Author: Jonathan Schwarz

I remember when Ronald Reagan was elected. I was in elementary school, and heard Jimmy Carter concede on the radio while my mother and I sat in the parking lot of a gigantic mall. (I’ve always thought that was symbolic of the years to come.) That night I couldn’t sleep because I was certain Reagan was somehow going to start a nuclear war. This was when my sister and I began our hobby of drawing concentric circles on maps of Washington to find out whether we’d be killed in the initial blast or survive to die in the subsequent firestorm.

But it turned out there was no nuclear war. All Reagan did was rachet up international tension so high we merely came within minutes of nuclear war. I’m still a little mad at Stanislav Petrov for proving me wrong.

Anyway, I haven’t felt the same level of gut level terror because of a politician until George W. Bush came along. Welcome back, gut level terror!

Joel C. Rosenberg, who writes Christian apocalyptic fiction, told me in an interview this week that he was invited to a White House Bible study group last year to talk about current events and biblical prophecy.

Rosenberg said that on February 10, 2005, he came to speak to a “couple dozen” White House aides in the Old Executive Office Building — and has stayed in touch with several of them since…

Rosenberg — like Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, the authors of the phenomenally popular “Left Behind” series — writes fiction inspired by biblical prophecy about the apocalypse. The consistent theme is that certain current events presage the end times, the Rapture, and the return of Jesus Christ. Rosenberg’s particular pitch to journalists is that his books come true…

Rosenberg says he got a call last year from a White House staffer. “He said ‘A lot of people over here are reading your novels, and they’re intrigued that these things keep on happening. . . . Your novels keep foreshadowing actual coming events. . . . And so we’re curious, how are you doing it? What’s the secret? Why don’t you come over and walk us through the story behind these novels?’ So I did.”

It would almost be worth it to me for these guys to start a nuclear war if I could live long enough to see their faces afterward when Jesus doesn’t show up. Whoops!

“Boy, are our faces red,” I imagine them saying, “and not just because of our fatal radiation poisoning!”

Reading Political Animal, I just learned the Syrian ambassador to the U.S. has his own blog.

I am in love with the internet, and I don’t care who knows it.

PREVIOUSLY, ON PLANET EARTH: Here’s famous Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov writing in 1974:

“Far in the future, more than 50 years from now, I foresee a universal information system (UIS), which will give everyone access at any given moment to the contents of any book that has ever been published or any magazine or any fact. The UIS will have individual miniature-computer terminals, central control points for the flood of information, and communication channels incorporating thousands of artificial communications from satellites, cables, and laser lines. Even the partial realization of the UIS will profoundly affect every person, his leisure activities, and his intellectual and artistic development. Unlike television… the UIS will give each person maximum freedom of choice and will require individual activity. But the true historic role of the UIS will be to break down the barriers to the exchange of information among countries and people.“

I see this recent column by John “I Give Nepotism A Bad Name” Podhoretz has been widely celebrated:

What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn’t kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything? Wasn’t the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?

Among those finding this noteworthy were Tristero, Matthew Yglesias, Mark Kleinman, and Gregory Djerejian. But what I don’t think many people remember is that in 2004 John Podhoretz’s mother, conservative luminary Midge Decter, frankly explained the real reason we attacked Iraq:

“We’re not in the Middle East to bring sweetness and light to the world. We’re there to get something we and our friends in Europe depend on. Namely, oil.”

So there you have it, straight from the world’s most appealing family: we invaded Iraq for the oil, but we may have made a mistake by not killing millions when we got there.

BONUS: Decter’s daughter is married to Elliot Abrams, making him John Podhoretz’s brother-in-law. Abrams, now on the National Security Council, pleaded guilty to misleading Congress over Iran-Contra. He also tried to cover-up the 1981 El Mozote massacre in El Salvador, in which 900 men, women and children were slaughtered.

I imagine big family occasions with this merry clan are really something.

“Has the caterer gotten here yet?”

“No. Let’s drop napalm on his town and then move house to house, shooting any survivors.”

“Sounds good! What about the band? Are they going to play standards, or more contemporary stuff?”

“I don’t know. Let’s pay a proxy army to rape and murder all the women and then go on a bloody rampage, killing thousands more.”

Christopher Hitchens spent an enormous part of his pre-September 11th life criticizing Israeli policies in the mideast and supporting the Palestinian national movement. He co-edited a book with Edward Said, wrote countless articles, gave a million speeches, etc.

Then on 9/11 he realized the secular progressives he’d worked with for decades had been harboring a secret desire all along to live in a caliphate ruled by Osama bin Laden. It seemed like a strange thing for secular progressives to want, particularly the women, but that just underscored how dangerous they were.

Of course, Hitchens’ new allies were the exact same people he’d excoriated for decades on Israel/Palestine. The question then became how long he’d hold onto his previous views on this issue, since they were now glaringly anomalous. For a while he gave it a shot. Here he is in December, 2003:

HITCHENS: I think a second term for [Bush] is more likely to lead to pressure being brought upon the Israelis than the election of any feasible or possible Democratic candidate… it’s a great deal more likely that the regime change forces in the case of Iraq, in Washington, will be helpful in the solution of the Israel-Palestine dispute.

Right. It’s just this kind of clear-sighted, 100% accurate prediction for which Hitchens is justly famous.

In any case, as anticipated, he’s now given up the ghost completely. Dennis Perrin explains:

In the final spasms of our friendship, Hitchens and I exchanged numerous emails about his apparent lack of interest in the continuing woes of Palestinian life…Amid all this bluster, Hitchens never really answered why he was largely silent on Palestinian suffering.

Or at least Hitchens didn’t until he wrote a op-ed for the Wall Street Journal last Tuesday. Says Dennis:

Titled “The Politics of Sabotage,” the piece exposes a part of Hitchens that he’s been trying to suppress or explain away, namely, giving the Israeli state the benefit of the doubt when it’s engaged in full-scale aggression…Hitchens finds that Israel’s “blowing up of [Lebanon’s] bridges and the other interruptions of all air and sea traffic possess a certain grim rationale”…

So committed is Hitchens to this premise that he writes “the former Israeli fans of Vladimir Jabotinsky are saying in public that Israeli colonization of Arabs is demographically impossible and morally wrong.”

These former Jabotinsky fans are part of Kadima…to say that Kadima has renounced colonization is simply false, as continued settlement of the West Bank (establishing “final borders”) immediately shows. And at last look, I’ve seen no indication that Kadima plans to give up East Jerusalem…That Hitchens blames Hamas and Hezbollah for derailing something that doesn’t exist — de-colonization — and that he confuses political pragmatism and necessity for state morality (another phantom concept), merely deepens his deceit, whether intentional or unconscious. Hitchens may not see himself becoming an Israeli state apologist, but after reading this piece (which I’ll send to anyone who wants to read it), I can see why the Wall Street Journal might happily differ.

The rest, all worth reading, is here.

Your heart just has to break to see these Shiite children in Lebanon smiling and writing “messages” on the rockets that soon will devastate Israeli homes. What kind of sick society produces little girls who exult in the infliction of pain against people they’ve never met?

And look at the woman in the background, presumably their mother—clearly she approves! Sadly, until the Arabs let go of their culture of incitement and rage, I’m afraid there’s no concession Israel can ever make that will bring peace with these people.

What’s that?

Those aren’t Lebanese girls writing on Hezbollah rockets, but Israeli girls writing on Israeli shells?

Oh.

Never mind.

(Via via.)