Best of the Web Today - March 8, 2005
By JAMES TARANTO
The Road to Peace
In an op-ed for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, author Frida Ghitis makes an excellent point:
Pay close attention to what is taking place just below the major headlines in the Middle East, because something extraordinary has just happened--or, more precisely, not happened.
For possibly the first time since 1948, since the creation of the state of Israel, an Arab government's principal--indispensable--method for manipulating and controlling its people has stopped working. The well-known political sleight of hand consists of deflecting popular anger against the regime by shifting attention and blame onto an outside enemy: Israel.
The trick always worked--until now. This is no small development.
Ghitis is referring to Syria's attempt to blame Israel for the assassination of Lebanese political Rafiq Hariri, a charge that also found voice in London's left-wing Guardian. But look around the Middle East and you see example after example of people turning against their own repressive governments rather than directing their anger at Israel.
In Kuwait, hundreds of women and men "marched on parliament Monday in the conservative Gulf state's largest female suffrage rally," reports the Associated Press from Kuwait City. Meanwhile, the French-based Web site Iran va Jahan reports on the latest Persian protests:
Iranian presidential candidate, Dr. Moein, faced a barrage of protests by students in Isfahan university yesterday. At the beginning of the proceedings, the Islamic Republic anthem was played, but the students instead of singing the official state anthem, stood up and sang the alternative nationalist "Ey Iran" anthem.
Many of the students held placards saying "Referendum Yes, Elections No" which referred to the futility of pre-selected elections in Islamic Republic and what the people of Iran really want, a referendum for the drafting of a new constitution that is compatible with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and all its associated covenants.
The faster the Arab and Iranian dictatorships fall, the sooner we will see a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is chiefly a proxy war between those dictatorships and their own people.
The World's Smallest Violin
The New Scientist carries an interview with two geneticists, one Palestinian Arab and one Israeli, who are collaborating in a study of deafness. The violin plays for the Palestinian, Moien Kanaan, who describes the hardships of his work:
You wouldn't believe what I had to go through to install our DNA sequencing machine. The supplier delivered it to Jerusalem, and I organised a car to bring it from Jerusalem to the checkpoint. Then I brought the university's car to the checkpoint, backing it up so we could move the equipment from the other car into mine. Then I had to go to a workshop in Tel Aviv for a week to learn how to install it. All these things are taken for granted in labs elsewhere. The agent comes, installs it, shows you how it works, then he leaves. I even have to check and repair it myself, because the Israeli agent cannot come here. I should be writing papers and grant proposals, I shouldn't have to worry about servicing equipment. Sometimes I feel, how long is this going to go on?
The Israeli, Karen Avraham, has somewhat more serious concerns: "I am already getting nervous because my son is 16 and will soon want to go to discos. I'm worried about him standing in line for an hour, because that's a perfect place for an attack to take place."
The Christians Are Coming!
It's a tired and familiar claim by people on the secular left: The "religious right" is just like Muslim fundamentalists! "At nearly middle age, having spent two equal parts of my life in Iran and the United States, I see the rising tide of religiosity in my adopted homeland bearing faint hints of the one I left behind," writes Roya Hakakian, an Iranian immigrant, in a Boston Globe op-ed. "Choice hangs in the balance: the right to choose a dress code or to bear a child. What oceans do to separate Iranian from American women, the looming threat to choice erases."
New York University's William Thatcher Dowell, in the Los Angeles Times, looks on the Sunni side:
George W. Bush may now find himself in the same kind of trap that ensnared Saudi Arabia's founder, King Abdulaziz ibn Saud. To gain political support, Saud mobilized the fanatical, ultrareligious Wahhabi movement--the movement that is spiritually at the core of Al Qaeda. Once the bargain was done, the Saudi royal family repeatedly found itself held political hostage to an extremist, barely controllable movement populated by radical ideologues. The evangelical movement in the U.S. nudged the president back into the White House, and Bush must now try to pay off the political bill for its support.
Now it's true that there are extremists among the "religious right"; blogger Will Hinton has an interesting essay on his youthful involvement with Operation Rescue, an antiabortion group that employed thuggish tactics. (Hinton now says "it could easily be argued that Operation Rescue and some of its affiliated groups are domestic terrorists.")
For the most part, however, the "religious right" eschews violence and disruption and instead participates in the democratic process through organization and persuasion. That's what worries people like Hakakian and Dowell, and it's why they're so utterly wrongheaded. Religious citizens' healthy participation in democracy is the best protection from theocracy.
Soderberg: I Was Only Kidding!
Well, it seems we started something with our item Wednesday about erstwhile Clinton aide Nancy Soderberg's interview on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart." As you'll recall, Soderberg was appearing to promote her anti-Bush book "The Superpower Myth," but instead she and Stewart spent most of the interview talking about how amazingly well the president's Mideast policy is working out and how troubling this success is to Democrats.
The Washington Times, The Weekly Standard and Rush Limbaugh (in a subscription-only page on his site, alas) all picked it up. Now there's a backlash from some on the left, including bloggers Eric Alterman and Mark Francis, both of whom say Soderberg is only joking.
Alterman: "Not only are the denizens of the conservative media too dumb to get the joke, they embarked on an immediate media jihad to burn They [sic] now have their proof that Nancy, indeed, all liberals, hate America." Francis: "Taranto, who, having admitted that he saw the show, must have known the truth, and wrote a slanderous piece anyway."
So we're getting lectured on humor by Eric Alterman, the male equivalent of Nancy Hopkins? And somehow it's "slanderous" to provide an accurate transcript of something someone said? (Actually, we did make one mistake: We thought we heard Stewart say "Baathists" when in fact he said "bad-asses.") Well, whatever. We assumed our readers were smart enough to figure out that there is a jocose element to the programming on Comedy Central. In any case, anyone who wants to evaluate all this for himself can watch the video here.
Soderberg herself showed up on C-Span Thursday, and a caller who'd read our item asked about her comments. (Video is available here; the exchange begins at around 6:30.) Soderberg said the whole thing was no more than a bit of tomfoolery:
This is a comedy show. We were joking about the dilemma of Jon Stewart having criticized the Bush administration over the last four years--what does he do now? And we were joking back and forth. I think anyone who follows the Democratic Party knows that they want America to succeed and President Bush to succeed. It's completely a missed context that the article from The Wall Street Journal editorial page.
Of course, [I] welcome the opportunity to rebut that. There's nothing better that Democrats would like than to see peace in the Middle East, nonproliferation. What I argue in the book is the last four years of the Bush administration have failed to advance those agendas, and I welcome what appears to be a shift in the administration right now to take those issues on with more realistic policies. And of course, I want them to succeed, so thank you for that question.
Let it be known, then, that Soderberg wants America to succeed. Actually, she said as much in the Comedy Central interview, and we quoted it: "As a Democrat, you don't want anything nice to happen to the Republicans, and you don't want them to have progress. But as an American, you hope good things would happen."
To our ear, this was a candid admission of ambivalence. As a patriotic American she wants her country to succeed. But as a partisan Democrat, she doesn't like to see Republicans do well--and, although she didn't make this point explicitly, she is invested in an ideological worldview that is under challenge from reality. In our opinion, she's not a bad person but a good person struggling to overcome bad ideas.
The it-was-only-a-joke line we're hearing from Alterman, Francis and Soderberg herself, though, is just too simplistic to take seriously. Why would it be funny to suggest that Democrats are hoping for America to fail--as Soderberg did four times--unless there's an element of truth to it?
He Knows How to Spell, Too
"Every day I read opinionjournal.com. James Toronto? Best of the Web Today--must reading. This guy gets more information out in about four pages than most newspapers get out in an entire edition. No offense."--a resident of North Olmsted, Ohio, answering the question "Do you read online journals (blogs)? Why?," quoted in the Cleveland Plane Dealer, March 8
Homer Nods
We were tired yesterday and made errors in three items, all since corrected:
o It was in 1993, not a generation ago, that the Washington Post famously described evangelical Christians as "poor, uneducated and easy to command," not "easily led" as we said in our item on the evangelical counterculture.
o The headline of the item on "Karl Rove's mignons" should have read "High-Steaks Politics," not "Stakes."
o The item on Ocean Haven, the Bush-hating Oregon inn, had the wrong link to the inn's homepage. Here's the right one.
Turkey Is Quirky
"Turkey has said it is changing the names of three animals found on its territory to remove references to Kurdistan or Armenia," the BBC reports:
The environment ministry says the Latin names of the red fox, the wild sheep and the roe deer will be altered.
The red fox for instance, known as Vulpes Vulpes Kurdistanica, will now be known as Vulpes Vulpes.
Turkey has uneasy relations with neighbouring Armenia and opposes Kurdish separatists in Turkey.
The ministry said the old names were contrary to Turkish unity.
"Unfortunately there are many other species in Turkey which were named this way with ill intentions. This ill intent is so obvious that even species only found in our country were given names against Turkey's unity," a ministry statement quoted by Reuters news agency said.
Turkish-Indian relations are just peachy, however. A turkey in Turkey is still called a hindi.
What Would We Do Without Hospital Spokesmen?
"A hospital spokesman said: 'If you cut your sex organ and then eat it, then something is wrong with you.' "--News Ltd. (Australia), March 8
The Erotic Elephant
We don't read Playgirl magazine, but thank goodness Matt Drudge does, or we wouldn't know about the fascinating revelation its editor, Michele Zipp, makes in the April issue. Drudge reports Zipp acknowledges that she is a Republican:
How could a member of the media who produces adult entertainment for women possibly side with conservatives from the red states? Zipp spells it out. "Those on the right are presumed to be all about power and greed--two really sexy traits in the bedroom. They want it, they want it now, and they'll do anything to get it. And I'm not talking about some pansy-assed victory, I'm talking about full on jackpot, satisfaction for all."
"The Democrats of the Sixties were all about making love and not war while a war-loving Republican is a man who would fight, bleed, sacrifice, and die for his country. Could you imagine what that very same man would do for his wife in the bedroom?" asks Zipp.
Maybe this explains why Teresa Heinz Kerry, who has been married to men of both parties, appears less than enthralled with her second husband, a Democrat. As the Seattle Post-Intelligencer notes, during last year's presidential campaign she "seemed to scorn the political wife's expected role of fixing her husband in adoring upward gaze."
She did do her duty, though: "Theresa Heinz Kerry campaigned tirelessly--'When I put out, I put out.' " Just lie back and think of France. |
