Who owns this hotel? Can the Jews have a room? And shouldn’t we blow up the bar and replace it with a mosque?

A Musical Play in Three Acts

by Thomas L. Friedman

Synopsis

ACT I

Scene 1
Early morning. A Bellhop is smoking outside of the service entrance. He sings ("Embrace the Future") of his misfortune. The Owner appears and castigates him angrily for wasting time ("Ultimate Confrontation State"). The Bellhop argues, and together they sing a duet ("Who Owns this Hotel?").

Scene 2
The grand lobby of the hotel bustles with workers and guests. The ensemble sings of the pains and triumphs of daily life ("Stop and Start at Will"). As the crowd disperses, the Bellhop finds himself face-to-face with a beautiful Girl, a guest. She asks him to take her bags, and he tells her that he has fallen in love with her ("True Protector"). She responds by telling him that she could love him too, but first he must make something of himself ("Bid for Primacy"). As the curtain falls, they embrace. Unseen by them, the Owner looks on in the background.

ACT II

Scene 1
In the employee lounge, the Owner confronts the bellhop about his affair with a guest ("Rejects and Recognition"). Together they sing a duet ("Disastrous and Reckless") in which the bellhop vows to pursue his dreams and the Owner laments the dreams he never fulfilled, which have left him angry and embittered.

Scene II
Alone on the beach and staring up at the brightly lit exterior of the hotel, the Bellhop sings an allegorical song ("Can the Jews Have a Room") about his position as an outsider. He prepares to return to the hotel, but is angrily confronted by the Girl's Parents ("Irreversible Threat"). He runs off into the night.

Act III

Scene I
In a hotel room, the Girl argues with her Parents. She tells them that she loves the Bellhop, and urges them to confront their own problems with alcoholism ("Blow up the Bar"). They react angrily, and the three sing a trio ("Civil War"). The girl leaves, slamming the door. The Parents come to see the error of their ways and embrace ("All of These Issues").

Scene II
The Bellhop has packed his belongings and is crossing the lobby, intending never to return. But the Owner has had a change of heart and rushes to stop him ("Great Struggles"), explaining that he has seen his own dreams crushed but wants the bellhop to have a better life. The girl arrives, pursued by her parents, and they all witness the Owner telling the bellhop that he is stepping aside and the Bellhop will now be in charge ("Earn Him Respect," "Who Owns this Hotel?: Reprise"). The bellhop and girl embrace, and the whole case sings a reprise ("Can the Jews Have a Room?" "Embrace the Future"). Curtain.

I Want My Em Tee Veeeeeeeeeeeeee

Being the Son of a Hospital CEO™, naturally I called Pops and asked him what he thought about Sanjay Gupta for Surgeon General and he explained to me that 1.) all doctors are morons; 2.) the chief of the medical staff is always the biggest, most self-involved moron in the passel of physician-savants; ergo 3.) the Surgeon General oughta be . . . But seriously, why not just make Lou Dobbs the Secretary of Treasury and Katie Couric our Ambassador to the UN? Gupta actually is a fer-real doctor, and yet his principal claim to fame is performing a nitpicking and largely inaccurate "fact check" on that movie where Michael Moore pits Fidel Castro against Charlton Heston in a mixed martial arts fight to the death. Is it really the job of the Surgeon General to tell us all whether or not açai is a superfood and give cookie-eating cubicle drones advice on losing weight without ever leaving their desks?

Pittsburgh Babylon

I want to state unequivocally that I currently have no recollection, to the best of my knowledge, of ever bumping into Yarone Zober at Club Pittsburgh.

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

So when you count the wars and other off-book spending you're talking about an annual deficit equivalent to 10 percent of GDP. What can you say about that? Our money is purely notional. It means nothing, represents nothing. It's one vast metafiction, totally self-referential, a system so floridly non-existent as to become magnificent.

Betamax

I'm a little late to the party, but there's something marvelous about Eliot "The Money's on the Dresser" Spitzer writing that we need to "make it cool to design the next cutting-edge video game or iPod" for one of these electronic internet news journal things. Brotherman, it is cool. I mean, I do love my Steelers, but mine is a generation that loves its graphic designers and facebook creators and The Googleand iPods. Lord only knows what the kids think is cool these days . . . nanobots and superviruses and FTL drives or something. The days of A/V club dorks getting smacked around by jocks aren't exactly over, but everyone plays video games, and you will find more young ones who want to be the next Bill Gates or Sergey Brin or Mark Zuckerberg.

E▪PLVRIBVS▪VNVM

Like the good little Augustus he is, Obama wants to stuff the guvmint with loyalists, lackeys, and dependable hacks. But La Feinstein is not pleased. "My position has consistently been that I believe the agency is best served by having an intelligence professional in charge at this time." (As opposed, one notes, to an intelligent professional. But we digress.)

I have no position on Panetta, but am pleased as can be that the Donk proves once again to be so splendidly inept at palace politics. Harry Reid barred Burris from the august chambers of the imperial city, meanwhile caving to Gopster demands that the Minnesota Frankenstein not be seated until . . . some other time. Boyking Black Reagan declares he will not pass his economic kidney stone without eighty senators on board. If not the mandate of heaven, at least a "bipartisan manner."

Lady Diane will cave, of course. Caesar will sit her down for a little chat, with Hillary behind him in houdou high priestess regalia holding the shrunken head of Vince Foster. As goes La Feinstein, so goes Harry Reid, who has all the tenacity of a plastic bag in a hurricane. They're just getting in their warbles while they still can.

It Ain't

This is usually more of the Wonkette beat, but whatevs. Go here to listen to human Sousaphone Brit Hume intone

Why is it that he's thought to be under a taint?

à propos Roland Burris.

What's This Day of Rest Bullshit?

JOHNNY CASPAR: It's a wrong situation. It's gettin' so a businessman can't expect no return from a fixed fight. Now if you can't trust a fix, what can you trust? For a good return you gotta go bettin' on chance, and then you're back with anarchy. Right back inna jungle. On account of the breakdown of ethics. That's why ethics is important. It's the grease makes us get along, what separates us from the animals, beasts a burden, beasts a prey. Ethics. Whereas Bernie Bernbaum is a horse of a different color ethics-wise. As in, he ain't got any. He's stealin' from me plain and simple.

-from Miller's Crossing

So, let's sum up the Blagojevich clusterfuck. Our modern-day Elliot Ness catches Hair-do musing on the value of a US Senate Seat, and as an exercise in preemptive justice, like Tom Cruise in that one movie, you remember, the one, he calls a big old presser and says that Abraham Lincoln and the Choirs of Heavenly Angels are singing salves and rending their garments because this bad, bad man did something that may or may not have been wrong. This, of course, is perfectly ethical behavior from a federal prosecutor. Nothing signals ethical rigor like gathering the national press and announcing a man's guilt before you even get a Grand Jury indictment. Now the Grand Jury is the most prosecution-friendly institution we've got, and a decent prosecutor can indict a kitten for cuteness if he so chooses, which leads me to conclude that Fitzy's case is about as tight as a boybutt after a DP scene. I.E., not so very. So, our, like, totally impartial justice system says, eh, here ya go, take another three months to see if you can make some shit stick to the wall. Laughable, man. Bush-league psych-out shit.

Gabor

Legal Eagle commenter la_rana noted this in comments a while back, but by Dog it's worth repeating, because even very, very smart men like Daniel Larison do not understand that there is no such thing as the "institution of marriage." There are, at least, two distinct institutions, one civil, the other spiritual. The latter does whatever it is that whichever particular religion claims it to do. The former confers a package of legal and financial rights and privileges onto two individuals who make a mutual contract. You can be married at city hall and never get the blessing of a priest, or be sanctified by your guru without ever going through the metal detectors downtown. Meanwhile, until very recently, historically speaking, so-called mixed marriages often went unrecognized by our various sects and denominations. A nice Catholic boy and a good Jewish girl joined by a rabbi weren't married in the eyes of Rome, etc. The idea that there's a unitary "institution of marriage" that is coextensive with all civic and religious attributes of the union we call marriage in conversational English is absurd and hysterical. This institution is invoked in opposition to same-sex marriage for one purpose: to have the state ratify a religious anathema, while mouthing--you'll pardon the expression--pieties and platitudes about equal protections in all but name. Those believers who wish to preserve their sacred institution from the encroachment of homos would do well to begin advocating for the end of civil marriage and the creation of some alternative means of conferring its attendant legal rights. Otherwise, and sooner than they think, they're going to lose.

Massacre of the Canaanites

One should be clear that this sociopathic indifference to (or even celebration over) the deaths of Palestinian civilians isn't representative of all supporters of the Israeli attack on Gaza. It's unfair to use the Goldfarb/Peretz pathology to impugn all supporters of the Israeli attack. It's certainly possible to support the Israeli offensive despite the deaths of these civilians, to truly lament the suffering of innocent Palestinians but still find the war, on balance, to be justifiable.

-The Greenwald

Dear Glenn,

No. It isn't.

Shalom,
IOZ

Herod Archelaus

I find it interesting that during the brokered cease-fire, Palestinians stopped launching rockets but Israel didn't stop the expansion of its settlements. I'm not implying a causal relationship--West-Bank settlements certainly weren't the proximate cause of the breakdown in Gaza. It says something about good faith, though, no? Anyway, one does wonder what Israel's endgame is in all of this. I mean, short of eradicating the Palestinian people, an option they don't have the stomach for (yet), what benefit do they hope to gain? Neither air power nor ground assaults, up to and including physical occupation, stop bombings and rocket launches. Cf. Iraq, Afghanistan. And if the plan is to topple the Hamas pseudogovernment in the Gaza Strip, who is to replace them? Clearly Fatah is in no position to step in.

A guy like Gerson is actually right to note that proportionality in warfare is an odd concept and that the mere taking of life for life is just revenge. The fact he conveniently elides, however, is that none of the goals in his fantasia are achievable through war. Israel is just engaging in some good, old-fashioned collective punishment. You don't even have to compare them to the you-know-whos. In that part of the world, there's plenty of older precedent. Everyone's a damn Roman these days.