Gleiwitz délivré

At the high point of the Jeremiah Wright imbroglio, I was chatting with a friend who largely shares my sympathies for passive radicalism, but as we talked about the truths behind the Rev's critique of the imperium, I found myself defending his contention that the US government introduced crack and HIV into the urban community. These are accusations that even the most staunchly anti-imperial political radicals generally eschew as being somehow beyond the pale, existing in the realm of pure paranoia and fantasy. On the merits of evidence, I endorse neither, but this notion that these kinds of conspiracies are categorically impossible is the real fantasy. The government that brought you the Tuskegee experiments and that deliberately dosed its own soldiers with LSD for days and weeks at a time is capable of plenty of skulduggery, and the government that will kill a million Vietnamese or displace 4 million Iraqis from their homes can hardly be defended with the line "well, they wouldn't do that . . ."

As for this anthrax shit and our friend Thoreau's willingness to embrace the distinct possibility that the gunman wasn't necessarily working alone, I raise a cloudy glass. We are ruled by people who would use a false flag operation straight out of the 1939 playbook, so let's never preemptively conclude that there are some lines they just wouldn't transgress.

The General, with the Cluster Munitions, in the Library . . .

Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism. Jesus Christ. I know a fair portion of the Donk substructure is just itching to show the GOPpers that they know how to run the empire all six-sigma-style an' shit, but are they really going to grab at it by amending The One True Candidate with a dude who by rights ought to be sitting in the dock at the ICC next to the other murdering dickhead? Obamaclark dot com: for real? Well, at least I won't lack for material these next four years.

The locomotive force is our old friend Matt Stoller, whose ubiquity on the internet is the true, mundane, waking end of William Gibson's dream of gothpunkcybercool. The AIs wear chinos. Fuck. Stoller's infelicity and penchant for cracked euphemism is legendary, at least in our little net-based anarchoshtetl, and one passage bears translation:

The political argument for Clark is simple. He is a great surrogate for Democrats, with experience in 2004 and 2006 on the campaign trail, and a genuine national base of supporters. In terms of governance, which is what Obama says is the most important criteria for his VP pick, Clark can help Obama deal with the mess that the Bush administration left behind. As commander of NATO in the late 1990s, Clark won a war, so he is more likely than any progressive out there to be able to wrangle solutions from a military establishment that has been decimated by Bush's cronyism and incompetence. That is really important moving forward, since rebuilding our national security posture is a critical challenge over the next eight years.

Translation: Wesley Clark may have run the world's shittiest primary campaign, and he may have campaigned for some milquetoast losers like Ned Lamont, who couldn't even knock off the Huckleberry Hound (I-Zion) in the general, but my geek buddies and I ["national base of support"] are so totally boned by his campaign of high-altitude cluster-bombing, especially when he bombed the fuck out of that civilian radio station. With skills like those, he'll definitely ensure that the United States can return to the days when it fights multi-continent, aircraft-driven police actions that minimize or eliminate American casualties while conveniently obfuscating the civilian toll.

The rest is pure fluffery, but I do enjoy the praise for his having "nearly died from his wounds in Vietnam," which is awesome, I guess, except what was he doing in Vietnam? The man in the black pyjamas. Worthy fucking adversary, dude. Then the penultimate sentence begins:

This is someone who would make an insanely good Vice President[.]

Insanely. Maybe Stoller's writ is more felicitous than I thought . . .

Gays in Horror!

Remember how rapidly gay marriage has become a requirement.

-Orson Scott Card

Take off your bands, gentlemen, and come with me.

First of all, I don't care what the Hugo judges thought, or what you thought when you were still a virgin: Ender's Game sucks, and the sequels suck worse than all the sequels and prequels to Dune and The Foundation combined.

Now. Card's peroration comes to me via The Editors, and, correct me if I'm wrong, he appears to be proposing that the Ozzies and Harriets of the world rise up and overthrow the government of the United States. Sure, honey, just let me finish with this laundry, and do you mind if we stop by the store on the way, because we're out of coffee.

Annals of Odd Vocations

Victor Davis Hanson, a former raisin farmer . . . wait. Really?

It Was Good Enough for Your Parents

Is it my imagination, or is David Brooks suggesting that we reconstitute the old versions of NATO and the Warsaw Pact because he's, like, confused?

Hollow Cost

Oh, The Krug Man is worried 'bout the planet. The Planet can't afford John McCain's cynicism. His nihilistic political opportunism threatens to reverse the movement of the tectonic plates! His gaseuous eruptions will poison the seas and skies!

You know, I for one, am a believer in anthopogenic climate change, but it ain't The Planet that's gonna get screwed beyond unscrewing, but rather the viral upright monkeys who caused that shit in the first place. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Rousseau. Man in a state of nature is extinct.

So apparently . . .

by being black, or whatever, Obama is playing the race card. With the usual caveats about despising Neo and all he fucking may or may not at some indefinite point in the ineffible future stand for . . . Jesus Christ, white people: what a bunch of pussies.

Now "the race card" is one of those classic expressions, and even though I know that you know that I know, I'm going to point out for the sake of clarity that while white people like to think that "playing the race card" means using the profagsor's universty-led PC jihad Kulturkamp-imposed Politically Correct sensibilities to one's advantage as a minority--in other words, accruing advantage because you're black or some such--what it really means is that on certain rare instances one's melanin content has failed to adequately diminish his prospects on the sociopoliticoeconomic ladder of our looney-bin, race-obsessed society. What it really means is that for once the cop forgot to shoot the dog, you know? That for once, some nigger had enough money to hire a decent Jew lawyer and beat the charge, that being a helium-filled black avatar of status-quo neoliberalism may, in fact, turn out to be a position of advantage when your opponent looks like he ought to be starring as a CGI effect in the next Brendan Frasier blockbuster.

The Flowers Bloom Like Magic in the Spring

Seriously, isn't it time that we banish fucking Kissinger to some decrepit parkbench, like Aqualung? Shouldn't he be feeding pigeons? Isn't the era of the crackpot Merwerkdigliebe past? Aren't our contemporary monsters supposed to be made of logos and high-definition feeds and iPhones and Facebook profiles? Why does this flesh-and-blood reptile continue to haunt us? Shouldn't he be sunning himself on a rock out on some nuclear Nevada proving ground, sucking blood and bile out of little girls impaled on curly straws? Can't he slink off to a decent Nazi-themed S&M party like other men of his generation, or enact his Saloian imagination in his own private redoubt, far from the madding crowd, far from me? When will it end, oh Lord, when will it end?

The American presence in Iraq should not be presented as open-ended; this would not be supported by either Iraqi or American domestic opinion. But neither should it be put forward in terms of rigid deadlines. Striking this balance is a way for our country to come together as a constructive outcome emerges. Thirty years ago, Congress cut off aid to Vietnam and Cambodia two years after American troops had been withdrawn and local forces were still desperate to resist. Domestic divisions had overcome all other considerations. We must not repeat the tragedy that followed.

The next president has a great opportunity to stabilize Iraq and lay the basis for a decisive turn in the war against jihadist radicalism and for a more peaceful Middle East. Surely he will want to assess the situation on the ground before setting a strategy for his term. He should not be limited by rigid prescriptions to vindicate maxims of the past, no matter how plausible they once seemed. Withdrawal is a means; the end is a more peaceful and hopeful world.

Cut off aid to . . . desperate to resist . . . domestic . . . Hey, you know, FUCK YOU, Henry, you whore.

Playing the Numbers

The number of foreign fighters entering Iraq has dropped to 20 a month, down from about 110 a month last summer and as many as 50 a month earlier this year, according to a senior U.S. intelligence analyst who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the nature of his work.

-The Washington Post

Dear Amit R. Paley,

I could tell you how many angels are dancing on the head of this pin, but then I'd have to kill you.

Anonymously,
█████████

The Raisins of Wrath

Masked guerilla lawyer la_rana tells me to keep reading The Corner, so I keep keep reading the corner.

As for me, I have been wearing a flag in my lapel since September 11, 2001, and with special care ever since American forces took the war to the place whence it emanated, Afghanistan. As long as brave Americans were willing to accept, if necessary, wounds or death on our behalf, I felt a duty to be faithful to them: “This flag’s for them!” And will stay in my lapel until they are out of harm’s way.

Everyone knows silly bravado when he sees it. So let me lay some out. Since Osama bin Laden is out to harm Americans all he can, it seems only right that we should wear a flag to make it easy for him to find us. It would be disgraceful to cower.

Accessorize! Back in the WWII days, guys collected scrap metal for the War Effort. Today, they pin it on their, uh, lapels. I'm one Victory Garden away from solving the global food-price crisis, myself.

Also, "the place whence it emanated"? Thou hast oppenned mine Eyes, my deare Novacke, with thine moste fulsome Love of Countrie.

The Good War

Tom Friedman sensibly notes (Christ, if I'd've thought one day I'd write that . . .) that the Obaman talk of beefing up the Afghan war has little to do with any real strategic considerations of the empire and everything to do with proving his martial bona fides while running as the ostensible peace candidate. The Donk's committment to escalation even as he purports to be antiwar is a source of constant amusement at Who Is IOZ? headquarters, and we raise our shot glasses in salute to overcoming cognitive dissonance and killing foreigners For Their Own Good™.

Fortunately for the consonance of my own precious cognition, Friedman continues to be wrong even when he's right, and there it is, right at the bleeding heart of his argument, that word, modernity, as in:

The core problem is that the Arab-Muslim world in too many places has been failing at modernity[.]

In Tommy's world, partial refusal to integrate into the globo-corpo-capito hegemony--this is what he means by "modernity"--of Western Consumption and Eastern Production indicates a fundamentally moral failure, and as such produces "humiliation." (Isn't humility a virtue? Whatever, dude.) Of course, any globocorpocapitalist can see that in the main the Middle-Eastern petro-producers are perfectly integrated as the filling station for the production and transit of goods. Tom has this idea that the world is going to run on wind farms (not with 7 billion people and rising standards of living it ain't), while a post-nomadic sand-dune monarchy with no arable land is going to produce a mature democracy, a "decent and consensual government," spurred on by the production of the same in Baghdad, Kabul, Islamabad. Meanwhile, this is the guy who gets hard just thinking about Dubai, whose system of government he seems to have confused with a small town in New Hampshire.

Afghanistan, meanwhile, is another matter. You want to produce a "decent and consensual government" in a country with 28% literacy. Somehow I don't think the Lockean social compact is going to take in that climate. Just a hunch, though.

Black Diamond Bay

In fact, I'll wager I could find a dozen future members of either administration who would roll out the red carpet and greet them like envoys of a fellow superpower if the Europeans so desired.

Yet at the same time, I'd also wager that I could not find a dozen current members of any European government who have even thought about coming up with any ideas at all. This is the hour of Europe—but do the Europeans even know it?

-Anne Applebaum

Man, I was down at the grocery store and there was Barack Obama transforming pineapples into gold and gold into lead and lead into $25.99/lb. Copper River Salmon, and when I said, "Hey Barack, Copper River Salmon isn't even in season, you asshole!" he disappeared--poof!--and left nothing but a panama hat and a pair of old Greek shoes.

Anyway, Anne Applebaum was playing dice with the nice Dominican boy over in the bulk food aisle and I guess she was in pretty deep because she was sweating and hissing and she kept kissing the monkey paw that she had hanging on a silver chain around her neck. She asked me if I could spot her a twenty and I told her, "No, Anne Applebaum. I'm not going to be your enabler. You need to get this addiction under control."

"Yeah well you can just go to fucking hell!" she screamed.

Then Barack Obama appeared in the sky above us in the shape of a piece of moldy toast and cried, "I am Barack Obama, and I am Zardoz. I have lived 300 years, and long to die. But death is no longer possible, I am immortal. I present now my story - full of mystery and intrigue. Rich in irony, and most satirical. It is set deep within a possible future, so none of these events have yet occurred. But they may! Be warned, lest you end as I. In this tale I am a fake god by occupation, and a magician by inclination. Merlin is my hero! I am the puppet master. I manipulate many of the characters and events you will see. But I am invented too for your entertainment and amusement. And you, poor creatures, who conjured you out of the clay? Is God in showbusiness too?"

Then a passing stranger told Applebaum, "My darling, je vous aime beaucoup."

It was Nicholas Sarkozy! And then we invaded Pakistan!

Buncha Queers

Simmering white hatred aside, I'm very sorry to see Unitarians targeted like this. I've known self-described Christian purists who had nothing but disdain for the Unitarians, which I always found odd, given that Unitarians actually practice what they believe Jesus preached, even though they don't think that Jesus was the Son of God. I suppose that for some Christians, this alone is a deal breaker. Putting Jesus' philosophy into action is secondary to accepting without question Christ's divinity. Well, you won't go broke or be ostracized for taking that approach. Jesus as a timeless, floating wizard is certainly more appealing than viewing him as someone who defended prostitutes and mixed with the diseased and wretched. This is America we're talking about.

-Dennis P.

One of the central conceits of the Christian hagiography is that after three centuries of persecution, Christianity finally conquered Rome (with a few more hiccups) through the conversion of Constantine I, but the truer reading is that Constantinian Rome coopted Christianity, ironed out its hippy-dippy mystical eschatology, set up a clerical bureaucracy, got together a game plan on heresy and apostasy, and built a state religion so strong that it would outlive the state that created it. Not too shabby for the year 325. Now it may seem that the Homoousian ontology of the triune God with its kooky consubstantialism is just an acid trip away from LA Woman, but that kind of jazz was pretty standard in the Classical world, even as late as the early Christian era, and it was surely less grating to the PowersThatWuz and other interested parties than "Rather, the Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living Father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty" and all that other gnostic hogwash. The Son of Man, meanwhile was a nice, novel deity, and turning him into a living appendage of the eternal skygod was clearly better for business than letting a bunch of millenarian freaks run around telling people that the Logos could enter them at any minute, too. That's why the Council of Nicea spent so much time harumphing over the Arians and the Paulians, etc.--you can hardly build a Church out of a bunch of indigent, pansy Billy Jacks talkin' 'bout vision quests n' shit.

If there's one thing I learned in 'Nam

Well, I would advise reading Yglesias' take on Lee Smith's take on Kenneth Pollack's new, uh, tome, A Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East, in order to avoid both Kenneth Pollack and Lee Smith. Pollack, you may recall, is the guy who wrote The Threatening Storm; Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, followed by The Persian Puzzle; Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. His grand thesis, plainly put, is that we are strong, no one can tell us we're wrong, searching our hearts for so long, both of us knowing love is a battlefield. Lee Smith appears to be some kind of circus phlebotemist, or possibly a kind of Straussian tranny fag, such as it is--point being that he remains rather more of a mystery. As Yglesias notes, in any case, the quest to dominate the Middle East through force of arms or political transformation (through force of arms) or whathaveyou because, well, shit, we gots ta have the oil seems to lack any appreciable . . . appreciation for the old notion of weighing costs against benefits. After all, the fifty gazillion dollars a second we're spending in Iraq et al. could rebuild the fucking railroads in the You Ess uhv Ay. Also recall: Henley's Law states that the best, easiest, and cheapest way to acquire petroleum would be to buy it. Considering that the region's other major natural resource is fucking sand, one presumes they'll remain willing to sell. I was going to write a book myself, actually, outlining a grand strategy for America in the Middle East, but as brevity is the soul of wit, and tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief: quit invading countries and killing people in the Middle East. The beauty of this plan, dude, is its simplicity.

Like a Slumber Party, but Tiffany's Got a Gun

It's breathtakingly simple, I suppose, to support a potentially endless mission in Iraq when you can't imagine that your decision to leave might have anything to do with the wishes of your hosts.

-Lawyers, Guns, and Money

Our hosts? The Liberal is often confused, but lately slightly deranged. I think it must be the impending handover of responsibility for imperial management, the series of intellectual (oh, my!) contortions necessary to justify internationalism as being For Their Own Good. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

It was Mark Lynch of Abu Aardvark who put our LGM blogger on the case. Lynch attended a symposium of sorts at the amusingly, self-regardingly titled US Institute for Peace, in which Kimberly Kagan--the wife of some Kagan or other and a baying werewolf in her own right--made the rather plain, obvious point that whatever lip service we may give them and their sovereignty, the needs and concerns of Iraqis mean fuck-all in answering the question, to paraphrase the Clash: should we stay or should we go? (If we stay there will be trouble . . . if we go it will be double. Oh, how the classics help us, even now . . .) Mr. Lynch is shocked, shocked!

Finally, Kim Kagan shocked me with a comment made forcefully, twice, once towards the end of her prepared remarks and again at the opening of her closing remarks: the future of Iraq depends primarily on American decisions, not Iraqi decisions. I found this extraordinarily revealing: for her it really is all about us. This infantalizes Iraqis - and, as Kahl would surely note, demands nothing of them, since it is American decisions and will which matter and not theirs. Such a world-view, characteristic of so much neoconservative foreign policy thinking, explains a great deal. How could one possibly contemplate drawing down American forces, after all, if American actions are the only actions that matter, American power the only power which matters, American decisions the only decisions which matter? Why would it matter what Maliki says, or what Iraqi politicians or public opinion polls say, if what really matters is only ultimately us?

Oh, it infantilizes them! It "demands nothing of them." How's that for post-war Liberal paternalism? Here is the sort of mind that thrills to Obama castigating black folk for being shitty parents. Personal responsibility! Get your own house in order! Up by the bootstraps! The Lord helps those who help themselves! A penny saved is a penny earned! It is to a far, far better place . . .

The curious thing about neoconservatives in this country is that although they claim Doc Strauss as their intellectual godfather, their dedication to the Noble Lie lasts only long enough for them to realize just how self-effacing the Lie really is. As soon as it occurs to them that the Lie entails a dimunition of Credit, they get wobbly and start telling the truth. (Remember poor Dustin Hoffman in Wag the Dog, who got a bullet to the brain in the end because he wanted credit due for his picture?) Kagan isn't the only attention-deficient court hanger-on to come out and say what has long been clear: invading and occupying Iraq had nothing to do with liberation or anything else so faggy. It was motivated by American interests; it was carried out for American purposes; its success or failure is measured in benefits accrued to the US; permanency is the point.

Meanwhile, it is the supposedly antiwar Donk set which seeks to polish the dirty deed with a patina of humanitarian legitimacy, yapping on and on about how shocking it is that no one seems to care what the Iraqi people, whatever they are, want. Ya think? Man, it's almost as if we invaded and occupied their country! I don't recall any local straw-polling prior to that decision. Well, I was pretty stoned back in aught-two and -three. Maybe I missed it.

Dear Liberals: the Iraqis are not our "hosts." We aren't their guests. America isn't a rude guest on a weekend at the coutry estate. This isn't hanging around the bar after last call. We are a foreign occupying power, however poorly we've acquited ourselves as such, and the Iraqis, their government, their military, their institutions, etc., are our subjects. Put away the lipstick. The pig is what it is.