Big Swinging D**ks take on Pelosi
When I was on Wall Street we used to call guys like Bernard Schwartz (above), Alan Patricoff, Steve Rattner, Hiam Saban and Stanley Shuman “BSD’s” for their aggressive deal style. They all supped at the trough of the Clinton Administration’s deregulation agenda and hope to do so again if Billary is elected. Schwartz got to sell missle technology to China and Patricoff, Rattner, Saban and Shuman all made millions off Bill’s Telecom deregulation agenda that led to media consolidation. Yesterday, they threatened Nancy Pelosi in the same tone they used threaten their deal opponents in the 90′s.
The letter carries an ominous tone, which stops just short of delivering a threat. The donors remind Ms. Pelosi that they are “strong supporters” of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. (A quick check, at least, shows that at least some of letter-signers have not given to the D.C.C.C.)
“We therefore urge you to clarify your position on super-delegates and reflect in your comments a more open view to the optional independent actions of each of the delegates at the National Convention in August,” the letter stated.
Fortunately Pelosi has a little more spine than some of the cowering CEO’s the BSD’s faced in the 90′s.
Rove’s Gilded Age won’t be over until these BSD’s stop owning both parties.
“AMSTERDAM — Holland’s prime minister roundly condemned the anti-Muslim film “Fitna” on Thursday within hours of its appearance on a Web site in the Netherlands.
The country’s cabinet went into a crisis meeting directly after the “debut” of the controversial film by right wing politician Geert Wilders as police formed a security cordon around the Dutch Parliament building in the Hague.
“Fitna” links verses of the Quran to a background of violent images from terrorist attacks.
Wilders had been unable to get his film posted on the Web or broadcast, but at 7 p.m. Dutch time Thursday his political party PVV put a link to the 15-minute short on its Web site. English- and Dutch-language versions were posted at http://www.pvv.nl via a link to LiveLeak.com. No TV channels aired the film.”
Here’s the film:
http://hotair.com/archives/2008/03/27/video-fitna/
I’d say plays nicely as opposed to “Bush’s War”
“I’d say plays nicely as opposed to ‘Bush’s War’”
Nice and hideous.
Watching that makes one want to go ahead and suit up.
For what it’s worth, there are thousands of hideous photographs of maimed, burned, and dead Iraqi men, women, and children on the WWW.
http://www.robert-fisk.com/iraqwarvictims_mar2003.htm
We have handed them a tremendous amount of graphic evidence for whatever hideous thing they want to think about us.
They could make the same kind of film using verses from you know where, using the words of Fundamentalist Christian… pastors, for want of a better word.
How is this evil vanquished? How do we get this genie back in the bottle?
I’ll say one thing. Any one of those cats in that film would absolutely ruin a dinner party. All that repression makes a boy super uptight. Furious, in fact.
We have tripped and stumbled right into their narrative.
We have to go deep state of the art on them.
“They could make the same kind of film using verses from you know where, using the words of Fundamentalist Christian… pastors, for want of a better word.”
JH, I know the verses seem similiar, but at least our crazy racist preachers, don’t cut off anybody’s head.
I think you skip the real argument, maybe not on purpose, that their meme, their narrative is/was architected for a head on collision with a whole lot of their betters – and some of them, they will beat. The liberals will be beat.
It may be unfashionable to keep it simple like this, but my question is why? What internal sickness allows intellects to wave this away? To equate one way of things, as just as “understandable” as another? The Netherlands is a very fun and “liberal” place – it is a dead on petri dish for what comes in the other “liberal” European nations.
Be certain, the behavior of these folks is rational. It is 110% rational for leaders of a seriously mentally reduced population to behave like this – it is how they gain power.
But it is frigging hysterical how hard this piece of video had to fight to get out. Yet, instantly bloomed, and will effect the world’s thinking because of the fight. Hysterical, because so many here and elsewhere worry about the censor, when the censor is the best publicity.
I’m not skipping any arguments, old boy. I’m not even arguing. I’m asking you a serious question.
How do we vanquish this foe?
To argue about this is pointless. We would be well served to seek a consensus.
It is a hard fact that they could make many of these films from the graphic material we have handed them. And if you want to call them rational, so be it. I don’t care if they are or are not.
You have a theory and all of that. It doesn’t inspire me. It is not poetry.
No one has the whole picture.
I am your ally.
March 27, 2008
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Imagined Snipers, Real Challenges
By ROGER COHEN
Here’s some news for Hillary Clinton: the Bosnian war was over in 1996.
Those of us, like myself, who first went to Bosnia at the start of the war in 1992 and then, in 1994 and 1995, endured President Bill Clinton’s circumlocutions as we sat in an encircled Sarajevo watching pregnant women getting blown away by shelling from Serbian gunners, know that.
We know that as President Clinton mumbled about “enmities that go back 500 years, some would say almost a thousand years,” Bosnia burned. We know what that talk of intractable grievances dating back to 995 was meant to communicate: no western intervention could achieve anything in the Balkan pit.
Only after the mass murder of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica, three years after the initial Serbian genocide of 1992 against that population (and one year after a genocide on his watch in Rwanda), did the gelatinous Clinton develop some backbone. NATO bombed, Richard Holbrooke did his brilliant work at Dayton in November 1995, and the guns fell silent in Bosnia.
So, yes, the war was well and truly over when Hillary Clinton arrived in the northeastern Bosnian town of Tuzla on March 25, 1996. It was over, although she recently recalled “landing under sniper fire.” It was over when “we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”
Oh, please. Researching a book, I also visited that base in 1996 to talk to Maj. Gen. William Nash, then the commander of U.S. troops in Bosnia. If you’d lived the war, the base was a small miracle of American order and security.
Hillary Clinton’s transference is intriguing: Suffering Sarajevans ran from snipers during the war her husband let fester. Invented danger, supposed to showcase bravery, may instead betray guilt.
But I’m not going to psychoanalyze the Clintons. I don’t have the space to plumb such unquenchable ambition. Few do. Anyway, she now says she “misspoke” about Tuzla. End of story, you might say. But I’d say it’s the beginning of another, more important one.
Clinton made up Bosnian sniper fire in an attempt to show that she’s tougher than Barack Obama; that she’s a hardened, seasoned, putative commander in chief ready to respond to crisis when the “red phone” of her fear-mongering ad rings.
John McCain’s own recent “misspeaking” about Iran, placing (Sunni) Al Qaeda in (Shiite) Iran, also smacked of muscle-flexing: he wanted to signal toughness to the mullahs in Tehran, where Obama has suggested he’d seek dialogue.
But what the United States, and those that look to it, need now is not more braggadocio from the White House. We’ve had a seven-year dose. That’s enough.
What’s needed, rather, is some new, creative thinking about a changed world in which authoritarianism is enjoying a renaissance and America and its allies need to work together to spread peace, prosperity, freedom, equity, security and, yes, democracy.
American hard power has not worked. The Iraq invasion was bungled. European soft power is insufficient.
As Constanze Stelzenmuller of the German Marshall Fund notes in an important recent essay called “Transatlantic Power Failures,” a “European Union with 27 member states and a total of 1.8 million men and women under arms” is incapable of pacifying little Kosovo (“one-quarter the size of Switzerland”) on its own.
The transatlantic bond of cold war years is gone forever. The alliance is going to be looser, more pragmatic. But it has to find “the right mix of idealism and realism,” and new cohesion, if one-pipeline Russia and one-party, Tibet-tormenting China are not to prosper with authoritarianism-for-export.
Foreign policy debate in this election campaign has been paltry. I’d like to hear something about GWOT – the “Global War on Terror” – the heart of U.S. national security strategy. It amounts to war without end because “terror” is a tactic and tactics don’t surrender. GWOT should be abandoned: it’s externally divisive and internally treacherous. Al Qaeda can be beaten sans GWOT.
I’d like some discussion of what NATO might do to help spread the Iraqi burden and ease a gradual extrication of most U.S. troops from Iraq.
On issues that cross borders – terrorism, financial market volatility, global warming – and on Iran, Israel-Palestine, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq – three things are essential: a new moral authority in the White House, the capacity for original strategic thought, and a 21st-century understanding of the border-jumping networks that have knit humanity into new relationships.
Obama, in his speech on race, did important things. He confronted reality, thought big, probed division, sketched convergence. He took Americans and many people beyond U.S. shores to a different mental place. Imagine that capacity applied to GWOT, Iran, Russia, China and Israel-Palestine.
If you don’t like the sound of that, there’s always seasoned swagger of the sort that runs from imaginary snipers.
Blog: http://www.iht.com/passages
“How do we vanquish this foe?”
Standard deterrence theory. Nothing more, nothing less.
Obama = Netherlands.
The real fact of Obama, is that if he gives the speech to end all speeches, and they don’t change, we will have to go McCain on their ass.
That should be his main selling point, “Vote for me, try it once this way, and if it does not work, if they do not relent, you will know you tried everything.”
Obama as the the ME’s last chance, is a foreign policy many Americans will vote for.
Of course we don’t have to wait (thanks Mr. Brooks):
“The first was delivered by McCain on Sept. 28, 1983. The Reagan administration was seeking Congressional authorization to support the deployment of U.S. Marines in Lebanon. McCain, a freshman legislator, decided to oppose his president and party.
McCain argued that Lebanese society, as it existed then, could not be stabilized and unified by American troops. He made a series of concrete observations about the facts on the ground. Lebanon was in a state of de facto partition. The Lebanese Army would not soon be strong enough to drive out the Syrians. The American presence would not intimidate the Syrians into negotiating.
“I do not foresee obtainable objectives in Lebanon.” He concluded. “I believe the longer we stay, the more difficult it will be to leave, and I am prepared to accept the consequences of our withdrawal.”
“The second speech was delivered on Nov. 5, 2003. This was not a grand strategy speech. It was a critique of the execution of existing U.S. policy.
First, McCain wondered about the Pentagon’s publicity campaign in Iraq: “When, in the course of days, we increase by thousands our estimate of the numbers of Iraqis trained, it sounds like somebody is cooking the books.”
He then pointed out that the U.S. had not committed sufficient troops. He called for a counterinsurgency strategy in which U.S. forces would actually hold secure territory. “Simply put,” he said, “there does not appear to be a strategy behind our current force levels in Iraq, other than to preserve the illusion that we have sufficient forces in place to meet our objectives.”
He excoriated the arrogance of Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority: “The C.P.A. seems to think that all wisdom is made in America, and that the Iraqi people were defeated, not liberated.”
” McCain offered to build new pillars for that system — a League of Democracies, a new nuclear nonproliferation regime and a successor to the Kyoto treaty. In stabilizing Asia and the Middle East, he would rely more on democracies like Turkey, India, Israel and Iraq, and less on Mubarak and Musharraf.
Unlike the realists, McCain believes other nations have to be judged according to how they treat their own citizens. Unlike the Bush administration in its first few years, he believes global treaties cannot solely be evaluated according to a narrow definition of the American interest. The U.S. also has to protect the fabric of the international system.”
“In so doing, he signaled that the foreign policy debate of the coming months will be very different from the one of the past six years. Anybody who thinks McCain is merely continuing the Bush agenda is not paying attention.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/28/opinion/28brooks.html?_r=2&oref=login&oref=slogin
What does that mean,”go McCain”?
In the parlance of those who think McCain is a war monger, those who long for Barack, if we try it Obama’s way and it fails, then we “go McCain.”
How incredibly boring.
You can say that again.
GLOBAL VIEW
By BRET STEPHENS
How al Qaeda Will Perish March 25, 2008; Page A22
Do minors require their parents’ consent to become suicide bombers? Believe it or not, this is the subject of an illuminating and bitter debate among the leading theoreticians of global jihad, with consequences that could be far-reaching.
On March 6, Al-Sahab, the media arm of al Qaeda, released a 46-minute video statement titled “They Lied: Now Is the Time to Fight.” The speaker is Mustafa Ahmed Muhammad Uthman Abu-al-Yazid, 52, an Egyptian who runs al Qaeda’s operations in Afghanistan, and the speech is in most respects the usual mix of earthly grievances, heavenly promises and militant exhortations. It’s also an urgent call for recruits.
“We call on the fathers and mothers not to become a barrier between their children and paradise,” says Abu-Al-Yazid. “If they disagree who should first join the jihad to go to paradise, let them compete, meaning the fathers and the children. . . . Also, we say to the Muslim wives, do not be a barrier between your husbands and paradise.” Elsewhere in the message, he makes a “special call to the scholars and students seeking knowledge. . . . The jihad arenas are in dire need of your knowledge and the doors are open before you to bring about the virtue of teaching and jihad.”
These particular appeals are no accident. Last year, imprisoned Egyptian radical Sayyed Imam Al-Sharif, a.k.a. “Dr. Fadl,” published “The Document of Right Guidance for Jihad Activity in Egypt and the World.” It is a systematic refutation of al Qaeda’s theology and methods, which is all the more extraordinary considering the source. Sayyed Imam, 57, was the first “emir” of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, many of whose members (including his longtime associate Ayman al-Zawahiri) later merged with Osama bin Laden and his minions to become al Qaeda. His 1988 book, “Foundations of Preparation for Holy War,” is widely considered the bible of Salafist jihadis.
Now he has recanted his former views. “The alternative” to violent jihadism, he says in an interview with the pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat (translated by Memri), “is not to kill civilians, foreigners and tourists, destroy property and commit aggression against the lives and property of those who are inviolable under the pretext of jihad. All of this is forbidden.”
Sayyed Imam is emphatic on the subject of the moral obligations of the would-be jihadist. “One who lacks the resources [to fight jihad] is forbidden to acquire money through forbidden means, like [burglary],” he says, adding that “Allah does not accept martyrdom as atonement for a mujahid’s debts.” As for a child’s obligations toward his parents, he adds that “it is not permitted to go out to fight jihad without the permission of both parents . . . because acting rightly with one’s parents is an individual obligation, and they have rights over their sons.”
“This has become pandemic in our times,” he adds in a pointedly non-theological aside. “We find parents who only learn that their son has gone to fight jihad after his picture is published in the newspapers as a fatality or a prisoner.”
These “Revisions,” as Sayyed Imam’s book is widely known in Arab intellectual circles, elicited a harsh and immediate response from unreconstructed jihadists. “What kind of guidance does the ‘Document’ offer?” asked al Qaeda commander Abu Yahyha Al-Libi in a March 9 Internet posting. “Is it guidance that tells the mujahadeen and the Muslims: ‘Restrain yourselves and [allow] us [Arab regimes] to shed your blood’?”
Even more sarcastic was Zawahiri himself. “Do they now have fax machines in Egyptian jail cells?” he asked. “I wonder if they’re connected to the same line as the electric-shock machines.” Zawahiri then penned a 215-page rebuttal to Sayyed Imam, whom he accuses of serving “the interests of the Crusader-Zionist alliance with the Arab leaders.”
The gravamen of the hardliners’ case against Sayyed Imam is that he has capitulated (either through force or persuasion) to the demands of his captors, and has become, in effect, their stooge. The suspicion seems partly borne out by Sayyed Imam’s conspicuous renunciation of any desire to overthrow the Egyptian regime. One Turkish commentator, Dogu Ergil, notes that “in prison many jihadist inmates were encouraged by the Interior Ministry and security apparatus to engage in religious dialogue with clerics from al-Azhar,” a Sunni religious university overseen by the state. Mr. Ergil calls this part of a deliberate “counter-radicalization program” by the Egyptian government.
But whatever Sayyed Imam’s motives, it is the neuralgic response by his erstwhile fellow travelers that matters most. There really is a broad rethink sweeping the Muslim world about the practical utility — and moral defensibility — of terrorism, particularly since al Qaeda began targeting fellow Sunni Muslims, as it did with the 2005 suicide bombings of three hotels in Amman, Jordan. Al Qaeda knows this. Osama bin Laden is no longer quite the folk hero he was in 2001. Reports of al Qaeda’s torture chambers in Iraq have also percolated through Arab consciousness, replacing, to some extent, the images of Abu Ghraib. Even among Saudis, a recent survey by Terror Free Tomorrow finds that “less than one in ten Saudis have a favorable opinion of Al Qaeda, and 88 percent approve the Saudi military and police pursuing Al Qaeda fighters.”
No less significant is that the rejection of al Qaeda is not a liberal phenomenon, in the sense that it represents a more tolerant mindset or a better opinion of the U.S. On the contrary, this is a revolt of the elders, whether among the tribal chiefs of Anbar province or Islamist godfathers like Sayyed Imam. They have seen through (or punctured) the al Qaeda mythology of standing for an older, supposedly truer form of Islam. Rather, they have come to know al Qaeda as fundamentally a radical movement — the antithesis of the traditional social order represented by the local sovereign, the religious establishment, the head of the clan and, not least, the father who expects to know the whereabouts of his children.
It would be a delightful irony if militant Islam were ultimately undone by a conservative, Thermidor-style reaction. That may not be the kind of progress most of us imagined or hoped for. But it is progress of a kind.
March 29, 2008
Suit Against Writer in Japan Dismissed
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
TOKYO — A Japanese court has rejected a defamation lawsuit against Kenzaburo Oe, the 1994 Nobel Prize Laureate for literature, agreeing with his assertion that the Japanese military was deeply involved in the mass suicides of civilians in Okinawa at the end of World War II.
In a closely watched ruling, the Osaka District Court threw out a $200,000 damage suit on Friday that was filed by a 91-year-old war veteran and another veteran’s surviving relatives, who said there was no evidence of the military’s involvement in the suicides. The plaintiffs had also sought to block further printing of Oe’s 1970 book of essays, “Okinawa Notes,” in which he wrote of how Japanese soldiers told Okinawans they would be raped, tortured and murdered by the advancing American troops and coerced them into killing themselves instead of surrendering.
“The military was deeply involved in the mass suicides,” Judge Toshimasa Fukami said in his ruling on Friday. Judge Fukami cited the testimony of survivors that soldiers handed out grenades to civilians to commit suicide with, and the fact that mass suicides occurred only in villages where Japanese troops were stationed.
The defamation lawsuit, filed in 2005, was seized upon by right-wing scholars and politicians in Japan who want to delete references to the military’s coercion of civilians in the mass suicides from the country’s high school history textbooks. Last April, during the administration of the former prime minister, Shinzo Abe, the Ministry of Education announced that references to the military’s role would be deleted from textbooks.
Some 110,000 people rallied in protest last September, in the biggest demonstration in the prefecture since the early 1970s. The protests, as well as Mr. Abe’s resignation and his replacement by Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, a moderate, led the Ministry of Education to reinstate most of the references in December.
The about-face was an embarrassment for the Japanese government, which has always denied accusations by China and South Korea that it engaged in historical whitewashing, and has asserted that its school textbooks are free of political bias.
“The judge accurately read my writing,” Mr. Oe, 73, said at a news conference.
If only Pelosi showed more backbone when it comes to ending funding for the war as she does when threatened by fundraisers…
[...] I’ve mentioned Hiam Saban before in this blog. He and his friends threatened Nancy Pelosi a month ago, but today the Huffington Post is reporting Hiam offered $1 million to the Young Democrats of America if they would commit their super-delegates to Hillary. Haim Saban, the billionaire entertainment magnate and longtime Clinton supporter, denied the allegation. But four independent sources said that just before the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, Saban called YDA President David Hardt and offered what was perceived as a lucrative proposal: $1 million would be made available for the group if Hardt and the organization’s other uncommitted superdelegate backed Clinton. [...]