bustardblog

Hanging Saddam

In my view, he was guilty of enormously horrific crimes - ones which were unconscionable. Still, we gave him neither a legitimate trial nor an honest chance for appeal: our rush to hang him was barbaric.  Just as he was.

Like Kim Jong Il, Louis the XVI's policies bankrupted his people and led to widespread hunger in the country he ruled. It doesn't make me more fond of those who sent him to the guillotine.

The Tsars of Russia were responsible for unspeakable cruelty, both to their own people, and to those they conquered. The killing of Nicholas and Alexandra, with their children, in the basement where they were imprisoned, does not make me characterize the Bolsheviks as swell.

We had control over the hanging that happened tonight in Iraq. Are you more proud of the U.S.A?  Are you safer and will you sleep better tonight?  Have we increased respect for the U.S internationally today?  Bush will proudly announce the hanging shortly. I will be ashamed.

I don't regret that Saddam does not exist tomorrow; I do mind that America is smaller tomorrow.

UPDATE
Josh Marshall said it way better. Please go here to read the whole thing.

This whole endeavor, from the very start, has been about taking tawdry, cheap acts and dressing them up in a papier-mache grandeur -- phony victory celebrations, ersatz democratization, reconstruction headed up by toadies, con artists and grifters. And this is no different. Hanging Saddam is easy. It's a job, for once, that these folks can actually see through to completion. So this execution, ironically and pathetically, becomes a stand-in for the failures, incompetence and general betrayal of country on every other front that President Bush has brought us.

 

Real about Rudy

I'll never understand how memorandum picks the items it features. Today it headlines a silly puff piece for Giuliani in the New York Daily News.

The author, Frank Luntz, claims to have an apartment on Eighth Avenue, but clearly he isn't it often. He writes that:

"Even Giuliani's biggest detractors give him credit for cleaning up an ugly, ungovernable city."

Absolute Balderdash. In the last year of his mayoralty Rudy was terribly unpopular in New York. He claimed credit for things he had nothing to do with (Disney coming to Times Square) to things he was marginally responsible for, like crime reduction which began before Rudy took office and continued after he left office.  He left the city a vastly more polarized and poorer place.

The real Rudy is the one who had affairs in the Mayor's mansion while his wife and kids slept there. Anyone who was really living in New York when Rudy held a press conference announcing his intention to seek a divorce, his latest mistress at his side, before he had even notified his wife or children, is ashamed that he was ever New York's mayor.

By the way, Frank Luntz has been Rudy's pollster in three elections. He claims not to be working for him this time around, but I think we can all recognize a job applicant sucking up to his potential boss, when we see one.   

Hate Speech

What is it about the right that loves loony verbosity?  There are a lot of reasons - using word games to hide flatulent arguments is just one of their old gambits.

The wing-nuts are also thrilled to express their honest thoughts and feelings without being "caught."  They love their little code words.  State's Rights?  Cracking Down on Crime?  Their constant desire to utter the indefensible, without having to be called upon to defend it, is a joy only surpassed by a "Southern Strategy."

Thus Jason Lee Steorts, Deputy Editor of The National Review chooses his words carefully in a piece entitled "Dominican Republican" in the December 31 edition of National Review.  In describing  the upper reaches of Manhattan, now populated by immigrants from the Dominican Republic, he chooses the phrase "nigrescent" to characterize "the hours before the cock crows." Never mind that  before the cock crows the sky starts to lighten, not darken, Steorts uses the word "nigrescent" to establish his racist credentials - as if writing for the National Review were insufficient.

The sentence says it all:

I doubt there is any Manhattan neighborhood where you can find more trash on the street of a Monday morning, or where you must endure louder blastings of reggaeton "music" in those nigrescent hours before the cock crows"

The "code" could not be clearer.

Yellow Cheddar, Yellow Derbyshire.

With that smidgen of self-deprecating  humor that he hopes will transform him from pedant toad into charming curmudgeon, John Derbyshire, writes in the latest National Review of the difficulties of life on suburban Long Island. Were you to read it, you'd understand the significant sacrifices that the 101st Keyboarders make for us. Huntington or Basra? They're both damned scary.

It seems poor Mr Derbyshire has to paint his garage. Even worse -  the evil environmentalists want him to properly dispose of the chips of lead paint after  he removes them. 'The Derb' knows that calling lead dangerous is just liberal hysteria, and would happily feed it to his two children, but he is afraid of the New York Secret Police - they're not that different from Sadaam's Security Forces, after all. He then runs into the problem of actually painting the thing.

Operating in the free market seems to make this problematic - his choice is between hiring people he can afford (who won't speak English and who will do a terrible job while they play "Death Metal at you from the radio in a dilapidated, salacious-decal-festooned truck"), and a nice company, one which is way over his budget. Because he is a true conservative, not a Bush neo-con, he wants to stay under budget, while still not having a person of color on his land. (1/4 Acre) He thus comes to the conclusion that he must do it himself.

Then the temperature rears its ugly head - after all; the average daytime temp in Huntington last month was 52 degrees. Far too cold for 'The Derb.'  "I am not short of advice here, only of will, and of tolerance for outdoor work in midwinter."

Last year, I asked you to send additional armor to protect our soldiers in Iraq  This  year, please send 'The Derb' some warm socks. Please. He just can't tolerate it.

James Brown would undoubtedly have left 'The Derb' his cape, had he only understood.

Crazy about Israel

The Opinion Journal prints another polemic against Jimmy Carter's new book on Israel. It's a piece that President Carter would have a hard time defending against - not because it's correct, but because there are no real arguments presented in it. Instead, we get a lot of smoke and mirrors, but without the talent of a magician. Oren is as competent a magician as W is a Commander in Chief, and no one can be deceived by his dishonest piece.

Try the first sentence: "Several prominent scholars have taken issue with ... Carter's book... cataloguing its historical inaccuracies..." Does Oren name a single "prominent scholar?" Does he cite a single "historical inaccurac[y]?"  Of course he doesn't.

Oren then tries to create a false choice - he finds it inconsistent of Carter to both lament the lack of a religious commitment on the part of some Israeli Jews, and on other hand not to support Israel's claim to all of the Biblically defined land of Israel.  The position that Oren demands we accept -  that if we would like to see a more religious Israel we must grant it borders delineated in the Bible, is nonsense. 

But the bulk of his piece is a cherry-picked history of the U.S. relationship with Israel - a hilarious history that has the Puritans, the Robber Barons, and virtually all American Presidents and religious leaders as being ardent supporters of Israel.  Because the Puritans named many new towns after Biblical towns, it somehow proves their support for Jewish "restorationism." New Canaan is one such town he mentions.  Some he did not mention are Moscow, VT, New London, CT, Peru, IN, Massapequa, NY,Rome, GA - the list is endless.

Most upsetting is Oren's rewriting of American history as a pro-Israel fable - it is no where near as despicable as Ahmadinejahd's holocaust denial, but it does deny facts in order to create a fantasy instead of a reality. For example, he describes Truman as "naturally inclined to acknowledge the nascent state [of Israel." But Trumans's own Secretary of Commerce quotes his boss a bit differently:

. He[Truman] said that 'Jesus Christ couldn't please them when he was here on Earth, so how could anyone expect that I would have any luck?' Pres. Truman said he had no use for them and didn't care what happened to them."

Oren says that William Bradford in 1620 demonstrated his "passion" for the return of Jews to Palestine, when he arrived at Plymouth Rock, and said "Come, let us declare the word of God in Zion." Why making such a statement is read  as support for a Jewish state in the Mideast is unclear to me. On the other hand Peter Stuyvesant was clear when he asked for permission to expel the first 23 Jewish refugees who wanted to come to New York.

" for ourselves as also for the general community of your worships, that the deceitful race -- such hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ -- be not allowed to further infect and trouble this new colony          to the detraction of your worships and the dissatisfaction of your worships' most affectionate subjects.

The picture Oren paints of the U.S. in the years between 1950 and 1650 is strongly pro-Israel. It is  not an accurate portrait.

Oren concludes his piece by saying that Carter, who "implicitly denounces Israel for its separatist policies ... isolates himself from centuries of American tradition."  In fact, it is Oren who has isolated himself from the reality of America, and failed to separate the  denouncing a particular policy of a nation with denouncing the nation.

Dead: Iraq vs. 9/11

Apparently a lot of Americans had to die first, but at long last the residents of wing-nuttia have recognized that what is happening in Iraq is completely irrelevant to the events of 9/11.

Now that the media is pointing out that more U.S.soldiers have died in Iraq than people were killed on 9/11; our friends on the right find it gruesome and grotesque to indicate any relationship between 9/11 and Iraq.

Holidayish

Light, yes, even lighter posting, as the Holidays allow me to leave town for the first time since the surgery in mid- September -

The Factless Right

ABC's The Blotter reports on a new missive from Al Qaeda indicating that they are congratulating themselves on the Democrat's win in November.

The right-wing blogosphere of course loves it. Some who have commented are Wake Up America, RedState, and Hot Air. Please visit some of these to see how once again, the right is reacting exactly how Al Qaeda wants it to. 

Their never ending denial of reality makes them cling to any source, no matter how dishonest and manipulative, that bolsters their fantasy of Iraq. For example Hot Air condemns the argument that "our presence in Iraq is ...  a powerful recruiting tool for jihad" by labeling it "leftist dogma." The numbers that the hardly leftist Brookings Institute published in N.Y. Times this Wednesday indicate that the number of insurgents in Iraq has grown from 5000 in November of 2003 to 25,000 in 2006, and the number of foreign fighters there has increased from 250 to about 1,350.

It's bad enough that bloggers on the right deny reality, but of course far worse that our Commander in Chief does so as well.

Rudy Lies

It's a small thing, but in the last few days since Rudy's failed fundraiser, there's been a narrative floating around that Rudy ended his first marriage after learning that he had married his second cousin. This is of course a lie

In fact, Rudy's extended family was fairly close, and he was unquestionably aware of who she was before marrying Regina Peruggi. Wayne Barrett makes this clear in his book "Rudy."

By the way, they were married for fourteen years. He started living with Donna Hanover, who would become his second wife, months before receiving his legal separation from Regina.

Josh Errs

I'm a big fan of Josh Marshall, but yesterday he quoted a reader as follows:

It hit me the other day that what the surge is going to accomplish for Bush and Cheney is to take them through these next two years. By the time they can claim to have the extra troops in Bagdhad it's gonna be May or June. They'll be there a few months till everyone has to admit that it isn't working (though in the interim I would predict the first really horrendous event in which our troops suffer a big loss, like 200 men in one blast), then it will be the end of 2007 and...

The italics are mine, and indicate a part of the analysis that I find really gratuitous and off base.