Tuesday, May 13, 2008


Obama, the Jews and Israel

There's a persistent, nasty notion that Barack Obama is bad for the Jews. It crests and falls rhythmically in public discourse, and I hear it expressed by Jews I know. The sense is Obama places somewhere on a spectrum between a latte-drinking, liberal milquetoast and a black anti-Semite. Wherever the dart sticks, it will be bad for Israel.

As someone who has spent years writing about foes of Israel, subtle and overt, and specifically these two types that supposedly bookend Obama, I'd like to go on record saying this is top-shelf, triple-distilled horseshit.

Over the next months, we'll come to see the fullness of Obama's foreign policy vision. We already have a fairly good sense of what it will be like. Some of it strikes me as vaporous, some of it seems groan-inducingly soft. Some of it makes sense. Most of it -- even stuff I don't agree with -- is fair enough after seven years of calamity at home and abroad.

As a policy package, it may ultimately fail, but none of it will be inimical to the Jews or Israel. Understandably, a lot of Obama supporters wanted to brush aside the Jeremiah Wright kerfuffle, but I thought it was fair to ask why the hell he would associate himself with a half-crazy demagogue like that. However, I'm satisfied that Obama was simply trying to shore up his cred with African-Americans, understand their milieu better, and above all find his faith. I simply don't think he has the slightest time for the victimology, the street-scholarship or the Jew-baiting buffoonery of the incredibly selfish man who was his pastor.

Jeffrey Goldberg, the New Yorker staff writer, is one of the more interesting working journalists. He's got a new Atlantic blog that I'll be reading (link added, left). Here's Obama speaking to him about this issue.

Look, we don’t do nuance well in politics and especially don’t do it well on Middle East policy. We look at things as black and white, and not gray. It’s conceivable that there are those in the Arab world who say to themselves, “This is a guy who spent some time in the Muslim world, has a middle name of Hussein, and appears more worldly and has called for talks with people, and so he’s not going to be engaging in the same sort of cowboy diplomacy as George Bush,” and that’s something they’re hopeful about. I think that’s a perfectly legitimate perception as long as they’re not confused about my unyielding support for Israel’s security.

Obama also says some considerably heartening things about the complimentarity of the African-American and Zionist narratives. Think about that for a moment. This blog's abiding theme is that for a variety of reasons, utopian politics lead algorithmically to anti-Semitism. Victimology and identity politics are powered off that grid. This is the marrow of Jew-hatred among African-Americans, who can see themselves as domestic Palestinians, preyed upon by owner-Jews or upstaged by the moral legatees of the Holocaust. Obama, however, invokes a classic, American liberalism:

So when I became more politically conscious, my starting point when I think about the Middle East is this enormous emotional attachment and sympathy for Israel, mindful of its history, mindful of the hardship and pain and suffering that the Jewish people have undergone, but also mindful of the incredible opportunity that is presented when people finally return to a land and are able to try to excavate their best traditions and their best selves. And obviously it’s something that has great resonance with the African-American experience.

One of the things that is frustrating about the recent conversations on Israel is the loss of what I think is the natural affinity between the African-American community and the Jewish community, one that was deeply understood by Jewish and black leaders in the early civil-rights movement but has been estranged for a whole host of reasons that you and I don’t need to elaborate.

Obama, in his perspicacious and articulate way that is an elixir after 8 years of Bush's cud-chewing, rhetorical chyme, has turned this precisely on its head. This is no accident. If Obama becomes President, his foreign policy might fail, but he's no enemy of the Jews or Israel.

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Sunday, May 11, 2008


Inside the Bunker!


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Thursday, March 27, 2008


The Audacity of Schlock

You know Andrew Sullivan is administering doses of soulful truth when he begins using stop-and-start sentence fragments. It’s like the shibboleth of his soul.

Marty does not excuse some of the indefensible comments of Wright that have now been bludgeoned into our consciousness to the exclusion of all else. And those comments should not be excused. And they have not been excused by Obama. But Marty does say this:

...

Read the whole thing. It matters. Because the truth matters. Because in these complex, volatile areas, Martin Marty is a far more reliable guide to it than Sean Hannity.

Either that, or the post leads with a contemplative picture of something beautiful.

(Don't take this wrong; I like Sully.)

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Sunday, March 23, 2008


Glenn Greenwald: Liar Again

Building on the theme of Glenn Greenwald being a liar, my previous post puts me in mind of the hectoring nudge's conduct during the controversy he ginned up about Joe Klein's misunderstanding of FISA in a column for Time Magazine. Like all bloggers who bulldog the "mainstream media", Greenwald is a serial self-aggrandizer who seeks to gain readership at the expense of the journalists he imitates and on whose work he almost entirely relies. In this he is no different from frauds like Little Green Footballs' Charles Johnson and the Powerline clowns.

Greenwald browbeat Klein for getting key facts wrong about FISA in this piece. Unlike Greenwald, whose writings on foreign policy are thin gruel, I try not to produce endless skirls on topics I know nothing about, so I'll take the former Wachtell litigator at his word that Klein fucked up. (Both Klein and Time admitted as much.) Seeking, like water out of a desert gourd, to wring all he could out of his gotcha, and once again wishing to perform his fantasy of being a journalist, Greenwald then teamed up with Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake to browbeat Priscilla Painton, the editor at Time responsible for failing to vet Klein's erroneous column. Remember, this whole thing was about Glenn Greenwald protecting your interests as news consumers...

Here is how Hamsher described that endeavor:

I've spent all morning on the phone trying to figure out who the editor at Time Magazine was on Joe Klein's FISA column (the one Klein has now written about five times, fully admitting he never read the original bill). I finally confirmed that the editor was Priscilla Painton, and called her and identified myself. I asked her what the editing process was, and how a piece with so many errors made it into print.

"That assumes that there are errors," she said. And hung up on me.

Pretty perfunctory. You could guess Painton was being churlish or evasive, or you could guess she wasn't ready to go "on record" with an amateur journalist about facts she wasn't certain of, or you could guess she didn't much care for being waylaid on her private line by some blogger who had badged herself as an investigative journalist. Either way, the exchange doesn't communicate that much.

Greenwald was Hamsher's second in this, observing via video conference, and this is how he described it:

I spent the morning working with the tenacious and resourceful Jane Hamsher on finding out exactly which Time editors were responsible for the wildly inaccurate Joe Klein FISA article. Numerous people at Time vigorously insisted they had nothing to do with it. Finally, Jane was able to ascertain that the person responsible was Time Editor Priscilla Painton.

As Jane details here, she called Painton in an attempt to find out information about how these false claims made it into Klein's article, what Time was planning on doing to correct it and whether they would account for what happened. I happened to be conversing with Jane by video when she was finally able to speak by telephone to Painton and thus heard Jane's end of the discussion.

The call lasted roughly 10 seconds. Jane asked one or two questions in the most polite and professional manner possible -- whether Painton was Klein's Editor and how such errors made their way into the article. As Jane describes, after she asked Painton how such inaccuracies could make it into the Time article, Painton snapped: "That assumes that there are errors." She then slammed down the phone in Hamsher's face.

Compare the two accounts. Hamsher's is like a healthy limb: formed and utile, featuring necessary detail. Greenwald's is like a limb stricken by elephantiasis: deformed and lumbering, cauliflowered hideously with unnecessary detail. But this is not just an aesthetic issue; Greenwald's embellishments are dishonest. Hamsher describes a fruitless encounter with Joe Klein's editor at Time Magazine. Greenwald transmogrifies this into the "tenacious and resourceful Jane Hamsher", who, in sussing out the culprits responsible for Joe Klein's "wildly inaccurate" column, bushwhacks her way through "[vigorous]" denials, to be confronted "finally" by an establishment functionary who "[snaps]" at her and "[slams] down the phone in [her] face".

This would be bad enough if Greenwald had actually witnessed and simply embellished these details. But he didn't. In his incontinence as a writer, he reveals a detail he probably should have kept to himself:

I happened to be conversing with Jane by video when she was finally able to speak by telephone to Painton and thus heard Jane's end of the discussion.

So Greenwald only heard Jane's side of the conversation, but he knows Painton "snapped" at Hamsher and "slammed the phone down in [her] face", and all the rest of it.

Glenn Greenwald is a polyp on the colon of public debate that should be removed.

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Glenn Greenwald: Liar

As is customary, Andrew Sullivan courtesy-links the meta-obnoxious Glenn Greenwald. This time it's in reference to what at first appears to be Greenwald making an insightful critique of the racial double-standards of movement conservatives. In his gouty, larded prose, Greenwald indicts a blog called Instapunk, which Glenn "Army of Corkies" Reynolds appears to appreciate. Reynolds has linked to it occasionally, most recently here to an Easter meditation. Through his snot-plug, Greenwald snorts:

Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds today linked to what he called "EASTER THOUGHTS" from one of his favorite right-wing blogs gers, his namesake, "Instapunk." That Easter post has a large picture of a crucified Christ along with a lovely religious poem.

Immediately beneath that righteous celebration of Easter is a somewhat less charitable post purporting to take up Barack Obama's invitation to speak about race. After listing a few black entertainers and sports figures he says he likes, here are some of the thoughts Instapunk offers on race...

What follows is an excerpt of a truly nasty post extending the old Gut Rumbles saw that some black people really are niggers, and all of us know it and might as well admit it if we want to take Barack Obama up on his call for a candid discussion about race. Suffice it to say this garbage is the right-wing inverse of the victimological identity politics of Jeremiah Wright, both of which Obama held up to censure in "A More Perfect Union", his brilliant speech in response to the Wright kerfuffle.

The problem -- now please go back and reread the Greenwald quote before continuing -- is Greenwald implies the Easter Meditation and the "nigger" excrescence are by the same author. They're not; Instapunk is a group blog. This in turn implies Reynolds' assent to or endorsement of the racist post. He gave no such thing.

Yes, you are absolutely right that guilt by association can be deserved. A political movement is by definition a group of ideas that coheres across many people. I myself wrote about the unsavoriness of Ralph Nader trying to court radical Muslims and far-Leftists in 2004 by invoking the specter of Jewish control of the White House. I also pointed out how M. Shahid Alam, the fool academic who compared the 9/11 hijackers to the American Revolutionaries, had published his piffle on Iviews.com, a radical Muslim web site that also published cartoons in the style of Der Sturmer and sold Henry Ford's The International Jew through an affiliated web site.

I did these things, however, while taking care to differentiate between the primary sources I was discussing and the secondary material with which they chose to affiliate. I took care to emphasize this was the nature of my observation -- that it was guilt by association I thought germane. Greenwald did neither, although later he made one of his supernumerary "updates" trying to set things straight. Instead Greenwald plays the smarmy lawyer's trick of making a factual recitation that is carefully worded to fool casual and lazy listeners into believing the facts are different, and more damning, than they are. Using Google, I can only find one post on all of Instapunk by "Oldpunk". It's therefore unlikely this author's oeuvre has much to do with Reynolds' admiration of the blog.

Greenwald might have written: "Glenn Reynolds links to an Easter Meditation on Instapunk, a namesake blog of his that he's praised before, by a blogger named 'Chain Gang'. That's troubling, because right underneath that post is a nasty racist screed about 'niggers' by some other guy named 'OldPunk'. Don't you think this calls into question Reynolds' judgment?" If so, I would have wholeheartedly agreed with him. But he didn't. He made it seem like Glenn Reynolds personally endorses Oldpunk's post.

Update: In this Rube Goldberg Machine of a sentence, in which he tries to extenuate the dishonesty on which his whole post is predicated, Greenwald lies again:

The original purpose in pointing out that Instapunk is a favorite blog of Glenn Reynolds was not to suggest that Reynolds is directly responsible for the particular racist screed I quoted, but rather, to demonstrate that I did not select some obscure unread blog nor go searching deep in the comment sections in order to find something inflammatory -- the typical method used to generate almost every liberal blog "controversy" -- but instead had found this written by a principal contributor on one of the most heavily-promoted right-wing blogs.


Greenwald refers to "Oldpunk" as a "principle contributor" to Instapunk. Again, this is factually true, if you interpret "principle contributor" as someone who contributes a post to a blog that happens to be on its front page right now. But Google and Technorati searches show that "Oldpunk" is not a principle contributor to anything, let alone Instapunk, which gives the lie to the interpretation Greenwald means you to make, which is Reynolds' appreciation for the blog is based on its racist oeuvre.

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Saturday, March 22, 2008


Separated at Birth?

Elliot SpitzerQuark the Ferengi

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Tuesday, March 18, 2008


Me on Sirius Radio

I just got done being interviewed by Joe Salzone for the Blog Bunker, a blog-centric talk radio show on Indie Talk, Sirius 110. Joe was great and I had a lot of fun. We discussed Ron Paul and his defunct campaign in light of my writings about the strange convergence of the antiwar Left with the isolationist Right, here and here. The program will rerun tomorrow morning at 8:00 AM and afternoon at 1:00 PM; I appear in the last twenty minutes of the hour-long show. Check it out if you're a subscriber.

Update: If you're coming by after having listened, feel free to leave some comments.

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