I fought the war, but the war won.
Last Friday, Dick Cheney was in Saudi Arabia for high-level meetings with the Saudi king and his ministers. On Saturday, it was revealed that the Saudi Shura Council—the elite group that implements the decisions of the autocratic inner circle—is preparing “national plans to deal with any sudden nuclear and radioactive hazards that may affect the kingdom following experts’ warnings of possible attacks on Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactors,” one of the kingdom’s leading newspapers, Okaz, reports.
It is because a massive build-up of forces inevitably creates the “climate” of war. Troops and the public, on both sides, come to accept its inevitability. Standing down is difficult and can entail loss of “face.” Consequently, political leaders usually are carried forward by the flow of events. Having taken steps 1, 2 and 3, they find taking step number 4 logical, even necessary. In short, momentum rather than policy begins to control action. As Barbara Tuchman showed in her study of the origins of the First World War, The Guns of August, even though none of the parties really wanted to go to war, none could stop the process. It was the fact that President Kennedy had been reading Tuchman’s book just before the Cuban Missile Crisis, I believe, that made him so intent on not being “hijacked by events.” His restraint was unusual. More common is a surrender to “sequence” as was shown by the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It would have taken a major reversal of policy—and considerable political bravery—to halt either invasion once the massive build-up was in place. No such effort was made then. Will it be now? I think the odds are against it.
We took impeachment off the table in 2006.
That means nuclear strikes are still on the table.
But Ms. Wolfe scoffs at the notion that her son causes or deserves the beatings he receives. She wonders why Billy is the only one getting beaten up, and why school officials are so reluctant to punish bullies and report assaults to the police.
Mr. Wilbourn said federal law protected the privacy of students, so parents of a bullied child should not assume that disciplinary action had not been taken. He also said it was left to the discretion of staff members to determine if an incident required police notification.
—Dan Barry, “A Boy the Bullies Love to Beat Up, Repeatedly”
Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.
—Goldberg’s formulation of the Ledeen Doctrine
Der Tod und das Mädchen.
Heather Corinna insouciantly tosses a head-slapper of an analogy into the sex-work debate.
Say nothing.
Sara reminded me of rickrolling, and got me to read the Wikipedia article, and—well, there’s just something about the po-faced seriousness of Wikipedia’s house style, you know?
In the “Never Gonna Give You Up” music video, directed by Simon West, a smiling Astley sings and dances to the song in various outfits and venues, sometimes accompanied by backup dancers. A bartender has a notable presence in the video, as his behavior gradually shifts from casually noticing Astley’s singing to being fully engrossed in the song with energetic acrobatic moves. The athletic exertion of many of the other dancers also becomes more intense over the course of Astley’s performance.
You’ve got to say something, but you can’t say something, or you’ll risk unleashing controversy—we assume, for the moment, that your goal isn’t to launch a flame war—and so you bend over backwards to say something about the thing in question without saying anything until that last sentence topples down a Zen navel of staggering uselessness, utterly indistinguishable from its hypothetical Onion parody.
I’d just gotten out of the shower, trying to sluice off the Bakersfield dust, and I stood there before the hotel TV set with the remote in my hand, gawping as the talking head said something like how unfair it was, how he couldn’t get over how unfair it was, that a white politician couldn’t survive something like this. This being Obama’s relationship with the storied Reverend Wright, his unfair survival of which has been only by dint of writing and delivering one of the most powerful speeches in the last, what, 40 years of American rhetoric? Can we make that call yet?
Thing being that it seems the talking head is blithely unaware of white politician John McCain’s relationships with snarlingly vicious anti-American Christianists such as John Hagee and Rod Parsley, that he’s managed to survive by dint of inviting the press corps to a barbecue at his wife’s summer house.
So I yelled at the TV and changed the channel. Alton Brown was showing us how to cook an omelette. —It was only later that it occurred to me: maybe when I was walking through the lobby and saw a giant TV screen full of TV screens full of pictures of Wolf Blitzer standing there, mildly puzzled, before a rank of giant TV screens in his glossy, empty Situation Room; or maybe it was while I was sitting in the Salt Lake City airport and some white-toothed boytoy surrounded by bobbing glossy headshots boasted about sending his Entertainment Tonight Truth Squad out on the thankless task of determining whether Will Smith was really a Scientologist now or what—the talking head had time to fill. He had to say something about the thing in question, but he couldn’t risk saying anything, and so.
…his behavior gradually shifts from casually noticing Astley’s singing to being fully engrossed in the song with energetic acrobatic moves.
It’ll help, I think, keeping this in mind. Whenever they say something stupid (which is, um), they’re just doing their job, which is to say something about the athletic exertions of the background dancers without saying anything at all.
—I’ll smile more, anyway, and yell less, which is as good as it gets these days.
Bittermuch.
I’ve said it before, but still I swear to fuckin’ God I hear one more person mouth off about Nader and the Greens and Gore and 2000 I will rip ’em a goddamn new one the likes of which this world has never seen. (“Most liberal GOP presidential candidate in a decade”? You mean since 1998, you witless, petulant twit?)
You’re going to reap just what you sow.
[via]
As falls Duckburg, so falls Duckburg Falls.
I don’t know why it should be so affecting to pick up an English translation of a 37-year-old Chilean book on Disney comics hauled down from the back bookshelf to proffer to a young cartoonist who ended up not borrowing it the night before as intended and flip through it desultorily only to happen at random upon the following passage—
Let us look at the social structure in the Disney comic. For example, the professions. In Duckburg, everyone seems to belong to the tertiary sector, that is, those who sell their services: hairdressers, real estate and tourist agencies, salespeople of all kinds (especially shop assistants selling sumptuary objects, and vendors going from door-to-door), nightwatchmen, waiters, delivery boys, and people attached to the entertainment business. These fill the world with objects and more objects, which are never produced, but always purchased. There is a constant repetition of the act of buying. But this mercantile relationship is not limited to the level of objects. Contractual language permeates the most commonplace forms of human intercourse. People see themselves as buying each other’s services, or selling themselves. It is as if the only security were to be found in the language of money. All human interchange is a form of commerce; people are like a purse, an object in a shop window, or coins constantly changing hands.
—but it is; it is.
People of quality.
Harper’s recently unearthed Dorothy Thompson’s spectacular assault on Godwin’s Law—
It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know.
(Don’t worry. She wrote it in 1941. I don’t think rhetorical assaults scale that preëmptively.) —It’s an interesting reading experience, a concentrated dose of the artist’s bog-standard Zen-flip, limning universals with specific particulars: Mr. A and Mr. B, D and Mrs. E, James the butler and Bill, the grandson of the chauffeur, who’s helping serve to-night. Who will go Nazi? Who already has?
I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.
Does she? —Far be it from me to question her credentials, but still: there’s something ugly in seeing this trick in ostensibly objective op-ed form, however thin the ostensibility: a roman à clef sans roman. Even Friedman’s cabbies have more panache.
Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi. They may be the gentle philosopher whose name is in the Blue Book, or Bill from City College to whom democracy gave a chance to design airplanes—you’ll never make Nazis out of them. But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis.
No matter how much you nod your head with the beat.
Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi. Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them.
Oh? Define “nice.” —People who don’t go Nazi? I see, I see.
But I come not to quibble with technique. Or Nazis, for that matter. Nor is this another self-indulgent joke at the expense of certain public intellectuals. —I’m more struck by certain issues of class as littered if not limned throughout the piece (Mr. A, but Bill, the grandson of the chauffeur—noticed that too, did you?), especially in light of the hullaballoo over that dam’ privilege meme. (And how sobering to find oneself even tangentially sided with Megan “Jane Galt” McArdle. Can one not hate the meme, but love the mimesis?) —Allow me a handful of quotes:
The gentleman standing beside the fireplace with an almost untouched glass of whiskey beside him on the mantelpiece is Mr. A, a descendant of one of the great American families. There has never been an American Blue Book without several persons of his surname in it. He is poor and earns his living as an editor. He has had a classical education, has a sound and cultivated taste in literature, painting, and music; has not a touch of snobbery in him; is full of humor, courtesy, and wit. He was a lieutenant in the World War, is a Republican in politics, but voted twice for Roosevelt, last time for Willkie. He is modest, not particularly brilliant, a staunch friend, and a man who greatly enjoys the company of pretty and witty women. His wife, whom he adored, is dead, and he will never remarry.
Thus, Mr. A. Now, his abecedarian counterpart:
Beside him stands Mr. B, a man of his own class, graduate of the same preparatory school and university, rich, a sportsman, owner of a famous racing stable, vice-president of a bank, married to a well-known society belle. He is a good fellow and extremely popular.
And thus to thesis, antithesis, synthesis—
Mr. A has a life that is established according to a certain form of personal behavior. Although he has no money, his unostentatious distinction and education have always assured him a position. He has never been engaged in sharp competition. He is a free man. I doubt whether ever in his life he has done anything he did not want to do or anything that was against his code. Nazism wouldn’t fit in with his standards and he has never become accustomed to making concessions.
Mr. B has risen beyond his real abilities by virtue of health, good looks, and being a good mixer. He married for money and he has done lots of other things for money. His code is not his own; it is that of his class—no worse, no better, He fits easily into whatever pattern is successful. That is his sole measure of value—success. Nazism as a minority movement would not attract him. As a movement likely to attain power, it would.
Forget the diagnosis. Note the particulars: money; background; breeding; taste; carriage—all different, even opposite, as so deftly delimited. And yet, we nonetheless have Mr. A and beside him Mr. B, “a man of his own class.”
Which means what, exactly? That set of people who attend the party as guests, not servants or relatives of the help?
(Well, yes. But still. —How can one begin to fight something so protean, yet so unyielding?
(Why, by talking about it, of course. Well, yes, but—)
Electric boogaloo.
Oh noes! He’s writing a sequel!
You can feel the end even as we start.
Anybody out there remember what it’s like to be disappointed by a president? Instead of, you know, mortally embarrassed? Outraged? Terrified?
How nice to find one’s blogging already done.
The Spouse begins saying what I might’ve gotten around to saying about that inexplicably popular privilege meme; then 
blackbyrd2 steps in and renders whatever I’d’ve added redundant.
