Month: April 2007

Gene Callahan reads up on the Iranian threat:

[T]he next inspiration to bang my head on my keyboard came from an article entitled, “Paper Tigers in West Let Fanatical Regime Roar.” Note: This was not on the op-ed page! No, to the [NY Daily] News, this is news. The story leads off claiming: “Iran keeps getting away with outrageous bullying behavior because the West has no stomach for confronting the fanatical Islamic Republic.”

Then it throws in the qualifier, “That’s how experts on Iran see the standoff.” See, it’s not the reporter’s bias; it’s what the experts are saying. Every last one of the two “experts” quoted in the article says this, in fact.

The first Iran “expert” is “Thomas McInerney, a retired Air Force general and staunch conservative.” Well, if retiring from the Air Force and being a staunch conservative doesn’t make you an expert on Iran, what would?

McInerney, according to the News, “said letting the mullahs get away with pro-terrorism foreign policy amounts to appeasement of a regime potentially worse than the Nazis, should they succeed in making nuclear weapons….” No, they’re not actually worse than the Nazis right now, but they could be, ya know, so… better bomb ’em just in case.

The article continues: “Critics point to Iran’s drive to build nuclear weapons.” So they do, but let’s not mention the lack of any real evidence that that’s what they’re doing, OK? “The UN imposed sanctions last weekend, but Iran turned around and seized 15 British sailors this week. ‘We’re going to appease these guys and lose 200 million people,’ McInerney predicted ominously.” Well, General McInerney, that’s a lot of people to lose. You ought to keep better track of them.

The qualifications of the next “expert”? He is “a more liberal observer.” I don’t know why the News didn’t also seek out “a more dull-witted observer,” and, perhaps, “a more statuesque observer,” in order to achieve a complete survey of expert opinion. In any case, Lawrence “more liberal” Haas says, “Iran is preparing for a much bigger war with us. We have a naive belief that we’ll negotiate our way out of this.” Iran is preparing for a much bigger war than what? Than the covert war the US has been waging against Iran for some time?

The clincher on the case is: “Haas said he fears that many experts have concluded Tehran can’t be stopped from getting nuclear arms and ‘it doesn’t matter because we can contain Iran like we contained the Soviets.’” And obviously, that will never work, because, while the USSR had hundreds of nuclear warheads that they could deliver to US cities, in a decade or so Iran might have one or two it could shoot a few hundred miles. So take that, clown ship of naïve appeasers! […]

Is Bill Maher never going to go away? That he ought to was proved definitively the other day during his interview with Rep. Ron Paul, who recently announced his candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination. Senor Maher claims to be a “libertarian” — but doesn ‘t seem to realize that this is not (necessarily) synonymous with being a sleaze-bag. (Maher, you’ll probably not want to remember, starred in the role of Bill Clinton’s penis). The smarmy look on his face as he tried to snark Paul with questions designed to trip up the congressman was a cross between Smeagol and one of those gargoyles that leer from the parapets of medieval churches. Paul creamed him, and won over the audience — much to Mayer’s visible annoyance.

I had my own duel with the fake “libertarian” Maher, which you can read about here. Suffice to say that Maher represents the “liberalism” of the Hollywood crowd: facile, content-less, and, in this particular case, downright malevolent. This is a guy who said of the Kosovo war, “I’m for this war because it’s the liberal thing to do,” agreeing with his guest Bill Kristol that we ought to “crush Serb skulls.” Oh, but that was one of Clinton’s “liberal” wars, and therefore fine with Maher.

I doubt I’m all that alone in being thoroughly sick of the posturing “comic,” whose unique blend of condescension and cant is now fermented beyond the bounds of good taste. It is especially embarrassing to see one of my formerly favorite television newscasters, Keith Olbermann, treat Maher as if he were the oracle at Delphi — with Maher sneering openly at him the whole interview. If Olbermann, who I’ve defend in the past, is intent on turning his program into a left-liberal copy of Fox News – with Olbermann as the Bizarro World Bill O’Reilly — then that almost merits yet another entry in the “People I’m Sick Of” sweepstakes. (Shouldn’t we have a contest, at year’s end, to see who people are the most sick of?)

[For more of the “People I’m Sick Of” series, go here for Part I (Arianna Huffington, of course), here for Part II (Camille Paglia), here for Part III (Andrew Sullivan), and here for Part IV (David Sirota: yeah, he’s a nobody, but they can be just as annoying as celebrities precisely because of their nobody-ness.]