nor anybody else needs credentials:

Odds are unfortunately high that even an $800 billion stimulus package will fall short of what’s needed to combat today’s downturn, and that more will be needed later. When the Obama administration asks for more, it will need to be able to make a compelling case that the first round was the best it could possibly be. It’s certainly not there yet.

Like a lot of other armchair Thurlow Weeds and Mark Hannas and Colonels House, Aunt Nitsy sometimes offers strategic notions that are a bit worrisome. Suppose the Crawford Crash aftermath still looks much the same eighteen months from now, why should That One™ be required to reassure Televisionland and the electorate "that the first round was the best it could possibly be"? Why should not the President claim, frankly or fibbingly, that American Recovery and Reinvestment™ would have worked out a lot better if only more than three -- 0003.000 of (188 + 39 =) 227 -- militant extremist Republicans had contributed? [3]

Happy days.

___
[1] As thee might have guessed, the W-word does not appear now that it respectably might. "The economy is too fragile. And the numbers are too huge" is not very close.

[2] http://defoe.classicauthors.net/shortestway/

[3] That comes to only 1.33% of the Grant-Hardin'-Hooverites in the Fedguv legislature.

The Trouble with Aardvarkian PubDip

2009-02-08T11:24:00.002Z

Pandering To Losers

2009-02-02T09:21:00.000Z

On Sunday, 1 February 2008--Day Twelve of Year I of the End of Western Sieve as Wingnut City Knows It--Lord Fairbalance graciously granted an audience to Fedguv Senator Kyl of Arizona, who plays Tonto to the Fabulous Flyboy at the state level and to McConnell-san at Beltway City:

FAIRBALANCE: Senator Kyl, as the Senate begins debate on the economic stimulus plan Monday, how many Republican votes at this point do you count for the Democratic package as it stands right now?

KYL: My lord, we haven’t begun our counting yet, but I can tell you that I see support for this legislation eroding. I think the more people around the country see of it, the angrier they get, because it’s very wasteful. It spends way too much money. By the way, if you throw in the interest, it’s over a trillion. It’s about $1.3 trillion. And it’s ineffective. I think the theory of it is if you throw enough money, somehow or other it’ll trickle down to people and that will help stimulate the economy. But the economists that we’ve talked to said that’s not going to work. I think the people understand that. And so I see support in the Senate actually eroding. [0]

(...)

Senator Kyl, recognizing, as you must, that your side lost the election and the Democrats won, what is the minimum that you would need to see in changes in this package to get significant Republican support? And is there a possibility that if you don’t get that that Republicans will try to filibuster to block this bill?

KYL: Well, first of all, of course, Dick Durbin is right, there is a crisis in this country. Republicans fully appreciate that. People are hurting. And that’s why we don’t want to see this opportunity wasted. [1] We’re not talking about little things at the margins. We’re talking about over a trillion dollars here, and it would be a shame to waste that money. In the first place, we don’t have it. So there would be major structural changes that would have to occur.

The centerpiece of this is a $500 rebate to folks, about 27 percent of whom don’t even pay federal income tax. That didn’t work last year. It’s not going to work this year. And so that’s not a good place to start. [2] It creates 34 new government programs. It sends $84 billion to the states when about $10 billion would satisfy the so-called FMAP needs that they have. [3] It wastes a ton of money.

I mean, there are so many different things that you can make fun of in this bill. Let me just mention one -- millions of dollars to World War II Filipino veterans in the Philippines. Now, that may be a good thing to spend money on, but not in a stimulus bill. It doesn’t stimulate anything. [4]

So I think you have to start from scratch and reconstruct this to -- start with the problem that created the entire cascade of events that have occurred here, the housing collapse. And Republicans, I think, will come forward with ideas to start with housing first, let people keep more of their own money, and in that way really provide some stimulus and better hope for the future. [5]

FAIRBALANCE: Briefly, Senator Kyl, I want to pick up on one thing you just said and re-press my question. "Start from scratch"? I mean, you’re really talking about rewriting this whole bill? And secondly, if you don’t get those major changes you’re talking about, will Republicans filibuster to try to block this bill?

KYL: I think that we would all agree there will be a 60-vote requirement for the bill. That’s the end result of a filibuster. [6] Our effort is not to delay the bill at all. We understand the urgency of the situation. And when I say “start from scratch,” what I mean is that the basic approach of this bill, we believe, is wrong. It may be that there could be some huge amendments that would redirect it, that would be adopted by our friends on the Democratic side. But every amendment in the Finance Committee was defeated. Every amendment we put forth in the Appropriations Committee was defeated. I don’t think there’s a real effort here. As Speaker Pelosi said, "We won the election, we wrote the bill." And I suspect that’s pretty much the way it’s going to end up. [7]

(...)

FAIRBALANCE: The administration is working on how to spend the $350 billion that’s left in the [TARP] program. And this last week, the president blasted Wall Street for giving out huge bonuses at the same time that the government -- or, rather, that the banks are asking for government bailouts. (...) Senator Kyl, there are reports now that the Administration may not impose tough new restrictions because of concerns that if they do, some of the banks that most need the money won’t end up accepting them. Is that a mistake? [8]

KYL: Well, you do have to be careful about the kind of restrictions you put on there. They need to make sense. Nobody supports this -- the kind of bonuses that were given and so on. But I do think we have to be careful that we don’t try to create some kind of a devil out of the business community here. We’re not going to create new jobs unless we have businesses. And so let’s be careful about suggesting that all business folks are bad and they shouldn’t make very much money. The President seemed to suggest that it’s wrong for them to make a profit in these days. Well, businesses won’t stay in business. They won’t create jobs. They won’t hire people unless they think they can make a profit.

Only 2.3 percent of the Senate bill actually provides tax relief to businesses in the hope that they can create jobs. That’s anemic. That doesn’t do any good. And the tax relief that Dick Durbin talked about last year that President Bush asked for -- well, it was a combination of Democrats and Republicans. It didn’t do any good. He’s right. And the same thing is not going to do any good in this legislation.

[0] The militant extremist neocomrade shows no sign of knowin’ anythin’ about economics, so it is mildly to his credit that he does not try to bluff. He also knows what he likes, though, and therefore positions his stereotypically Party-of-Grant druthers fair and square and right up front: "It spends way too much money." What public money is spent on scarcely matters (apart from obviously existential aggressions and occupations overseas, naturally): the great thing is simply not to spend so much.

NEVER to spend so much, actually. There is a little humbug about the times bein’ maybe just a little bit out of joint farther on, "there is a crisis in this country" et cætera, but Neocomrade J. Kyl only emits that sort of noise because the Great Hamiltonian Beast would get restless and balky if the GOP geniuses were to grantise and mckinleyate and hoover it with complete frankness. "Who knows not that to save the People one must often oppose them?" Everybody of importance further knows that it is advisable that the ignorant and unwashed savees notice the de haut en bas opposition of the Saviour Classes as little as possible.

Neocomrade J. Kyl handles that front rather well, I’d say, by assumin’ sans peur et sans research that the mob of salvation fodder agree with their betters already and do not need to be persuaded that "Hoover Was Right!" He "think[s] the people understand that." ("Je vous ai compris," observes M. le neo-général.) It would matter in only a minor tactical way, however, if the Great Beast did not understand at all. Indeed, in the light of the election returns, maybe on balance we beastly don’t really understand, and maybe the neocomrade Solon does not really suppose that we do.

The neocomrades over at the Goebbels School of Counterterror and Public Diplomacy are smart enough to have noticed that their Party’s "Hoover Was Right!" product is unmarketable to the mob at present without so much elaborate repackagin’ that they perhaps speak of ‘camouflage’ among themselves when nobody is likely to overhear. Like J. Kyl, the Party of Grant spinsters are tactically clever, or seem so to this keyboard, and they show it by concentratin’ their twistification on tryin’ to get the Great Beast to agree with their Party mammonologists ("the economists that we’ve talked to") that the New Deal was ruinously wrong and misguided, no matter what Dr. Hoover may have been. Presumably after another two or three decades of carefully controlled wombschoolin’ and Niederdümmung, the neocomradely factions will be able to inculcate their spiritual Peruna and Viagra straight-up and in the positive form. Soon enough President Roosevelt and the abominable Mr. Keynes will have passed out of living memory, leaving the world to darkness and to Kyl . . . .

But plainly the Party neocomrades are not quite arrived in Beulah Land yet. One might even paint the present state of our alien and bewildered world so as to make it look very unfavorable to the interests of Big Management. What if the Heimatland Gottes were -- even at this very late date, even after the End of Fukuyama™! -- to stray down some icky vonHayekian road to Psocialism and Pserfdom? It could still happen here!

Res gravis agitur. Neocomrade Dr. Limbaugh down in the gutter may or may not have been well advised to bark and bellow that he would like to see President Obama fail. At a more adult level, there is no doubt that it would be a catastrophe for the Party of Big Management should Keynesianism fail to fail. Neocomrade J. Kyl sneers boldly at the chief enemy of economic OnePercenterdom, "[I]f you throw enough money, somehow or other it’ll trickle down to people and that will help stimulate the economy."

Ah, but what if, contrary to all reasonable expectation and Chicago School dogmatic theology, throw-trickle-stimulate DID help?

NOTE. Student of AEIdeology and the Party of Grant ought to bear in mind that a neocomrade like J. Kyl almost certainly thinks that spendin´ (boo! hissss!!) is one thing, and tax cuts (huzzah!) utterly another. From the standpoint of the evil Fedguv the two can look very similar, but one would have to be evil oneself to look at anythin’ from that observation post. Anythin’ domestic, I mean: as noted, invasions and semiconquests and suchlike excellent adventures abroad somehow do not get counted the same way in neocomradely reckonin’s.

[1] Mr. Rahm said something very like that and got piled on by Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh. Notice that the honourable and gallant does not indicate what the Big Managers suppose their present ‘opportunity’ to consist in, and that he swiftly moves on to cast doubt on the idea that the opportunity really even exists: "In the first place, we don’t have" "that money."

Q. Did not havin’ the money ever impede R. Reagan and Dubya and Dubya’s Daddy?
A. What a silly question, Mr. Pilate!

[2] It looks as if the War on Untaxed Slackers™, originally declared by Rio Limbaugh alone, has now become the common project of all Homelandic reaction and neoreaction. If the Senator will trouble himself to root around in his factional garbage pails a little, I am confident he can do better than a measly twenty-seven percent.

[3] " The Federal Medical Assistance Percentages (FMAPs) are used in determining the amount of Federal matching funds for State expenditures for assistance payments for certain social services, and State medical and medical insurance expenditures."

Scrooge, Esq., wondered if there were no workhouses. J. Kyl, perceivin’ that he cannot be quite that straightforward now that FDR and the abominable Keynes have done their mischief, goes to work like this. Naturally it is not an accident or an oversight that Televisonland and the electorate do not know FMAP from Adam.

It may be statistically eccentric to follow in the wake of the unfabulous non-flyboy from AZ scooping up the Big Party poop for scrutiny, but there are rewards. Here, for example, we find a pretty contradiction with the usual neocomradely anti-health line, indeed, with the "Harry and Louise" line of yore: J. Kyl would never dream of sayin’ in so many words that state governments know better than doctors do what patients need, but he is not so very dogmatically opposed to the public sector that he cannot deploy it, suitably disguised and occluded, in the OnePercenters’ never-endin’ quest for spendin’ less.

Furthermore, one may take for granted that his unsourced ten billion bucks was an estimate somebody made BEFORE Mortgagegate 2008 and the Crawford Crash started puttin’ lots and lots of folks from the beastly mob out of work and out of health insurance.

[4] Nor are any votes lost by insultin’ the Lesser Breeds Without!

On the other hand, I am surprised that the neocomrade does not mention "Buy American" and its slimy heretical contempt for Absolute Free Trade.

[5] I.e., Big Management will think of somethin’ eventually, but has not yet actually done so as of Sunday morning.

[6] Kiddie Konstitutionalism is always fun, but the point of it is a little obscure in this case. I guess the neocomrade is tryin’ to avoid soundin’ too much like Dr. Limbaugh and prefers not to announce that he's prefer the damn thing just plain failed.

[7] More murk, although it is very likely that Neocomrade J. Kyl expects the obvious thig to expect, eventual passage with zero-to-derisory support from the Party of Big Management.

[8] "Leading the witness," that would be called in a Homeland court of law. Lord Fairbalance, though, is to be evaluated by the canons of Outer Murdochstan, with which I am regrettably unfamiliar.

The witness refuses to be led, oddly enough. Less odd is that he sees the political usefulness of grantin’ that Mr. Gordon Gecko really rather overdid his servicin’ of Lord Mammon.

At the bitter end, Neocomrade Senator J. Kyl all but deviated into accuracy, though he speaks cryptically enough that Televisionland probably did not notice anythin’ unusual. Cultivated despisers of the Big Party tend to claim that they never saw a tax cut they did not like, but, above the miserable Limbauvian morass, that is a misunderstanding of neorightism. Unless "tax relief" is relentlessly skewed towards the top five percentiles, at most, it will indeed not "do any good," as economic good is understood by AEIdeologues and Heritagitarians.

J. Kyl cannot afford to be a dogmatic AEIdeologue about the question, naturally, since if the GOP geniuses all did that, about 95% of 95% of the Homelanders would prefer America’s party in elementary self-defense. J. Kyl's crew, mere Big Party pols as opposed to the Owners of America, have to mumble stuff like "let people keep more of their own money" for purposes of their self-defense.

I am not sure whether or not the hacks are distinctly aware that it scarcely matters for the purposes of cocktail-napkin economics whether most people -- "the middle class" -- get to keep their own money or not. Perhaps there is not much distinctness about it, since that way it is easier for hacks like Kyl to believe that they believe what they are sayin’ -- what they indispensably have to say.

But God knows best.

" Ajami's Sleight of Hand: Bush made Emancipator and Obama Smeared"

2009-01-30T15:26:00.004Z

Well, yes, it is quite true that Herr Prof. Dr. F. von ‘Ajamí of the Johns Hopkins University does put one in the mood for doing a homebrew Phillipic: Quousque tandem abutere, Fuâde, patientia nostra? Quamdiu etiam furor iste tuus nos eludet?

Maybe it is not such a good idea to pick on the GOP neocomrade in the high extinct language of Western Sieve, however, since tricklin’ through our mesh to subvert is part of the ‘Ajamiyyan Agenda. JC notices as much, sort of, speaking of "his adopted country, the United States," but nothing much comes of that, not even with Citizen Paine, a felllow adopter, and General Arnold (a ‘disadopter’ of US, as it were) putting in an appearance before the show is over. The specimen could be shelved nicely between those two bookends.

The details of Herr von ‘Ajamí’s parochial background in South Lebanon, on the other hand, have little to do with the ‘Ajamiyyan Agenda, which would, I think, be 99% the same if its eponym were an Orthodox Mussulman from, say, Aleppo. Von ‘Ajamí’s dissenter background was of a certain importance back when he was praisin’ his Boy and his Party and his Ideology for the mission civilisatrice that they have so splendidly accomplished in the former al-‘Iráq. He is one of the few scribblers on that topic who does not find it vaguely unnatural that the former al-‘Iráq should be ruled by heretics and hillbillies instead of by the traditional Herrenvolk. My own boilerplate sarcasm about the formerness of internationalzonal and now postinternationalzonal "Iraq" would be simply thrown away on Herr von ‘Ajamí, a fact which is to his credit as far as it goes, but does not go far. If he ever tried to influence his empowered ideobuddies on that point, I missed it.

Doubtless on the subjective side the Big Party neocomrade’s unwillingness to take for granted the (Ottoman and British and Mecca-Monarchy and Free-Officer and Ba‘thí and) Bint-Yeorian dhimmitudo of IQ Twelvers is a large part of why Prof. Dr. von ‘Ajamí fancies himself a loyal friend and patroniser of Lady Democracy. As with most of her ladyship's fans, present company not altoether excluded, there is some question about purity of heart in such an instance, arithmetical majoritarianism being not quite so self-evident when it tends to put people one has always disliked and distrusted in the saddle, and not really so very self-evident at all when it looks as if the wrong folks may be undislodgeable once empowered. Still, Prof. Dr. von ‘Ajamí deserves at least a little credit on this score, especially against Professor Cole, who can't seem to find even a single encouraging word to say about the defendant. (My own supply has, I think, just been exhausted also, but maybe something else nice to say will come to me as I scribble?)

Less subjectively, I think JC and Herr von ‘Ajamí do not mean the same thing when they say ‘democracy’. Since JC and I both adhere to America’s party, I am happy to accept and endorse his demonstration that George XLIII did nothing worth mentioning to make Libya more democratic. At the same time, I would not expect any neocomrade from, or fellow traveler with, the Party of Grant and Hoover to go along with us automatically. The woods are full of militant extremist Republicans like Herr von ‘Ajamí whose notions of democracy, perfectly sincerely held, pretty well omit such minor details as majority rule and popular sovereignty. By their lights, Col. Qadhdháfí has really and truly become a great deal more democratic than he used to be insofar as he has made Libya more Grant- and Hoover-friendly, more open to ‘globalism’ and "creative destruction" and all that Finanzkapital jazz. (It is worth remembering that this specimen of ‘Ajamiyyan agitprop appeared in the Wall Street Jingo, where a consensus on questions of ideology is not only presumed but rigidly enforced. [1]) I daresay the neocomrades would not actually object to more human rights and more plebescites &c. &c. for the huddled masses of Libya -- as long as jihád fiends and zionbashers do not take advantage, of course, a crucial proviso -- but these things do not by any means come at the top of the neocomrades’ list of essentials of good government.

Under pressure from the unwashed mob of donkeys, as I presume, our GOP geniuses have come to use ‘democracy’ as a mere verbal synonym for "the way every régime ought to be." This neo-usage has led to a lot of confusion, most of which it would be electorally disadvantageous for the Party of Grant to clear up. Nevertheless, they do really mean (almost) every word they emit. But God knows best.

Thus Herr von ‘Ajamí’s notions about Col. Qadhdháfí and la démocratie en Libye are defensible enough after one establishes what his notions truly are. Decent political adults do not disagree with Big Management Party neocomrades about the facts on the ground at Tripoli or Algiers or Occupied Gaza, only about political philosophy everywhere. Only that and nothing more.

That’s more than enough from Mr. Nice Guy. In some ways JC lets Prof. Dr. von ‘Ajamí off the hook far too lightly. How about the flabbergastin’ neocomradely chûtzpah of evaluatin’ the Big Party Boy on the basis of six years arbitrarily selected from eight, whilst poor B. Husáyn XLIV is damned on the basis of a single journalistic performance? Even flabbergastin’er is the brazen attempt to grab credit in advance in case somethin’ the neocomrades happen to like happens under BHO:

"True, Mr. Bush's diplomacy of freedom fizzled out in the last two years of his presidency, and the autocracies in the Greater Middle East came to a conviction that the storm had passed them by and that they had been spared. But we are still too close to this history to see how the demonstration effect works its way through Arab political culture.

I hope I managed to annoy a couple of ’em when I posted one of their e-walls with the suggestion that by that swell new criterion, Democrats can attribute whatever we like to a pipeline originally laid down by Jimmy Carter or Woodrow Wilson. Or indeed, why not let Tom Paine and Gen. Arnold be the history that we are now finally far enough removed from to see clearly, following humbly in the path of Chou En-lai on the French Revolution?

In his capacity as Big Party sophist, Herr von ‘Ajamí is well past mockery by anybody other than himself.

The rest of the Boy / Party / Ideology pack are not, I suspect, very interested in Neocomrade F. von ‘Ajamí quâ sophist, or even quâ "professor of Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies ... also an adjunct research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution," although Wingnut City could certainly do with more immigrants bearin’ credentials like his. Their interest in him is, I fear, exactly on a par with their interest in Mr. Justice C. Thomas and Neocomrade Dr. Sh. Steele and Neocomrade Prof. Th. Sowell and, at least a few years back, Neocomradess L. Chávez on the Southern Front. Herr Prof. Dr. Fu’ád von ‘Ajamí is the Party of Grant's "token Áy-rab" -- that is what it comes too, and to be a token for the PoG is no light undertakin’ nowadays, for it does not any longer suffice to be an "Uncle Tom," one must militantly and extremely denounce every member of the index group who declines to uncle-tom it along with oneself. The real rôle of Neocomrade F. von ‘Ajamí is to explain to the GOP geniuses and to their Party base-and-vile and to the customers of Baron Murdoch exactly what is wrong with the other 99.9% or so of the Áy-rabs, and of course to explain it as only an ex-insider can ever do: Escape from the Hell Palace of the Ay-rabs: One Man’s Witness would fit nicely at the top of the ‘Ajamiyyan Agenda, would it not?

Accordingly, mention of General Arnold would have been à propos if the defendant had been portrayed as betraying the prescriptive or presumptive ‘asabiyya of Arabs and Muslims. The way JC actually drags our great national ratfink in is like throwing away a good hand of cards. To be sure, JC has respectable professional reasons to be interested in Herr von ‘Ajamí starting from the Levantine end. Unfortunately his public importance lies almost entirely at the Rancho Crawford and Wall Street Jingo end. Unless this specimen is displayed side by side with the Party of Grant’s Sowells and Shelbys and Chávezes and its Mr. Justice Thomas, visitors to the Neocomradely Cabinet of Curiosities will get the wrong idea, or perhaps no idea at all, about what it is a specimen OF.

Prof. Cole’s exact classification of the specimen is none too clear, but seems to place it in the general vicinity of The Weekly Standard and Commentary magazine: Herr von ‘Ajamí is taken for -- mistaken for -- a run-of-the-mill neoconservative. That strikes me as a mistake because the neocomrade could scarcely be less interested than he is in Jewish Statism and Hyperzionism for their own sake. He may be a very useful idiot for the Bnê Podhóretz and the Baní Peretz along the familiar lines of "the enemy of my enemy," but that does not mean that he actually belongs to their tribe. He doesn’t. Like his African-American and Hispanic neocomradely counterparts mentioned, after apostasisin’ from his own folk, Herr von ‘Ajamí did not join any new club or communion narrower than the Party of Grant as a whole.

A close examination of his agitprop work for the Wall Street Jingo will bear me out, I believe. For obvious reasons the slaves of Murdoch only invite him to address Middle Eastern topics, yet what he scribbles for them often wanders off into dubyapologetics and AEIdeology all across the board. Though the aspiration is no doubt hopeless, I betcha Herr Prof. Dr. von ‘Ajamí privately wants to be "Mr. Republican" in more or less the same way that Robert II Taft used to be. Or possibly he wants to be General Lord George Will. Something of that sort, in any case, an all-round cracker-barrel sage on behalf of the Big Management Party.

If it were not for the tiny ghetto or frog pond of commentary on the neo-Levant, nobody outside tertiary educationism would have heard of this exotic amphibian at all, but now that he has croaked and been heard, the bullfrog yearns (as I conjecture) for a wider world elsewhere, which ‘neoconservatism’ is not. Forty years ago, in the immediate aftermath of 1968 and All That, brand-name neoconnery of the sort formerly available in The Public Interest might have been a suitable vehicle to advance the ‘Ajamiyyan Agenda. In 1430/2009, it is nothing of the sort. There can hardly ever have been a movement of intellectuals that declined faster and farther than Irvingite Kristolianity has declined. Just take a look at a certain former op-ed artist for the New York Times, or at Pipes Minor and Kramer Minor and Podhóretz Minor! Herr von ‘Ajamí leaves me very cold, but all the same, it would only be ridiculous or malicious to pretend that he is as shoddy as that crew of señoritos.

Even Party-of-Grant apostasy from presumptive ‘asabiyya is not all bad, for it is quite incompatible with clamorin’ to be thought important now because one’s Daddy really was important once upon a time. The neo-apostate does not have any Daddy, he is a tub that stands on its own bottom. A tub that has personally decided to stand on its own bottom! I find myself wondering what on Gore’s green earth the offspring of neo-apostates will do for an encore, but meantime there is at least a little something to be said in favor of the ‘Ajamiyyan shtyk. At least if one grades it on the curve and by comparison with.

Happy days.

___
[1] Apart from Mr. Thomas Frank , who has functioned as in-house jester ever since Rupert Baron Murdoch bought the Jingo.

Dr. Cartoonoclastes on the Fate of See-Might Man

2009-01-19T13:58:00.000Z

Q. Has Cartoono the Magnificent detected an Ursemitisch radical, an underlying likeness between his own clients-or-patrons and the zanies of Zion?

A. Probably not, but let us give him the Murdoch treatment, shall we? Just in case.

I think if would be useful to compare [Z0] Israeli military-political strategy in the current war, with [S0] Al-Qaeda military-political strategy as reflected in its failure in Iraq and the internal debates surrounding those developments (...) the desire for breadth of support from co-religionists--and even more broadly public-opinion in general-- has been in both cases confronted with another trend, namely what you could call military absolutism.

As usual, Cartoono rapidly forfeits about 97.4% of the sympathy potentially available to him chez les Muses et nous, this time by pretending that we have already agreed to the Mu’ámara Junction theory of Operation Tin Soldier, "Israëli military-political strategy in the current war."

I do not know about thee, Mr. Bones, but I personally [1] have thus far arrived at no firm conclusions about what the Heroes of Hyperzion were hopin’ to accomplish on their Gaza outin’. It has seemed reasonably safe to conjecture that they have been conductin’ war-by-committee, wherein a number of knavish tricks with a clear connection between ends and means are merged or morphed so as to produce a Master Trick that seems to involve no coherent knavery whatever. I believe we may count on the learnèd Dr. Cartoonoclastes taking no interest in that sort of consideration, should he ever hear of it, and not merely because it means that his own firm’s claim to have definitively unmasked "Israëli military-political strategy in the current war" -- let us abbreviate that parcel of rogueries as IMPS/CW for fun, shall we? -- is going to be denied.

No, "war by committee" is bound to be a stench in the nostrils of Cartoono the Magnificent on purely philosophical grounds. He reacts to the faintest whiff of Aristotle like Count Dracula presented with a garlic frappe. We and The Master start, as ever, by concerning ourselves with the Form of the IMPS thingee, whereas Cartoono platonises and parmenidates about the matter of it. From the standpoint of the conspiratorialisin’ gentry, "war by committee" is no use at all, at once too WYSIWYG for their inner Parmenides and too formal and procedural for their essential Platôn.

More practically, there is the minor difficulty that I, at least, do not happen to be familiar with the latest in MJ conspiratorialisin’ and will have to learn the Lynx-Badger-Cartoonoclastes theory of IMPS on the fly. It appears that the bad guys [Z1a] "desire breadth of support from co-religionists" and [Z1b] desire "even more broadly [support from] public-opinion in general" and [Z2] dabble in "military absolutism."

What to say of that? Only [Z1b] stands out, to some extent, as differentiating this aggression from all the other aggressions. The Joseph Goebbels School of Terrorisation and Public Diplomacy has undoubtedly been workin’ overtime in the path of Hyperzion, at least for the U.S. market, although it is too early to assess the damage. [Z1a] is just silly: all the coreligionists of the Tel Avîv statelet that are ever goin’ to jump on the bandwagon did so long since. And [Z2] is unevaluatable, only words in the absence of previous knowledge of the MJ IMPS/CW theory.

Well, perhaps something will turn up if we just wade on through the swamp:

In recent years, Israel had been making slow but noticeable progress in relationships with Arab and Islamic regimes in the neighborhood, with a public handshake here and establishment of a trade office and/or diplomatic recognition there, and then in the last three weeks it has blown that all away in the interests of "teaching a lesson" to the Hamas regime and the people of Gaza, via a military campaign whose rules of engagement seem to have been quite lax in the question of shelling of schools and refugee centers, hospitals, residential areas, and so on. Any real distinction between military defense against military provocations was blown away in a campaign against civilians in which the underlying--perhaps unspoken--justification was the really the biblical-fundamentalist claim to all of Palestine. And all or most of the recent progress in neighborhood relationships went out the window.

Well, well, there it is! And who’d ’a’ thunk it?

Planet Badger is no mere uninteresting copy of Terra, thee will notice: in that parallel universe, there exist Islamic régimes in the neighborhood of post-Gentile Palestine that the Heroes of Hyperzion were, for a while, makin’ inroads upon. Closer to home, there is only the Islamic Republic of Iran in all the world, and the total amount of "progress in relationships" was/is simply zero.

How does this latest twistification work, then? Without the crackerjack box containing our Leo-Strauss-Brand® Magic Decoder Ring, it can be no more than guesswork on my part to suggest that Sa‘údiyya and some of the Gulfie minnows must count as Islamic régimes with the huntin’ and shootin’ and conspiratorialisin’ folks. "Islamic" is certainly a pejorative when it comes from those keyboards, and, as if to prove that nobody human can be perfect even in error, Cartoono does not care for les altesses royales du Ryad much more than thee and I do, even though Their Cardboard Highnesses are impeccably nonsectarian Sunninternis. So probably we can add two plus two here with reasonable confidence.

So then, let us tentatively decode as follows: the Tel Avîv statelet was makin’ progress with the quislingization of Egypt and Jordan and Sa‘udiyya and the Gulfies until last month, when M. d’Olmert et Cie. suddenly went nuts and blew it. Though not obviously correct, at least that is an intelligible view that a rational creature might hold this side of Planet Badger.

Attempting to mitigate justice with charity, let me say that the honourable and learnèd Cartoono is at least looking in roughly the right direction. Chances are good that Operation Tin Soldier was not primarily about either the (direct) management of the natives on their reservations or the management of Hyperzion’s relations with Barák Husáyn XLIV Obáma but rather the care and feedin’ of M. le général du Mubárak. Other Arab and "Islamic" régimes are comparatively important, although needless to say the Heroes of Hyperzion will not complain if the God Party of Lebanon were to feel a bit intimidated.

On the other hand, Cartoono is looking the right way only with his left eye. The right eye of the conspiratorialiser is trained, à la Little Tommy Wobble, Mr. Friedman of the NYTC, on " 'teaching a lesson' to the Hamas regime and the people of Gaza," i. e., on day-to-day administration of the Occupyin’ Power’s native reservations. I have a feeling that Cartoono lays undue stress on that aspect of the adventure because it is so easy for an agitprop artist to crank up indignation against Neocomrade Th. L. Friedman’s notions of popular education. [2] (Picking on Th. L. Friedman makes fishing in a barrel with dynamite look difficult.)

It looks as if when Dr. Cartoonoclastes says "what you could call military absolutism" he refers to what one actually would call something like "Friedmanite political pædagogy." Thee can see, I trust, why that LSB Magic Decoder Ring is so helpful in coping with the Parmenidisers of Mu’ámara Junction. Though it be true that Ms. Lynx and Mr. Badger and Dr. Cartoonoclastes avow as a basic factional principle that Truth is never apparent and appearances are never true, yet I cannot help thinking that they cheat more than a little when they manufacture the deceptive appearances themselves.

To linger a moment on the exact decoding, possibly it would be more useful to classify the Friedmanite-Cartoonoclastic theory of Operation Tin Soldier as PubDip, "public diplomacy," rather than as pædagogy? Knowledge will not have been instilled into the natives on their reservations, and the Street Arabs in their souqs, for the sweet sake of Knowledge herself, after all, but rather to achieve certain practical ends posited by the hack pols of Tel Avîv. If any increment of the number of data points available is to count as ‘education’, why, it might as well be any common blackmailer as Mark Hopkins who sits at the other end of the proverbial log! (But God knows best about Education.)

Onward!

[W]hat happened in Israeli policy seems to mirror what happened in Al-Qaeda policy in Iraq, where the carefully laid-out rationale of Bin Laden--striking at those who strike at us--was blown away by a campaign that appears to have reverted to a fundamentalist attack on Shiites as Shiites, delving back into history (in this case stories of Shiite collaboration with the Mongol invasions in the 12th century) just as much as the current Israeli campaign in Gaza delves back into the biblical theme of special entitlement as against non-Jews.

(Well, at least Neocomrade Th. L. Friedman will want to keep well clear of that pitch!)

But seriously, it is kind of Cartoono to encapsulate "what happened in Al-Qaeda policy in Iraq" so conveniently. Now that it is available for future reference, we may in future refer to it.

I think, however, that he has slightly shifted his twistatorial position, no doubt unconsciously, so as to seem to have less patience with the faith-crazies than he used to. He certainly has not much patience with M. bin Ládin at the moment, to present such a witless simplism as "striking at those who strike at us" as a carefully laid-out rationale. That jurisprudential fandango borrowed from Ibn Taymiyya about near enemies and far enemies was never in the brain surgery or rocket science class, to be sure, but at least it made the Satan of Khurasán look like a tolerable facsimile of an amateur ‘álim instead of a mere Neocomradess A. Coulter, a mouther of cheapjack slogans.

The Shaykh al-’Islám comes in rather handily here, if only to raise the question of whether Dr. Cartoonoclastes is aware that his attitude towards the Shí‘a would not be easy to disentangle from that of the late M. az-Zarqáwí. [3]

_____
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/debates/3394545/Oxford-compiles-list-of-top-ten-irritating-phrases.html

[2] Little Tommy of the big moustache professed to be as uncertain as most people what the Heroes of Hyperzion were actually doin’,

Israel’s military was not focused on the morning after the war in Lebanon — when Hezbollah declared victory and the Israeli press declared defeat. It was focused on the morning after the morning after, when all the real business happens in the Middle East. That’s when Lebanese civilians, in anguish, said to Hezbollah: “What were you thinking? Look what destruction you have visited on your own community! For what? For whom?” (...) That was the education of Hezbollah. Has Israel seen its last conflict with Hezbollah? I doubt it. But Hezbollah, which has done nothing for Hamas, will think three times next time. That is probably all Israel can achieve with a nonstate actor.

In Gaza, I still can’t tell if Israel is trying to eradicate Hamas or trying to “educate” Hamas, by inflicting a heavy death toll on Hamas militants and heavy pain on the Gaza population,

but since it is the evil that little laddies scribble that lives after them, usually, so Tommy will, I expect, be pigeon-holed by the historians of Princess Posterity as a theorist of political educationism, yet another zealous alumnus of the Goebbels School.

[3]

Imam Taqi al-Din ibn Taymiyya al-Harrani was a famous Hanbali scholar . . . his works in refutation of the Shi‘as . . . are second to none.

So Did Pharaoh Slay M. de Harírí et al.?

2008-12-30T13:30:00.001Z

Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit defended the troops at the Gaza border as guardians of Egypt and said they were capable of taking care of Nasrallah if necessary.

Speaking of our prescriptive betters, Mr. Bones, it appears that Lord Ann Arbour has taken steps to prevent the vulgar from scribbling their names and their silly notions on his precious pyramids.

But God knows best -- and further research will be undertaken.

Return of the Hambaker Humbugs

2008-12-23T17:17:00.001Z

They’re baaack, Mr. Bones: better run for the hills!

The bipartisan community of Responsible Nonwithdrawal artists have translated their politics and knavish tricks into an inferior grade of PowerPoint® for the convenience of Barák Husáyn XLIV (prolonged be His shadow!):

[A] President Obama should consider:

[A1] Meeting in his first months in office with top Iraqi leaders to underline his support for the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) and his commitment to supporting Iraqi institutions, so long as they meet reasonable expectations.

[A2] Ensuring that high-level Iraq-related positions in the U.S. government remain filled without gaps.

[A3] Making it clear that he is prepared to follow through on the 12-month withdrawal commitment in the SOFA if the July 2009 popular referendum on the SOFA fails.

To think of Judge Baker and Congresscritter Hamilton and all the lesser Hambaker bozos of the world leaves me feeling no holiday cheer worth mentioning. Nevertheless, as thee can see, Mr. Bones, from the alphanumerical apparatus that I have added to make them look a bit more pentagonny than they really are, they at least manage not to put themselves absolutely first: the Great Job Quest appears as only the second item.

The Great Job Quest being of scant interest to anybody musch beyond the circles of mothers-in-law and perp-school roommates, let us turn at once to [A1], and worry about exactly what the Heroes of Terror mean when they speak of their neocolonial clients "meeting reasonable expectations." Hambaker-class expectations of reasonable behaviour, naturally, but what are those?

A general disquisition on the Hambaker-CFR-Brookings-USIP criteria of rationality would be useful to have, but I cannot (reasonably) be expected to write one up from scratch ad hoc, now, can I? When they are feeling especially self-narcissistic -- which is to say, most of the time -- the Hambaker gentry pride themselves on their ‘realism’ and then stand there waiting for the applause of lesser beings to end. Could that notorious Realism of theirs be the same as their reasonableness? It will do no harm for us to assume so, I think: we can always start over if we hid a contradictio in adjecto, after all.

But I notice that I am being intellectually sloppy, Mr. Bones. Sorry. Before we discuss the materia of [A1], we ought to consider it formaliter, just as The Philosopher advised us. There appear to be two major formal considerations, one about the Form of the SOFA and the other about the Form of Commitment. So, then,

(A1a) Since the SOFA is very pointedly and proclaimedly not in the Form of a treaty, it must, I suppose, be more or less in the Form of an executive agreement, though presumably in a post-Cheneyite Form thereof, some Form which is inconsistent with the Fedguv Constitution as interpreted before the neocomrade invasionites turned up. Hence BHO can just cancel it if he likes, which would be an excellent idea, and not merely because a casual repudiation would shock the casablanca out of the Hambaker gentry. The International Zone neorégime might be taken aback a little also, though I do not see that Hannibal II of Da‘wa, or his quasiministers, or the I. Z. quasideputies, or anybody else at New Baghdád that comes to mind, has any standing to object to Uncle Sam complying with United States law for a change. I understand that Mr. Madison’s rules of procedure can cause foreigners a certain amount of inconvenience from time to time, yet if we are willing to put up with them when they take the trouble to act correctly and constitutionally, we may reasonably (?) expect them to return the favor.

Hambakerite Realismus will no doubt think I just said something especially fatuous, for I have solemnly pretended that the International Zone neorégime is exactly on a par with the world's One Indispensable Nation and Sole Remainin’ Hyperpower -- which is absurd. Hannibal II is a mere client and must do as his patrons direct, nicht wahr? Everybody understands what is really goin’ on. Even thee and I understand the ‘real’ correlation of farces, actually. We cannot, however, abandon our minds to Hambakerite Realismus without abandoning Aristotle as well, and that is a higher price than I care to pay for the dubious bipartisan mess of pottage in question. If one is not to be allowed to think of war and diplomacy and aggression and occupation as questions of Form primarily, there is not much to think about them materially except how best to grab what one happens to want to grab. Yuck. [1]

Sir? . . . No, I certainly do not think the Responsible Nonwithdrawal gentry want BHO "to underline his support for the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA)" in an exaggerated spirit of pacta sunt servanda, binding himself to save even bad pacts entered into by a bad Boy and Dynasty and Party and Ideology. You are just being silly, Mr. Bones. The gentry want BHO to support the Crawfordite SOFA because they themselves like it. They like it so well that they do not want to give the President-Elect any radical ideas about possible repudiation. I do not mean that they are against Rulalaw or against Mr. Madison and the Gang of ’87 "on principle," for the great point about Hambakerite gentry is that their Realismus prevents them from ever doing anything "on principle." Far exalted are they above such vulgar behaviour!

I see you've been reading ahead, sir. Well, it's no again -- I do not agree that slogans like "Restore U.S. credibility, prestige and capacity to act worldwide" have anything significant to do with "on principle" when deployed by Hambakerites. I daresay thee might dress up "U. S. credibility" verbally so as to make it look a bit like a genuine brand-name Principle® such as pacta sunt servanda, but thee is just wasting thee's time if thee expect to pull the wool over my eyes that easily. Slogans of that sort belong in Executive Summaries such as the one which thee pulled it out of, sir.

It is true that the gentry do seem to be slightly worried at [A3] that BHO might insist on hanging around in the former al-‘Iráq even after a plebescite begs him to go away. But thee must consider that that scenario, contingent in any event, is more than a whole Friedman unit off at the moment. The gentry will have plenty of time to change their minds about it when the time comes, and the odds are excellent that that is exactly what they will do. By a happy coincidence, this illustrates the unprincipled nature of "U. S. credibility": the Hambakerites can claim in December 2008 that poor Sam’s credibility will be diminished if we do not keep unconstitutional AEI-GOP-USIP-WSJ-EiB (&c.) promises to the I. Z. neorégime, but a year from now they will have changed their lyrics slightly and be singing in chorus that a premature and irresponsible withdrawal from ex-‘Iráq would do even worse damage to credibility. [2] There is not really any ‘there’ there at Credibility Barracks, sir. Kindly consider theeself so caveated.

In context, [A3] looks to me like a quid pro quo offered by paleface Realismus to the native and local I. Z. pols, whose political I.Q. the Hambakerites underestimate. They will promise to comply with a plebescite that is not going to happen and would not come out against them if it did, and in return, Hannibal II promises to do nothing that might be considered ‘unreasonable’ at Hambaker House. The gentry have not the slightest intention of spelling out their notions of rationality for the benefit of poor M. al-Málikí, however, since it will be much more satisfactory if he must ask permission before doing pretty well anything of the smallest significance to bipartisan invasionism. That makes for a lousy bargain as viewed from the ex-‘Iráqí side, but what with the celebrated Realismus and all, how could the bargain be very different? And of course it is not at all that the Hambakerites aspire to dictate every single little detail of administration and tactics to their hapless client: all they want is a veto, really. Only a veto -- but it must be their veto, for who can trust any native or local to decide what does or does not impair "U.S. credibility, prestige and capacity to act worldwide"?

(...)

No for a third time. Hambakerism is a strictly subphilosophical affair, sir, the gentry cannot possibly possess any formal or axiomatic definition of ‘unreasonable’ as "imparing the credibility or prestige or capacity of the Heimatland Gottes." They simply do not think like that, sir. Hambakerites are simply incapable of offering any general account of what it would be ‘unreasonable’ for Hannibal II of Da‘wa to do or omit. They are not just pretending that they cannot do that trick, they genuinely can't. But like Mr. Justice Whowuzzit with ‘obscenity,’ they will be able to tell you about any particular violation in thirty seconds or less from the moment they learn of it. Ergo the I. Z. collaborationist pols must always ask in advance to save unnecessary embarrassment all around. Though obviously subphilosophical, this nifty racket "makes sense" in a rough-and-ready way, does it not?

(A1b) Now as to the Form of Commitment, there is (A1b-1), the commitment of B. Husáyn Obáma, to be considered, but also (A1b-2), the commitment of the I. Z. collaborationists. Ideally this would involve two instantiations of one and the same Form, but in light of the celebrated Realismus at Hambaker House, we are not likely to see that. Deals between silly geese and virile ganders must involve a certain degree of asymmetry, commitmentwise: Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi..

And strictly de facto, the I. Z. pols need Sam lots more than Sam needs them. Everybody knows that. To elaborately pretend not to know it by expatiating on the Four Pillars of Piffle about the former al-‘Iráq -- her Sovereignty and Independence and Constitutionalism and Democracy -- can avail nothing against the celebrated Realismus. Either get serious or just leave the Hambakerite invasionites alone, wouldja please?

___
[1] I daresay there exists a Form of Opportunism, though, like that Form of Mud or Filth that Plato was forced at one point to worry about a little. If we were to start talking about that, Mr. Bones, would not the Hambakerite gentry fail to notice that we are talking about them at all?

'And would you be undecided also about ideas of which the mention will, perhaps, appear laughable: of hair, mud, filth, and other things which are base and vile?' 'No, Parmenides; visible things like these are, as I believe, only what they appear to be: though I am sometimes disposed to imagine that there is nothing without an idea; but I repress any such notion, from a fear of falling into an abyss of nonsense.' 'You are young, Socrates, and therefore naturally regard the opinions of men; the time will come when philosophy will have a firmer hold of you, and you will not despise even the meanest things. But tell me, is your meaning that things become like by partaking of likeness, great by partaking of greatness, just and beautiful by partaking of justice and beauty, and so of other ideas?'

Parmenides

[2] The famous Realismus takes for granted, I expect, that the Hannibal of Da‘wa will make sure that the wrong side does not win such a plebescite, should it even happen at all. Hardly any neorégime in history since that of General N. Buonoparte first discovered the plebescite shtyk has failed to get across that pons asinorum.

Neocolonial Unrealpolitik

2008-12-22T10:55:00.004Z

As thee know, Mr. Bones, the WASP God Folk used to annoy politically grown-up Old Euros almost beyond endurance with their Gladstonianity, the solemn pretence that nobody had ever been Pharasaïcally in earnest about human events before their own immediate ancestors evolved. [1] This brain disease has survived the GOM and even, rather notoriously, come to flourish in the North American colonies. Hath not Graham Greene vouchsafed us The Quiet American?

Now nothing in the world brings out the shallow unrealism of the Gladstoniator than the following sort of misbehaviour amongst the LBW, Lesser Breeds Without:

... kicked and punched ... then the beating continued ... the torture included kicking and punching; beating all over the body with chains; cigarettes extinguished behind his ears; stripped of his clothes and doused in cold water; subjected to electric shocks ... lasted for 30 hours... evidence of that in the form of bruises, swellings and cuts all over ....

It is definitely not cricket that these people are playing! Even a heartless Old Euro could make that preliminary analysis, however. Gladstonianity proper only commences, in my judgment, when the analyst begins to flatter herself that these are not Cricket People, that ‘torture’ is an instrinsic part of the whole breed’s lesser withoutness.

If one is only concerned to laugh at the bozos, their ne plus ultra must be that "Gentlemen don't read one another’s mail" of 1929 from H. L. Stimson of the militant extremist GOP. No neocomrade, that specimen! On the other hand, his palæocomradely credentials are so exaggerated that they look kinda bogus even if they were not. It is impossible for this keyboard to believe that all the GOP geniuses, let alone all the Big Management Party’s base-and-vile under Engineer Hoover were anythin’ like as Britified as H. L. Stimson pretended to be. Presumably this is the usual syndrome according to which Saskatchewan and Kankakee attempt to rival Mayfair and wind up lookin’ silly because they lay it on far too thick. A trowel is Britwise acceptable -- the universe possesses M. D'Israëli's authority for that point -- but a dumptruck is too much.

Naturally the above scrimmage was not a game of any sort for the scrimmagers. What was going on?

Dr. Cartoonoclastes anthologises and twistifies as follows:

... one of the purposes of this torture was to extract from him a confession that he had been motivated to do this by one of the parties or one of the militias. They brought a video camera to record his confession of this.
Under pressure of the torture, his brother asked them to [have him] sign a black [sic, perhaps for ‘blank’?] piece of paper, and they could then write on it what they liked. But Maliki's guards, who were supervising the torture, rejected that, and insisted on a videotaped confession!"

Meanwhile, Aswal al-Iraq reported that "Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on Sunday said that investigations [!] have revealed that a man involved in the “slaughter” of several Iraqis was behind the shoe-throwing incident, but he didn't say who or from what group. (The Iraqi government site quotes Maliki's remarks to journalists extensively. He said Zaydi had expressed his regret to him [Maliki] in a letter, and had named the person who instigated him to do this, a person Maliki said "is known to us as a cutter of throats..." Maliki talked about the Iraqi tradition of respect for honored visitors, independence of the judiciary, the need to avoid stirring up fitna, and so on and so forth). That isn't all. Maliki went on to say (according to the Aswat al-Iraq summary) that whoever encouraged or asked al-Zaydi to do this is "either an opponent of the political process in Iraq, or they are opposed to the new political situation entirely."

That silly bang [!] belongs to Cartoono the Magnificent, naturally. Far be such punctuation as that from the present keyboard! It marks the low-water point of his shallow Gladstonianity: the customer is solicited to suppose that only wicked sectarians would conduct themselves so unsportsmanlike under pretext of conducting ‘investigations’.

___
[1] I suppose the happy evolution must have been supposed to have happened in or around the year of religionism 1100/1688. Of course in reality the accession of Victoria would be far more like it.

BRAT BITES INVISIBLE HAND

2008-12-20T15:54:00.003Z

"If we were to allow the free market to take its course now, it would almost certainly lead to disorderly bankruptcy and liquidation for the automakers. Under ordinary economic circumstances, I would say this is the price that failed companies must pay -- and I would not favor intervening to prevent the automakers from going out of business. But these are not ordinary circumstances. In the midst of a financial crisis and a recession, allowing the U.S. auto industry to collapse is not a responsible course of action."

The neocomrades’ 566/640 Kid is not especially good even at apostasin’ , is he, Mr. Bones?

Will the militant extremist Denkpanzer of OnePercenterdom -- their AEIdeologues and their Heritagitarians and their Hoovervillains, plus also the Catoholics, an Associated rather than an Allied Power -- now conclude their Party’s Dynasty Boy was really, really dumb all along? Was he up to graspin’ the dogmatic theology of Mammonism even in quiet times? To muster the level of sophistry (or cynicism) a loyal High Mammonian requires at the moment has always been off that little laddie’s scope by everybody’s account.

Now considering that the Learnèd Elders of Vanity Fair have never been so unreasonable as to expect their pols to understand what it is that they, the pols, are defendin’ when they defend the Protocols of the Chamber of Commerce, it would not be nice or edifyin’ if they turn on the 566/640 Kid too sharply. Should they want a hunk of pseudacademic flesh they can really get their teeth into, let them set to on Neocomrade "Doctor" A. Greenspan, whose rake's progress brought him at last to his Cannæ and Stalingrad and Waterloo and Grammarian's Funeral:

In Congressional testimony on October 23, 2008, Greenspan acknowledged that he was "partially" wrong in opposing regulation and stated "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder's equity -- myself especially -- are in a state of shocked disbelief." Referring to his free-market ideology, Greenspan said: “I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact.” Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) then pressed him to clarify his words. “In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working,” Waxman said. “Absolutely, precisely,” Greenspan replied. “You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.” Greenspan admitted fault in opposing regulation of derivatives and acknowledged that financial institutions didn't protect shareholders and investments as well as he expected.

Compared to the Archangel of the Apostasy detectin’ a ‘flaw’ in the theory of High Mammonolatry, it is no big deal that the Krawford Kiddies would rather leave some Legacy visible to hack journalists and junior-high-school textbook authors than receive the blessin’s of the LEVF, Learnèd Elders of Vanity Fair.

If there were any justice in the world, absolutely everybody would fling a shoe or two at the catafalque of Neocomrade "Doctor" Alan Greenspan as it solemnly progresses down Wall Street towards the People’s Recycling Center. But as thee know, Mr. Bones, there is no justice in the world, so don’t let anybody sell thee a ticket to that show -- not unless she will toss in a Brooklyn Bridge or two as well. Or possibly a used mortgage that belonged to a little old lady

who only drove it to conventicle on Sabbaths.

Better Aggression Through Chemistry

2008-12-18T07:47:00.005Z

Mr. Obama apparently did not ask Mr. Gates or Admiral Mullen for specifics on withdrawals [from ex-‘Iráq], according to people briefed on the discussions. “There was not challenging or questioning of any particular timetable,” a transition official said. “There wasn’t a point on which there was any pushback from either side.”

For his part, Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, said that Mr. Gates had left the Chicago meeting feeling that “they had an excellent discussion, and excellent chemistry as well.”

Domenico Tojetti (1807 – 1892) was an Italian-American painter.

Born in Rocca di Papa, near Rome, the artist frequented the Roman circle of the Torlonia Princes, providing frescos in the ballroom of Villa Torlonia under the direction of his teacher Francesco Coghetti.

The artist provided also frescoes in churches of Rome, including the Basilica di San Paolo fuori le Mura and Sant'Agnese fuori le Mura. In this period he developed friendship with Constantino Brumidi, who moved to USA in 1852, and with Leonardo Massabò.

In 1867 Tojetti moved with his family to Guatemala, then in Mexico and finally to San Francisco, California, where produced paintings for churches, public and private buildings.

He died in San Francisco in 1892.

Ne Sutor Ultra Crepidam

2008-12-15T16:04:00.003Z

If ever a human event

was unmissable, it is the public calceatio of George XLIII Bush by a demented neo-subject, but even so, the intrepid and, so to say, eagle-eyed Miss Lynx noticed it and gave it to Mister Badger, who dipped it in that dam pond of ideology and factionalism that so graces Mu’ámara Junction BC before passing it on to the honourable and gallant Dr. Cartoonoclastes, local squire and muftí of the manse in those parts, who decided to deploy it in the Mu’ámariyya's interminable War Against Juan:

The journalist who threw his shoes at Bush is Muntadhir al-Zeidi and he works for Baghdadiya TV. [Ellipsis the First] Juan Cole is not amused. He says, without citing any evidence, that the channel "supports the Sunni Arab insurgents fighting the Americans and the Maliki government". I thought he had switched to "Kutbist fundamentalists" for his main sectarian slur, but there you are. As it happens, Azzaman says the man works for several different TV stations, and hails from Sadr City. [Ellipsis the Second] [A]l-Zeidi in addition to the reported remarks, also said this: "This is from the widows, the orphans, and those who were killed in Iraq..." Obviously, as Cole says, a supporter of the "Sunni Arab insurgents".

Actually Don Juan recovered from his Qutbist phase promptly, thank you, thought not to the point, I presume, of forgetting how to spell it.

Poor M. Muntazir al-Zaydí [1] will doubtless rot in some I. Z. pesthole of domestic rendition for the term of his natural life. Unless, that is, he is quickly released and returns to his native place through a specially manufactured breach in the walls whilst choruses of (decently draped) young damsels recite Pindar and al-Muntanabbí in his praise. Plus then free lunch at City Hall every day for the rest of his life -- I believe that is the standard accomodation in such case.

Meanwhile, a bit closer to home, thee should notice, Mr. Bones, how little it takes to set grumpy old Cartoono off into slurrin’ other folks as slurmongers. Take "supports the Sunni Arab insurgents fighting the Americans and the Maliki government." The Guru of Mu’ámara Junction is not primarily concerned to claim that Al-Baghdádiyya is not really like that [2], he is shocked to his innermost casablanca that anybody uses such language at all.

Not only is that a slur, it is a very special kind of slur. It is defamatio chartonoclastica, so to speak, a rare hot-house flower of the lower sub-Arctic. Juan the Wicked is "slurring" some poor newspaper proprietor for doing exactly what Miss Lynx and Mister Badger and Cartoono the Grump think everybody in the world ought to be doing, supporting "the [lacuna here] Arab insurgents fighting the Americans and the Maliki government." The slur consists entirely in noticing out loud that Al-Baghdádiyya is guilty of "supporting while Sunni."

Then, leaping straight to the counterslur, the honourable and learnèd (and Magnificent) Cartoono makes Juan the Wicked out an ignoramus who supposes that the preferred religionism of the Natural Masters of Mesopotamia is adhered to only by flat-out faith-crazies, Wahhábís and "Kutbists" and Mawdy-Doodies and what not. (Perhaps he should toss in "Assassins" from time to time and see if any of his dupes and marks call him on it? And there are also the "Wallace Fard Muhammad fundamentalists" to muck about with for counterslurry purposes.)

A very strange hot-house flower is the Mu’ámariyya, Mr. Bones. A sort of vicarious Erastianism, perhaps. But maybe I attempt to make the specimen out rarer and more precious than it really is? After all, M. le Président Saddám would have been almost as upset in his time as Miss Lynx and Mr. Badger and Dr. Cartoonoclastes are in ours to have his Natural Mastery of Mesopotamia confused with his private religionism. And more upset still, should it be linked with his communitarian religionism. Our gleeful threeful cannot possibly want the Ba‘th back as such, yet if they ever get what they crave, certain resemblances to the Good Old Days before wicked ‘sectarianism’ was imported under Sultan Jerry would recur. The Thought Police would consider it fort mauvais for any political dhimmí to claim that his status as a second-class subject of the Baghdád régime was connected with his not being an Orthodox Mussulman. Or an ethnographic Arab. Obviously, folks with jet black skins and Oklahoma City culture and the theology of Mary Baker Eddy can be just as first-class Natural Masters of Mesopotamia as anybody else. All they have to do is . . . .

... well, neither the Ba‘thí nor the cartoonoclastic positive theory of Virtuous Antisectarianism is familiar to me, so thee had better go google it up for theeself, Mr. Bones, exactly what it is that one has to do to satisfy the factionists and ideologues of Sunní Ascendancy, native and vicarious. Though perhaps we had better speak of [Lacuna] Ascendancy, sir, especially if we think we might want a visa someday. [3] BGKB.

___
[1] The scrappy lad’s Christian name goes like the surname of the evil Qommie Ayatollah Montazerí. This coincidence may (or may not) indicate that shoe-thrower and turban-bearer are both awaiting the same One.

[2] Cartoono's defense of the Sunninterní fishwrap’s rigorously impartial and unsectarian devotion to the once and future Natural Masters of Mesopotamia is a joke. They can't spend every issue singing Pindar to their own shootists -- or even praising such lesser breeds as may occasionally abuse the Hannibal of Da‘wa for the inferior reasons of inferior persons.

[3] "[Lacuna] Ascendancy may typify the See-Might Mind™," she jested. "Notice how they all leave the vowels out all the time, and how one pack of See-Mights will never mention Father Zeus by name. Reducin’ other folks to a condition of abject dhimmitudo is the crux of See-Mightism, plainly: ‘Look on Our Might, ye dhimmies, and despair!’ Mme. Bint Yeor’s esoteric researches have revealed many dark corners of the See-Might Mind™, yet I believe she has never yet come to grips with [Lacuna] Ascendancy, despite inhabiting the Tel Aviv statelet where the thing exists in a state of near perfection. The dhimmies of the T.A. régime, Gentile Palestinians mostly, may say almost anything they like about their Natural (neo-natural?) Masters as long as they do not go on about [Lacuna]. Hyperzionizers may oppress their patients because of an innate libido dominandi, or because they are scared and therefore conductin’ a Long War against Global Tourism, or perhaps merely because See-Might might can not be properly seen unless somebody gets visibly oppressed. But one is not to mention [Lacuna] in this connection. Conversely, one is encouraged, if not absolutely compelled, to countenance the notion that anybody at all could become a first-class Israëli subject, provided she . . . .

". . . leaving that bit lacunose in prudent self-defense, we may notice that present-day [Lacuna] Ascendancy at Tel Aviv and its counterpart in the jolly old Baghdád of 1908-2003 are not simply interchangeable. If Dr. Cartoonoclastes was shilling for Hyperzion rather than for his present patrons, we would not, I think, be hearing about "wicked ‘sectarianism’" all the time. In the Tel Aviv statelet, "sectarians" means various harmless bands of East European weirdos who usually disapprove of the whole [Lacuna] Ascendancy shtyk from beginning to end. Sometimes we hear it worried about that they are becoming too important in politics, but not often, and nowadays less frequently than formerly. Gentiles are Gentiles, they are not ‘sectarians’ in the meaning of the Act. Turks and Brits and Mecca Monarchs and Free Officers and Ba‘thís would all have been delighted to have the ideological leverage that the notion of "Gentiles" makes available to the [Lacuna] Ascendancy in the State of Israël. But "life is unfair," and they just plain did not have it. Tough luck, guys!

"Finally," she jested in addition, "everybody knows that for one lone sub-Arctic hothouse of virtual and vicarious fans of the Baghdád [Lacuna] Ascendancy -- plus also Prof. Dr. Righteous Virue out there someplace in North Denmark, admittedly -- there are tens of thousands of Tel Aviv [Lacuna] Ascendancy fans, nines of thousads of them centered right here in our very own Heimatland Gottes. The vicars’ and volos’ efforts at Lacuna Enforcement are unrelentin’ and heroic. Though not always crowned with success, and of course not officially organised as a Denkpolizeiamt, these efforts are formidable indeed. Ask Prof. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt to tell thee about it sometime, Mr. Bones."

(( Lady Pilate is not an absolutely reliable source, I fear, and in any case we have agreed that discussions of the Greater Levant in general and of the former al-‘Iráq in particular should not be held hostage to the Palestine Puzzle. A geopolitical dogma of Telavívestání Exceptionalism, so to call it, would be a hundred times better grounded than your run-of-the-mill Yankee homebrew counterpart is. Or, viewed from the Baghdád or International Zone end of the flight path, there is no reason why ‘Iráqí or post-‘Iráqí See-Mightism should specially resemble the See-Mightism of Jewish Statists.

(( The patrons that Cartoono shills for are also reminiscent of the late M. Slobodan Milosevic, whose credentials as an Indo-Germanic were, to the best of my knowledge, impeccable. A revived [Lacuna] Ascendancy at Baghdád would possess a ‘right’ to rule all of the former ex-‘Iráq (as it will then ipso facto be) pretty strictly analogous to Serbia's natural mastery of Kosova. The main ingredient in this mess of pottage is that Ms. Clio gets to trump almost any amount of degenerate modern nose-countin’. Since M. Milosevic's plans miscarried, one cannot be sure exactly what attitudes his Thought Police would have inculcated in the Kosovar dhimmies. On the whole, I don't think there would have been a [lacuna] about the fact that the latter are, and must forever remain, second-class Serbians because they are not Serbs -- ethnography pure and simple. The Balkans possessing perhaps even less éclaircissement than the Greater Levant, probably the Thought Police would have allowed their dhimmies to say what I just said, but knock them down if they "tried to make something of it." More or less the Ba‘thí plan, as far as the mere physical violence goes, but with much less mental wear and tear on the second-raters, who could quickly learn exactly what never to be caught saying out loud.

Should poor M. al-Málikí and the International Zone neorégime totter and fall, with a revived [Lacuna] Ascendancy acceptable to Messers Lynx and Badger and Cartoonoclastes and Virtue replacing it, the hillbilly dhimmies and the heretic dhimmies would be in tricky straits to navigate. They must not, of course, insinuate that there is anything the least bit ‘sectarian’ about their subjection to Natural Masters™, but exactly what expressions would the new Thought Police consider to so insinuate? Of all the words that twenty-four centuries of Pol. Sci. have made conceptual mud pies with, ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ take the cake. The patrons of Mu’ámara Junction very sincerely consider that an "al-‘Iráq" run by hillbillies and heretics is an affront to Ms. Nature, not really an al-‘Iráq at all. This view has the extraneous support of the militant extremist GOP, for to call anythin’ those stumblebums did or do or will do hereafter in ex-‘Iráq ‘natural’ would be absurd on its face. If alien aggression and intermeddlin’ be not artificial, nothing on Gore's green earth is artificial.

More distictly than Messers Lynx and Badger and Cartoonoclastes, Messer R. Virtue has made clear that he thinks the druthers that Prof. Dr. R. Virtue wants to see imposed on the former al-‘Iráq are exactly Ms. Nature’s own thoughts on the question.

And the moral of that, Mr. Bones, is that one can have a lofty IQ and a presentable PhD and still be a flaming jerk.

A seasonable moral for all seasons in itself, I trust, but at the moment I would have thee notice how ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ bring out the inner jerk in some folks. Who knows, maybe that was poor M. Muntazar al-Zaydí's problem? Throwin’ shoes at the nominal chief of the alien invasionite banditti who have wrecked one's country their way rather than one’s country’s own way can certainly be called "a natural reaction" -- unless I have forgotten my Chicagoland English altogether.

The Cole Patrol

The Arab Spring Unsprung

South of the Rio Grande del Patxama

News from Nowhere

"A better way to push for reforms"

Concerning a Possible Flaw in "Heads We Win, Tails Barry Loses"

Concerning a Possible Flaw in "Heads We Win, Tails Barry Loses"

Yet Another Letter the Editor Was Spared

Outremer for Dhimmies

A Traitor to his Faction?

Snoopy at Bay meets The Shadow

"Changes everything"

"national paranoia and xenophobia"

Phashism at Los Angeles and elsewhere

"A Fatwa on your head?"

’Tis now to be "war of awesome dimensions," by G*m!

*** OVERTURE ***

*** INTERMEZZO sive ZWISCHENSPIEL ***

*** CODETTA ***

Ray Takieh and the Space Invaders

Ardor-Motivated

TPM Café (09 April 2010)

"Time for a Persian Sistani," or, Neotourism Unmasked

General Lord George Wont

A Word about Power-Affirmin’ Nationalism

Appeasing The Jihád Careerists

Welcome to Bernieworld!

"a wind of 18 months to 2 years"

Harrop et Ramázání Frères S. A.

"As he wrote a couple of weeks ago"

The Apotheosis of Princess Neoterica

The One-Fifth Column Hypothesis

This Is Why One Laughs At Them

Gleichschaltung im Morgenland

The Only Real Question (!?)

Traffic Unbearable

Horizon of Hyperzion

Bizonia Not Yet Ruled Out!

O God! O Cæsarea!

"a fact of life because of, well, the Americans"

Miller's Tail

"re-evaluate their culture of hate"

"Obama’s New Linkage"

Coleological Cross Reference

Democracy and the Neo-Semite Mind™

The Pronoun Watch

"No democrat can sustain the position ...."

"... no one can spell out a good reason...."

Maybe Gospodin Minister Liebermann is More Cuddly Than He's Painted?

Introducing the Washin’ton Daily Standard

Colonel Blimp’s New Rhetoric

De Ignaviâ

Annals of the Neocomradely Konstitution (II)

America's Moonpaper of 17 February 2009

Annals of the Neocomradely Konstitution

Wall Street Jingo of 17 February 2009

"and hope no one notices"

Concerning " ‘Sound’ Liberalism"

Politics for Popinjays

Turning Nitsy On

The Trouble with Aardvarkian PubDip

Pandering To Losers

" Ajami's Sleight of Hand: Bush made Emancipator and Obama Smeared"

Dr. Cartoonoclastes on the Fate of See-Might Man

So Did Pharaoh Slay M. de Harírí et al.?

Return of the Hambaker Humbugs

Neocolonial Unrealpolitik

BRAT BITES INVISIBLE HAND

Better Aggression Through Chemistry

Ne Sutor Ultra Crepidam

* OVERTURE *

* CODETTA *