| OxBlog |
|
Front page
|
Monday, October 24, 2005
# Posted 11:49 PM by David Adesnik Surprisingly, even though Heidt accused Lagouranis of "buddy f*cking his own" among other things, Lagouranis decided to respond in the comments section of Heidt's post. Moreover, Lagouranis didn't just respond once, but engaged in an extended debate with numerous critics who continually attacked him in a very personal manner. Good for him. That takes courage. The issues at play involve a level of military detail far beyond my ken, so I won't venture to say which side got the better of the debate. However, what I would ask is whether, before there was a blogosphere, it would ever have been possible for audience members to cross-examine someone who had appeared on television. Moreover, not just run-of-the-mill audience members, but those with considerable expertise in the same line of work. Score one for accountability (with an assist from the blogosphere). (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 11:18 PM by David Adesnik Howell brings to her post more than four decades of experience as an editor and correspondent. I'm not sure that this kind of one-dimensional background provides the best education for an ombudsman, however. Although extensive experience as a journalist is necessary to ensure that an ombudsman understands journalism from the inside out and can speak with authority to the WaPo staff members she must criticize, I would prefer to have an ombudsman who has also been on the receiving end of the journalistic profession. Someone, perhaps, who has worked as a congressional staffer or for a state government. Because in order to be an effective ombudsman, I think one should know first-hand what it is like to be misrepresented and misquoted. But Ms. Howell can't change her past, so my objections are purely academic. Thus my advice to her is as follows: read a lot of blogs. Blogs from the left and blogs from the right. In her inaugural column, Ms. Howell says that she reads three different newspapers a day, sometimes more. But newspapers tend to teach you as much about media criticism as White House briefings teach you about candor. By reading multiple newspapers, journalists tend to reinforce their own perception of their profession as one of noble Davids battling the politicians' Goliath. By entering the blogosphere, Ms. Howell will discover a world where journalists benefit from no presumption of intelligence, good faith and competence. Naturally, bloggers are often unfair to their cousins in the print trades. But the unpleasant truth is that only when journalists see themselves being treated unfairly by bloggers, do they begin to understand how the subjects of their coverage feel about them. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 10:27 PM by David Adesnik Eager to demonstrate success in Iraq, the U.S. military has abandoned its previous refusal to publicize enemy body counts and now cites such numbers periodically to show the impact of some counterinsurgency operations.These opening sentences are rather misleading, since no one in the military, "eager" or not, made a decision to release body counts as part of public relations strategy. Rather, commanders have occasionally decided to release body counts in order to illustrate the size of certain engagements. How this story made it onto the front page, I have no idea. It provides some information worth knowing, but goes far out of its way to make the Army seem ignorant of its historical experiences. If anything, this should have been an "analysis" column somewhere inside the A section. Or perhaps an op-ed. Or even just a post on some moderately popular blog. I think the real lesson of this article is that journalists are unable to comprehend Iraq except through the prism of Vietnam. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 6:48 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 6:14 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 5:46 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 4:08 AM by Patrick Belton Sunday, October 23, 2005
# Posted 6:03 AM by Patrick Belton An open letter to the Most Rev the Lord Archbishop of York, bashed out with painted fingers after reading that this truly heroic man, a former Ugandan dissident opponent to Idi Amin turned Midlands C of E cleric, has been receiving racist mail, to include letters smeared with excrement, after announcement of his appointment to Bishopthorpe Palace. 21 October 2005Do your own, just sign your own name, because that would be a bit odd. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 1:58 AM by David Adesnik Dan's case in point is Azerbaijan, where the Bush administration has so far been highly content to praise a regressive pro-American dictatorship flush with oil. Presumably, conservative realists have no qualms about this sort of behavior. But as Dan implies, liberal realists just don't have the stomach to get behind this such a ruthless pursuit of narrow, national self-interest. As Henry Farrell warned some time ago, But leftwingers who rush too quickly to embrace their new friends on the right should meditate upon the malign example of Henry Kissinger, and the implications of Realpolitik for the causes and issues that they’re committed to.Henry's right. (Farrell, I mean, not Kissinger.) All I can add to his point is a bit of historical perspective. Much of the incoherence at the heart of Jimmy Carter's foreign policy reflected an inability to reconcile realist anti-interventionism with an idealist commitment to human rights. Today we tend to think of Carter as exclusively a dove and an idealist, but his strongest supporters included liberal realists such as Harvard's Stanley Hoffmann. When Reagan embarked on a crusade against communist Nicaragua, his liberal critics often invoked the realist principle of respecting state sovereignty as a justification for leaving the Nicaraguans alone. Yet the exact same liberals eviscerated Reagan for supporting a brutal right-wing dictatorship in nearby El Salvador. What the Democrats have constantly been searching for is a synthesis of realism and idealism, a proverbial Third Way that would allow them to anchor their situational preferences in a coherent and consistent doctrine. My sense is that they are no closer to finding this golden mean than they were when Jimmy Carter was in the White House. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 12:21 AM by David Adesnik Liberal commentators, including OxBlog favorites such as Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias , often observe that Democrats, unlike Republicans, don't have a simple set of core beliefs that can be summarized in an "elevator pitch", i.e. a 30 second speech that you could give to someone while riding in an elevator. With this shortcoming in mind, the leader of our focus group asked the ten or so participants to write down in three sentences or less what the Democratic party stands for. A few months ago, Kos wrote: Ask 10 people what the Democrats stand for, and you'll get 10 different answers. Ask me what the Democrats stand for, and I'll stare back speechless.Yet in our focus group, almost every answer was exactly the same. The purpose of the Democratic party is to help the poor and the disadvantaged. Most participants added that the federal government is the Democrats' preferred mechanism for helping the disadvantaged. More than one participant justified this focus on the disadvantaged by arguing that the free market structure of American society ensures that there will always be a significant numebr of Americans who are disadvantaged. The organizer's response to this unexpected consensus was both sympathetic and devastating. On the one hand, this consensus suggested that there is a foundational commitment on which Democrats can build. On the other hand, if the purpose of the Democratic party is to help the disadvantaged, what can the party possibly offer to the overwhelming majority of Americans who see themeslves as middle class? Adding insult to injury, I said that no one at the table had listed either national security or defending the United States as one of the core purposes of the Democratic party. Thus, how could anyone expect undecided voters to think of the Democrats as the party strongest on security issues if even the most committed Democrats don't define security as one of the party's most important missions? (To be fair, one or two participants sought to extend the principle of helping the disadvantaged to the international arena. Of course, calling for more foreign aid is hardly the way to win middle class votes.) After identifying why the party's core message failed to resonate with more voters, the discussion turned to the question of whether the answer to this problem is to "frame" its agenda differently or whether the substance of the party's agenda had to change. On this point, there wasn't much of a consensus. Take the issue of being pro-market, for example. Not one person at the table listed a commitment to either entrepreneurs or free markets as a core part of the Democratic agenda. Yet everyone at the table was basically pro-market and pro-business BUT believed that America must pay more attention to those left behind by markets and businesses. Given that Republicans always identify themselves as the party of markets and entrepreneurs, could Democrats make any headway with this kind of "yes, but" approach to the subject? But if framing isn't enough, how can Democrats alter the substance of their agenda without simply becoming more like Republicans? In the final analysis, there was no answer to this question. Even a table full of Ivy League-educated Democratic activists couldn't come up with an answer to the question of what the Democrats want to offer America as a whole, and not just the disadvantaged. But the question itself is important, because it has the potential to force the Democrats to approach every major policy debate from a fresh perspective. (1) opinions -- Add your opinion Saturday, October 22, 2005
# Posted 2:14 PM by David Adesnik One might describe RWaC as an accidental cocktail of Beverly Hills 90210, Freudian psychoanalysis, and morbid existentialism with just a dash of Boyz N the Hood. These days, we think of juvenile delinquency as the result of broken homes and economic deprivation. Yet poor Jim Stark has grown up in a two parent, Ozzie & Harriet home where his mother cooks him bacon and eggs for breakfast on school days. In order to explain the breakdown of this suburban fantasy, the film invokes the good Dr. Freud. Jim, it seems, is prone to violence because he has to compensate somehow for growing up with a domineering mother and emasculated father. Of course, based on what we see in the film, one might describe his father as mildly hen-pecked and his mother a tad overbearing, but in no way would one consider either condition to be pathological. Even so, poor Jim is so distraught that he has to defend his delicate masculinity by partaking in knife fights and playing chicken with stolen cars. Meanwhile, Jim and love interest Judy (Natalie Wood) speculate about whether life is worth living since it is inherently meaningless. This point gets driven home by the most surreal moment in the entire film, in which Jim's school goes on a field trip to a planetarium where the students watch a film narrated by a spooky old man who tells the kids that the earth will one day be destroyed by fiery explosions, thus renering pointless the existence of all mankind. Perhaps things had changed by the 1980s, but when I was a kid, most planetarium shows tried to be a little more uplifting. Oh, and did I mention the homoerotic subtext to the film, primarily involving the relationship between Jim and his sidekick Plato? Jim's dad also gets thrown into the mix during an extended scene that involves him wearing his wife's frilly apron. All in all, RWaC is so bizarre that I find it impossible to imagine what contemporary audiences thought of the film. Was it daring and subversive? Or was it a mostly unremarkable depiction of suburban life in the 50s? Given James Dean's status as icon, I wouldn't be surprised if there is an extensive literature, both popular and academic, that addresses such questions. In fact, if you do an Amazon search for "James Dean biography" you get a very, very long list of results. Sadly, OxBlog does not have either the time or energy to undertake a detailed exploration of popular culture in the 1950s. However, if any of you saw RWaC when it first came out, I would be glad to post your reminiscences about what kind of reactions it provoked. UPDATE: The veritable methuselah known as MD writes that: Suffice to say I and my classmates in high school thought this was one of the more ridiculous stories ever told regarding us. Of course, the girls went to see Dean, and we guys went to see Natalie. Steve McQueen and the kids in "The Blob" were more believable as teenagers than anyone in RwaC.(1) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 2:11 PM by David Adesnik Friday, October 21, 2005
# Posted 11:49 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 8:33 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 8:12 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 8:02 AM by Patrick Belton On another note, Yossi Beilin says we should ditch the Road Map, because with no party having fulfilled its commitments, it's traversed the security corridor dividing reality based diplomacy from fiction. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 6:46 AM by Patrick Belton • Brummies come last in a UK courtesy poll. Ah gerrot, shut yer cake hole. • Harriet Miers launches a blog. ('JUST THOUGHT OF SOMETHING: Does anyone have any good recommendations of general books on Constitutional Law, history of the Supreme Court, etc? THANX!!!') Talk of the Town interviews her via IM. Dallasharriet44: Do I get to see the story early? I PROMISE I won’t blog it.• Via Galley Slaves, 'when it comes to the future most Russian women are voting with their foetus: 70 per cent of pregnancies are aborted. [...] It has the fastest-growing rate of HIV infection in the world...at least 1 per cent of the population. [...] Most of the big international problems operate within certain geographic constraints: Africa has Aids, the Middle East has Islamists, North Korea has nukes. But Russia’s got the lot: an African-level Aids crisis and an Islamist separatist movement sitting on top of the biggest pile of nukes on the planet'. Though I believe Mark Steyn might be underestimating the strength of Russian nationalism or the domestic revanchist lobby if he believes Russia will sell Eastern Siberia to China, irrespective of how bad the AIDS crisis gets. • Remember Haiti? Randy Paul points out it's still there, and surveys other goings-on in Latin America while he's at it. (Remember to back up? If not, let Randy be a lesson to you about bad things that can happen to nice people. Um, we do all the time.) • Nathan points to a new blog from Uzbekistan, and to Ariel Cohen's summary of Condi's Central Asian trip. Also, the Beeb's Jenny Norton has been barred from Uzbekistan for her reporting on Andijan. • Over at Volokh, David Bernstein asks why we insist upon Marx's Jewishness if his parents converted and he was raised as a Christian - apart from serving the interests both of those who care to perjoratively trace socialism to yids, or those who care to, um, give credit for socialism to yids. • Kevin, insightful always, comments on Matt and Sam Rosenfeld's TAP article attacking liberal hawks who argue that the Iraq War was a good idea prosecuted badly . ('Because Sam and Matt's arguments against democracy building are technical, they beg a question: what if we corrected the problems they allude to? After all, it's not impossible to have a bigger army, or to have an army that's better at policing and counterinsurgency') • Kieran, enjoyable as always, catches out Leon Kass being particularly grumpy. (LK: 'For why would a man court a woman for marriage when she may be sexually enjoyed, and regularly, without it?' KH: 'Well, it’s not as if I’m going to make my own pot roast, now is it?') (1) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 3:53 AM by Patrick Belton ![]() ![]() Thursday, October 20, 2005
# Posted 1:13 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 6:55 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 4:57 AM by Patrick Belton Meanwhile, several constitutional law scholars said they were surprised and puzzled by Miers's response to the committee's request for information on cases she has handled dealing with constitutional issues. In describing one matter on the Dallas City Council, Miers referred to "the proportional representation requirement of the Equal Protection Clause" as it relates to the Voting Rights Act.Also, Will and the Crescat kids have some crazy good posts up on the Miers nomination, including this precious quote from Judge Kozinski: [A]ll arguments that intensive questioning violate judicial independence confuse cause and effect or derive from other fallacies.... Or, as Judge Kozinski once put it, "Well, what the hell are you supposed to ask? Who do you like to sleep with? Girls? Boys? Will you sleep with me? Of course you'll ask them how they'd rule!"(0) opinions -- Add your opinion Wednesday, October 19, 2005
# Posted 2:28 PM by Patrick Belton In her Guardian article, Ms. Wolf seems to imply that, were it not for a TV show "that can acclimatise Americans to a woman in power" (this just after a sole, parenthetical mention of Condoleezza Rice), a Clinton candidacy would be doomed by the inability of the unacclimatised to accept a female President. In her eagerness to credit the TV show with an unlikely importance (it "... could change US politics for ever", as the subhead hyperbolically puts it), she paints herself as out of touch with current political reality - in fact, a May poll found a majority "likely" to vote for Sen. Clinton, even before being instructed to by the producers of Commander-in-Chief. And a more recent poll indicated that 79% of Americans "felt comfortable with a female president".(0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 12:58 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 12:01 PM by Patrick Belton The thought of a woman in the White House has naturally captured theThis from the same anonymous backbench MP whose 17 November newsletter carried the title 'For Fawkes' Sake'. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 8:30 AM by Patrick Belton * Actually, Dessie's in the INLA, as someone kindly pointed out. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 6:41 AM by Patrick Belton Tuesday, October 18, 2005
# Posted 10:46 PM by David Adesnik WRONG WEBSITE, BUDDY: On Yahoo! Search, OxBlog is one of the top ten websites that come up if you enter "salma hayek sucking". What really baffles me, though, is why anyone would actually click on the link to our website when the other nine results seem to promise so much more of what one is presumably looking for.On a related note, OxBlog is the first (yup, first) website that comes up if you Yahoo! Search "is harry potter circumcise". I had hoped that our readers would have better grammar.
# Posted 10:30 PM by David Adesnik Anyhow, this theory came to mind when I read the first paragraphs of the top story in today's WaPo, entitled Iraqis Say Airstrikes Kill Civilians: BAGHDAD, Oct. 17 -- A U.S. fighter jet bombed a crowd gathered around a burned Humvee on the edge of a provincial capital in western Iraq, killing 25 people, including 18 children, hospital officials and family members said Monday. The military said the Sunday raid targeted insurgents planting a bomb for new attacks...In theory, this is an example of he said/she said journalism. But you'd have to pretty thick not notice the Post's hints that the Iraqis, and not the US military, are telling the truth. As WaPo correspondent Mike Allen once observed in a moment of accidental candor, journalists shade their coverage so that "discerning readers" know who to believe and who is lying. Now in this instance, the Post may very well have put the correct spin on the story. I mean, you'd think families would know if their children were killed. But my purpose here isn't to challenge the facts of a specific story. It's just to demonstrate that liberal journalists know how to get their message across without breaking the rules of the game. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 10:04 PM by David Adesnik The list for cadets includes classics such as John Keegan's Face of Battle, which I must admit to having not read, although it is very high on my 'to read list'. Yet the list for generals starts of with some trendy bits of pundit-puff such as The Clash of Civilizations and The Lexus and the Olive Tree. (Sorry, Tom, you're a great columnist and a friendly guy, but that book just got on my nerves. Not that you care. You're rich and famous, so you can wear floral-print Hawaiian shirts in public or even have a kooky haircut.) On the bright side, the generals' reading list does gets much better as it goes along. The highlight, of course, is Donald Kagan's account of the Peloponnesian War. If only our generals had time to read the original four-volume edition... (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 9:48 PM by David Adesnik ONLY MILLIONAIRES CAN AFFORD KOOKY HAIRCUTS: One of the great things about being rich (not that I would know) is that you can be eccentric without worrying about the cost of being mocked. For example, see below for what kind of haircut multi-millionaire Malcolm Gladwell currently sports. And then see if you can recognize the man in the photo to the left.Yup, that's also Malcom Gladwell, except before he was rich and famous. So watch out: as soon OxBlog gets rich and famous, the Jewfro will become inevitable. Actually, I don't have the hair for it. But in high school I did have a ponytail for a while. So you might say that what being a millionaire really lets you do is relive your adolescence, except without parents there to prevent you from doing anything really stupid. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 9:22 PM by David Adesnik AND YOU THOUGHT THE GUYS AT OXBLOG WERE NAIVE OPTIMISTS: The haircut alone says that Malcolm Gladwell is an optimist. But it's hard to beat this quotation, from a roundtable on technology in the current issue of Time: One of the big trends in American society is the transformation of the evangelical movement and the rise of a more mature, sophisticated, culturally open evangelical church.Go back to Gladwell's first sentence for a moment. How often do you hear a Blue State intellectual use the words 'mature', 'sophisticated' and 'open' in the same sentence as 'evangelical'? On the other hand, what Gladwell's saying is that right now, all of the trouble America has with religion is because evangelicals are immature, unsophisticated and culturally closed. That sort of condescending generalization almost makes me wonder whether secular Americans might in some small way be responsible for the conficts we have about religion. Anyhow, let me counter Gladwell's optimism with some of my own: I predict that there will fewer arguments about religion ten years from now because secularists will become increasingly respectful, patient and socially generous. Cool, huh? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 6:42 PM by David Adesnik Certainly, Penn had more important things to do with his time than give interviews to graduate students. Yet he was always generous with his time. Less than twelve months ago, after Penn had already begun his struggle against brain cancer, he suggested that I conduct my follow-up interview over dinner at his home in Georgetown. Over a home-cooked meal, Penn spent more than an hour passionately recounting the battles of old, even though his surgery was so recent that the scars on his head were still visible. It was that kind of living passion that nourished my interest in a facet of American politics and diplomacy that has few students left today, in spite of its historic importance. For a more detailed account of Penn's life and accomplishments, I strongly recommend reading the obituaries published by the Washington Times and the New York Sun. Although one might infer from the names of those papers that Penn was an arch-conservative, he was, in fact, a life-long Democrat appointed to high offices by Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright. Yet Penn never hesitated to challenge his party and support the other when he believed that it the GOP was doing more to promote democracy across the globe. Thus, Penn always led an uncomfortable existence in the center, preferring principle to partisanship. It is a position with which I can certainly empathize. But more importantly, Penn's tremendous success in life suggests that one may achieve the most by staying true to oneself. I wish all the comfort in the world to his wife, Marie-Louise, in her time of loss. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 10:05 AM by Patrick Belton ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]()
(0) opinions
--
Add your opinion
# Posted 8:28 AM by Patrick Belton First speaks Lear, wearing the horns of office. All right lads, so listen; we’ve got 800 years to get to run the world. Can someone help me roll over the next slide? I had a late night reinventing the wheel for these. Now, as some of you might have noticed, we’re here, wearing animal skins, and they’re over... here, developing calculus. So we’ve got some catching up to do. My suggestion – first, we’re going to need some boats to go with the sailing songs Worthy Brother Edmund came up for us last week; Edmund, well done. Then, we import some members of the opposite sex from the tribe of the Thongii, the ones whose midriffs and underwear stick out. You all remember that one down at the pub last Thursday. (Witena gemot nod in approval.)(0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 7:42 AM by Patrick Belton PB: (after several pages wherein he complains about the paucity of goats to be had above 8,500 feet)) Also, after my TLS article i seem to be a one-man european muslims industry these days, which really cracks me up given that i don't know any, although i came really close to getting one's number at a bar once.(0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 5:17 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 5:10 AM by Patrick Belton Monday, October 17, 2005
# Posted 5:01 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 4:40 PM by Patrick Belton Agent: "Hello. I would like to order 19 large pizzas and 67 cans of soda."Via Snopes. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 11:46 AM by Patrick Belton A final benchmark for examining the demolition of the synagogues, by either Israel (had it been carried out) or the Palestinians, is supplied by the general standards of religious tolerance required under international law. Most of these standards appear in instruments that are not formally binding under international law, but they nevertheless have normative content and are widely accepted. The dissenting judge of the Israeli High Court of Justice quoted UN General Assembly Resolution 55/254 of 11 June 2001, in which the General Assembly “condemns all acts or threats of violence, destruction, damage or endangerment, directed against religious sites as such, that continue to occur in the world.” This Resolution, adopted in response to the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, extends beyond its immediate circumstances, and reflects general standards concerning religious tolerance. These standards have been elaborated in the 1981 Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief, in the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights,[25] in the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action[26] and in UN action. Resolution 2003/54 of the Commission on Human Rights on the Elimination of all forms of religious intolerance,[27] for example, calls on all States “to exert the utmost efforts, in accordance with their national legislation and in conformity with international human rights standards, to ensure that religious places, sites and shrines are fully respected and protected and to take additional measures in cases where they are vulnerable to desecration or destruction.”[28]So perhaps not formally speaking illegal, but at any rate still a fairly nasty thing to do. UPDATE: A reader questions whether the removal of the Torah scrolls prior to the Israeli withdrawal may have effectively deconsecrated the synagogues under the texts quoted above. Anyone? I believe that the UN Resolution refers to buildings functioning as religious venues. My understanding was that once the Torahs were out of the building it was just a building, i.e., like a deconsecrated church. What one does with the building afterwards has no meaning, except in this case as an example of self-damaging spite. The Palestinians could have turned the buildings into schools, clinics, community centers, or the like; instead they trashed them.(0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 10:57 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 9:09 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 12:38 AM by David Adesnik In the private sector or even in most government jobs, the idea of letting go a proven performer would be considered absurd. I think the entire tenure system is flawed. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 12:25 AM by David Adesnik Personally, I'm appalled by this entire circus. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Sunday, October 16, 2005
# Posted 11:28 PM by David Adesnik News analysis columns in both the NYT and WaPo focused much more on how the referendum will play in Washington rather than Iraq. Still, the respective expectations of the optimists and the pessimists are fairly clear. The White House asserts that "increased participation by Sunni Arabs will draw them into the political process."Critics, represented in this instance by Ken Pollack's quote in the NYT, respond that "The theory that democracy is the antidote to insurgency gets disproven on the ground every day."I would argue that neither the results of the referendum nor the fact of extraordinary Sunni participation tells us much at all. What we need to understand is how the Sunnis understood the meaning of their vote. Although we have no systematic knowledge of Sunni motivations, I think that American journalists' spot interviews of Sunni voters emerging from the polls provide some very important clues. What the White House would want to hear from such voters is that they believe the poltical process is giving them a fair chance to make their voice heard. It would've been nice, but that's not what they said. If the critics are right, Sunnis should've explained their "no" vote as an act of resistance against the US occupation and the Shi'ite dominated government. But that didn't happen either. As Anthony Shadid emphasized in his dispatch from Baghdad, Sunni voters kept saying again and again that they were voting "no" in order to preserve Iraq as a unified state. One might consider such talk of unity to simply be a code for the restoration of Sunni dominance. But why bother talking in code to an American journalist? Typical dispatches from both Sunni and Shi'ite regions of Iraq often include quotes from named individuals saying horribly nasty things about both the United States and other Iraqis. If Sunnis wanted to say that this was a vote against America, they could have. And some of them did. Instead, many of them said things like: "I had to vote," [Mehdi] said, "to prove that we're still one nation -- Sunni and Shiite."...Of course, some Sunni voters said what one might expect: "Do we vote for the [American] massacres of Fallujah, for the massacres of Qaim?"...So, then, what does it mean that so many Sunnis seemed to think of their vote in terms of preserving a unified Iraq rather than in terms of giving the Americans the finger? At first glance it may almost seem nonsensical, or even the height of chutzpah. How could the supporters of a sectarian insurgency say with a straight face that what they value is national unity? One might speculate that Iraqi Sunnis are so used to thinking of Iraq as theirs that they can't distinguish between true unity and Sunni domination. But I consider that degree of self-deception to be implausible. I think Sunnis know quite well that Iraq is in the midst of a low-intensity sectarian war. Thus, I am inclined to intepret Sunni talk of national unity as an indication of their desire -- almost certainly hesitant -- for some sort of national reconciliation. Will that desire translate into less support for the insurgents? Probably not anytime soon. But I do now expect the Sunnis to turn out for the national elections in December. More broadly, I expect the Sunnis to try and get what they can from the political process without abandoning the insurgents. Some might consider this a cynical exercise to get concessions from the Shi'ites and the Americans by pretending to buy into the political process. In contrast, I think the Sunnis have decided that they should give the political process a chance in order to see whether it produces better results than the insurgency -- while using the insurgency to improve their position at the bargaining table, just as Arafat used suicide bombings as an adjunct to the negotiating process rather than a substitute for it. Of course, Arafat was never willing to abandon violence no matter how many concessions he secured. Yet for Arafat, peace represented a serious threat to his mini-dictatorship. Arafat was also able to draw on a major reserve of international support, both political and financial. In contrast, the Sunnis control nothing and get only few shreds of support from Syria, et al. They have a lot more to gain from peace. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 1:53 AM by David Adesnik
# Posted 1:44 AM by David Adesnik About a half-dozen polling centers came under attack; one of them was in the predominately Sunni town of Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad, where insurgents attacked a polling center and stole a ballot box...It seems safe to infer that the insurgents no longer feel as confident as they once did about opposing elections. One might argue that their acceptance of the vote is merely tactical. Of course it is. One might argue that the insurgents consider the referendum to be a win-win proposition; either the constitution fails, or it passes in spite of Sunni opposition, which demonstrates that democracy cannot serve Sunni interests. But even that kind of thinking is far different from the blithe confidence required to slaughter prospective voters, as the insurgents did in January. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 1:20 AM by David Adesnik Turnout appeared to be highest in Shiite and Kurdish areas, although in many places, including Baghdad, it seemed not to approach the levels seen in January...In contrast, the WaPo reports the following in articles entitled On the Streets of Iraq, Scenes of Joy and Determination, In a Sunni Quarter, A Day of Emotion, and Sunni Turnout Is High In Vote on Iraqi Charter: Through the day, the referendum unleashed paroxysms of emotion among many in the Sunni Arab community...I guess the answer to my confusion is obvious: only read one newspaper, and then the world will seem like a much more orderly and rational place. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Saturday, October 15, 2005
# Posted 3:13 AM by Patrick Belton One mountain goat to another, in a classic New Yorker cartoon: 'They're climbing it because it's there. But why are we climbing it?' OxBlog: providing base camp since 2002! (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Friday, October 14, 2005
# Posted 8:57 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 8:47 PM by Patrick Belton Incidentally, apparently President Bush said "And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, 'Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East'. And, by God, I'm gonna do it."Personally, I'm rather fond of the idea of a Blues Brothers president. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 7:51 PM by Patrick Belton 'As President Ahmedi-Nejad's recent speech at the United Nations made clear, key Iranian leaders remain hostile to the United States and to the West; they have refused to embrace the norms of the international community; they are determined to overturn the status quo; and we must be prepared for them to pursue all of these goals with the same mix of rhetoric, diplomacy, bullying, subversion, and terrorism that they employed throughout the 1980s and '90s.Of course, we could always ignore it and see if it might go away. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 7:49 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 7:09 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 7:02 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 5:36 PM by Patrick Belton QUESTION: Change the subject? There's a report in The Post today that there's a whole shipment of British MREs that's sort of languishing in a warehouse because of fears of mad cow and I think the State Department is supposed to be making some efforts to dispatch them. Can you describe to where?(0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 3:37 PM by Patrick Belton
(0) opinions
--
Add your opinion
# Posted 11:58 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 10:06 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 7:48 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 7:33 AM by Patrick Belton ![]() Thursday, October 13, 2005
# Posted 11:32 PM by David Adesnik Although comic books tend to be thought of as childish, As The Crow Flies is far more sophisticated -- psychologically, artistically and emotionally -- than Hollywood's mediocre Batman Begins, which millions of certified adults had no reservations about paying ten dollars to see. Of course, if you're comics fan, it will hardly come as a surpise to find out that superheros are much more sophisticated on the printed page than on the silver screen. But even if you are a fan, As The Crow Flies is well worth a read. Above all, the collection stands out because of the extraordinarily unusual relationship between Batman's enemies du jour, the Penguin and the Scarecrow. Instead of gleefully teaming up on the Dark Knight as supervillians are wont to do, Penguin and Scarecrow wrestle psychologically with one another while physically assaulting the Batman. Plus, there is a priceless sequence of events where Robin dresses up in drag and gets hit on by men. What more do you want? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 11:16 PM by David Adesnik OXBLOG FILM CLASSICS: I just saw The Dirty Dozen for the very first time. Even though it was made in 1967, I think it compares favorably with most of the action films that benefit today from super-high-tech special effects.This comparision of The Dirty Dozen to today's action films, rather than military films such Band of Brothers and We Were Soldiers, is intentional. In terms of authenticity, it isn't in the same league. But I'm not sure it's supposed to be. The premise of The Dirty Dozen is that it's just before D-Day and the Army needs twelve men to go on a sabotage mission so dangerous that it's only fit for criminals, who would risk anthying to avoid life in prison or death on the gallows. As you can probably tell, plausibility isn't the main concern here. Instead, The Dirty Dozen puts its own clever spin on the classic Hollywood tale of raw recruits whipped into shape by a tough-as-nails officer. The script is solid, the acting is solid, and the film never loses its momentum. Prepare to be entertained. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 10:53 PM by David Adesnik Kevin Drum yawned at the obviousness of this advice, only to find himself under heavy attack from his left for selling out Democratic ideals. Although David Broder is on Kevin's side, I'm not either one is going to be on the winning side on this one. But even if the Democrats did unanimously decide that they need to get tough on national security, do they even have the slightest idea of what that would entail? The party's hawks, not to mention its doves, find Bush's version of getting tough to be anathema. But if there's a Third Way for getting tough about security, no one seems to know what it is. UPDATE: And if all this weren't enough to get Mr. Drum in trouble with the Democratic base, he has also taken it upon himself to contradict his own guest bloggers, a pair of liberal scholars who insist that the GOP is extreme even on domestic politics. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 10:13 PM by David Adesnik I'd say that the report provides some very clear indications that the new Iraqi army is, in many respects, a Shi'ite political force. But I would caution Kevin not to underestimate the tolerance of the Shi'ites. Both their religious and political leaders have a strong record of moderation in spite of the horrific slaughter of Shi'ite civlians by Sunni terrorists. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 9:52 PM by David Adesnik Packer also insists that in spite of all the bad that has come of the occupation, the Iraqi people deserve our support, although he refuses to come out four-square against the bring-them-home crowd. In another Kerryesque turn of phrase, Packer writes that There can be no phased withdrawal from the future of Iraq.Being a liberal hawk ain't easy. If you truly consider other Democrats to be your peer group, then you will find yourself, like Packer, consistently under siege. I once thought of "liberal hawk" as the label that came closest to fitting my own political profile. But with liberals showing so little concern for the people of Iraq, I have a hard time identifying with the label any more. Of course, I'm still a big fan of George Packer. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 8:05 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 7:57 PM by Patrick Belton Bouncers: Violence and Governance in the Night-Time Economy. by Dick Hobbs, Philip Hadfield, Stuart Lister, and Simon Winlow, all of whom quite large and willing to frisk you for side arms. Standing outside a door of OUP 2005.
(0) opinions
--
Add your opinion
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
# Posted 6:23 AM by Patrick Belton
(0) opinions
--
Add your opinion
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
# Posted 11:36 PM by David Adesnik The last time I saw Hakim Taniwal, I thought he was a dead man walking.Wow. Again: Wow. And don't forget to read the rest of Baker's article, which includes a half-dozen other success stories that are almost as stunning. Sometimes, I think of Afghanistan as what Iraq would be without powerful insurgents. For all of its persistent maladies, Afghanistan as it now stands is living proof that American armed forces often are the heralds of true liberation. Nonetheless, it would be impossible not to temper with caution this sort of optimisim. Baker himself fills the remainder of his article with a multitude of caveats: Even the most optimistic Americans here acknowledge that the job of stabilizing Afghanistan is nowhere near finished, and they worry that it might come unraveled again if a distracted Washington averts its attention too soon...What is most amazing about Afghanistan in a certain way is that no one can attribute its success to the genius of American planning. American officials such as Zalmay Khalilzad may have done quite a lot for the occupation, but Washington certainly never prepared for the task of nation-building. In spite of its negative sound, that statement doesn't carry much in the way of partisan connotations because no one could have expect the Bush Administration to do much planning in the two months between September 11 and the fall of the Taliban. But how, then, could Afghanistan have succeeded? After all, isn't Bush & Rumsfeld's total lack of planning the principal cause of the ongoing chaos in Iraq? Yes and no. I think the relative success of Afghanistan demonstrates just how much influence unexpected circumstances have had on both occupation efforts. If you had asked the experts before 9/11 whether it would be harder to occupy and democratize either Iraq or Afghanistan, the experts would have declared both to be impossible, with one, perhaps, being more impossible than the other. But the importance of luck hardly exonerates the White House for what's going on in Iraq (even if I am more optimistic about the situation there than most). What the relative success of Afghanistan demonstrates, I think, is that serious planning might, just might, have made a major difference in Iraq. Or not. But given the potential for success, the failure to plan is profoundly regrettable. UPDATE: In contrast, Josh Marshall agrees with Matt Yglesias that there was probably never any chance of things going right in Iraq at all. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 11:14 PM by David Adesnik But today's news suggests that an enduring compromise may have been brokered. The precise nature of the compromise is not yet apparent, but the most important Sunni organization are indicating that they will endorse the constitution once the Shi'ite parliament ratifies the deal. Until now, I have thought of Iraq' s constitutional referendum as necessary, but as not able to provide any more democratic legitimacy for the government than the January elections already gave it. But if some or even most Sunni voters ratify the constitution, it could change the entire ballgame. As Robert Worth, a NYT correspondent in Baghad, asserts in his latest dispatch, The [Sunnis'] new support is likely to undercut the widespread notion that the constitution was being forced on an almost uniformly hostile Sunni Arab population.Thus, I think Worth is absolutely right to describe the new deal as "a major victory for American officials" (even if that kind of editorializing doesn't exactly belong in a straight-news column). It's possible that the constitution will fail in spite of the Sunni endorsement. Sunni public opinion may simply be against it. Or those who support the constitution may be afraid to vote, while those against it may have less to fear from Ba'athist insurgents (although not the foreign fighters). But now I have my fingers crossed. The insurgency may find it much harder to operate without even the pretense of Sunni support. UPDATE: The optimistic Publius says he knew it all along. Glenn Reynolds says he almost knew it. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 6:01 AM by Patrick Belton ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Hey, I'm a Victorian. What did you expect? ![]() ![]() ![]() My camera ran out there, so you all get off easy and don't have to come the rest of the way. Slogan for the t-shirt: 'at 1 am solo on the Eiger glacier with an expiring torch, no one can hear you sobbing inarticulately for mother.' Hottie of the day honours: though not technically a hot water bottle, these would have to go to my thermos, thanks to which I had a refreshing cuppa of Darjeeling at the top of the first ridge, to which I invited a cluster of nice new goaty friends. There's no joke there. Stop looking for it. Until I have a ph.d., all of our readers have a chalet in the Swiss alps. It's absolutely brilliant up in the mountains, and I can't wait to get up there again, even if shortly after the photographs stop and the sun went down the soundtrack in my head did gradually shift from the first of the Enigma Variations to Dylan's 'Take a load off fanny' (v. imp. n.b.: Am., not Br. Eng.). (Relevant favourite quote from mountaineer Joe Simpson, stranded on Siula Grande: 'Bloody hell, I'm going to die to Boney M.') I summitted at sunset, hiked to the Eiger glacier by starlight and then down to Grindelwald for the night by 1:30 am, and then up Kleine Scheiddeg and through Biglenalp on the way back to Wengen in the morning. En route, I met OxBlog's new Mad German Scientist correspondent (chiefly Ir. Eng., but not exclusively), whose name is Margit and does outlandish things to mice. My friends had bubbly waiting for me when I got back, being of course incredible and annoyingly perfect sweethearts, and I fell asleep to Evelyn Waugh and dreams which seem to have featured sheep. UPDATE: My Swiss friends accuse me of making a clever pun on Wald within the Where's Waldo caption. I must protest I did no such thing. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Monday, October 10, 2005
# Posted 8:45 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 8:40 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 8:28 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 8:24 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 12:48 PM by Patrick Belton
(0) opinions
--
Add your opinion
Sunday, October 09, 2005
# Posted 6:29 PM by David Adesnik STUDENTS FOR GLOBAL DEMOCRACY: A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a couple of OxBloggers expressed that the hope that there would someday be a student movement committed to spreading democracy across the globe.Thus, I am extremely gratified to report that Students for Global Democracy (SGD), founded by Charlie Szrom at Indiana University, has already organized chapters at twelve different universities in six different countries, including, remarkably enough, Nepal. SGD's signature effort is its BELL campaign, whose purpose is to support the non-violent democratic movement struggling to push out Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenka, aka "Europe's last dictator". (Photo above) Next Saturday, SGD will lead a Worldwide Walk for Democracy in Belarus. It purpose is to raise awareness of repression in Belarus as well as to raise funds to help the opposition. As part of the event, SGD chapters across the globe will lead 12-kilometer walks, one kilometer for each year Lukashenka has been in power. If you are a student and you want to do something that really matters, get involved with SGD. See if there's a chapter near you. If not, start your own. If you're not a student, why not send a few dollars to SGD so that they can keep up the good work? I'll be sending them $50 as soon as I'm done with this post. If you're a blogger, go to SGD's website, read about the organization, and then post about it, because they deserve to be better known. Oh, and in case your're wondering whether SGD is effective, Lukashenka's thugs have already started to harass SGD's friends in Belarus. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 6:23 PM by David Adesnik Saturday, October 08, 2005
# Posted 6:15 PM by David Adesnik I think that most political blogging falls into the category of opinion journalism. Although not regimented into 800-word columns, blogging resembles very closely what one sees on the editorial page of America's major newspapers. It consists of analysis based on facts compiled by others.(0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 5:34 PM by David Adesnik prompted Bolton to inquire, “I'm just curious, those of you who are hissing, who do you think will judge better than us?”Canada, presumably. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 6:55 AM by Patrick Belton My participation in Irish society consists, conversely, mostly of bad jokes. Quick quiz of the day: which is more likely to elicit an invitation to an ambassador's residence shortly after arriving in Switzerland? Answer: another guiness brownie, excellency? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 6:13 AM by Patrick Belton Also, my housemate Barbara has just made a machine that makes mooing noises, a useful invention for a heavily bovine rural area. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Friday, October 07, 2005
# Posted 1:19 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 9:38 AM by Patrick Belton '[W]hen the moment came his character defined the moment rather than the moment defining him. He made the image, I just took the picture. I felt honoured to be there.' The man in the image has been named as Wang Wei Lin, though without certainty. He has never been heard from again.
(0) opinions
--
Add your opinion
# Posted 8:09 AM by Patrick Belton Why? Mark me down alongside the fetching Camilla Cavendish, By the time I got to Blackpool on Monday I was wondering how difficult it would be to start a new party. That weekend a Populus poll had found that 49 per cent of voters agreed with the statement “British politics would be better off if the Conservative Party was replaced by a new right-of-centre party” — a palpable level of frustration that is the very reverse of apathy.Hear, hear. Mercifully the right flank's banner-bearer David Davis self-destructed after giving delegates a sense of what they could have watched during PMQs for five years. Another parliamentary bumbler far to the right of the nation would have given Labour too easy a ride, and politics would have (continued to have) been the poorer. Cameron's take on One Nationism leaves one hoping he might offer Britain what it hasn't had for ages - a credible Opposition for Her Majesty which promises for the UK what in 1998 a candidate Schröder long past had once portended for Germany, a new debating partner and a new middle. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 2:58 AM by Patrick Belton Thursday, October 06, 2005
# Posted 11:16 PM by David Adesnik
# Posted 6:56 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 6:32 PM by Patrick Belton Aunt Julia(0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 7:08 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 12:14 AM by David Adesnik As such, I find it quite remarkable that the top item right now on the UC law school homepage is an announcement of the faculty blog's existence. Earlier this year, a research center with which I was affiliated briefly entertained a proposal to start a blog for the faculty and graduate students. The idea went nowhere, I think, because even those who liked it didn't really believe that enough people would take the idea seriously. What the issue comes down to, I think, is the perception that blogging is inherently unbecoming of a scholar. Posts are brief and rapid-fire. But what I hope that more faculties are beginning to discover is that blogging can serve as an important complement to the traditional forums for scholarship. No one thinks that blogging should replace books or journal articles. But I think it can serve as an invaluable means of allowing scholars to apply their knowledge to current situations without having first to write a 30 or 300 page manuscript. Thus, I wish the UC faculty bloggers all the best and hope that their example will demonstrate that blogging is anything but the academic equivalent of lese majeste. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Wednesday, October 05, 2005
# Posted 11:15 PM by David Adesnik New York City's police force has fewer officers, less money and more work than it did four years ago. Yet, by almost any measure, the city is safer today than it was before Michael R. Bloomberg became mayor in January 2002.This afternoon, I watched New Jack City, a film best described as Scarface set in Harlem, starring Wesley Snipes instead of Al Pacino. Although mostly a primitive shoot-'em-up, New Jack City (NJC, for short) also has pretensions of serving as a commentary on Reaganomics' responsibility for the urban crime wave of the 1980s. The strange thing about watching NJC in hindsight is trying to empathize with the pervasive fear of drugs and street crime that once made living in New York so emotionally draining. Even as a child at the time -- or perhaps precisely because I was a child at the time -- I had a very sharp perception of my middle-class, family-centered way of life being under siege. And most disturbing thing of all was the knowledge that the situation could never get better, only worse. There had once been a golden age for New York City, but I knew that it never would return. (By the same token, sophisticated intellectuals in the 1980s believed that America's golden age was dead and gone, never to return. See Kennedy, Paul.) Now I certainly don't give Giuliani or Bloomberg all of the credit for stamping out crime in New York. But my point here isn't about who deserves credit. It is about the changed mindset made possible by a safer New York. According to this morning's Times, crime is down 20% since 2001, with murders down from 714 in Giuliani's last year to 572 in 2004. But what has happened in New York over the past decade and a half transcends statistics. It is about living in a city which you are proud of, in which one feels that public spaces truly belong to the public and not to the threat of criminal violence. The crime wave of the 1980s gave rise to an entire genre of black, urban crime stories: New Jack City (1991), Colors (1988), Juice (1992), Boyz N The Hood (1991), Menace II Society (1993). Although, unlike NJC, some of those films were excellent, I think that they were all made possible by a cultural moment in which Americans felt that they were losing control of the cities they lived in. Of course, gangsta culture hasn't disappeared. It continues to inspire an unending array of million-selling albums purchased by kids in the suburbs. But the success of these albums doesn't depend on their threatening the listener, the way the films mentioned above threatened their audience. In this sense, gangsta culture has become more tame, even as it glorifies the mindless self-destruction of young black Americans. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 4:34 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 12:50 PM by Patrick Belton For more nasty chaps, see this WSJ piece on al-Manar, the Hezbollah telly network which is your first stop on cable for unbiased trustworthy information on Jewish ritual child murder, the underrated joys of jihad and DIY martyrdom in Iraq in five easy steps. Nissan and Tefal advertise on the network; for shame. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 11:39 AM by Patrick Belton Also worth listening to in podcast form - BBC's recent series on the future prospects and promises of the larger developing countries, Brazil, Russia, India and China, the so-called BRIC nations. Though personally, and perhaps it's because it's roundabouts lunchtime, I prefer the BLT nations of Brazil, Lebanon, and Turkey. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 6:54 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 12:17 AM by Patrick Belton ![]() There's something strangely British about this hottie, which we haven't been able to quite put our fingers on. But that doesn't mean you'll be able to keep yours off: this stiff upper lip has got the slyest hint of a pout, and if there's reserve on the outside, I think you'll find things heat up quite a bit underneath. We hope this hottie comes over to warm up our dark, wet, dank, dreary, influenzal countryside nights. Sob. Mother? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Tuesday, October 04, 2005
# Posted 5:34 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 5:13 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 5:01 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 5:00 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 4:56 PM by Patrick Belton ![]()
# Posted 9:48 AM by Patrick Belton Thought you might be interested in learning a little bit more about the Guardian's expert on the killer dolphins.I still think it was a damned good caption. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 9:45 AM by Patrick Belton Mr. Belton, (regarding Michael Lind in Prospect. ah, go on - all my friends call me 'm'lord' - ed.)(0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 9:08 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 8:54 AM by Patrick Belton Hello Patrick(0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 8:51 AM by Patrick Belton * Dylan reference. For Dylangate, incidentally, see here for underwhelment of the left and here for the underwhelment of the right with Scorsese's latest. (1) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 6:11 AM by Patrick Belton ![]() OxBlog's answer to page 3. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Monday, October 03, 2005
# Posted 8:03 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 7:45 PM by Patrick Belton We would have sent our brand new west of Ireland artsy fartsy correspondent, but she's oddly on the wrong end of the country. Máire did file by 'phone this evening, however, to tip Charlie Byrne's to take over Kenny's mantle as bibliophile must-see site when in Galway. (Very very unrelated word of the day in her honour: 'jailteacht,' to describe IRA prisoners' autodidacticism of Irish in H-Block and elsewhere.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 7:09 PM by Patrick Belton Elsewhere, at the convention today Francis Maude said the party must change or die, frontrunner David Davis seemed to disagree (oops), Rifkind made a call for one-nation conservatism, q.v., and Ken Clarke, whom I happen to quite like and who is as close to a Heathian Tory as there is out there at the moment, had to reassure party members that he really didn't like Europe all that much; actually, it was more of a fling, really. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 6:57 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 6:47 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 4:52 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 1:24 PM by David Adesnik It is a free service designed specifically for those who don't have plans to go elsewhere. There are 100 places available for walk-ins. Tell the folks at the door that OxBlog sent you and you'll get a smile. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 12:21 PM by Patrick Belton Also at CFR today, Ambassador Sestanovich looks to who's in position to succeed Putin. (Hat tip: Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces have announced an anti-Kremlin alliance, starting with Moscow city council elections this autumn. Putin for his part looks to step down to influence from 'the ranks', a la Lee Kuan Yew or Deng Xiaoping from the Central Military Commission, though not Jiang Zemin) And finally, Charlie Kupchan says Europe is having quite a bad hair day: the pace of integration and economic growth will be further slowed by a weak government in Berlin, and the demise he foresees for Turkey's accession prospects (occulted under a facade of hollow negotiations) will cultivate nationalism there. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 8:44 AM by Patrick Belton Yesterday,Gotta give credit where credit is due: Jerry Pournelle (minor degradations mine) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Sunday, October 02, 2005
# Posted 9:02 AM by Patrick Belton I'm quite for Turkish membership, promoting Europe as an example of diverse peoples living under liberal democracy, and taking at European level a principled stand against the populist rhetoric surrounding discussion of Turkish membership in Austria, Germany and France. Turkey would provide a sharply greying Europe with a massive infusion of cheap, young labour which it desperately needs, and with subsidies from Brussels probably having peaked following the recent round of enlargement, it (unlike France) is unlikely to siphon off much from European treasuries in the form of structural aid and other subsidies. And this is a sharp moment in Turkey's own political evolution, determining whether its recent political, economic, legal and civil rights reforms will be rewarded or spurned by neighbours whose moral legitimacy turns not on their being a club of prosperous white Christians, but on upholding precisely those sorts of reforms and rights. So here's one for hoping that meeting tonight in Luxembourg, EU foreign ministers do the right thing. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 8:21 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 7:02 AM by Patrick Belton Elsewhere in the papers: The New Criterion notes the NYT's cultural coverage is really rotten while meanwhile in Britain, intellectuals beat up men of letters. Christopher Andrew has a lovely charming piece on spies and Indira. Frequent TLS contributor Ronald Aronson opines gimme that old-style atheism, while Carlos Fuentes, developing further some material I heard him lecture with in London, looks to nominative uncertainty within Don Quijote for wellsprings of the novel as democratic polyforum, the public square where everyone has a right to be heard but no one has the right to exclusive speech. ("Religion is dogmatic. Politics is ideological. Reason must be logical. But literature has the privilege of being equivocal. The quality of doubt in a novel is perhaps a manner of telling us that since authorship (and thus authority) are uncertain and susceptible of many explanations, so it goes with the world itself.") And finally, Rebecca Saxe, a lovely brainy lady who studies brains, examines the potentialities of cognitive science to offer descriptive theories of universal moral reasoning. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Saturday, October 01, 2005
# Posted 12:03 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 11:32 AM by Patrick Belton (Disclaimer: I write occasionally for Sir Peter's publication, but receive no remuneration for plugging his blog. But I am inadverse to being remunerated, and in fact would consider it quite nice, actually.) (1) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 10:47 AM by Patrick Belton Incident(0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 8:09 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 7:06 AM by Patrick Belton As to the first day of the month, it's the Kalends, origin of calendar, and the day on which debts come due. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 7:01 AM by Patrick Belton Also, one of the side benefits of being a blog that's been around for a bit, of which Dan Rather can only be jealous, is that after a while you inevitably come to be one of the top google hits for monstrous tits. (David, not me.) More humbling, we're also the top hit for misinterprets. (That one'd be me.) (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Friday, September 30, 2005
# Posted 1:29 PM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 10:28 AM by Patrick Belton Thus Ramananda Sengupta: To me this is much more personal. My father died unattended because the goddamned doctors had gone on strike in Calcutta.(0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 10:25 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 10:17 AM by Patrick Belton I quibble with whether the ideal he describes is quite so much in decline: I've certainly come across it quite strongly at Oxford, and earlier at Yale as well. My personal impression might be that technocratic specialisation is more inculcated by the British former polytechnics and American state universities to create niches in which their graduates can compete with those of the grander sounding unis. The question is rather whether liberal humanistic education has then become a luxuriant preserve of graduates who can coast on the names of their universities in the labour market, a state of affairs which has its unsettling aspects as well. But it's nonetheless an ideal quite worth defending and expanding (who ever writes pieces, or posts, arguing for ditching liberal education?), and I find the way he goes about doing so to be quite resonant. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 10:08 AM by Patrick Belton In response to repeated reader requests, we'll soon switch all our blogging over to Irish and Uzbek. But not for a few weeks yet. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Thursday, September 29, 2005
# Posted 9:01 PM by David Adesnik David Ignatius: We're winning the war in 2/3 of Iraq, but that other 1/3 is killing us. Jim Hoagland: Bush won't listen to reason. How about to an old college buddy? David Broder: Here's a list of Republicans who can tell Bush how to deal with Katrina. Leon Kass: Americans refuse to admit that getting old means getting frail. Robert Novak [print only]: There are a few Republicans left who don't want to spend like Democrats. Editorial 1: Tom Delay is a big jerk, but he may be innocent. Editorial 2: The GOP Congress wants innocent people to get the death penalty. Editorial 3: Virginia pols don't have the guts to raise taxes, so the highways are f****d. Today's must read? Ignatius, hands down. Reporting from the front lines in Iraq, he writes: It's a war in which U.S. troops remain upbeat, even as support deteriorates back home; in which the appearance of stability in much of Iraq is shattered by spasms of hideous violence; in which U.S. military strategy is confounded by Iraq's political disarray...I don't agree with that last point. There isn't much reason to think that Sunni politicians -- let along the insurgents -- will be worn down enough by the end of the year to play a constructive role in government. Set an early deadline, and we are asking for chaos. Nonetheless, great reporting from Ignatius. Also of note, Jim Hoagland suggests that the GOP can get around its aversion to tax hikes by just asking for a one-time, one-percent-of-your-income "surcharge" to help pay for Katrina. Here's my idea: pass a one percent surcharge, but allow people to divert as much of it as they want to Katrina-related charities. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 11:40 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 11:26 AM by Patrick Belton ![]() I'm told, however, by credible informants that the pink balloons pictured slightly to the northeast of Mrs Blair's head do not, in fact, represent a choice of headgear. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 11:16 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 4:16 AM by Patrick Belton Dolphins have been trained in attack-and-kill missions since the Cold War.But don't just trust the Guardian. Trust the U.S. military instead. Take it from NSCT-1: if it has an acronym, after all, it must exist. As the SPAWAR web page notes, there are five 'marine mammal systems' utilised in operations by U.S. Naval Special Clearance Team-One. There are MK 4, MK 7, and MK 8, which use dolphins to retrieve mines and lost objects; MK 5, which uses sea lions, and MK 6, which uses both sea lions and dolphins, but not Seals, which are apparently different. (But wait, the dolphins are attacking and killing...mines? ed: Perhaps the Guardian thought they said mimes.) Dolphins are better at working underwater than humans, controversially claimed Mike Fedak, a marine mammal biologist at the University of St. Andrews and apologist for American empire. They also apparently require less shore leave. So if you join Naval special operations, you might end up swimming with the ![]() Wednesday, September 28, 2005
# Posted 6:07 PM by David Adesnik Robert Samuelson: The Japanese and Germans aren't concerned enough about making profits. Harold Meyerson: Why must American corporations be so damn concerned about making profits? Anne Applebaum: Louisiana pols prefer pork to profits. Stephan Haggard & Marcus Noland: North Korea prefers starvation to profits. Editorial 1: Bush's record on torture is appalling. Editorial 2: Bush now wants us to conserve oil? He sounds like Jimmy Carter. Editorial 3: Thank God the US airline industry is in dire straits. Also, in connection with Editorial 1, the Post has reprinted a letter from Army Capt. Ian Fishback to Sen. John McCain describing his futile effort to get guidance from his superiors about how to treat prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. Fishback's letter shows that the armed forces have recklessly ignored the issue of torture and that their civilian superiors have displayed an even more disturbing brand of apathy. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 4:55 PM by Patrick Belton While we're waiting for our blogroll, you can see here for a detailed review of the extant academic literature on Shane's teeth: Shane MacGowan is somewhat famous for his teeth, or lack thereof. Many of his teeth are missing; the remainder are rotten, crooked and resemble cigarette butts.As an excuse to insert another Hibernocentric comment here, research has indicated that the only women interested to date Irish males are apparently American. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 7:39 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 5:53 AM by Patrick Belton
# Posted 3:39 AM by Patrick Belton (I should note that back when the Jews, Skull and Bonesmen and Freemasons were running the world, we spelt quite well, thank you.) hugs and kisses, Zokor-5 (formerly Shmuelly Throckmorton III).
(0) opinions
--
Add your opinion
# Posted 2:53 AM by David Adesnik "Completely humiliated by his obvious incapacity to face the wrath of God, who battered New Orleans, city of homosexuals."(0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 2:50 AM by David Adesnik Prosecutors had sought 74,000 years apiece in prison for [conspirators] Yarkas, Chebli and Ghayoun, representing 25 years for each of the almost 3,000 people killed in the Sept. 11 attacks.Yarkas got 27 years a piece instead, the other defendants. I guess we won't find out about the virgins. Plus, commentary from Capt. Ed. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Tuesday, September 27, 2005
# Posted 3:59 PM by David Adesnik George Will: Dianne Feinstein is a bleeding-heart liberal. Richard Cohen: Why isn't John Roberts a bleeding-heart liberal? Ira Katznelson: We should all be bleeding-heart liberals. E.J. Dionne: Democrats aren't sure whether they should be bleeding-heart liberals. Eugene Robinson: Protests are groovy. Editorial 1: The worst looters in Louisiana are the congressmen. Editorial 2: There is a tiny chance that diplomacy could work with Iran. Editorial 3: Bureaucracy killed a small child. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 6:27 AM by Patrick Belton "But... are these what the virgins in paradise will look like, effendi?"Also, Dear Mr. and Mrs. _AL-DURRA____:(0) opinions -- Add your opinion Monday, September 26, 2005
# Posted 11:59 PM by David Adesnik David Ignatius: Our generals really, really, really want Iraqi soldiers to fight harder. Jackson Diehl: Imagine if Fidel Castro had lots of oil. That's Hugo Chavez. Sebastian Mallaby: If America doesn't stop borrowing, it will qualify as Latin. William Raspberry: Poor people fantasize about money instead of earning it. Robert Novak [print only]: The GOP is addicted to pork. Bush, too. Editorial 1: Please nominate another justice with no opinions, Mr. President. Editorial 2: Beltway traffic sucks. Editorial 3: Jack Abramoff is hurting Bush, not just DeLay. Best article? Jackson Diehl, hands down. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 2:10 AM by David Adesnik Seriously, folks, can we get back to the real work of spreading the progressive message and end these useless noisefests?Lorelei Kelly asks, [Is] ANSWER working for Karl Rove?Only Deep Throat knows for sure. Btw, it is worth noting that Lorelei found the protest itself "hugely gratifying". In contrast, Matt Yglesias is Beset with deep-seated doubts about the efficay of this sort of endeavor,although he reports that the rock concert afterward was hugely gratifying. If I hadn't been zonked after the protest, I might've also stayed to watch Le Tigre at midnight. Moving on to the real positives, Max Sawicky celebrates the "diversity" of the protest, while lashing out at "jingoists" who try to subvert the anti-war movement by pointing to the role of ANSWER in organizing the protests. Max's full explanation of the jingoists' tactics is here. In it, he observes that There is little that is offensive in the ANSWER positions per se, from a mainline radical standpoint.Or as OxBlog might say, there is little that is offensive in Pat Robertson's positions per se, from a mainline reactionary standpoint. Also, Max blasts the Democratic Party and the "so-called liberal blogosphere" for being AWOL at the protests. On that point, OxBlog is compelled to agree that the Dems were absent. Score one for Max. Over at EzraKlein.com, Shakes is touting the 500,000 turnout figure provided by some. As someone who attended the anti-war protests in NYC in 2004, which apparently had an actual attendance of 500,000, my thoroughly inexpert opinion is that yesterday's march had 15 to 30 percent of that. Also, Shakes blasts the MSM for only covering the "nutzoid radicals" instead of the mainstream protesters. I think she must be talking about the NYT. On a similiar note, BradBlog is angry about the MSM's insufficient coverage of the protests, especially those networks who didn't send camera crews. When it comes to the numbers game, Brad cites 100,000 as the absolute minimum and 600,000 as the upper limit. Finally, Nicholas Beaudrot argues that insufficient or biased press coverage may not matter, since today's anti-war movement has become much more influential much more rapidly than the anti-war movement in the days of Vietnam. I would add that not too many Democrats jumped onto that bandwagon all that early in the game, either. You might say that Kerry '04 is our Humphrey '68. The question is, who will play George McGovern? (0) opinions -- Add your opinion Sunday, September 25, 2005
# Posted 8:27 PM by David Adesnik COVERING THE COUNTERPROTESTS: Beautiful, buxom women are delightful to behold. But posting pictures of them does not constitute coverage of yesterday's counterprotests. Thus, in spite of some good photo-blogging, the puff-posts put up by conservative bloggers don't provide much in the way of information (let alone thoughtful analysis) about the counterprotests.Given most conservatives commitment to teaching the MSM a thing or two about fairness, I think it would be a beneficial thing for them to engage in slightly more self-criticism, even if they don't have pretensions of being neutral or objective. To its credit, the WaPo did a reasonable job of covering the counterprotests, although its account leaves out enough important things for the subject to merit a post of its own here on OxBlog. What's good about the WaPo article is that tells you both about the dignified presence of soldiers' families as well as the nastiness of some of the counterprotesters' counterattacks: Debbie Ellsworth of Wolverine, Mich., had a framed photo of her son Justin, who was killed Nov. 13, 2004, in Al Anbar province, Iraq. "I know what kind of grief Cindy Sheehan must have because of the death of her son. I feel that same grief for my son," Ellsworth said, "but remember that she does not speak for me."...What the Post fails to report is that the protesters directed that kind of remark and much worse at their counterparts. During the 30 minutes or so I spent along the line of police officers and metal fencers separating the rival groups, I constantly heard the protesters tell the counterprotesters they were Nazis and fascists. One red-faced men even responded to a large poster that read "Duty, Honor, Country" by saying "Hitler would have loved that! Pflicht, Ehre, Land!" The man, whose prowess at translation I admire, then went around screaming "Heil Hitler!" Another disturbingly common response by protesters was giving their critics the finger. I even saw one guy marching back in forth with his hands in the air, one with the middle-finger raised, the other with a two-fingered peace sign. In contrast, there were some protesters who did their best to take the high road. At one point, around ten or so women locked arms and began to sing a very sweet rendition of "We Shall Overcome". (Overcome what? The insurgents' car bombs?) One thing I didn't do that I probably should have is cover the counterprotest from its side of the metal fencing, rather than the from the protesters' side, where I was. Had I done that, I might be able to provide some better examples of offensive things that conservatives said. But even if some of the comments were drowned out by the noise, I could read the signs, which tended to be moderate and patriotic. Among scores of signs that showed pictures of Iraqis voting and whatnot, there were a few that said things like "Hippies smell" and one bizarre poster that read "Rad fems = Neo-Marxists". What were these guys criticizing? A graduate seminar in the Harvard English department? But the worst thing I saw was the huge banner put up by counter-protesters, according to which ANSWER coordinator "Brian Becker is a Commie". The assertion may be true, since the ANSWER leadership is filled with members of the Workers World Party, and other fringe groups. Nonetheless, both the language of the banner and its emphasis on discrediting a specific individual bring to mind the worst sort of red-baiting from a bygone era. I think conservatives would only do themselves a favor by emphasizing ANSWER's perverse support for left-wing dictaors. Apart from all of these specifics, I think it's important to give a better sense of the atmosphere at the counteprotest, which occupied the long block on the north side of Pennsylvania Ave. NW between 9th St. and 10th St. By the time I got there, the central mass of the protest march had long since gone by and there was just a more relaxed flow of protesters down Penn Ave. What happened, though, was that the protesters had begun to cluster together in knots just across from the counterprotesters. The center of each knot tended to consist of one particularly loud screaming match that had drawn the attention of those on both sides. In between the knots there were smaller, more personalized confrontations, along with occasional unoccupied spaces. (Imagine the scene in the photograph above multipied along the length of a football field.) The composition of most of the shouting knots changed slowly, as both the participants and observers on the anti-war side of the fence continued to march along the official protest route. The police also did their part to encourage forward movement, in order to prevent any of the confrontations from getting to heated. I don't think one can really say that there was much substantive debate going on along the counterprotest block. Rather, there was a mix of condescension and lost tempers on both sides of the fence. One thing that struck me about the chants that went back forth, was how quickly they all returned to the chickenhawk debate. One of the most popular protester responses to just about everything coming from the other side was "How come you're not in Iraq?" or "Why don't you enlist?" The general response was for the counterprotesters to point out or pull over the soldiers on their side of the fence or, alternately, the families of soldiers. On occasion, the protesters challenged some of the soldiers to go back to Iraq if they supported the war. Once, there was even a chant of "Re-enlist! Re-enlist! Re-enlist!" Equally nonsensical was the demand of one counterprotester to know why, if the protesters cared so much about peace, they weren't in the Peace Corps. But leaving aside such strange arguments, I think the prevalence of the chickenhawk argument does say something important the anti-war movment, namely that the only story it can tell itself about those who support the war is that they are very selfish or very naive. If this war is about blood for oil and profits for Halliburton, how could anyone support it if they aren't selfish or naive? In contrast, mainstream Democrats know that promoting democracy is a good objective and that pulling out of Iraq may be very dangerous, even if they are 100% sure that we have already lost the war thanks to Bush's incompetence. But that kind of intellectual opposition to the war doesn't get people out in the streets. Cindy Sheehan overcame such reluctance to a certain degree by infusing liberal arguments against the war with emotional content. But with soldiers and their families still coming out for the mission much more often than against it, Democrats can't get as outraged as they were a generation ago, when our government was forcing young men to fight and die in Vietnam. That is the invisible strength of an army of volunteers. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 6:53 PM by David Adesnik The second staple of conservative protest coverage is mocking the protesters, a la Michelle Malkin. In a limited sense, this sort of coverage also serves as a form of a media criticism, since the MSM have become so proficient at pretending the "moonbats" don't exist. Nonetheless, a fair amount of this coverage just crosses the line into being tasteless and spiteful. So what can bloggers do to overcome this kind of entrenched habit? I'm not exactly sure, but I do want to focus in this post on one point that seems to have eluded the both the big papers and the bloggers completely: The Democratic Party, both in terms of official organizations and major politicians, stayed away from yesterday's protests like the plague. There were a number of fringe Democrats on the speakers list, such as Jesse Jackson and Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-GA). But the closest thing I saw to official Democratic represenation was a number of protesters wearing t-shirts advertising the College Democrats. (Their timeless slogan: "Have you ever heard of a good piece of elephant?") The closest thing I saw to a Dem-affiliated organization I saw was a delegation from SEIU, a service workers union. The SEIU brigade stood out both because of their purple t-shirts and because of their being almost exclusively black at a very, very white protest. But perhaps one of the most important indications of the Democratic Party being MIA was what the protesters' signs were saying and what clothes they were wearing. I'd expected to see at least some leftover Kerry/Edwards paraphrenalia. Maybe I saw one or two items during my five hours at the protest. In contrast, it was very easy to find folks wearing items such as the popular "International Terrorist" t-shirt, featuring a black-and-white portrait of President Bush. Naturally, I'm sure that almost everyone wearing those kind of t-shirts voted for Kerry last fall because they felt they had no choice. But their fashion preferences provide a good indication of just how far outside the Democratic mainstream most protesters are. It is simple: If any Democratic senator or presidential candidate described Bush as a terrorist, they would destroy their own reputations. Imagine if Kerry had called Bush a terrorist. It would have made the reaction to Dick Durbin's "gulag" remarks seem tame. If you read the WaPo or NYT, you get no sense of how far outside the Democratic mainstream the protesters are. And if you read conservative blogs, very few authors acknowledge that there are dramatic differences between the protesters and other liberals. (Although Glenn did point out that even some of Kos' bloggers found the protests distasteful.) At the extreme of the protester spectrum are those who rare few who hold up posters of Bush and Hitler or superimpose a swastika on the American flag. But the description of Bush as a terrorist was common place. According to one chant I heard, "Who is a terrorist? Bush is a terrorist!" (Wash, rinse, repeat.) The other major thread of protester sentiment that is totally anathema to the Democratic mainstream is the pervasive blood-for-oil slogan. Sample chant: "George Bush, corporate whore -- we don't want your oil war!" On the rare occasions when protesters did refer explicitly Democrats, their comments were critical. One sign I saw compared today's Dems to LBJ. And there were at least as many of those sorts of signs as there were pro-Democratic ones. Perhaps the closest thing I saw to real, active passionate support of the Democratic party was when Ralph Nader took the stage at the Ellipse and someone behind me screamed "F*** you, Ralph!" Al Gore would be proud. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
# Posted 6:19 PM by David Adesnik The protests [in Washington DC] and elsewhere were largely sponsored by two groups, the Answer Coalition, which embodies a wide range of progressive political objectives, and United for Peace and Justice, which has a more narrow, antiwar focus."Progressive" is a hard word to define, but I'm pretty damn sure that it has nothing to do with serving as an apologist for Fidel Castro, Kim Jong Il and other left-wing dictators. In fact, that is the exact opposite of progressive -- it is reactionary. As for UPJ, it is somewhat misleading to define it as having a "narrow, anti-war focus". Tactically speaking, that is not inaccurate, although UPJ itself advertises its interest in the Palestinian issue, "corporate globalization", and nuclear disarmament. (Amusingly, the latter emphasizes that "It is time to disarm America!", rather than, say, North Korea or Iran.) But getting back to my point, UPJ's ideology in no way has a narrow, anti-war focus. It's purpose is to stop the "relentless drive for U.S. empire". Here's the key graf from UPJ's Unity Statement, its organizational manifesto: It is now clear the war on Iraq was the leading edge of a relentless drive for U.S. empire. Exploiting the tragedy of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration has sought to use aggressive military action to pursue a long-term agenda: to forcibly dominate the world and impose right-wing policies at home under the cover of fighting terrorism.You know, you'd think that UPJ would give Bush more credit for being good at imperialism. I mean, look at what happened to the Russians and the British when they tried to take Afghanistan. And if Bush can pull our chestnuts out of the fire, then he really deserves an Oscar for imperialism. (0) opinions -- Add your opinion
|