Friday, August 27, 2004
The Pressure-Cooker Theory
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, August 27, 2004; Page A21
Upon losing a game at the 1925 Baden-Baden tournament, Aaron Nimzowitsch, the great chess theoretician and a superb player, knocked the pieces off the board, jumped on the table and screamed, "How can I lose to this idiot?"
Nimzowitsch may have lived decades ago in Denmark, but he had the soul of a modern American Democrat. After all, Democrats have been saying much the same -- with similar body language -- ever since the erudite Adlai Stevenson lost to the syntactically challenged Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. They said it again when they lost to that supposed simpleton Ronald Reagan. Twice, would you believe? With George W. Bush, they are at it again, and equally apoplectic.
Actually, this time around, even more apoplectic. The Democrats' current disdain for George Bush reminds me of another chess master, Efim Bogoljubov, who once said, "When I am White, I win because I am White" -- White moves first and therefore has a distinct advantage -- "when I am Black, I win because I am Bogoljubov." John Kerry is a man of similar vanity -- intellectual and moral -- and that spirit thoroughly permeates the Democratic Party.
Democrats feel a mixture of horror and contempt for the huddled masses -- so bovine, so benighted, so besotted with talk radio -- who made a king of an empty-headed movie star (Reagan, long before Arnold) and inexplicably want the Republicans' current nitwit leader to have a second term.
Historians will have a field day trying to fathom the depths of detestation that the Democrats are carrying into this campaign. Vanity is only part of it. What else is at play? First, and most obviously, revenge. Democrats have convinced themselves that Bush stole the last election. They cannot bear suffering not just a bad presidency but an illegitimate one.
Moreover, against all expectations, it turned out to be a consequential presidency. Bush was not the mild-mannered, Gerald Ford-like Republican he was expected to be -- transitional and minor. He turned out to be quite the revolutionary, most especially in his radical reordering of American foreign policy. A usurper is merely offensive; a consequential usurper is intolerable.
But that is still not enough to account for the level of venom today. It is not often that a losing presidential candidate (Al Gore) compares the man who defeated him to both Hitler and Stalin. It is not often that a senior party leader (Edward Kennedy) accuses a sitting president of starting a war ("cooked up in Texas") to gain political advantage for his reelection.
The loathing goes far beyond the politicians. Liberals as a body have gone quite around the twist. I count one all-star rock tour, three movies, four current theatrical productions and five bestsellers (a full one-third of the New York Times list) variously devoted to ridiculing, denigrating, attacking and devaluing this president, this presidency and all who might, God knows why, support it.
How to explain? With apologies to Dr. Freud, I propose the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release.
The hostility, resentment, envy and disdain, all superheated in Florida, were not permitted their natural discharge. Came Sept. 11 and a lid was forced down. How can you seek revenge for a stolen election by a nitwit usurper when all of a sudden we are at war and the people, bless them, are rallying around the flag and hailing the commander in chief? With Bush riding high in the polls, with flags flying from pickup trucks (many of the flags, according to Howard Dean, Confederate), the president was untouchable.
The Democrats fell unnaturally silent. For two long, agonizing years, they had to stifle and suppress. It was the most serious case of repression since Freud's Anna O. went limp. The forced deference nearly killed them. And then, providentially, they were saved. The clouds parted and bad news rained down like manna: WMDs, Abu Ghraib, Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, Joe Wilson and, most important, continued fighting in Iraq.
With the president stripped of his halo, his ratings went down. The spell was broken. He was finally, once again, human and vulnerable. With immense relief, the critics let loose.
The result has been volcanic. The subject of one prominent new novel is whether George W. Bush should be assassinated. This is all quite unhinged. Good God. What if Bush is reelected? If they lose to him again, Democrats will need more than just consolation. They'll need therapy.
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, August 27, 2004; Page A21
Upon losing a game at the 1925 Baden-Baden tournament, Aaron Nimzowitsch, the great chess theoretician and a superb player, knocked the pieces off the board, jumped on the table and screamed, "How can I lose to this idiot?"
Nimzowitsch may have lived decades ago in Denmark, but he had the soul of a modern American Democrat. After all, Democrats have been saying much the same -- with similar body language -- ever since the erudite Adlai Stevenson lost to the syntactically challenged Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. They said it again when they lost to that supposed simpleton Ronald Reagan. Twice, would you believe? With George W. Bush, they are at it again, and equally apoplectic.
Actually, this time around, even more apoplectic. The Democrats' current disdain for George Bush reminds me of another chess master, Efim Bogoljubov, who once said, "When I am White, I win because I am White" -- White moves first and therefore has a distinct advantage -- "when I am Black, I win because I am Bogoljubov." John Kerry is a man of similar vanity -- intellectual and moral -- and that spirit thoroughly permeates the Democratic Party.
Democrats feel a mixture of horror and contempt for the huddled masses -- so bovine, so benighted, so besotted with talk radio -- who made a king of an empty-headed movie star (Reagan, long before Arnold) and inexplicably want the Republicans' current nitwit leader to have a second term.
Historians will have a field day trying to fathom the depths of detestation that the Democrats are carrying into this campaign. Vanity is only part of it. What else is at play? First, and most obviously, revenge. Democrats have convinced themselves that Bush stole the last election. They cannot bear suffering not just a bad presidency but an illegitimate one.
Moreover, against all expectations, it turned out to be a consequential presidency. Bush was not the mild-mannered, Gerald Ford-like Republican he was expected to be -- transitional and minor. He turned out to be quite the revolutionary, most especially in his radical reordering of American foreign policy. A usurper is merely offensive; a consequential usurper is intolerable.
But that is still not enough to account for the level of venom today. It is not often that a losing presidential candidate (Al Gore) compares the man who defeated him to both Hitler and Stalin. It is not often that a senior party leader (Edward Kennedy) accuses a sitting president of starting a war ("cooked up in Texas") to gain political advantage for his reelection.
The loathing goes far beyond the politicians. Liberals as a body have gone quite around the twist. I count one all-star rock tour, three movies, four current theatrical productions and five bestsellers (a full one-third of the New York Times list) variously devoted to ridiculing, denigrating, attacking and devaluing this president, this presidency and all who might, God knows why, support it.
How to explain? With apologies to Dr. Freud, I propose the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release.
The hostility, resentment, envy and disdain, all superheated in Florida, were not permitted their natural discharge. Came Sept. 11 and a lid was forced down. How can you seek revenge for a stolen election by a nitwit usurper when all of a sudden we are at war and the people, bless them, are rallying around the flag and hailing the commander in chief? With Bush riding high in the polls, with flags flying from pickup trucks (many of the flags, according to Howard Dean, Confederate), the president was untouchable.
The Democrats fell unnaturally silent. For two long, agonizing years, they had to stifle and suppress. It was the most serious case of repression since Freud's Anna O. went limp. The forced deference nearly killed them. And then, providentially, they were saved. The clouds parted and bad news rained down like manna: WMDs, Abu Ghraib, Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, Joe Wilson and, most important, continued fighting in Iraq.
With the president stripped of his halo, his ratings went down. The spell was broken. He was finally, once again, human and vulnerable. With immense relief, the critics let loose.
The result has been volcanic. The subject of one prominent new novel is whether George W. Bush should be assassinated. This is all quite unhinged. Good God. What if Bush is reelected? If they lose to him again, Democrats will need more than just consolation. They'll need therapy.
Wednesday, August 25, 2004
The Atlantic is Becoming Even Wider
By Michael Lind
Whitehead Senior Fellow
The Financial Times
August 23, 2004
Neo-conservatives claim that the US and Europe are diverging in their values and interests. Atlanticists claim that on both counts, the US and Europe remain closely aligned. Both schools are wrong.
In their values, the US and Europe are growing closer. At the same time, their geopolitical interests are diverging. The attitudinal divide between Americans and Europeans is easily exaggerated. The influence in the US government of social conservatives in the southern and western states is grossly inflated by the presidential electoral college, the malapportioned US Senate and the rigging of congressional electoral districts by Republican state legislatures. Conservatives may keep winning elections for a few more years. But time is not on their side. White southern Protestants, the base of today's Republican Party, are steadily shrinking as a percentage of the electorate.
On issues of sex and reproduction, Americans are steadily becoming more "European" in outlook - even in the conservative heartland. Gay marriage is still controversial, but acceptance of gay rights is increasing. The controversy over stem-cell research is likely to accelerate the defeat of the religious right's crusade against human biotechnology. As Alan Wolfe, the sociologist, has noted, even evangelical Protestants are growing more liberal.
In the realm of the media, as well, the US is becoming more European. For generations, what was banned in Boston could be bought in Paris. Europe continues to break down barriers in censorship - not necessarily for the better, as the European invention of reality television proves. But the American media tend to follow European breakthroughs after a few years. Thanks to cable television and, in time perhaps, internet programming, the censorship efforts of US conservatives will be thwarted.
While the US remains far more religious than Europe, the long-term trend is toward European-style secularism. Although still a minority, the number of purely secular Americans has increased dramatically with each census - at the expense of the liberal denominations of Protestantism, Catholicism and Judaism. As a result, hardline traditionalists make up a growing sector of America's shrinking religious population. This creates a misleading image of a religious revival in the US, where in fact church attendance and religious belief are in long-term decline.
While the US is moving towards European-style social liberalism and secularism, Europe is becoming ever more American in terms of the economy and constitutional politics. Since the 1980s, under the influence of neo-liberalism, European governments on both left and right have been moving away from statist social democracy towards more market-based economies with less generous entitlements. American constitutional theories are conquering Europe as well. Parliamentary democracy rather than US-style separation of powers remains the European norm. But the American constitutional devices of judicial review, written constitutions, bills of rights and federalism have been adopted by many European countries whose political thinkers once rejected them. Britain is an example.
Immigration, too, is "Americanising" Europe. Once a source of emigrants, Europe, now greying and with low fertility, is increasingly the destination of inward migration. As a result, Europeans must deal with challenges of assimilation and ethnic politics with which Americans have long been familiar.
For better or for worse, the two sides of the Atlantic are converging on a similar model of society: secular and liberal in the realm of values, market-oriented in economics, focused on individual rights in the constitutional realm and admitting large numbers of immigrants. But the transatlantic convergence in values does not translate into foreign policy harmony. Even as their societies become more alike, the geopolitical interests of the US and Europe are diverging.
The disappearance of the Soviet threat has removed the chief reason for the Nato alliance. With Russia experiencing a demographic nightmare of high mortality and low fertility, Europe is more likely to be threatened by chaos to its east than by an aggressive great power.
As the dominant power in east Asia, the US worries about the military implications of China's rise. This is not a major concern for Europe. Both the US and Europe share a common interest in thwarting al-Qaeda and similar jihadist movements. Nevertheless, the interests of the two differ in the Middle East.
Unlike Europe, Russia, China and India, the US neither borders the Muslim world nor itself contains a substantial Muslim population. This fact permits America to have a Middle East policy influenced by geopolitical ambitions and domestic political factions, such as the Israel lobby and its Christian Zionist supporters. America can afford this policy because it is next to Mexico, not the Arab world. That the US is far less vulnerable than Europe to al-Qaeda is suggested by the Madrid bombing along with the absence of al-Qaeda attacks in the US since September 11 2001.
Europeans are more likely to pay the price for US misadventures in the Middle East than the American people. When Europeans point this out, they are accused of appeasement by American neo-conservatives. The truth is that Europeans, for whom the Middle East is their "near abroad", have far more at stake than Americans, for whom engagement in the region is a matter of choice rather than fate.
The US and Europe really are drifting apart. The divide is caused not by different social values but by different geopolitical interests. In the years ahead, Americans and Europeans are likely to become more and more alike. But they are likely to agree on less and less.
By Michael Lind
Whitehead Senior Fellow
The Financial Times
August 23, 2004
Neo-conservatives claim that the US and Europe are diverging in their values and interests. Atlanticists claim that on both counts, the US and Europe remain closely aligned. Both schools are wrong.
In their values, the US and Europe are growing closer. At the same time, their geopolitical interests are diverging. The attitudinal divide between Americans and Europeans is easily exaggerated. The influence in the US government of social conservatives in the southern and western states is grossly inflated by the presidential electoral college, the malapportioned US Senate and the rigging of congressional electoral districts by Republican state legislatures. Conservatives may keep winning elections for a few more years. But time is not on their side. White southern Protestants, the base of today's Republican Party, are steadily shrinking as a percentage of the electorate.
On issues of sex and reproduction, Americans are steadily becoming more "European" in outlook - even in the conservative heartland. Gay marriage is still controversial, but acceptance of gay rights is increasing. The controversy over stem-cell research is likely to accelerate the defeat of the religious right's crusade against human biotechnology. As Alan Wolfe, the sociologist, has noted, even evangelical Protestants are growing more liberal.
In the realm of the media, as well, the US is becoming more European. For generations, what was banned in Boston could be bought in Paris. Europe continues to break down barriers in censorship - not necessarily for the better, as the European invention of reality television proves. But the American media tend to follow European breakthroughs after a few years. Thanks to cable television and, in time perhaps, internet programming, the censorship efforts of US conservatives will be thwarted.
While the US remains far more religious than Europe, the long-term trend is toward European-style secularism. Although still a minority, the number of purely secular Americans has increased dramatically with each census - at the expense of the liberal denominations of Protestantism, Catholicism and Judaism. As a result, hardline traditionalists make up a growing sector of America's shrinking religious population. This creates a misleading image of a religious revival in the US, where in fact church attendance and religious belief are in long-term decline.
While the US is moving towards European-style social liberalism and secularism, Europe is becoming ever more American in terms of the economy and constitutional politics. Since the 1980s, under the influence of neo-liberalism, European governments on both left and right have been moving away from statist social democracy towards more market-based economies with less generous entitlements. American constitutional theories are conquering Europe as well. Parliamentary democracy rather than US-style separation of powers remains the European norm. But the American constitutional devices of judicial review, written constitutions, bills of rights and federalism have been adopted by many European countries whose political thinkers once rejected them. Britain is an example.
Immigration, too, is "Americanising" Europe. Once a source of emigrants, Europe, now greying and with low fertility, is increasingly the destination of inward migration. As a result, Europeans must deal with challenges of assimilation and ethnic politics with which Americans have long been familiar.
For better or for worse, the two sides of the Atlantic are converging on a similar model of society: secular and liberal in the realm of values, market-oriented in economics, focused on individual rights in the constitutional realm and admitting large numbers of immigrants. But the transatlantic convergence in values does not translate into foreign policy harmony. Even as their societies become more alike, the geopolitical interests of the US and Europe are diverging.
The disappearance of the Soviet threat has removed the chief reason for the Nato alliance. With Russia experiencing a demographic nightmare of high mortality and low fertility, Europe is more likely to be threatened by chaos to its east than by an aggressive great power.
As the dominant power in east Asia, the US worries about the military implications of China's rise. This is not a major concern for Europe. Both the US and Europe share a common interest in thwarting al-Qaeda and similar jihadist movements. Nevertheless, the interests of the two differ in the Middle East.
Unlike Europe, Russia, China and India, the US neither borders the Muslim world nor itself contains a substantial Muslim population. This fact permits America to have a Middle East policy influenced by geopolitical ambitions and domestic political factions, such as the Israel lobby and its Christian Zionist supporters. America can afford this policy because it is next to Mexico, not the Arab world. That the US is far less vulnerable than Europe to al-Qaeda is suggested by the Madrid bombing along with the absence of al-Qaeda attacks in the US since September 11 2001.
Europeans are more likely to pay the price for US misadventures in the Middle East than the American people. When Europeans point this out, they are accused of appeasement by American neo-conservatives. The truth is that Europeans, for whom the Middle East is their "near abroad", have far more at stake than Americans, for whom engagement in the region is a matter of choice rather than fate.
The US and Europe really are drifting apart. The divide is caused not by different social values but by different geopolitical interests. In the years ahead, Americans and Europeans are likely to become more and more alike. But they are likely to agree on less and less.
Tuesday, August 24, 2004
Today's pearl from IRAQTHEMODEL:
Boring stories.
Yesterday, one of Ali’s friends came by and suggested that we go out to have dinner somewhere just to break the circle of boring routine daily life. “Do you know a good place?” I asked, “there’s a nice restaurant that’s getting very popular these days” Ali’s friend replied.
It was already 9 pm and I thought that we will find them preparing to close. I know that many places stay open until 11 or 12 but the majority close at around 10 pm but this place was amazing; the parking place was full that we had to park the car on the opposite side of the street.
The place was so neat and natural-looking and the tables were placed outdoors in a big garden with lots of tall palm trees. The restaurant lies in Jadiriyah which is so close to the Tigris river and it’s also rich in date palms and other trees which makes the weather a little bit colder in the night when compared with other areas in Baghdad.
It was 9:30 and new visitors and families were still arriving at the restaurant. At the beginning we ordered fruit flavored narghiles and soft drinks. The narghile there is quite long-lasting and one can keep smoking a single one for more than an hour.
Later the waiter flooded our table with various dishes of appetizers even before we made our orders; frankly speaking, if you eat all the appetizers you won’t have a space left in your stomach for the main dish.
Maskoof is one of the main dishes served in this rest. It’s basically river fish barbequed in a special way that gives fish a superb taste that cannot be matched and the smell of the barbeque was enough to make my saliva run.
One of things I noticed was that most of the visitors there were apparently middle class families and this is different from what it used to be years ago as only rich families could afford to have dinner in restaurants like this one. Dinner for a 6 person family costs approximately 60 000 ID (40$) while two years ago a similar meal would cost a little bit less (35 - 45 thousands) but the huge raise in incomes made it affordable once a month or once every fortnight when there are more than one working member in the family.
We had dinner but we couldn’t finish the dishes because the dish they serve is extraordinarily big and can be enough for two hungry people.
We left at about 11:30 but a lot of people were still there.
You sit in a restaurant like this one and see families relaxing with their children playing and having fun late at night and you feel that there’s ‘something’ wrong in the way MSM is dealing with the Iraqi issue. I watch TV and I see hell breaking around me then I go outside and see enough normalcy AND progress to make me believe that the people in the media are not here to report how’s life going but rather they are here reporting pre-prepared stories and to be faced with something that contradicts the picture they have in their minds would be really annoying and will mean more hard work to try to find the truth or something close to it.
So let me see, I’m a reporter in Iraq and I’m here to tell stories that sell from a land that has been invaded, as everyone is saying it was invaded and not liberated. God, that must be awful! Ok so I need destruction, death, fear, clashes in the streets, angry mob...etc. Where do families having dinner in a place they couldn’t afford before the war, or a father buying a new car for his son which he also couldn’t afford before, or a man renewing his house which was falling apart, or free speech and flourishing business, where does all this fit in such a frame?! It doesn’t! Besides, where's the action in such boring stories!? Moreover, there are pictures of death and destruction and they only need some ‘further clarification’, and that’s easier than making a whole new story. So why bother! I already have frames for good stories and I’ve worked hard in that and it would be a shame to waste all that effort and start all over again. So let’s get the story we worked on and get the hell out of here.
- posted by Omar @ 20:25
Boring stories.
Yesterday, one of Ali’s friends came by and suggested that we go out to have dinner somewhere just to break the circle of boring routine daily life. “Do you know a good place?” I asked, “there’s a nice restaurant that’s getting very popular these days” Ali’s friend replied.
It was already 9 pm and I thought that we will find them preparing to close. I know that many places stay open until 11 or 12 but the majority close at around 10 pm but this place was amazing; the parking place was full that we had to park the car on the opposite side of the street.
The place was so neat and natural-looking and the tables were placed outdoors in a big garden with lots of tall palm trees. The restaurant lies in Jadiriyah which is so close to the Tigris river and it’s also rich in date palms and other trees which makes the weather a little bit colder in the night when compared with other areas in Baghdad.
It was 9:30 and new visitors and families were still arriving at the restaurant. At the beginning we ordered fruit flavored narghiles and soft drinks. The narghile there is quite long-lasting and one can keep smoking a single one for more than an hour.
Later the waiter flooded our table with various dishes of appetizers even before we made our orders; frankly speaking, if you eat all the appetizers you won’t have a space left in your stomach for the main dish.
Maskoof is one of the main dishes served in this rest. It’s basically river fish barbequed in a special way that gives fish a superb taste that cannot be matched and the smell of the barbeque was enough to make my saliva run.
One of things I noticed was that most of the visitors there were apparently middle class families and this is different from what it used to be years ago as only rich families could afford to have dinner in restaurants like this one. Dinner for a 6 person family costs approximately 60 000 ID (40$) while two years ago a similar meal would cost a little bit less (35 - 45 thousands) but the huge raise in incomes made it affordable once a month or once every fortnight when there are more than one working member in the family.
We had dinner but we couldn’t finish the dishes because the dish they serve is extraordinarily big and can be enough for two hungry people.
We left at about 11:30 but a lot of people were still there.
You sit in a restaurant like this one and see families relaxing with their children playing and having fun late at night and you feel that there’s ‘something’ wrong in the way MSM is dealing with the Iraqi issue. I watch TV and I see hell breaking around me then I go outside and see enough normalcy AND progress to make me believe that the people in the media are not here to report how’s life going but rather they are here reporting pre-prepared stories and to be faced with something that contradicts the picture they have in their minds would be really annoying and will mean more hard work to try to find the truth or something close to it.
So let me see, I’m a reporter in Iraq and I’m here to tell stories that sell from a land that has been invaded, as everyone is saying it was invaded and not liberated. God, that must be awful! Ok so I need destruction, death, fear, clashes in the streets, angry mob...etc. Where do families having dinner in a place they couldn’t afford before the war, or a father buying a new car for his son which he also couldn’t afford before, or a man renewing his house which was falling apart, or free speech and flourishing business, where does all this fit in such a frame?! It doesn’t! Besides, where's the action in such boring stories!? Moreover, there are pictures of death and destruction and they only need some ‘further clarification’, and that’s easier than making a whole new story. So why bother! I already have frames for good stories and I’ve worked hard in that and it would be a shame to waste all that effort and start all over again. So let’s get the story we worked on and get the hell out of here.
- posted by Omar @ 20:25
