Newt Gingrich, GOP debate 12/10/11: If we do survive, it will be in part because of people like Rick [Santorum] who’ve had the courage to tell the truth about the Iranians for a long time.
Dan Drezner, Foreign Policy: Even a nuclear-armed Iran led by the current regime of nutball theocrats cannot threaten America’s survival. I get why the United States is concerned about Iran going nuclear, and I get why Israel is really concerned about Iran going nuclear. The only way that developments in Iran could threaten America’s survival, however, would be if the US policy response was so hyperbolic that it ignited a general Middle East war that dragged in Russia and China. Which… come to think of it, wouldn’t be entirely out of the question under a President Gingrich.
Lemkin: Yep. In line with suddenly making this “rotten discourse day” around here, this is just one more symptom, to be filed under “imaginary foreign policy | Serious Person edition.” Yes, existential threats to the United States and to “civilized” life on Earth as we know it are real and do exist. Climate change is very, very high on that list and may, in fact, far outweigh any other risk currently facing either the United States or, more generally, humanity itself in a truly existential fashion. That one party is allowed to categorically deny its very existence in defiance of the preponderance of evidence and inevitably in the name of journalistic integrity or “not taking sides” will be, perhaps, marveled at by whatever future race digs through the ashes of our long forgotten society. But there is simply no way a nuclear Iran poses an existential threat to these United States at any time in the near- to mid-term future. It is the height of folly to think otherwise and utterly laughable to suggest it on the national stage in the hopes of being taken seriously. And yet one party is allowed to do so frequently and in direct contradiction to any reasonable estimation of the empirical reality of the Iranian situation specifically or Middle Eastern policy in general. And, what do you know, here we are, back at our rotten discourse again. Funny that.
Tag: Israel
The Sound of Silence
Earlier this summer, when Helen Thomas said Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and return to Germany, among other places, The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz appeared to share the widespread outrage. The nation’s most prominent media writer noted Thomas’s history of “spewing bias and bile,” and asked, “why wasn’t she reined in earlier?”
So you might have expected that Kurtz would again have been on the case when Martin Peretz, the editor in chief and long-time owner of The New Republic, blogged earlier this month that “Muslim life is cheap.” Peretz added: “I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.”
After all, with the country awash in ugly anti-Muslim sentiment, calling out this kind of bigotry is more important now than ever. And yesterday, Peretz, a former Harvard professor, was removed from the list of speakers at an upcoming university event. But, as far as we can tell, Kurtz hasn’t said a word about Peretz’s comments.
Do yourself a favor and click through.
Sorry State of The Atlantic
Don’t know how I missed Glenn Greenwald’s take on Jeffrey Goldberg’s idiotic spew in The Atlantic (Now! More neoconservative than ever paired with incisive stories about the End of Manliness!).
Jeffrey Goldberg, in the new cover story in The Atlantic, on an Israeli attack on Iran:
Israel has twice before successfully attacked and destroyed an enemy’s nuclear program. In 1981, Israeli warplanes bombed the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, halting – forever, as it turned out – Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions; and in 2007, Israeli planes destroyed a North Korean-built reactor in Syria. An attack on Iran, then, would be unprecedented only in scope and complexity.
Good news! Israel can successfully end a country’s nuclear program by bombing them, as proven by its 1981 attack on Iraq, which, says Goldberg, halted “forever, as it turned out – Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions.”
Jeffrey Goldberg, The New Yorker, 2002, trying to convince Americans to fear Iraq:
Saddam Hussein never gave up his hope of turning Iraq into a nuclear power. After the Osirak attack, he rebuilt, redoubled his efforts, and dispersed his facilities. Those who have followed Saddam’s progress believe that no single strike today would eradicate his nuclear program.
So good. Read the whole thing.
here we find yet again exposed the central lie of American establishment journalism: that opinion-free “objectivity” is possible, required, and the governing rule. The exact opposite is true: very strong opinions are not only permitted but required. They just have to be the right opinions: the official, approved ones. Just look at the things that are allowed. The Washington Post lavished editorial praise on the brutal, right-wing tyrant Augusto Pinochet, and that caused no controversy. AP’s Washington Bureau Chief Ron Fournier got caught sending secret, supportive emails to Karl Rove, and nothing happened. Benjamin Netanyahu formally celebrates the Terrorist bombing of the King David Hotel that killed 91 civilians and nobody is stigmatized for supporting him. Erick Erickson sent around the most rancid and arguably racist tweets, only to thereafter be hired as a CNN contributor. […] Having someone who was part of the slaughter of 80 civilians in Lebanon on your Board is fine. [Having] a former AIPAC official with an obvious bias toward Israel […] is perfectly consistent with a news network’s “credibility.” But expressing sadness over the death of an Islamic cleric beloved by much of the Muslim world is not. Whatever is driving that, it has nothing to do with “objectivity.”
Glenn Greenwald, opining on the inexplicable firing of CNN’s Octavia Nasr. Read the whole thing. Your Liberal Media.
IOKIYAR
Helen Thomas says something stupid (about Israel, no less) and what happens to her:
Thomas had been dropped by her speakers’ agency; upcoming appearances were being canceled; the White House was unlikely to call on her ever again; and perhaps most importantly, the board of the White House Correspondent Association (WHCA) was considering whether to revoke her front-row seat. The board was not likely to deliver a response Thomas would like – in a statement, the WHCA called her comments “indefensible.”
Glenn Beck, on the other hand, offers no apology this morning for his latest edition of fetid spew:
This morning on his radio program, Glenn Beck responded to the general outcry over his approving comments last week for the work of Elizabeth Dilling, a virulent anti-Semite who actively supported Hitler and the Nazis during World War II. Beck’s response contained neither an apology nor a disavowal nor any indication whatsoever that he was at all contrite over using his considerable media presence to promote a discredited and hateful woman’s writings.
Rush Limbaugh likewise offered no apologies on his recent work re: the Nazis:
Rush Limbaugh, last week unfurled shocking rhetoric in which he compared the Obama White House to a Nazi organization and even likened Obama to Hitler. (“Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama, also ruled by dictate.”) The outlandish attacks seemed to be a case of Limbaugh playing catch-up to Fox News’ Glenn Beck (Limbaugh = Beck Lite?), who had been pounding the noxious Nazi angle for weeks.
There is literally nothing a right wing pundit can say that will get him or her removed from the “serious people” commentariat. Nothing. Concomitantly, almost any comment, no matter how banal, will, can, and probably has already been used to permanently silence someone with known left-wing tendencies. I don’t pretend to defend Helen Thomas, but her near-instant defenestration is absolutely without context relative to the treatment of far more horrifying offenses taking place daily from the mouths of commentators with far more reach and impact than Helen Thomas has ever had. Unforgivable. Your Liberal Media at work.
19 suicide bombers
The WSJ editorial section hits on one of the most pervasive yet utterly unsupported myths of 9/11/01:
If 19 terrorists (the number who carried out the 9/11 attacks) each blew himself up at one- or two-week intervals in a shopping mall or a movie theater, America likely would become a seething nation of paranoid shut-ins. That it hasn’t happened tells you something: Al Qaeda doesn’t have a ready supply of competent suicide bombers, domestic or imported, to carry off serious attacks.
I’ve seen this false supposition treated as plain fact again and again. It’s one of the most pervasive media and governmental frames there is: that all 19 members of the “team” on 9/11/01 were 100% in on the plan and had committed themselves to fly planes into buildings. Clearly, the optimal way to plan this mission given the obvious (and ongoing) limit re: reliable, willing, and able suicide bombers (in this case “suicide pilots”) is to tell most of each team that you’re just going to pull the old “seize the plane, fly somewhere, and then make some demands.” Exactly what the passengers thought was going to happen, too. Only one or two members of each team need know the true mission on the day and the remaining three or four are merely muscle, and, ultimately also a kind of unwitting victim of the very attacks they helped carry out. In fact, the fewer “in on it” the better, in that under this analysis you only require one suicidal zealot (and this is always going to be the rarest resource, really) per plane. Thus you potentially had only four “suicide bombers” for 9/11. Not 19. It’s at least conceivable that some of that muscle, also finally realizing what was really going on contemporaneously with the other passengers, were in on the struggle that ultimately ended in the crash in Pennsylvania. Unlikely, but possible. Fundamentally, though, if al Qaeda had 19 suicide bombers they could use to carry out the attacks the WSJ theorizes above: they would have done it. There is no reason at all to believe they did not wish to carry out the most spectacular attack possible with the resources at hand. An unremitting series of attacks spreading over weeks would have fit that bill to a T. That they chose another, extremely spectacular but vastly more concentrated style implies strongly that the resources simply weren’t there for the WSJ-style attack. Period. Not on 9/11, not today.
The economics of suicide bombing and the number of willing participants is, was, and will always be a primary limitation on its use so long as the target nation remains a relatively comfortable place to live. Give people a reason to stick around, minuscule as it may be, mostly they will choose to live. This is the underlying logic of the shoe- and underpants-bomber failures: these guys just aren’t the brightest bulbs in the world…but they’re what’s available that has any reasonable chance of getting the job done. You’ll note that they weren’t planted here prior to attempting their attacks; they weren’t deemed sufficiently reliable for a long-term, slow developing infiltration style plan, apparently.
Worth noting that the Israeli government is still working this terrorism opportunity cost issue out as well. With even modest improvements to the daily lives of Palestinians, most of the quasi-daily attacks would begin to melt away, and without further recourse to walls or super-high security. Even a tiny bit of hope is a powerful incentive to the potential suicide bomber to continue living. And the Israelis will continue to fail to understand it so long as they receive billions in untethered, unregulated support from us. The old Sinclair saw applies [with a minor addition]:
“It is difficult to get a man [or a government] to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
Index Israel’s support to GDP of the Palestinian territory going forward. Things would change rapidly. Suddenly, their salary would depend on it.
In Aid of A,B,C
The lipstick on a pig thing is indeed the greatest issue facing the country since John McCain spent several years as a guest of The Red Menace.
But it’s worth noting that there’s another scandal of phenomenal proportions out there, just waiting to give us its money:
Palin’s [gubernatorial] office requested $2 million in federal monies to study crab mating habits; $494,900 for the recreational halibut harvest and $3.2 million for seal genetics research.
Those requests for the study of wildlife genetics and mating habits seems pretty antithetical to the long-standig views of Palin’s running mate, John McCain.
“We’re not going to spend $3 million of your tax dollars to study the DNA of bears in Montana,” McCain said earlier this year, referring to a request from Montana for federal money to study the endangered grizzly bear. “I don’t know if it was a paternity issue or criminal, but it was a waste of money.”
My stars, she wanted to study crab fucking? How old were those crabs? Were they instructed on how to use crab condoms? Were there any crab abortions planned as part of the research? And, won’t somebody please think of the seal DNA!?! This is before we get to her tacit approval of dread science and knowledge. Jesus, shouldn’t she be in some kind of jail cell right now awaiting verdict?
Of course, we’ll hear about none of this. Why? Well, fortunately Joe Scarborough told us why in this little moment in which the truth slipped out:
MATTHEWS: Now, [the lipstick on a pig flap will] die, as we said, it’ll jump the shark. Two days ago, no, we’re all talking about – you’re waving the tabloids around, come on. Two days from now – I want to ask you, what will we talk about two days from now?
SCARBOROUGH: Whatever the McCain campaign wants us to talk about, because the McCain campaign is assertive.
To quote Steve Benen:
As far as I can tell, the story has to a) have video; b) be exceedingly simple and easy to summarize in a few seconds; and c) be good for John McCain.
Millions of dollars for seal DNA and crab fucking clearly have A and B, but not enough C. Back to porcine cosmetics, then.
Why not try this on for size: John McCain must hate Israel since he wants to de-fund our support to it. Sarah Palin quotes an anti-Semite in her speeches; she must hate Israel even more (and that’s rather charitably assuming she’s aware of its existence). AIPAC much? They were never that into politics anyway. But they probably just realize that this one only has A and lacks B or C. Lets face it, Israel’s just too boring and complicated for the media. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what the McCain campaign decides to talk about.
Lemkin 