Letters to the Editor
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Penis Envy
Here in Italy I switched from CNN to the BBC and back again and actually sat through Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech yesterday, and for a minute or two nobody seemed to notice at the end when he said the soldiers would be freed as a "gift to the British people." Even CNN's chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour seemed totally taken aback, blinking for a few moments with astonishment, or should I say cognitive dissonance. But she quickly regained her professional aplomb and soon the wires were humming. Now as I watched this unfold, I fully understood this was grand political theater on a stupendous scale, and I felt a grudging admiration for Ahmadinejad. THIS is how we're dealing with a "crisis," he grinned. THIS is how civilized and clever and imaginative people do things. Propaganda, yes, of course. He has his agenda. But by God neither he nor Tony Blair were rattling sabers, nor were bombs falling, nor were people bleeding and dying in the streets. I felt a great, overwhelming sadness for the absolute catastrophe Bush and Cheney and Rove unleashed with their cynical lies, and it was sickening watching Bush at his flared-nostril presser continue to lie while timid--shall I say flaccid?--reporters copied down his lies and turned them into "news" stories. It was horrid. And bizarre. And nauseating. Glenn, you're absolutely right to point out that what drives all this seems to come down to some twisted form of penis envy. Occam's Razor. It's nothing complicated, just profoundly pathological. BTW, perhaps the most bizarre image of the day was tubby Cheney lurking, scowling in the bushes as the president recited Turdblossom's scripted lies to the press corps. This all was and is surreal. Truly BAD fiction. Which makes reading you, Glenn, so essential these days. Thanks for your service.
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The Learned Master of Persuasion and Negotiation
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,989559,00.html
TIME magazine ** Monday, Nov. 16, 1998
Fall Of The House Of Newt
By NANCY GIBBS AND MICHAEL DUFFY...If Clinton is a prisoner of his appetites, Gingrich is a prisoner of his ego. He kept trying the same strategy again and again, drawing lines in the sand and waiting for his adversary to come across. Except it was Gingrich who always blinked first. In May 1995, when Clinton seemed at his weakest, Gingrich boasted to TIME of his plans to shut down the government and then wait for the President to come crawling, meekly accepting Newt's cuts in Medicare and other government programs. "He can run the parts of government that are left [after the cuts], or he can run no government," Newt said. "Which of the two of us do you think worries more about the government not showing up?" As it turned out, it was Newt.
After the shutdown, Gingrich remorsefully talked of sidelining himself, of having "thrown one too many interceptions." Back then no one knew that this would be his habit. In June 1997 the issue was disaster relief. Republicans loaded the bill with blatantly partisan riders, assuming Clinton wouldn't dare veto it. The President did, within minutes of its landing on his desk, and the Republicans were blamed for flood victims' getting stranded. A coup ensued, but Gingrich prevailed, primarily because there was no obvious candidate to replace him. His response: a 12-point memo on the lessons to be learned from the disaster-relief disaster. Lesson One: "In dealing with Clinton, you must never put yourself in a position where he can be compassionate or self-righteous."
So where was Gingrich last spring? Putting himself in a position in which Clinton could be self-righteous. So confident was Gingrich that the intern scandal would doom the President--despite polls that were already consistently showing that the public didn't care--that he assumed he would have the upper hand in any budget deal. Instead, the public saw the Democrats as the party that was trying to attend to business while the Republicans were distracted by scandal.
All that history made it hard, after the elections last week, for anyone to trust Gingrich with another two years as Speaker. Most may have been willing, once again, to accept his promises of change -- change in management, in decision making, in priorities. But there was one thing Gingrich couldn't change. "The problem for the party is that Newt is the face of the party," said a G.O.P. congressional operative on the eve of Gingrich's resignation. "Until we elect a President, he's the most visible spokesman we have. The snake won't die unless you cut off its head."
- - By NANCY GIBBS AND MICHAEL DUFFY
- - With reporting by James Carney, John F. Dickerson, Karen Tumulty and Michael Weisskopf -
Mmmm … Giraffeburgers
http://unauthorised.org/anthropology/anthro-l/march-1995/0336.html
“If combat means living in a ditch, females have biological problems staying in a ditch for thirty days because they get infections and they don’t have upper body strength. I mean, some do, but they’re relatively rare. On the other hand, men are basically little piglets, you drop them in the ditch, they roll around in it, doesn’t matter, you know. These things are very real. On the other hand, if combat means being on an Aegis-class cruiser managing the computer controls for twelve ships and their rockets, a female may be again dramatically better than a male who gets very, very frustrated sitting in a chair all the time because males are biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes.”
– - Adjunct Professor Newt Gingrich, Reinhardt College, January 7, 1995, “Renewing American Civilization.” -
Calling mepex -- wherever you are
Urgently needed — a new Greasemonkey script to collect salon letters on a single page. HELP!
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Lest we forget
Sysprog, thank you for the reminder. I was never much of a fan of Clinton's apertura alla destra, but at least he was/is an adult, and had/has given the future of America and Americans some serious thought. Newt, on the other hand, has always behaved as the petulant teenager, the boy who read too many books and learned virtually nothing from them, nor, for that matter from the people around him.
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Gingrich wants Lebanon redux?
It seems as if Gingrich is advocating the same approach that Israel used in Lebanon, which was an colossal failure in so many ways. Although Israel caused much death and destruction in Lebanon, they lost the war because they could neither get their captured soldiers back, nor stop Hezbollah from continually firing rockets into Israel once the fighting began, and they could not even make any significant headway into Lebanese territory without incurring unacceptable losses. By brazenly pushing the "you are tiny" line against Hezbollah, they effectively proved that they were not capable of defeating a militarily "tiny" enemy, and thus weakened themselves and their deterrent power as well as weakened their already tarnished moral authority. Iraq and our f**ked up Middle East policy is a mirror of the same mistakes that Israel has made in Lebanon and elsewhere.
Looking at this from another angle, has anyone noticed that while the warmongerers never cease to tell us that we must constantly push every other country around if they don't do exactly what we want, because after all, might makes right, at the same time they insist that soldiers, or sailors in this case, who have little or no control over what happens to them in this kind of situation, should refuse to "surrender" to might. Why do they think that others will respect us for using our might to bully them, when they themselves obviously don't respect any American or Brit who is bullied by the "other"? Do they really think that our bullying will have a different effect than anyone elses bullying, or do just so vengeful that they don't care?