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But, oh, what a thrilling moment! Every time you forget that Rumsfeld is the MVP of this administration, he reminds you.
If you actually felt this way, wouldn’t you still be a little embarrassed to admit it? Mary McGrory, the liberal columnist writing in a much-noticed column in the Washington Post, said that Powell had spoken in a “strong and unwavering” voice. Really? Tough sh**. What if he had provided garbage in a strong and unwavering voice? What if he had provided irrefutable evidence in a weak and wavering voice? This is not the Old Vic: This is world politics, war and peace, life and death, truth and falsity. Liberals are way too unserious for war — even too unserious for discussion about it.
One of his statements was, “Many of [the] wary warmongers are baby-boom liberals whose aversion to the deployment of American power was formed by Vietnam but who had a kind of epiphany along the way — for most of us, in the vicinity of Bosnia.” In this sentence, Keller apparently meant that certain liberals were moved by the plight of innocents in the Balkans — people who were being slaughtered. (Ed Luttwak once published an essay called “If Bosnians Were Dolphins.”) This is the “humanitarian” argument, or motivation. Funny, then, Keller’s casual dismissal of Vietnam. Were the Vietnamese not worth saving from torture, imprisonment, “reeducation,” totalitarianism, and murder? If you prick a Vietnamese, will he not bleed? Is Bosnian life worth more than Vietnamese life? I’ll never forget the words of Gen. Vernon Walters: “For over ten years, bombs rained down on every village and hamlet in South Vietnam, and no one budged. It took the coming of a Communist ‘peace’ to send hundreds of thousands of people out into the South China Sea, on anything that could float, or might float, to risk dehydration, piracy, and drowning.” Bill Keller further said that the “liberal hawks” — the “reluctant warriors” — “worry about all the things that could go wrong.” Oh, don’t flatter yourself, Keller: Paul Wolfowitz and the rest of the boys at the Pentagon worry far more than you about things that could go wrong, and have spent the last many months — even years — doing so. It’s one thing for your erstwhile opponents to come to agree with you; but they always have to do it with such condescension, petulance, and stupidity.
McCain also knocked the Axis of Two — Paris and Berlin — for “vacuous posturing.” Whoa! What’s their position on campaign-finance reform again?
I say once more: Hats off to John Howard.
He writes, “As prime minister in 1975, Mr. Chirac helped promote the $260 million Franco-Iraqi nuclear deal that resulted in the building of a reactor at Osirak[, which] was destroyed on June 8, 1981, by Israeli bombers . . .” Chirac was so closely associated with the nuclear reactor that Israelis dubbed the site “O-Chirac.”
That is especially interesting in light of the fact that the U.S. government joined the rest of the world in condemning the Israeli raid — a raid that almost certainly saved the lives of many.
This is par for the course, folks. They were saying all this when I was in a Middle Eastern Studies program myself. Tuition has gotten higher — and the hate and perversion are just as thick.
Radosh recalled for us the Dean of Canterbury, Hewlett Johnson, who, on visiting Stalin in 1942, reported that “there was nothing cruel or dramatic” about the dictator; ol’ Joe simply wanted “a square deal for the masses.” And, in 1941, our Charles Lindbergh alleged that the anti-Hitler drive for war sprang from “the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration.” These days, one can hear much the same cry: only replace “Roosevelt” with “Bush.”
In its statement, the Vilnius Group said,
Yes, they understand, better than “old Europe” — as many of us have been pressing for a good long time now.
This is absolutely fascinating, on many different levels.
By the way, everything Andrew Sullivan says about Howell Raines’s Times is true. No exaggeration. You have to follow it fairly closely to believe it.
Ah, only in the Post. Also, David Seifman had a column entitled “Taking a Stand on ‘Slip & Fall’ Suits.” It seems that Mayor Bloomberg is cracking down on frivolous lawsuits filed against the city. This is another respect in which his election was a boon, his faults and mistakes aside.
He had been engaged by the San Francisco Opera, and the director wanted to do some fairly wacky things involving nudity. Jerry thought about this and decided he didn’t want to participate in it. So, at one rehearsal, he said calmly to everybody — not in a preachy way — “Look, folks, I just feel that I don’t want to participate in this. I just don’t feel right about it. No hard feelings — I’m not trying to dictate to anybody. I just need you to carry on without me. My understudy will handle my role.” And, one by one, the other singers agreed with Hines — said that they, too, were uncomfortable with it. (But it had taken Jerry to speak up.) The director actually relented. Jerome Hines was quite a soul, in addition to a hell of a singer. |
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s has long been proven, I love Rummy as much as anybody — even as
much as Mrs. Rumsfeld — and my anti-German credentials are equally
well established. But . . . even I think he went too far in grouping
Germany with Cuba and Libya, as nations unalterably opposed to U.S. policy.
But, of course, the world — at least the world’s elites —
greatly prefer Colin Powell. That’s why it was important that the
secretary of state gave that U.N. presentation. The shallow among us didn’t
really care what he said; they cared that it was Powell saying it. It
was the “messenger” — many of them said explicitly —
as much as the “message.” 
