Atrios quotes Frank Rich talking about how Sen John Warner (R-VA) will finally break the Republican ice on the Iraq war:
As General Odom says, the endgame will start “when a senior senator from the president’s party says no,” much as William Fulbright did to L.B.J. during Vietnam.
Just as an historical note, though, while Fulbright started speaking out against the war in 1966, US combat troops didn’t leave for another seven years, and LBJ was out of office for five of those years. That’s one hell of an “endgame”.
Last Sunday, the Oregonian gave over its non-ad space on the back of the Opinion section to Brian Doyle, the editor of a magazine at the University of Portland, who started off his hi-larious commentary with this naive assumption:
Was I the only person on this sweet bruised Earth to pick up the newspaper recently and see Osama bin Laden’s vengeful-squirrel face, and before even reading the report of his latest rant about How Everybody Should Do What He Says, burst out laughing that he had dyed his beard?
Uh, no Mr. Doyle, you weren’t. Google has more than a quarter of a million hits on the words osama dyed beard. Some of them are straight news reports, some of them claim to be able to tell where bin Laden in by the way the beard’s dyed, some claim that it’s a signal to launch an attack, but a lot of them do, indeed, make fun of the fact that he’s dying his beard.
Doyle’s novel idea is to make fun of bin Laden.
Imagine if we used humor as a weapon; surely the one thing vanity of such monumental proportion cannot stand is being laughed at. Let’s have Christopher Guest make a faux documentary starring bin Laden’s hairstylist. Let’s have Richard Simmons make a video of The Bin Laden Workout — Trim! Tan! Taliban! Let’s have Larry David create a sitcom about bin Laden’s harried video producer. Let’s point out that His Osamaness has probably never fired, let alone cleaned, the rifle always carefully propped in his videos.
That’s some humor that bites! My letter to the Oregonian (which looks like it’s gone into the bin again):
Brian Doyle suggests that Osama bin Laden’s apparent decision to dye his beard jet black makes him a “raging narcissist” and opens up all sorts of possibilities for derisive humor.
The same might be said for someone like Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, who sported a jet-black goatee a couple of years ago in photographs of him wandering the Bush ranch in Texas hand-in-hand with the President and kissing him on the cheek. The Crown Prince was 81 at the time.
Ronald Reagan never admitted to dying his hair, even though he was almost 78 when he left the White House and his hair was still jet black. He said he didn’t take naps either.
The idea that a wave of humor is going affect Osama bin Laden rather ignores the fact that there have been six years of jokes both better and worse than the ones Doyle proposes — usually having something to do with a cave. Bin Laden doesn’t seem to be paying much attention.
The real joke is that the guy’s still free after six years and that he can dye his beard and make a new video. Unfortunately, that joke’s on us.
The US Senate just passed Sen. John Cornyn’s (D-TX) amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act condemning the “Petraeus/Betray Us” ad placed two weeks ago by MoveOn.org by a 72-25-3 vote.
To express the sense of the Senate that General David II. Petraeus, Commanding General, Multi-National Force-Iraq, deserves the full support of the Senate and strongly condemn personal attacks on the honor and integrity of General Petraeus and all members of the United States Armed Forces.
Sen Gordon Smith voted “yea”, naturally. Sen. Ron Wyden voted “nay”. But 22 Democratic Senators (out of 49) voted for it. Joe Biden (D-DE), Maria Cantwell (D-WA), and Barack Obama (D-IL) did not vote.
This is precisely the kind of measure we had a post-mortem on several weeks back, with regard to the 2003 Oregon House resolution Jeff Merkley voted for, that mixed expressions of support for President Bush and a reiteration of the lies about the threat Iraq posed to the United States with a statement of support for the members of the armed services.
In this version, the US Senate says Gen. Petraeus deserves their support and condemns attacks on his honor and integrity as well as attacks on the honor and integrity of the “United States Armed Forces”.
The “sense of the Senate” resolution has no more force than the House statement Merkley voted for in 2003. Very few people are going to argue against condemning attacks on members of the armed services.
It’s possible that Merkley may have thought the ad went too far. It’s possible he believed that and didn’t think it worthy of condemnation, but I have to wonder based on past performance whether he’d have felt compelled to vote for this amendment on the ground that it also condemned attacks on servicepeople, His vote for the 2003 House bill was predicated on wanting to show “strong support” to members of the military. Apparently men and women on their way to the war zone were paying special attention to non-binding resolutions passed by state legislatures. Would Cornyn’s amendment have done any less?
At four and a half years into the war in Iraq, wouldn’t “strong support” be even more necessary than at two days? If he’d been in Gordon Smith’s place, would he have felt compelled to once again pick-and-choose which portions of the purely cosmetic amendment he wanted to say he was supporting and throw away the part about Petraeus (if indeed he disagreed with it) so that he could support the troops?
Judgment at Nuremberg is a fictionalized account drawn from the second round of trials of war criminals in Allied-occupied Germany. Based on a television play by Abby Mann, the trial at the center of the story concerns four judges involved in sentencing people to sterilization based on supposed inferiorities and to death for racial “defilement”.
Spencer Tracy plays the lead American judge, in one of his last movie roles. Burt Lancaster plays Ernst Janning, one of the four German judges on trial, an eminent legal scholar who initially refuses to participate in his defense or to recognize the authority of the court.
The cast of the 1961 film features Richard Widmark, Marlene Dietrich, Maximilian Schell, Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift, Werner Klemperer, and even William Shatner as a dirndl-chasing American military officer. Schell and the screenplay received Oscars, Tracy, Clift, and Garland all received nominations, along with the art and set direction, the cinematography, the costume design, the director (Stanley Kramer, who preceded this movie with On the Beach and Inherit the Wind and followed it with It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World), the editing, and the picture itself (it lost to West Side Story). The film was one of the first mass media venues in which images from Nazi concentration camps were shown.
Toward the end of the trial, Janning decides to break his silence with a speech that addresses the willingness of people to put patriotic fervor ahead of human decency and the tendency to not ask questions they would be uncomfortable knowing the answers to. Like all too many documents of the post-war, post-McCarthy era it strikes an awful lot of chords with the current political situation. Or maybe it’s just me.
There was a fever over the land, a fever of disgrace, of indignity, of hunger. We had a democracy, yes, but it was torn by elements within. Above all there was fear, fear of today, fear of tomorrow, fear of our neighbors, and fear of ourselves. Only when you understand that can you understand what Hitler meant to us, because he said to us:
“Lift your heads. Be proud to be German. There are devils among us, communists, liberals, Jews, gypsies. Once these devils will be destroyed your misery will be destroyed.”
It was the old, old story of the sacrificial lamb.
What about those of us who knew better, we who knew the words were lies and worse than lies? Why did we sit silent? Why did we take part? Because we loved our country. What difference does it make if a few political extremists lose their rights? What difference does it make if a few racial minorities lose their rights? It is only a passing phase. It is only a stage we are going through. It will be discarded sooner or later. Hitler himself will be discarded — sooner or later. The country is in danger. We will march out of the shadows! We will go forward. “Forward” is the great password.
And history tells how well we succeeded, Your Honor. We succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. The very elements of hate and power about Hitler that mesmerized Germany, mesmerized the world. We found ourselves with sudden powerful allies. Things that had been denied to us as a democracy were open to us now. The world said, “Go ahead. Take it. Take it! Take Sudetenland! Take the Rhineland! Re-militarize it! Take all of Austria! Take it!”
And then, one day we looked around and found that we were in an even more terrible danger. The ritual begun in this courtroom swept over the land like a raging, roaring disease. What was going to be a “passing phase” had become the way of life.
Your Honor, I was content to sit silent during this trial. I was content to tend my roses. I was even content to let counsel try to save my name, until I realized that in order to save it, he would have to raise the specter again. You have seen him do it. He has done it, here, in this courtroom. He has suggested that the Third Reich worked for the benefit of people. He has suggested that we sterilized men for the welfare of the country. He has suggested that perhaps the old Jew did sleep with the 16 year old girl after all. Once more, it is being done — for love of country.
It is not easy to tell the truth. But if there is to be any salvation for Germany, we who know our guilt must admit it — whatever the pain and humiliation.
I guess when you’re publishing the likes of Robert Novak, Cal Thomas, Ann Coulter, and Lars Larson, taking the time to spell-check 14 words of ad copy is less important than putting out the Obama smears.
