Friday, July 20, 2007 :::
 
What a great, fat lot of wholesome fun!

What grand, joyous silliness!

To what is A Mind That Suits referring?

If you feel like asking that, then a certain pudgy, balding English teacher must ask in turn if you are a hermit.

For he comes not to buy J.K Rawling, but to praise her.

The buying part will take place tomorrow, at the Borders in bustling Silver Spring, Maryland, whose staff will at that point be completely uninterested in the feelings of anyone there for the latest and last Harry Potter novel.

The store will of course have been open since midnight, but age will prevent A Mind That Suits from really partaking in the revelries. He will be there for perhaps two hours prior to opening to take it all in, he will wait to see if he won the raffle at 11:30 for one of the first ten places in line, he will wait for the whoop that accompanies the official opening, and he will probably then head home, because he will probably have lost the raffle.

But now, for the praising.

What a grand accomplishment.

We are not going to quibble here over prose style, because J.K. Rowling deliberately went for a quick-paced, action-packed narrative. But it is still a fine prose style, one that will teach many youngsters how to think about language.

And what a lot of youngsters have learned about language from her, although a recent study indicated that kids are still reading less. One suspects that many of the minority of kids who are reading more, are doing so because of J.K Rowling. One suspects that there are kids who only read J.K Rowling.

Fine.

But the sprightly language did allow Ms. Rowling to do one very wonderful thing.

Our unhinged society, for once, is unhinged about an author who teaches young people the very sharp line between good and bad. There is no ambiguity here. One is reminded of Galadriel’s comment, to Samwise Gamgee, that he used “magic” to describe both things that were good and things that were bad. As in Middle Earth, even most of the spells and wizardry in the world of Harry Potter seem to be divided between things that do good and things that do bad. Most certainly, there is no ambiguity about which side any wizard should be on, no matter what tools he employs.

Within that world of good and bad, we have real people, battling to do their best, or overcome by temptation to do their worst.

“Real people?”

Weren’t we talking about wizards?

Here it may be wise to quote the great Dr. Johnson’s Preface on Shakespeare:

“Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirrour of manners and of life. His characters are not modified by the customs of particular places, unpractised by the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate but upon small numbers; or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions: they are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation will always find. His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species.”

Just so. J.K Rowling created a fantastic world in which we may observe how real humans behave.

Consider just the three main protagonists.

There’s doofy Ron, who never once thinks about what he should be doing, but, when called upon to do it, nearly always delivers. (Let’s expand that to his entire family, the Weasleys, who do their disorganized best, especially the parents, who always support their children. It remains to be seen—we will all see at midnight tonight—just how many of the children repay that love.)

Then there’s Hermione, so pompous and interfering and completely unaware of how often she goofs up, but who is so desperate to do the very best she can for everyone she loves.

Above all, there’s Harry himself, upon whom a very great burden has been placed at a very young age. We always sympathize with him, but there is a lot wrong with him. Most particularly, he lies continuously and almost always without apology. His hostile friend (or deepest foe?) Severus Snape points this out just as continuously.

This is the normal way with boys. Because so much can go so wrong with them, the adults around them nearly always overreact. Harry learns this early, so his answer to nearly every query from concerned adults is, “Oh, nothing much is going on.”

Actually, that’s what nearly every boy says. As with Everyboy, about half the time, this lands Harry in a lot more trouble than would have happened if he had just fessed up. But boys don’t just fess up. Yet they often do they best they can, and that is what Harry always seems to be doing. Harry Potter may be the best fictional representation of a real actual boy since Tom Sawyer. (Huckleberry Finn of course suggest himself, but he is too particular, although he is also very real.)

So just what is it that A Mind That Suits so loves about Harry?

For the answer to that, we must look back to the origins of the whole business.

As everyone knows, Ms. Rowling wrote the first novel when she was a single mother on welfare in Scotland. She waited until her young daughter went to sleep, then snuck downstairs to an all- night café and scribbled out longhand Harry Potter and the Philospher’s Stone. (In the US, it is “Sorcerer’s Stone.”) She thereby probably violated perhaps every child welfare law on the books, or at least would have in the States. We will get back to that daughter's welfare in a moment.

In the overall world of popular culture, no single work may have been so brilliantly written, because it so obviously had an audience of one.

As a certain pudgy, balding English teacher commented after finishing it, to the valued friend who introduced him to the World of Hogwarts, in the typical Steven Spielberg “lonely boy” film, an utterly normal lonely boy takes on all the evil in the world and vanquishes it. To give the lonely boy actual supernatural powers seems like weighting the scales.

And so, after the first book enjoyed the kind of success that Steven Spielberg movies so deservedly enjoy, the very greatest film director of all time was left with something of a dilemma: “Do I do this wonderful story, so very like other stories that I have done, or do I move on?”

The Washington Post, in the complicated aftermath, ran a lengthy story on what happened when Atlas Shrugged, or, more particularly, when the mighty Steven decided that he no longer made that kind of film. (Now that one thinks of it, moving the mighty Steven on to AI, Minority Report, and Catch Me If You Can should be added to Ms. Rowling’s considerable accomplishments.)

When Mr. Spielberg said no, Chris Columbus, of course, got the job, which meant he didn’t take this other job, which then somebody else took, and on and on down the whole ranks of Hollywood. A Mind That Suits commented to that same valued friend that it was probably the first time in 10 years the Washington Post had run an article on something the average American actually cared about.

So just what is it that A Mind That Suits finds himself feeling as the whole thing rings down to a glorious end?

Ms. Rowling once commented that she loved America. She cited as a reason a personal appearance at the Tower Records in Manhattan. (RIP, Tower Records, but that is another story.) At one point, this woman grabbed her hand enthusiastically and proclaimed loudly, “I am so glad that you are so rich.” In Britain, Ms. Rowling dryly noted, we don’t say those kinds of things.

So let’s add it all up: the books that got millions of youngsters reading, the moral lessons they have been taught, the brilliant characters, the wild imagination, the wonderful films, all done under her watchful eye. What makes him happy?

Here, a certain pudgy, balding English teacher will reveal himself to be an American.

J.K Rowling: single mother on welfare to happily married billionairess. How well did she take care of that daughter?

When it comes right down to it, A Mind That Suits is so glad that J.K Rowling is so rich.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 6:51 PM



Sunday, April 08, 2007 :::
 
A certain pudgy, balding English teacher would like to wish everyone a blessed Easter.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 11:26 AM



Wednesday, November 08, 2006 :::
 
A busy day and a late night make it hard for A Mind That Suits to say much, so he will sum it up as he did to a friend:

Very few people got what they didn't deserve; a whole bunch of people got what they did.

The Republicans ran a lousy campaign in a Democratic year.

The Democrats have William Jefferson Clinton to thank again: he surely put the oddball Jim Webb over the top with a last minute rally in Virginia, and most probably stalled the Michael Steele juggernaut at normal Republican levels for Maryland.

A Mind That Suits finds himself strangely unmoved by the election. In part, that is because, as a conservative, he puts very little store in politics.

But his neighbors in DC's leafy, lefty Mt. Pleasant are exactly the sorts who say things like, "the personal is political," which necessarily entails the reverse: the political is personal, often VERY personal. So why was no one smiling much this morning? They WON didn't they.

There is an activist personality type that always thinks the world is a grim ugly place and their job is to correct every instance of injustice that they see. Those types probably thought the big news was the loss of Ned Lamont in Connecticut, which had been predicted by all observers the minute he was nominated.

But SOMEBODY whould be smiling here in LeftyLand, and no one really was. Strange.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 1:56 PM



Tuesday, November 07, 2006 :::
 
A Mind That Suits returns to blogging today to make a couple of important points.

This is, first of all, perhaps the only election he has ever been through where there is absolutely no point to voting. In nearly all previous elections in Your Nation's Capital, it was the solemn duty of everyone who could see why to send a signal that there were those in the District of Columbia who hated Marion Barry. That alone was enough to force one to vote.

This year, however, the all-too-slick Andrien Fenty was annointed by the Democratic Powers That Be early on, and his election today is a mere formality, as he easily swamped all of his opponents in September's Democratic primary.

Whether this is a good thing for DC remains to be seen.

Councilwoman Linda Cropp, who did valiant service opposing the new DC baseball stadium, a pure giveaway to people who don't need it, never had a chance, and she may not have otherwise deseved one.

So there is actually nothing to vote on today.

But then a Certain Pudgy, Balding English Teacher remembers what his dear father went through to ensure that he and every American had the right to vote, so he will take something to read later this afternoon, and do his duty.

Predictions: the conventional wisdom seems to be right today, based on a last minute surge for Republicans. That is surely because lots of people who prefer not to think about politics except for one week every two years--a blessed, happy lot, who should be honored--probably focused on the phrase "Speaker Pelosi" and all that that entailed.

However, because Republicans have conceded 10 or more seats in the House of Representatives, Speaker Pelosi is what we will likely have. She has apparently already promised all the plum chairmanships to her soulmates on the Far Left, but thanks to the ever-practical Rahm Emmanuel, who headed this year's Democratic drive in the House, she will be confronted with junior minions who do not think it is odd to go to church or value unborn life. Others have predicted, therefore, that hers will be a much reduced agenda, and so says A Mind That Suits.

For an excellent discussion of why this election will determine a LOT that happens in the next two years, but probably does not alter the underlying electoral realities, please click here.

And exactly because voters have awoken to the issues, it is unlikely that the Senate will be Democratic. It still could be, but it seems unlikely. Any shady House Republicans who think they will get a reprieve simply because some voter showed up to put a Republican in the Senate is dreaming. No one has to punch all the holes in a ballot.

And if the Senate is hard for the Democrats to get ahold of, it will be because they, on the local level in Maryland, did what the House Republicans did on a national level: instead of governing, they bullied. They put two machine politicians at the top of their ticket. Most particularly, they pitted Old Hat Ben Cardin against the entirely refreshing, authentic, and original Michael Steele. Lt. Gov. Steele happens to be Black, a fact not lost on the residents and leaders of Prince George's County, who also happen to be Black. At this point, frankly, it looks like a juggernaut, thanks to Lt. Gov. Steele's indefatigable campaigning where no Republican has gone before, to whit, P.G. County. This means that Democrats have had to pour millions into Maryland that they would logically have put elsewhere, just as they would have put former President Clinton elsewhere at that last minute. But he was in P.G. County two days ago.

Now, in Maryland, a Republican juggernaut means the candidate will win by half a percentage point, because most Republicans just don't win. And because the margin is so slim, Lt. Gov. Steele may yet lose. But that seems unlikely.

And because that means Republicans will probably pick up a Senate seat, that probably also means that Democrats will not pick up the Senate.

Probably. Electoral forecasts are notoriously difficult, and if A Mind That Suits wakes up tomorrow to find Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Harry Reid, he will, in fact, not be much surprised. Less surprised than if he wakes up to find Majority Leader Mitch McConnell AND Speaker Denny Hastert, but not much surprised either way.

And he will be utterly unsurprised if he wakes up to Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader McConnell. That seems most likely.

Now, if you haven't, go do your duty.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 3:24 PM



Friday, October 13, 2006 :::
 
Buried on page 21 of yesterday's Washington Post was an important article. It surely deserved to be on Page One, even though, as the Post accurately pointed out, it was hardly surprising.

The Shi'a majority in the Iraqi parliament voted to give the 9 Shi'a-dominated provinces of Iraq the right to form their own autonomous region in the South, just as the Kurds in the North have enjoyed their own autonomous region for quite some time. This region could not be formed until 2008, but one can be excused for harboring serious doubts that a parliament that has been unable to form a working government over these many months (or is it years?) will really be able to intervene if the provinces just go ahead and do it.

The Shi'a provinces are dominated by two parties, one of which calls itself the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, whose website can be found here, and the other of which calls itself the Dawa'a Party. "Dawa'a" roughly translates to "Teaching Others the Path of Islam." Or at least that's what more learned writers have said.

The head of SCIRI, Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, was a major supporter of the US invasion, and of the election. A Mind That Suits has never understood why conservative supporters of the war thought this was a good thing, from an American point of view. Didn't it enter anyone's mind that Mr. al-Hakim merely wanted us to do the heavy lifting and then go home? That is certainly how he has acted since we got there.

The Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani did not want us to come at all, but once we were there, he wanted us to guarantee an election which was surely going to bring his people to power.

Which it did.

That does not mean, nor has Mr. al-Sistani ever said, that he ever supported the establishment of a liberal democracy. He does, however, abjure gratuitous violence and persecution of religious minorities. He is also seriously ill, and others who do not abjure such violence and persecution are already vying to assume his mantle.

It is worth noting that, according to what few reports have come out, once the Shi'a parties gained power in their 9 provinces, they began forming intimate relations with the government of Iran, with which we have rather pressing business.

And it is worth noting that the only members of Parliament who voted to give those 9 provinces their autonomy were Shi'a, judging by the numbers. All of the Sunni, and surely all of the Kurds, walked out.

There is the added consideration that some of the Members of Parliament most assuredly represented the province of Anbar, far to the west of Baghdad and cheek by jowl with Syria. It is there that, according to our own Defense Department, the US has no influence whatsoever.

Anyone who can seriously claim to be a conservative knows that "nature abhors a vacuum."

Just who will fill that vacuum??

Just what military power in the region needs to save face bacause it was driven from Lebanon?

Oh, let us think.

Did "this government,"perhaps, provide significant support to the Shi'ite (Hezbollah) war against Israel a few months ago, even though "this government" is neither Sunni nor Shi'ite?

Oh, perhaps they did.

And perhaps they are about to chomp off one huge chunk of the political entity known as Iraq.

Just as the government of Turkey is talking openly about chomping off the huge chunk of the political entity known as Iraq, a huge chunk controlled by the Kurds.

Just as the Shi'ite-dominated Parliament of the political entity known as Iraq just voted to give the Shi'a-dominated huge chunk of the political entity known as Iraq the right to form alliances with a Shi'a government not known for its fondness of the United States of America.

And none of all this would lead anyone to think that democracy is about to break out all over the region.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 12:58 PM



Thursday, September 28, 2006 :::
 
One often gets the feeling that more care should be given in handing out research grants.

This thought returned while reading several notices of a book that purports to explain why your child comes up with strange sentences while learning to talk. He is not making errors, the author insists. He is trying out the grammars of various languages. He wants to see if you will respond if he uses English words with Chinese syntax.

This theory has delighted people who get all warm and fuzzy when another culture—any other culture--gets mentioned. It provides the opportunity to prove once again that they are not restricted by their silly old Anglo-Saxon culture. Oh, some writers squealed, our children are naturally multicultural. Here is a nice positive something or other to be nurtured, and these precious youngsters can be raised free of socially constructed fetters.

Now, A Mind That Suits would not want to enter fully into a battle best left to the pros, many of whom have pounced and shown little mercy.

But a few thoughts do enter the head if one has spent time with people who speak other languages or come from other cultures. (Those two often amount to the same thing.)

The first is that children are hardly the world’s biggest fans of altering social customs. What does a child most often do when put into a new situation, particularly if he senses Mommy is about to depart? Cry, of course. And while children might calmly play with a new child without noticing his or her skin color, anything the other child might do that seems odd often unleashes more tears, or a slap. Sandbox social stratification is—and anyone can remember this—far more vicious than that experienced at a cocktail buffet during New York’s Fashion Week.

The second is that children are hardly the world’s biggest fans of being misunderstood. They get impatient if Mommy doesn’t understand (more tears, of course), or visibly look perplexed as they try to sort out what they are saying wrong. And wrong is the word, contra our author’s assertion that he is just experimenting freely.

Linguists tell us that any language needs to have certain kinds of words: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions. A child will assign his own names to the restricted number of things he considers important, and most mothers seem to pick up on these otherwise unintelligible outbursts. But the mother intuits when the child can learn more, and immediately begins teaching him the words.

Soon enough, he figures out there are things and there are actions and there are descriptions. He learns the name of things by pointing. He learns things such as adverbs by listening. “Slower” he no doubt picks up because once children can walk they insist on running, which they can’t do very well, and so break things, including themselves. “Faster” he probably learns from his mother’s assurance to relatives that he, the child, is developing so much faster than is normal for his age. It’s what the pediatrician told her. The first preposition is probably “away” or “off.”

Now if you take a child’s first likely full sentence—“I want milk”—there are only so many ways to arrange the sentence. “I want milk.” “Milk want I.” “Want milk I.” “Want I milk.” “I milk want.” “Milk I want.” 6 all told. English uses the first, Italian almost all of them, Japanese the fifth, and Yoda the last.

Any child will try all six, and the one that gets him what he wants is the one he will use, period. And the one that gets him what he wants is what his parents will accept. Yes, it is of course socially conditioned. All of life is.

It is utterly remarkable that the human mind can accommodate any language, and so your child could learn Chinese just as easily as he is learning English, provided you spoke Chinese at home. But, contra the multi-culti squealers, it would not be great if he walked around using every available grammar all the time. He must learn to connect to people, or he will live alone. To connect to other people, he must use the language used by others around him, and in ways that they recognize as “correct.”

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 1:51 PM



Wednesday, September 27, 2006 :::
 
A Mind That Suits finds himself in the mind to blog, though if that will actually happen remains to be seen.

He however wishes to recommend this superlative column by his intellectual hero, William F. Buckley, Jr. It crystalizes, as he might say, exactly what the issues are this fall.

And A Mind That Suits hopes this finds all his long-suffering readers well.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 2:29 PM



Monday, August 07, 2006 :::
 
A Mind That Suits found himself this morning getting what any blogger wants, free publicity, in the form of a discussion of Mel Gibson’s latest embarrassment on Washington Post radio, which can be found here.

Following the Post on Mr. Gibson which caused the publicity, new readers will find an assortment--a chrestomathy, if you will--of postings from the last year. A Mind That Suits covers a lot of ground, from the war to ants crawling in three story windows. In addition to this chrestomathy, interesting posts from the last year have included comments on traveling in Italy (March, 2006), a response to a ill-conceived review of the Chronicles of Narnia (December 14, 2005), and one of many dissections of our ill-conceived war in Iraq October 14 and 15, 2005). A Mind That Suits is away from home, and working on his beloved iBook. Blogspot, for some reason, does not "support" formating on Mac, so he can only use caps where he would want to use bold for headlines.

For those who are interested in politics, they can look at the November 17, 2004 posting, a long statement on why a lifelong conservative would oppose the war . The statement is in the form of a satire, “The Litany on the GWOT.” A Mind That Suits is happy to report that it enjoyed a long ride on college e-mail, judging from the hits this humble blog got. And one can find another chrestomathy--actually, 3 chrestomathies--on August 10, 2003 which have lots of examples of writing just for fun.

A Mind That Suits was planning to come back full bore following his almost annual sojourn at a certain red-tile-roofed university on the West Coast, but, you know, carpe diem, so he will be back to regular blogging Tuesday morning.


MEL AND ALL THAT.
It appears that our Mel--that being Mel Gibson--has seriously blotted his copybook. This wasn't because he was caught driving drunk, apparently, but because of the hateful things he said to the police.

What is so sad about this is that it immediately reflects on his magnum opus, "The Passion of the Christ." Christian-baiter Christopher Hitchens demands that those of us who "defend" that movie speak now, or be forever ignored. This writer is used to being ignored, but let him speak up for a minute.

There is nothing anti-Semitic, in any way, about "The Passion of the Christ." It's easy to sort out if one remembers that EVERYONE IN THE MOVIE IS JEWISH, with the exception of Pontius Pilate and his functionaries. Modern sensibilities dictate that anyone who is shown anguishing over doing the wrong thing is exculpated by his agony, and so many reviewers said that Pilate was shown in a good light. Mel Gibson does not have a modern sensibility. Pontius Pilate is thus shown as the baby carried by Satan as Christ is being scourged. A brilliant, and theologically rich, image.

Oh, yes, and the hand that drives the nail into Jesus's hand belongs to Mel Gibson.

Those rich images aside, everyone in the movie is Jewish, including Jesus.

On which point, let us now allude to the hilarious final season of Garry Shandling's continuously hilarious take on the life and neuroses of a late night talk show host, the Larry Sanders Show. The head writer to the show was an angry s.o.b., given to anti-gay comments directed at some production assistant who was mercilessly gay, to the point that he might get sued for creating a hostile environment. Not the anti-gay guy; the gay guy. He pushes it right up to the limit, until he finally shows up in a tank top and hot pants, driving the straight guy over the edge.

Straight guy gets sued, and is informed by the producer, played by the ever-wonderful Rip Torn, that this is serious trouble, because the only group more powerful than the Jews in Hollywood is the gays, prompting said straight guy to get sloppily drunk and cry to the gay guy that his career was going to be ruined by the "gay Jews." (The gay guy ends up getting to “console” his former enemy, relevant here only to prove it is pretty common folk wisdom that, sufficiently tanked, a guy will do anything.)

And then there is the slightly less amusing spectacle of the unendurable Michael Ovitz complaining that his attempt at a comeback in Hollywood, as uber-producer, had been killed by the "gay mafia." Jay Leno did one of his "Jay walking" things on Hollywood Boulevard, and got one guy to say that the gay mafia probably made "killer flower arrangements."

All of which is to say that in a normal life in entertainment, one encounters a lot of different people.

And when one is really drunk, one will say anything.

One is reminded of the case of the young mother, Susan Smith, who drowned her children in a car om a small Southern town and then suggested that an African-American had done it. More than one liberal was heard to say--to the astonished befuddlement of any normal human being--that they would NEVER implicate Black people in anything that they did wrong.
Race-baiting is UP from killing your children. Dispicable in every way, but not as bad as killing your kids.

And Mr. Hitchens will not allow the alcohol level in Mr. Gibson's blood exculpate him, saying that one does not decide, between the first and second vodka, to become anti-Semitic. But between the first and fifteenth vodka, one does not decide anything except to get drunker.

But, really, the drunk excuse is not exculpatory. Mr. Gibson gets more money than any other actor in history, because he delivers. He has the widest range of any modern actor, and is a superlative director. It is hard for most of us to undertand why someone with that much money and spare time does not pay someone to lock him away until he dries out. Most of us, in fact, will conclude, rightly or wrongly, that he has not been serious.

Oddly enough, in this day and age, someone as popular as Mr. Gibson could take the low road and simply produce three more blockbusters and be done with it, pundits such as Mr. Hitchens being consigned to the sideroads.

One suspects that that is not the road Mr. Gibson will take. As evidenced by the Passion of the Christ, he is a serious Christian, and he will seek some way to atone for his sin, which in this case is considerable. It has brought dishonor to him, all his work, and all who support him. He knows that, and his fellow Catholics should remember him at Mass as he seeks to set things as right as they can be.

And they should remember never to get that---we’ll say drunk, just to be polite.

CHRESTOMATHY, or An Invitation to Enjoy A Mind That Suits

IN THE MATTER OF JOE WILSON and the famous "sixteen words" in the President's ill-considered State of the Union Address from 2003, A Mind That Suits found himself discussing the case with an elderly friend, an old-style liberal whose wife had served in the CIA.

As is true of so many, he had the impression that Amb. Wilson had proven the President was wrong. This would be news to the CIA operatives who debriefed him after returned from his "investigation" in Niger. As the Senate Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence discovered, those pros concluded that his investigation was inconclusive, but tended to support British Intelligence, the source of the report that Saddam had gone looking for "yellow cake" uranium there. Indeed, both the Senate Permament Select Committee on Intelligence and a committee of Her Majesty's Privy Council went out of their way to reveal what a blow-hard Amb. Wilson had become. The British still maintain that the "underlying intelligence" about Saddam's shopping trip "was sound."

Said elderly friend listened intently to the list of errors--we are being polite--committed by Ambassador Wilson in his famous New York Times op-ed and later book. Said list includes the fact that he never filed a report that went to Vice-President Dick Cheney, he did not "prove to the entire intelligence community" that the intelligence report was false, and he never saw documents he claims to have proved as forgeries.

The next day, said older friend asked the obvious question: why didn't Karl Rove and company simply go the press with the truth, instead of launching a full-bore, top secret attempt to smear the good Ambassador? A certain PBET formulated an answer, but it took a somewhat harsher form on reflection, which he has not shared with his friend. Yet.

So why is it that a certain Washington type--common in both major parties--goes for blood when simple ink will suffice?

If you are a f****r, the only thing you know how to do is f*** with people.

GWOT, AGAIN.
A Mind That Suits found himself in a friend's car listening to the news. A Distinguished Gentleman from the United States House of Representatives was saying that the solution to the crisis in Lebanon was clear: we have to eliminate the terrorists' infrastructure. At that, the friend spat out, "Terrorists don't have an infrastructure," which is true, and why the "Global War on Terror" is a name without a concept behind it.

Terrorist movements live and die by support. If they have a consituency, they will live on. If a constituency never develops, or deserts them, they die off. Suffice it to say that the Shi’ite “Party of God" has several constituencies, including Syria, Iran, and the Shi'ites of southern Lebanon. If their own people tire of them, then Syria and Iran might be forced to back off, but that does not appear likely.

The question for the Israelis is, then, what will lead to the least trouble? Heaven only knows.

As A Mind That Suits, a city dweller, doesn't catch rides with friends very often, it is annoying that for the second time in as many months, he left his cell phone in the car. It inspires the feeling that losing your cell phone feels like death, and then one thinks of the poor people of southern Lebanon, so you put it all back in perspective. But it does show how conveniences so quickly acquire the air of being indispensible.

ANOTHER VICTORY IN THE GWOT. (From 2005)

You may remember that not so long ago, the long-suffering people of Uzbekistan staged riots, during the course of which untold numbers of people were killed by their merciless leaders. Now, the Uzbeki government has been useful in the fight in Afghanistan, because it allowed us to use an airfield, so W. has been remarkably silent about its human rights abuses.
But the US could hardly ignore this. It therefore, through the UN, helped the Kirgistani government relocate several hundred refugees whose return for “trial” the Uzbecki government had demanded. It had somehow slipped this writer’s notice, but, in retaliation, the Uzbecki government gave the US 180 days to quit the airfield. It would make sense that they want to play Russia against the US, so there are no doubt frantic negotiations going on.
With our good friend, the Uzbecki government.

And did you hear the one about the Islamist Pakistani General????


IT'S THE NATURE, STUPID. (Following Katrina and Rita.)

As meteorologists have pointed out, over the recorded history of hurricane activity, there have been long periods when hurricanes hit Florida and then headed up the East Coast, and long periods when they have crossed Florida and hit the Gulf of Mexico, source of the Gulf Stream that warms the East Coast and Northern Europe. For much of the '80's and '90's, they headed north, wreaking havoc in such places as Wilmington, NC, where a certain pudgy, balding English teacher spends a fair amount of time, and Long Island, home to people who think that tragedies can never happen where people went to Harvard.

But in those times when hurricanes have crossed Florida, they have hit the warm waters of the Gulf, which are a lifeline to many in the Altantic, and a death sentence for others.

With the exception of one in the 1930's which devasted Long Island, where bad things are not supposed to happen because everyone went to Harvard, most of the really nasty ones have crossed Florida, hotted up in the Gulf, and then consumed some poor city or other along the Gulf Coast.

Now, the Gulf Coast is normally a lovely place to live. Just ask a certain pudgy, balding English teacher, who grew up in
Florida and often wiled away the time on lovely Sanibel Island. The Gulf Coast is also the source of much of the storied wealth of the United States, as ships that enter the mighty Misssissipi River at New Orleans can make their way to Ohio and Missouri and loads of other places.

Everything, however, comes with a price.

The price of living on the Gulf Coast is, perhaps, an early death.

This comes as news to many of our reporters who, fed on stories of Woodward and Bernstein, always think the "real story" is hidden, when it is often right out in front of their noses. It MAY be that "Global Warming" is hotting up the hurricanes, or it may be that, now that we have entered a period of Florida-crossing hurricanes, the hurricanes themselves get the chance to really hot up, and do so at will.

When you have been through a real hurricane, you have a hard time not assuming that they do things "at will."

Remember: Lovely Rita crossed the Florida Keys as a tropical storm and a Catgory One. It MAY be that Rita benefited from all those carbon-based fuels dragged up out of the Gulf floor, or it MAY--more likely--be that she just hotted up because any hurricane that makes it to the Gulf will do so. At will.

And it is no accident that the Director the National Hurricane Center has said, often, that he is worried that the population is building up on the Louisiana Coast and Long Island, and in Galveston TX, the Florida Panhandle, and the Keys.
That hurricanes may well take out two of those five just this season should turn him into a national hero.
Instead, people will be wondering whose fault it is, and where they can "take action" to ensure the Mother Nature will never again do that which, in the final analysis, man can do nothing to stop.

A-HA! (From earlier this year.)
It was the opinion of a certain, pudgy balding, English teacher--then a slender, already balding history grad student at a certain red-tile-roofed university on the West Coast--that a brand new radical computer company had copped its name from a once radical record company. Indeed, Steven Jobs has been silly enough to admit that Apple Computer got its name--"in part"-- from, well, the Apple Corps, Ltd., which elaborate pun serves as the name of the the corporate incarnation of the Beatles. By the time Apple Computers came along, the Apple Corps had retreated behind closed doors because of the innumerable law suits between four rather famous Liverpudlians, and the younger denizens of said red-tile-roofed campus expressed some perplexity on the issue when it was raised by the "older" grad student.

It turns out that said Apple Corps was not at all asleep at the wheel on the name copping, but had, with an eye to profits, agreed to let the matter sleep as long as "Apple Computers" only made Apple computers.

And then came the i-Pod and i-Tunes.

Oops.

Those're about music.

Apple Corps has once again gone to court with Apple Computers over said agreement. Just enter the phrase "Apple sues Apple" in any search engine, and you will see that this has been going on for a while.
Now, the principle shareholders in Apple Corps do not need money. But neither does Mr. Jobs. Longstanding English common law precedent is clear: in trademark, the first shall be first. It is not hard to see that Mr. Jobs may well be forced to fork over yet more cash to two boys from Liverpool and to the heirs of two other boys from Liverpool. On the other hand, he can probably find some pretty sharp lawyers to prove that iTunes is not a music business, or at least not one that violates said agreement.

It's all rather funny, actually, and it illustrates what the old song says:

All You Need Is Lawyers.

No, wait...

(Of course, Apple later won this lawsuit, although the Apple Corps has appealed.)

FUN WITH LANGUAGE

DO I HAVE TO GO TO PRISON?

AOL Instant Messenger is telling A Mind That Suits that he can get a personal horoscope sent to his cell.

He is not tempted, in part because he figures that the matter was settled late in the 4th Century AD, when the father of the man who was to become St. Augustine and a neighboring farmer made a deal. They both had slave women who were pregnant and due at about the same time, so they arranged to have other slaves run and say when each child was born. The slaves met each other mid-flight, meaning the two children were born as close to the same time as makes no nevermind. And the two children turned out to be radically different.

But, even if he were concerned about his horoscope, a certain pudgy, balding English teacher could not accept the offer in good conscience. He is not in prison, you see, so he has no cell to which horoscopes could be sent.

This is an example of a practice that came to his attention some years ago: the use of adjectives as nouns. It is common in some tongues, notably any of Latin's modern descendants, but it is not natural to English. (Yes, language is a natural phenomenon, just as bird calls are.) But it is natural to what the French Protestant Marxist philosopher Jacques Ellul called the "technique society." (That was badly translated into English as The Technological Society.)

Now, A Mind That Suits has no trouble quoting Protestants or Frenchmen, but does everything he can to avoid quoting Marxists. It's that "defense of mass murder" thing that gets him down. But in this, M. Ellul was quite correct: we have figured out how to do things, and so people who know how to do things are elevated in esteem beyond their true worth to other human beings. The correct translation from the French, you see, would probably be "The Know-How Society." He means roughly the same thing that Oscar Wilde meant when he had a character in The Picture of Dorian Gray say that "people nowadays know the price of everything, and the value of nothing."

Some time ago, among technical folks--to be more specific, perhaps, among technical folks in the military--it became a sign of technical sophistication to use adjectives without their accompanying nouns. "Let me give you this hypothetical." This was a new usage. In any version of Latin, to give you an Italian hypothetical, if you have to choose between two ties, you might choose "il rosso," whereas in proper English that should be "the red one." (Actually, that wasn't a hypothetical. That was what the wife of an Italian friend said when a certain pudgy, balding English teacher presented her with two ties he could not decide between. And actually actually, "one" is not in this case a noun but a pronoun. Still, you get the point.)

It should be, "let me give you this hypothetical situation."

But no longer. A "cell phone" is now a "cell," an "e-mail adress" is now an "e-mail," and, horribly, Washington's magnificent Union Station is now routinely referred to as "Union." Perhaps the most radical truncation has transformed your Social Security Number into your "social," eliminating not only a noun but a noun-serving-as-an-adjective.

All by people who are pretending to know far more than they actually know.

English-wise, this is a negative.


SPEAK ENGLISH, PLEASE, NOT PRETENTIOUS

A waitress friend--oh, sorry, a femal server friend--was fuming. She is Brazilian, and was offering an hors d’oeuvre--if that is spelled correctly--on endive, the usefully shapped green that forms the basis of so many such foods. Following the rules of English pronunciation, she said, well, “endive.” And the pretentious guest corrected her, "on-deev."
Now, the first thing that makes this so offensive is that the waitress is in a subordinate position, and a person of more elevated status should not needlessly make her life more difficult.

The second thing that makes this so offensive is that the waitress--oh, sorry, female server--was speaking English, her second language. Why make her accountable for a third, in this case, French?

Except that "on-deev" is not French. True enough, the "i" in French sounds like the long "e" in English, though only a linguist could tell you if they are truly identical.

But.

The correct French pronunciation involves a nasal sound. A Certain Pudgy, Balding English teacher some time ago heard himself recorded in French, and realized with horror that his nasal sounds were nowhere near correct. He was shocked because he has made an avocation of learning French pronunciation over the years, and has received many compliments from French people on his French pronunciation--which compliments he gladly reminds everyone are rarely handed out by French people. But he simply was not getting the “n” right.

Which makes him think the pretentious guest did not get the "n" right either. So, too, she probably did not get the "d" correct, nor the final "e," which is not silent, as in English. It is a ghostly presence, but it is a presence nonetheless.
'When in Rome, do like the Romans" said Shakespeare..

It's application here is, "When speaking English, use Engilsh rules of pronunciation."

That can be further honed as, "When using the English word 'endive,' use a long 'i', and don't inflict your pretentions on a poor waitress."

Urrr, female server. Person. Oh, you know.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 12:58 AM



Tuesday, July 25, 2006 :::
 
One of life's eternal lessons.

If one has young friends,as college teachers are wont to do, then one will probably be prompted to invite them out for a burger every once in a whie "just to talk." On a statistical sample of two, it would appear that Sunday afternoon is a lousy time for such meals, as it is rather close to Saturday night, herein defined as anything that happens before dawn on Sunday.

Last week, A Mind That Suits found himself being driven home from church by the nephew of an old friend.

Said young man, just out of college, vouchsafed that he had not really gone to bed. He sagged increasingly during Mass, and announced that he was pretty exhausted immediately on exiting the church. A Mind That Suits concluded that the scheduled lunch was out of the question, and, indeed, the young driver freaked out at his own sleepiness on the drive to the Metro, so he became passenger on the drive to his own aunt's house, on the presumption that someone would be home who could then take a certain pudgy, balding English teacher to the Metro. No one was home, other relatives wouldn't answer the phone, it was a boiling hot day, and the aunt's house was beyond the East-West Highway, a two lane country road in the heart of Washington's notorious traffic, with exactly no walking space. A Mind That Suits was stuck on a verdant suburband island, about a mile and a half from where he wanted to be, which was his favorite pub in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Large groups of family members arrived shortly thereafter, although, as a tiny baby arrived at about the same time and most of the assembled were female, it was some minutes before anyone focused on the fact that there was a slight problem that should be solved. Indeed, the mother of the young miscreant looked straight past a certain PBET, even though they have known each for years and he should not have been there. His uncle, the old friend, speculated that he had been up all not on the internet, a regular habit, apparently. When told by A Mind That Suits that he had mentioned some friends that lived in Georgetown, he blurted out, "oh, if he was with his friends he's been drinking."

This week, another young friend, the son of yet another friend, now not so young, revealed that in a moment of nostalgia, he and his friends, back from college, decided to return to an old tire swing on the Potomac River much favored during their high school days. This was at about 2 in the morning. They managed to arrive at exactly the moment when the police decided to visit the site and interrogate this year's crop of high school students hanging out at the old tire swing. Said young friend had to wait while the sergeant investigate each car, and he came last in the rotation. Said sergeant had perhaps determined that said young friend had arrived at exactly the wrong moment, because he just asked if he had been drinking. The denial being plausible (and likely true), the sarge just waved him off.

Two and a half hours after they had arrived.

Perhaps mindful of the frustration expressed by A Mind That Suits over the previous week's youthful shenanigans, this young friend did his level best to keep up his end of the conversation, although he hinted broadly that it was an effort. Indeed, he expressed satisfaction as his house came into view.

That young friend is only in town a few weeks a year. As he spent his high school years shooting pool evey Tuesday with A Mind That Suits, the two make a point of getting together when they can. They had to this last Sunday afternoon--even though a certain PBET was headed to North Carolina that afternoon. And attepmt the previous Friday night had failed because they had misunderstood where to meet, at Ballston Commons in Arlington, VA. This illustrates why cell phones were invented. The only reason they didn't save the day last Friday was that this was the day (mentioned below) when A Mind That Suits and his phone were separated.

There are two things A Mind That Suits hates about driving: traffic jams, and thunderstorms. Traffic jams are a decidedly distant second, as one cannot hydroplane in a traffic jam. After dropping off his young friend, he pulled onto I-95 headed south just and ran into one gigantic, 15-mile-long traffic jam, just as he snapped on the news radio to hear, "Ifr you are headed south on I-95, there's clear sailing all the way." Only there wasn't, so 10minutes later the same announcer intoned, "If you are headed south on I-95, good luck." An attempt to steer clear of the traffic by moving over to US-1 turned out to be ill-considered, adding perhaps another 15 minutes to the delay.

Which turned out to be all to the good, as A Mind That Suits pulled onto I-40 headed to lovely Wilimington, NC, some thirty minutes behaind the last thunderstorm. He announced to his father on his arrival that he had timed that exactly right, and his father concurred.

In the matter of Joe Wilson and the famous "sixteen words" in the President's ill-considered State of the Union Address from 2003, A Mind That Suits found himself discussing the case with an elderly friend, an old-style liberal whose wife had served in the CIA.

As is true of so many, he had the impression that Amb. Wilson had proven the President was wrong. This would be news to the CIA oepratives who debriefed him after returned from his "investigation" in Niger. As the Senate Permanent Selectx Committee on Intelligence discovered, the professionals concluded that his investigation was inconclusive, but tended to support British Intelligence, the source of the report that Saddam had gone looking for "yellow cake" uranium there. Indeed, both the Senate Permament Select Committee on Intelligence and a committee of Her Majesty's Privy Council went out of their way to reveal what a blow-hard Amb. Wilson had become. The British still maintain that the "underlying intelligence" about Saddam's shopping trip "was sound."

Said elderly friend listened intently to the list of errors--we are being polite--committed by Ambassador Wilson in his famous New York Times op-ed and later book. Said list includes the fact that he never filed a report that went to Vice-President Dick Cheney, he did not "prove to the entire intelligence community" that the intelligence report was false, and he never saw documents he claims to have proved as forgeries.

The next day, said older friend asked the obvious question: why didn't Karl Rove and company simply go the press with the truth, instead of launching a full-bore, top secret attempt to smear the good Ambassador. A certain PBET formulated an answer, but it took a somewhat harsher form on reflection, which he has not shared with his friend. Yet.

So why is it that a certain Washington type--common in both major parties--goes for blood when simple ink will suffice?

If you are a f*****, the only thing you know how to do is f*** with people.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 9:33 AM



Friday, July 21, 2006 :::
 
A Mind That Suits found himself in a friend's car listening to the news. A Distinguished Gentleman from the United States House of Representatives was saying that the solution to the crisis in Lebanon was clear: we have to eliminate the terrorists' infrastructure. At that, the friend spat out, "Terrorists don't have an infrastructure," which is true, and why the "Global War on Terror" is a name without a concept behind it.

Terrorist movements live and die by support. If they have a consituency, they will live on. If a constituency never develops, or deserts them, they die off. Suffice it to say that "the Party of God" has several constituencies, including Syria, Iran, and the Shi'ites of southern Lebanon. If their own people tire of them, then Syria and Iran might be forced to back off, but that does not appear likely.

The question for the Israelis is, then, what will lead to the least trouble? Heaven only knows.

As A Mind That Suits, a city dweller, doesn't catch rides with friends very often, it is annoying that for the second time in as many months, he left his cell phone in the car. It inspires the feeling that losing your cell phone feels like death, and then one thinks of the poor people of southern Lebanon, so you put it all back in perspective. But it does show how conveniences so quickly acquire the air of being indispensible.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 1:09 PM



Saturday, May 20, 2006 :::
 
A waitress friend--oh, sorry, a femal server friend--was fuming. She is Brazilian, and was offering an hors d’oeuvre--if that is spelled correctly--on endive, the usefully shapped green that forms the basis of so many such foods. Following the rules of English pronunciation, she said, well, endive. And the pretentious guest corrected her, "on-deev."

Now, the first thing that makes this so offensive is that the waitress is in a subordinate position, and a person of more elevated status should not needlessly make her life more difficult.

The second thing that makes this so offensive is that the waitress--oh, sorry, female server--was speaking English, her second language. Why make her accountable for a third, in this case, French?

Except that "on-deev" is not French. True enough, the "i" in French sounds like the "e" in English, though only a linguist could tell you if they are truly identical.

But.

The correct French pronunciation involves a nasal sound. While a Certain Pudgy, Balding English teacher has received many compliments from French people on his French pronunciation--which compliments he gladly reminds everyone are rarely handed out by French people--he did finally hear himself recorded in French and realized with horror that his nasal sounds were not exactly right.

Which makes him think the pretentious guest did not get the "n" right either. So, too, she probably did not get the "d" correct, nor the final "e," which is not silent, as in English. It is a ghostly presence, but it is a presence nonetheless.

'When in Rome, do like the Romans" said Shakespeare.. It's application here is, "When speaking English, use Engilsh rules of pronunciation." That can be further honed as, "When using the English word 'endive,' use a long 'i', and don't inflict your pretentions on a poor waitress.

Urrr, female server. Person. Oh, you know.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 11:06 AM



Tuesday, March 28, 2006 :::
 
A-ha!!

It was the opinion of a certain, pudgy balding, English teacher--then a slender, already balding history grad student at a certain red-tile-roofed university on the West Coast--that a brand new radical computer company had copped its name from a once radical record company. Indeed, Steven Jobs has been silly enough to admit that Apple Computer got its name--"in part"-- from, well, the Apple Corps, Ltd., which elaborate pun serves as the name of the the corporate incarnation of the Beatles. By the time Apple Computers came along, the Apple Corps had retreated behind closed doors because of the innumerable law suits between four rather famous Liverpudlians, and the younger denizens of said red-tile-roofed campus expressed some perplexity on the issue when it was raised by the "older" grad student.

It turns out that said Apple Corps was not at all asleep at the wheel on the name copping, but had, with an eye to profits, agreed to let the matter sleep as long as "Apple Computers" only made Apple computers.

And then came the i-Pod and i-Tunes.

Oops.

Those're about music.

Apple Corps has once again gone to court with Apple Computers over said agreement. Just enter the phrase "Apple sues Apple" in any search engine, and you will see that this has been going on for a while.

Now, the principle shareholders in Apple Corps do not need money. But neither does Mr. Jobs. Longstanding English common law precedent is clear: in trademark, the first shall be first. It is not hard to see that Mr. Jobs may well be forced to fork over yet more cash to two boys from Liverpool and to the heirs of two other boys from Liverpool. On the other hand, he can probably find some pretty sharp lawyers to prove that iTunes is not a music business, or at least not one that violates said agreement.

It's all rather funny, actually, and it illustrates what the old song says:

All You Need Is Lawyers.

No, wait...

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 4:59 PM



Sunday, March 12, 2006 :::
 
For those seeking news of Flan O'Brien's, please scroll down.

It has been the unhappy lot of a certain pudgy, balding English teacher to be unable to travel to his beloved Italy for four years, primarily because he has been traveling to California to take care of the literary estate of his beloved uncle, Allen Drury. But one night in mid-December, flush with cash and no discernible cares, he got on the web and bought himself ten days in that lovely land.

This may have been a big mistake. Italy is still a cheap date, but the euro is doing entirely too well. Economically illiterate people think this is a sign that something is wrong with the dollar, when most US Administrations try desperately to keep the dollar down.

Economically illiterate people also seem to think that whatever is true today will be true tomorrow. Although he has known in an abstract sense for many years that this is untrue, the reality was driven home to him several years ago when Alan Greenspan expressed his concern that the dollar was too high, whereupon the euro surged by 10% for exactly the two weeks that A Mind That Suits was in Italy. Curse that man.

The dollar will be strong again. It just was not strong a week ago, when the euro was 25% above what it was the last time that A Mind That Suits found himself in his beloved Italy.

Scattered Thoughts.

Never again will A Mind That Suits take a taxi into Rome. (See Part One, below.) He had before, to a preferred perch atop the Gianicolo, a famed hill above the Vatican, but his hotel the first night was in the Centro Storico (historic center), a scant km from his previous domicile. But what a km. Once you enter the Centro Storico, you are lost in a maze of tiny streets jammed with colorful local vendors. The taxi driver usually knows generally where to drop you, but not always. And he will finally pull up and say, “I cannot get there. Just walk two streets over.” Far better to take the train in.

Too American. His previous perch was a religious house called the Villa Bassi. The Sisters who technically owned it were very old, and they rented it out to someone who ran it as a hotel. A Mind That Suits assumed it would always be available, but it closed its doors on December 15. It is a fine building with a beautiful garden, so presumably it will beome expensive apartments or a three-star hotel. Whatever, it is now gone.

For the Italian-ness of his trip, this was a disaster, because he used to begin every day with a cappuccino, a stroll, another cappuccino, and the purchase of such basics as bananas, water, and yogurt, and, of course, the morning papers, combined with many conversations with the workers in all the various stores. The whole process set an Italian tone for the day.

Now, A Mind That Suits split for Assisi, his favorite spot on earth, immediately after his arrival, but when he returned, he found himself domiciled where most tourists are, in the vicinity of Stazione Termini, the main train station, and the Piazza d. Republica, not far away. He was marginally closer to the sites, but overall this meant too many Americans and too many Italians who wanted to practice their English.

Where to Stay in Rome. Rome is perhaps the easiest city in the world to find lodging in. You just walk around Fiumicio (the airport) or Termini and 25 people will fall all over themselves offering you room. The “official” offices are not very reliable: they steer you towards more expensive rooms offered by their friends, so it is entirely likely that the guy who is obviously hocking his own place will give you a better deal.

Indeed, after a stroll to and fro across Termini, a fellow plucked a certain pudgy, balding English teacher out of the air. He had such an elaborate tale that, out of sheer American admiration for entrepreneurship, A Mind That Suits allowed the fellow to keep spinning words until he had to laugh.

You do not need to go through this: Italy put all its hotels on a central computer when it hosted the World Cup, in 1990, so that, when the internet became a big deal, it simply uploaded all the information. Rome used to be impossible, because there are so many “pensioni” that the system would crash, but no longer. Pictures, maps, rates: everything. Just go to http://www.enit.it/. They will take care of you.

That said, the huckster who pressed A Mind That Suits into staying at the Hotel Matisse in fact offered clean lodging and firm beds for an entirely reasonable 50 euro a night (winter rate). So stay there. 039(Italy)-06(Rome)- 389-978-7112

Now, as it happens, the Hotel Matisse solved the Italianness problem,

Because it was across the street from an Irish pub.

That’s right: the key to experiencing Italians in the Via Nazionale is to hang out at Flan O’Brien’s, at the intersection with Via Napoli. Trust your pudgy balding English teacher.

There is only one problem: smack in the middle of a lovely Irish pub, the owners plopped down an Italian bar.

Now, as nearly any of my readers will know, a decent Anglo-Saxon pub has a huge bar at which all the single guys eat. It is our God-given right. The single ladies, no, not so much. But pudgy, balding English teachers—all the time. Indeed, there is an Irish pub run by actual Irish people in the Via d. Plebiscito called the Scholar’s Lounge. If you want to meet other English speakers—a silly goal, if one is in Italy—then that is the place to go, and they have the system down, complete with placemats and rolled silverware for all the “singoli.”

However, to the owners and managers of Flan O’Brien’s, at Via Nazionale and Via Napoli, all this was a cultural mystery. An Italian bar is about .3 m deep and 2m long. (13” by 6’, in other words.) You grab your latte in the morning and your shot of whiskey on the way home at night, but you do not sit, and you do not eat.

That is, unless you are a certain pudgy balding English teacher. He is all for respecting other people’s cultures, but, hang it all, if you are going to have a pub, it needs to be a pub.

Particularly when several members of the staff are infectiously cheery youngsters, what the Italians call “ragazzi.” There was no way in hell that yours truly was going to sit all alone, not when all the entertainment was available for free.

He made friends with Davide, from Napoli itself, who is into surfing and does not care about football (soccer.) And with even-tempered, always courteous Samuelle, the barback. Poor Samuelle was mugged walking across the park in front of Stazione Termini—many restaurant workers seem to live there. As that has happened more than once to a certain pudgy, balding English teacher, and exactly at the same stage in life as poor Samuelle, he always made sure to slip him an extra euro and a smile to brighten his night.

But then there came the night when A Mind That Suits had made a mistake in the Centro Storico and had eaten a dinner of contorni (vegetables), insalate (salads), and riso (rice.) He was full, but desired that masculine fundamental: meat. He knew, from his first night in Rome, that Flan O’Brien’s had a wonderful saltsiccia (sausauge), so he asked the bartender if he could eat on the bar. The bartender said “of course,” but then checked himself and asked a passing waitress.

The waitress was the wonderful Dragana, whose nearly-but-not-quite perfect English pegged her immediately as a Slav. She is, indeed, Croatian, and she is a lovely person and very much in charge, which is why the bartender deferred to her. The technical answer was that, as with most Italian bars, no, they did not serve food there, but “for you, perhaps, we will make an exception.”

And the bartender was Mauro, an Argentinian by birth who has rocketed into the pantheon of best bartenders in the experience of A Mind That Suits, and that is saying something. Indeed, so much fun was his company that A Mind That Suits persisted in having late night snacks at that very bar, and everyone who asked why—which would be everyone who worked there—immediately understood that it was for the company.

This did not mean that anyone ever understood the Anglo-Saxon conception of bar. When he want to the “casse” (checkout counter) to pay for the sausauge, the young lady there stared at the ticket and then asked, “ha mangiato li? (You ate over there?)” “Si, ho mangiato li.” (Yes, I ate over there.). A later night, concerning an order of very nice fries, the manager mentioned that a seat was available at a table, which offer was waved off.

But everyone seemed to understand that young friend Mauro was the star attraction. I

ndeed, this illustrates how systems have their ups and downs. There is no question that the Italian style bar moves people in and out quickly, thus guaranteeing a steady pace. But it is also true the the European system of “service included’ means you get lousy service. That is not such an issue in Italy, where a 3-hour meal is normal, but in other countries, where you are expected to get in and out fast, it is not so nice.

And with servers who provide excellent service—as did the storied Mauro and Dragana—they are at a real disadvantage. With a good Anglo-Saxon bar---2” x 18” (.7m x 5m) they would have a real opportunity to charm the customers and rake in the cash. But it is simply not to be. The system is different.

Which does not mean that A Mind That Suits has anything other than very happy memories of Flan O’Brien’s and its various inmates, particularly said Dragana and Mauro. And how he wishes Flan O’Brien’s was just across the street, instead of across the ocean.

Language Notes. Young friend Mauro was better at mixing actual cocktails than any Italian bartender who had heretofore come to the attention of said pudgy, balding English teacher. Indeed, said PBET, the first time he was in Flan O’Brian’s, steered another American away from something--a pina colada, perhaps—on the grounds that Italians did not do mixed drinks very well.

But then came Mauro, who can pour a drink using three bottles at once. Quite the master, it seems. He taught the bouncer, who had been dragged into barback service thanks to another bartender who called in with a “headache,” how to mix something he called a Long Island Beach. A search of databases back in the good ol’ U.S. of A does not reveal any such drink. It was perhaps (indeed, most probably) a Long Island Sunset, or—perhaps-- a Long Island Taxi. Readers can find a full list of drinks that have “Long Island” in their name here. (If indeed the drink is not on that list, then Young Friend Mauro may have inadvertently named a drink, an accomplishment that took A Mind That Suits twice as many summers to accomplish. Please see the posting for ______________.)

Young friend Mauro’s skill, while notable, would not warrant much space here at A Mind That Suits were it not that he so endearingly called his creation a “Long Island.” Any English speaker would of course ask, “A Long Island WHAT?”

This is perhaps the biggest hurdle that any speaker of any modern version of Latin must confront while speaking English, to whit, in Latin, the noun comes first, and in English, the adjectives do. Indeed, it is remarkable that Young Friend Mauro did not simply call it a “Long.” He obviously knows that there is a place called “Long Island,” so at least he kept those words together. If there is a drink called the Long Island Beach in the US, then it would be referred to simply as a “Beach” for shorthand.

This is an enduring problem. Twice in the space of 24 hours, in his incarnation as supplier of food, drink, and general happiness to the elite of Your Nation’s Capital, A Mind That Suits had to straighten out problems created by the fact that Spanish speaking subordinates thought that the FIRST word in an expression was the most important, when it was really the last.

Most amusingly, Il Mesagero, a prestigious Italian newspaper, covered some event or other at “il Madison di New York.” “The Madison” is, of course, a low-budget hotel in New York City. That fact is in itself worth noting, low budget hotels being something of a rarity in New York City. And it is worth noting to non-English speakers that “The Madison Hotel” becomes “The Madison” because the word “hotel” is uninteresting.

But of course Il Mesagero was not covering some event that happened in the lounge at a cheap hotel. It was covering an event at the mighty, storied Garden, no city designation needed. Say simply “he played the Garden last night,” and any American with any cultural education will understand.

Il Mesagero was referring to Madison Square Garden, of course, and Americans will please forgive the pedantic explanation. He has some foreign readers.

Now, if one wants to really be pedantic, one can refer to it as “the New Madison Square Garden,” as indeed it was referred to when a Certain Pudgy, Balding English teacher was a wee slip of a lad. The building opened when he was but 11.

The current, architecturally uninteresting Garden replaced the original Garden in Madison Square. Actually, it was the third building to replace the original Garden, as one can learn in the history provided by the current owners. The name “Garden” appears to come from the fact that, in its first two incarnations, there was an actual garden on the roof. The second one, regrettably lost, was designed by master architect Stanford White, who nestled a restaurant among the trees on the roof. He therefore inadvertently provided a picturesque setting for his own death at the hands of a jealous husband.

All of which is kind of beside the point, which is that in English, the noun comes last, and that poses something of a hurdle to speakers of any modern version of Latin, in which the noun comes first.

But it was kind of fun to hear Young Friend Mauro refer to his creation as a “Long Island.”

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 8:46 PM



Thursday, March 09, 2006 :::
 
Italy, Part One.

Some things are eternal.

Take Rome for instance. Ignore the piles of broken columns and entablatures scattered around. Ignore the magnificent churches and palazzi.

Consider the taxi drivers.

But let’s first consider the expense involved.

A Mind That Suits had been far too long away from his favorite major city, but had proudly saved 90 Euros, bought on the very first day that Italians used the Euro, in anticipation if his return.

Rather than taking the train and the bus to his hotel, which would have been wiser, he thought to take a cab. It had cost something like $30 the last time he went to his preferred resting spot, an incredibly cheap religious house on the Gianicolo, otherwise the most expensive district in Rome. Ah, but said resting spot is now closed, the religious sisters whose order owned it having, perhaps, gone on to their final reward, so that there was no one else to run the place.

And so a certain pudgy, balding English teacher had a friend find him a place, which turned out to be in the most desirable section of the “Centro Storico,” the “historic center” of the most historic city in the West.

Which posed certain problems.

First of all, the euro has pushed beyond the dollar by about 25%. Economically illiterate people think that this means something bad about the dollar, but the dollar goes up and down all the time. Indeed, Larry Summers, the legendary Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, when asked about a weak dollar under his watch, would comically pull reporters close to him, ask them if they really wanted to know what he felt, and then mutter, “no comment.” There are immense benefits to a “weak currency,” mainly keeping money at home and driving up costs of imports, thus helping local business.

But for the aging tourist, this eats a hole in his pocket the size of the Circus Maximus.

And then there is the matter of getting from the Gianicolo to the Centro Storico.

The taxi driver was not dishonest. He took exactly the same route as the taxi drive who last took A Mind That Suits to the Gianicolo, but he sped right past the turn-off to the old resting spot and went down past the Vatican into the heart of Rome.

Cinicinnatus himself never faced such an ordeal.

The euro’s dominance meant that the first leg of the trip itself went from $30 to almost $40, but that is not all.
Because beyond the Gianicolo there is the Centro Storico.

It is not just traffic, although that is bad enough.

It is that the average street is shorter than two blocks.

A certain pudgy balding English teacher was immediately reminded that Rome is a very physically demanding city. It is not at all uncommon to find a small truck run up on a sidewalk, with restaurant workers hand-carrying supplies across picturesque cobblestones into a small eatery.

It may be picturesque, but it involves a lot of work.

And, if said restaurant workers are blocking the street, crazy taxi drivers cannot get you to your hotel.

You may therefore find yourself dropped, unceremoniously, two blocks from your hotel, with confident assurances that it is “sempre in diritto,” that is, straight ahead (“always in the right way.”)

Thus did a certain pudgy, balding English teacher find himself deposited, with much good will, in front of Michelangelo’s magnificent Pallazzo Farnese, with confident assurances that he needed only go “sempre in diritto.”

Said crazy taxi driver, about which more later, was absolutely right. But that extra little bit from the Gianicolo, which involved not a little zipping in and out of small roads, ran the bill up another $20.

Lesson learned.

Go to Stazione Termini, the main train station, and take the 64 or the 40 to the edge of the Centro Storico, and then walk. That is the way to save cash.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 10:12 PM



Tuesday, February 21, 2006 :::
 
AOL Instant Messenger is telling A Mind That Suits that he can get a personal horoscope sent to his cell.

He is not tempted, in part because he figures that the matter was settled late in the 4th Century AD, when the father of the man who was to become St. Augustine and a neighboring farmer made a deal. They both had slave women who were pregnant and due at about the same time, so they arranged to have other slaves run and say when each child was born. The slaves met each other mid-flight, meaning the two children were born as close to the same time as makes no nevermind. And the two children turned out to be radically different.

But, even if he were concerned about his horoscope, a certain pudgy, balding English teacher could not accept the offer in good conscience. He is not in prison, you see, so he has no cell to which horoscopes could be sent.

This is an example of a practice that came to his attention some years ago: the use of adjectives as nouns. It is common in some tongues, notably any of Latin's modern descendants, but it is not natural to English. (Yes, language is a natural phenomenon, just as bird calls are.) But it is natural to what the French Protestant Marxist philosopher Jacques Ellul called the "technique society." (That was badly translated into English as The Technological Society.)

Now, A Mind That Suits has no trouble quoting Protestants or Frenchmen, but does everything he can to avoid quoting Marxists. It's that "defense of mass murder" thing that gets him down. But in this, M. Ellul was quite correct: we have figured out how to do things, and so people who know how to do things are elevated in esteem beyond their true worth to other human beings. The correct translation from the French, you see, would probably be "The Know-How Society." He means roughly the same thing that Oscar Wilde meant when he had a character in The Picture of Dorian Gray say that "people nowadays know the price of everything, and the value of nothing."

Some time ago, among technical folks--to be more specific, perhaps, among technical folks in the military--it became a sign of technical sophistication to use adjectives without their accompanying nouns. "Let me give you this hypothetical." This was a new usage. In any version of Latin, to give you an Italian hypothetical, if you have to choose between two ties, you might choose "il rosso," whereas in proper English that should be "the red one." (Actually, that wasn't a hypothetical. That was what the wife of an Italian friend said when a certain pudgy, balding English teacher presented her with two ties he could not decide between. And actually actually, "one" is not in this case a noun but a pronoun. Still, you get the point.)

It should be, "let me give you this hypothetical situation."

But no longer. A "cell phone" is now a "cell," an "e-mail adress" is now an "e-mail," and, horribly, Washington's magnificent Union Station is now routinely referred to as "Union." Perhaps the most radical truncation has transformed your Social Security Number into your "social," eliminating not only a noun but a noun-serving-as-an-adjective.

All by people who are pretending to know far more than they actually know.

English-wise, this is a negative.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 2:49 PM



Monday, February 20, 2006 :::
 
It happened that a certain pudgy, balding English teacher assisted in the festivities surrounding the wedding of a young Indian lady, as in Subcontintental Indian. And it happened that the Americanized younger generation still has a fondness for mango juice, only with vodka added. He asked if there was a name for that combination. The young people, one and all, professed ignorance on that point, whereupon he named it the "Delhi Sunrise." The name was greeted with great enthusiasm by one and all, and so it has passed in to general use.

It is free for use by anybody, but no corporation may trademark it. As with the Screwdriver, the Cape Codder, and the Seabreeze, it is now a generic name, free to anybody.

Now,if that is not a life's accomplishment, what is?

Vodka and mango.

Vodka plus mango.

The Delhi Sunrise.

You heard it here first.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 9:45 PM



Wednesday, December 14, 2005 :::
 
Time still will not allow a certain pudgy, balding English teacher to give proper attention to an accounting of last weekends Latin percussion concert, in which said English teacher distinguished himself by actually producing two solos that had structure, a first, though the second solo ended in a way inconsistent with the underlying structure of the song.

But, pending that, here is a letter which A Mind That Suits felt constrained to write to the estimable Stephen Hunter, longtime film reviewer for the Washington Post. The advantages of blogging are that one can edit, and in fact the e-mail arrived in Mr. Hunter's in-box with a couple of grammatical howlers, and one enormous factual one: although C.S. Lewis's artistic sensibility is almost entirely English, he was in fact born in Ireland and "Lewis" is a Gaelic name, apparently. But his family had somewhere joined the "Anglo-Irish aristocracy" and so he came by his Englishness quite naturally. Still, he was Irish.

One can guess at the nature of Mr. Hunter's review from the comments below.

In keeping with a quite gratifying pattern with Post writers, Mr. Hunter sent back a most gracious reply. Only writers at the Weekly Standard seem to be strong enough to accept criticism. Writers for most other publications are entirely to Olympian, and thin-skinned.

Herewith, the letter:

Dear Mr. Hunter:

I find your reviews most informative and helpful, and very well-written. You are one of the few film reviewers I make a point of following.

Which made this morning's "any wisecrack is a good wisecrack" review ofNarnia so disappointing. You could have said in a serious way that youwere bothered by the film's Christian basis. Instead we got ad hominems and witticisms.

1) Is it a crime for C.S.Lewis to have been British? (His sensibility is almost entirely English, even though he was born in Ireland.) 1950 was not a bright time for Britain. Why would he be wrong for recalling things that were good about England? How does that make the Chronicles an "unquestioning colonial morale-raiser?" The only parallels with Britain would be if Hitler had won, and the British were waiting for someone to throw him out. You would have advised them not to?

2) Where, in all Narnia, is there an empire? The war is a defensive war. Narnia goes on no rampages in other lands.

3) Lewis's biggest villain is white. Why then the slur about the children ruling over "darker masses?" Are the masses darker? I just used The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe for an ESL class--three priests and two Korean Presbyterians, so no worries about appearing to evangelize--and I do not recall that the trolls are even given a skin color.

4) In the later books, where a vaguely Eastern religion is introduced, the relationship with the religion of Aslan is laid out with considerable ambiguity and nuance, and darker-skinned characters are heroes. And let's not forget--as who could--Reepicheep? (The name given to the country to the South, Calormen, if you were thinking of saying anything about it, is based on the Latin word for heat, not color.)

5) The "turn the other cheek" rule is for us, not Jesus. Jesus has considerably more leeway. Cf., the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, St. Matthew 25. And even we get to debate people, so it's ok if I write a letter like this, as long as I am fair, temperate, and accurate. Please forgive any excesses of sarcasm.

6) The reason the children become rulers is that beavers can't actuallyread.

7) The reason the fictional children go in through the wardrobe is thatreal children find wardrobes and closets fascinating, unlike certainwriters for the Washington Post.

8) The Post is a family newspaper, so why did we have to hear about Lewis's spanking fantasies? Did he actual spank anybody, anyway?

9) When he took up with the older woman, he was an atheist. (Oops. That's from William Booth's article.)

10) Speaking of which, what's with William Booth's crack about C.S. Lewis's drinking? Only American evangelicals worry about drinking. Lewis was Anglican. Mr. Booth reminds me of the young Democrat who butted into a bar conversation to ask why, if I was so conservative, I was in a bar. If I could find a nice bar in DC that wasn't populated by entirely liberals, I would. SOME would be fine, but ALL?? Far too bland and homogeneous for me.)

11) Back to you: suffering and sin are the warp and woof of any deep understanding of Christianity. The tortured details of his life explain (rather than contradict) Lewis's deep faith, but in what way are the Chronicles a "rich vein of psychological ore?" I know the man's work and life story well, and at no point see any psychological sidelight to any of the Chronicles.

12) Back to the Empire bit: Brittania has four syllables, Narnia three. Narnia bears as close a relation to "Brittania" as do Transylvania,Spotsylvania, Pennsylvania, and Ruritania. "I-A" is Greek for "land of, " as in Indonesia.

13) I will see the movie shortly, so I cannot speak for it, but in thebooks Susan is not timid, she is overly practical.

14) When did Jesus have any doubt? In the Garden, he underwent AGONY, and at several moments He was very sad, but I do not recall any instance where He did not say cearly that he was right.

Well, that about wraps it up. I will continue to read your reviews, and look forward to what you have to say.

You have my eternal gratitude, in any case, for one line, about 1998's radical movie of the year, the horrid Happiness: "The film is devoid of style, unless the decision to push the camera's On button could be called a style." For that, I can forgive a lot.

One suggestion, though: next time you find you have written an out-sized review like this morning's, go back and cut out the wisecracks. They are the salt, not the main meal.

All the best,

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 12:11 PM



Tuesday, December 13, 2005 :::
 
A Mind That Suits will return shortly with a description of an entirely fun weekend playing Latin percussion. However, this week, a certain pudgy, balding English teacher finds himself, belatedly, writing 135 Christmas cards to the members of a Marin company stationed in Iraq. He is doing this only because friend Tina, lovely, dainty wife to tall, gangly friend Jeremy--Staff Sergeant Jeremy to you--has become the Tigress of Troop Support, and so A Mind That Suits is doing what he can. Because he believes in every single sentiment---while remaining a dissident on the war--he is writing personally to each jarhead...

Dear X,
Thank you for all that you are doing for world peace, the people of Iraq, and, most of all, this wonderful country. If we did not have guys like you, we would not have our freedom. My thoughts and prayers are with you, your family, and your company. All the best...

But writing this 135 times takes time, so the Latin Percussion post will have to wait until Friday.

Later...

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 10:53 PM



Wednesday, November 30, 2005 :::
 
!

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 12:54 PM



Monday, October 17, 2005 :::
 
Despite provisions in the rules that seemed to doom the proposed Iraqi constitution, it passed. As was easy to foresee, the vast majority of Sunnis voted against it, but that was not enough to have it fail in three provinces, which would have meant failure overall.

This does not mean, however, what the Administration and its supporters want it to mean, or at least not obviously. Let our able and distinguished Secretary of State make the case, as quoted in this morning’s Wall Street Journal.

"The Sunnis are now invested in this process," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on "Fox News Sunday." "There is no political base any longer for this insurgency."

This assumes that the insurgency is based on something like this: The Sunni elite encouraged their people to stay away from January’s elections. Average Sunni were then shocked to find found themselves locked out of the process, so they got mad, and their elite encouraged their anger as a way to justify the leaders’ miscalculation on the first election. Now that the leaders are “in” the process, they will find it worth their while to assure their followers that everything will be ok.

To which anyone who followed the world in the ugly 20th Century can only respond: Sinn Fein.

It is entirely possible for a movement to have leaders involved in the system even as they feed popular anger that the system itself is illegitimate.

There is this one difference: despite what your raving Irish aunt might have said, the IRA has rarely enjoyed much popular support. In Iraq, however, the Sunni are very much supported by…the Sunni.

The Sunni think the Shi’a are apostates and infidels, a stench in the nostrils of God, as George F. Will memorably and accurately translated their feelings. And, as Mr. Will also pointed out, the Shi’a reciprocate.

The reference to “your raving Irish aunt” brings up another point: without outside support, the IRA would have folded decades ago. In addition to wide popular support among themselves, as it were, the Iraqi Sunni are supported by technically secular Ba’ath Syria, and by technically very much not secular Saudi Arabia. Please remember how the secular Saddam suddenly got religion after the First Gulf War. “Whatever it takes” is a popular saying among leaders in that part of the world, as it is among leaders in every part of the world.

Sunni leaders have demanded an audit of the vote, saying that Shi’a showed up in their provinces and voted. Democratic Party activists said similar things here in the US following the elections of 2000 and 2004. (2004? Oh, but yes. In 2000, they said that it was immoral that the loss of one state (Florida) would deprive Al Gore of the presidency, though he had won the popular vote by 500,000. In 2004, they said that it was immoral that the loss of one state (Ohio) would deprive John Kerry of the Presidency, though he had lost the popular vote by 3,000,000. They therefore pressed wild claims about irregular voting in both states. What it comes down to is that Democrats think that it is immoral if any Republican wins any election.) So, yes, today’s protests are a normal part of democratic life, for good or ill.

But they also show that the Sunni are still the Sunni.

They believe what they believe.

They say what they believe.

They do not hide what they believe.

They preach what they believe day in and day out.

And the Shi’a have pushed for a weak federal system where oil revenues are reasonably controlled as they build ties with Iran, in fulfillment of age old beliefs that the Shi’a, followers of Ali, the true heir to the Prophet, should have a kingdom all their own.

And the President of the United States himself has said that Iraq has become a breeding ground for terrorists who could destabilize the region.

You may wish to search around the website of the Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani, available here. (For some reason, one cannot link individual pages.) Boosters of the war have cast him as the “Martin Luther” who made way for the “Konrad Adenauer.”

Mr. Sistani does not see himself as a transitional figure at all, but as one who furthers the truth. He has, with great consistency, opposed the war, and opposed early US withdrawal. Until, in the Eastern provinces of Iraq, the kind of state he has long envisioned is finally established. Flip through what he has to say about unclean things and the nature of Islamic society, and you will understand why he has said what he has said about the US but never, ever met with any American official.

And why his close ally, the head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, has

supported the war,

supported our continued presences,

and preached openly about the day when a pure, Shi’a Iraq will lead jihad against…well, you fill in the dots.

People believe what they believe, and say what they believe. Ignore them at your peril.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 6:14 PM



Friday, October 14, 2005 :::
 
Where We Stand As the Results are Being Counted in Iraq

For our return, this blog will recount a story told some time ago. Readers, please bear with us, and you will find something new in the fifth paragraph.

A couple of years ago now, a certain pudgy, balding English teacher sent a pessimistic e-mail to a valued friend, a lawyer with wide experience in foreign affairs. Fond as this writer is of history, he was speculating. Suppose things spun out of control in Iraq, what might happen? The Shi’a would try to realize dreams of a pan-Shi’ite state, the Sunnis would ally with Syria to protect themselves, and Syria would jump at the chance. Turkey would then preemptively invade Kurdistan, just because. That would spell the end of any hopes they have of joining the EU, but they must realize that their chances, realistically, are very slim. Kurdistan would be the bird in the hand.

Well, the lawyer fellow acted as if he had been electrocuted. Indeed, when next sighted, he bore a frown that conveyed some fear that his correspondent must be one of that kind of conservative, the kind that has made his professional career quite difficult at times. He also has an aversion to any stereotyping of Muslims, which is admirable as long as room is left for dispassionate discussion. In any case, he grew a little frosty for a while. If one’s friends at some point don’t think you are crazy, they probably don’t know you very well. Comity has since been restored.

But there was an important point: the differences in perception indeed fell on either side of the split between moderate Republicans, who tend to prefer talk of economics and politics, and conservatives, who see culture as trumping everything, a view which this writer unswervingly holds. The particular manifestation of the split was over the question of whether Iraqis have any sense of being Iraqi, or whether their religious and racial identities are stronger. This writer would instinctively say the latter, but he is indeed not one of that kind of conservative. He was just looking at the map, and speculating.

Then he read a little more on Iraqi history, and speculation gave way to serious dread.

The relevant discoveries about Shi’ite political dreams were discussed at length in a post some months ago (see February 24, 2005.) We will here add two brief comments on the question of Iraqi identity.

Shortly after the war began, the invaluable David Pryce- Jones republished The Chatham House Version, by the late Elie Kedourie, the great Baghdad-born historian. In it, there is a “Brief History of the Kingdom of Iraq,” which demonstrates clearly that Iraq was an entirely fictional construct that sprang fully formed from the foreheads of some of the looser cannons in British history such as T.E. Lawrence, and Gertrude Bell.

The upshot is that what we are attempting to do in Iraq has been attempted before, with dismal results. (No doubt, that was Dr. Pryce-Jones’s point.) Not too long after independence, the Assyrians, whose Nestorian Christian culture once influenced all of South Asia, were slaughtered wholesale and driven from the country. It is happening again to the few Christians who remain. (The Jews, including Prof. Kedourie, were driven out in the 1950’s.) That question aside—although it is an important one—Prof. Kedourie marshals any number of quotes from residents who found the whole concept of Iraq alien at best.

At about the same time, the equally invaluable Strategic Studies Institutes at the US Army War College published a study covering the years after the Ba’ath Party took over from the “kings.” It came to this dismal conclusion: the only experience uniting different groups in Iraq was that of being oppressed. That would be the Kurds, the Christians, and the Shi’ites. The Sunnis have not had to worry about that until now.

Here is the situation on the eve of a plebiscite on the new constitution for Iraq: one group of Sunni clerics has decided to encourage its people to vote for the constitution, as they were able to wring concessions from the Kurds and Shi’ites that make it more palatable. The concessions would also, in the hands of almost any lawyer, make the thing moot on being approved, as they provide for, in essence, renegotiation.

This is supposed to give us hope, and perhaps there is some in there. But this happened only in the last few days. Boosters fail to note that other, larger groups of clerics have been relentless in telling their people, Friday after Friday, that it is a religious obligation to vote, and to vote “no.”

What happens if the constitution is defeated, as seems likely? The country will still be governed by an assembly with virtually no Sunnis. What then? We will find out, very likely, soon enough.

In a summer that brought a host of serious books, perhaps the most important was The Fate of Africa: From the Hopes of Freedom to the Heart of Despair by Martin Meredith a comprehensive History of 50 Years of Independence. Here, we see the same thing as in Arabia: Europeans carved out “countries” with not even the slightest concession to local realities, or even geography. As the British Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, commented, “We have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where they were.”

The rule for the first, and even the second generation of African leaders, was that these European borders were inviolate, even where they divided one tribe and put part of its people in the same “country” as an age-old enemy. For these very borders created a new thing, a legal entity, which contained much to be coveted, mainly the control of natural resources. Today, inevitably, nothing is inviolate, and “World War III of Africa” rages off and on with virtually no one outside expressing even the vaguest concern.

Except for the current Pope, Tony Blair, and George W. Bush, which is a reality that would bear teasing out, but not here.

In Arabia, and particularly in Iraq, the artificial designs were drawn by no less a megalomaniac than T.E. Lawrence, whose mastery of Arab culture led his superiors to deferr to him even at his craziest, and he was at his craziest at virtually every moment.

And so there is this legal entity, this Iraq, over which a fierce battle for control is raging.

Which brings us to what may be the most important point. When, a few months after Saddam was booted, the Shrine of Ali, the center of Shi’a life, was bombed, Shi’a leaders ordered their previously secret militias to openly carry their weapons, in violation of an American decree. Faced with open war and inadequate forces, our commander in the area announced that, on the whole, having them carry their weapons openly was probably better, so he lifted the ban.

It has been downhill ever since.

The fascinating story in all this is the skill at insinuating themselves into every aspect of government displayed by the “otherworldly” Shi’a clerics. This not anything new: their political aspirations were so strong that, long ago, the British drove them into Iran, where they founded the famed school at Qom that bred the Ayatollah Khomeini. In the recent war, if the US or the official Iraqi authorities failed to provide one service or another, the clerics did, such that the administrator of one utility in Basra lamented that under Saddam, technical skill was all that mattered, but now he could only hire people approved by the clerics.

And those clerics have been busily building close ties to Iraq.

A normally level-headed person like Fouad Ajami may feel compelled to write that “no one of consequence” is talking about building a theocratic state, but even that needs verification against the public record. The dominant political party in the Shi’a region is the one known in English as the United…well, forget that. In Arabic, it is known as the House of Shi’a. And its leaders have indeed talked about a local administration following Shari’a, the Islamic Holy Law, guided, if not governed directly, by the clerics.

But assuming that is secular enough for Prof. Ajami, it really doesn’t matter what anyone, of consequence or not, is talking about. What they have been doing is constructing a society in which every aspect of life is submitted to the clerics for their opinion.

And they have been busily building ties with Iran.

Oh, yes, this last thought. If one checks back not so very long ago, you will find that true-believer supporters of the war were scoffing at the notion that Iraq had become a “breeding ground for terrorists.” This scoffing continued even as American military leaders began to say so openly. Now, George W. Bush, that most bewildering man, has issued a call to seeing the whole thing through because Iraq has become a prime recruiting tool for terrorists, and they could destabilize the region.

Which calls to mind another comment from that lawyer friend. When this writer wondered whether we could win, the lawyer blurted out, “We’ve got to, because the cost of losing would be…” and here he broke off, stared into space, and shook his head.

Just so.

Final thought: You may remember that not so long ago, the long-suffering people of Uzbekistan staged riots, during the course of which untold numbers of people were killed by their merciless leaders. Now, the Uzbeki government has been useful in the fight in Afghanistan, because it allowed us to use an airfield, so W. has been remarkably silent about its human rights abuses.

But the US could hardly ignore this. It therefore, through the UN, helped the Kirgistani government relocate several hundred refugees whose return for “trial” the Uzbecki government had demanded. It had somehow slipped this writer’s notice, but, in retaliation, the Uzbecki government gave the US 180 days to quit the airfield. It would make sense that they want to play Russia against the US, so there are no doubt frantic negotiations going on.

With our good friend, the Uzbecki government.

And did you hear the one about the Islamist Pakistani General????

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 4:39 PM



Monday, October 03, 2005 :::
 
About the nomination of Harriet Miers to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, nearly all that can be said has been said by David Frum, excepting this:

There is about George W. Bush the air of the fighter pilot, which he once was. He has a strong desire to show that he is nobody's man but his own. The superlative choice of John Roberts as his first Supreme Court nominee showed that he knew how to pick a conservative so qualified as to force the Left to admit that the only reason they opposed him was that he did not bow before their stunted gods. Or before them, more to the point.

The bewildering choice of Harriet Miers is intended to show that W is in charge, and not the people who elected him.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 2:58 PM



Wednesday, September 21, 2005 :::
 
A Mind That Suits has been pre-occupied of late. It is the beginning of the school year, several writing projects are due, and it is High Season for special events in Washington, DC. All of that makes life difficult for blogging.

A few thoughts to start with.

It's the nature, stupid.

As meteorologists have pointed out, over the recorded history of hurricane activity, there have been long periods when hurricanes hit Florida and then headed up the East Coast, and long periods when they have crossed Florida and hit the Gulf of Mexico, source of the Gulf Stream that warms the East Coast and Northern Europe. For much of the '80's and '90's, they headed north, wreaking havoc in such places as Wilmington, NC, where a certain pudgy, balding English teacher spends a fair amount of time, and Long Island, home to people who think that tragedies can never happen where people went to Harvard.

But in those times when hurricanes have crossed Florida, they have hit the warm waters of the Gulf, which are a lifeline to many in the Altantic, and a death sentence for others.

With the exception of one in the 1930's which devasted Long Island, where bad things are not supposed to happen because everyone went to Harvard, most of the really nasty ones have crossed Florida, hotted up in the Gulf, and then consumed some poor city or other along the Gulf Coast.

Now, the Gulf Coast is normally a lovely place to live. Just ask a certain pudgy, balding English teacher, who grew up in Florida and often wiled away the time on lovely Sanibel Island. The Gulf Coast is also the source of much of the storied wealth of the United States, as ships that enter the mighty Misssissipi River at New Orleans can make their way to Ohio and Missouri and loads of other places.

Everything, however, comes with a price.

The price of living on the Gulf Coast is, perhaps, an early death.

This comes as news to many of our reporters who, fed on stories of Woodward and Bernstein, always think the "real story" is hidden, when it is often right out in front of their noses. It MAY be that "Global Warming" is hotting up the hurricanes, or it may be that, now that we have entered a period of Florida-crossing hurricanes, the hurricanes themselves get the chance to really hot up, and do so at will.

When you have been through a real hurricane, you have a hard time not assuming that they do things "at will."

Remember: Lovely Rita crossed the Florida Keys as a tropical storm and a Catgory One. It MAY be that Rita benefited from all those carbon-based fuels dragged up out of the Gulf floor, or it MAY--more likely--be that she just hotted up because any hurricane that makes it to the Gulf will do so. At will.

And it is no accident that the Director the National Hurricane Center has said, often, that he is worried that the population is building up on the Louisiana Coast and Long Island, and in Galveston TX, the Florida Panhandle, and the Keys.

That hurricanes may well take out two of those five just this season should turn him into a national hero.

Instead, people will be wondering whose fault it is, and where they can "take action" to ensure the Mother Nature will never again do that which, in the final analysis, man can do nothing to stop.

And man can do nothing to stop guys from being stupid. Why is that every disaster brings pictures, such as this one (click on slideshow) and this one, (click on "next" for images until you get to the one I mean of a strong young guy standing the surf.) None of these quite matches the shot of the --yes, young male--surfer standing in the roaring tide in Biloxi before Katrina, but what do details matter?

Why, guys, do the ladies think we are often dumb as s***?

Because we often are.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 2:24 PM



Monday, August 01, 2005 :::
 
What to say? Four days of fun and productivity. Ensconced once again in the dorm for Visiting Scholars at a certain red-tile-roofed university on the West Coast, A Mind That Suits has been having a pleasant if unexciting time. This year, alas, said V.S.'s are housed in Xanadu, a house known in early days as 555 Mayfield, on the Row, home to wood paneled rooms and lots of earth-huggy types, where a certain pudgy balding English teacher spent four years of his life. The dorms used the last two years, in what used to be a trailer park, were MUCH nicer, but this year has brought a number of unenexpected friendships with much younger scholars, mainly of the Latin variety.

These new friendships brought a game of shirt-and-sock basketball--you know, where you take off your shirt and socks and use them to sink baskets--at 3:30 in the morning, which marks the first time this year that Your Correspondent has let the kids set the pace, and will be the last for a while. Always fun, always brings a reminder that one is not as young as one's companions.

Pleasant enocunters have also included renewing a long lasting friendship with Ranger Bill at Hoover, and a shorter term friendship with Young Friend Simon, a remarkably smart German who works on the history of the Gulag, which has to be depressing but he says actually isn't. The weather has tended toward hot, but as that is nothing as compared to what he left behind in DC, a certain, pudgy, balding English teacher has no complaints.

His schedule has brought him here too early to catch any scrimmages from his favorite sports team in the whole wide world, the mighty Leland Stanford Junior University Water Polo team, but he did run into one very fit, skinny, and tall young man wearing a water polo tee-shirt. A few penetrating questions revealed that he was indeed the senior goalie on the team, and that he was as self-possessed and intelligent as have been the vast majority of the SU water polo players that have crossed the path of a certain pudgy, balding English teacher over the last 30 years. There is perhaps no water polo in his immediate future, at least until he returns to DC, where he can enjoy the coaching of Friend Mike at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, a school ranked higher academically than the mighty LSJU, although the mighty LSJU likes to ignore that fact. Friend Mike is a great coach, but he coaches water polo on the East Coast, and so Navy, however smart its players, will hover somewhere around 10th place, the first nine probably being Mountain Pacific teams, the first of which will probably be the team for which the pleasant young man is the senior goalie.

And A Mind That Suits must go take a nap.

Later.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 7:17 PM



Tuesday, July 26, 2005 :::
 
We have now reached the end of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. While Goblet of Fire may take pride of place on rereading--which shall commence after a certain pudgy, balding English teacher returns from his sojourn in California--Half-Blood Prince is a fine, even great accomplishment. In terms of skill, J.K. Rawling leads the reader astray until the very end. In terms of writing, she successfully portrays very real people in surreal surroundings, the way Shakespeare did, though at a different level of course. And when the death arrives, you are not so much stunned as deeply saddened, and she draws the pain out just right to tear your heart.

The end shows, also, that she has been affected by the Lord of the Rings, because now young Harry sees himself on a journey whose end, good or bad, will still leave him alone. So, too, does one scene remarkably recall both the Gate of Moria and Weathertop. Nevermind. Both are worth building on. And Harry has developed just as the readers who grew up with him have, which explains why the mysteries and twists are not so obvious.

The moral or religious problems that the adventures of young Harry pose to that capacious mind, Joseph Ratzinger, remain mysterious to this loyal son of the Church. However, there does appear to be one if suspicions about the epochal moment turn out to be true: it appears to have been a mercy killing. A morally complex and ambiguous one, to be sure, but still a mercy killing. And so does A Mind The Suits enter his bet on the question that will bother all denizens of Hogwarts for the next two years: what really happened ?

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 4:42 PM



Thursday, July 21, 2005 :::
 
Halfway through Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and happy to report it is wonderful. The tension is mounting, as three likely candidates for getting offed present themselves, although the Wall Street Journal reviewer tipped the scales slightly by saying that the murder "hurts." Also, Ms. Rowling has already revealed who the Half-Blood Prince is, although Harry, somewhat typically, is missing the obvious. This then raises the question of what she could possible have in store.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 11:08 AM



Tuesday, July 19, 2005 :::
 
The First Step in Ending An Addiction is Admitting That You Have One.

The second one, if memory serves, is deciding to end it. But what if you don't want to?

When A Mind That Suits first appeared, Harry Potter was making his fifth appearance, and he has just made his sixth. A certain pudgy, balding English teacher vowed to resist the siren call. He is about to decamp to California for his annual, and perhaps final, sojourn among the papers of his late, beloved uncle, Allen Drury. He has much to do before he departs, and has been getting little sleep. He will now be getting less. Following a rave review in this morning's Wall Street Journal, he caved. Review to follow. It will be a rave.

Admitting an addiction can save you money. A Mind That Suits found himself in the Barnes and Noble in Bethesda, Maryland, standing before a whole display of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince discounted at 40%, but he vowed to resist.

Fool.

Overwhelmed by compulsion, he was forced to buy it at Borders, the major bookstore on the street where he lives. Well, not lives, but when he was but a wee slip of a lad, downtown DC consisted of Farragut Square, and that is where his bank and post office are. Had he moved east down Pennsylvannia Avenue along with the law firms, he could have bought the latest bit of wizardry from J.K. Rowling at the downtown Barnes and Noble. Alas, it was not to be, and Borders only has a 30% discount. Thus did A Mind That Suits lose 3 bucks.

(He could have waited until tomorrow, when he will again be in lovely, ultra-modern Bethesda, but, you know, addiction is a terrible thing to waste.)

It is with some perplexity that A Mind That Suits finds that his beloved spiritual leader, the in-every-way admirable Joseph Ratzinger, now Benedect XVI, long may he reign, does not share his high estimation of the young wizard. As this touches upon a matter of faith and morals, he must listen, and so he will. (The Pope is not infallible on contingent matters, i.e., how hot it is today and whether "2 +2 = 4 .") The issue that the Wall Street Journal highlighted this morning--the "Manicheaism" of the earlier novels--seems to be a non-starter. Manichaeism, or gnosticism, maintains that the good and the evil are so separate that they can have no contact whatsoever, and so the Son of Man could never have been corporeal, which He undoubtedly was.

Throughout Ms. Rowling's novels, however, good and bad lurk everywhere, as they do in real life. In the, of course, transcendently greater Lord of the Rings, there are, as in Harry Potter's England, many who have chosen the path of evil. Orcs are a special problem, because they are presented as irredeemable and worthy of contempt, but the invaluable letters of J.R. R. Tolkien reveal that they are demons, and so of a whole different order than mortals. Mortals who serve the Dark Lord are, at the end of the greatest work of literature of the last 200 years, granted clemency. So a Manichaeism charge against Prof. Tolkien is ill-founded.

As it would appear to be against Ms. Rowlings.

However, a certain pudgy, balding English teacher, loyal son of the Church and devoted follower of Joseph Ratzinger for many years, will of course give the matter all the attention that it is due, and there are several websites dedicated to the question. As XVI has not spoken ex cathedra (that is, infallibly), extreme papalists should note that he is under no obligation to agree, or even assent. (Now there is a Catholic distinction for you.) But he IS obliged to take the matter seriously, and so he will.

A Mind That Suits was, as is the case with so many addicts, turned on to Harry Potter by a trusted friend, who is now either a senior mid-level or low high-level official in the Bush Administration, doing the Lord's work in a vital job concerning families of the poor. A Bush official? Will the scandals never cease!!! However, a certain pudgy, balding English teacher would here like to express his great gratitude to his "enabler." Or "dealer." Whatever.

But he must really go get back to the Half-Blood Prince. It has been four days, and "who dies?" still hangs heavy on the mind.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 11:24 AM



Monday, July 18, 2005 :::
 
Although Joe Wilson bashing is a rewarding addiction, we will go cold turkey after this. And a final word on Karl Rove, whose tenure in the West Wing is likely to be cut short.

As for Amb. Wilson, the Washington Post said it all yesterday when it reported that Wilson's report never got to the President's desk. Indeed, as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found, it was considered inclusive and "mildly supportive" of the idea that Saddam went looking for yellow cake uranium in Niger. Not worth the time, and if W had seen it, he would not have interpreted it the way the good Ambassador seems to remember that he wanted it interpreted.

Given that, the fact that he "misrpresented" the role of his wife and "disproved" the authenticity of documents he had never in fact seen seems like small potatoes, but it certainly goes to his reliability. (That, plus knowing nothing about basic things like business management and the nature of Niger's feeble economy.)

A certain pudgy, balding English teacher went into the matter deeply, to find out how CIA professionals were considering the "Plame kerfuffle." Was there shock that a covert operative's cover had been blown? Outrage that confidential information was being used politically? To find out the answer to these and other pressing questions, he dug deep, and asked a CIA office director over poker. Said director said that he had heard only one or two comments about it in months, although, understanding the point of the question, he did add that the CIA had "other issues" to deal with. He no doubt would not put it this way, but other issues probably included, you know, being wrong about the whole WMD thing, plus senior officials who got involved in the presidential election and tried to kill W by leak, and then that whole Porter Goss-avenging angel thing.

As for Karl Rove, reports in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal make it seem highly unlikely that Mr. Rove will be around much longer. It appears that there is a question of a State Department briefing paper that was delivered to Air Force One as the President took off for Africa. In it, Amb. Wilson's wife is identified by name. It was after this Africa trip that stories began to circulate about how Amb. Wilson, with no professional qualifications whatsoever, had ended up with this particular job. Patrick Fitzgerald, the special investigator in this case, has subpoened the plane's phone logs. If, as it is reasonable to assume, "somebody" aboard AF1 made phone calls even hinting that reporters look at how Joe Wilson got his job, then they violated the light confidentiality placed on the document, and indeed were spreading information they got because of their jobs. Not a major crime, but a violation of some sort. As Mercutio said, ""tis not so deep as a well, nor so broad as a church door, but 't'will do, 't'will suffice. "

It also makes clear the role of Bob Novak. He is not a favored reporter of this White House, as he has maintained a very steady and well-reasoned opposition to the war from his position to the right of the administration. This hurts, and this White House punishes the smallest opposition with the greatest severity. It is unlikely that he would be the recipient of a phone call from AF1. So it is entirely possible that various reporters got suggestive phone calls, rumors started spreading, and "see everything, hear everything" Mr. Novak got wind of it. Mr. Novak's memory is that Karl Rove responded to his question along the lines of, "Oh, so you've heard that, too." Which, being translated, means, "great--it's got to Mr. Bullhorn."

It is also fascinating that Mr. Rove seems to think he did nothing wrong. He signed a waiver of confidentiality with reporters a long time ago, and his lawyer's letter to the lawyer of Mr. Cooper, the Time reporter whose notes spilled the beans on Mr. Rove, says that his client "reaffirms" his waiver. So he felt he had nothing to hide. Ignorance of the law, as the old saying goes, is no excuse, but the more fundamental principal is the one about living by the sword.

The regrettable Michael Kinsley had a column in the Washington Post this Sunday citing Newt Gingrich as a man who had been totally discredited but has found a profitable and influential life since then. Mr. Kinsley is not a fair man, and it is worth remembering--or rather, Mr. Rove should remember--what it was that "completely discredited" the then Speaker of the House. Mr. Gingrich had submitted an affidavit regarding a business deal to the House Ethics Committee, and then the NEXT DAY submitted a correction to it. It seemed clear that he had thought of lying, and then thought the better of it. If memory serves, what he was making affidavits about was not even unethical. In the annals of Washington crime, that hardly even rates a mention. However, after 3 1/2 years, nearly everyone had tired of Mr. Gingrich, and so out he went.

And so out goes Mr. Rove, with Mr. Delay--though these days he has dropped off the radar--probably following close behind.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 9:51 AM



Friday, July 15, 2005 :::
 
Let’s go back, back to the days of yesteryear, when an undistinguished former ambassador named Joe Wilson made headlines by publishing an op-ed in the New York Times claiming that he had proven that Saddam Hussein had never bought “yellow cake” uranium—whatever that is, except it is supposed to explode rather spectacularly—in the largely unnoticed country of Niger. This supposedly proved that a now-infamous 16-words in a State of the Union address by W were deliberate lies.

Several reporters discovered that the reason this partisan Democrat had been sent on an important fact finding mission by the uber-Republican Bush Administration was that his wife, a covert CIA operations director, had gotten the job for him. Bob Novak said her name, but several others had the story. Novak mentioned two administration officials he had talked to, so there grew up the story that six other journalists had been approached 2 mysterious administration officials before Novak—in this telling, a toady of any Republican—took the bait. Novak said that he had been merely doing the job for which he was so famous: calling up everyone he knew and asking questions. And he said the six journalists were a myth.

Let us remember the allegations:

1) Joe Wilson disproved that Saddam Hussein had bought yellow cake uranium.
2) Bob Novak had taken a deliberate leak from two administration officials, all of whom thereby endangered the life of an important undercover CIA-operative and who knows how many “moles” overseas.

Those were the allegations—loudly and repeatedly blasted across the media—of those calling for what they presumed was the head of Karl Rove, uber-advisor to W. No variation or rewording of those allegations is allowed in this little review of the facts. “He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword.”

So here we go:

As for Ambassador Wilson:

Joe Wilson said his wife had nothing to do with his appointment.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence unearthed the note in which she recommended him. Oops.

Joe Wilson said that he had inspected certain important documents concerning the potential sale.
The CIA didn’t even have those documents until 8 months after Wilson left the case. Oops.

Joe Wilson said that he proved the documents that he actually never saw were fake.
The CIA—here meaning “a group of professionals who have actually seen the documents”-- is confident that they were forgeries, and foreign intelligence agencies believe they were red herrings to pull them off the scent of the real documents, which the Italians now have. Oops.

Joe Wilson said that Cogema, the French nuclear power giant which oversaw the Nigerien “yellow cake” uranium mines, assured him that they kept close watch on the mines.
Joe Wilson forgot to ask if they kept up security after the mines were officially closed. They did not. Oops.

Joe Wilson said that Cogema assured him that they would know about any sales of “yellow cake” uranium.
When our invasion of Iraq convinced Libya to come in out of the cold, we found 100’s of tons of the stuff completely unaccounted for in Cogema’s records—presumably because it was mined after Cogema wrapped up operations in Niger. Oops.

Joe Wilson interviewed an ex-government official who said that Baghdad Bob—remember him? “Thousands of American soldiers are committing suicide before the gates of Baghdad”.--approached him while in office about a trade deal. He felt that B.B. was looking for uranium, so never met him. Joe Wilson said that this was just an assumption, and so hardly worth considering.
Niger only has two exports: uranium and goats. It is hard to imagine that Saddam needed any more goats. Actually, it is disturbing to imagine what it might mean that Saddam was looking for fresh goats, so we will just conclude that the Nigerien official knew his business, and Joe Wilson did not. Oops.

Joe Wilson presents himself as knowing Niger well, and a natural choice for the job, even though he admits he had no idea how to investigate something like this.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence unearthed more than one internal CIA document from professionals wondering how they had been saddled with this loser. Oops.

Joe Wilson said he proved that Saddam had never “bought” yellow cake uranium in Niger.
The President said “sought.”Oops. A certain pudgy balding English teacher will reveal here that he wondered to an editorial writer at the world's most important newspaper why they hadn't commented on that, and was pleased to see that they highlighted that point in their next major editorial eviscerting Amb. Wilson.

Joe Wilson dismissed the allegations as fantasy.
The intelligence agencies of Britain, France, and Italy all concur with the CIA that Baghdad Bob made his visit looking for uranium. Oops.

Now as for Karl Rove and Bob Novak:

Critics say that they both violated the law.
36 news agencies, in an amicus brief, did not hesitate to say “no underlying crime had been committed.” Oops.

Critics say that is a crime to release the names of covert operatives.
The law says clearly that it is illegal only if it is part of a pattern of disrupting intelligence operations. Oops.

Critics say that Ambassador Wilson’s wife should not have been brought into the matter at all.
She brought herself in. Moreover, the courts have consistently held that investigations into why something happened do not violate the law. Oops.

Critics say that Karl Rove and an unnamed second administration official were merely trying to discredit Wilson.
Republicans are allowed to defend themselves, although in this case they would have been better off letting Joe Wilson discredit himself. He does such a good job of it. Oops all around on that one.

Critics say that Karl Rove and his unnamed co-conspirator initiated calls to reporters.
The notes of a New York Times reporter all indicate clearly that Rove was answering a question. Oops.

Bob Novak said that he called one official to find out why a partisan hack had been sent on a sensitive mission, and then called another to confirm it.
Karl Rove has, reports indicate, testified that he had never heard of Wilson’s wife until Bob Novak mentioned her when he called to confirm the story,which is consistent with the notes from the New York Times. It also means that Rove was betraying the trust of Bob Novak, not the CIA. Oops all around on that one as well.

So there was no crime, Karl Rove initiated no smear campaign, Bob Novak was probably telling the truth in every detail, and Joe Wilson is a blowhard. Karl Rove can relax.

Anyone with 5 seconds of experience in Your Nation’s Capital knows that life here is not fair. It would be something if a blowhard partisan hack unseated one of the best political operatives this town has ever seen, but this town has seen bigger surprises than that. Not too much can be made of the President’s tepid statement about waiting for the investigation to continue, as W. is not an articulate man when surprised. Still, we will just have to see how it bounces. This longtime DC resident suspects that Mr. Rove will just have to stay in his office for a week until something of substance, or something else of no substance, grabs the public’s attention.

Still, Mr. Rove does not, in style, play a gentleman’s game, and he has acquired more than his share of real enemies, so he can expect no mercy from anyone outside his circle. “He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword.”

And, as a certain pudgy, balding English teacher has long maintained, it will be some special kind of irony if the only allegation made in that regrettable State of the Union address that turns out to have been true is the now infamous “16 words.”

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 12:02 PM



Thursday, July 07, 2005 :::
 
And They Wonder Why We Hate Them

The Washington Post is at this moment carrying the Associated Press's feed of a press conference with security officials in London. Why are these things so predictible?

'Why did you lower the security level one month ago?"
"What does this say about your security plans?"

And what were these same reporters moaning on about, oh, yesterday? Do you even have to ask?

"Paranoia." "Obsessive worrying." "Pointless intereference with people's daily routine."

Terrorists are simply very hard to stop. They understand fully that the only way for us to defend ourselves against them with 100 % certainty is to bring an end to the liberties which we prize and they despise. All of which means that some terrorist at some time will be successful for the rest of history, and there is no complete end to it in sight, just as there is no end in sight to some reporters' being stupid.

Best answer from one official: "We are of course shocked, but we are not surprised that this happened."

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 10:44 AM



Tuesday, July 05, 2005 :::
 
A Certain Pudgy, Balding English teacher has had a lot on his plate in recent weeks, explaining his long absence from these pages, and finds he has a lot to talk about.

Today we will consider the fact that William Rehnquist is still Chief Justice of the United States (not of the Supreme Court, please note. Go read your Constitution.)Now, Mr. Rehnquist's continued service is a consummation devoutly to be wished, but the fact is that he is no longer physically able to do his job. Why, then, did he let Sandra Day O'Connor retire first?Many possibilities suggest themselves.

First and foremost, as anyone familiar with the ways of Washington can tell you, Mr. Rehnquist is one of life's true gentlemen. Always polite, considerate of waiters, other serving people, and even law clerks, he would naturally allow an esteemed colleague, particularly a woman, to go first.

Secondly, he obviously has a high estimation of his own abilities, with which this write concurrs. One would not set pen to paper (or pixels to screen) if one did not believe that what one had a lot to offer, and Mr. Rehnquist has a lot to offer. Add to that that he was once physically dominating, and the resignation of office clearly becomes something like resignation from life. In a town of big egos, it should not be doubted that Mr. Rehnquist has one of the biggest, but he is the opposite of Winston Churchill's famous dig, that a certain Member of Parliament was "a modest little man, with much to be modest about." Mr. Rehnquist is a proud man, with much to be proud of. A recent Washington Post assessment extolled the skill with which he managed the Court System, a quality lacking in his immediate predecessor.

Thirdly, he is a keen observer of people. Conservative admirers of George W. Bush often completely miss one very disturbing quality: he hates to be reminded of his obligations. The more that conservatives tell him that he should under no circumstances nominate Alberto Gonzales--who handles public office as if he were the personal attorney of, oh, you know, a certain former baseball executive--the more he will get his back up and be determined to appoint, oh, you know, Alberto Gonzales. (Gonzales, as George Will has noted, is Spanish for "Souter.")

And so it just may have entered the head of a certain Chief Justice of the United States that it may be his solemn duty to wait and see. Can he trust the Commander in Chief, or will he have to die with his boots on?

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 11:57 AM



Friday, June 10, 2005 :::
 
A Certain Pudgy, Balding English Teacher was watching TV with a friend when Jay Leno poked fun at John Kerry's poor performance at Yale. His grades, if you missed it, were released along with his military recoreds, which should have been released,oh, you know, last summer. In any case, Mr. Kerry apparently performed admirably in the military, as all his fellow sailors reported, but he did not do so well at Yale. In fact, he did worse than someone who was there at about the same time named "Bush." When Mr. Leno took entirely justified aim at the good Senator, the friend expressed his surprise.

Why is that? Lots of liberals felt surprised. During the campaign, Sen. Kerry was singulgarly bad at answering reasonable questions, though he was good at looking ponderous. And there is nothing stupid about Mr. Bush. A glance through a book of supposedly horrifying Bushisms revealed that he has a tendency to change the grammatical subject midflight, yielding disagreement between singular and plural, and to conflate idioms, both of which are probably the result of the same personal quirk, which is not even vaguely the same as stupidity.

There is a big difference between the men, however: Mr. Bush can make decisions. The outgoing Canadian ambassador embarrassed himself by recounting his surprise when he met with our cabinet. Mr. Bush was completely in charge. Now, as regular readers of this blog will know, it is the opinion of A Mind That Suits that Mr. Bush can make spectacularly bad decisions. But that really is better than being unable to decide anything, except that you would think it pretty cool to be President.

And it is annoying that liberals like to think they are smarter. Why, then, do they support "Whole Language Learning," as opposed to phonics? Phonics teaches kids to read, "Whole Language" doesn't. Period.

As recounted in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg came in vowing to save the schools, and then promptly hired some factulty member from a grad program in education. Big mistake. Wide application of "Whole Language," and a dramatic decline in already poor scores among inner city children, exactly the ones who would be MOST liberated by the discipline of reading well. There is, one supposes, a word for clinging to a theory even when the facts contradict you, but that word is NOT intellectual. Intellectuals do it all the time, but that doesn't mean it is a smart thing to do. And when you know (or should know) full well that by inflicting your theories, you are actively hurting underprivileged children, it becomes hard to think of you as moral, either, but the Left likes to say they are that, too.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 9:42 AM



Wednesday, June 01, 2005 :::
 
A Mind That Suits has been deepening his acquaintance with Howard Shore's magnificent score to the Lord of the Rings. It turns out that he has been a fan of Mr. Shore's for a long, long time, since he brought very idiomatic American music to the original Saturday Night Live. Lord of the Rings is pretty classic 19th Century sort of stuff--he uses the full orchestra, but he uses it wonderfully. This is not the normal stuff admired by a certain pudgy, balding English teacher, who has an "anything but the 19th Century" attititude toward orchestral music, but he can live with it if it is going to be this wonderful.

For horror, Mr. Shore veers toward that ugliest of musical places, Wagner-land. A fitting choice, but that does not make it enjoyable. As he thinks it silly to only read things you agree with or listen to things you like, said English teacher shelled out 8 bucks for a sampler from the Ring cycle, conducted by Herbert "Isn't all orchestral music Romantic???" von Karajan and featuring uber-singer Dietrich Fischer Dieskau, on the ground that his dislike of Mr. Wagner should be an informed dislike, and who better than Mssrs. von Karajan and Mr. Diskau do the informing? There's no faulting the singing, the conducting, or Mr. Wagner's considerable skill, but "caterwauling" is the word that comes to mind, as does this, the very greatest of all musical insults, which fell from the lips of the poet Baudelaire:

"I love the music of Wagner, but what I really prefer is that made by a cat, suspended by its tail, trying to grab a pane of glass."

Cheers...

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 12:56 PM



Saturday, May 28, 2005 :::
 
Reasons to hate left-speak.

The child care center at the bottom of the hill is undergoing major renovations. It is a beautiful, Spanish-style complex, a former Episcopalian church, but it needed work, as old wood-and-stone buildings are wont to do. The problem is not the renovations; the problem is the sign describing the work.

"Renovation, restoration, and life safety improvements." Life safety???? What other kind of safety is there? Does the addition of that word "life" somehow make them more important, or justifiable?

Look up once in a while.

A certain pudgy, balding English teacher has a friend who, shall we say, has a pronounced tendency to see things in a negative light. This was highlighted the other day, a day which saw a continuous dreary drizzle, leaving everyone in a bad mood. Someone commented that they were ready for the warm weather, which has been unaccountably delayed this year, and he blurted out, "yeah, we're going to go from winter to summer, without any spring, just like always."

That does happen. Last year, in fact, A Mind That Suits was able to show his dermatologist cracked hands and a sunburned face on his first visit, or as he put it at the time, pointing first at his hands and then at his face, "Winter...summer." Monday, if memory serves, had been freezing, yielding the cracked hands, and Wednesday had been sultry, yielding the sun-burned face.

But this year, it has been very different. We have had 10 weeks of the most glorious weather. Everyone has commented on it. The flowering plants keep flowering, instead of descending into a tired, overladen greenness so typical of the South. (A Mind That Suits loves the overladen greenness, as he is a Southerner.) People spontaneously walk everywhere, which they almost never do in a normal May in Your Nation's Capital.

It has been, in every way, the most glorious of the 24 Washington springs that a Certain Pudgy Balding English Teacher has ever seen.

Which reminds him that when he came here, he had himself seen 24 summers, so now fully one half of his life has been spent domiciled here, 23 of those 24 in Washington itself. He came thinking he would stay only 2 years. As he left government "service" after 7, he has, in a sense, "left Washington."

But he lives in DC.

DC has taught him many things, among them what life is like under a hard Marxist revolutionary (Marion C. Barry, former Mayor for Life, as the leftist City Paper always calls him).

But it also taught him why trees make life tolerable. On this issue, Prof. J.R.R. Tolkien may supply the theory, but DC provides the praxis.

The "natural architecture" of DC--the architecture that was not imposed by the bureaucrats, but is the result of the utterly normal activity of human beings--is far and away the loveliest in the Unites States, passing even San Francisco, whose charming stucco pillboxes--once enthralling--now seem too uniform. Worse, San Francisco, thanks to the workings of God, lacks trees. It is something about that blowing mist. There are trees that will survive on that promontory, and there is a Coalition for Urban Forrests which will, if you give them some nominal sum ($35?) get all the permits and plant a tree in front of your SF rowhouse. A Certain Pudgy Balding English Teacher--an unapologetic conservative Republican--says more power to "Think globally, act locally" leftists with a blessed aesthetic sense.

But better to live in DC, where not having trees is unthinkable in the first place, and where a tree has to really work NOT to grow unto its fullness, which, as Prof. Tolkien was anxious for us all to understand, is a magnificent fullness indeed.

All of which thoughts were inspired by the strange comment about how this most glorious Spring has not existed.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 11:08 AM



Tuesday, May 17, 2005 :::
 
Regular readers will know that A Mind That Suits has complained that we do not seem to be acquiring an intuitive understanding of Islam analogous to the one conservatives had for communism during the Cold War. The horrors unleashed by the irresponsible Newsweek story about our soldiers' flushing the parts of the Qu'ran down the toilet are inexcusable for two reasons: Newsweek seems to have understood it was inflammatory in some sense, but went ahead with it on flimsy grounds. Much worse was the as-yet unnamed Pentagon official who vetted the story and reacted to other parts of it, but not that. Anyone with even the mildest exposure to Muslims would understand what a powderkeg it was, and would ask questions about it, but he did not. Whoever it was, deserves to be fired.

A propos of nothing: "Work smarter, not harder." Good concept, but have you ever noticed how the guy who says it first is usually a lazy ass?

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 2:45 PM



Thursday, May 05, 2005 :::
 
A certain pubgy, balding English teacher has, for many years now, had coffee nearly every morning at the coffee shop in Sam's Park and Shop on leafy Connecticut Avenue in Northwest DC. Sam's Park and Shop was one of the first strip malls in the country, and Sam himself is commemorated by a plaque on a rock in the little grassy picnic area on the corner. (The rock takes up the place where the third table would go.) Nobody calls it Sam's. It used to be referred to as "you know, where Uno's is," because what used to be called Ye Olde Neighborhood Pub in this august column was the biggest thing there, taking up three of 11 or 12 commercial spaces. But Uno's, alas, is now was and stores are identified as "next to McGruder's," in honor of the fine but expensive corner grocery at the other end of the mall. For perhaps four miles from where Connecticut Avenue starts, at the front door of a piece of prime residential property called the White House, whatever-you-want-to-call-Sam's-Park-and-Shop is the only place one can, you know, park and shop, so the stores do quite well.

Which explains the durability of the coffee shop. First it was Brothers', then it was Foster Brothers', and now it is the i-Cafe, but everyone still calls it "Brothers'." One of the things that has been consistent about it is that the owners have taken no interest whatsoever in its operation. "Badly run" would describe it on the best days, such that young friend Kevin, who used to sit next to a certain pudgy, balding English teacher every day and read his newspaper before he went to class as a finance major at American University, would often comment that the mismanagement he observed taught him more than anything he learned in class. He was really not exaggerating.

But through it all, two ohter things have remained consistent: good coffee, and great seating. It was designed by the original Brothers--whoever they were-- to attract people who like to sit, and that is what it has continued to do, despite some alterations by the current owner. However, the usual morning crew has dwindled of late, for a couple of reasons. One is that the owners decided to bring in the second morning person later, such that lines form early in the morning.

And the other is that the woman who opens Monday through Wednesday has a certain way with the customers. Despite having known a certain pudgy, balding English teacher for two or three years now, she rarely says anything even vaguely pleasant. She never says anything pleasant to anyone, except her coworkers, who are, as she is, from Ethiopia. Amharic is a opaque language, but, judging from the squeals and chattering when any of her compatriots come in, she is quite chatty. She is particularly friendly with the lovely other woman who comes in late those days--and blessedly, opens Thursdyan and Friday. But even mid-squeal, if a customer comes up, she gives him only icy stares and curt responses. Once, when a customer gave her too little money--the prices are not visible on the register, and she deliberately mumbles--she snapped at him as if he were trying to steal. When he told her that she should not talk that way to customers, she just glowered.

It is not that she dislikes Americans, so far as one can tell, or that she doesn't work hard. She is continually cleaning and restocking, which is in keeping with the careful way that she dresses and presents herself.

Having now seen this going on for a while, a certain pudgy, balding English teacher has realized what is going on: she thinks her job is cleaning and restocking. Customers make the place dirty as they, with considerable nerve, take things from the carefully arranged shelves.

So the fact that she scares customers away is probably, to her mind, a good thing, and the lost tips a small price to play for having clean, full shelves.

For a considerable time, the women's room displayed a sign saying "out of order," and yet one could hear the women who worked there going in and out, in between which one could hear flushing sounds. When asked if it had been repaired, they would only give a mumbled reply. No doubt customers complained, perhaps even directly to the owner, if they could catch him during his ritual five-minute visits every afternoon. Slowly, it dawned on A Mind That Suits that the Imperious One had decided she needed a bathroom that no one else could spoil, and had commandeered it, with the collusion of the other women. This was confirmed when she took a two-week vacation, and the sign came down one day--and has not reappeared.

Lesson for the day: if you have an employee like that, watch her carefully. She is scaring away your business.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 9:38 AM



Friday, April 29, 2005 :::
 
These are the days of miracles and wonders.

Yesterday brought news that scientists had confirmed a happy finding: the Ivory-billed Woodpecker is alive.

Why is this such great news? First, because it is one magnificent animal.

Second, because a Certain Pudgy, Balding English Teacher saw one when he was but a wee slip of a lad of 7 summers. They are very large--perhaps 2 1/2 feet including crown and tail feathers--and when you are a wee slip of a lad and one is sitting not ten feet from your grandparents' window, it tends to make an impression.

Rationality drove one and all to consult the reference books, and decide that perhaps it was a Piliated Woodpecker, except that the Piliated Woodpecker, whatever its many virtues, lacks the distinctive top-know and white markings of the Ivory-Billed. Repeated study of drawings and photographs could never dispel the certainty that what had sat outside the windows of 1810 Adams Drive in Maitland, Florida, was the rarely seen Ivory-Billed. When it flapped its wings and soared away, it displayed a majesty no mere Piliated could aspire to--though memory fails as to whether a certain lad saw it, or was told about it by his mother after he ran to find a camera. The memory of that flapping is strong, but who knows...

Whatever, the whole event, and the majestic bird, do dwell in the memory so.

There have been numerous reported sightings from non-authoritative birdwatchers, collected assiduously but discounted by authoritative ones. One theory held that there were breeding colonies in Cuba, which would explain the silence in the scientific community, but the most recent sightings have been in the wetlands of Arkansas. It seems highly improbable that they made their way from Cuba to Arkansas, and so perhaps there are two colonies. If freedom comes to Cuba--a consumation devoutly to be wished--then perhaps we will find out.

The post below on Cardinal Ratzinger's election has been revised.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 11:00 AM



Thursday, April 28, 2005 :::
 
A paradox: John Paul II, of most happy memory, was seen in person by more people than anyone else in history and obviously loved being around ordinary people. Yet the first book of his that might be described as "accessible" in the popular sense was Crossing the Threshold of Hope, which did not appear until 1994, 16 years into his reign. It could be argued that the only reason it was accessible to the average reader was that it was, in fact, an interview. Subsequent books by JPII, including Gift and Mystery, about being a priest, and Rise, Let Us Be On Our Way, about being a bishop, were, however, books written simply by the man himself and they are very accessible, so there was more likely some development in his understanding of communication. This does not mean that his many other writings are in any way badly written; they are often beautiful. But they require work, which great writing often does.

Joseph Ratzinger enters office as Benedict XVI with a reputation for difficulty and obscurity, and yet he is well served by three interview books: The Salt of the Earth (which is probably the place to start), God and the World (conducted after John Paul refused to let him retire), and the unfortunately named The Ratzinger Report, which sounds forbidding but isn't. Best of all is Milestones, his own telling of his life until he became a bishop. It is perhaps the best modern autobiography ever written, as it is short (barely 100 pages), yet leaves you with a complete and satisfying picture of the man. Start with Milestones and Salt, and you will have a complete and easily digested idea of what Joseph Ratzinger is about, which is the Lord's business. You will also understand why 'stern' is so inapt a description of the man as to be bizarre.

You may remember that he stood with all those who waited in line to view John Paul's body lying in state, and how it was taken as a sign that he was running. But then you find out that this is how he normally behaves, and you ask yourself how, if he simply loved Karol Wojtyla and loved pilgrims and loved being a priest, he would act differently if he were running, and the answer comes, "not at all." Read a little, and you will understand how wrong that impression was. His standing in line? What he did every Thursday when he was in town and presided over the Vatican's German language Mass. What he did every day as he walked across the Piazza San Pietro on his way to work. His eulogy? Exactly what he has always said and wanted to say again about his best friend. His pre-conclave homily? Exactly what he would say--and has said--under any circumstances about what the Church needs.

There are also reports the he resented the story that he suggested the complete silence of the Cardinals during the period of mourning for John Paul that lead up to the conclave, as he in fact thought it unnecessary. That he has let his fellow German cardinals chatter on about how he got elected indicates that he is no great fan of secrecy, and so he probably really did think the blanket of silence was unnecessary.

There is nothing--nothing--in the man's story to indicate any kind of ambition whatsoever. But there is nothing to indicate the indecisive academic who cannot handle administrative details.

How myths do grow.

And one must be fair: the comments which led to this understanding of what has really just happened came from Fr. Richard McBrien, somewhat charitably described as a theologian at Notre Dame in Indiana. Provided he did more scholarly work--and that's a big
"provided"--he would be more accurately be described as a theological historian, but we will let that pass without further comment. What he does for a living is provide comforting soundbites to secular reporters, as when he assured them that no kids would go to Toronto for the World Youth Day because JPII was losing his charisma. About 600, 000 extra, unexpected kids showed up.

Poor Fr. McBrien--except he never seems to learn.

But he did tell the Washington Post that H.E. Cardinal Ratzinger's pre-conclave sermon was not a campaign speech. His reasoning was faulty and meretricious. It assumed that H.E. Ratzinger had, at some point, been campaigning. He never was, but this writer will admit to thinking, foolishly, that he was. Fr. McBrien said the sermon was not a campaign speech because he realized he would never be elected and was going for broke.

Bad reasoning.

His homily was not a campaign speech SOLELY because he was not campaigning, and it did not differ in any detail from any homily he would give under any circumstances concerning what the Church needed.

Just as he would not respond in any other way than standing in line for hours, at 78, despite a lifelong weak constitution, thanking and blessing those who had come to say good-bye to his best friend.

What surprised him, perhaps, was that the Cardinals agreed in detail with what he had to say, and concluded that they had found their man.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 2:31 PM



Monday, April 25, 2005 :::
 
Perhaps no single statement about America has been as wrong as F. Scott Fitzgerald's assertion that there are no second acts to American lives. Just ask Alcee Hastings, the second to last impeached official to be convicted by the Senate. He almost immediately won election to the very House that impeached him.

Or Katherine Harris, the much maligned Florida Secretary of State, whose attention to the details of the law brought her so much hatred from those who maintain that the law courts should determine public policy. She, too, has found a secure home in the House.

Or, perhaps most spectacularly, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who was rejected by the Senate after Ronald Reagan nominated him to the federal bench. He now serves on the Judiciary Committee with some of the very Senators who wished to push him out of public life and were so brutal about it.

There is, however, one sure way to make sure your public life is over fast: be a complete son of a bitch. Not just rude; a lot of people in DC are rude. But when you scream at people who give you the wrong kind of coffee, when you humiliate subordinates in public, when no one can really stand sitting next to you, you are going to bite it. Subordinates and colleagues who agree with you will do you in, not your opponents. Just think of John Tower, the Republican chairman of Senate Armed Services who was so rude that, when Bush 41 nominated him to be Secretary of Defense, even conservative Republican Senators fell all over each other trying to stab him in the back. Two Republicans are about to be shifted off to lobbyist-land for similar offenses, and it is not like they weren't warned.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 4:38 PM



Tuesday, April 19, 2005 :::
 
10 years ago or more a thoughtful Evangelical was pondering a move to Rome, and so it came to pass that he asked a Certain Pudgy Balding English Teacher, whom he knew well, why he had not yet joined the Catholic Church. “If I could join the Catholic Church of Joseph Ratzinger,” came the reply, “I would convert in a minute.”

This morning—appropriately enough--brought a provocative e-mail from another Evangelical friend who is endocrinologically anti-Catholic. He asked for a reaction to people who were getting all excited about what appeared to be a profile of the Virgin Mary in the mineral deposits from a leaky pipe.

The reaction was that there was no reaction.

Protestants excommunicate each other with abandon and without a second thought. It takes an act of submission to share a pew with people whose faith is utterly alien to yours, and to honor that faith. That is the Catholic Church of Karol Wojtyla, at once the most intellectual and most democratic leader of the 20th Century. To read even his most casual thoughts is to be drawn into the deepest well. To see a saint immobilized before his time by Parkinson’s joyfully bending all his strength to kiss some gaudy plastic Holy Toy proffered up to the Popemobile is to be drawn into the deepest love.

And now we have the Catholic Church of Joseph Ratzinger.

As it happens, the news of the election of Benedict XVI proved somewhat bittersweet, though not at all unwelcome. To get to the Catholic Church of Joseph Ratzinger, this pilgrim had to pass through the Catholic Church of Karol Wojtyla, and was changed thereby. A concern for the liturgy, the experience of being a Bishop without a clergy on the frontiers of Islam, the life of an Evangelist through whom the Holy Spirit worked wonders in a destitute land, now seem very special qualifications for the Shoes of the Fisherman. Francis Cardinal Arinze came to hold a special place in that English teacher’s heart. His Eminence is, in his very being, the personified extension of the teachings and life of Karol Wojtyla.

But he must wait his turn, or wait his final reward. The next decade belongs to Benedict XVI. The faithful servants of John Paul the Great will not go unnoticed under Benedict. Francis Arinze is there for the Holy Spirit to use, and he will not be put aside.

But he will not be Pope. Not yet, anyway.

What of Benedict?

The feature of Benedict that was so attractive 10 years ago still attracts. He has a wide-ranging mind that does not flinch from the unfamiliar, but what he knows, he knows clearly, and he states clearly. In the world of Francis Arinze, this is a great virtue. Indeed, it is good to remember then-Archbishop Arinze’s reaction to the election of Karol Wojtyla: “We are going to have a bit of clarity in the Church. We are going to know where we stand, clearly, without being aggressive—but clear.” (Many thanks, as always, to George Weigel, for the quote, from his magisterial Witness to Hope.) To put it bluntly, when Islam and evangelical Catholic Christianity face each other, abortion will not be an "issue"—it will be a point of common understanding. Clarity, not pusillanimous “openness,” is the way forward, and the way of hope.

For those who think that “Europe is the Church, and the Church is Europe,” in Belloc’s formulation, these are not good days. Cardinal Ratzinger came out of that faith, and he intervened--perhaps imprudently--to protest Turkey's entrance into the European Union on that basis. But he also sees clearly that Europe has made its choices, nearly all of them bad. The first Pope from Middle Europe in 1000 years (and the first Polish Pope ever) believed that the tide could be turned, and Europe could find its way back from the brink. The second Pope from Middle Europe in 1000 years—the first Pope in 1000 years from the country that gave the world one of its clearest examples of European “culture” unhinged from its roots—does not share Karol Wojtyla’s hope. Joseph Ratzinger—Benedict--thinks European culture has entered its death throes. (Thanks again to Prof. Weigel for highlighting this essential difference.) If certain Cardinals were unready for a Pope from the South, they got a Pope who looks to the South.

Cardinal Ratzinger’s last book to appear in English—the one released just a few months before he became Benedict—is Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions, which exactly takes up those problems being mentioned following his election. One shamefully admits that the book lay unread on the shelf until this afternoon. But what a revelation. The book displays a full and sympathetic understanding of the ways of thought of Southern Asia—including Islam, and most particularly, Hinduism--and their influence around the world. But what Joseph Ratzinger knows, he knows clearly, and he states clearly. He was not the candidate of those who grasp at the last shreds of "Europe is the Church." He is looking forward. (His last books as Joseph Ratzinger are apparently not yet in English, and one is on Europe.)

Once again we must be blunt: the Papacy of Benedict XVI is the cherry coating on the medicine that the Church, and the world, need. The Popemobile is pointed South.

Faithful children, buckle up. It’s going to be a wonderful day.

People are making something of his choice of Benedict, as the original St. Benedict is the Patron of Europe. However, something in the creaky memory says that the Holy Father had a "Benedictine sensibility," meaning he was a student of Benedict and followed his teachings on spirituality. So there may be less to the name than some think.

Nope, got that wrong: his Augustinian.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 9:44 PM



Friday, April 08, 2005 :::
 
One could hardly do better in summarizing the essence of John Paul II, of most happy memory, than did His Eminence Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger this morning during his homily at the funeral, and so this humble blog will simply refer readers to that great man's comments.

One small thanks to the moderator of ABC's coverage, a Protestant who asked entirely suitable questions of the very knowledgeable priest who with him. He read the translation of the Mass as it was being said, but when it got to the Responsorial Psalm, his good taste got the better of his reportorial duties. He choked on what the New American Bible had done to "The Lord is My Shepherd, I shall not want," so halfway through he said, "as we used to say," and recited the King James from memory. Simply must drop that boy a thank you note.

It comes close to excusing him for asking, after the homily, whether there was as significance to the fact the H.E. Ratzinger was presidingi.e., is he a favorite to become Pope. (There was no significance, as he is Dean of the College of Cardinals, and so would be expected to officiate in any case.) Immediately after the homily comes the Creed, of course, which was being sung. But even George Weigel, over at NBC, who really should know better, could not resist the urge (or perhaps the urging of producers buzzing in his earpiece) to offer a post-game commentary on the homily, so ABC's Protestant gets a by on that one.

Everyone who watched, apparently, did as did this writer: constantly click around channels trying to find the one where no one was talking. Ah, telecom competition: it does have its advantages.

It was a magnificent service in its simplicity--just the full liturgy done beautifully--so watch it if you get the chance. For those who wish to quibble, a full choir does not make a Mass complicated, and neither do 160 Cardinals, just very musical, and very, very red.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 2:59 PM



Sunday, April 03, 2005 :::
 
Many thoughts crowd in these long, sad, joyful days. Assessments of John Paul II's papacy come pouring in, each one inspiring varying degrees of assent or dissent, adding to the roaring babble of a talk-obsessed era. But it is amazing how that saint's name jumps out like a victorious young athlete sprinting across the finishing line, still. The images of age and agony, and all the chatter, cannot dim the light he brought, and continues to bring.

It seemed wise to come a few minutes earlier to 10 o'clock Mass at the Cathdedral of St. Matthew, on the notion that this Sunday would be much like Easter, bringing people who do not regularly attend. As that is normally the Latin Mass, it seemed unlikely to be the main draw, but there would be a larger number than usual.

Should have checked the archdiocesan website. The Cardinal apparently felt that it was the most convenenient time for him to celebrate at his own See and catch the plane to Rome, where he will govern the Church along with his 116 red-hatted fellows for the next two or three weeks. Gone was the Latin, in were the TV news crews--as the young hero of Terminator II answered when asked how many police were outside, "All of them, I think." And so a certain pudgy balding English teacher had to stand. Actually, he had a seat, but could not see the altar or the bishop's throne, so he finally took a corner and stood there. The music was glorious as always, the homily fitting, the general air solemn but joyous, which was also fitting. As Cardinal McCarrick is very active in Rome already and has such a direct role to play in the future of the Church, events far away seemed much nearer than TV can bring them.

Lots of young folks, as always, which calls to mind a humorous note of the kind that Karol Wojtyla dearly loved: the ones provided by kids.

A Mind That Suits has a new favorite barkeep, occupying the space once held by young friend Joe, who has gone on to a career in broadcasting. Only young friend Sean is really young, as Maryland law allows underage bartenders and Sean is a college freshman, having only recently arrived at 19. He is also Catholic. "It's strange to think the Pope is dead," he offered. "I guess he's the only Pope you've ever known," offered a certain pudgy, balding English teacher, "When you were born, he had been Pope for 7 years." "Really?"

Ah, youth.

Which calls to mind a image that has formed in the mind the last few days: Karol Wojtyla's first reward is to ski down the slopes of Paradise, with the souls of all the children who came before him gleefully racing behind him. RIP.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 7:21 PM



Friday, April 01, 2005 :::
 
Two striking images from this morning. One, the Pope at a recent ceremony, where small children "assisted" him in releasing doves from his apartment window. They didn't assist. As he could hardly move, they did it, and, as they were very small, they didn't. One bird eventually took off, but the other two merely found their way to the edge of the broad window sill and sort of looked around, reminding one and all that doves are beautiful but not very smart. Even what little happened only came about after much pointless flapping of wings, which disturbed the little boy by the Pope's right hand, who started shooing his bird away. And the Pope? His face broke out in a huge smile.

The other image was not so striking except in contrast: wonks on their way to work, some of them to do a lot of good, some to do ill, and some to do not much at all, which is the point. To someone who came to Washington in the wake of the Reagan Revolution believing great good could come from Washington, only to see many good intentions sputter into irrelevance, it now seems that some political action can be done better than others, but hope does not lie in politics. One of the last major statements this Pope made was to remind everyone of the importance of politics, sternly cautioning us against thinking it is irrelevant.

But he also helped this pilgrim see that it was not the ultimate aim of life, however much good it may do in the short term, and however important that short term is. That is one of many things for which I am grateful on this bright sunny morning in Washington.

John Paul II is not leaving us a safer world, in the sense that most people mean that. Personally, I feel the world is much less safe than it was in 1978. As he saw all to clearly, we may well be headed into one of the grimmest eras in the grim history of humanity. But he taught us to hope, and it is for that, above all, that we should be grateful.

And we should be grateful that his work here on Earth is not done. He loved St. Terese of Lisieux, who was hurried on her way to heaven by the will of God. When he elevated her to the status of Doctor of the Church, he cited her words, which should be a comfort to us all: she hoped to spend her eternity doing good on Earth.

Which is a blessed thought, because the overwhelming feeling this morning, with all eyes turned toward Rome, is that the world is about to become much lonelier.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 8:32 AM



Thursday, March 31, 2005 :::
 
Concerning Clint Eastwood's justly praised--but also overly praised--Million Dollar Baby, the ending has drawn considerable attention, particularly as it seems to be the main point of the movie. In it, the character played by Hilary Swank is permanently paralyzed, requiring a respirator. She has all her faculties, however, and so never loses legal control over her care. Clint Eastwood's character, who has been personally at war with the Church for a very long time, consults a priest, who tells him that he will be committing a very grave sin if he "does this." "This" turns out to be removing her from the respirator.

In fact, the only things the Church has an objection to are the illegality of it (Eastwood pulls the plug under cloak of darkness, without a doctor's supervision), and the injection of adrenaline, which will actively kill her. The respirator is by definition a "heroic measure," and so not required under Church teaching, and if the shot had been morphine, to ease the pain, that would have been fine, even if the levels of morphine passed into the lethal range, as long as lethality was not the intent.

This misrepresentation of Church teaching, and the similar misrepresentation on the debate over the recently deceased Terri Schiavo, come to mind with the news that the Holy Father now has a urinary infection, resulting in a dangerously high fever and requiring antibiotic treatment. Any student of the remarkable life of Karol Wojtyla will understand the comment that he must be thinking that, given the strides modern medecine has made in prolonging life and the frequency of such situations, it is now his part in life to teach us how to pass on to the next world.

Our prayers should be for his comfort, and not ours. He has given us quite enough.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 4:48 PM



Thursday, March 24, 2005 :::
 
The recent flap over comments made by Harvard President Larry Summers on possible differences in scientific aptitude between the sexes has served mainly to highlight the silliness of modern academe. The one useful distinction introduced into the debate was that there may be an innate difference in interest. When parents come home and find some expensive new household gadget mysteriously dismantled and perhaps irreparable, with parts lying all over the house, it is not on any girls in the house that suspicion normally alights. Just ask any boy who has had the occasion to indignantly demand, "Why don't you ask her if she did it?"

Now comes a study by 250 scientists mapping the human genome, who found that the differences between male and female humans may make up as much as 2% of the genome, prompting one of the researchers to comment that there may not be one human genome, but two. Indeed, it may be that men and women show greater genetic variation than that between humans as a species and our closest cousin, the chimpanzee. According to press reports of the study, which was published in the journal Nature, the scientists found that even where the X-chromosomes had genes that were the same in both sexes, women's genes interacted in more complicated and difficult to understand ways.

As the Weekly Standard's Scrapbook reports this week, one scientist told the Chicago Tribune "any of us over the age of two realizes there are plenty of differences between males and females that are characteristic of the two sexes."

With all due respect to the niceties of academic discourse, they should have called the article simply, "Duh."

Grammar note: This writer remembers that the great William F. Buckley, Jr., perhaps the country's greatest stickler for grammatical rectitude, once complained about people who pedantically use the possessive before gerunds, "I saw his sitting under the tree" being an example that popped to mind just now. Obviously, that should be, "I saw him sitting under the tree." But consider: "His sitting under the tree is not helping us." The difference is simply this: are you talking about the actor, or the action--or in this example, the inaction.

Further, if the phrase is the reduction of an adjective or relative clause (two different names for clauses with but a single function), then the possessive is entirely out of place. The description of the scientists quoted above is short for, "250 scientists who have been mapping the human genome." No possessive is required.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 10:12 AM



Thursday, March 17, 2005 :::
 
A Mind That Suits begins a new feature today. It is very simple.

22 Days. That is how long it has been since an pro-Iranian Islamist apparently won the coveted post of first freely-elected prime minister in Iraq's history. And that is how many days we have had of complete silence on that inconvenient fact from nearly all of our conservative intellectual elite, aside from the ever-astute David Frum. Michale Ledeen this morning has us, once again, marching on Tehran. Aside from the rather obvious question--"You and what army, Dr. Ledeen?"--there is now a new one: what will the Iraqi prime minister have to say about that?

We'll keep a count here over at A Mind That Suits. When someone else has the guts to say, "You know, we may have just spent $300 billion and 1500 American lives installing an anti-American government," we will let you know.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 1:24 PM



Monday, March 14, 2005 :::
 
We start quickly with one of life's mysteries: How can Liv Tyler look so obviously like her dad and still be beautiful?

That said...

A Mind That Suits is one sixth of the way through his annual trek through Middle Earth, but he had to break off quickly last night because he realized with some horror that he was to begin teaching The Great Gatsby on Thursday. The first chapter is masterful--it embodies a note you will find on the last page of The Last Tycoon, "ACTION IS CHARACTER." Not for Fitzgerald the clunky opening of so many novels. People are introduced doing and saying things.

Which means it is impossible for foreign readers to understand. The last time he taught it, the students got bogged down. So a certain pudgy, balding English teacher is going to dash off a description of the characters and the general situation. The students will have a hard enough time understanding, in Chapter 2, what the fabulously wealthy Tom sees in Myrtle, his girlfriend. She is poor, plump, and demanding, and "Her face...contained no facet or gleam of beauty." This time through, it seems like a question of complete dominance, and calls to mind the shenanigans of a certain Arkansas-bred politician. The analogy will perhaps help the students understand the situation. Her description, the students will have no trouble understanding. If they do their homework.

Chapter 1, they would not understand, particularly this class, and so this afternoon will be given over to writing up a quick summary for their use.

However, on Sunday night, said English teacher did NOT want to tear away from Middle Earth. Until he did his duty and was reminded again of just how great Gatsby is.

And was reminded that few people are confronted with that kind of "dilemma." And so he should be grateful for his lot in life.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 12:48 PM



Saturday, March 12, 2005 :::
 
Okay, the post that follows is serious fun, but this just came up on a quite innocent Google search, and it is just silly fun. Be where you can laugh out loud before you go there. One hates to do this to a woman whose life did nothing but make everyone else's lighter, but, you know, it's not malicious. "Sawed in half." That's the best.


Because they're fun to be around, that's why.

A certain pudgy, balding English teacher was leaving his office after a evening of reading and writing, which is what he does, mainly. His office is, by the workings of fate, in the engineering building. The freshman architecture studio used to be across the hall from his office, but it has been moved. He regrets its absence, but the engineering labs provide quite enough entertainment.

We have passed the summit of the semester and are now descending down the other side. Projects are coming due. CUA, where he teaches, has a very good civil engineering department, which routinely enters the local "concrete canoe competition."

The kids build canoes. Out of concrete. They have to float.

CUA not infrequently places very well, and to pull that off you need loads of kids with a will to kill and enough energy to stay up all night. Well, okay, nearly ALL kids have enough energy to stay up all night, and spend most of their college years doing just that, and falling asleep in class. But not all of them have the skill and dedication to make concrete float. As he walked out that night, said PBET saw two young guys smeering concrete on a distinctly canoe-shaped frame in a lab. Outside, he found another kid covered in dust in a cement mixing room of whose existence he had heretofore been unaware. Said dust-covered lad could not be bothered with English teachers at just that moment, and did not notice his passing. The room, opened completely to the outside world for obvious reasons, was a mess. But not as big a mess as it would have been had he left his large container full of concrete mix in the room. It was outside, obviously to prevent the need for cleaning the room any more than necessary. And so it came to pass that the loading zone was covered with a fine dust of cement mix. Had any of the light mists we've been having sprung up, said young man would have learned an object lesson in removing a thin crust of concrete from other people's property, but that night he was heedless of such considerations.

On the Metro, a large gaggle of kids, probably all humanities majors, was chattily waiting on the platform. Having fun, laughing, looking young. The agonies of "Does he like me?","Why is she talking to him?" and all that are not apparent to the passive observer, and they just look fresh. The train comes and they all pile on--the English teacher deliberately in the car behind this time. For all the entertainment, it's nice to use the mute button every once in a while. The excitement spills over, as it always does, when one last group of girls tries to get through the doors in time and only ends up putting their fingers in. Lots of shreaks and giggles as kids on both sides try to open the doors. This is why adults were invented. The Metro driver came on and sternly reminded everyone that the doors are at her command and do not open as do elevator doors. The kids finally give up, fortunately without breaking the door.

A Mind That Suits has begun his annual passage through Middle Earth. When he got home, he settled down to finish a chapter, and then decide that one more wouldn't hurt, when he came to the first morning of Frodo's trek. He, Sam, Merry, and Pippin have slept with the Elves and are now alone and about to start. Frodo rises late and joins the other. When young Pippin tries to talk, Frodo tells him he wants to think. Pippin snaps at him and runs off to the edge of the glade. Frodo thinks of his burden, which at this point he thinks only involves Samwise and himself. Then...

"The merry voice of Pippin came to him. He was running on the green turf and singing.

" 'No! I could not!' he said to himself. 'It is one thing to take my young friends walking over the Shire with me, until we are hungry and weary, and food and bed are sweet. To take them into exile, where hunger and weariness may have no cure, is quite another..."

In other words, Frodo simply likes the company of the young. As does a certain pudgy balding English teacher.

It is utterly remarkable the way that Prof. Tolkien catches the cadences of teenage speech, without descending to caricature. As he lived in the Oxford College where he taught and tutored students one on one, in the British fashion, he had lots of exposure. But he made Pippin so whole! Pippin's age is uncertain at this point--if it is given, perhaps it will pop out during this reading or next year's. In hobbit years, he is probably in his twenties, but what he is is the perfect portrait of an unpretentious Oxford University undergraduate. In fact, he brings to mind a favorite student, a Brazilian agricultural scientist of about 20 years who possessed the same infinite supply of intelligence, politeness, and good cheer.

Which makes it such a pity that the movie gets Pippin completely wrong. Billy Boyd is a wonderful comic actor, and plays a goofy teenager without descending to caricature. But he could clearly have handled a more complex character. For a discussion of that problem, please see the previous post.

Said agricultural scientist of about 20 years had that distinctive Brazilian pronunciation, where endings are so recessive they are nearly inaudible. (Ours are close to that, which is one of the things that makes English so very hard for foreigners to learn.) When said lad uttered the word "university," it sounded like "universe." And so when he complained "I want to meet students from the university," said English teacher would stare up into the sky, prompting said Brazilian genius to blurt out, "Oh, come on."

Oh, and that thing about kids sleeping in class? You have to think it is funny. You have to handle it--a slap on the desk in front of them often does it--but you have to think it is funny or it will drive you NUTS. Indeed, a certain pudgy, balding English teacher has long maintained that we are meant to find the young funny; otherwise we would kill them.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 2:04 PM



Tuesday, March 08, 2005 :::
 
Some Ifs, Ands, And Buts,

But...

It's Magnificent.

We must return to a favorite topic, The Lord of the Rings. A certain pudgy, balding English teacher had, without shame, anticipated the release of the 12-CD boxed set for some time. Indeed, he kept on anticipating it after it came out, out of deference to his teacher’s salary. Once, he went into a Suncoast Pictures outlet not so long ago and asked about it, only to be told that they had each 4-CD set, at $50 per. Smart enough to ask how much the full set was, he was told $120, making part-by-part purchases absurd in the extreme. He therefore held back until he was in North Carolina recently, and wandered into a Target during some downtime. Reduced, the whole thing was, to $89.99, and so he bought it.

And did not sleep for the rest of Spring Break.

In the few remarks that follow, one thing must be held at the front of the mind: the movie, overall, is magnificent. There is much to quibble with, and even argue with. But it is truly wonderful.

A Mind That Suits saw the second installment, The Two Towers, first, and his first comment was, “It’s too short. It needs to be fifteen minutes longer.” This is because one traveled from crisis to crisis with no time to feel the crises developing, an effect amplified if one is sitting in the grand old Uptown Theatre in Washington, DC. The “extended cut” is very much longer than the original—about one extra hour per installment, in fact—and it makes a tremendous difference. If one listens to the “actors’ commentary” (a section in which—if you are not an extended cut DVD fan--the actors’ talk over the film as it runs past), one hears continuously, “I am so glad that put that back in.” And they are right. One hopes that this extended cut exists in a film version, for release to repertory theatres, but until then, the CDs suffice, and then some.

Asked by long time friend Ranger Bill, one of the very first people on the planet to read The Lord of the Rings when it came out, what he thought of the film, a certain pudgy, balding English teacher replied, “It’s great, but there are things that they just don’t get,” a sentiment with which Ranger Bill agreed.

A confession: said English teacher himself at first did not get the need for some of the changes. In the first installment, the changes in the escape from the Shire now seem judicious to get the story moving. Director Peter Jackson admits that the exposition was the hardest part, and he very often succeeded.

However, there are still things that seem wrong.

One that is the very troubling is the character of Peregrine Took, called Pippin most of the time. In the way of Hollywood, Pippin, the youngest of the four principal hobbits, is played by the oldest of the four actors playing them. (Billy Boyd was 31 at the time of filming.) But that is not the problem: he looks young enough in real life. Add good make-up artists and enough filters on the cameras, and you are surprised he has to shave in real life. The problem is the conception. Pippin, in the book, really does only one thing wrong, and that is look into something called a “palantir.” Aside from that, his main crime is being young. All the drama comes from the conflict between his aspirations and abilities, and people’s low expectations of a teenager.

The film overdoes the youth thing, which is very ironic. It ascribes to him the vices of youth, his only virtues being the substantial ones of bravery and loyalty. Over the palantir incident, his buddy Merrie, in the film, shoots out something about his always having to rush in and never thinking. That is not the way it is with the book, which emphasizes his tremendous abilities. Throughout, other characters comment on his politeness and his perceptiveness. During one scene, involving the lunacy of a much older man, he behaves as if he were Stormin’ Norman Schwartzkopf—but with the utmost politeness and grace. In the way of real humor, the grim setting allows him to get off some of the funniest comments in the book.

In 1200 pages, Peregrine Took rarely sets a hairy foot wrong. His character is an extended commentary on the verse from the New Testament, “Let no man despise you because of your youth.” (There’s the irony.)

Which brings us to a most important point, and that is the overwhelmingly Christian nature of the spirituality in the book. J.R.R.Tolkien told one friend in a letter that the entire thing was an elaboration of the prayer, “Lead us not into temptation.” He wasn’t light-handed about it, either. Frodo drops the ring into the Crack of Doom on the very day that was held traditionally in the Middle Ages as the date of the Crucifixion. (There is a calendar to the story, though reading it through the first time you might not notice it, it is so well woven into the text.) He called it “fundamentally a religious and a Christian work.”

Much of the spirituality is in the movie, because the makers were so loyal to the anthropology of Middle Earth. They were also aware of the importance of hope to the story. It is interesting that at a mock trial of Peter Jackson held at Ave Maria College, the “prosecution,” according to a press report, did not concentrate on issues of spirituality, but casting, a good sign. Be certain that if there were heresy afoot, Ave Maria is exactly the college where it would be smoked out.

But the makers were not, perhaps, so aware of the origins of that hope for Prof. Tolkien, at least if one judges by the comments from the director and writers that made it into press when the first movie came out. (With all due allowances for any unfortunate choices by reporters.) By the time the third movie came out and the Catholic press was given access to them, they were certainly aware of it. Philippa Boyens, one of the screenwriters, was even honest enough to acknowledge that she disagreed with some aspects of the spirituality of the books (on the purpose of suffering, if memory serves, and that is, after all, the big one.) But she did not, so far as one can see, let her disagreement interfere with her writing.

Indeed, in those comments to the Christian press, they seemed to find it pleasing that there was such a loyal following for the books among Christians. One’s initial reaction is that such secular folks might merely be being polite, but exposure to their personalities on the DVDs makes one realize that they seem like perfectly lovely people. New Zealanders as a whole must compete with Australians for being the loveliest people in the English-speaking world. (A certain pudgy, balding English teacher has always wanted to go there, and this whole LotR thing has certainly made the desire even stronger.)

One must note that J.R.R. Tolkien hated allegory in the extreme. He was not Dante. And he did not want anything he wrote to be tied to the 20th Century, which saw the horrors of Nazism, Fascism, and Communism. He knew them firsthand, having seen trench warfare in WWI, but he was also a serious enough student of history to know that such things have happened throughout human history. Industrialization may have made the effects larger—he comments on that directly in The Hobbit itself-- but the crimes themselves are intrinsic to human existence.

The fact that such a direct tie to the 20th Century in The Hobbit itself means, of course, that Prof. Tolkien was protesting a bit too much, but his point should be taken seriously. He was trying to capture universal experience, and he sure succeeded on that score.

(His distaste for allegory must have made for some interesting discussions among the Inklings, the famed Oxford literary circle to which he belonged. Charles Williams, another member, was perhaps the foremost authority on Dante in the English-speaking world at that time. And it must be said that Dante’s allegory is often very human. The famed Pageant of the Eucharist at the top of Purgatory is probably what Prof. Tolkien had in mind; it has always struck this writer as too formal. It is very hard not to think that Mordor has a whiff of the Inferno about it—particularly the motionlessness at the heart of it. So, too, the related inability of Frodo to ascend Mount Doom without the assistance and strong back of Samwise Gamgee seems very like Virgil’s crawling across the Devil with Dante on his back. As for the iconography of hell and sin, it is probably not possible to escape Dante's influence.)

What is disturbing, really, is a largely unspoken assumption that Prof. Tolkien was equally interested in paganism. That is an easy enough assumption if one does not look into it, because he was such a great scholar of Northern folklore. He did not, however, believe in it, in that sense. Catholicism has always been more (or less) comfortable with redeeming the culture it is planted in. Think of Irish Catholicism. It stopped the pagan rituals, but the sensibility of the people is clearly influenced by their ancient culture. Most Protestants would have a harder time understanding that, and certainly people who are not religiously inclined might miss it. If one has delved into the mystical aspects of Catholicism—the favorite way to begin subject headings in the new Catechism seems to be “the Mystery of…,” so the mystical takes up a lot of Catholicism—then it is not hidden or difficult to understand at all. It helps further if you have a Franciscan sensibility, as does this writer, or Carmelite one, but just paying attention as a Catholic probably allows you to absorb what Tolkien so cherished and to recognize it in his work.

The author they bring in on the DVDs to discuss the spirituality of the books held that the central motif, of pressing on with a solemn task even if might mean death or failure, is “essentially pagan.” If Prof. Tolkien believed, as this professor does, that one presses on “without hope,” (to use the author’s words) then it might be pagan, but Prof. Tolkien believed in hope, and that one should press on with task even if one felt certain one was going to die, which is a very different thing entirely. Hope is a theological virtue to Catholics, and the difficulty of holding it is stressed throughout the New Testament. The whole theme of hope is even picked up on the DVD a few moments after the author’s comment. As for the question of dying, one must most charitably conclude that the author has never read the New Testament. It is unfortunate that this was the author they brought into chat and, no doubt, reveals the prejudices of the film’s makers. At least they are honest about it, and loyal enough to Tolkein that it does not alter his intent.

We have now spent far too long on discussing the “just don’t get" parts. We must simply conclude by saying again, very clearly, that the extended version of the Lord of the Rings is a magnificent accomplishment.

Now, where’s the remote?

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 1:39 PM



Monday, March 07, 2005 :::
 
A Mind That Suits is about to deliver himself of a considered opinion of the Lord Of the Rings boxed set. As soon as he can tear himself away from the old screen.

Not to tip his hand or anything.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 8:28 PM



Wednesday, March 02, 2005 :::
 
A loverly morning down here in Wilmington, not that we would ever rub the noses of faithful readers up North in that fact, as they are suffering, poor dears.

The post on epidemics and SARS lacked a key paragraph, so, pending a post later today on life in general, a certain pudgy, balding English teacher would ask the indulgence of his loyal readers and urge them to scan that post, where the new paragraph follows the first.

"Loverly" was a typo, but brings up happy memories of great musicals, and so he will leave it as it is. A Mind That Suits doesn't even like musicals in their own right. As with nearly all art forms, he likes them when they are well done, and bores quickly if they are not. But "loverly" was a happy error, and so it stays the way it is.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 8:12 AM



Monday, February 28, 2005 :::
 
The good, and the painful.

When this distinguished blog started, SARS was the big deal, and the WSJ carried a story about how scientists, working feverishly around the globe and around the clock with the aid of the internet, isolated the virus within a few months. Pressing business (lunch with Dad down here in Wilmington) prevents a search for the original post on that heroic success, but it ran along these lines. "Scientists in several countries have isolated the SARS virus after only a few months, as opposed to the several years it took to find the HIV virus, and, oh, the millenia it took before we figured out how bacteria and viruses worked. Go us."

This came to mind again with the worrying news about the avian flu, which now appears to spreading from human to human. Scientists worldwide have been monitoring the recent outbreak in southern Asia on a case by case basis, even before it was clear that it could spread among humans. They are debating furiously whether it could turn into a pandemic. And they are trying to do things to prevent it. 2 millions doses of a vaccine have been made from the blood of a Vietnamese man who died from it. This marks an improvement even on the remarkable SARS achievement. The only problem is, the vaccine may not work, and all this furious work may give us nothing more than an ability to watch it spread in real time while standing around hopelessly. Which is why prayer is still, and always will be, just as urgent as the scientific work.

And now the painful:

We are going on one week since it became clear that Islamic fundamentalists largely won the first free Iraq elections, at least in Shi'a areas. (See previous post.) The silence from the nattering nabobs of nothingsgonewrongism continues to deafen. Aside from David Frum's unblinkingly realistic assessment, none of the supporters of the war have said much of anything, and even Mr. Frum made only the briefest comments. Personally, this writer thinks his beloved homeland may be in the worst strategic shape he has ever seen, but he is known to be pessimistic on such matters.

You would not even know, however, that there are clouds anywhere in the sky by reading the war's supporters. Their silence on the elections may be the only welcome thing about the whole situation, but they are not content to just sit in embarrassed silence. They tout every rebellion in the Arab world as sign that our policy of democratization is working, and very quickly. The Lebanese want Syria out after the not-so-mysterious death of a former prime minister. Hosni Mubarak is going to allow multi-party elections for President, or at least says he is going to.

But wait: wasn't Lebanon a bewilderingly complex basket case of ethnic and religious rivalries before Syria intervened? And aren't Mr. Mubarak's chief opponents Islamic fundamentalists?

Two comments from the most important thinkers who helped form American conservatism.

From Alexis de Tocqueville, this warning to Mr. Mubarak: tyrants are most in danger of uncontrolled rebellion when they first try to loosen their grip. It is not fate. Ask Gen. Pinochet. But it happens more often than not.

And second, from Edmund Burke: Before I congatulate a man on his liberty, I must first know what he intends to do with it.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 10:49 AM



Thursday, February 24, 2005 :::
 
It was not, you know, supposed to end this way. It really wasn’t. The first prime minister of Iraq was not supposed to be a pro-Iranian “Islamist.” But that’s what appears likely.

There is another step to come: the Kurds and the backers of interim Prime Minister Allawi will have a say. But if Mr. Jafaari answers certain questions to their satisfaction---and, for reasons we will discuss in a minute, that is very likely—then he will indeed be the first elected Prime Minister of Iraq. It is not, as David Frum pointed out yesterday, the end of the story. It is, however, the end of US control over events, which was always a slippery thing anyway.

When the results of the vote were first tabulated, the two parties at the top of the list, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and Dawaa (meaning “Teaching Others the Ways of Islam”) immediately cast off the caution urged on them by the Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani, and talked openly about imposing shari’a, Muslim holy law, at least on a province-by-province basis.

Mr. Jaafari, the new Prime Minister, seemed to change his tune by saying his party did not " ‘aim to establish an Islamic state to apply the Islamic sharia,’ or law. Instead, it would establish a government ‘respecting human rights and applying justice and respecting the rights of women.’” (Quotes taken from the Washington Post.)

This writer’s first reaction was that Mr. Jafari had gone far in trying to achieve office, but now, he realizes, he merely changed a few words—something which did not hoodwink Mr. Frum who, according to the caricature of “neo-cons,” should be a patsy for this kind of talk. But he is not, and with good reason. Mr. Jaafari said nothing about applying shari’a on a provincial level, merely on the national level. Indeed, it is probably in his interest for there to be not much of a national state established at all. (Perhaps we are seeing the birth of a state which actually will "wither away.") And “respecting human rights and applying justice and respecting rights of women” is what traditional Muslims think they are doing when they establish shari’a. This writer knows that from having conservative Muslim women tell him that in class, in rather emotional terms, even as one of the leaders of Dawaa, a woman, has told the press.

In any case, as all this was being resolved, this writer was absorbing Christopher de Bellaigue’s absorbing In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs. Mr. de Bellaigue, the Economist’s Tehran correspondent for fifteen years, is fluent in Farsi and, perhaps most importantly, married to an Iranian. It appears that he has indeed written the one book you need to read to acquire a textured, living understanding of Shiism and Iran. One vital section of the book, an extended interview with an opponent of the regime into which he weaves much of the history of Iran, should tell you clearly that opposition to the revolution does not mean opposition to shari’a, nor to “political” Islam. (This writer is not sure there is a non-political version of Islam, but he will admit that he does not know enough to say with confidence.)

Mr. de Bellaigue drops quite the little bombshell in discussing the revolution of Ruhollah Khomeini, who was himself one of the Grand Ayatollahs in his day. It is indeed true, as many a writer has tossed off reflexively, that Mr. Khomein’s views involved novelties, particularly as regards a doctrine called the “Guardianship of the Jurist.” (It is impossible not to notice how closely that resembles the Ideal Republic of our tenured left.) But it is also true that many a Shi’a has come to agree with him on just that point.

And, during Mr. Khomeini’s brief stay in Paris, he could be heard to talk about how his aim was democracy, although the qualifier “real” before democracy should have tipped off anyone conversant with 20th Century totalitarian rhetoric. (This writer will pause to note that he was surprised to find out that Mr. Khomeini lived in Paris, the vacation home of many of the last century’s real monsters, for only a very few months, having been driven from Iraq, where he had lived after the last Shah threw him out. He became famous in the States only during his Paris sojourn.)

In any case, let us pause over this passage from Mr. de Bellaigue’s invaluable book:

“It’s possible that the Imam was speaking sincerely in Paris and that he subsequently changed his mind. (In Paris, he approved a draft constitution that restrictred the role of senior mullahs to membership of a council that could declare legislation incompatible with Islamic law at the request of government officials.) Some believe that the Imam was exercising what Shi’as call prudential dissimulation—the right to lie about one’s beliefs as long as the lie is in the wider interests of the faith.” (P. 98, emphasis added.)

“Prudential dissimulation.” Sit back and think about that one for a minute.

And then think about all the confident assertions from all the war-boosters based on single comments from Iraqis.

Single comments. For whatever reason, people took single comments and turned them into proofs.

They almost never are. They can be, but almost never. Most of life is ambiguous.

And it turns out that Shi’a believe that, in single quotes, you can lie, although they do not call it that.

Mr. de Bellagues’s book is full of tantalizing information, which begs to be teased out and explained. For instance, Mr. Khomeini’s Guardianship of the Jurist was new, but the “other-worldly clerics” of Karballah and Najaf were so much trouble that the British, seeking to establish some mystical, never-before-heard-of nation of Iraq following World War I—fifty years before Mr. Khomeini, in other words—threw them out. The famed seminary at Qom, where Mr. Khomeini taught most of his life and died, was established only after the clerics had been thrown out of Iraq. And modern ethnic Iranians cherish bricks made from the earth of Karballah in Iraq, an Arab country. In other words, it is an emotional thing with Iranians, perhaps not so much Arabs, that they be united with southeastern Iraq.

As an aside, that doctrine—“prudential dissimulation”—makes it almost certain that Mr. Jaafari will come up with a way to satisfy the Kurds and Mr. Allawi’s supporters. What that means is anyone’s guess.

With all due respect, the conservative faithful should have been told all this stuff a long, long time ago.

This writer will not shy away from pointing out that he wondered about all this stuff over a year ago, when he discovered that there was something called the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and that its leader openly supported a US military liberation. (He is claiming no prescience, just awareness of details that need exploring.) The calculus, it seemed obvious, was different than it appeared to certain non-profit-think-tank-dwellers and their heroes in the Defense Department. But to raise the question was to risk being denounced as the perpetrator of a “vile lie,” as this writer actually was on a prominent conservative website.

What is notable is that the usual derisive cascade of sneers from those conservative websites has not appeared in the last few days. There has been a glorious and welcome silence from all that know-it-all-ness. Gone are all the so-much-fors and failed-to-understands and totally-ignorant-ofs. It has turned out exactly the way that the support for the American intervention by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq would imply. They assured us it would not be so; they stamped their foot and threw acid sneers toward anyone who said it might be so, but now it indeed is so. The "national" question in Iraq remains problematic; on the local level, the entire situation has become problematic because there is absolutely no question about how the average Shi'a feels. Would the situation have changed if certain writers had listened and been less confident? Probably not, but the country would have been better prepared.

(There is some remarkably oblique commentary about how the elections are inspiring protests in other countries, but again their is that strange silence on what the protesters want. It is as if everyone has forgotten that, fraud aside, the overwhelming majority of German voters in 1933 voted for National Socialism or its equally repugnant half-sister, Communism. Protesting is not in and of itself a virtue.)

Those who, for reasons that escape this writer, idealize Mr. Chalabi may find moral consolation that Mr. Chalabi actually has the support of a majority of the 140 recently elected members of parliament from the United Iraqi Alliance (or House of Shi’a). He says he has them, and the two major religious parties simply refused to allow a ballot among the members, confirming that he is right.

This may sound like foul play, but one must remember that this was German-style “list” voting. A party produces a list of candidates, and voters vote for the party. If the party gets 15% of the votes, then they get 15% of the seats. In Iraq’s new parliament, that would be about 40. So that party, in this case Mr. Allawi's, would take the first forty names on their list and put them in office. (The House of Shi’a got less than 50 percent of the vote but more than 50 percent of the seats because certain small parties missed the threshold for getting any seats.) In other words, neither Mr. Chalabi nor anyone else actually went before the voters. Indeed, out of fear for the insurgents, many names on the lists were not public.

However, in the provincial elections, the religious parties—separate from the alliance-- swamped everyone else. That implies that the average voter thought “federation nationally, shari’a locally.” Mr. Chalabi wisely decided to regroup, and the situation is what it is.

Two things need to be added about Mr. de Bellaigue’s amazing book.

One is that the distance between the Islamic Revolution and “quietist” Shi’ism is marked by many gradations that only an expert could clarify. They are certainly more complicated than many a pro-war writer has allowed.

The other is that Mr. de Bellaigue is undoubtedly a member of the trouble-free, rich, privileged, Western elite. He compares the Iran-Iraq conflict with the Cold War. It is hard to think who, between Saddam Hussein and Ruhollah Khomeini, proposed the Middle East equivalent of establishing the rule of law in Germany, Italy, Japan, most of Latin America, Central and (some of) Eastern Europe, the elimination of an aggressive Soviet State, and the “build-down” of nuclear weapons.

Ick.

So get the book from the library or used bookstores. Don’t give him as much money as A Mind That Suits regrets that he has given him.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 4:03 PM



Friday, February 18, 2005 :::
 
New readers will find a sampling of A Mind That Suits on August 10,2003 (links at right) and the full text of The Litany, a discussion of war policy in satirical form, on Nov. 17, 2005.

Joel Kotkin is one of the authors who contributed to this fortnight's wonderful issue of The Weekly Standard, and he has very graciously printed a letter from a certain pudgy, balding English teacher, which you can find at his website.

And other than that, you all have a great weekend.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 1:42 PM



Thursday, February 17, 2005 :::
 
Run, do not walk, to your local newstand and pick up the Feb 14-21 number of The Weekly Standard. It is as close to a perfect edition of a magazine as can be imagined, if the magazine is dedicated to current affairs. There are quibbles: promoters of democracy should be self-consciously and deliberately aware of its failings in Russia, Latin America, Algeria, and perhaps most tragically, in Turkey.

Actually, that is more than a quibble; it is a moral imperative.

But that aside, this issue is a classic of its kind, confirming that The Weekly Standard of today is the true heir to the National Review under William F. Buckley, Jr. The current iteration of the National Review is not without its considerable merits: the review section, the English contributors, Michael Novak, David Frum, Wesley Smith, Katherine Jean Lopez, and of course William F. Buckley, Jr, himself. But, due to the obsessions of some of its editors, it is not old self, which one hopes it will soon become again, because then we would have two journals whose vision includes the whole world.

Until the, run, don't walk, to your local newsstand, and pick up the Feb. 14-21 number of The Weekly Standard.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 4:51 PM


 
Now There's An Idea to Cherish.

Friend Alex in San Diego writes:

"Maybe the Nobel Committee should award YasserArafat an unprecedented second Peace prize this year. After all, when did he ever do as much in the interest of peace as he did this (past) year?"

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 11:51 AM



Wednesday, February 16, 2005 :::
 
Why Liberals Are So Hard To Like.

When a certain pudgy, balding English teacher was an undergraduate, in...oh, well, nevermind, but Commentary was just finishing its turn to the right...the only game in town for intellectual conservatives was really The National Review, of happy memory. He would occasionally find on the campus of a certain legendary, red-tile-roofed, West Coast university a literate leftie who admitted that he had once picked up a copy, but invariably said lefty would add, "then I read X and stopped reading."

Why are leftists such Sensitive Plants? (There actually is a plant whose name is "Sensitive Plant." ) They stop reading when they run across things they disagree with? You cannot be educated if you do not sit still and work your way through things that you do not agree with on first blush. A Mind That Suits, who counts Isaiah Berlin among his intellectual guides, actually had to set aside Essays on Liberty. (Formerly Four Essays on Liberty, but before Prof. Berlin died he added a fifth and an (opaque) introduction, making it six.) Something right at the front upset said English teacher terribly, so he set it aside. When, later, he picked it up again and began at the middle--often advisable, if a book is worth reading--he realized he had misunderstood the other statement and went back to the beginning. That is the way of the educated person, and catching the vapors at the first sign of anything disagreeable is silly beyond words.

It's also stupid, and makes you bad company.

But leftists who read anything even toward the center are precious commodities, if they even exist at all.

DC, which is home to A Mind That Suits and the Weekly Standard, the true successor to the National Review under William F. Buckley, Jr., is--how shall we put it?--full of rich, unendurable, whiny leftists.

Which fact was driven home this afternoon when A Mind That Suits went to his post office, which is so close to the offices of The Weekly Standard that he could pick up a loose brick in the sidewalk on L St NW and hurl it at the head of William Kristol. ( Not that he would want to.) He absently reached into his mailbox without looking and pushed something back out the other side onto the floor. There was a man waiting for an postal worker to give him some large package, which meant that the delay in retrieving said object would be short. Indeed, said postal worker put the mail back in the box on the way to opening the service door. In the brief interim, a certain pudgy, balding English teacher pulled out the other item in the box, although he almost pushed it out the other side as well. The other gentleman, espying the cover of this week's TWS, with the inspiring picture of the veiled Iraqi woman with the purple finger, blurted out, "Too bad it wasn't the junk mail (that you pushed out the other side.)"

A Mind That Suits, who eschews confrontation, looked blandly at the cover and said, "Oh, that's not junk mail; I subscribe to it."

But what he was thinking was: "You !@*(&#) closed-minded, provincial, !@#)(&* !@#*!@#!"

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 5:14 PM


 
If one looks back to the "nightmare scenario" outlined on A Mind That Suits some weeks back, it concluded with the thought that, if Iraq splinters, at least one of our allies, Turkey, would have some of the oil.

Scratch that. Read this. Get depressed. (Link requires free registration.)

There is one bright spot in the election. The House of Shi'a swamped all its competitors in local votes, getting something like two thirds of the seats on local councils. But the intellgivent Iraqi voters split tickets, as mentioned here before. That would seem to indicate some substatial doubts about closer ties with Iran. (And very few doubts about imposing shari'a, but that has been discussed.) The war between the two countries must have left horrific scars, and they may not heal fully.

So we have Kurdish fear of Turkey and some Shi'a fear of Iran, plus a joint fear of Syria and its intentions, which they have been actively pursuing. That may be all we get.

We'll take it, we'll take it.

Also, one should correct misimpressions. The Turkish election that was voided was some time ago. The party that the army nixed got elected again in a landslide by swearing it was not Islamist, but has been acting that way in power. Which means that if the Turkish army enters Iraq, it will probably no longer be surpressing Islam as it has for 100 years. So much for that "moderating influence" of democracy.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 1:30 PM


 
Useful Idiots, by Mona Charen. Own it; cherish it. In it, she assembles all the shameful things the "Blame America First" said during the Cold War, and shows how they do not match up to the cold, hard facts. It has been on the future reading list, but the fact that it might be helpful to young friend and editor Philip over in Germany as he completes his dissertation finally moved a dilatory professor to read it before he sent it over. Most of the material is familiar to anyone who has read Paul Hollander or The Black Book of Communism, but she tells the tale with such verve and puts them all in one large seting. What a pleasure. A quilty pleasure, surely, because it is a pleasure to see so many people correctly identified as guilty.

We leave you today with one thought that has, to this writer, always seemed self-evident, though many intellectuals disdain the thought. Quoth Ms. Charen: " 'Hating" communism should be the minimum expected of any civilized human being."

And why is it that so many intellectuals disdain what is self-evident? Here we must turn to one George Orwell, who said, "Some things are so stupid only intellectuals would believe them."

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 9:03 AM



Tuesday, February 15, 2005 :::
 
More of the Same, From A Mind That Suits, and From the Wall Street Journal.

Our theme for the last few days continues, because more examples keep rolling in.

The once mighty Wall Street Journal editorial page today offers yet one more conservative assessment where there seems to be a lot that is not being said. Again, they express their relief that Shi'a religious parties will have to form a coalition so they "will be in no position to demand an Islamic constitution for Iraq and that the political influence from Iran will be a long way from the dominance feared in much Western reporting."

Again, the bluff confidence and the sneering, this time bubbling just below the surface.

"But," the impish, ill-behaved conservatives who refuse to "sign on" might reasonably ask, "weren't we supposed to believe that Iraqi Shi'ism was 'quietist" and apolitical? And that there was no fondness for Iran among Iraqi Shi'a? So then why are you so relieved that they came in just a few points lower than expected?" But then one remembers that the same editorial column once insisted it would be great to bring in Indonesia's armed forces, with their "distinctly quietist" version of Shi'a, or some such. If it was distinct, or uniquely, or emphatically, how then is it different from other forms of Shi'ism? Or is that just something that good boys and girls are not supposed to ask?

They also put the best face on Sunni reactions, and one certainly hopes the Sunni come to their senses, but there needs to be a little more information available than there is to draw too many conclusions.

Sneers all around, too, to those who think Muslims might vote for an Islamist ticket because "democracy itself is a moderating influence." Good little boys and girls are not supposed to remember that Islamist parties have won in Nigeria, Algeria, and--oh, what's that country's name? Oh, yes, Turkey. The military in Algeria and in Turkey voided those elections, of course, but in Nigeria a few years back crowds torched 100 churches in a Muslim state. And didn't the religious parties just get a whopping percentage of the Shi'a vote? That 48 percent applies only to the whole country. How did they do in Basra and Najaf?

And the writers seem unaware of the history of "list" voting in Europe, where, Karl Popper pointed out, it allows parties to shift and form new coalitions without ever having to take responsibility for their own contributions to the failures of the coalitions that they left.

Charming, too, that they caution the Bush administration to resist "the (CIA) temptation to pay kingmaker or otherwise try to influence the result." They themselves have been shameless in promoting Ahmed Chalabi, who spent several years in the '90's trying to attract dissidents to a camp he had in Kurdistan, with no results, and who scrambled so feverishly to gain some power base in a country that hardly knows him that he went visiting the Iranians himself (he is Shi'a). He was at one point the least trusted public figure, according to one poll, and did not face the voters himself. He negotiated himself onto the list, which is something, and a tribute to his tenacity. What else it means, this writer has no way of knowing, but if the Journal bases its support of him on the same kind of reasoning they are applying to this situation, he will remain agnostic on the question of Mr. Chalabi's supposed virtues. It is worth remembering that the Journal wanted us to just impose Mr. Chalabi on Iraqis--although other conservatives maintained that he would have been greeted as a national hero if we had just staged it right. By all those Sunnis who refused to participate in the election, of course.

It may be wise here to say again that the point is not that this writer knows what is going on over there. The point is that it is the sacred duty of intellectuals to maintain some distance from situations and to be critical, to seek the truth, to call public officials to a higher standard, and that is not happening. It seems as if too many writers feel that they are part of a movement, and that they are defending precious certainties against the awful ambiguities of reality. It is also sad that one could read the Journal and the National Review every day and not know one more thing about Shi'ism than you did when you started. That's not entirely true: David Pryce-Jones does his best, which is considerable, and so do some others, but they are almost drowned out in all that boosterism. Plus, he has the standing to say whatever he wants. It is, sadly, also worth noting that nasty letters from extreme leftists get published, but letters from conservatives who merely have doubts and want to ask questions never do. Indeed, they seem to inspire the greatest hostility.

Much the way, ironically, that liberals treated neocons when they left the fold.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 12:10 PM



Monday, February 14, 2005 :::
 
The Things They Don't Want You To Know.

A suspicion has been lurking in the back of the mind for quite some time that the pro-war conservative press has been keeping things from us. The Shi'a are always "quietists" who "believe in the separation of mosque and state." Dreams of a pan-Shi'a government are the product of the Iranian Revolution and were introduced as a novelty by the Ayatollah Khomeini, of unhappy memory.

The planted axioms are rather close to the surface: "quietist" means apolitical, "separation of mosque and state" means freedom of religion, and somehow the longsuffering Shi'a of Iraq have never, in the course of 85 years of oppression, been influenced by political thought emanating from Qom, where no one before Khomeini ever had any troubling thoughts. Do any of those bear rigorous analysis?

Consider conservative commentary on the murky Iraqi election results.

This morning, on National Review Online, James Robbins, professor at the National Defense University and senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, offers his analysis, which you can find here .

It is hard not to miss how much is not being said. The substantive observations are that the two leading Shi'a parties were way ahead but will still need to form some kind of coalition, and that this was a good thing. Otherwise, he merely outlines the procedure that must be followed. Pretty slight stuff, which starts off with a jocular reference to "handicapping." Given Arab fondness for betting--actually, everyone is fond of betting, come to think of it--that is surely going on, but the use of that word makes it sound as if what is being handicapped is something rather ordinary, which it is not.

Prof. Robbins, who is made of stern stuff and did not wilt under pressure from A Mind That Suits, points out that the procedural stuff is in fact not well known, and so it is substantive. A point well taken.

As always with a certain brand of conservatives, there is that sneer towards anyone who doubts. He refers to the United Iraqi Alliance as the "so-called Shi'a list." You see, you are not supposed to worry that ethnic and religious differences will cause problems, never mind that Belgian political parties are still split along such lines. He somehow doesn't mention that the other name for the list, in Arabic, is The House of Shi'a.

Which, one has to assume, Dr. Robbins knows, or, if he doesn't, he should not make so bold as to write anything on Iraq.

But that jocular "handicapping" kind of crashes against the name of the leading party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). How pro-war boosters can write the name of that party and not realize they need to dig a little further is beyond a certain writer's understanding, as is so much else these days. Dr. Robbins also seems to think it unnecessary to point out that the second party, Islamic Dawah, is a religious party. Indeed, it took about 3.5 seconds to learn that "dawah" refers to instructing people in the way of Islam. Why that information has not been common currency among conservative commentators is beyond--well, you get the idea. Why Dr. Robbins does not mention it should, at this point, start to raise questions, but it should make clear why he thinks the coalition bit is a good thing, even if he doesn't spell it out.

Oh, and by the way, both parties were based in Iran when Saddam was on top instead of on the bottom. (That sounded worse than it was intended, but we will leave it as being accidentally apposite.)

Now, turn your attention to this account in this morning's edition of The Independent from Britain. You will find some first class writing. (The headline is inexcusable. Where are the words "Some leaders feel?") The woman who is a SCIRI candidate opposes bringing clerics into the government, making it clear that "separation of mosque and state" does not mean what certain writers want you to think it means. Certain Shi'a, it appears, have dedicated themselves to an Islamic Revolution where the teachers teach and governors govern--rather as in classic Islam, where the caliph was not a cleric.

But the caliph was supposed to be good at enforcing the law, which is what the teachers taught.

The man who states baldly that "80 percent of Iraqis have no problem with shari'a (holy law)" is a member of the government which was installed by the US, which could mean that he and the people who back him supported the transitional law only as a transitional law. And it is clear that at least some Shi'a are feeling their oats and are not content to follow the Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani's admonition not to gloat.

What all that means is anyone's guess, but it is so galling that one has to use Lexis to learn all this from a British leftwing rag rather than from the National Review, whose writers used to fall all over themselves trying to show off their erudition.

One hopes that all good conservative intellectuals did what the invaluable David Pryce-Jones hoped they would do when he republished Elie Kedourie's magisterial The Chatham House Version and Other Middle Eastern Studies. But they do not appear to have done their duty,or else they would know that dreams of a pan-Shi'a state are well-entrenched in Shi'a teaching.

Or maybe they know that, and are also, as suggested above, actively keeping things from us, hoping that we will be good boys and girls and just believe .

This writer is not a good boy, and doesn't believe.

Fishing around in the old brain reminded this writer that the vast majority of the Shi'a clergy agreed to let Mr. al-Sistani be their spokesman for the duration of US administration. We will have to see if they stand by that as the jockeying for power begins. One doubts it very seriously. Then it will be interesting to see how quickly anyone gets around to telling us the names and political beliefs of the other three Grand Ayatollahs. After they get around to telling us what Mr. al-Sistani actually believes.

This just in: a check of Lexis for the years preceding the war reveals precious little on Mr. al-Sistani. However, it appears that he is the only Grand Ayatollah actually living in Iraq, even though he himself is ethnically Iranian. The other three are in Qom, and are also presumably Iranian. There is, evidently, a top post, "marja," which was held by a 103-year-old leader briefly because no one could decide who it would be. There is no reference, after his death, to anyone actually succeeding to the title, so the disagreement continued. The Iranian government, not surprisingly, wanted the title reunited with job of head of state. All of the Grand Ayatollahs are listed as opposed to combining clerics and government, but, as discussed above, that does not mean they believe freedom of religion.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 3:00 PM



Sunday, February 13, 2005 :::
 
The election results in Iraq have been hearteningly muddy--hearteningly, because the lead Shi'a list, which we are all supposed to be good little boys and girls and just love, is in fact headed by a man who also heads something called the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI).

Why we are supposed to just love that is beyond me.

While normally rational conservative commentators have been writing, "neener, neener, neener" in response to anyone who asks about Shi'a dreams of a pan-Shi'ite organization or even empire, the Financial Times of London has, rather more soberly and responsibly, reported that SCIRI is indeed openly pro-Iranian. What that means is, as with so much else, anyone's guess. Doesn't anyone in the US media read Arabic or know someone they can pay to translate? Until then, we will have to take it as read that "pro-Iranian" is a general tendency we do not want to encourage.

It was somewhat worrying that SCIRI swamped its rivals in the local council elections, reported two days ago. However, Iraqi voters have apparently learned the wisdom of ticket splitting, and gave the parliamentary ticket headed by SCIRI something less than half the vote, forcing them into some kind of coalition with a secular Shi'a list and the Kurdish list. What that means is, yet again, anyone's guess, except that it has to be better than SCIRI being in charge. Here we offer yet another appeal for some responsible conservative group to go find someone who speaks Arabic.

However, what it most certainly means is that those once- conservative writers who sneer and snarl and snipe that "You are just so stupid to ask that question" should be asking questions about this situation themselves. The rest of us should pray, frankly, as so much is out of our hands, and should lobby our Congressmen for the return of the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, which in fact did translate all kinds of things. Then one could just skip over all those once-conservative writers who sneer at anyone who is bothered by, you know, facts.

The Wall Street Journal on Friday reported also on active Turkish "interest" in Kurdistan, ostensibly in defense of a relatively small ethnic group called the Turkmen. What everyone thinks they are really interested in is containing their own Kurdish problem and the oil near Kirkuk, a largely Kurdish town. And for all the talk about how Kurdistan is a preaceable secular democracy, an official of the regional Kurdish government is quoted as saying that the Arabs in Kirkuk have to leave. They were moved there by Saddam after the disastrous revolt we provoked, to Arabize the town in the way that countries like Lithuania and Latvia were forcibly Russified. There may be Kurdish leaders that disagree, but there is so much stuff we do not know and should, after two years. But for the nonce, at least one conservative writer is deleting the word "peaceable" from his concept of "Kurdistan."

It is, finally, worth noting that many conservative writers hang on every word that issues forth from the lips of distinguished Princeton professor Bernard Lewis, who holds up Turkey as a model of a Muslim democracy. He may have missed the part a few years ago where thousands of Turks were dying in civil strife. He also skips over the fact that Turkey has almost no freedom of religion, which means it has almost no freedom. Oh, yes, and the military voids elections it doesn't like. And Turks who leave Turkey and go to Europe revert to a very "Islamist" version of Islam, meaning the country is in no way de-Islamified the way Kamal Ataturk wanted it to be. Oh, yes, and Turkey is sniffing around Kurdistan. Aside from that, great model, Prof. Lewis, but, um, do you have another one?

Pretty please?

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 5:39 PM



Thursday, February 10, 2005 :::
 
Two posts for today--scroll down for actual punditry in print by A Mind That Suits. The promised appreciation of a fallen colleague--on the theme "Angels Unawares"--is proving a little difficult to get right, for reasons that will be obvious whenever it appears. Virtue is so very hard to write about.

Now, the first of two for the day:

A Mind That Suits is pleased to introduce a new blog--Dr. Curmudgeon--put together by some old friends, some of whom are very well placed. Which is why they are anonymous. For you Allen Drury fans out there, the post reproduced below is by a political operative whose insightfulness so impressed Al that, after getting the usual round-up from his then-less-pudgy-and-not-quite-so-balded nephew would ask, "What does (Dr. Potomac) think?" The contributors are all first rate, as are their posts.

As soon as he remembers how to link without deleting his own blog, he will add Dr. Curmudgeon to his list on the right.

But attend to these brilliant insights, anent the good doctor from Vermont.

Praising Dr. Dean

Dr. Potomac must thank the Ombudsman for raising the important point of Dr. Howard Dean, erstwhile presidential candidate and governor of Vermont, and soon to be Chairman of the oldest political party in human history. The reason for Dr. Potomac's silence on this topic is simply that he is of two minds.In one mind, he's sees the logic of it perfectly. Dean is the closest thing that exists to a genuine populist figure in the Democratic Party -- if one can imagine a a popular base made up entirely of the academic, environmental and feminist elites of the country. He was able to raise $40 million dollars for his presidential bid (not since John Connally has so much political money been spent to so little political effect) through innovative use of Web-based campaigning. That is the kind of political entrepreneurship that has been entirely missing among the Democrats for 30 years or so and which was starkly missing in the John Kerry campaign. (John Kerry, true to his parsimonious New England heritage, managed to save $9 million of the funds he raised, and boy does he has some 'splainin to do.) From the rank-in-file standpoint, Howard Dean might not be a good candidate but he could very well be an excellent chairman.The above explanation assumes, of course, that the Democratic party is still on the rails of reason. A second, more plausible, explanation is that they really are just batty. Dean, as he did on the campaign trail, is the chairman of those reduced to spittle-flecked rage by the Bush presidency. Peter Beinart's call to purge the Dean/Michael Moore wing of the party, brings to mind the famous Leninist formulation, "Kto, kovo?" Translated into our context this means roughly, "Just who's going to purge whom around here?" The reason Dean has waltzed into the chairmanship is that the Deniacs are the permanent Democratic party as opposed to the Democratic party that assembles quadrenially in the cold, Iowa night to launch a frontrunner. One expects the owner to mind the store. It is Howard Dean's party. Everyone else just has to live in it.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 4:25 PM


 
A certain pudgy, balding English teacher is now a columnist in Germany. Well, perhaps "regular contributor" is the mot juste, although mot juste is French. German is largely opaque to A Mind That Suits, whose feeble attempts to become a real scholar as a lad left him with sufficient German to be able to eat and sleep comfortably from Hamburg to Vienna, but that is about it. He writes what his editor asks him to write, and then turns it over to said editor, who then translates. This is a humbling amount of respect to receive, so even when he is overcome with the urge to throttle, he is thankful for the opportunity.

Said editor is young friend Philip described last month, a genius and an accomplished intellectual in the grand German tradition. This is a rarer breed than it used to be, so it is nice to see it thriving. His dissertation advisor is a) retiring, b) unwilling to read a dissertation over 300 pages, so young Philip will also have to synthesize, something intellectuals in the grand German tradition tend to avoid. This is a good thing, and young Philip will do it quite well. It would be nice to return the favor, and offer to translate the thing, but young Philip's English is nearly flawless, so perhaps he will just edit.

In any case, in addition to starting a family and finishing a dissertation, young Philip decided to start a new free-market journal called "Gegengift," which means "the Antidote." He and his fellow Young Turks intend to be the antidote to every silly, soul-destroying social policy inflicted upon the German people, apparently, and Godspeed. If they benefit from our experiences, then so much the better.

The first issue is apparently wending its way to the US even as we speak--well, not speak, but, you know, hang together, whatever. Here is the contribution from their correspondent in Washington.

How far right is America going to turn?

It’s not clear she has turned right, first of all. The last election consolidated the lead of the Republican Party, but the Republican Party is not George W. Bush.

Mr. Bush himself sought no mandate for his policies, running an almost exclusively negative campaign. Love is blind, it is true, but Europeans simply refuse to see what a terrible candidate John Kerry was. The choice was particularly stark, as Mr. Bush refused to publicly rethink anything he had done and Mr. Kerry refused to commit himself to anything other than an absolute right to abortion.

On foreign policy, Americans will likely never accept the idea that diplomacy without strength will get anywhere. However, the full truth about Iraq will soon impress itself on the American public, and then we will see where America goes. As it is, she has no further troops to go adventuring with, so now, maybe, we all can talk. But again, in this election, the choice was so stark as to make inferences pointless.

Yet it is true: the Republicans appear to be in charge. Why?

One must understand that the USA has no Right, in the European sense, and perhaps never has. Slavery was our own horrifying anomaly, and neither it nor any of its consequences corresponds to any aspect of Western European society.

America, however, does indeed have a very real Left. Franklin Roosevelt actually proposed a “war-time” employment act that would give him the right to reassign production capabilities and workers throughout the country. That would have been the end of property rights. Congress balked. Earlier, the Supreme Court, the third branch of our government, had put a brake on his efforts to accomplish the same thing piece-meal.

Throughout the rest of the era of Democratic Party dominance, attacks against property and family continued apace on the local level. By the 1970s, at least three cities--New York, Detroit, and Washington, DC—were dominated by mayors or senior bureaucrats whose politics could only be described as Marxist, with corresponding decay.

But Marxism is not the preferred form of radicalism. Far more influential is the “lifestyle” left in the tradition of Sartre, Gramsci, and, ultimately, Rousseau.

Sartre, Gramsci, and their heirs are still worshiped by our elites as much as by those in Europe, yet our elites are certain they live the land of the Philistines. Americans are often free to ignore them, and often do. Our elites, you see, are not as elite as Europe’s elites. Tocqueville noticed this nearly 200 years ago: there are many places and many ways to be important in America. This diffuse power system produces very real benefits.

A number of books have appeared trying to explain our “right turn.” Right Nation, by two British journalists, may help Europeans understand the ins and outs of every local variation of Americana. The better book is surely Hard America, Soft America by Michael Barone, our foremost political scientist. Mr. Barone demonstrates how, for example, leftist schools may teach mathematics as an “adventure for everybody,” but our vibrant economy demands workers who actually know real math. A young person launched upon the world with inferior skills almost immediately begins looking for adult schools or home study programs to get what he was denied as a child. Even our most ostentatiously leftwing corporations, such as Starbucks Coffee and Borders Books, subject their new employees to training regimes so severe that all their workers handle money with ease and speak clearly.

Towards the end of The Fatal Conceit, von Hayek comments, “Common practices must have a chance to produce their beneficial effects on a group on a progressive scale before selection by evolution can become effective.” (p.136) In the United States, they have that chance. Those states that have the best set of policies and laws flourish, and they attract people from states that have inferior policies. When the massive migration to the South began in the 1970’s, many leftwing commentators assumed that the conservative South would become more liberal. Racial tensions did ease considerably, but those who left the North wanted nothing to do with the failed policies that ravaged those states. The South is now almost irreversibly Republican.

Consider, also, this remarkable statistic: the African-American vote for W went up almost a quarter, from 9% in 2000 to 11%. This, after four years of shameless leftist charges that Bush had “stolen” the Florida election by intimidating Black voters. Not one single instance of such intimidation has been uncovered, but the President, typically, relied on the reports of experts to vindicate him. He almost never actively challenges what is said about him.

Blacks, however, can make their own comparisons. African-Americans who accept the requirements of modern life have done quite well. Many prominent automobile dealers in the D.C. area are Black, for instance, and they have mammoth houses—and are welcome--in the most exclusive neighborhoods. Bill Cosby, our most venerable African-American entertainer, chose 2004 to point out the gulf in skills separating poor Blacks from the rest of the country.

In 2004, perhaps most importantly, Blacks lost their historic place as “the largest minority” to Hispanics. The reason was writ large. 2004 was also the 31st anniversary of the judicial fiat, Roe v. Wade, by which an unrestricted abortion right was mandated. 12 million Blacks have been aborted since. Planned Parenthood, the great promoter of abortion, began as a eugenics outfit and for years promoted abortion as a way to reduce the welfare rolls. In style, Blacks do not “hold back”, and Black conservatives on their own initiative ran ads saying bluntly, “Murder is not the way to help poor people.”

Among religious Blacks, Pres. Bush received more than a third of the vote.

Which brings us to the question of religion. Religion thrives in America because it is free. The de-Christianization of Europe came about because elites wanted it. It was not popular when it started, and even now faces strong resistance on occasion. In very sharp contrast, the American government funds virtually no religious activities, but it cannot curtail any either. American religion is consequently highly personal, and its actual effect on politics can be debated. But religion itself is very strong.

Our Left is not comfortable with this. It is hard to imagine a cabinet member being blocked because of his religious beliefs, as was Rocco Buttiglione. Leftists have, however, opposed several of W’s judges solely because they are Christian, despite sterling credentials. The judges have not yet been finally blocked, and what would normally be minor nominations with no publicity have become causes celebres—on the Right.

The above quote from Hayek was taken from a chapter on “Religion and the Guardians of Tradition.” While he was no conservative, and he ultimately found religious language meaningless, he was a great defender of tradition on evolutionary grounds. He was adamant that the “Great Society” (that is, the liberal, capitalist system) was built by institutions and practices that support both property rights and the family. Conservatism in the US is famously the first kind of conservatism in the European tradition to embrace both free markets and traditional values. Hayek saw no contradiction between the two, but he did see that they could conflict and interfere with each other. Still, he maintained, both were necessary. Europeans may wish to look to themselves, therefore, and not the “frightening” US, to understand their own failures.


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 4:12 PM



Tuesday, February 08, 2005 :::
 
A certain pudgy, balding English teacher had a car this weekend--a Chevy Malibu that performed quite nicely on a quick jaunt to NC for the monthly visit with Dad. Said English teacher had a Ford Taurus that survived daunting odds (being owned by a certain pudgy, balding English teacher) but when said Taurus finally called it quits, so did the English teacher. For one reason: his leafy Washington neighborhood has become overgrown with two car families. Mt. Pleasant didn't need "gentrification," per se, as it was a pleasant mix of rich, middle, and poor, but there were a host of houses that could get fixed up and now have been. What a pain. By habits a late night person, said E.t. has not seen a parking space anywhere near his house at a time when he would need one for perhaps a year. Or more. T'ain't worth it.

But the sense of liberation in having a car is tremendous. It is an amazing feeling to hop in it and just go.

Until you get to the part where you have to sit in it and just stop. As in two hours of "parking is actually faster" traffic out of DC. Or as in suddenly remembering your secret "northern route" around a school and Metro station zone that is perennially clogged, and making it back behind the two busses that were just ahead of you when you detoured--only you are now exactly behind, as the cars that had been between you and the busses are nowhere to be seen, the streets that you avoided being mysteriously empty. (For you non-urban types, that means the cars that were in front of you got caught in something, so you have just dodged a bullet.)

Then it comes back to you: it takes 24 minutes on a normal morning to get to your office which is theoreticallyon 7 minutes away.

So then you find yourself thinking: busses--unpredictable, but you can read half the paper on the way to the coffee shop.

Tomorrow, a tribute to a colleague who just passed away. His story brought to mind the Bible verse, "some have entertained angels unawares." (Hebrews 13:2)


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 1:38 PM



Friday, February 04, 2005 :::
 
It's simple really: if you aren't moved by all those people defiantly holding up purple fingers, there is something deeply wrong with you.


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 10:39 AM



Wednesday, February 02, 2005 :::
 
testing again



::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 4:52 PM


 
Testing...testing...


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 4:44 PM


 
Hey, y'all (sorry--grew up Down South):

If you are looking for THE LITANY, please scroll down to November 17, but leave your comments here, as A MIND THAT SUITS just enabled comments.

Well, maybe he didn't--it doesn't seem to be taking. He will try again later.




::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 4:35 PM



Sunday, January 30, 2005 :::
 
Hats off to the Iraqi people. A few weeks ago, this writer wrote that he would not be surprised if everything went well, but he did not expect it. He is not surprised, and he admits he was a pessimist. However, it turned out about the way that the hopeful realists said--large turnouts among everyone but the Sunnis, most of whom wanted to vote but were scared. Still, it is a mighty accomplishment, and a tribute to the dedicated people of Iraq.

It is a refreshing thing to see that supporters of the war are now talking about how long the road is ahead. This beats talking about happy natives rising up to greet us, and is a concession to the realist position that is way overdue. That the supporters of the war are now saying it is the realists who expected it to be easy--a complete, shameless, and willful lie--is most annoying, but we will have to take what we can get from the "cakewalk" folks.

For right now, our hats must go off to the Iraqis for their bravery today, and we must increase pressure on our leaders to do things right.




::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 6:27 PM



Thursday, January 27, 2005 :::
 
The invaluable MEMRI has produced this moving collection of "get out the vote" ads from Iraq. If this blog has maintained a critical attitude toward what a far more knowledgeable man called "the incompetence of this administration," it is because letting these poor people suffer anymore would be a very great tragedy. There will be silence on this blog through the weekend, in support of this inspiring yet fragile moment. May peace come to that troubled land.


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 7:57 PM



Wednesday, January 26, 2005 :::
 
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!

National Review Online has this headline right at the top this afternoon:
TKS: '08 Watch.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 8:24 PM


 
Newcomers, please check August 10, 2003, for a handy selection of A Mind That Suits. For the entire text of the Litany on the GWOT, please scroll down to November 17.

For today:

The Global War on Terror: coming soon to a power grid near you. (1)

In the torrent of words surrounding W’s re-election last fall, two statements set off alarm bells, but few heard them. One was an essay in the Wall Street Journal. One was by an outgoing Cabinet member.

The essay was called, “Our Hair Is On Fire.” In it, the authors, including two former senators and a legendary New York Times correspondent, outlined in the starkest possible terms our vulnerability to attack by terrorists and the inattention that vulnerability is receiving from our leaders. It repays rereading.

The other, far more worrying, was a comment by outgoing Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson. In his final press conference, he wondered aloud why our food supply had not been attacked because “it would be so easy to do.” Jay Leno had a field day with that one, but our supposedly more serious thinkers more or less let it fly by.

A little background is in order. Tommy Thompson is one of the finest public servants of the last 50 years. It is to him that we owe the destruction of a welfare system that was destroying poor families—although Republicans have so far been too weak-kneed to extend welfare reform, so his legacy may be short-lived in that area. Much of the content of W’s “compassionate conservatism” was tried out in the testing laboratory known as Wisconsin under the steady hands of then Gov. Thompson, so it made sense that W. put him in charge of social policy.

And he did a superb job, as always. This became clear during the anthrax attack. Sec.Thompson quickly acquired a crack team to handle the attack and personally ensured that bureaucratic roadblocks would be blown aside. A close friend help set up the office. He was a Kennedy era liberal about to retire, and he was awed and amazed at Thompson’s performance. At various times during the day, the Secretary would wander in, sit down next to someone, and ask what they needed. And they got it.

It is therefore highly unlikely that he would idly point out an area where we are unprotected, which is why his statement was so worrying. It is unthinkable that he would not have told the President.

Which may mean that there is at work in the Administration a serious misconception in the War on Terror. As discussed here and by others far more able, the whole concept of a War on Terror is the problem, but we will return to that later.

Two things to think about.

In the stunned aftermath of 9/11, many an expert pontificated about how much support the terrorists needed, with numbers reaching into the hundreds. Those hundreds have never been found—because they were never there, and were never needed.

Osama bin-Laden did indeed use his network to get his people in place and get them the training they needed, and that network is (or was) impressively arrayed. There was also a “general” who commanded that group of terrorists.

But assuming that bin-Laden was willing to die himself and actually had as much cash as people then thought (he doesn’t, we know now), how many people would he have needed to pull off the attacks?

19.

The “support” he needed came from services provided happily by diligent entrepreneurs, about as much support as you need to plan a vacation or get a professional certificate.

The second consideration is this, mentioned directly in “Our Hair Is On Fire.” Since 9/11, al-Qaeda has pulled off two major attacks. The Madrid attack was, relative to population, as devastating as 9/11, and the Bali attack wreaked considerable economic havoc on a very vulnerable population. The US itself, however, has not been attacked.

Why?

Supporters of the war say that it was the war, or, as a skeptical George Will quoted one officer of the Southern Command, “we are so much in their shorts over there.”

This is not true. We have not been attacked because the British did a good job making sure we wouldn’t be. The British police and intelligence services thwarted an attack on our major financial institutions, not the British army, despite the admirable job it is doing in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And this is the major misconception that seems to be at play, that military operations alone will keep us safe. The war has not made us safe, or perhaps even safer. It eliminated Saddam Hussein. If a stable government is established, we will have someone we can work with, although our poor planning has already ensured that a vast array of military supplies has been stolen and distributed who knows where. And a message has been sent—if we can make it stick—that governments that support terrorists may get what they deserve.

But the 9/11 plot was hatched here in the good old U.S. of A., so will we really be safe even if every government on earth is on our side?

No, we won’t be.

You may remember the massive blackout in the summer of 2003 caused by some seemingly small technical glitches in an Ohio power system. One important point to remember about it is that many Arabs believe Osama bin-Laden pulled it off.

But far more importantly, following that debacle, a joint Canadian-American investigative commission published a report. A snooze-inducing analysis on the Journal op-ed page noted blandly that the best thing about the first half of it was that we finally had a thorough explanation of how the power grid worked.

All this writer could think of was 100 really creepy guys flipping through it going, “uh-huh…check...interesting…worth looking into…” We have to read the newspapers in a different way.

And that friend who helped Tommy Thompson worried, on his own, about our phone switching system, put together haphazardly and lying utterly unprotected.

And Tommy Thompson felt he had to mention the food supply to someone who would listen.

It is worrying, indeed, that he did not feel he had been heard, and worrying indeed that the authors of “Our Hair is On Fire” sensed that no one was much doing what needed to be done.

A final sobering thought. The second largest terrorist attack in the US was carried out by two loners who were part of, but hardly needed, a larger network. They were largely uneducated, and they killed 167 people with fertilizer. What can 20 really smart guys pull off? Are we worrying about that?

For a superb summary of the problems, by a group of people who really know a lot more, please look at the National Intelligence Council's recent Mapping the Global Future .


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 6:54 PM



Tuesday, January 25, 2005 :::
 
When one is subject to chronic bronchitis, one kind of gets used to the suspended animation into which it puts you. Everyone sounds as if they are ten miles away, and you feel like doing nothing other than sleeping. But somehow, one gets through the day. And then one remembers one has a blog.

Tomorrow will commence an analysis of the concept, "The Global War on Terror." But for now, a few more z's.

May those of you in hot climates have your cars boil over. Winter is nice. Freezer burn on your scalp is not.

For the full text of the Litany on the GWOT, please scroll down. For a look at the Best of A Mind That Suits, please see the August 10, 2003 archive.

Later.


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 1:40 PM



Tuesday, January 18, 2005 :::
 
A Mind That Suits is pleased to be getting so much traffic, but he enjoy knowing who is out there, so please take a moment to use the e-mail address over at right.

For newcomers--most of whom probably got here because they received a copy of the Litany on the GWOT--please go to August 10, 2003, for a selection of greatest hits to give you an idea of what A Mind That Suits is all about. It is not, per se, a political blog, and the war has overshadowed that a little, but we are slowly returning to our more rounded self--not that a certain pudgy, balding English teacher needs to be rounder, but you know what he means.

We leave the last thought this morning toJay Leno (we paraphrase) : "President Bush says that his re-election showed that American people support his policy in Iraq--the way in 1996 that Bill Clinton thought his re-election showed that the American people thought he should continue to cheat on Hilary.

Same sort logic."


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 9:03 AM



Monday, January 17, 2005 :::
 
Bear with A Mind That Suits for one minute. He would like to quote himself from 13 months ago. If you remember this post, scroll through it to the end, where there are some new thoughts, as A Mind That Suits has now seen Elf.

From December, 2003.

The editorial that always leads off the Taste page extolls the success of Elf, a thoroughly G movie, whose innocence even the normally shameless (though brilliant) Will Ferrell is proud of. The editorial is always anonymous, but reads far more personally than the real editorials in the main section. This writer compares Elf with kid movies that slip in swear words or leers to make themselves appear more sophisticated. But instead of citing, say, the Cat in the Hat, which is supposed to be quite vulgar and aggressive, the writer reaches all the way back to 1982 to slam the "gratuitous 'penis breath'" used in ET. Now, that particular famous expression may have been gratuitous, in that the movie could easily have done without it, and because the use of some rough language was forced on a then fledgling Steven Spielberg by the studio. (Yes, Virginia, there was a time when the mighty Steven did not have final cut.) A "G" movie just wouldn't sell, said the studio. And yet the complain misses a point: ET is not a children's movie, in the way that Elf is. It is a very sad, deeply moving tale about, in Spielberg's words, "what it's like to grow up lonely in the suburbs." And faced with an unreasonable demand from a studio, he searched within the world he was describing and came up with exactly the kind of expression that a sheltered, nerdy kid might say. "Penis" is not really a swear word, and "penis-breath" is not something anyone with any real exposure to rough language is likely to say. That is left to the 15-year-old brother, who mumbles two rather pedestrian but indisputably obscene epithets later in the movie. Yet no one complains about those. Which may--just maybe--mean that Mr. Spielberg succeeded in coming up with mot juste, if you will. And when he hears complaints about it, A Mind That Suits finds himself wondering, "how may 11-year-old boys do you know?"

The last time he saw it, A Mind That Suits was nearly alone in Washington's magnificent Uptown Theatre halfway up Connecticut Avenue, a grand movie palace from the classic days, and he found a seat dead center, in the front row of the balcony. About 1 hour into it, he began crying for no discernible reason, except that the family situation in the movie is so in expressibly sad. He was worried that he would be the object of some derision from the teenaged girls behind him until just after the movie, when a mother came over to them and said, "I'll (sniff) meet (sniff) you (sniff) at (sob) the car (sniff)," and the girls replied, "o (sniff) k (sob)." Which is why whatever cavils one may have about "penis-breath," it is far, far more important to recognize that ET is indeed one of the monuments of 20th Century American art. Elf, whatever its merits, is unlikely to hold a similar position in the 21st.

And now the new stuff:

A Mind That Suits has now seen "Elf," a wise housemate having waited until it was on DVD to see it. It is garbage. It is not, really, even garbage in the grand tradition of child adventures starring Hayley Mills, at which Disney used to excell.

Secondly, he would like to repent of his acknowledgment of the word "gratuitous" regarding the epithet "penis breath" in E.T., for reasons he will state below.

Thirdly, he would like to know which version of Elf the Journal editorialist saw, as the 10-year-old protagonist of Elf say, loudly and emphatically, "up yours." "Up yours" is indisputably foul, about as foul as it can get.

Fourthly, let A Mind That Suits say clearly that "penis breath" was not gratuitous. Repeat: "penis" is not technically a swear word, and "penis breath" is exactly the sort of phrase that someone unused to rough language would use. As, for instance, a nerdy, painfully lonely 11-year-old in a broken home.

Fifthly, thinking today, he came up with a much better example of something gratuitous. Jungle 2 Jungle, starring Tim Allen, featured young Sam Huntington, then 14 but looking just-pubescent, walking around largely naked making sexual inuendo. He was covered front and back, or rather, about 4 inches front and back, which covering was held by a string that left him naked on the side. It is listed as a family comedy.

So why does "penis breath" still grate, after 22 years? Because Steven Spielberg may be at his best in showing us what boys are really like, and boys make lots of people very uncomfortable.






::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 11:55 AM



Friday, January 14, 2005 :::
 
Yesterday's blog dumps on conservatives who see the world in black and white, implicitly coming to the defense of Brent Scowcroft. But perhaps it is time to dish a little out to those who see the world in gray, as the foreign policy establishment most emphatically does.

First, the statment by Gen. Scowcroft--that the election may well push Iraq into full-scale civil war--is hardly a radical proposition, and it is interesting that he did not in fact suggest pushing it back, unless it was later in the talk. So apparently the almost complete lack of Sunni candidates is just one of those things we shouldn't worry about.

But Gen. Scowcroft did go on to make an excellent analysis of the reasons that the Bush administration was so adamantly unlitateralist, and how they should now seek to re-establish ties with our "allies." But then he went a bridge too far: You really can get your allies to agree if you just talk to them.

Oh, really? At the first NATO meeting after 9/11, in October of that fateful year, Donald Rumsfeld drew headlines for outlining exactly such a unilateralist policy. And why did the Administration not try conciliation first? Because the French had told us, unilaterally, that they would not help us. Mr. Rumsfeld didn't bother to explain,though. He just stated.

So there is the problem in a nutshell.

Conservative impulses, including a real hesitancy about alliances, can also lead one to have doubts about the current Administration's way of handling things.

But, sorry, General, talking doesn't always get your allies to agree.


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 1:29 PM



Thursday, January 13, 2005 :::
 
This writer, frankly, does not understand this world--the world, that is, of the conservative intellectual elite, or of some of it. Tom Donnelly, usually a fairly clear-sighted man, has a piece this morning on the Weekly Standard's website decrying the "conventional wisdom" on Iraq, which is that a civil war is inevitable. It's not the President's supporters who are blinded by ideology, but the holders of the "conventional wisdom" who are--you know, such as former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft (Gen,U.S.Army-Ret), renowned the world over for his devotion to ideology and his irrational, impulsive behavior. That incident where he danced naked in Lafayette Square still inspires giggles in foreign policy circles. Oh, yeah, and he never learned how to read. Or so you'd think.

And the Journal--just to make it a perfect morning for this kind of thing--had a piece on how great the Iraq economy is doing.

What's with this "black-and-white" stuff? If one wants that, one can always be a liberal. Why can one not believe in a "forward strategy of freedom" and still be thoroughly depressed at how that strategy is being implemented? Why can one not believe average Iraqis want freedom and democracy and not watch fearfully for signs that they might not get it?Mr. Donnelly simply does not have his facts right--dreams of a pan-Shi'a state are old and entrenched, not a product of the Iranian revolution, and those dreams are held by current Shi'a leaders, perhaps even the leader of that unified slate that is supposed to make us all happy.When he asserts that the wide array of people running demonstrates a pluralist society, he overlooks the US government's own polls showing the religious parties to be ahead. There're a lot of people running, but that doesn't mean they all have any kind of electoral base, or that they all think pluralism is anything more than a useful tool to be discarded on Feb. 1. The Journal itself reports this morning that the Shi'a have given up on finding a way to get the Sunnis to the polls. There is, as usual in this kind of piece, an overload of assertions, and a paucity of facts to back them up. He may be right, but conservatives are supposed to like words like that--the tentative ones. He makes cold hard predictions.

As for the economy, the Journal has tons of people that know full well that people profit enormously under ephemeral booms as they do in a solid economy. All the op-ed piece did was spin off positive stats. Not a good argument.

Missing from Mr. Donnelly's piece is any discussion of what is being proferred by those political parties, and the only run-down this writer has seen--from the indispensable MEMRI -- states clearly that the unified Shi'ite-plus-some-other-folks slate is running on no platform whatsoever, meaning its members could not agree on one. Yup, that's a great sign.

These pieces read exactly the way liberals talk: if you disagree, you don't know the facts and you are deluded and irrational. At least they don't include insinuations about how you must secretly hope to gain from your positions, but that's probably coming. There is a reason this writer doesn't read the New York Times, and fortunately many other writers at the Standard do a much better job.

The job of an intellectual is to criticize, to seek the truth. That includes criticizing one's own position. When will our elite return to that sacred task?

This writer is prepared for things to go well in Iraq, but does not expect it. Are "believers" in Iraqi democracy preparing themselves for what will happen if the "realists" turn out to have been realistic?

Pop quiz, here: has anyone seen an explanation of what a "Grand Ayatollah" is? Explanations exist, but most journalists--right, left, or center--clearly have no idea. Here's a hint: no journalist has bothered to go find out what the other ones think. Yup, there are other ones.

Oh, and that thing about Gen. Scowcroft dancing naked? Didn't happen. And he can read.


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 11:53 AM



Wednesday, January 12, 2005 :::
 
Before today's news, let's welcome the newcomers.

New to A Mind That Suits? Check out the "best of" from August 10.

For the full text of The Litany on the GWOT, please scroll down.

For a whole discussion of the role of conservative intellectuals in the run-up to the Iraqi elections, please start reading through and you will find several posts.

And now for some quickies:

DC was shocked this morning when its venerable "alternative rock" station WHFS switched to a Salsa/Carribean blend Spanish language format. Back in the 1980's, this would have been a tragedy, as HFS was how everyone heard of U2, the Smiths, and the Pixies. In the 1990's, it would have meant the loss of one more rock station, altough as late as 1999, a certain pudgy balding English teacher was able to keep up with the kids in the youth group he was helping with by listening in on the way to work. Even then, when they changed their motto to "The New Rock Alternative," said English teacher joked, "How about, 'The Alternative to New Rock?'" But two or three years ago, it hit bottom, with a heavy metal format and sleazy DJ's whose emotional level was not much higher than the 14-year-olds they were trying to "reach." So frankly, good riddance HFStival, hola, El HFS.

According to the Washington Post, the Iraq Survey Group that has been looking for those WMD has given up, and the most recent "interim report" given by ISG head Charles A. Duelfer will become the final report. Escalating violence and the lack of new leads led them to pack it in, factors which, of course, neither the insurgents nor the French will dare mention. Now will it affect troop morale.

Today also marks the 447th consecutive day that George W. Bush and his supporters in the conservative intellectual press have failed to articulate why we are in Iraq, or own up to the missing WMD. The main concern now is that our failures have betrayed in advance the brave souls who will risk their lives voting on January 30. But nevermind.





::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 5:20 PM



Tuesday, January 11, 2005 :::
 
In his on-going campaign to make sure that no "conservative" publication outside the Weekly Standard will ever be willing to print anything he writes, a certain pudgy, balding English teacher sent the following letter to Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review, who, along with some other misguided soul, committed that strange offense: accusing conservative opponents of Donald Rumsfeld of doing what--the record clearly shows--Mr. Rumsfeld himself has done. In this case, to say that war would be easy.

The career-stiffling letter (with two tyos corrected and a parenthetical explanation added):

Dear Mr. Lowry:

I hope this finds you well.

When you wrote that "conservatives should know better" than to make war sound easy, I could not agree with you more.

I felt just that way when I went back and checked the record, and found that Mr. Rumsfeld had told Congress, in September, 2002, that "it won't cost much" to liberate Iraq.

I felt just that way when I went back and checked the record, and found that several conservatives, in late Winter, 2003, expressed the opinion that "a few days" after the tanks rolled, everyone would know we were right about WMD and join us in the GWOT.

I felt just that way just this very morning, when Pio Laghi, a reliable man, was quoted as saying, ""When I went to Washington as the pope's envoy just before the outbreak of the war, he(the President) told me, 'Don't worry, your eminence. We'll be quick and do well in Iraq.'" (That was in the Post.)

What I don't remember is the part where conservatives are just supposed to sit down and "oooh and aaah" at the wisdom of the enlightened. I thought conservatives were supposed to be sceptical of government power, and read their documents. Which is what I am, and what I have done, and why I must count myself among Mr. Rumsfeld's detractors, and not his supporters.

Conservatives should indeed know better.

All the best,

A Certain Pudgy Balding English Teacher


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 4:32 PM



Sunday, January 09, 2005 :::
 
A Mind That Suits promised happy thoughts, and indeed there are some to come, including meditations on how our society treats the handicapped, what a beautiful city Washington is, if you ignore the residents, and the joys of being in a large Latin percussion concert with lovely ladies your own age and a bunch of teenage boys who serve, as one of the lovely ladies pointed out, to make us older folk sound good.

But work calls--the semester starts tomorrow, and a certain pudgy balding English teacher is woefully unprepared--so we will leave you with this thought about music.

For Catholics, the Christmas season extends, essentially, from December 17 to today, the Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord. December 17 begins the final countdown to Christmas--if we can use "countdown" in this context--and The Baptism of Our Lord ends the commemoration of the day when "The Word Become Flesh" was made manifest. For the commercial interests, the Christmas season begins shortly before Labor Day, and ends on December 26, which begins the "let's get rid of all this junk" season. The commercialization of Christmas is something that just gets worse, but it has been noted for a very long time. Tom Lehrer, the last truly funny leftist, had a Christmas song in the Sixties which contained the memorable line, "Angels we have heard on high, telling us to go out and BUY."

So how can this breed a happy thought? Well, with the development of the whole feelgood market in music--epitomized, need we spell it out, by Celine Dion--there has come a whole raft of feelgood Christmas songs which can only be described as complete garbage. About the only two songs that this writer enjoys hearing are a perky little version of "All I Want for Christmas Is You" by Mariah Carey, and " Happy Xmas (War is Over)," by the Plastic Ono Band (i.e., John and Yoko), which song sounds suspiciously like the old folk song "Stewball Was A Pony," but is beautiful nonetheless. Aside from that, all garbage.

Which means that all the really gorgeous traditional Christmas music is, at long last, confined to wear it belongs, on home stereos and at Church. If you want to know the power of the familiar and the beautiful, park yourself somewhere in Washington's St. Matthew Cathedral next year and hear the faithful launch into "Adeste Fideles" shortly after midnight. It helps if the crowd has been prepared--as they are at St. Matthew-- by a wonderful Scola Cantorum's singing of a classic 16th Century piece called the "Mystery of the World." Trust me--really boffo stuff.

And you won't hear it at the Mall.

And that, as a certain inmate in a minimum security prison likes to say, is a good thing.



::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 1:39 PM



Monday, January 03, 2005 :::
 
The previous post contains the statement that one of the reasons conservative intellectual discourse about the war is so abysmal is that many conservative writers majored in "political science or some other social science, and not history and philosophy."

Although there is truth in that, it needs a little shading. Certainly a number of people whose academic training is technically in political science have made major contributions to intellectual discourse. Two of our best writers on current affairs--William McGurn of the New York Post and Robert Samuelson of Newsweek--are trained as economists. Mr. McGurn, in particular, writes with considerable knowledge on a wide range of subjects. While doing research last summer, this writer wiled away mildly bibulous Friday nights with a brilliant young German economist just completing his Ph.D.. Young Philip was the embodiment of the classic German ideal of the broadly educated scholar, and had a real conservative’s depth of historical knowledge.

It is hard to think that there could be a conservative sociologist, given that Auguste Comte, that field’s founder, said that the aim of sociology was socialism. Yet it was exactly a sociologist, the great Peter Berger, who provided some of the best initial work among the dreaded “neo-cons.” Even one of his books written when he was more liberal--Pyramids of Sacrifice--still repays careful attention.

But let us look at journalism, traditionally the least respected of academic fields--except for teacher's training. If that book that keeps not getting written had actually been written, then someone seeking an argument could point out that “you said that Allen Drury was the single most important influence in your intellectual development. Did he not major in journalism?” Indeed he did.

And we will go one better: there is a current Washington Post reporter--a secular liberal even--whose work rises to the lofty standards maintained by Al. Al’s own work as a reporter in the 1940’s and 1950’s is still mined by scholars of the period, particularly his greatest work, A Senate Journal, written during FDR’s decline. Al, it should be pointed out, was 26 when he wrote it. So “lofty” is the word to apply to his standards, and my Post friend rises to them with aplomb.

But let us look more closely: the Stanford journalism (now communications) department requires that its majors pick another field to minor in. More importantly, Allen Drury came to Stanford pre-soaked in British and American history. He took a circumnavigational approach to studying, which displeased his teachers somewhat, but the style paid off: he dedicated one whole summer to studying the Confederacy on his own, something which almost no major university allows. The Senate he came to cover almost immediately after he graduated was dominated by the segregationist Democrats of the “Solid South.”

In his declining years, he sent his pudgy balding nephew a book he thought of some interest. It is called The Great Game, a history of European competition over South Asia. The book acquired a new cachet after 9/11. In one of his last novels, A Thing of State, Al referred to the “Third Gulf War” when the oil fires from the first one were still burning. Allen Drury, it seems, never lost his reporter’s nose.

So, too, with the Post reporter. His desk groans under a pile of books, none of whose contents will ever warrant even one column inch in his writings, but they inform his writing and give him leads that simply escape any other reporter on the same beat at a major publication. (The Journal, in many ways the most important paper in the world, published an overview of the career of the most important public figure in that area. The reporters had done nothing more than ask people at a typical liberal New York dinner what they thought. It was appalling.)

It is almost a certainty, by the way, that the Post reporter would never have bought some of those books on his desk on his own; dispassionate reading is a key to good reporting.

The magic word is “reading.” This new breed of conservative writer seems to fall down exactly where we used to be strongest--our comfort around difficult books.

The French have a marvelous expression which has no counterpart in English: “professional deformation.” There is something about each profession, in other words, that tends to twist the views or affect the personalites of its members. Journalism has one of the worst. Call it “Woodsteinism:” the belief that the greatest moment comes when you can yell “gotcha.” In thrillers, this often takes the form of a reporter going to see the one expert everyone tells him he simply has to talk to. The expert gives him an account of whatever problem he is an expert in, but at some point, the reporter snarls, “but what’s the real story?” At which point, the expert pauses, brushes aside the stacks of paper he has been referring to, and whispers some incredible conspiracy theory, a large corporation usually being the real villain. (How so many reporters can live on the assumption that corporations are the embodiment of evil when they in DC, where for many years there was no private sector and the government raped the poor folks, is beyond this writer, but that is a tale for another day.)

The important point is the attitude toward reporting: the story is almost always in the documents, and the documents are what a younger generation of conservative writers seems unfamiliar with. Worse, they do not seem to have acquired a genuine intellectual interest in Arab culture or Islam. If any of them have read beyond Bernard Lewis and Stephen Schwartz, or has even read Prof. Lewis’s books and not just his op-ed pieces, it does not seem to be showing up in their reporting.

As for how many have taken up Arabic--well, we are talking about Americans, and foreign languages seem especially foreign to most of us. But during the Cold War, it was the Hoover Felllows who spoke Russian fluently, and conservativer writers who remembered what happened in 1933, or 1949. Most younger conservatives seem unaware that former Communists continue to dominate even in such successful ex-Communist countries as Poland. All they know is that Ronald Reagan won the Cold War. They “know” about 1989, but not even about 1993.

So it’s not so much that too many conservatives have majored in journalism or poli sci, it's that they have been uncritical of the assumptions and superficial thinking that seem to go with those fields.

And they’re not reading enough.

Happy thoughts tomorrow. Promise.





::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 11:20 AM



Friday, December 31, 2004 :::
 
Sigh.

That was the reaction elicited by a lengthy editorial in the Wall Street Journal this morning. That once mighty source of rigorous argument and diligent reporting offered its assessment that 2004 marked the end of the romantic view of terrorists.

That may be plausible--a word to which we will return--when one looks at international cooperation on criminal investigations. If most European countries afforded their own citizenry the civil liberties we take for granted, even under the “onerous” Patriot Act, then a whole host of terrorists would still be running around. (Those “French citizens” from Guantanamo that we had to give up were returned to the loving hands of their government, and have not been heard from since. One wonders if French even has a word for “public defender.” ACLU, telephonez chez vous.)

Today’s editorial bore the marks of some of the larger misunderstandings that seem to plague discussion of the “war on terrorism” on the Right, misunderstandings that form the core of a piece that will appear here in the New Year.

What drew the sigh was the confident allegation that “in Iraq, things are gradually turning America’s way.”

The evidence for that? The failure of the majority of Sunnis to rise up and defend Fallujah. “The only voice to heard from the proverbial Arab street” was the infamous Mr. Zarqawi's cursing Muslim clerics for failing to support him.

There has been the dizzying sensation during this whole wretched season that, in asking questions of nominal conservatives, one finds oneself talking instead to liberals, judging by their intellectual style. Liberals are past masters at what this writer long ago dubbed “single-facting.” That is, it is impossible to talk to many liberals because they always bring out one fact that is supposed to make you smack your forehead and say in breathless awe, “I never thought of that.” Perhaps a better name for this lazy and annoying reflex is “my gay friend.” You know, if the subject of gay marriage comes up, the liberal always cites “my gay friend” who is so loyal to his lover of “so many years” as evidence that any opposition to gay marriage is based on blind ignorance or worse.

Once, this did not form the staple of conservative intellectual discourse, which had stood head and shoulders above anything on the left over most of the last 40 years, but it does now. Wonder about troop morale? Why, here’s a letter from Johnny next door who says how much everyone in his company is just proud to serve. You can just ignore the kid from down the block who lost his arm and complains bitterly that no one has explained why he had to go over there in the first place. Well, morally and intellectually, you can’t, but if you write for certain publications, you do anyway.

The “evidence” cited above to prove that “things are gradually turning America’s way” certainly doesn’t merit the name. For one thing, if anyone is really keeping track of what those clerics are saying, he has not been reporting it. One hastens to add that it must be a survey of all the clerics, and not just the one from next door. Moreover, what is the evidence that many Sunni leaders don’t want the elections to fail? How about, they do, but they also don’t want anything to do with Zarqawi. What about all those newly minted police in Mosul who greeted the fleeing Fallujah insurgents with open arms and joined them? What is the evidence that a violent minority hasn’t terrorized the Sunni into sitting out the election? The leader of the largest Sunni party has already called on people to avoid the election--though it must be pointed out that it is hard to be certain it is the largest party, just as it is hard to know if many Shi’a really agree with the Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani, who has been granted a status by some American writers that goes beyond what a “Grand Ayatollah” really is. We do know that there are so few Sunni candidates that the Shi’a leaders are thinking of just giving them seats in parliament.

(If the Sunnis overcome their fear and go to the polls, the way the Afghanis did, it will inspire awe in this writer. He is not saying the election is doomed. He is saying it is problematic. The question is, are the Pollyannas on the Right preparing themselves for all possibilities?)

What are the reasons for this intellectual flabbiness? Part of it might be that many conservative intellectual leaders have received their training in political science or some other social science, and not history and philosophy. Many also took part in debate in school, which these days rewards those who blow the most smoke (thanks to a scoring system created by Larry Tribe, which should tell you.) Part of it also comes from a faulty belief that knowledge comes from defending propositions, from collecting positive examples. It does not: on what the Medieval philosophers called “contingent” facts--ones that can be either true or false--the only way to find out the truth is to test and criticize, and then test and criticize some more.

But ultimately what it comes down to is too many lunches. The conservative intellectual establishment is so big that, until things really started to unravel in Iraq, many conservative columnists would start a piece, “As my good frend X said to me just yesterday…”

Whatever the reason, conservatism has achieved a state of genuinely inferior intellectual discourse. Victor Davis Hanson provided an excellent illustration recently when he defended Donald Rumsfeld, as is his wont. He dilated on that favorite topic of his because some very respectable voices had been enraged by the good Secretary’s response to that staged question from a soldier about armored Humvees. And how did Prof. Hanson describe that response. “Plausible.” That’s it. That’s acceptable. “Plausible” is good enough.

But it’s not. It's really not. West Point Professor Frederick Kagan, in the Weekly Standard, provided a list of decisions--all a matter of public record--coming from Mr. Rumsfeld which showed that we went to war with the Army Donald Rumsfeld wanted. So the response was “plausible” only if you strip it from its context, which conservative intellectuals are never supposed to do. Nor are they supposed to cut anyone slack because he means well. If you put that response back in its context, then it becomes clear what Sec. Rumsfeld dared utter to our troops, and it is worth pointing out that we used to be the party of personal responsibility.

Two last observations to show that the closely argued editorial this morning could better be described as circular.

It is true that the Shi’a seem committed to this election. Regular readers of this blog know that the head of the Shi’a list of candidates is the head of something known as the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a man who favored the American invasion exactly because it would afford the opportunity to bring on that revolution and bring Iraq closer to Iran. And he is not the only Shi’a to think that might yet happen . Iraqi Prime Minister Allawi attended a meeting of Iraq’s neighbors to solicit support for the election. Guess who showed up to offer their help? Members of the Iranian government.

And as for France’s new found clarity on terrorists, those of us who look at the whole range of French actions find it remarkable that no one in Europe started screaming much when a member of the French government referred to the insurgents as “our closest foreign policy collaborators”--because it will embarrass the United States and strengthen a Gaullist Europe. French cynicism knows no bounds, of course, but it is worth remembering that the next time Mr. Gigot quotes his gay French friend.


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 11:09 AM



Wednesday, December 29, 2004 :::
 
A Cheerful Thought

The horrific earthquake and tsunami have dominated the headlines, as they should. Certainly, our prayers and donations should be with the poor victims.

But things continue apace in Iraq, and on that front, the news does not appear to be good. The major Sunni party has called on people to boycot the election. Whether the average Sunni is actually fed up with their self-appointed leaders and will show up at the polls regardless, as happened in Afghanistan, is known only to God. It is something to hope for, and pray for, and work for, if one can, but it is not something to depend on. The insurgents have made some impressive attacks--impressive in the worst way--and a reasonable belief is that even people who hate them and want a democratic Iraq are feeling the pressure to abstain.

And it is certain that Sunnis who find themselves with little or no representation in the new parliament will feel uneasy about submitting to a government that is 75% Shi'a or more. The Shi'ite leaders are aware of this, and are reportedly trying to come up with plans to forestall this calamity--including just handing parliamentary seats to Sunnis. One hopes whatever they come up with works.

But if the situation just deteriorates or even spins out of control, is it likely that the Shi'a leaders, many of whom want the US out as quickly as possible, will suddently decide they want us to stay? Or will they decide, as good Muslims, that help from the infidel has gone on long enough and it is time for them to take control of their slice of the dar-al-Islam?

This writer will not hasten to say. But it is worth considering alternative ways that things will play out, and a very real one has the Shi'a working diligently to push us out once the votes are counted--quickly or slowly depending on their reading of the situation, but determinedly.

And then Devil take the hindmost.

It is also worth thinking what will happen to a President whose major policy has blown up in the worst way imaginable, given his inability to rethink what he has done and his disdain for negotiation. Will the Republicans in Congress, seeking to save their natural advantage with the voters, simply throw him overboard, rhetorically speaking. They could highlight the many honorable things they did to try and warn him on foreign policy, and simply take over domestic policy. Congress has already given notice that they will not merely ask "how high?" They may even start asking "who are you?"


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 1:53 PM



Thursday, December 23, 2004 :::
 
There is a real sense of liberation when your employer locks you out of your workplace, if they expect you back at a later date. And so it was with some pleasure that a certain pudgy, balding English teacher heard the back door of his classroom building click shut. No way to get back in. "If there's no choice, there's no problem," as a very great thinker, James Burnham, once put it.

But that does mean no blogging until this weekend, when A Mind That Suits joins his father for Christmas. Until then, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all.


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 1:11 PM



Monday, December 20, 2004 :::
 
The Great Goddess Feelgood is apparently a stern mistress who demands complete submission from her lovers. The once-glorious editorial page of the Wall Street Journal this morning offers an interesting plan for "internationalizing" the war effort in Iraq: include troops from Muslim countries. Which?, you might reasonably ask.

Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia comes the answer.

On Bangladesh, this writer offers no comment, as he knows nothing, just as he knows that the writer of this editorial knows nothing of Bangladesh. On Pakistan, one supposes, the loyal conservative reader is supposed to suppress everything he has ever read about how Islamic fundamentalism is rife in the armed forces and Pres. Perves Mushareff has had a terrible time controlling them. On Indonesia, we are supposed to forget the recent, spectacularly violent domestic strife and reports of all those vicious Islamist leaders and the schools (madrasses) that they run, and we are supposed to believe that they would make no effort to inflitrate and control the units sent to Iraq.

But the Great Goddess Feelgood has an even greater sacrifice to demand of her paramours, in this case, consistency. The editorial refers to Indonesia's "distinctive, moderate form of Shia Islam."

Wait a minute.

Weren't we supposed to rest assured that Iraq's Shi'a leaders, or at least some of them, belonged to a "quietest, otherworldly" school of Shi'ism? What happened to them? Why, they formed an alliance with other Shi'a. In fact, the quietest Shi'a, in the 1930's, worried the British with dreams of a unified Shi'a state across Iran and most of Iraq. But instead of finding out what "quietist" Shi'ism entails, conservative editorialists ran with the word "quietist" to assure us that they meant no harm.

Books, lads; they're called books. History books, in fact. It would help if our supposed intellectual leaders cracked a few, before spouting any more of their "plausible" scenarios. How about "probable" ones? They're depressing, but at least you don't get surprised.

The editorial was carried the subtitle " A Better Idea Than Firing Donald Rumsfeld." How about, "A Dumber Idea Than Keeping Donald Rumsfeld?"

The President continues to show a firmer grasp of realities than do many "conservative" intellectuals, which grasp you can see on display if you read the section of a press conference this morning in which he characterized the performance of Iraqi troops so far as being, in part, "unacceptable."

The grim assessment on prospects for the war offered in the previous post has been revised somewhat. The whole thing has been tightened stylistically, but scroll down to the section on "slivers of light."


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 4:07 PM



Friday, December 17, 2004 :::
 
Grim new blogging today after this public service announcement:

If you came here because someone sent you a copy of the Litany on the GWOT, please let me know at amindthatsuits@yahoo.com .I'd be interested to see where it is traveling.

For the full text of the Litany, please scroll down. For a sampling of A Mind That Suits, see August 10, 2003 archive.

For today, this thought:

A little over a year ago, I explained to a valued friend, a senior member of the Council on Foreign Relations, my nightmare of how the war in Iraq would play out: a unified Shi'ite state, Turkey confiscating Kurdistan, Russia reabsorbing such countries as Georgia to protect themselves, and to announce their return to international troublemaking. That friend looked at me, frankly, as if I were describing the latest science fiction movie. Ah, but great science fiction--1984, Brave New World, Farenheit 451, the work of Philip K. Dick--is based on a firm grasp of science and human nature. My own conjecture was based on a lifetime of reading history, from which I have learned one definite thing: putting the best face on things is an evil instinct when people's lives are at stake. Richard Nixon's henchmen joked that a publicly optimistic face when facing disaster was a woman named Rosie Scenario--and I say she is a terrific whore.

I have found only one contemporary analysis of the ethnic situation in Iraq--from the invaluable Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College. And I read Elie Khadourie's depressing history of the Kingdom of Iraq, in which I found that, in the 1930's, the Shi'ites were indeed dreaming of a pan-Shi'ite state.

Evidently they still are. One of the chief supporters of a US invasion was the head of something called the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Guess what system he thinks Iraq should have? And guess who heads the unified Shi'a slate of candidates for the new parliament?

Am I wrong in thinking that our intellectuals should have been looking for all this stuff from the start? Why have I seen no comprehensive, critical survey of political thinking among Iraqi leaders? Why am I supposed to sit down and stop asking questions just because somebody uses the word "democracy?" Does Kim Jong-Il not bandy it about freely? Did we not very recently cheer as a large handful of nations dropped the word "democratic" from their names?

"Critical" is the important word. Truth is only found by criticizing, and so I will criticize myself. I forgot to include in my list of horrors a Syrian confiscation of the Sunni Triangle. But guess who has been funding the insurgency, according to one recent report? We probably should invade Iran and Syria, just as we should invade North Korea. But we went to war with the army Donald Rumsfeld wanted, not with the one we could have. And now we have no army to fulfill our new found imperial dreams, or even stave off a really concentrated set of attacks.

There are two little slivers of light that I can see: "Europe," which still means "Western Europe," may decide that an Atlantic Europe is best, or Turkey may come to see the slender military reed that "Europe" has become. Either way, Turkey may--and, please, let us emphasize "may"--tilt our way. That would be "nice," one supposes. An Iraq divided into four would no longer be Iraq, and we should have some sort of relationship, however grudging, with someone who controlled one of those fourths.

The other is that we will have blundered our way towards a solution to "the Iraq problem."

Let's call it "the Yugoslav model."

My CFR friend and I are still good friends. If your friends don't occasionally harbor the suspicion that you are insane, they probably don't know you that well. I still value his opinion and friendship highly, and of course we do not know how it will turn out. But I must admit I no longer reader certain conservative writers with the enjoyment I once did, and there are some I simply no longer read--particularly if they didn't land on Mr. Rumsfeld for the complete lie that horrible man dared utter in front of the troops last week. I would like to take comfort from the fact that the President gave the Medal of Freedom to people who fought Mr. Rumsfeld in the bureaucratic wars. But none of them still has his job.


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 10:01 AM



Wednesday, December 15, 2004 :::
 
THE LITANY--scroll down. New blogging--right here. What is A Mind That Suits? August 10, 2003.

Blogspot, home to A Mind That Suits and countless fellow freeloaders in the bloggosphere (or is that "blogosphere?"), closed down its statistics service, and A Mind That Suits--techno-klutzy if ever a pudgy, balding English teacher was--only just recently got a new service, courtesy of SiteMeter (scroll to bottom of blog). And it is kind of nice to see that people are still finding their way to the most erudite blog there is by way of mermaid suits and Joe Don Rooney's youthful, muscular--er, hindquarters. A Mind That Suits stayed at a motel called the Mermaid Inn, and he enjoyed fleeting flame for an article of his that appeared on National Review Online objecting to the public display of Joe Don's hiney on CMT. There is, apparently, a crying need for mermaid suits--which, one would think, the market could easily meet--and young Mr. Rooney is not the first person whose nether regions are the object of fascination. Why do women like...well, that is a question for another day. A Mind That Suits would like to say that he does not know where to buy mermaid suits, and he still wishes Mr. Rooney had kept his pants on.

This probably isn't the most erudite blog there is, but we like to say that here at A Mind That Suits.




::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 8:24 PM



Tuesday, December 14, 2004 :::
 
The semester is coming to a close, and it is time for blogging, because there is time to blog.

If someone sent you a copy of THE LITANY, would you please let me know by dropping me a quick line at amindthatsuits@yahoo.com ? It would help to understand how this is spreading. If you have received only part of it, you can find the entire LITANY ON THE GWOT below.

For those looking for more of what A MIND THAT SUITS is all about, please see the archive for August 10, 2003, where there is a good selection of previous stuff.

And now, to today:

In this "fortnight's" National Review, the invaluable, if frequently wrong-headed, Victor Davis Hanson offers a brilliant analysis of Oliver Stone's spectacularly wrong-headed take on Alexander.

The Great, that is.

Mr. Stone apparently sacrifices what is truly one of the most interesting stories in history--interesting in the sense of "psychopathic"--to score modern points, including ones about Alexander's sexuality. Mr. Stone apparently makes a great deal of The Great Mass Murderer's passion for at least one young man, making him look "gay,"when, as Prof. Hanson points out, society back then was tolerant of military leaders who grew tired of isolation from women and conscripted younger subordinates to...well, let's just say that the older guy didn't do anything that wasn't "masculine." The younger guy wasn't expected to do much either, except assume a position that wasn't, er, "masculine." The modern concept of "gay" hardly, er, entered into it. More like prison, as Prof. Hanson points out. Effeminate men, or men who went after guys their own age, were held in contempt.

A certain pudgy, balding English teacher, who was an undergraduate in Classics when Prof. Hanson was a grad student at the same red-tile-roofed university on the West Coast (though their paths rarely, if ever, crossed) found fault with one comment, directed, apparently, at the brilliant if irrepresible Colin Farrel.

He therefore wrote:

I quibble, however, with your description of "ludicrous Irish-brogue" in the movie. Is Colin Farrel not Irish? That is no more ludicrous than a modern British actor declaiming Shakespeare in a modern British (meaning English) accent--or, far worse, an American actor declaiming Shakespeare in a modern "British" (meaning English) accent. Shakespeare did not have (and could not have had) an Oxbridge accent, and using one muffles the scansion as much as an American one does. And yet, unless he is musical, an actor must use the accent God gave him. (God decided where he was born, after all.)

People tend to assume that "classical" themes must be declaimed in "British" (meaning English) accents, but they do not need to be at all. The ideal, as one actor said, is Sean Connery: no one is bothered that he always sounds Scots, because he is. Young Mr. Farrel is a brilliant actor, but he may not have yet acquired the gravitas carried by Mr. Connery, and he probably needs that to pull that off with an Irish accent. Not yet, anyway. If what he describes as his "general laddishness"--meaning alcohol and women--does not derail him, he will acquire it, and then, as people look back, the only criticism of his role in Alexander will be that he was in a boring, pretentious Oliver Stone movie, not that he was Irish.

I would point out that the reason Mr. Connery needs --and Mr. Farrel needs to acquire-- all that gravitas is that a Gaelic accent is taken as comic, for very unpleasant historical reasons. Mr. Farrel, by the way, does appear to be musical, as his American accent in the magnificent Minority Report was flawless. But you may understand why an Irish actor would not wish to use his gifts to mimic a "British" accent.

As I recall, by the way, the original meaning of British was in fact English, and it was press baron Lord Beveredge (correction, Lord Beaverton)--a Canadian--who pressed for it to mean "British," if that makes sense.

BEAVERBROOK--the guy's name was Beaverbrook!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Ah, that memory and age thing.


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 3:52 PM



Wednesday, November 17, 2004 :::
 

The Litany
on
The GWOT

A conservative looks at crazy "conservative" beliefs about Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Global War on Terror.

Extensive research in secret archives by a lifelong conservative has revealed that a mysterious religious cult has attracted a number of writers and intellectuals who have for years identified themselves as “conservative.” Its members must subscribe to a set of factual assertions that are either not true or highly debatable and to principles that are not in any way conservative. These have been assembled into a Litany. The cult’s members must recite it every night before bed and every morning when they wake up. They quote parts of it when challenged in public, but it is here presented in full for the first time. The lifelong conservative who uncovered the text of this Litany feels that it is his duty to publish it so that the world may know.



Information on The Litany and on reproducing it can be found at the end.

Divisions of the Litany of the GWOT

I: Afghanistan and Pakistan

II: Weapons of Mass Destruction

III: The War in Iraq

IV: Torture

V: American Soldiers

VI: Spreading Democracy

VII: Heroes and Villains--of Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, L. Paul Bremer, and a Cast of Thousands

VIII: Judgment Day--So You Know Who the Good People Are

IX: Things We Just Know Are True--Whatever the Facts May Say


Part I
Afghanistan and Pakistan

AP-1. The Afghanistan war was brilliantly conceived and effortlessly executed, and is a proven model for delivering every country from oppression and transforming it into a stable democracy. You can just forget the entire rest of human experience. In a couple of weeks, we got it all down, and you need to listen to us.

AP-2.The Taliban and al-Qaeda did not adapt themselves to our new way of fighting, so of course neither organizations poses any problem for us anymore. No, wait...

AP-3. If Donald Rumsfeld told Congress in October 2002, that the border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan needed to be secured, no one should be bothered that nothing much was done about it until the spring of 2004, when the British went in to clean up our mess.

AP-4. If Donald Rumsfeld told Congress in October 2002, that there were still vital security problems in Afghanistan that needed solving, it does not matter that he simultaneously diverted intelligence resources to Iraq.

AP-5. If the Defense Department planned the war on the basis of new, radical theories of precision warfare and made a big, big deal about it, no one should notice that the first group of soldiers dropped into the mountains of Afghanistan had to ride horses up sheer cliff faces on paths often only 1 meter wide. (1)

AP-6. Certain defense intellectuals make a big, big deal about the theory of “defense transformation,” which emphasizes quick, lightly armed responses. Because of intense publicity, which the intellectuals actively sought, the whole world was watching the first demonstration of their theories in practice. The planners therefore knew about 1m-wide paths up sheer cliff faces and carefully selected fighters who had been trained in mountain warfare under primitive conditions.

AP-7. O.K., so only one guy knew how to ride a horse. It was the first try. What did you expect?

AP-8. That experience has no bearing on whether inter-service and intra-service rivalries will hinder the “transformation” of the Defense Department.

AP-9. Since that time, one of the most persistent problems our troops have faced has been rockets launched from donkeys. This tactic was predicted in the Marine Corps Small Wars Manual produced in 1940, but the tactic and the manual were totally ignored in the planning for the Afghan and Iraq wars. That little oversight is something we should just forget.

AP-10. It was great that John Kerry, in the closing days of his campaign, obsessed about allegations that we let Osama bin-Laden slip through our fingers at Tora Bora. We got to get all huffy and puffy and point out that, at the time, only some intelligence sources thought he might be there, while other intelligence sources said he was elsewhere.

AP-11. And we can all breathe one great big sigh of relief that he never took his current office seriously enough to show up to committee meetings, because then he might have found out that intelligence analysts, picking through the debris in the caves at Tora Bora and interrogating whatever enemy operatives we captured, came to the conclusion that Osama bin-Laden had indeed been there and got away.

AP-13. It was great that John Kerry, in the last days of his campaign, obsessed about Osama bin-Laden, because we got to get all huffy and puffy and point out that capturing bin-Laden is probably not the most important objective in the “Global War on Terror.” It is the al-Qaeda organization, regardless of who is in charge of it, that poses such a great threat.

AP-14. And we can all breathe one great big sigh of relief that he never took his current office seriously enough to show up to committee meetings, because then he might have found out that 1000 or more al-Qaeda operatives marched out of Afghanistan along with Mr. bin-Laden, a large number of whom were skilled at such things as blowing up night clubs.

AP-15. The “Afghan Model” maintains that US technology has advanced so far that we can march in and turn scattered groups of shepherds into a liberation army in no time. That model underwent the acid test at Tora Bora. It was indeed moving to watch groups of “shepherds,” who had spent 10 years of their lives ineffectively fighting each other and foreign oppressors, uniting to happily accept our donations of equipment and money and then to happily stand aside as Mr. bin-Laden marched out with his buddies.

AP-16. Tora Bora was a victory because the enemy stopped shooting at us in that particular spot.

AP-17. Following our victory at Tora Bora, we uncovered tons of fascinating and important evidence regarding al-Qaeda in the caves where they hid until our allies assisted them in escaping. There is some dispute how about extensive the caves are, but we may never know. Donald Rumsfeld diverted intelligence resources to Iraq, leaving many of the caves of Tora Bora unexplored. That is nothing more than a poignant little tale of “what might have been.”

AP-18. Even if some Pakistani military commanders support the Taliban and al-Qaeda, President Pervez Musharaff has them under control.

AP-19. We know that because he ordered his troops up to the border following Tora Bora and intercepted escaping al-Qaeda operatives.

AP-20. O.K., he only caught 300 out of 1000 or more. It’s the thought that counts.

AP-21. Look, we got some Afghani warlords to help us and the Pakistanis caught some escaping al-Qaeda members. If you are worried about “the other” warlords and “the other” al-Qaeda operatives, that just proves you are a defeatist, or stuck in the past. Or something.

AP-22. Pres. Musharaff will survive an infinite number of assassination attempts. In fact, he will be President of Pakistan for the next 50 years.

AP-23. The problem of Pakistani trade in atomic technology has been solved.

AP-24. The War in Iraq was fully justified because it inspired Libya to disarm, which led to the discovery of the “A.Q. Khan” network of trade in nuclear materials, which Pres. Musharaff decisively handled by immediately pardoning Dr. Khan for any crime he had committed.

AP-25. The average Pakistani does not think A.Q. Khan is a hero.

AP-26. Libya also turned out to be involved with a whole host of other countries and terror groups that we had not dreamed of, countries and groups we have not even begun to think about planning to deal with. That should not dim our joy at having effected a major disruption in the Terror Network.

It’s true they laughed at the Wright Brothers. They also laughed at the guys who strapped on fake wings and drove their bikes off of cliffs.


Part Two
Weapons of Mass Destruction

WMD-1. Operation Iraqi Freedom was not about Weapons of Mass Destruction. The war in Iraq was about “real reasons,” you know, the “real reasons” people cite whenever anyone is rude enough to point out that there were no WMD in Iraq.

WMD-2. Any fool would relax about those pesky WMD if they just checked the President’s many public statements about Iraq between August 2002 and the start of the war in March 2003. All but one emphasized the “nexus” between WMD and the Terror Network. So of course he meant we were going to war for “real reasons.”

WMD-3. When a French reporter quoted French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin’s concern that “US policy was slipping toward transformation of the Middle East,” and Colin Powell said, “The war is about disarmament,” that was code for the “real reasons.”

WMD-4. No, wait, that was Colin Powell. He “just doesn’t get it.” If you look at what Donald Rumsfeld said...

WMD-5. No, wait, Donald Rumsfeld is opposed to nation building on principle.

WMD-6. O.K., just trust us: the war was not about Weapons of Mass Destruction.

WMD-7. True, everything anyone wrote advocating the war depended on WMD, but it is of no significance whatsoever that they were nowhere to be found.

WMD-8. You see, we didn’t actually write those things. Noam Chomsky did, using our names.

WMD-9. Just to show you how wrong you are, let’s look closely at the “Iraq Resolution” passed by Congress and signed by President Bush. In the section on reasons for fighting Saddam, fully 53% was about WMD, 16.3 % about terrorism, 9.5% about disobeying the UN in general, 4.8% about issues unresolved following the First Gulf War, and 4.2 % about hostility to the US.

WMD-10. So, as any fool can see, the issues that convinced Congress were democracy in Iraq (3.7%) and democracy in the Middle East (1.8%).

WMD-11. Conservatives were rightly offended when Tim Robbins asserted--in one of his lethally boring, preachy plays--that the late political philosopher Leo Strauss advocated hiding the “real reasons” for government actions from the public. Prof. Strauss is an idol to many of the people described as “neo-conservative,” and Mr. Robbins was clearly trying to taint his followers with the alleged sins of Prof. Strauss. It was a gross distortion of what Prof. Strauss taught, and what “neocons” believe.

WMD-12. So, of course, when we said “WMD,” that was a code word for the “real reasons.”

WMD-13. It’s a lot clearer if you’ve studied numerology.

WMD-14. In his famous “Axis of Evil” speech, the President named three specific countries: Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. We took out after the one that did not have an advanced nuclear weapons program, but in no way did that make nuclear weapons more attractive to rogue governments.

WMD-15. Tony Blair has suffered much worse abuse from opponents over the allegedly missing WMD than has George W. Bush. This in no way influenced his decision to get into bed with the French and the Germans as they seek to smooth over the very real problem of the Iranian nuclear weapon program.

WMD-16. The French and the Germans worked to lift sanctions against Saddam’s Iraq because they had a financial stake in trade with Saddam. The missing WMD have in no way provided cover for them as they try to pull the same stunt with Iran.

WMD-17. Colin Powell went against his instincts to support the Administration case against Saddam in a powerful speech to the UN Security Council. Our own investigations have proven that the situation with Saddam’s WMD was not what Gen. Powell said, a fact which has been trumpeted across the globe by many opponents of the US. This has no impact whatsoever on his credibility as he challenges the French, the Germans, and the British over Iran’s nuclear weapon program.

WMD-18. And if it does, it’s Colin Powell’s fault, because he “just doesn’t get it.”

WMD-19. Dr. David Kay didn’t find any WMD because he didn’t looked everywhere.

WMD-20. Dr. Kay did not find WMD because he lost faith and gave up too early.

WMD-21. Nearly everything anyone wrote in support of the war depended in some way on the work of Dr. Kay. That does not mean that we should listen to him now, or even respect him, that turncoat.

WMD-22. When Dr. Kay gave his stunning interim report to Congress in October 2003, making it very clear that the WMD were likely not there, we were under no obligation whatsoever to start explaining why we went to war.

WMD-23. If we had, Jay Leno could not have spent the last year making jokes that the “real reasons” for the war were “oil.” Only a spoilsport stands in the way of a good joke.

WMD-24. A carefully argued piece in the National Interest (circ: 27) carries much more weight with the American public than some joke by Mr. Leno (average audience: 489,273 gazillion. Squared.)

WMD-25. Look, all 27 of us had lunch in the last month, and not one of us could repeat one of Mr. Leno’s jokes about “oil.” Most of us are in bed by ten, and we can’t tell jokes anyway.

WMD-26. O.K, we checked, and it was just 26 of us. There’s that retired Foreign Service Officer who lives in Trinidad. He doesn’t get into town much anymore, but we are pretty sure he doesn’t have a television. Besides, they don’t show the Tonight Show in Trinidad, do they?

WMD-27. Dr. Kay was appointed to head the “Iraq Survey Group” only after it turned out our troops did not trip over WMD as they marched through throngs of happy natives rising up to greet them. He could not begin his work until July 2003.

WMD-28. After three months of work, Dr. Kay recounted that his team frequently entered laboratories and research centers to find files that were still smoldering and running computers that had just been stripped.

WMD-29. Those last two points shed no light whatsoever on how well the war was planned.

WMD-30. In any case, Saddam’s WMD are in Syria or buried in the ground. Or somewhere. They will dramatically appear two days before the election.

WMD-31. Well, O.K., they didn’t, but the President is waiting to reveal them at the right moment. He’s holding out to test our faith, and our faith in the existence of Saddam’s WMD is unshaken by the cold, hard evidence. Make no mistake about that.

WMD-32. Look, they really are there. In Syria. Or underground. Or somewhere.

WMD-33. Okay, listen up, all you little countries who bravely resisted bullying from France and Germany to support us. That was great, and, yes, our extravagant claims about WMD convinced you to do so over the opposition of your own people. But look, we are under no obligation whatsoever to explain what happened, you little ingrates. You should come up with your own damn reasons for supporting us. We are too busy implementing the “real reasons.” Which we can’t specify.

WMD-34. If someone had no interest whatsoever in nation-building before the war—like, you know, every senior official in the Bush administration—but now he uses nation-building as cover for the fact that there are no WMD, that’s really cool.

WMD-35. Trust us: Syria. When we invade Syria, we’ll find them.

It’s true they laughed at the Wright Brothers. They also laughed at the guys who strapped on fake wings and drove their bikes off of cliffs.

Part Three
The Iraq War

IW-1. The Iraq war was confirmation—as if any were needed—that the fundamental nature of warfare has changed, thanks to American technology and management techniques. This new way of war has been tested and found to be a screaming success.

IW-2. If we ever have to use it against an army that is actually motivated, prepared, and well equipped, it will work just as well as it did against an army that turned and ran like scared little bunny rabbits.

IW-3. O.K., so most of Saddam’s troops melted away. Some units of the storied 101st still faced fierce opposition. Their valiant conduct is especially inspiring when one remembers that they were ordered into battle before all their food supplies had been off-loaded from ships.

IW-4. And let’s not forget the brave men of 2nd Battalion 69th Armor of the Third Infantry Division. 1000 US soldiers, supported by only 30 tanks, faced 3 full brigades totaling at least 5,000 men supported by at least 25 tanks, 75 armored personnel carriers, and artillery. They fought them off successfully after fierce fighting. (2)

IW-5. O.K., so they walked into that battle blind. The high-tech reconnaissance equipment failed completely, and the first time they knew the enemy was even there was first contact, which swiftly turned into a full-scale battle. That just proves how great our boys’ll be when all the equipment works.

IW-6. And it’s not as bad as you are making it out to be. The much vaunted communications network was tested in numerous encounters small and large. Our frontline troops were equipped to receive all the available information collected by a vast array of satellites and other sensors and analyzed by computers, so that they could have “total situational awareness.” A thorough report under preparation by the Rand Corporation (and seen in summary by Technology Review) has concluded that, in nearly every one of those encounters, the system failed completely. No, wait…

IW-7. Anyway, there is no way that the planners who put those men into that mess need to make an apology.

IW-8. Prior to this war, never, ever had a vastly outnumbered army followed a strategy of fading back and letting the stronger army get bogged down. Totally, totally unheard of. Why would we plan for that?

IW-9. When the success of that tactic is plastered all over the front pages, if we just say that it isn’t working, it isn’t.

IW-10. Nearly every conservative writer on the Vietnam War has insisted that the fundamental error of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations was their dependence on the “Best and the Brightest,” a group of policy and defense analysts who believed that, using computers and techniques borrowed from business, they had divined a new way to conduct war. This led to a failure to commit enough troops early on, which enabled the enemy considerable freedom to operate. It is difficult to think of a conservative thinker in the last forty years who has not said the same thing over and over again.

IW-11. Therefore, when a group of people who call themselves conservative decide to give the guys with the pocket protectors another shot at running a war, all the conservative faithful out there in the cheap seats should just forget everything they have ever read and keep quiet.

IW-12. And if anyone dares speak up, you should taunt him with the word “quagmire.”

IW-13. There is no way that the United States can ever suffer a Pyrrhic Victory. None of our generals is named “Pyrrhus,” for one thing. Would we trust a guy named “Pyrrhus” with a whole army? Come on.

IW-14. Wars are over when we say they are, even if some dumb enemy keeps fighting to win. You don’t want them to “set the terms of debate,” now do you?

IW-15. In fact, if the President of the United States flies out to an aircraft carrier and his advance men hand a preprinted banner with the words “mission accomplished” on it to the sailors, and those bonehead enemy soldiers still keep fighting, it only proves that the enemy, too, “just doesn’t get it.”
IW-16. O.K., we liberated Iraq. That’s enough. Our failure to commit enough troops to control Baghdad may have allowed a little looting, but, hey, is that our problem?

IW-17. If everyone on the ground goes, “wow, look at how all those looters are going directly to the most sensitive ministries,” that is so totally not because Saddam had well-placed agents ready to direct the angry mobs in their direction.

IW-18. True, the anger of the people was against certain ministries, and it served the Ba’ath Party’s interests if the records in exactly those ministries were destroyed. And, true, there is nothing easier than directing an angry mob to ransack the building of your choice. Does that have any significance in this situation?

IW-19. You read a lot of Science Fiction, don’t you?

IW-20. O.K., look, it’s like “you just don’t get it.” The fundamental nature of warfare has changed. Nothing that has ever happened in any other war can ever happen again, so we don’t have to worry about it. Now, does that sound like your precious Science Fiction? Huh? Does it?

IW-21. How can anyone criticize planning for the war, given the tremendous success of the storied 101st Airborne under the inspiring leadership of Gen. David Petraeus? As President Bush put it when welcoming them back to Ft. Campbell, Kentucky, the 101st “liberated the cities of Najaf, Karbala, and Hilla. You secured southern Baghdad, and sent 1,600 soldiers by helicopter to Mosul, in the longest air assault in military history.”

IW-22. Therefore, the refutation of all criticisms of the war plans is “David Petraeus.”

IW-23. What it all boils down to is this: the plans for the Iraq War were perfect, and should not be criticized.

IW-24. True, three months after the end of “major hostilities,” the Administration recalled Robert Blackwill from the sensitive post of Ambassador to India so that he could co-ordinate Iraq policy. That is so totally not because Iraq policy was in disarray. It was just that Amb. Blackwill had done such a good job in New Delhi, the President wanted to give him an easy job where he could just kick back, enjoy himself, and walk around naked.

It’s true they laughed at the Wright Brothers. They also laughed at the guys who strapped on fake wings and drove their bikes off of cliffs.

Part Four
Torture

T-1. Just because one can learn any language in a year does not mean that the Commander in Chief needs to order anyone to learn Arabic.

T-2. That is especially true if they are interrogating people whose only language is Arabic.

T-3. He can, however, at least think about letting interrogators know he will wink if they commit torture, even though Congress has declared that illegal.

T-4. The fact that the U.S. Constitution reserves solely to Congress the authority to determine how “captures on land or sea” are conducted does not bind the Commander in Chief.

T-5. As a side note, it should be added that Sen. John F. Kerry would have made a terrible President because he might have appointed justices who ignored the clear language of the Constitution.

It’s true they laughed at the Wright Brothers. They also laughed at the guys who strapped on fake wings and drove their bikes off of cliffs.

Part V
American Soldiers

AS-1. All soldiers instinctively vote Republican, and no one should waste time or money finding out what they really believe.

AS-2. Beginning at least with Andrew Jackson and continuing at least to Wesley Clark, the Armed Services have harbored many liberal Democrats. That does not mean there are any liberal Democrats in the Armed Services today.

AS-3. Personally, if my party had Andrew Jackson and Wesley Clark in it, I’d join the other side, but that’s just me.

AS-4. Reporters should only quote soldiers who support the war, think it has been brilliantly led, and love Donald Rumsfeld.

AS-5. Of course we should listen to the complaints of soldiers in the frontlines, if the complaints are valid and not just regular bellyaching.

AS-6. Lack of body armor, training, armored Humvees, and food for a mission whose goals are loosely defined and where the situation on the ground is almost the complete opposite of what was predicted are not valid complaints. It just proves what wimps kids are today.

AS-7. If a bunch of guys we like sit in a room and determine just how many armored Humvees are needed according to scientific principles of war management, that’s how many should be used. Anyone who questions them is “stuck in the past” or “defeatist” or “just doesn’t get it.” Or something.

AS-8. Each war should only get a minimum of armored Humvees, so we can be ready for as many wars as possible.

AS-9. If you think Donald Rumsfeld doesn’t care about the troops, just remember the time he unexpectedly flew to Iraq in May, 2004, and allowed the troops to ask him questions, saying how much more he enjoyed answering questions from the troops than from reporters in Washington.

AS-10. If the second GI asked him why there weren’t enough armored Humvees, that is just one more sign that the pernicious influence of the New York Times is a sickness spreading throughout American society. (3)

AS-11. If we make a big, big noise about how we are sending our young people over to disarm Saddam Hussein, and it turns out that he was already disarmed, the kids should just suck it in and deal with it. We are too busy saving the world.

AS-12. In fact, we are very sensitive people, and this war has been very traumatic for us. Those soldiers don’t have to worry about anything more serious than living in a land with no running water far, far away from their families and loved ones surrounded by people who are trying to kill them.

AS-13. Therefore, soldiers should make us feel good by writing letters home about how “all of my buddies are voting for President George W. Bush.” They should not ask us why we sent them there, or complain in any way. That would be very rude and inconsiderate of them.

AS-14. And look, here’s a letter from that kid from next door, saying exactly how morale is high and all his buddies are voting for “President George W. Bush.”

AS-15. So when the Wall Street Journal finds a company where many of the soldiers were not registered and seemed uninterested in the election, that doesn’t mean anything like they are normal kids who have not yet realized fully that they have a say in who their Commander in Chief is. That kid from next door knows them much better, and he says they’re all voting for “President George W. Bush.”

AS-16. And if the sergeant assigned to make sure everyone is registered tells the Journal he is voting for Ralph Nader, that doesn’t mean anything at all.

AS-17. When a conservative reporter finds a soldier who loudly and enthusiastically supports “President George W. Bush” and claims that everyone in his unit does, too, the reason most of the other soldiers look at their feet and mumble “yeah” is that they agree. It is absolutely not that they consider the other guy a hopeless bootlicker and prefer to keep their own counsel because they haven’t made up their minds yet.

AS-18. You see, soldiers who loudly and enthusiastically support “President George W. Bush” have been given a mystical ability to correctly gauge the feelings of their neighbors, an ability denied nearly every other human being on the planet.

AS-19. If, as seems likely, a majority of our soldiers did indeed vote for President Bush, that is not because they felt uncomfortable electing as Commander in Chief a man who slandered his own comrades while they were still fighting, who could not make up his mind about what to do in Iraq, and who would provide the country with a First Lady who thinks the child victims of a hurricane in Haiti should just revel in the opportunity to “go naked.” Nor were they worried about gay marriage, the Supreme Court, or taxes. What it really shows is that they support every aspect of the war.

AS-20. In fact, it shows that they love Donald Rumsfeld as they do their own fathers.

AS-21. We could freely criticize the abilities of our troops because we were indirectly criticizing Bill Clinton and his lack of concern for defense matters. No one can criticize us directly for bad planning and faulty thinking because that would be criticizing the abilities of our troops, which is unpatriotic, and proves you work in Hollywood.

AS-22. Besides, there was no poor planning, and we think very clearly.

It’s true they laughed at the Wright Brothers. They also laughed at the guys who strapped on fake wings and drove their bikes off of cliffs.

Please see note(3) at end.

Part VI
Spreading Democracy

SD-1. Those who doubt that Iraq or any other country can easily become a democracy are forgetting the examples of Germany and Japan.

SD-2. The fact that we had to level both those countries in order to convince their people that they should behave differently is beside the point.

SD-3. That we took the further precaution of permanently disarming them is even more irrelevant, if that is possible.

SD-4. The people of any country will vote for liberal democracy any time they can, the way the Germans did in 1933.

SD-5. Anyone who doubts that democracy can spring up quickly in cultures without strong democratic roots has forgotten the lessons of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union. Democracy has proven strong and vital throughout the former Soviet Empire. Look how well it’s doing in Russia.

SD-6. You shouldn’t worry that Iraqis would have anything like a “War Between the States.” They don’t have anything like “states,” really.

SD-7. If America fails to prevent widespread looting which destroys what little people have, those people will understand and they will all love America anyway.

SD-8. If the US calls on people to rebel, and they rebel, but the US does not support them, those people will understand and they will all love America anyway.

SD-9. All cultures, religions, and traditions have the same end, and talking about any perceived differences is racist or defeatist. Or something.

SD-10. People will gladly accept a redefinition of their religion foisted on them by non-believers.

SD-11. Muslim “quietism” is the same as Christian “quietism.”

SD-12. No form of “quietism”—Christian, Muslim, or Zoroastrian--is political.

SD-13. Religious quietism, you see, is kind of like Romanticism, with all those poems about love and living out in the country. Nothing political ever came out of that, now, did it, Sen. McGovern?

SD-14. In the 1930’s, the British worried that the “quietist” Shi’a dreamed of a pan-Shi’ite state combining Iran and most of Iraq, governed along “other worldly lines.” That carries no message for today whatsoever.

SD-15. Average people can never be blinded by their religion to overwhelming strategic realities, which explains Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and why the Emperor of Japan now wears business clothes.

It’s true they laughed at the Wright Brothers. They also laughed at the guys who strapped on fake wings and drove their bikes off of cliffs.

Part Seven
Heroes and Villains

HV-1. Ahmad Chalabi should be recognized as the natural leader of Iraq, even by Iraqis who, after 10 years of listening to him, have no apparent affection for or trust in him whatsoever.

HV-2. The Iraqis would have developed real trust and affection for him if we had just let him lead a 10,000-man-strong battalion of crack troops recruited from all those Iraqi exiles that can be found in any neighborhood just dying to give up their safe and secure lives to fight for a country to which they have only tenuous connections.

HV-3. If the CIA gave up on Mr. Chalabi after years of supporting his efforts, the only explanation is that the CIA “just doesn’t get it.”

HV-4. In fact, anyone who doubts Messrs. Chalabi or Rumsfeld “just doesn’t get it.” You can just stop reading right now and admit how wrong you are.

HV-5. Donald Rumsfeld made sure that every commander under him felt free to tell him if the war plans were wrong, or they needed more troops, armored Humvees, or food. If they had just told him, he would have sent them.

HV-6. Okay, so the chief of each of the armed services personally appealed to the Commander in Chief for more troops, but Donald Rumsfeld and his handpicked CJS opposed it anyway. How were they supposed to know the service chiefs were serious? They’re such kidders.

HV-7. Donald Rumsfeld responded quickly and decisively when it became apparent that the insurgency was organized and widespread in Sunni areas.

HV-8. He was really Johnny-on-the-spot when the Shi’ites perked up.

HV-9. Donald Rumsfeld had a clear concept of how post-war Iraq should be administered. Look, when a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee asked him point blank, he mumbled incoherently for a couple of minutes and finally said, “Ask the State Department.” What more do you want?

HV-10. The Defense Department cooperated fully with the State Department’s Future of Iraq Project. So when the Defense Department’s designated administrator for Iraq, Gen. Jay Garner, appointed the head of the Future of Iraq Project as his principal assistant, Donald Rumsfeld swiftly and decisively fired him.

HV-11. It was entirely appropriate that the Administration, three weeks after we took Baghdad, summarily fired Gen. Garner as well. He clearly had given no thought beforehand to what he was going to do.

HV-12. Okay, look, this is getting tiring. The Defense Department didn’t trust the State Department’s boys because they are slaves to the UN. DOD had its own project on post-war Iraq, which was much more thorough and realistic.

HV-13. Gen. Garner’s statement that he had been shown no plans for post-war administration should therefore be completely ignored. He got fired, didn’t he?

HV-14. O.K., O.K., it’s true: a few months after the end of “major hostilities,” the Defense Department sent former DOD official Anthony Cordesman to survey the situation in Iraq because it seemed to be going badly. And, yes, it was true that every member of the armed forces he met told him that no one had shown them any plans for post-War Iraq. That so totally does not mean Donald Rumsfeld thought such plans were irrelevant.

HV-15. Further investigation has revealed that it was all the fault of the soldiers: they just filled out the wrong requisition order. Form A6907-F83 is for “coffee room supplies.” F84—F-O-U-R—is for “nation building plans.” Stupid grunts.

HV-16. As the Administration was making the case for war against Saddam, the Army Chief of Staff, General Eric K. Shinseki, honestly responded to a question by estimating that the occupation of Iraq would take “hundreds of thousands” of troops and be very expensive. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously humiliated Gen. Shinseki by announcing his retirement a year early, and there are rumors about what Sec. Rumsfeld said to him in front of subordinates and civilian Defense Department officials.

HV-17. This had no impact whatsoever on the willingness of officers further down the chain of command to say they thought things were going badly because we did not have enough troops.

HV-18. The Pentagon’s special investigation into the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib recounted that communication up the chain of command had broken down completely. Many of the problems were credited to the “Office of the Secretary of Defense.” This was not a euphemism for Donald Rumsfeld. They meant Wilma Jones, who prepares notepads and coffee for meetings, and Frederick T. Smith, the Deputy Administrative Assistant to the Assistant Deputy Administrator for Computer Keyboards.

HV- 19. When the head of that investigation, former Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger, was asked whether Donald Rumsfeld should resign, given all the statements in the report about the “Office of the Secretary of Defense,” he said that “would be a boon to all of America's enemies, and consequently I think that it would be a misfortune if it were to take place.” Former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, who also served on the investigation, strongly endorsed that sentiment.

HV-20. They did not, by that, mean that Sec. Rumsfeld’s resignation would send a signal to our enemies that we back down at the first sign of trouble. They meant that there was absolutely nothing wrong with anything that had been done by the current Secretary of Defense, only by his Office. You really need to lay off poor Mr. Rumsfeld, who has so much on his mind these days. If you are so concerned about those mistakes by the “Office of the Secretary of Defense,” go talk to Fred and Wilma.

HV-21. All of the military investigations and blue-ribbon panels have exonerated Donald Rumsfeld.

HV-22. If any of the investigations and blue-ribbon panels appears to criticize Donald Rumsfeld, you just need to read the reports more closely and see them in their broader context to realize that they exonerate him.

HV-23. O.K., if a careful reading of the reports and seeing them in their broader context reveals that they do indeed criticize Donald Rumsfeld, that only proves that all the investigators and panelists “just don’t get it.”

HV-24. Colin Powell is not trustworthy and has not been supportive of this President.

HV-25. Colin Powell does not believe in debloviating the UN, leading with strong stands, promoting a conservative foreign policy, regime change, or pre-emptive action, even though he has made numerous statements supporting just those policies.

HV-26. That’s because he doesn’t believe in doing them all right now, planning is just a sign of weakness, there’s no time to lose, he who hesitates is lost, fire every missile we have right now, what are you waiting for??, we’re all going to die!!!!

HV-27. Colin Powell, you see, “just doesn’t get it.”
HV-28. L. Paul Bremer is an arrogant bully who is the mindless slave of the Foreign Service, the UN, the Trilateral Commission, the Bildeberg Group, the Illuminati, the Triad, certain shady characters from former Iron Curtain countries, and the New York Times. He holds séances to communicate with Willi Brandt.

HV-29. In fact, we can just skip over his bravura performance in service to his country and Iraq while facing insurmountable odds, because L. Paul Bremer also “just doesn’t get it.”
HV-30. Richard Lugar, USS, has accomplished the remarkable: he is the Senate’s most conservative member, its most respected, and its most loyal supporter of George W. Bush, several of whose positions are neither conservative nor popular. He has a detailed knowledge of foreign affairs and has sponsored highly effective legislation dealing with the consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Empire. He is a Rhodes Scholar and a painfully decent and fair-minded man who has never reacted quickly or thoughtlessly to anything since he was 15.

HV-31. So when he starts talking about the “incompetence of this Administration,” you should just look the other way and forget you heard anything. That kind of talk can spread.

HV-32. Anyone who thinks we should have used more troops does not realize the brilliance of Donald Rumsfeld’s plan to create thousands of Iraqi police officers through intensive training courses that last a whole two weeks and are taught by people who do not speak Arabic.

HV-33. The fact that this cockamamie plan failed utterly in Najaf and Fallujah is proof that it was actually concocted by L. Paul Bremer and his “friends in the National Security Council.” They just wrote “Donald Rumsfeld” after the funny word “From” that they put at the top of memos.

HV-34. But, you see, we should rest assured about the future of Iraq, because Donald Rumsfeld has this really nifty plan to train local police officers.

HV-35. The fact that insurgents escaping from Fallujah easily overran the new “police forces” in the previously peaceful city of Mosul is just one of those unfortunate things, and has no significance whatsoever.

HV-26. If you can make the last four points not completely conflict with each other or with the cold hard facts, you could get a job writing editorials for a major conservative publication. Apply now.

HV-27. Besides, later reports revealed that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of the Mosul police fought with the insurgents.

HV-28. O.k,, o.k., so the police fought “along with” the insurgents. They got confused by all the explosions. All we have to do is get them to turn around.

It’s true they laughed at the Wright Brothers. They also laughed at the guys who strapped on fake wings and drove their bikes off of cliffs.

Part VIII
Judgment Day

JD-1. No preventable mistakes were made in the planning or the prosecution of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

JD-2. No mistakes were made for ideological reasons.

JD-3. No one should be held accountable for preventable or ideologically based mistakes, if there even were such mistakes.

JD-4. See, the war advocates were really sincere, and that makes them nice people.

JD-5. If they refused to listen to those who warned them that they were making some serious mistakes, why, you should just be grateful that such fine people are there protecting us and shut up.

JD-6. No one should investigate to find out if any mistakes were made, nor should there be any attempt to ascertain whether the mistakes were preventable or ideologically based.

JD-7. If any investigation is made, it should be clear that only State Department officials will get punished.

JD-8. If somebody’s warnings about the war turned out to be correct, no one should apologize for having trashed him mercilessly when he made the warnings.

JD-9. People who had doubts about the war should be judged by whether or not they bow when we walk into the room.

JD-10. And they should only straighten up when we tell them to.

JD-11. See, it doesn’t matter what you do. It just matters if you mean well.

JD-12. Only people who agree with us mean well.

It’s true they laughed at the Wright Brothers. They also laughed at the guys who strapped on fake wings and drove their bikes off of cliffs.

Part IX
Things We Just Know Are True

TWJKAT-1.We are fighting a general war against terrorism, not against a specific group of terrorists who hate us specifically.

TWJKAT-2. Foreign policy and military alliances can be conducted in the same way as any international business, even though markets thrive because they allow corporations to make horrendous mistakes and fail, which happens routinely.

TWJKAT-3. We can win the War on Terror, just as we won the Cold War.

TWJKAT-4. In fact, the War on Terror is just like the Cold War in every way. Now that we have experience, we can pack this one away in a year or two.

TWJKAT-5. Oh, and the fact that everyone likes to say that “Communism fell,” even though it was the Soviet Union which did and Communism is still alive and well around the globe and in American universities—forget that part.

TWJKAT-6. We owe everything to Ronald Wilson Reagan, who proved the “consensus” wrong by forcing the Soviet Union’s back against a wall. He understood the importance of persuasion, and dedicated the vast majority of his time as President to negotiating and “communicating.” He talked incessantly to the American public, toured foreign countries, and was famous for his willingness to pick up the phone and chat with Democratic Party leaders. Mr. Reagan met frequently with members of Congress, in groups or individually, as needed. He made every effort to become close personal friends with Francois Mitterand, a committed Socialist whose every instinct was the opposite of Mr. Reagan’s.

TWJKAT-7. George W. Bush is the Second Coming of Ronald Wilson Reagan. Except in the communicating part. But, hey, what does that matter?

TWJKAT-8. The Afghanistan and Iraq wars proved that modern technology has fundamentally altered the nature of war.

TWJKAT-9. But only in our favor. Technological advances make it easy for us to target and kill our enemies. It never makes it easy for our enemies to target and kill us.

TWJKAT-10. There is an acceptable human cost to right-up-to-the-edge experimentation in “defense transformation,” but that experimentation should never be subject to rigorous analysis.

TWJKAT-11. The US is the only source of justice in this world, and the U.S. is superior to the entire rest of humanity both technologically and militarily. We should therefore take on every enemy and cure every ill that presents itself to our infallible judgment. Prudence is for wimps.

TWJKAT-12. The fact that the US only produces 25 to 30 percent of the world’s economic goods should not deter us in any way. One of our dollars is easily worth three of anybody else’s.

TWJKAT-13. Do not even think about the obvious implication of all that—that 100 percent of the US Gross National Product should be converted to military purposes. What are you, some kind of leftist, peace-loving wimp?

TWJKAT-14. There is a universal aspiration to live in a liberal democracy, so we don’t need to know any boring details about any elections we set up in countries we have liberated. You know, boring things like the platforms on which candidates in elections are running.

TWJKAT-15. If we remove monstrous villains from power, everyone that has been subjected to them will dance in the streets and ask America how they should live their lives.

TWJKAT-16. No person or group in a country we liberate will seek to control the county on their own terms.

TWJKAT-17. Everybody loves America, and wants to be American.

TWJKAT-18. You know that thing about how conservatives are supposed to know history and to believe that culture trumps everything? Forget that. We’re going to try that thing about how a few dedicated activists can alter history. And myabe we need a new name, a name whose root is the same as "liberty," because that is what we are spreading. We're thinking of calling ourselves "Liberals."

TWJKAT-19. Only those people who believed in the purest form of “defense transformation,” “Liberation Lite,” “regime change,” and every thing else that anyone at a calls-itself-conservative think-tank came up with should be honored. Everyone else has to prove themselves.

TWJKAT-20. We should just pop open all of South Asia and see what happens.

TWJKAT-21. We must march on. On to Damascus. And to Tehran. And Riyadh.

TWJKAT-22. Yargh.

TWJKAT-22. Any questions mean failure. You need only believe.

TWJKAT-23. And only in us.

It’s true they laughed at the Wright Brothers. They also laughed at the guys who strapped on fake wings and drove their bikes off of cliffs.

For an explanation of the "how" and "why" of The Litany, please scroll ot the end.

I am struck speechless with awe at the courage of our soldiers, the Afghan people, and the Iraqi people. Let no one say that I have uttered a word against them. For a further explanation of The Litany, please see A Mind That Suits. (http://amindthatsuits.blogspot.com/). You may comment on it from there.

(1) The background for AP5-7 is taken from Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare: Implications for Army and Defense Policy, by Dr. Stephen D. Biddle. (http://www.carlisle.army.mil/ssi/pubs/display.cfm/hurl/PubID=109) ã 2002, Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College. Carlisle, PA. All rights reserved. Before you comment on this section, please read his paper carefully. However, he had nothing to do with what I wrote, so direct your angry comments to me.

(2) The background for IW4-7 came from an article by David Talbot, “How Tech Failed in Iraq,” in Technology Review, Vol. 107 No. 9, pp. 36-44. ã 2004, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All rights reserved. Anyone who wants to hold forth on “defense transformation” needs to study this article carefully.

(3) I support our soldiers 100%. I have met veterans of this war who have deep misgivings. I am shocked that no one has sought to find out what they think. During that “town meeting” where the soldier asked Donald Rumsfeld about why there were so few armored Humvees really happened, the soldiers there peppered him with questions about things that were bothering them. (See transcript here: http://www.dod.gov/speeches/2004/sp20040513-secdef0423.html) Why this didn’t tip off self-styled conservative writers that there was a serious problem is utterly beyond me

The Litany on the GWOT. Copyright 2004, Kenneth A. Killiany. All rights reserved.

Please pass it on if you feel it is worthy. You may pass it on as a whole, in the “parts” I have designated, or as isolated quotes. You may make your own arrangement of The Litany provided that 1) you present each point in its entirety, 2) you use the numbering from the original, and 3) you include the address for my blog so people can read the whole thing.

You must include the entire copyright notice when you pass it on except when using isolated quotes, which are covered by the “fair use” doctrine. You must, however, identify in some way where you got the quote from.

You may not renumber any item, reword any of The Litany, add your own points with numbers, or present any part of one point as a separate point.

Note for pedants: the primary meaning of “factual” is “pertaining to facts,” and so a “factual assertion” may be either true or false.

“WMD” is probably a plural, although that is still in flux. If you say it out loud, you instinctively say “WeaponS of Mass Destruction.” One particular “weapon of mass destruction” will be a bomb, a vial, a canister, or something else with a name. In The Litany, “WMD” is used as a plural. If usage eventually demands that it be singular, it will, without argument, be changed here.

How did the Litany come to be written?

“November 2 promises to be another in a long line of elections decided by those Americans who are the least engaged, least interested in, and least informed about politics.”

So wrote the redoubtable Jonah Goldberg, who transformed National Review Online into the most interesting political site in existence, as even one hopelessly and unapologetically Democratic party website acknowledged. (That would be my hometown rag, the mighty and superb Washington Post. When I say “unapologetically” I do not mean “openly.”)

The in-every-way-wonderful Kate O’Beirne made much the same point here , although she cites polls to back up her point, which is that independents are people who don’t know much about politics.

The fallacy is clearer with Ms. O’Beirne. She automatically correlates those who know nothing about the quotidian details of politics with people who have not decided. Sorry, but I have had conversations recently with liberals who know nothing about the abortion issue and conservatives who know nothing about issues affecting our troops. There is exactly no correlation between not knowing how you are going to vote and what you know about politics.

But long before she wrote that, Mr. Goldberg had his little hissy fit. (Or is that “hissie?” Politically correct MS Word will not allow either. Methinks “hissie.”)

What grated was that his outburst did not describe me, who at that time was undecided. And, when I confessed that, (and my ruminations on casting a protest vote for Ronald Reagan, as I had in 1992) to an esteemed internet friend---one Than Whom It Is Not Possible To Be More Accurately Described As “Neocon”—I received the curt reply to
“not waste your vote.”

The last reply cut because a protest vote would not be a wasted vote, and it implied that the only commitment in politics must be total commitment. I lived in the DC of Marion Berry, and so can never vote Democratic. But what if I felt the current foreign policy of the United States was not conservative, but merely warmed over—or perhaps hotted over—Kennedyism?

As for Mr. Goldberg, his comments not merely grated but irritated, as in fact I knew far more about the Iraq War or the GWOT (the inaptly named “Global War on Terrorism”) than the diligent reader of the National Review ever would. Make that, more than would the diligent reader of the National Review, the Weekly Standard, or the mighty editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.

Why? Because long before the Weekly Standard woke up—which was in September, 2003—I had despaired of commentary in the conservative press, on which I had depended all my life. I had resorted to reading government documents, congressional testimony, and think tank reports (the best coming from the Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvannia.)

I had come to the conclusion, you see, that the gatekeepers of the debate among conservative intellectuals—the editors—had failed mightily in the main job of intellectuals, which is to seek the truth, which can only come from criticism. “Boosterism” is what most editors had committed from August 2002 to September 2003, which is when the Weekly Standard jumped ship. They realized, apparently, that “defense transformation” and what I was the first to describe as ‘Liberation Lite” cannot square with “nation building.” (A little late guys. Better late than never, but let’s work on that “ahead of the curve” thing for next time.) This conservative has his doubts about “nation building” as a goal, though he agrees with the notion that democratic world is better for the US. The space between those two is where there needs to be a real debate.

The Litany began as the end of a reply to Mr. Goldberg. The educated person can, I felt, vote for Mr. Bush is it is certain that he no longer trusts people who say certain things, after which I started a list. And then it grew. And grew.

Whom the Litany is NOT directed against?
W. He has his faults—undisguised in THE LITANY—but frankly what has upset me most is that he was obviously playing “true believers” as fools. He was worried about WMD and terrorism. The only pre-war speech he gave on “nation building” was to the American Enterprise Institute, and that speech is full of conditional modal auxiliary verbs such as “would” and “could.” In other words, he did not—and probably does not-- believe in nation building. Neither does Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, or—most importantly—Donald Rumsfeld. The distance between that reality and the rhetoric of certain conservatives is another place where there needs to be debate.

All conservative intellectuals. “Neither paleo- nor neo-, just con“ is how I describe myself, and that is how one would describe Bob Novak, George Will, and—above all—William F. Buckley, Jr,, the founder of National Review and the Indispensable Man in the creation of an American alternative to what the French call “statism.” All had reservations about the war; all have been morally committed to rational criticism of its prosecution.

But what to make of Eliot Cohen?

Prof. Cohen, of the Johns Hopkins University School for Advanced International Studies (known here in DC simply as “SAIS,” pronounced “sice,” as in “slice.”), was the object of much furious debate shortly before the war because of a book he wrote entitled Supreme Command , which W read as he contemplated war with Iraq. His views were dubbed radical by the foreign policy establishment, and he has been lumped in with the dreaded “neocons” since he became a public issue.

Given his reputation, it surprised me somewhat that Prof. Cohen was almost first out the box with a criticism of the war from a conservative perspective. (The redoubtable Stanly Kurtz at NRO may have been the first.) In fact, I cannot recall anything of Prof. Cohen’s that I have disagreed with.

His most recent column occasioned the thought that perhaps it was time for me to learn more about Prof. Cohen. In all the riches of the Internet, I could find precious little that I disagreed with. Indeed, he wrote an article for Foreign Affairs magazine, from the painfully establishment Council on Foreign Relations, in which he dilated on the realities of empire. For a whole host of reasons, thinkers both left and right dodge the word “empire,” even though every single large country in history has been a “multi-ethnic empire,” defined as a political entity cobbled together by one particular ethnic group with a large enough army to beat up on related neighbors. That definition applies to modern day England (without even going into the “United Kingdom”) France, Germany, Italy, and—most obviously—Spain. Everyone else, take a ticket and stand in line. I first noticed that reality running through the footnotes to the magisterial Open Society And Its Enemies, by my intellectual idol Karl Popper. Clear vision on that point dispenses with loads of nonsense both left and right. (Peter Brimelow, call your office.)

And it turns out that the thesis which some found so dangerous was that the executive arm of government must take a strong stand as against the military leadership. Oh, how villainously Madisonian of him. The best review I found stressed that he emphasized that a full debate must be allowed, but that the executive must be unapologetic in exercising its prerogatives.

But Prof. Cohen is listed as a “neocon,” and I am “neither paleo- nor neo-, just con.”

The resolution of that little problem is that there is probably no real difference between “neo” and just “con.” The Weekly Standard, the hometown rag for neocons, has—a little late, guys—led the healthy criticism of our foreign policy, whereas Paul Gigot—whose intellectual roots are with the Wall Street Journal editorial page he now leads, and so is just “con”--has wagged his finger at W. that if he does not take military action against Iran—with what army, he does not specify—the President will be betraying that 51% of the electorate that returned him to office.

Let us note that Prof. Cohen apparently believes the executive should take charge after a full debate, whereas certain boosterish thinkers seem to feel that any debate is in itself treason. There is another space where there needs to be real debate.

The answer to Ms. O’Beirne comes from the first presidential debate. Quoth the President: “Let me -I'm not exactly sure what you mean, passes the global test.” That little dash there conveys a look of genuine bewilderment on the part of the President. He started to give a stock answer, and then went with his gut. I am not the first to say that the gut, the instincts, are what counts in a candidate, but here is well-illustrated a point by the chief advocate of rational criticism, Karl Popper. Thank God, he is once reported to have said, for people who cannot explain why they believe what they believe.

And why did I vote for W? Because according to one report by Fred Barnes, he was positively Machiavellian in arranging the selection of Interim Iraqi Prime Minister Allawi. And because he blurted out that we cannot win the war on terrorism. Prof. Cohen, if memory serves, said that a war on terrorism is the equivalent of FDR’s declaring a war against bombers after Pearl Harbor. I have put it more bluntly: a War on Terror makes as much sense as a War on Toothpicks. Terror is a device, a tool—an evil one, to be sure. But the problem is the terrorists.

::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 2:37 PM



Monday, November 15, 2004 :::
 
The mother of A Mind That Suits, who was as good a journalist as her more famous brother, hated editors, but A Mind That Suits himself thinks they must come in handy. In rereading Mondays post, he realizes that he left out "16" (seize) from the list of French numbers that, according to one theory, are improperly named. (See the post--the theory is confusing.) That would mean that the barrier to French children's learning of math at 300 percent of the one in English, and that is not even looking at numbers 70 and up. But the theory is utterly silly, so details are probably unimportant.

And he notices that for "numeric," he wrote "numberic," which is, he believes, a language spoken in the Horn of Africa.

From Monday:

A needlessly badger-like existence in the last four months has resulted in not attending to friendships, new and old, so it was somewhat humbling to see that Friend Eddie, over at One Good Turn, mentions A Mind That Suits in his latest post, when we have not communicated for months. Shame on a certain pudgy, balding English teacher. But scanning over his blog is a reminder that he writes the most mind-bendingly interesting stuff. He is a philosophy professor who has the job that A Mind That Suits would have wanted had he stayed in philosophy:a professorship in a department unconcerned with the cul-de-sacs into which modern philosophy drives itself and very concerned with keeping alive the mighty, glorious Western tradition in philosophy. Bravo, Eddie, says A Mind That Suits, and more power to you. Eddie also writes affectingly of departed friends, and does so this morning. (A Mind That Suits hopes and expects not to have that honor for a while, but that is in God's hands.)

And now, to today's thoughts.

With the resignation of Colin Powell, George W. Bush is losing one of the finest aides a ruler could hope to have. It is unlikely that this great man will go away--and A Mind That Suits does not describe pro-"choice" moderates as "great" with great frequency. But the Administration could use his wise counsel. Gen. Powell has spent most of his life mastering large bureaucracies that normally master their masters, and the most frequently mentioned successors, including Dr. Rice, have many virtues, but lack that ability to command. He will be missed, and Godspeed.

May Donald Rumsfeld follow quickly, at which point the world would be about even in the win-loss calculus.

A Mind That Suits has busied himself this fall with learning more about French, a wonderful language which is, unfortunately, mainly spoken by French people. A lovely West African woman who occupies the classroom down the hall on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays is doing her considerable best to inculcate the basics of that glorious language in the minds of somewhat reluctant freshman. The kids were actively engage' this morning, which is a good sign, but it does serve as confirmation of a comment uttered by another friend, a cynical waiter of advanced years who confirms by example nearly everyone's prejudices about the French. He worked for years at the World Bank, and has said that the great traditions of France live on only among the young people from the French empire (which, as the poor Cote-d'Ivoireans have learned this week, is still viciously in place.)

But his own efforts remind A Mind That Suits of one of the most glaring examples of what happens when social scientists get large grants. Searching for a reason that Chinese students do so much better in math than American students, some researchers came up with this. In Chinese, the mathematical concept "11" is rendered by a word that would, in English, be rendered "one-teen." There was no break between 11 and 12 and the rest of the teens, and the words "thirteen," etc, correctly represent the mathematics underlying them. This, according to these researchers, explains everything, and if English started saying "one-teen," all would be well.

Ahh, but this is why one should lift one's head while doing research. France has produced, on a per capita basis, far more great mathematicians than China, and just how does one count in French? Well, not only are there unique words for 11 and 12, but unique words for 13, 14, and 15. So French children, according to this blighted theory, should take 250 percent longer to learn basic arithmetic than do English speaking kids, which is manifestly not true.

And what to do with French numbers 70 and above? 70 is rendered "sixty-ten" (soixante-dix), so the poor children of France, West Africa, Martinique, and Reunion must take numbers out of sequence and add them. And if 11 in English is a problem, what about 71 in French, which is "sixty-eleven" (soixante-onze)? Even more fun are 80 (four-twenty) and 90 (four-twenty-ten). In English, all those words follow "Base 10," which is one of the two number systems that are of any real interest. (The other is "Base Two," which--if you have forgotten basic math--you see every day in the 1-0 switch on your computer.) "80" in English is "eight-ten," which is a very good representation of "8 in the 10's place," the way we had to learn in elementary school. Not so in French. Using the system of our social scientists, English has only two words out of place, but French, 35.

And yet French children routinely clobber ours in international competitions. Why?

For two reasons.

One is that no normal person thinks about the words they use everyday. They would go nuts if they did. French kids say "four-twenty-thirteen" for "93" and don't give it a moment's thought. Maman says it, so they do. They simply do not think, "oh, I am saying {(4 x 20) + 13 }." They think "93."

The other is that the speech and numeric functions of the brain are almost completely separate. We all know some people who can function in the numberic realm but can hardly speak, and others who can speak beautifully but ask you to calculate the tip. And a whole host who show somewhat greater strength in one or the other.

But relatively few folks are smart enough to get a federal grant to worry about two words in English and forget the 35 words in French, and--moreover--to get the Washington Post to print their article about this "problem," which doesn't exist.

The problem is, our kids don't study, and papers like the Washington Post do not support vouchers, which would go a long way toward solving that problem.


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 3:37 PM



Friday, November 12, 2004 :::
 
A week and a half after the election, and not much to add. It is raining a dismal, dreary rain--rather like what Northern Californians get all winter, when they constantly reassure you that "it's not normally like this," although it is. Such weather was the blight of the college years of a certain pudgy, balding English teacher, and it's a blight on life today.

Democratic Party leaders are following form, and dumping on John Kerry for losing the election, when all the evidence indicates that it was the Democratic Party's message that got clobbered. As the Clinton years testify, they really do seem to value power alone, and they are looking for the villain who kept them from it. Conservatives, of course, are gleefully defending Kerry, for one obvious reason: it makes it that much easier to dump on liberals, which is fun to do.

But is that entirelyfair? Democrats have a point, thought they do not make it well. Kerry was indeed a lousy candidate, because his ideas were incoherent, and he went for the jugular when plodding would have served better. There is a huge case to be made against George W. Bush's way of handling his office. Kerry never made it. He went on and on about losing Osama bin-Laden in Tora Bora, when the big problem was pulling intelligence resources away from Afghanistan to concentrate on Iraq before they had had a chance to digest everything they uncovered.

Worse, to partisan crowds, he repeated the mantra that "Bush lied," when Bush didn't. Out West, a random person, who turned out to be a liberal, walked up to A Mind That Suits because she saw that he was reading the 9/11 Commission report, and asked about it. After hearing a brief summary, she said, "It's just so good to know that Bush didn't lie." If a likely Kerry voter knew that much, why did Kerry himself lie? Or why did he think that even his own voters would swallow it? Or--which is almost as bad--why did he run for President knowing so little about the real issues?

Venerable Richard Lugar, perhaps the finest man in politics today, gave Kerry the sword he needed when he talked about "the incompetence of this Admininstration, " although that weapon has been there to be grasped since long before the Chairman of Senate Foreign Relations blurted it out. Kerry used it, but it got thrown in with all the other nonsense, instead of being the basis for the campaign.

So, you know, maybe Democrats have a point. But do they understand it?

A certain, pudgy balding English teacher reconciled himself to voting for Mr. Bush almost entirely on the basis of indications that Mr. Bush himself did understand the point.


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 1:46 PM



Wednesday, November 03, 2004 :::
 
YAY!

I guess.

Actually, I know. Overheard in Ye Olde Neighborhood Poolhall ("Ye Olde Neighborhood" herein defined as Cleveland Park, home to lots and lots of rich pretentious leftists): "You know it's going to be Chief Justice Antonin Scalia."

From your whiny liberal lips to God's ears. Or at least to W's.

Note to David Gelernter: They are not the same person.

And I will maintain that what did John Kerry in was that first debate. "Global test" is the kind of thing that scares lots and lots of Americans, as it should.

A further thought on W's character. He told the Journal editorial board while he was still governor that what he learned from his father's term was that if you have political capital, you should spend it. And whole gallons of ink has been spilled on what he learned from President Regan, though three aspects of his management style are pretty clear: the first is to let your staff duke it out right in front of you in meetings and then make your own decision, the second is to be loyal to your staff no matter what, and the third, by negative example, is to punish leakers, which Mr. Reagan unfortunately did not do. Then there is the largely unexplored question of his striking similarity to his mother, as a person. (He'd look terrible in a blue dress.) But this thing about deliberately running a race to win by a small margin on your own terms, rather than a large margin with too many compromises? I am not sure I have heard anyone ask him what he learned from Margaret Thatcher.

And so, yes, yay.


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 10:37 AM



Tuesday, November 02, 2004 :::
 
2 thoughts for the day, as there is nothing other to do than wait.

On the way to the voting station in the middle of the afternoon, (when wise people vote if they can, to avoid lines) a certain pudgy, balding English teacher was greeted by a group of youngsters, probably 6th-graders, from the public charter school on the corner. (DC has no private charter schools--yet.) They were as mixed as could be, racially, but they were, of course, largely separated into groups of boys and girls, and the girls got to him first. "Excuse me, sir. Have you voted?" "Well, I'm on my way right now." "Who are you going to vote for?" "George Bush." The questioner solemnly entered the information on her clipboard, but this other young lady burst out, "NNNNNOOOO!!!" Said English teacher, with lots of experience with youngsters, shamelessly made fun of her, and then pointed out it was a democracy. "Thank you," said the questioner solemnly, and their teacher, who bore all the signs of a lifelong reader of the New York Times, ushered them along without comment. The boys came up a few seconds later, and another very solemn questioner asked the same litany. However, when said English teacher told him he had voted, the young man did not ask for whom. He just marked Bush. Said child was actively engaged in stereotyping, but stereotypes sometimes have foundations in fact.

The neighborhood, Mt. Pleasant, to the west of 16th Street--the one that ends at the White House--is one of the nation's most beautiful, and also one of the most actually, honest-to-goodness diverse. The houses on Park Road sell for millions of dollars, and Hispanic families crowd spacious and adequate basements just around the corner. Well, that held true until an influx of two-kid, two-car families bought up all the group houses and converted them into million-dollar showplaces, so most everyboy is white these days. But not this group of kids.

And A Mind That Suits, who sides with the Weekly Standard against the Journal and National Review on the war, but with the Weekly Standard and the Journal against the National Review on immigration, was reminded of how wonderful this country can be as a group of really, really old folks form a home blocked his way out of the voting area. His mother taught him well, so he just waited, though one elderly gentleman just gave up and sat on the wall to let other people pass. He was African-American, and the ladies he was with were chattering in Spanish. In other countries, they would not be allowed to vote. Here, they are conveyed by the taxpayers, through the 501(c)(3) that helps them. What a great country.

The one thing this neighborhood has never had is many Republicans. In frustration, A Mind That Suits wrote in Ronald Wilson Reagan in 1992, and the Communist Party candidate got more support.

As for the candidates, a couple of reports have come out confirming that George W. Bush audibly what he obviously thinks internally: he would rather win his way with 50% than compromise and cruise with 60%. If he loses--an even chance, as of this writing--that will make both father-and-son presidents one-termers. However, John Quincy was a clone of John, although a better politician, but W. is nothing like H.W. He said in his acceptance speech that he was like his mother, and he is right. Everyone "loves" her because of her unapologetic white tresses and unapologetic liberalism, but she is fiercely loyal to her conservative son. And they are both pleasant, prickly, and uncompromising. The apples doesn't fall far from the tree; you should just remember that, with humans, there are always two trees involved.

GET OUT AND VOTE.


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 3:24 PM



Monday, November 01, 2004 :::
 
Osama bin-Laden's calling card was interesting for a number of reasons, the first--and blessed--one being that it did not come in the form of explosives and mass murder.

So far as one can tell such things, what that means is that he doesn't have something nasty of his sleave. Let us pray that is so.

That can't be because he doesn't want to have some action planned. For such a man, the raw "success"--in his terms-- of the horrific Madrid bombings can only have increased his lust to do the same thing to the Great Satan. What it most probably means is that the plot to blow up major financial institutions was it, and we broke it up. Bully for us.

But here's the thing: in the strange litany of beliefs about the "War on Terror" recited by a small group of conservative writers, one is supposed to laugh at anyone who emphasizes the law enforcment aspect of it. And yet, as Dr. Jeffrey Record, among others, has pointed out, all but one of the al-Qaeda operatives and other terror leaders we have caught have been caught exactly by law enforcement officials. It needs to be added that several of them have been caught by French and German police. (That was as of the time Dr. Record's fine book was published. This writer would have to check on the most recent numbers, and the French, typically, have a fondness for just throwing these people out, which doesn't do a lot.) The Financial District plan was cracked by the British. So why are we supposed to sneer at the law enforcement angle? This writer, for one, doesn't get it.

Sen. Kerrey disqualifies himself by ranting on about Tora Bora. This man who supposedly knows so many details talks about how we outsourced our search for bin-Laden to the local warlords there. The General in charge of the operation points out, in this morning's Journal, the US actually took charge of that operation, so the good Senator has his facts wrong, nevermind that every lead putting bin-Laden in the area turned out to be wrong. Or that the Senator supported the operation at the time.

In his famous "nuisance" quote, the Senator actually said he wanted to take us "back" to when it was a nuisance, meaning, one supposes, the Clinton era. We depended on a law enforcement model "back" then, which is a different kettle of fish. That was when bin-Laden spent his time planning 9/11. One hates to burst the Democrats' balloon, but that plot did not come into his twisted head as he watched George W. Bush being sworn in.

Which also points out why the Democrats have disqualified themselves as a whole. They jumped on the Financial District plan, sneering, in their turn, that the intelligence used to capture the plotters was several years old, meaning that Mr. Bush was drumming up a crisis. Yet bin-Laden plans these things for years, and it now looks as if we got it right.

This time. We have to keep looking ahead to next time.

Which brings us finally to Mr. Bush and to the handful of policy intellectuals holding down the debate on the Right. Is the military model it? If we had infinite resources, perhaps, but we are stretched very thin and we just decided to send more troops to Iraq--a little late, one might add. Whatever comes into the fevered imaginations of Michael Ledeen and Frank Gaffney, we really don't have enough troops to go much of anywhere, and if Columbia blows--which it is always on the verge of doing--and Iran and North Korea become front burner issues? We are rapidly approaching the point when bin-Laden could taunt us with "you and what army?" and that man never means anything as a joke.

A cartoon recently showed--if memory serves--a "Pumpkin Carving Contest." Sen. Kerry was scratching his chin and saying "we have to first carefully consider the nature of the pumpkin," leaving the pumpkin untouched. The President was standing with an axe in his hands and the ruins of a pumpkin around his feet, saying, "That looks great."

That about sums up the choice, but this writer has to go with guy with the axe.

For one thing, the military model is more favored by the intellectuals than by the President, who doesn't bother telling us what he is up to but at least keeps returning to law enforcement tactics. Having to read tea-leaves is frustrating, but the signs are that he has more sense than some of his supporters.


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 11:14 AM



Thursday, October 28, 2004 :::
 
Nice Work, Guys

In what the British call the “run-up” to the war, the preferred expert on WMD of conservative commentators was the estimable Dr. David Kay. The no-less-estimable Kate O’Beirne dedicated one column to his testimony before a Congressional Committee, but other commentators were no less indebated to him.

And then he answered the call of the President and set about looking for those WMD as head of the CIA’s “Iraq Survey Group,” and found that they were not there in any way approximating what was claimed before the war.

And, suddenly, he became Public Enemy Number One.

Which is very frustrating to this writer, who initially was very doubtful about the war but became reluctantly convinced of its necessity exactly because of Dr. Kay’s work. In his “exit interview” before the Senate Armed Service Committee, there is a colloquy between Dr. Kay and the embodiment-of-every-Republican-virtue-you-can-imagine, Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, which should be the basis of any future conservative policy on the fight against terror. It is built upon the evidence, and not on any need to defend what was said before the war. However, Dr. Kay loyally threw President Bush and anyone else who needed them enough bones to save face, saying repeatedly throughout his testimony such things as the war was “incredibly prudent.”

For this unflinching dedication to the truth, Dr. Kay was of course honored by those commentators who lionized him before the war, right?

No, he was ignored or villified.

This writer had wondered about the psychological effect of being isolated by the people who used to support you. There was a hint of an answer a few weeks ago, when Dr. Kay was interviewd on MSNBC about the most report of the ISG, now headed by Charles Duelfer. Dr. Kay is very good at providing soundbites, remarkable considering he has spent most of his career in service to various bureaucracies, including the mercilessly opaque United Nations system.

His answers were models of clarity and accuracy.

And also, perhaps, models of vengeance.

He provided Pres. Bush with precious little wiggle room, in sharp contrast to his appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee a few short months ago.

And now, when President Bush most needs—and actually deserves—cover, over those not-really-WMD explosives that have gone missing, what is Dr. Kay saying? He is right in there trying to push the Administration over a cliff, saying that they were there when we got to Baghdad.

That is plausible, but unlikely, in sharp contrast to most of his previous testimony, which regarded the likely and most reasonable.

How much does it take a man to actively work against people he has been associated with all his professional life? We now know.

Such are the consequences of the lock-step, closed-minded, on-to-victory mentality that has infected our conservative intellectual elite.

It is going to be tight Tuesday night, and there will likely be some lawsuits which will drag it out. But liberal Democrat and Arab-American activist John Zogby, who demonstrates a dedication the cold hard facts which many conservatives should emulate, says that his polling data indicate W. should win, though he will not make an absolute prediction. Over the last 15 years, Mr. Zogby has demonstrated a reliability which commands respect. Certainly, whatever “surge” Sen. Kerry got from the recent spate of bad news is quickly receding.

Will the conservative elite, who have done so much to choke off necessary debate, be chastened by the close call, or will they be emboldened to follow their reckless ways? Can the Republic survive much more of this hot-house theorizing about nation-building with oppressed peoples rising up to greet American liberators?

It would be nice if that elite would take a breath and think about these things, before the leaders of those oppressed peoples go all out to make it clear that they prefer to call the shots in their own lands.

Only time, as TV reporters love to say, will tell. This conservative is throwing his lot in with Sen. Roberts and Dr. Kay, even if he will ignore Dr. Kay in voting for George W. Bush.


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 1:14 PM


 
Nice Work, Guys

In what the British call the "run-up" to the war, a favorite expert of conservative commentators was the estimable Dr. David Kay. The equally estimable Kate O'Beirne, no less, dedicated one column to his testimony on Iraqi WMD, but other conservatives relied on him no less.

And then he was asked by our President to figure out what happened to those WMD.

And, because he did not flinch from the truth, he became Public Enemy Number One.

In his "exit interview" before the Senate Armed Services Committee as lead investigator on WMD--technically, as head of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group--he did his best to justify the war. He called it "incredibly prudent." And indeed, it was his work which converted this war skeptic to reluctant war supporter. There is a colloquy between Dr. Kay and that embodiment-of-Republican-ideals, Sen. Roberts of Kansas, which should form the cornerstone of any realistic policy on fighting terror and WMD.

So Dr. Kay was of course embraced by the conservative intellectual elite for his bravery and dedication to the truth?

No, he was villified or ignored.

This writer had wondered about the psychological effect of being isolated by people who used to idolize you, and he got a hint in an interview with the estimable doctor not so long ago on MSNBC. Dr. Kay--surprisingly for someone who spent most of his life working for bureaucracies--is very good at soundbites, and gave 10 second answers which were models of quotability.

They were also models of accuracy.

There were also models of exasperation.

For Dr. Kay granted Pres. Bush precious little wiggle room, unlike his responses to the Senate Armed Services Committee, which allowed any conservative listening wide latitude in using what he had found--which was, alas, that there simply were no WMD to be found. But, as we noted, those responses were not used.

That was a few weeks ago. What about now, just when Pres. Bush most needs cover and actually deserves it--over these not-even-WMD explosives that are unaccounted for? Dr. Kay is right in there trying to push this Administration over the edge, claiming that the explosives were probably there when we took Baghdad. That is plausible, but it is not probable.

What does it take for an honorable and dedicated man like Dr. Kay to actively seek the defeat of a cause he has served so well? We now know.

That is yet one more consequence of this lock-step, closed-minded, on-to-victory mentality that has seized our conservative intellectual elite. How much time has been lost through defending a (clearly false) certainty when conservatives should have been dedicated to finding the truth, no matter what happened to the reputation of Donald Rumsfeld--or of George W. Bush, for that matter?

And that, more than anything else, explains why W. is the fight of his life against an opponent he should have buried by late September.


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 1:05 PM



Wednesday, October 27, 2004 :::
 
Conservative commentators, or commentators who call themselves conservative, are, in essence, crying that the explosives that were not where they were supposed to be prove that Saddam still had WMD.

The problem is, the explosives weren't there on April 10, 2003, when our troops first looked at the site, accompanied by an embedded NBC News reporter. So they just become some more dangerous items that Saddam may well have ditched.

Nor were they WMD, exactly. They could be used to trigger nuclear weapons, but, as the Iraq Survey Group has established beyond any reasonable doubt, Saddam's nuclear weapons program, such it was, was in a pretty sorry state.

John Kerry makes the far more serious point that they could be used by the terrorists who, he implies, stole them out from under the noses of our troops, except that our troops were never guarding them. Saddam may have, in a final desperate move, tossed them over to his friends in every terrorist organization in the world, or he may have gotten rid of them. In any case, we could have done nothing to prevent anything that he did with them.

What is troubling is that Sen. Kerry seems to understand neither the war nor what we should do about a very difficult situation. Just as troubling is the unwillingness of commentators who call themselves conservative to embrace the clear truth. Saddam ditched his WMD so that he could get rid of the sanctions, which were indeed near the point of falling apart when we invaded. But the earliest he could have gotten his precious WMD back was at least a year or two out from that point, which had not yet arrived. The war was necessary, in other words, but not urgent. It was even more necessary that the war be planned and carried out in a radically different fashion than it was, but it wasn't. Where to go from here is the issue, and the Democrats have not given us someone who inspires any confidence in his ability to even choose a path.

April 10, 2003, was also the first time that serious doubts about the war were raised on A Mind That Suits, on which doubts this blog has never softened.


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 10:38 AM



Monday, October 25, 2004 :::
 
The news is filled today with praise for James Cardinal Hickey, who led the Washington Archdiocese for twenty years. The praise is well deserved. He was personally holy, dedicated to helping the poor, and unswervingly orthodox.

Little attention is drawn to one aspect of his governing style, because it ensured that little attention was needed. If priests were caught with their hands down a minor's pants, he had a one sentence response: "You're fired." He handled it in an old-fashioned way--quietly, by moving priests to office jobs. Quietly is how he handled everything. But fired they were and fired they stayed. When one priest decided to loudly leave the Church, he claimed that he had been assigned to accounting or some such because of racism. The Archdiocese calmly replied by pulling out his record, which was not, shall we say, exemplary in this matter.

The result has been a very quiet time for this Archdiocese during the lengthy scandals, and freedom for Cardinal Hickey's successor, Thomas Cardinal McCarrick, to be the Bishops' point man on this issue. There also seems to be little concern among members of the Archdiocese about their priests.

The next Cardinal over--Keeler, in Baltimore--followed a softer approach heavily informed by certain psychological theories. It resulted in one priest's getting shot--not mortally-- by a disturbed young man.

"You're fired" works better.

In a fitting tribute to the late Cardinal, Peter Robinson provides some more details. Apparently the good Cardinal got even sterner with miscreant priests.

I knew the priest I mentioned personally: in my skinny, stylish, spikey-haired days, he used to use the donations from his splinter congregation to lunch well and often at the fabulously expensive, nationally known restaurant where I worked. He swatted at me with the menu on at least one occasion, when he was not otherwise occupied telling the pretty young man who was his companion how he was going to set him up with an office, etc, etc, etc. His Administrative Assistant dined there three or four times a week, always having a White Russian. Or a Nutty Almond. One of those drinks.

Then one day she left her glasses. Told by my manager that she was this priest's "secretary," I called his office, but whoever answered the phone at first did not recognize who I meant.

Alas, I had misidentified her role. A pudgy, stylish, rather nervous young man showed up to fetch the glasses, and informed me seriously that she was not his secretary. We never saw her after that.

That actually happened with a Bush I official at about the same time. During Secretary's Week, we were so full that the same manager told me to accept no reservations whatsoever. I then received a call from another nervous young man, who may have been pudgy and stylish, I don't know. He probably wasn't balding or an English teacher. When I told him there was no room for his boss, his boss got on the line and sounded utterly dumbfounded. I remained resolute, as per instructions. When my boss found out, he said, "How could you? He's here almost every day." But you said...?

After that, he wasn't. There every day, I mean. One night on his birthday, when his wife insisted, apparently, that he go and enjoy his favorite restaurant despite my foolishness, they and another couple graced our tables, during which festivities he looked utterly miserable.

Childishness, apparently, knows neither Left nor Right.

But Cardinal Hickey was a saint. Requiescat in Pacem.


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 10:28 AM



Friday, October 15, 2004 :::
 
The new tracking poll found Bush pulling into a tie with Kerry among Catholics and women voters, and moving slightly ahead with young voters. Kerry still holds a solid lead among seniors.

That is from a news article on the least reliable wire service (Reuters) about the latest poll by their partney, the most reliable pollster, John Zogby.

As nearly all reporters support the most extreme version of abortion rights, they failed to notice how extreme John Kerry's response was on judges and abortion in the last debate. At least he was consistent. However, as even NARAL Pro-Choice America (the leading pro-abortion group in the country, whose president used to live next door to a certain pudgy, balding English teacher) admits that a majority of women are now opposed to abortion, one has to wonder about the raw political wisdwom of Mr. Kerry's position. Mr. Zogby is often right about these things, as a respected friend whose business it is to depend on such information pointed out many years ago, and Mr. Zogby has been right for a decade or more, so this is not good news for Sen. Kerry.



::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 1:10 PM



Thursday, October 14, 2004 :::
 
There was one fascinating thing about last night's debate. This time, A Mind That Suits saw it without hearing it, as he was in Ye Olde Neighborhood Poole Halle and was otherwise occupied. At the end, when they cut to the wives, the First Lady looks the way she always looks, but in the happy, ever-so-slightly animated version. Teresa looked as if she had just lost her fortune, which may be how she sees it. That may be telling.

The Washington Post-ABCNews overnight poll has it a draw, and the story is candid that that is mainly because the Democrats in the poll overwhelmingly thought Kerry had won. Last week, when Cheney won the polls largely because of Republican support, the headline blared, "Cheney wins, with a little help from his friends." The headline this morning on the ABCNews website says merely, "Debate a draw." And that is something that Mr. Bush ahs to work around, as must all conservatives; Sen. Kerry is running with a lot of help from his friends--in the "major" media.


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 11:23 AM



Tuesday, October 12, 2004 :::
 
A certain pudgy, balding English teacher is privy to the social functions of the nation's elite, and he can tell you one change over the last ten years that is most marked: he never hears French.

Now, the French he used to hear was pretty painful. He has always felt that the primary difference between French and English was pronunciation, and, indeed, in one comprehensive French-English Grammar he ran across, the author outlined what she felt were the very few grammatical differences between the two languages.

That does not mean there are no differences, but it does mean that pronunciation, in short, is everything.

At a previous school, a group of French high schoolers showed up one August, and A Mind That Suits asked their teacher how they were doing. It was strange, said the teacher, whose two languages were English and Arabic. They do very well on grammar tests but their pronunciation really stinks. "Do you know any French?" asked A Mind That Suits, which the Arab-American teacher predictably answered, "No." "Your students are out partying every night," came the response. They were, in fact, relying on the similarities between the two languages.

But most French-speaking Americans seem to think that the mere fact that they speak any French at all is a major accomplishment. Come to think of it, most English-speaking French people have roughly the same attitude. And so A Mind That Suits would hear the most painfully awful French--and painfully awful English--uttered by people with the most painfully smug expressions on their faces.

But no more.

In the recent encounter between Jacques Chirac and a bunch of Vietnamese students discussed below, the conversation centered on the utility of the French language. That that was even a question is embarrassing for the leader of what was once Europe's dominant culture. Of the 25 members of the European Commission, who guide the European Union, all speak English but only 11 speak French. The French elite have, in other words, made their language irrelevant, and it is simply never heard on the diplomatic circuit in Washington anymore.

Which is a real pity, because what the French did well, they did magnificently. A few years ago, despite the protestations of then-Prime Ministare Lionel Jospin, nearly a million French youngsters showed up to hear John Paul II. Perhaps their love of the Polish Wonder will inspire them to burst out of the cul-de-sac to which the storied cynicism of the French elites has led them, and France will find itself again. One hopes so, but until then a love of French is quickly becoming comparable to a love of the Latin from which it sprang.


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 4:14 PM



Monday, October 11, 2004 :::
 
The Afghan election has quickly quieted down, and one must offer praise here to two sets of people who have largely been ignored in the debate.

First, to the Afghan people. They have endured 25 years of hell, and they are tired. They registered, they voted, and neither the Taliban nor al Qaeda was able to influence in any way the avererage person over whom they exercised such horrific authority for far too long.

This is also true of the Iraqi people. The great economist P.T. Bauer noted many years ago that the average person is some out-there country was quite able to calculate which course of action would benefit him most, and would act on it if given the chance. The Iraqis have been steadfast in their desire to build a better future, and the supposed answer-to-all-problems Grand Ayatollah Sistani drew bitter denunciations from the "man in the street" for allowing Mr. al-Sadr's followers to go unpunished for their supreme offense of taking over the Mosque of Ali.

The second group is the US military. They have been given impossible tasks, and no resources with which to do it. It turns out that the service chiefs--the Army Chief of Staff, the Marine Commandant, the Chief of Naval Operations, and the Air Force Chief of Staff (appropriately named "Jumper" and that is not made up)--all braved the wrath of Donald Rumsfeld and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Myers by telling the Commander in Chief to his face that they were concerned about troop levels. Alleged conservatives--they do not honor the sacrifice of the military, and so they are not conservative in any real sense--sneered at them because of an ideological belief that this war could be fought on the cheap. But it could not be, and our armed forces have served bravely and exceeded any expectations one could place on them.

It is a sign of the desperation of the proponents of "defense transformation' that they have fallen back on the reprehensible device of saying that, when you criticize the leaders of the military, you are criticizing soldiers. That has risen as far as the level of the otherwise admirable Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, and it should stop. The soldiers, sailors, and Marines have served their country well. It is their leaders who have failed them.

One of the signs of the general weakness of defenders of this Administration is that they love to quote lettters from some soldier who say that "all the guys in my unit back the President all the way." NO ONE who looks for objective evidence of this broad-based support can find it--and the only truth about this world worth supporting is the objective truth. The Journal found a company where the youngsters could not be bothered to register--so how could they be voting for Bush???????--and the enlisted man assigned to convincing them to get their youthful rear ends in gear supported Ralph Nader. (Shouldn't that be spelled "Nadir?" But we digress.)

All of which makes the dedication of the Afghans, the Iraqis, and the US military all the more inspiring, and we should all do what we can to support them.

More and more information comes in, by the way, that John Kerry would do a worse job. In 30 years of voting, this writer has never seen a starker choice between unworthy candidates, but Mr. Kerry has abdicated nearly every responsibility he has taken on in elective office. That's saying something, but it is not saying that George W. Bush has executed his responsibilities wisely.


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 1:09 PM



Sunday, October 10, 2004 :::
 
Recent news indicates that the opposition leaders who complained about vote fraud in the Afghan elections are backing off a little bit, perhaps because the pressure from their own people is forcing them to tone down the absolutist language and concentrate on particular problems. One really does hope that this situation remains calm and the Afghan people get a break.

The original post:

One hates for war and politics to intrude on Sunday, particularly when one has been to a glorious Latin Mass at the Cathedral of St. Matthew in downtown Washington, DC. But war intrudes on the lives of its victims without mercy or attention to the calendar, and so one must.

I have been wondering if a "tipping point" would come for George W. Bush. By that I mean, would there be a point when the combination of bad news and shocking revelations would overcome the public's fundamental trust that our president is a very tough man, which he is, and that his instincts see him--and us--through the strange impasses brought on by his own intransigence?

The overheated rhetoric of some of his followers, it seems to me, only adds to the likelihood that the tipping moment will come sooner rather than later. Mr. Bush has been derelict in his duties--our soldiers currently have no idea why the Commander in Chief has sent them to wherever they have ended up, and it is his solemn moral duty to tell them--but certain fantasists who dare to call themselves conservative when they are not have poured gasoline on the fire by making claims that are ever further from self-evident reality.

I hope and pray that some solution can be found to the morrass into which the Afghan elections quickly transformed. The fantasists mentioned above have looked the other way at the compromises that their preferred candidate--acting President Karzai--has made with the unrepentant warlords who still dominate most of the country. Other candidates for president have not overlooked them, and they are under no obligation to do so. As of this writing, 15 of them have charged that vote fraud is so rampant that the results of the election are unreliable. 10 million people have braved terrorist attacks to register and then to vote, and every report has them hoping that the elections will bring peace to their long-troubled homeland. Every person of good will should join with them, and every person of good will should curse the way in which numerous people--foreign and domestic--have ridden roughshod over the dreams of the average Afghani.

And so one must hope and pray that some way is found out of the chaos.

But I wonder if--should no way be found--this will be the proverbial straw. The Administration has placed a ridiculous amount of weight on the "success" of an Afghan war that it did not finish, and so it will only be fitting if this is its undoing. John Kerry's fundamental beliefs and civic irresponsiblity are so profound that one can only look on the prospect of his presidency with what diplomats euphemistically call "the gravest concern." But are we faced with a choice so unacceptable that giving the other guy a shot may be the reflex of thinking voters?

And yet one is still given moments of wonder and beauty in this ugly world. A confidentiality agreement prevents this writer from revealing the particulars of a scene to which a certain pudgy, balding English teacher was privileged last night, but the general story is so wonderful that it must be shared.

A prominent writer in his seventh decade and with grown children has found a woman--another woman--he loves, and so he held a lovely dinner to follow their wedding. And to that dinner was invited a college friend, another prominent writer, a writer who is, in his chosen field, perhaps the greatest that there has ever been.

It turns out that these two writers, shameless liberals both, share with this writer a fondness for that greatest of all American prose works, The Great Gatsby. So the Friend, rising to honor the Groom, recalled the moment when he first read the "last page" of that great novel. Stunned, he went to his college buddy--decades later, the Groom--who shared a passion for great writing, and asked him what he thought of it. It was the greatest expression of the failure of the American dream, responded the Groom. It is the greatest American prose ever written, said the Friend, and announced his intention to memorize it. If you memorize it, said the Groom, you will always have in your head (the perfect model of great writing.) (That is in parentheses because the Friend's voice dropped at that moment so it was not quite clear.)

And so it came about that on this brisk fall evening many decades later, in tribute to his friend and his friend's new-found love, the very greatest writer in his chosen field that has ever been stood and recited from memory the greatest American prose ever written--clearly, movingly, without affect or needless drama. One should look for such moments, and savor them when they come.

What is the difference between a liberal and thinking conservative? "The greatest expression of the failure of the American dream." Put "a" before failure, and you have a thinking conservative. The difference is not slight. The Friend had, for many years, a reputation for bitterness that was overcome by the love a good woman, which he freely and admirably admits. This is so obvious to everyone that just the night before, a friend of this writer, watching him on TV, commented that "since he got married, he always (makes positive statements.)" The Groom had apparently found love twice in his life, and both the Groom and the Friend--and their wives--are quite comfortable, economically speaking. Gatsby, however, never got Daisy, and Scott did get Zelda.

A recognition that failures are always particular makes one a conservative. A recognition that there are such failures makes one a thinking conservative.


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 2:19 PM



Friday, October 08, 2004 :::
 
That's Why They Call Them "Gauls."

A certain pudgy, balding English teacher was quite thoroughly insulted last night by the President de la République Française, Jacques Chirac. Actually, that towering twerp insulted the entire United States. Liberals, please take note. He was not taking on George W. Bush. He was taking on us.

He is on a grand tour of Asia right now, and yesterday he let fly with a cri de coeur--if he has a coeur--about the hégémonie of American culture. If A Mind That Suits understood the French news broadcast correctly, he also said that it could lead to a worldwide ecological disaster. (A Mind That Suits can read French quite comfortably, but is still working on the listening part. If they just spit a little less...but we digress. When he finishes the text, he will let you know for sure.)

One must remember that the French have a conception of educated culture which generally goes by the name cosmopolitanism. According to this, the culture of the elites of the world should be one culture. And, according to French intellectuals, guess which intellectuals should be les arbitres of this elite world culture? And of course, the French intellectual elite was responsible for "educating" many of the greatest monsters of "socialist internationalism" of the 20th Century, including Ho Chi Minh. So if one places M. Chirac in his context--apart from his usual one among les premieres sacs de sleaze du monde --what he is saying is that he is really pissé that Americans are beating the French at their own game.

Ho Chi Minh. Now there is a name to conjure with. With a certain élan and also a certain chutzpah, M. Chirac delivered his denunciation in Hanoi of all places, a heavy-handed and quite intentional attempt at drawing a parallel between our most disastrous war and our current one. He pronounced himself happy that there were now such strong ties between France and Vietnam "beyond the vicissitudes of history." If one remembers just how well the French prepared the ground for us in good ol' Indochine, one knows that there were un enfer of a lot of vicissitudes.

His made his remarks in the context of a question-and-answer session with students at a cultural center, and it may have been the questions which drove him to his outburst. The first? We, the young Francophone Vietnamese, we like the French language, and we are happy to practice it, but it is difficult to learn. Is it a lasting investment for tomorrow, and is it a good investment for looking for a job? M. Chirac passed over the implied insult to recent French economic and military performance with his usual savoir-faire, and gave a good answer. He could not, however, resist getting in a crack about how, if everyone spoke the same language, everyone would think the same way. He had already laid the groundwork for what followed by singing the praises of diversité. Whether out of an impish desire to hear a Frenchman praise Vietnamese culture, or to get him to unload on America, the students pressed him on the issue. One suspects it was the former, as one lad could not resist pointing out that most young Vietnamese preferred to pursue their etudes somewhere in the vast realm of les Anglo-Saxons, "even" en Australie. In any case, Jacques-buddy's swipes at nos amis americains quickly got more pointed.

But the fundamental question posed by the first student reminds us of one vital point about l'histoire personelle of the latest in a long line of cynical and depressing French leaders. M. Chirac's first accomplishment in public life was indeed economic: as a junior government minister in the early 1970's, he secured a deal for trade in nuclear material between France and Ba'athist Iraq.

Diversité, indeed.

Further reflection brought to mind the largely unacknowledged fact that France still maintains its empire in West Africa, and secures the loyalty of their elites by offering their children free education in France. Those children, in turn, repay their benefactors by using their diplomatic connections to gain entrée to the United States, where their job prospects are so much greater.

Quelle ironie.

It should be noted that M. Chirac praised the entreneurial spirit of Australian universities and complained about the resistance of French universities to his plea that they follow suit. He is not an idiot, that man, which makes it an even greater pity that he is such a jerk.



::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 9:56 AM



Thursday, October 07, 2004 :::
 
The in-many-ways-wonderful-despite-being-liberal Washington Post is often as good a paper for somone living in Dubuque as for someone living in Washington. During the reign of Marion Barry, e.g., only those offenses which made national news made into the Post, with the ornery Washington City Paper left to fill in the gaps, which it did with relish.

That basic reportorial fact was driven home when the Post finally noticed what was becoming of the justly famous Metro. When A Mind That Suits was but a lad just out of college, the Metro system was very small, and trains on weekends often had only two cars. These days, the system covers most of the metropolitan area, and one almost never sees anything less than six cars. During rush hour, there are never any fewer than the maximum eight, and those maximum eight cars are filled to the maximum, making it a real effort for the trains to pull out of the station or stop, so overloaded are they. Stuck in a tunnel one morning because a train had lost contact with the third rail, a certain pudgy, balding English teacher did the math and calculated that a full 8-car train probably held 1200 people. At one train every 2 minutes, that is a lot of people going in and out of stations.

This radical increase has come about in part because traffic congestion and the absence of Marion Barry have made it very attractive for professionals to move back into town. That they can move into the most beautiful everyday houses in the US makes it that much more attractive. Plus, following a plan laid down by Mr. Barry but thankfully executed by others, the entire area from Dupont Circle to the Capitol itself is filled with luxurious office buildings, so many more people both live and work downtown.

Now, it appears that local governments will follow through on long frustrated plans to carry the Metro out to Dulles International Airport, which--travellers should note--is nowhere near Washington, DC but is very near the wonderful Udvar-Hazy Center of the National Air and Space Museum. And so the Post has finally noticed that the Metro may in fact already be carrying all the humans that it can ever hope to carry. Ah, well. Better late than never.

In politics, the ever-insightful (and inciteful) Hugh Hewitt has said what all pundits should realize, and that was that A Mind That Suits was correct about how disastrous the first debate was for Sen. Kerry. What a wise man Mr. Hewitt is. George Will, an opponent of Administration war policy, gave a good account this morning of why conservatives should vote for Mr. Bush. The Washington Post's lead editorial gave an intellectually honest account of all the issues raised by the final report on Iraqi WMD, and it should be studied closely, as should this short take by David Frum, a brilliant man with whom A Mind That Suits often disagrees, although he does today.

Meetings You Are Glad You Did Not Attend

The normally indispensible Wall Street Journal was almost silent about the report, granting it a few column inches in its news pages and no notice at all on its famed editorial page. It is unimaginable that they did not snag an advance copy, and even if they didn't, Dr. Duelfer, the lead investigator on WMD, spoke twice yesterday before Congressional committees, giving them more than ample time to formulate a response. But they have had a lot more ample time than a 12 hour news cycle.

The problem is, the WSJ has committed itself to a position that can only be described as irrational: the war was not about WMD, but the WMD are in Syria, which makes the war justified. Had they bent their considerable collective intellectual firepower to justifying the war based on the work of Dr. David Kay, whose interim report, released almost exactly one year ago, differs in no significant way from either his final report last January or Dr. Duelfer's report, this would have just been one more day in the trenches. One can only imagine that the most recalcitrant of the true believers at that august journalistic institution simply do or does not want to admit that the initial justification for the war was almost entirely wrong, even if the report actually justifies the war, which it does.

Religion is supposed to be a comfort, but Donald Rumsfeld is a strange god to worship. And you simply do not want to be at the meetings where the reality of the report was thrown against a belief that is impervious to argument or fact, and some form of collective judgment was to be formed.


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 1:16 PM



Wednesday, October 06, 2004 :::
 
And here's why.

Why there are no banners blaring on poll results. (See previous post.) Over at ABC, which had "Poll Gives Kerry Victory" or some such last week, there is a bland little button marked "Poll." And what one discovers, if one pushes said button, or click here, is that Mr. Cheney won by a margin similar to Mr. Kerry's. Sorry, boys, your guy lost. Please note the sneering "with a little help from his friends." That refers to the unequivocal response of Bush/Cheney supporters. But Kerry/Edwards supporters did the same thing, and did not get that little sneer. I guess being paid $300,000 to read cue cards makes you sensitive to negative vibes, or something.

And no, banners does not require an 's because "banners blaring" is a reduction of "banners that are blaring." The possessive is only when the gerund is acting as a noun.

Attend:
Your going out every night is affecting your work.
I saw you going out again last night. What about your work?

In the second sentence, you as you were going out was reduced to you going out.

Pedants, please note further: "go out" is a unique verb, which differs from "go."


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 10:18 AM


 
If any further evidence is needed concerning the sympathies of the old-line establishment press, consider the way that polls are, or rather are not, being reported this morning. After President Bush's poor-ish performance last week, you couldn't hit a webpage without seeing polls extolling Kerry's performance. As of 9:30, I can find none, except a CBS poll of uncommitted voters which gave Edwards a victory, although many called it a tie. Interestingly, CBS's similar poll of such voters last Thursday was a minute-by-minute poll of answers, whereas this was just a post-debate survey. But the general "who won, who lost" surveys have yet to appear. Hey, Washington Post, your website down or something?

However, Democrats around DC last night were wincing at Edwards's style, particularly his habit of going back to the previous question before answering a new question. At least, that was true of the Democrats whose paths cross that of a certain pudgy, balding English teacher. This seems like overreaction, just as happened among Republicans last week. Kerry is again falling in the polls, so the first debate may well have been as without meaning as it was without substance. And that may be true here, as well.

And, yes, in formal English, Edwards is supposed to get 's as a possessive.

It's hard to think that the public is going to change opinions of Mr. Cheney overnight, with four years of Saturday Night Live parodies, Jay Leno monologues, and nasty sniping from the Left. It seems the public's perception in this debate will be more over the issues. See further discussion below.

There is a new, comprehensive report coming out saying that there was absolutely no current WMD threat in 2003. We will see if conservative commentators actually face the music this time. A year has been lost Dr. Kay revealed this was true, and there performance has been intellectually shoddy at best.

On the question of Mr. Bush's character, two things are interesting. The first is his inability to address an issue on which he has been wrong. This does not mean apologizing, but rather going back and rearguing the case given the facts as they are revealed. Just as interesting is his way of handling it: he has made sure that all relevant reports come out before the election. Either he trusts that he will be vindicated, or that the truth will not be too hard for the American people to accept and they will still trust him. He cannot be accused of stonewalling, but one hopes that some member of the "town hall" meeting on Friday night asks him to say clearly what we are doing in Iraq.


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 9:35 AM



Tuesday, October 05, 2004 :::
 
At the risk of sounding obstinate, Thursday night's debate proved that the Democratic Party made a terrible mistake in nominating John Kerry to be President. The incoherence of his comments during the debate mirrored the incoherence of his votes and his campaign statements. His record in office, particularly on Iraq, are simply appalling, and Vice-President Cheney made the case against him very well.

Just as John Edwards made the case against George W. Bush very well.

The difference is, George W. Bush has the personality to be President. He has just used his considerable leadership skills very unwisely.

Which leaves this voter where he was before the Vice-Presidential debate: how to express one's opposition to the first 16 months of the Bush Administration's war policies and still leave the country in capable hands?

Tonight's debate was, as was the Vice-Presidential debate in 2000, what a debate should be: two very well-informed and intelligent people debating the issues strongly but within the bounds of decency.

It's just that neither man, really, would make a good President. A good President would know how to use such men, but he or she has be a different kind of person all together.



::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 10:23 PM


 
At the risk of sounding obstinate, Thursday night's debate proved that the Democratic Party made a terrible mistake in nominating John Kerry to be President. The incoherence of his comments during the debate mirrored the incoherence of his votes and his campaign statements. His record in office, particularly on Iraq, are simply appalling, and Vice-President Cheney made the case against him very well.

Just as John Edwards made the case against George W. Bush very well.

The difference is, George W. Bush has the personality to be President. He has just used his considerable leadership skills very unwisely.

Which leaves this voter where he was before the Vice-Presidential debate: how to express one's opposition to the first 16 months of the Bush Administration's war policies and still leave the country in capable hands?

Tonight's debate was, as was the Vice-Presidential debate in 2000, what a debate should be: two very well-informed and intelligent people debating the issues strongly but within the bounds of decency.

It's just that neither man, really, would make a good President. A good President would know how to use such men, but he or she has be a different kind of person all together.



::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 10:23 PM

What doesn't kill me, makes me laugh... usually. Favorite politician: Dick Lugar. Favorite foreign policy expert: Eliot Cohen.