For anyone in the New York City area, Dennis Perrin will be appearing on Wednesday the 30th at the Tarrytown Music Hall (just north of Yonkers, easy access by MetroNorth) in a debate on the mideast. Ticket purchasing information is here.
Horror and Chaos in the Middle East:
Who’s to blame, and is there a remedy?
Moderated by WABC radio host Ron Kuby at the legendary Tarrytown Music Hall (minutes away from MetroNorth)
Did the latest round of atrocities begin with the Palestinian abduction of an Israeli soldier or was it triggered by the Israeli abduction of a doctor and his brother from Gaza? Are Israel and America attempting to further destabilize the Palestinian and Lebanese territories for their own benefit or is Israel (with America’s support) simply defending its people against the unprovoked attacks of its neighbors? Ultimately, what are the genuine motivations of the movers and shakers on all sides? What role does the existence of religion play in all this? Can real peace ever flourish when people primarily identify themselves with diametrically opposed faith-based belief systems? Could a tilt towards secularism in conjunction with an all-out assault on poverty yield a more hopeful future for everyone? Come join us as we address these questions and grasp for solutions.
The panel discussion will be followed by Q & A from the audience.
As you can see, there will likely be verbal fisticuffs aplenty. If you go, be sure to say hello to Dennis afterwards. Also, ask him for me why he loves Osama bin Laden so much.
Just found out that Prisoner of Trebekistan is already in its second printing, and it doesn’t even reach stores for two more weeks. So apparently it’s doing OK so far.
And if you haven’t yet decided you’d like a copy, if it means anything, the book now seems to be on Amazon’s top ten list for pre-orders among Biographies & Memoirs. This is a trip. Other writers on the list include Bill Bryson, Steve Wozniak, and U2. I cannot tell you how weird it is to see my book on the same page, even knowing that it’s probably only for a day or two and that it doesn’t really mean anything whatsoever.
The AP kindly published a glimpse of Bush’s notes during yesterday’s press conference. Unfortunately, from the angle and distance, they’re pretty darn hard to read.
However.
We all know these things are stage-managed to the hilt, so I don’t want to clog this page with minutiae, but if you’re curious, I blew the image up and rotated it around so we can see the notes from roughly Bush’s own perspective here.
Comparing the notes to the White House transcript, it becomes obvious that even the most trivial utterance — e.g. “the final history in the region has not been written,” etc. — has been carefully tested and regurgitated.
No big shock, I know. Just interesting to see the machine at work from the other side of the podium.
Here’s a piece of mine from TomPaine.com on the weird delusions of politicians that they’re middle class. Among the most deluded? Joe Lieberman.
The day before the Connecticut primary, Joe Lieberman was getting down with the folks in a restaurant in Southington, a small town near Hartford. As the American Prospect reported, a longtime state employee named Paola Roy told Lieberman she felt the middle class has been forgotten by the federal government. Lieberman responded that he shared her concerns, and for good reason: “I came out of the middle class,” he said, “and, being a senator, I haven’t gone much beyond the middle class.”
Being a senator, I haven’t gone much beyond the middle class. Could anything better sum up the way American politicians seem to have relocated en masse to a new planet, and forgotten how things are back on Earth? In 2005, Lieberman and his wife Hadassah—a lobbyist at D.C. powerhouse Hill & Knowlton—together made $366,084. This places them securely in the top 1 percent of U.S. households. In fact, just the money they receive each year for supervising family trusts would likely put them in the middle quintile of American families. Moreover, they have financial assets —i.e., over and above their homes in Connecticut and Washington—worth somewhere between $465,000 and $1.9 million. The comparable amount for the average U.S. family is about $30,000.
The debate is over: By any definition, Iraq is in a state of civil war…
Welcome to the new “new Middle East” — a region where civil wars could follow one after another, like so many Cold War dominoes.
And unlike communism, these dominoes may actually fall.
In other news, we’re just weeks away from the 4th anniversary of the publication of Pollack’s book The Threatening Storm. I wonder how it’s holding up? Let’s read page 268:
Imagine how different the Middle East and the world would be if a new Iraqi state were stable, prosperous, and a force for progress in the region, not a source of violence and instability. Imagine if we could rebuild Iraq as a model of what a modern Arab state could be, showing the frustrated and disenfranchised of the Arab world what they should be trying to fashion. Imagine if there were a concrete symbol demonstrating that America seeks to help the Arab world rather than repress. Invading Iraq might not just be our least bad alternative, it potentially could be our best course of action.
Yes…just imagine!
By the way, this was Pollack’s explanation of why Saddam was so dangerous:
[Saddam’s] own determination to interpret geopolitical calculations to suit what he wants to believe anyway lead him to construct bizarre scenarios that he convinces himself are highly likely.
What Atrios said. The firing squad in Connecticut stopped being “circular” the day Lieberman lost the primary and left the Democratic party. Lieberman’s loyalty to the Democratic party is slightly better than Zell Miller’s at this point, so why shouldn’t bloggers and activists committed to helping Democrats take over the Senate be concentrating on this race? Joe Lieberman isn’t a Democrat anymore. He’s just another spoiler candidate like Ralph Nader. Joe’s got more money, better name recognition, the not-so-secret support of the entire Republican noise machine, and the bully-pulpit of incumbency. As long as Joe Lieberman is campaigning against the Democratic candidate in the race, he’s a threat to to the Democratic party’s chances of taking the House or Senate in November.
The 20 year-old son of Israeli writer David Grossman was killed in Lebanon just two days before the ceasefire. I’d never read his famous 1987 book The Yellow Wind about the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. So I got it out of the library today. At one point Grossman writes this about the Israeli self-image:
I pondered then about how much one must be suspicious of people who testify about themselves morning and night that they are merciful.
Clearly he stole this from something I said 17 years later:
…when people get righteously worked up about how wonderful they are, and their enemy’s lack of gratitude, you really need to keep an eye on them.
Ooooh, I hope Karen Hughes gets some public diplomacy credit for this
Have you ever wondered who’s the new top Marine general at U.S. Central Command? And what kind of decisions he gets to make? And why things have gone so very, very well in Iraq?
I think you’ll be pleasantly horrified by the answer to all three questions, here.
A federal judge has ordered an immediate halt to the President’s NSA spying program. TPM Muckraker has some excerpts from the judge’s decision :
“The Government appears to argue here that, pursuant to the penumbra of Constitutional language in Article II, and particularly because the President is designated Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, he has been granted the inherent power to violate not only the laws of the Congress but the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution, itself.
We must first note that the Office of the Chief Executive has itself been created, with its powers, by the Constitution. There are no hereditary Kings in America and no power not created by the Constitution. So all “inherent power” must derive from that Constitution.”
Upon hearing this decision, President Bush, whose great-grandfather was a close adviser to President Hoover, grandfather was a Senator, and father was President, said “I’m sorry, were you trying to tell me something?”
I just finished a cartoon about the differences between those who take terrorism “seriously” and those who don’t. Predictable wackiness ensues, but you’ll have to wait till next week to read it. For the time being, let me just direct your attention to someone who takes the war on terror very seriously: John Fund of the Wall Street Journal.
On MSNBC’s Hardball, Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund falsely asserted that the United States has maintained “the same number of troops” in Saudi Arabia “that we had five years ago, about 16,000.” In fact, the State Department reported that the United States withdrew its troops stationed in Saudi Arabia after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and a July report by the Congressional Research Service stated that about 300 U.S. military personnel remain there. Moreover, five years ago, there were reportedly about 5,000 troops in Saudi Arabia.
If you want to feel better about our often-benighted species, go visit the impressive Jonathan Edelstein and Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings. Both are offering to match donations up to a certain amount for the rebuilding of Lebanon and/or northern Israel. In addition to the matching funds, you will also receive an imaginary tote bag filled with real positive feelings about humanity.
