The neocons now think China is going to attack us with… earthquakes. Lunacy, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.
When the President Talks to God
Here‘s a video of a band called Bright Eyes playing a pretty cool antiwar song on Leno.
Giraldi on Nuking Iran, CIA, Shi’ite Revenge
The American Conservative briefing by Philip Giraldi that has been getting all the attention is now available online.
Former CIA officer Giraldi discusses the Pentagon’s plans to nuke Iran, details of an internal CIA review of George Tenet, and the Shi’ite revenge killings going on in Baghdad.
What’s New at National Review?
Over on the blog, John Derbyshire – of whom Gene Healy once wrote, “It’s almost as if a team of genetic scientists took a mouth-breathing, beer-swilling, Pak-bashing specimen of pure Cockney trash and raised his IQ by 100 points.” – keeps it real:
- I would much rather we had done ten times as much damage, killed ten times as many Iraqis, and left ten times as quickly. That is the war I should have liked to see; that is the war that might have done us some good and advanced our interests. This is a half-hearted war, a nice war, a lawyer’s war.
Uh huh. Well, I’m with him on the “quickly” part. Say what you will about the man, but never say he’s dishonest:
- Our policy should be the one practiced by the great empires throughout history: (1) Soothe the barbarians with flattery, gifts, bribes, and commerce — and yes, always hope they will take up civilized ways, which they always might. (2) Watch them constantly for signs of trouble. Infiltrate, conduct quiet assassinations, set them squabbling among themselves. (I greatly enjoyed the Iran-Iraq War.)
Ah, the good old days. Thank goodness none of that has come back to haunt us!
What else? Oh, another Brit (they class the joint up) gets into a cyber slap match with John “My Dad Is Norman” Podhoretz. After Andrew Stuttaford called Tony Blair “disgusting,” Baby Pod’s smooth dome turned a deep purple:
- OH, I’M HERE, STUTTAFORD… [JPod]
…and I caught you calling Blair “disgusting” again, and I just want to say that for me and millions of others, calling Blair disgusting is disgusting.
To which Stuttaford responded perfectly (emphasis mine):
- [W]ho are these ‘millions’ of whom you speak? Probably not those millions of Brits who specifically did not vote Labour because of Blair’s personality, and probably not those millions of British Conservatives who as, Iain correctly notes, find Blair “despicable”. It’s probably fair to say that a good number of those who write for the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph (two publications which are normally quite well thought of around here) also consider Blair disgusting. Perhaps their views don’t count. They only have to live under Blair after all. Why should they know anything about him?
What’s this? One country in the world where Americans don’t know best? Somebody report this Stuttaford fellow to the Neocon Reeducation Unit, stat. (The Stuttaford-Podhoretz argument continues on the Corner for those excited by the swagger of SPF-50 cowboys.)
Finally, over at David Frum’s special blog – we can’t have the wordsmith behind “axis of evil” mixing it up with the rabble, now can we? – we learn that Linda Tripp was a CIA agent.
Sgt. Benderman Gets 15 Months for Lesser Charge
Debbie Clark covering the court-martial for Antiwar.com from Fort Stewart, Georgia, reports that judge Col. Donna M. Wright has convicted Sgt. Kevin Benderman of the charge of missing movement,” failing to convict on the charge of desertion.
Updated: Judge Wright sentenced Sgt. Benderman to 15 months. Observers felt this was a harsher sentence than expected for the lesser charge. He also received a dishonorable discharge and a reduction in rank to E-1. This is believed to be the harshest sentence yet for an Iraq resister. Judge Wright threw out the bogus charge of larceny (for clerical error in receiving combat pay) earlier in the week.
Military police immediately took Sgt. Benderman into custody.
Read Debbie Clark’s earlier report on the court-martial.
We will update this report as details come in.
My First PodCast
It’s funny the way I did my first podcast. The software had just come in, and I was experimenting with the editing function. A copy of The Double Axe, by Robinson Jeffers, was on my desk, by happenstance, and I picked it up: it seemed to me that poetry and podcasting sort of go together. At any rate, I turned at random to the "Suppressed Poems" section, which includes poems deleted by publisher Bennett Cerf from the original Random House edition. These poems were deemed far too politically incorrect to be published in postwar America: criticism of Franklin Roosevelt? Not allowed! At any rate, the suppressed poems were published in subsequent editions, and they are searing. I read three of them herein, with commentary.
I have written about Jeffers here, and so I’ll just note that Jeffers was the leading poet of the 1920s, a Taft Republican whose opposition to the war pervaded his later books, and led to his exile from the leftist-dominated Popular Front literary community, which fulsomely supported both the President and the war: they were the neocons of their day.
Jeffers is one of my favorite writers, not only for his poetic imagination and prose style but also on account of his politics, best expressed in his poem "Shine, Perishing Republic":
"While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire, And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens, I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth. Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother."