My Grandmother was terribly funny and I spent as much time with her as she would tolerate, usually three or four hours per visit, after which she would declare that she didn’t spend that much time with anyone, and that she was going to lie down.

But we could cover a lot of ground in an afternoon — first she would take me to a roadside clam shack, the kind of white-clapboard treyf-palace that only exists in New England, where she lived, and insist I order anything and everything I wanted. One giant pile of fried clams (the kind with the bellies intact, the whole clams, like you can Food porn for Jews.never get in New York, served on a piece of white bread, which is not for eating, but just for absorbing the grease) and a buttery lobster role later, she would tell me I eat too much, that I am putting on weight, and then insist I have a milkshake. After that we’d go back to her apartment and sit at her kitchen table and drink coffee and make fun of everyone we knew.

A couple of years ago, before she died and when she was still on fire, we began having our first conversations about politics, something we had never talked about before. I honestly had no idea what she thought about the President — mostly we spent our time making fun of my mother, who is weight-obsessed, and works out all the time and eats only steamed vegetables and melba toast. She is also hugely judgmental, my mother that is, which is not the only reason why I never introduce her to the women I date, but is one of the best. She invariably gives them the once-over, and then makes a face like the cat just pissed on her Gucci bag. No one can be thin enough for my mother. She could make a Pepperidge Farm goldfish feel fat. 

My Grandma, like most Jewish grandmothers, liked to see people eat. “You can’t go out to a restaurant with her!” she would complain about my mom. “It’s no fun!” She wasn’t too keen on my mom’s husband, either, whom she called “Mr. Personality.”

But what really put a bee in the Old Trout’s bonnet was George Bush. She HATED him.

Not Grandma's kind of people.

And she was appalled that her children — my mother and my uncle — were voting for him.

“WHY??” she wanted to know. “He’s an idiot. Why is your mother voting for him?? Is it because Mr. Personality told her to??” My mother’s new husband is a right-wing kook.  “She has a mind of her own. You better talk to her.” I tried to talk to my Mom, but it was pretty useless. You can’t argue with someone who only eats broccoli and low-fat snacks — there is not enough fatty tissue stored up in their brains, which is where the reasoning takes place. Socrates, or so I have been told, lived on pork ribs and chocolate pudding.

Like a lot of old people, Grandma had just seen too much war in her life, and she was sick of it. I know she cried for all the  young Americans who were killed in Iraq, and God Bless her, she wept for the Iraqis, too. She knew their kids were dying, and that they all had mothers and children of their own, and that it was just a horrible thing that didn’t make any sense. Besides all of the ugly wars she had seen in her life, she had also heard far too much bullshit, and she was fed up.

And then she died. Well, not so suddenly, she got very sick, and pretty soon after that it was lights out. She was 93 years old and she had seen most of her friends die, and she was very tired.

I miss her terribly. Sometimes I get the urge to call her, but never, ever when I am stoned, because she could always bust me, even long distance. When I was a teenager I could be around my mother when I was tripping on acid and she would say, “Wow! You are in such a good mood!” As an adult, one bong hit, and Grandma would call me on the phone and tell me that I was “out of it.”

I guess kids never listen to their parents, I certainly never did. Then again, even in retrospect, their advice was always shit. Actually, they didn’t offer much of the stuff. 

One reason I found the Democratic National Convention so moving was all that talk about “Americans wanting the same thing — for their children to have it better than they did, that their children would know that they could do anything and be anything if they worked hard enough, that in America their were no limits, blah blah.” It moved me because that was never my experience at all. I was always told, “You’ll never make it. Writing isn’t a job.”

Feh.

I guess it is ridiculous to think that Grandma would have been able to talk her kids out of voting for John McCain and his imbecile running mate. I don’t even know for sure that she would have voted for the black guy. She is a first generation American who grew up in a very segregated town where Jews and blacks lived quite literally on different sides of the tracks, in deep suspicion of each other. She didn’t go to college. She was superstitious.

But she read the paper every day. She was very up on current events. As long as I knew her, it was the one constant in her life. That, and coffee brewing in an electric percolator that was probably the best of its type when she got it in the late 50s. After she died I looked for it in her house but didn’t find it. I got her chopped-liver grinder, though. I am looking at it now, as I write this. It is really heavy and looks like it was hand-tooled at the birth of the Industrial Revolution. Like my Grandma, there is no bullshit about it.

Mike Edison, author of I Have Fun Everywhere I Go, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he'll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

***********************************

Mike will be performing with his band, featuring Jon Spencer, in a very special evening of "Literary Mayhem and Rock'n'Roll," with special guests Jonathan Ames, Rachel Shukert, and Amanda Stern, Thursday, October 16^th,at the incredible Spiegelworld tent at the South Street Seaport inManhattan. For info, free MP3s and videos (including the infamous BongGuitar video) and much more, please visit www.rockettrain.com

Literary Mayhem!

For a couple of weeks now, liberals and anti-warriors have been freaking out about reports by Patrick Cockburn that the Bush administration was planning some secret arrangement with the Iraqi government (the latter presumably under duress) for a permanent US occupation of the country involving some 58 separate military installations and a military detachment whose members are not subject to Iraqi law. The administration's trump card, according to Cockburn, was the threat of withholding tens of billions of dollars of Iraqi assets now kept at the Federal Reserve bank in New York.

Unsurprisingly, Andrew Sullivan and Matthew Yglesias are breathing a sigh of reliefBush And Maliki: Less important than you think about today's independent reports that the Maliki government won't go for the deal. "A decision of this magnitude should not be made by an out-going administration regardless of the evolving views of the American people. Americans deserve to debate this as well as Iraqis," says Sullivan. "Leaving decisions about how U.S. forces operate in Iraq up to the next president sounds like an awfully good idea to me," says Yglesias.

Now call me a Luddite if you must, but Article II, section 2 of the US Constitution does quite clearly state that the president requires two thirds approval of the Senate to ratify a treaty. In practice, of course, presidents skirt such rules all the time, including the present. But by the same token, since whatever offer the administration makes sure the Iraqis can't refuse is not a binding treaty under the Constitution, the next administration can just rescind it at its discretion. In the meantime, in the eight months between now and inauguration day, the de facto reality of the US presence in Iraq isn't going to change substantially, regardless of formal changes in its classification. So the Bush occupation plan just isn't that important; if the US occupation of Iraq continues through the next administration, it will be because of the next president's decisions, not George Bush's.

None of this is to absolve the Bush administration of charges of imperialism. A country occupied by a foreign power in perpetuity under rules that supersede any of its laws isn't an independent sovereign state, it's a satrapy. The Bush administration just isn't very good at imperialism, and there's no need to give them credit for power they don't really have.

ADDING: The political angle, though, is obvious. If Bush can scratch out some agreement, no matter how coerced and contrary to Iraqi sovereignty, that provides (flimsy) grounds for hawks to scream "betrayal" and "backstabbing" in case the next president winds down the occupation. 

Just how thoroughly ignorant of the world beyond Crawford, Texas is George W. Bush? How steadfastly determined is he to remain so ignorant? Enough, in both cases, that seven years after he came to Washington seeking to chart a new course of humble, non-interventionist foreign policy, only to have his presidency to hijacked from the outset by a cabal of Jewish war-mongers (that is what happened, right?), he could describe his daughter's wedding to two Israeli journalists this way:

It was --- as my Jewish friends tell me, there was mazel tov.

Was there, George? Was there really?

The Hebraicization Of The West Wing Begins... To be sure, fluency in basic Yiddish and Yinglish phrases isn't a sufficient condition for a good presidency, nor even a necessary condition. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower† would have stuck out in a minyan of chosen persons like a bacon-and-shrimp cheeseburger at Zabar's, but they all did a fine job. (The Freemasons among them might have picked up a bit of crappy liturgical Hebrew.) Harry Truman, the first president for whom relationships with Jews was a high-profile matter of foreign affairs, acquitted himself well in his correspondence with Chaim Weizmann and inaugurated an unbending policy of near-total cooperation with Israel. But it's still hard to picture the man from Independence, MO feeling at home on the Lower East Side. And of course, despite our strategic commitment to Israel, it was still possible in 1968 and 1972 for a deranged, pathological antisemite to be elected president. Only in the Reagan years did pictures like this one start to pop up, let alone this one or this one.

However, it took a half-Kenyan, half-undifferentiated white candidate with Luo-Swahili Christian first and last names flanking the middle name "Hussein," to make the matter of whether the probable next president (the bid/ask spread on Intrade is 57.1/57.4 as I write) can really connect with Jews an issue of high salience in our political coverage.

One of the highest-trafficked items in Jewcy last week was my annotated clipping of Barack Obama's interview with Jeffrey Goldberg. I said at the outset that the interview demonstrated Obama's deeper and richer connection to American Jewish and Israeli experience than anyone who has been in his position before. Which is a sword with two very sharp edges, a point both Obama's supporters and opponents missed in interpreting the Goldberg interview.

...And Collapses Into Self-Parody To borrow a couple of aphorisms from David Samuels' recent work here, alone among other constituent groups in the American experience, "Jews and blacks...[often] embrac[e] an alternative historical narrative that at times trumps the mainstream narratives commonly accepted by our fellow citizens."

Obama in particular embodies that common thread between my community and his by being (again from Samuels) "a self-made man, part con artist, part performer, living in an imaginary future that will make him and his audience whole."

The flip side is that, truly unlike any potential president since the early days of the Republic (except Lincoln, maybe), he is a person of the book, and of books, and of philosophy and literature. If he does get to be president, his memoirs will be vastly more penetrating in their insights than anything a president has produced since Ulysses Grant more than a century ago, and radically unlike any president's literary output since presidents stopped writing for themselves sometime last century. That literariness is balanced by an Ivory Tower-trained analytic intelligence --- as the Clinton campaign found out to their chagrin, he was in fact a fairly skillful and accomplished legal academic.

All of which means that if elected, Obama will be the first president in ages (if not ever) to suffer from what Joyce called the agenbite of inwit (from ME, meaning "remorse of conscience"), the near-universal soul-sickness of introspective literary and intellectual types in the modern age, grasping for and unable to find concrete, stable concepts of identity and historical progression by which to gain a foothold on their world.

The condition is a two-edged sword for scores of reasons. For example, on the positive side of the ledger, it can provide fuel for empathy, for a creativity in problem-solving, and for just enough misanthropy to motivate the enlightened governance that rejects crude, short-sighted populism (his stand against the gas tax pander, his connections to and education from people like Austan Goolsbee and Lawrence Lessig are the encouraging data points here). And on the negative side, consider that Woodrow Wilson was the closest precedent in this regard, and one of the worst presidents we've ever had, and Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon are next closest. Intellectuality, especially when self-aware, can be a straitjacket and an amplifier for mistakes.

But more to the point here, the agenbite is, if not a Jewish condition, then more pervasive among Jews than any other group, by a wide margin. (It wasn't merely for the sake of wordplay that Buck Mulligan described Stephen Dedalus as "a jesting jew jesuit," nor was it coincidental that the greatest song ever written about the suffering and dispossession of American southerners in the Civil War was written by a half-Jew half-Mohawk from rural Ontario.) Virtually every significant feature of Obama's biography --- from his name, to his twice-over paternal abandonment, to the clash of skin colors with all his relatives, to his drug years, to his Ivy League education, to his admission to modern day Talmud study in a law faculty --- scream of the agenbite, and through it, to a connection with the experience of overwhelming numbers of post-Haskalah Jews (which may or may not come to the same thing as the Jewish experience).

The connection includes, moreover, his spiritual wanderings from inchoate ecumenicism in Indonesia, to a default atheism, and finally to the liberationist Christianity of a turbulent priest preaching an improbable amalgam of social conservatism, theological pacifism, and racial resentment (the first two in vastly greater proportions than the third, incidentally). How many of the Jews who took the greatest offense to the sermons of Jeremiah Wright belong to congregations that feature a regular call for a bloodletting of Arabs or Persians? A lot. How many of them are among those calling regularly for a bloodletting of Arabs or Persians? Also, a lot. Obama's relationship with Jeremiah Wright makes him more rather than less Jewy, in this case for ill, no matter how it affects the feelings of some Jews about him.

His reflexive detractors, especially his reflexive Jewish detractors, would make better use of their time criticizing the Obama that actually exists, with all his numerous flaws, instead of wrestling against some phantom existing only in their minds. But then his election would raise certain disquieting questions about their pat conception of the American character, and indeed, of the American Jewish character, so I wouldn't hold my breath expecting them to decide to be relevant.

Yesterday, conservative LA radio host Kevin James appeared on Hardball with Chris Matthews ostensibly to discuss George Bush and John McCain's decision to test whether repealing Godwin's Law is a winning issue.

James came on the air screaming --- literally --- that if George Bush wasn't, as Dana Perino assured us he was not, comparing the Democratic presidential nominee to Neville Chamberlain, "HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN" [that seems like the most faithful orthography -- ed]. After several minutes passed without James' wall of sound subsiding or giving any hint that it would soon, Matthews' bullshit meter went off.

So he asked James, "What did Chamberlain do wrong?" The result: A moment of television both entertaining and edifying. The fun starts at 4:10.

Before finally giving up and admitting he has no idea why it's unflattering to compare someone to Chamberlain, James let loose with several paroxysms that by all rights ought to have been co-scripted by George Orwell and Trey Parker:

"It all goes back to appeasement...It's the key term"; "His actions enabled, energized, legitimized ...It's the exact same thing" [presumably the subject is Chamberlain and the object Hitler, but that's far from clear -- ed.]; "'38, '39, what year do you want?...It's the exact same thing that happened"; "He's talking about appeasement!";

Best of all, in response to the specific question of what Chamberlain had done that James didn't like: "Neville Chamberlain was an appeaser."

That, of course, is the essence of Bush loyalism at this late stage (and what makes the clip so edifying): Parroting key phrases like an opera singer cantillating in a language she doesn't understand, and using language not as a medium of communication, but simply as a cudgel with which to beat political opposition.

Which highlights precisely what is so crazy not just about this latest display of classlessness from the president, but about the media-enabled codification of the idea that steadfastly holding to the principle of conducting diplomacy like a petulant kindergartner makes a politician "strong" on national security. Chris Matthews may have fun embarrassing a buffoon like James, but it's thanks to him and his colleagues that we consider someone like Joe Lieberman --- who has yet to encounter a foreign policy problem he wouldn't solve by getting other people killed, and has yet to encounter a domestic freedom he wouldn't consider restricting --- a moderate. Lieberman's reputation for moderation is diagnostic proof of a pathology in our political culture. The fact that a man can be comfortable going on national television to excoriate appeasement without having the slightest clue what 'appeasement' means is only a minor symptom.

But sane people who know words like 'appeasement' and what happened at Munich just don't sign off on this codicil of the Bush doctrine, or much of the rest of it for that matter.

Hence, back in the land of agitprop-free reality, there is virtually no one outside a faction within a faction of neoconservatives --- the clan that warned of Reagan selling us out to Gorbachev and presciently predicted a massive Soviet revival by the late 80s --- dumb or paranoid enough to confuse talking with appeasing. Not even John McCain, who as Jamie Rubin notes, favored negotiations with Hamas as recently as 2006. To be sure, Rubin has honesty issues of his own, but the Huffington Post found the video evidence to prove McCain was for negotiating with Hamas --- along with an admirably perspicuous explanation of what got Hamas elected (hint: it's not Palestinians' intractable hatred for Israel).

And why would McCain have taken that position? Because it's simply flipping nuts not to, that's why. Here we have a basic tool of diplomacy that comes with a negligible opportunity costs, a literally zero potential downside cost, and an enormous potential upside; and rather than use it, some people would rather impugn the fitness of others for leadership.

That's how you know they're full of shit. If their ancestors had faced such a decision and opted to throw a tantrum rather than use the low-cost, high-profit tool, they would have been culled by natural selection long before passing on their genetic material to our current crop of ostriches who think they're hawks.

The Republican party seems to think that the crucial swing voter in this election will be Apollo Braun. How else to explain their decision to abandon anything resembling a traditional political strategy --- including their recent instant classics of fearmongering --- in favor of a months-long extended violation of Godwin's Law at once hysterical in its desperation and overreach, and nearly impenetrably byzantine in its content. Apart from a certain minority of ignorant American Jews afraid of their own shadow, it's difficult to imagine any undecided voters who are on the right wavelength to pick up such rarefied dog-whistling.

George W. Bush has been in Israel this week to take part in 60th anniversaryGeorge Bush: "If my opponents are so smart, how come they're like Hitler? Riddle me that, Harvard." celebrations, and had a chance to address the Knesset earlier today. Rather than say anything remotely germane, he decided instead to denounce an unnamed American senator who reacted to the Nazi invasion of Poland by exclaiming, "Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided." The reference was to Sen. William Borah (R - ID), who left office in January 1940. Bush's press flack, Dana Perino, assured the press that any apparent comparison to another senator from a state starting with "I" is purely coincidental; but John McCain (and his pet soothsayer Joe Lieberman, natch) missed the memo about not unveiling veiled slanders. Hence he piled on:

If Senator Obama wants to sit down across the table from the leader of a country that calls Israel a stinking corpse, and comes to New York and says they're gonna, quote, "wipe Israel off the map," what is it that he wants to talk about? What is it that he wants to talk about with him?

Hmm. That is a real poser of a riddle, but let me take a crack at it. Obama would want to talk to Iranian leaders (not necessarily Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who wields very little actual power) about negotiating Iran out of pursuing nuclear weapons, about nuclear non-proliferation generally, the stability of the Iraqi state, a resolution to the Kurdish national question, Lebanese sovereignty, shutting down anti-Iranian and anti-Shiite terrorist networks, opening up the Iranian economy to American goods and vice versa, trade and allocation of petroleum resources, relaxation of infringements of the rights of women and religious minorities, integrating Iran into western political institutions, setting up student exchange programs, and of course, Israeli security.

Part of the reason Obama would talk to Iran about all the foregoing is that George W. Bush --- unlike other American presidents since the fall of the Shah, who found uses for back-channels to Iran other than flipping them off --- has abdicated his responsibility. Bush's grounds for his foreign policy malfeasance is his belief that it's futile at best, Chamberlinian appeasement at worst, to talk to "terrorists and radicals" (note the elision of an important distinction) unless you can "persuade them they have been wrong all along." Which is a nice encapsulation of many of Bush and McCain's strategic blinders. It is possible to talk productively with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (or the actual leadership of Iran) --- for example, by negotiating a framework for Iraqi stability --- without convincing him that Israel is not, in fact, a stinking corpse. It's even possible to talk to Iran about curtailing their support of Hezbollah --- say, by offering something in return, perhaps something that could be revoked if the Iranians break the agreement --- without deciding one way or another whether Israel is a stinking corpse. Believe it or not, it's even possible to conduct diplomacy with Iran without giving away the Sudetenland.

Sure, it may sound nuts, or worse, like Chamberlain, to conceive of diplomacy as an exercise in anything other than demanding that other states bow to our will or else, but hey, since that approach hasn't worked out perfectly, maybe we should roll the dice.

Not if McCain has his way. Negotiations with Iran, he claims, entail "enhanc[ing] the prestige of a nation that's a sponsor of terrorists and is directly responsible for the deaths of brave young Americans"; so arguing for such negotiations demonstrates a lack of "the knowledge, the experience, the background to make the kind of judgments that are necessary to preserve this nation's security."

So at least we know what strategic concept is McCain's top priority --- prestige --- but it's a concept unlike anything recognizable in the history of political or diplomatic history. It has nothing to do with the GDP of Iran, nothing to do with its International Red Cross, Human Rights Watch, or Freedom House ratings, nothing to do with the esteem in which anyone on earth holds Iran, nothing to do with its technological capabilities, and nothing to do with its military, political, and economic power. It can't have anything to do with any of them, since talking to Iranian leaders can't enhance any of them.

Still, we should probably trust in John McCain's knowledge, experience, background, and most importantly, his direct access to the Platonic form of prestige. After all, if pre-empting any enhancement of Iran's prestige weren't a matter of existential importance, then John McCain's monomaniacal pursuit of policies guaranteed to augment Iran's actual power and diplomatic clout, let alone his fatuous comparisons of anyone who stands in his way to Neville Chamberlain, would be alarming, inexcusable, and disgraceful, and probably render him unfit for the presidency.

The Washington Post has a piece today on how things are looking up for George W. Bush:

The war in Iraq seems to have taken a turn for the better and the opposition at home has failed in all efforts to impose its own strategy. North Korea is dismantling its nuclear program. The budget deficit is falling. A new attorney general has been confirmed despite objections from the left.

However, his poll numbers remain dismal:

Yet none of this has particularly impressed the public at large, which remains skeptical that anything meaningful has changed and still gives Bush record-low approval ratings.

Polls are a tricky thing. I too would respond with disapproval of Bush's performance if polled. He simply has not been conservative enough for me. His immigration plan, the spending, the too-few vetoes, our weak fighting of this war, all of it has soured me on the man. I had many problems with him in his first term too. I despised giving a new entitlement program to the richest segment of the population in the form of his Medicare plan, hated his signing of McCain's ridiculous Campaign Finance bill, and nearly cried when he confirmed that despite his belief in freedom for all, Taiwan is part of one China.

Despite all this, I am someone who worked to re-elect George W. Bush in 2004, and would do it again tomorrow in a repeat Bush-Kerry race. While I'd like someone fiscally conservative, who is an international badass that can maybe pronounce nuclear, the reality of the situation is that Bush was better than either of his opponents by a mile.

Bush's legacy won't be decided by his poll numbers today or tomorrow, or even the day he leaves office. Whatever he has done in his 8 presidential years, all of it will come down to Iraq in the end. It will be noted in history books that we had no further attacks on U.S. soil in the 6 years following 9/11. But if Iraq is still a disaster, that fact will only be an afterthought. As someone who supported the Iraq war when it began, and still supports it today, Bush's legacy matters to me only in so far as I want what is best for both America and Iraq. Rooting for failure in Iraq to show up Bush is unconscionable, and should be rejected by anybody with any sense of humanity.

Ultimately, current polls of the president's approval are meaningless. Only time will really tell us if the Iraq war will have been a success. For a president whose reputation rests on that result, his current legacy projection matters not at all.

On November 3, 2007, General President Musharraf of Pakistan, imposed emergency rule in Pakistan (the text of the declaration is here), citing a need to curb terrorism and restricting activist judges. Reputable Pakistani journalist, Hamid Mir reported on Geo TV (Pakistan's largest private cable news station) that the US gave the green-light for Musharraf to go ahead and call the emergency.

Musharraf's decision came a few days before Pakistan's Supreme Court was set to rule on a series of cases that would have challenged his legitimacy to hold the post of president and chief of military simultaneously. The Provisional Constitutional Order (text) that followed the emergency declaration, put Pakistan's 1973 constitution into abeyance , and suspended all fundamental rights:

With the Islamic provisions of the Constitution to remain in force, the fundamental rights as enshrined in Article 9 (security of person), 10 (safeguard as to arrest and detention), 15 (freedom of movement, etc.), 16 (freedom of assembly), 17 (freedom of association), 19 (freedom of speech, etc.) and 25 (equality of citizens) shall remain suspended.

The suspension of fundamental rights has already led to four men being convicted of treason for making anti-government speeches. Pakistan's private TV stations were all blacked out and sale of satellite dishes was halted. Hundreds of lawyers and activists around the country were detained or put under house arrest, and the most recent estimate is that around 2500 people are in jail.

General Musharraf, who came to power in a coup in 1999, is a close ally of President Bush's war on terror. He has received nearly $10 billion in aid since 2001 and the Bush administration has asked Congress to approve nearly $800 million more for the coming year.

Most of the aid is in the form of untraceable cash transfers , sometimes reaching $100 million a week. 

On Wednesday, President Bush made a telephone call to General Musharraf:

President Bush telephoned General Musharraf for the first time since the crisis began and bluntly told him that he had to return Pakistan to civilian rule, hold elections and step down as chief of the military, as he had promised. Mr. Bush called him from the Oval Office at 11:30 a.m. Washington time, and spoke for about 20 minutes, according to the White House.

However, the impact of the President Bush's demands seems minimal in light of the fact that:

Bush administration officials are unanimous in saying that American financial support for Pakistan will continue regardless of whether General Musharraf reverses course.

Meanwhile, in Pakistan, initial demonstrations were limited to lawyers and journalists, with lawyers bearing a significant amount of crush, including prosecution under anti-terrorism laws. A Western traveler in Pakistan noted that while city life continued on as before, lawyers and professors simply failed to show up to appointments on account of having been picked up by the police. After a few days of silence, former Prime minister Benazir Bhutto, who earlier was willing to participate in a power-sharing deal with Musharraf, began challenging Musharraf and threatened mass protests, including a "long march" from the capital city Islamabad to the second biggest city in Pakistan, Lahore. It is not unreasonable to speculate that she may be arrested soon as well.

US support for Musharraf must be questioned for being part of a pattern by the US of supporting military dictatorships in Pakistan. Some commentators, including Vali Nasr from the Council on Foreign Relations, have compared Pakistan's situation with that of pre-revolutionary Iran, and one expert warns that the situation is "eerily similar" to Iran in the late 1970's, stating:

I'd also point out that what people forget about the Iranian revolution is that it wasn't originally just Khomeini and the Islamists. It was a broad coalition that included leftists, liberal democrats, student activists, religious moderates and radicals who all came together to overthrow the government. It took roughly a year from the time that protests began to the actual abdication of the Shah and another year before it became fully apparent that the government would be dominated by radical clerics, who weren't necessarily the most popular but were the best organized and most able to step into the breach. Similarly today we see a fractured society and tenuous dictatorship in Pakistan where pro democracy and Islamist forces are putting pressure on Musharraf whose hold on power is slowly weakening.

Recently, Joe Biden and Governor Richardson have also concurred with that assessment.

Putting aside the ethical problem of supporting autocrats, the fact is that Musharraf has not been a good ally in the war on terror. As I noted in my article at the Guardian:

Dictators are incapable of eliminating extremism. A dictatorship is afflicted with the original sin of having seized power with violence, and therefore has no moral authority to speak against those who employ violence. A dictatorship is bereft of the psychological calm that comes from being popularly elected and lives life like an anxious little demon, spraying bullets wildly, without aim or purpose.

Musharraf did not carry out reforms of the madrassa system; he killed those leaders who were keeping the Taliban at bay; he tried to appease militants by permitting them to implement Sharia; made alliances with pro-Taliban parties; and even, some experts note, engaged in crimes against humanity. Musharraf's remarkable failures in the anti-terrorist arena is at odds with Bush official John Negroponte's statement that Musharraf has been "indispensable." Indeed, Musharraf has been so successful as an anti-terrorist that he is now less popular in Pakistan than Osama Bin Laden (pdf).

As it stands right now, Musharraf had stated that he will allow elections on February 14, which in itself is illegal, as by law he was required to move towards elections by January 15. Further, there is full expectation by experts that these elections will be rigged.

• Matt Damon and George Clooney support Barack Obama's campaign. [AHN]
• Drudge Report: Catholic priest in Colorado charged for jogging naked. [The Denver Post]
• Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney on Wednesday defended his five sons' decision not to enlist in the military, saying they're showing their support for the country by "helping me get elected." [The Huffington Post]
• Granted new power to spy inside the U.S., the Bush administration may be doing more than eavesdropping on phone calls--it could be watching suspects' every move. [Salon]
• The good, the bad, and the ugly: celebrity tattoos. [TMZ]

• Britain, and Prime Minister Gordon Brown, ask the U.S. to release five British residents from Guantanamo. [Yahoo]
• "It was appalling to watch over the last few days as Congress — now led by Democrats — caved in to yet another unnecessary and dangerous expansion of President Bush’s powers." [The New York Times]
• China launches summer camp to help young Internet addicts. [Yahoo]
• Swimmer dies in 1.5 mile Alcatraz race. [San Francisco Chronicle]
• From the bloggers: Barry Bonds and the Asterisk of Doom. [Slate]
• Iraqis push their cars as they wait in line to buy petrol in front of a gas station in al-Saadun street in central Baghdad. [IraqSlogger]

• A-Rod hits his 500th home run, Bonds ties Hank Aaron, and Tom Glavine gets win #300. [ESPN]
• On top of steroids, Bonds record tainted by "mechanical device." [Editor & Publisher]
• "The Pentagon has lost track of about 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols given to Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005." [The Washington Post]
• Civil liberties are WAY overrated: "President Bush signed into law on Sunday legislation that broadly expanded the government’s authority to eavesdrop on the international telephone calls and e-mail messages of American citizens without warrants." [The New York Times] [Guardian Unlimited]
• Mitt Romney leads Republicans in the race for nomination. [Political Wire]
• Video: Romney gets all worked up talking about his Mormon faith with an Iowa radio host. [The Politico] 
• Mayor Bloomberg called for jury duty. [Breitbart]
• NY Times cutting page size to save money. [Editor & Publisher] [Gawker]
• Jack Bauer and "24" vow to fight global warming. [The Washington Post]

• Cal Ripken Jr. and Tony Gwynn inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. [ESPN]
• Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman dies at 89. [The Washington Post]
• Barack Obama's Achilles Heel. [Slate]
• Can its soccer team's victory in the 2007 Asian Cup bring unity to Iraq? [My Way]
• Top Democrats want to block Bush's $20 billion arms gift to the Sauds. [The Hill]
• From Wonkette's Daily Briefing Dpmt., "Lying is the New Black." [Wonkette]

SJC Chairman Patrick Leahy says he "exhausted every avenue of voluntary cooperation from [Rove] and the White House."

Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy announced Thursday he had subpoenaed White House adviser Karl Rove and his deputy. He accused them of stonewalling a widening probe into the firing of federal prosecutors.

"The Bush-Cheney White House continues to place great strains on our constitutional system of checks and balances," Leahy said in issuing the subpoenas. "Not since the darkest days of the Nixon Administration have we seen efforts to corrupt federal law enforcement for partisan political gain and such efforts to avoid accountability."

Egyptian and Jordanian foreign ministers arrived in Jerusalem representing the only two Arab governments that have signed peace deals with Israel. They spoke today about the peace initiative and specifically avoided referencing the Arab League, which has never recognized Israel. Yet, without mentioning the League, the two foreign ministers are pushing the Arab League’s peace plan for the region which stipulates three main conditions for normal relations with Israel: 1. full withdrawal from land occupied in the 1967 war, including Jerusalem, 2. the creation of a Palestinian state, and 3. a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem. [Debka] [The Washington Times]

Beijing’s Xinhua news service reported today that Taliban rebels have demanded that eight Taliban prisoners be released in exchange for eight South Korean hostages. The hostages are primarily female members of a Christian group who were abducted last Thursday in Ghazni, southwest of Kabul. [Xinhua]

The deadline for releasing the Taliban prisoners was set for Tuesday evening and then extended indefinitely. Debka reported this afternoon that the Taliban has killed one of the hostages. [Debka]

Shvitz editor Michael Weiss, posted yesterday on Libya’s release of six medical workers—five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor—who were held for eight years under the dubious and unsubstantiated charge of deliberately infecting children with the virus that causes AIDS. [Jewcy]

Susannah Sirkin, deputy director of Physicians for Human Rights, said, “The charges were fabricated; the nurses were tortured into confessing; there was no due process.” [The New York Times]

In the aftermath of the prisoners’ release, the EU has no problem normalizing relations with Libya’s leaders: French President Nicolas Sarkozy will travel to Tripoli to boost the EU-Libya ties. [BBC]

President Bush’s lynchpin: personal diplomacy via frequent video conferences with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq. They chat on troops and leadership and God, which is all well and good, but where are the results? [The New York Times]

David Remnick writes the Letter from Jerusalem in this week’s New Yorker profiling Avraham Burg, a former Speaker of the Knesset, and a “Zionist politician who has lost his faith in the future” (of Israel).

“People are not willing to admit it,” Burg said, “but Israel has reached the wall […] We are already dead. We haven’t received the news yet, but we are dead. It doesn’t work anymore. It doesn’t work. . . . There is no one to talk to here. The religious community of which I was a part—I feel no sense of belonging to it. The secular community—I am not part of it, either. I have no one to talk to. I am sitting with you and you don’t understand me, either.”

“After some fifteen, twenty years in political life I had a feeling all of a sudden that, to use the Biblical term, Israel was the kingdom without prophesy. I realized that the three founding narratives of the national idea of Israeliness were over: the mass immigration to the land, aliyah; the security of the land; and the settling of the land. All three had served their purpose and were no longer the core of the nation’s narratives.”

On the Holocaust as a reference point for Israeli statehood, Burg told Remnick,

"We confiscated, we monopolized, world suffering. We did not allow anybody else to call whatever suffering they have ‘holocaust’ or ‘genocide,’ be it Armenians, be it Kosovo, be it Darfur. In the last years, Israeliness has confined itself for itself only and lost interest almost for what happens in the world. For me, Israel is shrinking into its own shell rather than struggling for a better world."

Otniel Schneller, a Knesset member from Ehud Olmert’s centrist Kadima Party, has said that when Burg dies he should be denied burial in the special section of Mt. Herzl National Cemetery reserved for national leaders.

Today, more than 600 French Jews made aliyah. [JTA]

Just when you thought things couldn’t possibly get any…

President Bush will undergo a routine colonoscopy Saturday and temporarily hand presidential powers over to Vice President Dick Cheney, White House press secretary Tony Snow said.

Rest easy, fellow Americans. At least our unflinching commander-in-chief will have a plastic tube camera in his tushy.

From Jacob Goldstein's WSJ blog:

Bush Opposes Expansion of Children’s Health Insurance

President Bush won’t back a Senate plan to expand health insurance for children whose families don’t qualify for Medicaid but can’t afford private insurance, the Washington Post reports.

The Los Angeles Times: A group of Sudanese from South Sudan are living at a shelter in Northern Israel. They say they have had the same religious and cultural repression as those from Darfur.

• "Israel is cracking down on a recent influx of illegal immigrants, many of whom are Sudanese, over its 140-mile border with Egypt." [The Los Angeles Times]
• Amnesty slams Israel and Lebanon for civilian deaths in last summer's 34-day war. [The Jerusalem Post]
• Bush behind the podium to discuss Iraq at 10:30 this morning. [Yahoo]
• A Times profile on a woman exiled by Katrina. [The New York Times]
• Sex sells. Posh sex sells more: David and Victoria Beckham strip to their knickers for W Magazine. [Daily Mail]
• "Hillary is from Mars, Obama is from Venus." [Salon.com]
• In Slate's blog roundup, eulogizing McCain and firing Alberto Gonzales. [Slate.com]
• Robert Novak on whether John McCain can make a comeback in his presidential bid. [The Washington Post]

The IDF thinks that Iran will go nuclear about 5 years sooner than the date projected by a United States National Intelligence Estimate. This doesn't come as a shock (the IDF is probably only weeks away from handing down a report that they've spotted split hooves under the Grand Ayatollah's robe and horns under his headgear). What's actually bizarre is that Mr. Olmert seems to believe that Ahmadinejad speaks for his country:

Iran, through the voice of its president [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad, calls almost daily for the destruction of the State of Israel.

Considering that the only people who like Ahmadinejad in Iran are roughly equivalent to the people who still like Bush in the U.S., a statement like the one above is hardly different from saying that the United States, through the voice of its president, speaks like a rodeo cowboy. Clearly, most in the U.S. despise their president. Easy to do, really--although I will say those Bushisms sometimes merely show a fellow who, for better or for worse (usually for worse), doesn't mince words.  Sometimes cutting to the chase is necessary and refusing to do so can make you look even more like an idiot.

Mr. Bush only a few months ago astutely noted:

There's a lot of blowhards in the political process, you know, a lot of hot-air artists, people who have got something fancy to say.

How right he was. The Italian premier Prodi, with whom Olmert was meeting to discuss the Iranian problem actually said the following:

Because Iran is a regional power, it must act responsibly, and give up any nuclear military program

According to the illogic of this rhetorical sidestep, the reason for abandoning nuclear program would also be incidentally the only precondition for acquiring such a thing! He should have just reminded us that clerical fascists like Kahmeni and wacked out populist nobodies like Ahmadinejad are blowhards. That would have made some sense. No nukes for blowhards. Simple as that.

Reuters: A Pakistani man cried for his brother, who was inside the Red Mosque in Islamabad as the Pakistani military stormed the complex

• Talks fail; nearly 50 Pakistanis dead in early-morning raid on mosque. [The New York Times]
• NAACP holds mock funeral in Detroit to bury the 'n-word.' [Chicago Tribune]
• Almost half of the country say they want Bush impeached. For Cheney, more than half. [Counterpunch]
• Slate on Staying the Course. [Slate.com]
• Since the Hamas coup on June 12th, economic crisis in Gaza. [International Herald Tribune]
• Severe punishment for bad seafood: China executes ex-food and drug chief. [The Washington Post]
• More than 2000 Sudanese refugees in Israel, and they're often dropped in unsafe places. [The Jerusalem Post]

I really haven't followed the case and its stultifying minutiae carefully, so I won't comment on the defendant's innocence or guilt. However, some statements are self-evidently silly and histrionic, and Andrew Sullivan has made the issuance of them his signature blog form:

It is hard to think of an action more contemptuous of the rule of law - except for so many decisions made by this lawless president, acting as a monarch. De facto pardoning or commuting of a sentence was once a royal prerogative that even kings reserved for those they didn't know, convicted clearly unjustly, whose sentence had often largely been served.  And yet Bush uses it in office for a friend, hours after the failure of his appeal, to protect his own political and legal liability for jeopardizing intelligence and compromising national security.

The phrase bandied around the Daily Dish for last twelve hours has been "rule of law." In what sense has this president violated such an adamantine concept with respect to Scooter Libby, exercising, as is his full constitutional right, the ability to pardon or grant clemency to convicted criminals? 

Timothy Noah -- surely another a beetle-browed agent of Dick Cheney's master plan -- fills in some of the abuse-of-power blanks that the Saint Sebastian of the Right evidently felt were too niggling to fill in himself:

Judge Reggie Walton went overboard in sentencing Libby to 30 months. This was about twice as long as the prison term recommended by the court's probation office, and if Libby hadn't been a high-ranking government official, there's a decent chance he would have gotten off with probation, a stiff fine, and likely disbarment. Walton gave Libby 30 months and a $250,000 fine, then further twisted the knife by denying Libby's routine request to delay the sentence while his lawyers appealed it. (Libby was duly assigned the federal prison register number 28301-016, but Libby's lawyers managed to move quickly enough to keep Libby out of the slammer until his appeal was denied on July 2, the same day Bush commuted his sentence.) The voluminous pleas for leniency from Libby's A-list friends seem to have annoyed Walton, who erred on the side of severity not in spite of Libby's high position in government but because of it. Walton wanted to make an example of him.

The term for Walton in conservative circles would be "activist judge." But far be it from the author of The Conservative Soul to know one when he sees it.

• Bush nixes Libby’s two-and-a-half year prison sentence. [The New York Times]

• Clearly, Bush missed the point in commuting Libby. [The Washington Post]

• Barack says, “This is exactly the kind of politics we must change." [BarackObama.com]

• Not so fast: a Slate.com editorial says Bush acted rightly and Libby shouldn’t be behind bars. [Slate.com]

Sam Tanenhaus has a brilliant essay in this week's New Republic (not yet available online) about the slow, sad decline of American conservatism as a philosophy. If Andrew Sullivan wonders why his book The Conservative Soul caused an ocean of yawns on the right when it debuted months ago, it's because our body politic has had little need for the Oakeshottian dichotomy between enterprise and civil associations. (Andrew's native Tories evidently have little need for one these days, too.)

Conservatism as a galvanizing movement has always been one of negation rather than positive assertion. Leo Strauss, discoursing on the favored twin in Isaiah Berlin's Gemini category of liberties, referred to "negative liberty" -- the blessed absence of state compulsion -- as "liberty with a minus sign." American conservatism has always been ideology with a minus sign. The cold war gave it its reason for being; it was religious in both the literal and metaphoric senses of the term, with the god-fearing waging their "twilight struggle" against the godless. As Tanenhaus writes, American triumphalism, which was postwar conservatism avant la lettre, was a "purifying doctrine" pitted against the "Soviets' derived from Marx by way of Lenin," yet it consisted of... "what exactly?" Nothing. It didn't need to consist of anything beyond a transcendent and apocalyptic repudiation of "Marx by way of Lenin."

So if George Bush has failed to take up the mantle of Whittaker Chambers -- correctly if conveniently identified by Tanenhaus, Chambers' biographer, as the founder of American conservatism -- it is because Bush has failed to understand the true menace of Islamism the way Chambers did that of Communism. (That not many Republican strategists were once Kalashkinov-toting jihadists who eventually saw the light may delay further the necessary comprehension.)

I'm not sure I buy Tanenhaus's thesis that conservatism is on the wane, but I do agree that Chambers is still worth taking seriously if for no other reason than those farcical defenders of Alger Hiss continue to view him as a threat. Here's a post I wrote a few months ago about tragic Baltimore bullfrog of the twentieth century:

"I have sometimes been asked at this point: What went on in the minds of those Americans, all highly educated men, that made it possible for them to betray their country? Did none of them suffer a crisis of conscience? The question presupposes that whoever asks it has still failed to grasp that Communists mean exactly what they have been saying for a hundred years: they regard any government that is not Communist, including their own, merely as the political machine of a class whose power they have organized, expressly to overthrow by all means, including violence. Therefore, ultimately the problem of espionage never presents itself to them as a problem of conscience, but as a problem of operations. Making due allowance for the differences of intelligence, nerve, background and political development among the individual men involved... the answer to the question must still be: no problem of conscience was then involved. For the Communists, the problem of conscience had been settled long before, at the moment when they accepted the program and discipline of the Communist Party." -- Whittaker Chambers, Witness

I shall never forget the feeling of a missed opportunity when I began my first job out of college at the Queens Museum of Art. A few months before my hire, Alger Hiss's son had been invited to speak at the museum about how his poor, beloved papa was turned into a falsely accused victim of a national bugbear responsible for the insidious advent of Joseph McCarthy and the age of the "loyalty oath." It's easy to trick yourself out as a martyr -- or, in Hiss, Jr.'s case, a vicarious one -- when every schoolchild has been taught that America's relationship to Communism was nothing more than a series of reactionary witch-hunts. There was no real threat to national security, Communists did not infiltrate the State Department. And if you need moral surety on this question, just look who interrogated Hiss -- Richard Nixon.

Political myths die hard. We now know the following about Hiss: He was a spy attached to the Washington "Ware group," who copied sensitive State Department documents and passed them along to Moscow. (His typewriter was matched with the ink on the documents, microfilms of which were buried for years in a pumpkin on Chambers' Maryland farm.) Though never a CP member (that wouldn't have looked good on his government job application), Hiss volunteered his automobile for above-ground Party use, despite being told that this was irregular and dangerous -- an underground agent was not supposed to let anything that could be traced back to him come out in the open and tinctured Red. Hiss was just that eager to advance the struggle. He also thought Franklin Roosevelt, whom he publicly adulated, was a craven bourgeois guilty of resuscitating capitalism just as the revolution looked to be imminent. Whittaker Chambers, who endured no small amount of obloquy and was the target of decades-long character assassination, was telling the truth. Richard Nixon was right.

Continue reading...

Eagerly awaiting an explanation as to how George W. Bush is responsible for the assassinations of schoolteachers in Thailand:

...the new generation of separatist militants, calling themselves Patani Freedom Fighters (pejuang kemerdekaan Patani, or pejuang), has been responsible for 75 deaths and 91 injuries of teachers since January 2004, when the insurgency escalated. They have also burned 194 schools in the same period.

These folks aren't content to merely boycott educators and places of learning. They go all out. And why?

Human Rights Watch examined leaflets distributed by pejuang militants in the southern border provinces explicitly warning ethnic Malay Muslims not to send children to government schools and not to cooperate with Thai authorities. The leaflets say that doing so is considered to be a forbidden sin (haram) and can be subject to severe punishment, including death.

Apparently the Patani "Freedom Fighters" aren't even big on educating themselves in their own beliefs. If they were, they might have come across this quote from the Prophet Muhammad in the Hadith:

The ink of the scholar is more holy than the blood of the martyr.

Insha'Allah, this idea will gain ground sooner than later.

Iranian democracy activists tell Canadian Time Magazine that the recent imprisonment and harassment of Haleh Esfandiari is only emblematic of a larger crackdown. The new wave of repression, they say, has been facilitated by the Bush administration's talent for ignoring people who know that they're talking about:

"...warnings were delivered to U.S. officials by others, including Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council. "We had talks with the State Department and with lawmakers," Parsi told TIME. "We pointed out the dangers. Our advice was not taken into consideration. Things have turned out worse than we expected." Parsi says that, in the past, individual democracy activists have been arrested without a pretext, but that the Bush Administration's program gave the regime an opportunity to go after as many as 10,000 non-government organizations and their memberships. "There is tremendous self-censorship going on," Parsi says. "They know that the money has made them targets."

D'you ever get the image of the Bush administration as Frankenstein's monster, tossing the little girl in the lake with the best of intentions then watching with a dumbfounded look on his face as she drowns? Stupid Frankenstein--what did you think the mullahs would do upon hearing the American Satan was going to funnel tons of loot into projects aimed at their demise?

Might Herr Doktor send Fritz out for some replacement cortex?

Political pundit and syndicated columnist Molly Ivins died yesterday at 62 after a long battle with breast cancer. The sharp-tongued Texas liberal known for her catch-phrase witticisms of our President, whom she referred to simply as "Shrub" frequently criticized the current administration, while at the same time delivering the signature Ivins dose of the onus is on the rest of us to enact change.