| Subject: Re: ? |
| From: Karen Lancaster <lancaster.karen@gmail.com> |
| Date: 12/12/09, 18:30 |
| To: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> |
Actually, disregard that one, too, I'm rewriting the last portion.
On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 8:26 PM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
Disregard the last one, here's a longer and tweaked version:
Charles Krauthammer
Even if we look very hard, we find nothing truly funny in service to fascism or communism. But we may find that communists and fascists have otherwise promoted their totalitarianism by way of great and glorious contributions to film, music, and the performing arts - which is to say that anti-individualistic political persuasions may produce fine works of aesthetics, but apparently not humor.
This may lead us to suspect that humor is not subject to whatever strings together the totalitarian-accessible arts. It may also lead us to be wary of a political movement that has lost its ability to put forth comedic works in defense of itself and in opposition to its opponents. Political humor is heavily dependent on the ability to perceive and present irony; if a political population consisting of tens of millions of people cannot produce at least a few competent political humorists, we might draw some insulting conclusions about such a population.One of the more common elements of O'Rourke's earlier, readable work was scorn for the histrionics of mass politics, and particularly the empty ritualism of marches and protests. Conservatives, he asserted on several occasions, did not attend protests because they have jobs.
For over a decade, the finest political humorist in America was P.J. O'Rourke, a reporter and veteran of National Lampoon who had made a gradual transition from Maoism to conservatism. O'Rourke's conservatism was never of the populist strain; he simply favored free market economics and a somewhat hawkish foreign policy stance in such situations as that a hawkish foreign policy stance might be in order.
But in 2009, when the ongoing descent of conservatism into populism and anti-intellectualism brought us to the extraordinary farce of the Palinist tea party movement, the same humorist who had so consistently mocked the mentality of the protest-goer could now find no humor in large gatherings of misshapen, chanting people. Instead, he criticized those media outlets that had been insufficiently respectful of such things, beginning an August Weekly Standard piece with the following paragraph of populist boilerplate:He goes on to complain about a sidebar by Alec MacGillis in which the reporter begins with the assertion that "[h]ealth care reform is not that hard to understand, and those who tell you otherwise most likely have an ulterior motive." O'Rourke chooses to take this, as well as the entire piece, as some sort of elitist assault on his Burkean masses, to which he responds with a sarcastic quip that is supposed to summarize the intent of this Post piece: "All you town hall hecklers, calm down and go home."
Us right-wing nuts sure is scary! That's the message from the Washington Post. To put this in language a conservative would understand, the fourth estate has been alarmed once again by the Burkean proclivities of our nation's citizens. The Post is in a panic about (to use its own descriptive terms) "birthers," "anti-tax tea-partiers," and "town hall hecklers.""Burkean" is probably not the first term I would use to characterize large demonstrations by self-described "regular folks" in opposition to some perceived contingent of political elites, but then O'Rourke is certainly entitled to his hilarious delusions.
This is an odd interpretation of the article in general and that first sentence in particular, as the very next sentence of MacGillis' piece goes on to say: "Reform proponents exaggerate the complexity of the issue to elevate their own status as people who understand it; opponents exaggerate it to make the whole endeavor out to be a bureaucratic monstrosity," and the rest consists of a summary of the major elements of health care reform proposals that were then under debate - who was objecting to what and why and what compromises were likely to be reached as the process continued and that sort of innocuous thing. But O'Rourke repeats his bizarre characterization of what this is supposed to convey: "But calm down and go home, because the Washington Post said so."
One must read between the lines, apparently. Still, the Post did indeed assign a reporter to compose a sort of political fashion piece in which is detailed the particular slovenliness of the heckler crowd, as O'Rourke relates:
Then, to add idiocy to insult, the Post sent Robin Givhan to observe the Americans who are taking exception to various expansions of government powers and prerogatives and to make fun of their clothes... Meeting with Givhan's scorn were "T-shirts, baseball caps, promotional polo shirts and sundresses with bra straps sliding down their arm."We learn, then, that making fun of other people's clothes now constitutes "idiocy" according to O'Rourke. This is a new development.
O'Rourke once began an article on the 1990 Nicaraguan elections with a multi-paragraph critique of the sort of clothes worn by those visiting American liberals who supported the Sandinistas. He included similar critiques of liberal dressing habits in an article on the 1994 Mexican elections. He spent a good portion of an essay on the general increase in world travel decrying the fashions of tourists in general and the French in particular, and elsewhere took issue with the appearances of those among the Great Unwashed who now fly on commercial airliners. He made fun of those who appeared before the Supreme Court in opposition to a flag burning ban for their general ugliness. He spent much of the '90s mocking youngish leftists for wearing nose rings and black outfits - in fact, he did this so much as to actually ruin it for everyone else through overuse - and did so on at least one occasion in the pages of The Weekly Standard itself. He's written an entire article in which he and his girlfriend roam around an Evangelical-oriented theme park and make fun of everyone present for their general tackiness. And he once asserted that Hillary Clinton should stop messing with her own hair and instead "do something about Chelsea's."
He was right. Aging liberals who run around Latin America and Mexico dress like idiots. Half of the people one today encounters on a domestic flight would have been rightfully barred from the plane by the captain in a more civilized age. I don't even know where to start with the sort of French people who wander Manhattan in August. Earnest young leftists should be wearing suits or at least a button-down shirt instead of whatever the fuck they think they're doing now. You can probably imagine what a bunch of Middle American Evangelicals look like when they're at the mall.
Seeing William Kristol pretend to admire the innocent primitivism of the sort of people with whom he would rightfully never associate is one thing; Kristol has always been worthless. But O'Rourke was once the greatest political humorist of the conservative movement, as well as a strong advocate of taste back when taste still favored Republicans. Today, he must defend the people he once despised; the GOP is now filled with little else.
***
If we agree that the inability to produce humor on its own behalf is a sign of degeneracy on the part of a political movement, and if we identify the modern American conservative enterprise as being incapable of producing viable political humor relative to its counterparts, and if we understand humor to be dependent on irony and understand irony in turn to be a sign of intellect, we may reasonably conclude that the actual intellectuals produced by such a movement as this will be rather mediocre. But perhaps we should check just to be sure.
Like O'Rourke, Charles Krauthammer is a refuge from liberalism who eventually became a highly effective advocate of conservatism. Unlike O'Rourke, Krauthammer is just as talented today as he's ever been. Also unlike O'Rourke, Krauthammer was never particularly talented to begin with.In a profile piece that appeared in mid-2009, Politicos Ben Smith proclaimed the Canadian-born commentator to be a coherent, sophisticated and implacable critic of the new president and a central conservative voice in the Age of Obama. Around the same time, New York Times mainstay David Brooks characterized him as the most important conservative columnist right now. When Krauthammer was presented with an award that summer by Rupert Murdoch in recognition of his having done a lot of whatever it is that makes Rupert Murdoch happy, Dick Cheney himself was on hand to congratulate the veteran commentator. In liberal terms of achievement, this is somewhat akin to winning an award from Noam Chomsky while being fêted by the ghost of Louis Brandeis.
These things being relative, he is today considered - rightfully - to be among the Republican Party's greatest intellectual assets.
Krauthammer's prestige is such that, when foreign publications find themselves in need of someone to explain the conservative outlook, they are as likely to turn to our chapter subject as to anyone else. In October of 2009, Der Spiegel published a particularly comprehensive interview in which Krauthammer held forth largely on foreign policy. Among other things, he derides Obama as a wide-eyed amateur who lacks the columnist's own grounding in reality:In pronouncing judgment upon a president's competence in the arena of foreign policy, Krauthammer thereby implies that he himself knows better. It is a fine thing, then, that we may go through the fellow's columns from the last ten years and see for ourself whether this is actually the case. Whatever will we find? Oh, it shall be such an exciting escapade!
I would say his vision of the world appears to me to be so naïve that I am not even sure he's able to develop a doctrine. He has a view of the world as regulated by self-enforcing international norms, where the peace is kept by some kind of vague international consensus, something called the international community, which to me is a fiction, acting through obviously inadequate and worthless international agencies. I wouldn't elevate that kind of thinking to a doctrine because I have too much respect for the word doctrine.
***
In 1999, NATO sought to derail yet another potential humanitarian disaster in the Balkans by way of an air bombing campaign against Serbia. Krauthammer promptly denounced Bill Clinton in a column that begun thusly:
Our columnist seems to have since changed his mind on the propriety of playing golf in the midst of conflict, but then if we are to concern ourselves with every little thing for which he has denounced his opponents while giving a pass to his allies, we will be forever distracted, so knock it off. Better for us to note that Krauthammer uses the term "genocide" in quotes and implies such a characterization to be the work of the foolish Clintonian State Department; the intent here is to cast suspicion on Clinton's judgment by implying that no such thing as genocide is actually taking place. And in the very next paragraph, when Krauthammer asserts that NATO intervention thus far has failed to prevent "savage ethnic cleansing, executions of Kosovar Albanian leaders, the forced expulsion of more than 100,000 Kosovars" - with no such terminology being put in quotes this time - the intent is to cast even greater suspicion on Clinton's judgment by implying that some sort of genocide is taking place.On Monday, as "genocide" was going on in Kosovo (so said the State Department), Bill Clinton played golf. The stresses of war, no doubt. But perhaps we should give him the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he needed to retreat to shaded fairways to contemplate the consequences of his little Kosovo war.
Krauthammer goes on to argue that air strikes would be insufficient to force Serbian forces from Kosovo. Bizarrely enough, he even tries to convince his readers that General Wesley Clark agreed with him over Clinton, quoting the then-NATO commander as telling Jim Lehrer, we never thought that through air power we could stop these killings on the ground. No doubt due to space constraints, Krauthammer leaves out the rest of Clarks answer, in which it is explained that the person who has to stop this is President Milosevic and that the purpose of the air campaign was to force him to do just that - which, of course, it did.
Even after Clinton's "little Kosovo war" proved successful, Krauthammer remained ideologically committed to chaos in the Balkans, having also predicted in 1999 that NATO involvement would sever Kosovo from Serbian control and lead inevitably to an irredentist Kosovar state, unstable and unviable and forced to either join or take over pieces of neighboring countries. When an ethnic Albanian insurgency arose in Macedonia along its border with UN-administered Kosovo in 2001, he felt himself vindicated, announcing that the Balkans are on the verge of another explosion, making several references to Vietnam, and characterizing our continued presence in the region as a quagmire. The violence ended within the year, having claimed less than 80 lives. Kosovo has since joined both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and is now recognized by three of five permanent members of the Security Council; as of late 2009, Macedonia is preparing for membership in NATO as well as the European Union.
Like most others who had cried apocalypse in Kosovo, Krauthammer bumbled into the Afghanistan war in a haze of amnesia and inexplicable self-regard. When New York Times contributor R.W. "Johnny" Apple wrote a piece in late October proposing that the conflict could develop into a "quagmire," our columnist ridiculed him for using a term that he himself had wrongly applied in his own Balkans-as-Vietnam column from earlier in the year. The Apple article in question proved to be among the more prescient compositions of that period; unlike Thomas Friedman, who was in those days proclaiming that Afghans don't really mind having bombs dropped on them and was otherwise engaged in the inexplicable application of scare quotes around the word "civilians," Apple predicted that civilian casualties would become a major source of discontent among the population and that this might very well be problematic for U.S. efforts to win such people over. He ended the piece by pointing out that there exists "a huge question about who would rule if the United States vanquished its foe. Washington never solved that issue satisfactorily after the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, and solving it in Afghanistan, a country long prone to chaotic competition among many tribes and factions, will probably not be much easier." And, of course, he was right.
Long after others had abandoned the illusion of quick and longterm success in Central Asia, Krauthammer was still mocking anyone foolish enough to express concern over whether the illusion might be illusory. "Before our astonishing success in Afghanistan goes completely down the memory hole, let's recall some very recent history," Krauthammer politely suggested in a December 2004 column. "Within 100 days, al Qaeda is routed and the Taliban overthrown. Then the first election in Afghanistan's history. Now the inauguration of a deeply respected democrat who, upon being sworn in as legitimate president of his country, thanks America for its liberation.... What do liberals have to say about this singular achievement by the Bush administration? That Afghanistan is growing poppies." This was indeed noted by liberals of the time - along with a whole range of other concerns that Krauthammer does not bother to address, with one exception:As it turns out, this "deeply respected democrat" won the 2009 election by deeply undemocratic means, further de-legitimizing himself in the eyes of Afghans already angry over the corruption that marks not only Karzai's cabinet but also certain members of his immediate family. The former monarch's authority, meanwhile, has not so much been "gradually extended" as it has retracted. American analysts of both the private and public sort are now virtually united in their contempt for the fellow.
The other complaint is that Karzai really does not rule the whole country. Again the sun rises in the east. Afghanistan has never had a government that controlled the whole country. It has always had a central government weak by Western standards.
But Afghanistan's decentralized system works. Karzai controls Kabul, most of the major cities, and much in between. And he is successfully leveraging his power to gradually extend his authority as he creates entirely new federal institutions and an entirely new military.
"What has happened in Afghanistan is nothing short of a miracle," Krauthammer continued. Previous to the Age of Miracles in which we were then living, "Afghanistan had suffered under years of appalling theocratic rule, which helped to legitimize the kind of secularist democracy that Karzai represents."
Question: What kind of "secularist democracy" proclaims Islam to be its official religion, holds that none of its civil laws may violate the teachings of Islam, and punishes conversion from Islam by death?
Answer: The misidentified kind.
Krauthammer poses another question in the same column. "The interesting question is: If we succeeded in Afghanistan, why haven't we in Iraq?"
The Interesting Question: If we succeeded in Afghanistan, why haven't we in Iraq?***
Answer: Because our nation's foreign policy is informed in large part by people who thought we had succeeded in Afghanistan.
Three weeks into the Iraq conflict, Krauthammer was hailing it as "The Three Week War" and mocking those who weren't. Six months later, he was calling for perspective.
On the reconstruction of Iraq, everybody is a genius. Every pundit, every ex-official and, of course, every Democrat knows exactly how it should have been done. Everybody would have had Iraq up and running by now, and as safe as downtown Singapore. Everybody, that is, except the Bush administration which, in its arrogance and stupidity, has so botched the occupation that it is "in danger of losing the peace" - so sayeth John Kerry, echoing Howard Dean, Ted Kennedy and many others down the Democratic food chain.The last time Krauthammer had called for perspective was two weeks into the Iraq conflict:
A bit of perspective, gentlemen.
The first gulf war took six weeks. Afghanistan took nine. Kosovo, 11. We are now just past two weeks in the second gulf war. It's time for a bit of perspective. This campaign has already been honored with a "quagmire" piece by the New York Times' Johnny Apple, seer and author of a similar and justly famous quagmire piece on Afghanistan published just days before the fall of Mazar-e Sharif and the swift collapse of the Taliban.KIDZ KORNER!
This section is intended for children aged nine to one hundred and nine! Anyone who does not fit into this age group is not permitted to enjoy this section. If you are eight, fuck off. You need to learn about express written contracts.
First, take a look at the second Krauthammer excerpt above. How many things can you find that are either wrong or hilarious or hilariously wrong or wrongly hilarious? More to the point, how many can I find?
1. Afghanistan did not so much take nine weeks as it did eight years and counting as of this writing.
2. Kosovo did indeed take just 11 weeks, during which time Krauthammer kept calling the whole thing a "quagmire" and comparing it to Vietnam. The operation resulted in a total of two NATO deaths.
3. Krauthammer makes fun of Johnny Apple for having written an earlier piece warning that Afghanistan might develop into a "quagmire."
4. See #1.
5. Krauthammer makes fun of Johnny Apple for having written a more recent piece warning that Iraq might develop into a "quagmire."
6. See Iraq.
7. Krauthammer makes a passing reference to the "swift collapse of the Taliban."
8. See #1.
9. Fucking Salvador Dali has more "perspective" than this incompetent little beta male.
10. The paragraph itself does not really flow all that well.
How about a riddle? "I am a Nobel Prize winner and a highly-respected public intellectual. I probably live in some big awesome house somewhere. I am always wrong." Think about it! The guy's telling you he's always wrong, but doesn't this mean that he's wrong about this, too? Actually, no. It could be the case that he is sometimes wrong and happens to be wrong in saying that he is always wrong. What a MINDBENDER! I just BENT your MIND!
Here's another one: what walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening?
Man! He crawls as a baby, walks as a man, and uses a cane in his old age. This is a very old riddle from a famous tale that's been told for over two thousand years!
Here's a newer riddle: what walks on four legs in the morning, two legs for a portion of the afternoon, and then no legs for the rest of the afternoon and forever after as well?
Charles Krauthammer! His legs were paralyzed in a scuba-diving accident years back and he's since lived in a wheelchair! Also, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and coalition forces and contractors! They were hurt in an accident whereby certain people made a bunch of huge mistakes at work! And they still work in the same place and make the same mistakes! This is what big people who are not Republicans call "irony!"
That's enough Kidz Korner for today! You kids should all go outside and run around for a while!
***
The aforementioned column that Krauthammer wrote six months into the Three Week War ends with the following taunt:
Losing the peace? No matter what anyone says now, that question will only be answered at the endpoint. If in a year or two we are able to leave behind a stable, friendly government, we will have succeeded. If not, we will have failed. And all the geniuses will be vindicated.This was in 2003. In 2005, Krauthammer penned a column in which he acknowledged that his errors had assisted in the promotion and failed perpetuation of one of the most terrible foreign policy mistakes in American history, and of course he stopped making sarcastic attacks on those other commentators and public figures whom he had previously mocked for their correct predictions. Having done a great deal of soul-searching and realizing that he had been dreadfully wrong about the three most recent American wars, and recognizing that the distribution of poor commentary harms the ability of voters and policymakers to make wise decisions regarding matters on which the lives and well-being of millions are at stake, he also decided to refrain from providing further commentary on military affairs.
Just kidding! Instead, he eventually he took to denouncing retired military figures like John Batiste as the I-know-better generals for second-guessing Rumsfeld, whom he continued to support after even William Kristol had begun calling for the defense secretary to be dismissed. "Six of them, retired, are denouncing the Bush administration and calling for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation as secretary of defense," he noted in the April 2006 column. "The anti-war types think this is just swell. I don't." He then explains to us why he knows better than the "I-know-better-generals," citing three key issues:
The first is that he doesn't listen to or consult military advisers. The six generals make that charge, but it is thoroughly disproved by the two men who were closer to Rumsfeld day-to-day, week-in-week-out, than any of the accusing generals: former Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Myers, and former Marine Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong. Both attest to Rumsfeld's continual consultation and give-and-take with the military.Well, that certainly settles that! After all, at least one of these generals just doesn't understand the ephemeral nature of military planning like Charles Krauthammer does:
In his most recent broadside, retired Army Maj. Gen. John Batiste accuses the administration of "radically alter(ing) the results of 12 years of deliberate and continuous war planning'' on Iraq. Well, the Bush administration threw out years and years and layer upon layer of war planning on Afghanistan, improvised one of the leanest possible attack plans and achieved one of the more remarkable military victories in recent history. There's nothing sacred about on-the-shelf war plans.More like General Wrong Batiste, amirite?
But the failure of so many retired generals to understand things they obviously understood perfectly well was eclipsed by another, deeper concern on the part of our intrepid military historian:
Nope.We've always had discontented officers in every war and in every period of our history. But they rarely coalesce into factions. That happens in places such as Saddam's Iraq, Pinochet's Chile or your run-of-the-mill banana republic. And when it does, outsiders (including United States) do their best to exploit it, seeking out the dissident factions to either stage a coup or force the government to change policy.
That kind of dissident party within the military is alien to America. Some other retired generals have found it necessary to rise to the defense of the current administration. Will the rest of the generals, retired or serving, now have to declare themselves as to which camp they belong?
When the surge was proposed in 2007, Krauthammer was among the few conservatives to come out against the idea, explaining in a 2007 column that it will fail due to the perfidy and incompetence of the Maliki government "If it were my choice," he wrote in January, "I would not 'surge' American troops in defense of such a government. I would not trust it to deliver its promises."
Let us see what Krauthammer thinks later that year, after surge has begun to appear successful:
To cut off Petraeus' plan just as it is beginning -- the last surge troops arrived only last month -- on the assumption that we cannot succeed is to declare Petraeus either deluded or dishonorable. Deluded in that, as the best-positioned American in Baghdad, he still believes we can succeed. Or dishonorable in pretending to believe in victory and sending soldiers to die in what he really knows is an already failed strategy.When Petraeus proposed the surge, Krauthammer opposed it - which is to say that by his own logic, Krauthammer himself must have likewise considered Petraeus to be "either deluded or dishonorable" insomuch as that our columnist believed that the surge would be a failure and thereby waste American lives. And he does not bother to note that he himself opposed the strategy that nobody else must now oppose less they insult Petraeus in the same way that Krauthammer apparently did. He certainly didn't bother to note that he, like all these "wobbly Republicans," also considered Maliki to be incapable of making use of any surge. Instead, he here deems the surge as falling under the category of "short term" reconciliation and that Maliki is capable of it - without, of course, admitting that he himself had argued the exact opposite case seven months before.
That's the logic of the wobbly Republicans' position. But rather than lay it on Petraeus, they prefer to lay it on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and point out his government's inability to meet the required political "benchmarks." As a longtime critic of the Maliki government, I agree that it has proved itself incapable of passing laws important for long-term national reconciliation.
But first comes the short term.
At any rate, Krauthammer today considers the strategy to have been a success after having initially predicted its failure. Thus it is that this most respected of conservative commentators may be the only pundit in the country to have been wrong about every major U.S. military question of the last decade.
On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 11:25 AM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
First part of Krauthammer chapter:
Charles Krauthammer
We find nothing truly funny in service to fascism or communism. But we may find that communists and fascists have otherwise promoted their totalitarianism by way of great and glorious contributions to film, music, and the performing arts - which is to say that anti-individualistic political persuasions may produce fine works of aesthetics, but apparently not humor.
This may lead us to suspect that humor is not subject to whatever strings together the totalitarian-accessible arts. It may also lead us to be wary of a political movement that has lost its ability to put forth comedic works in defense of itself and in opposition to its enemies. Political humor is heavily dependent on the ability to perceive and present irony; if a political population consisting of tens of millions of people cannot produce at least a few competent political humorists, we might draw some insulting conclusions about such a population.
For over a decade, the finest political humorist in America was P.J. O'Rourke, a reporter and veteran of National Lampoon who had made a gradual transition from Maoism to conservatism. O'Rourke's conservatism was never of the populist strain; he simply favored free market economics and a somewhat hawkish foreign policy stance in such situations as that a hawkish foreign policy stance might be in order.
One of the more common elements of O'Rourke's earlier, readable work was scorn for the histrionics of mass politics, and particularly the empty ritualism of marches and protests. Conservatives, he asserted on several occasions, did not attend protests because they have jobs. But in 2008, when the ongoing descent of conservatism into populism and anti-intellectualism reached its completion with the extraordinary farce of the Palinist tea party movement, the same humorist who had so consistently mocked the mentality of the protest-goer could now find no humor in large gatherings of misshapen, chanting people. Instead, he criticized those media outlets that had been insufficiently respectful of such things. A piece that O'Rourke wrote for The Weekly Standard in August 2009 is incredible in the extent to which it consists purely of rambling, anti-elitist boilerplate. The article begins as follows:
Us right-wing nuts sure is scary! That's the message from the Washington Post. To put this in language a conservative would understand, the fourth estate has been alarmed once again by the Burkean proclivities of our nation's citizens. The Post is in a panic about (to use its own descriptive terms) "birthers," "anti-tax tea-partiers," and "town hall hecklers.""Burkean" is probably not the first term I would use to characterize large demonstrations by self-described "regular folks" in opposition to some perceived contingent of political elites, but then O'Rourke is certainly entitled to his hilarious delusions.
He complains about a sidebar by Alec MacGillis in which the reporter begins with the assertion that "[h]ealth care reform is not that hard to understand, and those who tell you otherwise most likely have an ulterior motive." O'Rourke chooses to take this, as well as the entire piece, as some sort of elitist assault on his Burkean masses, to which he responds with a sarcastic quip that is supposed to summarize the intent of the piece: "All you town hall hecklers, calm down and go home."
This is an odd interpretation of the article in general and the first sentence in particular, as the very next sentence of MacGillis' piece goes on to say: "Reform proponents exaggerate the complexity of the issue to elevate their own status as people who understand it; opponents exaggerate it to make the whole endeavor out to be a bureaucratic monstrosity," and the rest consists of a summary of the major elements of health care reform proposals that were then under debate - who was objecting to what and why and what compromises were likely to be reached as the process continued and that sort innocuous thing. But O'Rourke repeats his bizarre characterization of what this is supposed to convey: "But calm down and go home, because the Washington Post said so."
Or, rather, it didn't. But it did assign a reporter to compose a sort of political fashion piece discussing the particular slovenliness of the heckler crowd, as O'Rourke explains.
Then, to add idiocy to insult, the Post sent Robin Givhan to observe the Americans who are taking exception to various expansions of government powers and prerogatives and to make fun of their clothes... Meeting with Givhan's scorn were "T-shirts, baseball caps, promotional polo shirts and sundresses with bra straps sliding down their arm."We learn, then, that making fun of other people's clothes now constitutes "idiocy" according to O'Rourke.
O'Rourke once began an article on the 1990 Nicaraguan elections with a multi-paragraph critique of the sort of clothes worn by those visiting American liberals who supported the Sandinistas. He included similar critiques of liberal dressing habits in an article on the 1994 Mexican elections. He spent a good portion of an essay on the general increase in world travel decrying the fashions of tourists in general and the French in particular, and elsewhere took issue with the appearances of those among the Great Unwashed who now fly on commercial airliners. He made fun of those who appeared before the Supreme Court in opposition to a flag burning ban for their general ugliness. He spent much of the '90s mocking youngish leftists for wearing nose rings and black outfits - in fact, he did this so much as to actually ruin it for everyone else through overuse - and did so on at least one occasion in the pages of The Weekly Standard itself. He's written an entire article in which he and his girlfriend roam around an Evangelical-oriented theme park and make fun of everyone present for their general sloppiness. And he once wrote that Hillary Clinton should stop messing with her own hair and instead "do something about Chelsea's."
He was right. Aging liberals who run around Latin America and Mexico dress like idiots. Half of the people one today encounters on a domestic flight would have been correctly barred from the plane by the captain in a more civilized age. I don't even know where to start with the sort of French people who wander Manhattan in August. Earnest young leftists should be wearing suits or at least a button-down shirt instead of whatever the fuck they think they're doing now. You can probably imagine what a bunch of Middle American Evangelicals look like when they're at the mall.
Seeing hacks like William Kristol pretend to admire the innocent primitivism of the sort of people with whom he would himself rightfully never associate is one thing; Kristol has never been of value as an honest observer. But O'Rourke was once the greatest political humorist of the conservative movement, as well as a strong advocate of taste back when taste still favored Republicans. Today he must defend the people he once despised; the GOP is now filled with little else.
***
If we agree that the inability to produce humor on its own behalf is a sign of degeneracy on the part of a political movement, and if we identify the modern American conservative enterprise as being incapable of producing viable political humor relative to its counterparts, and if we understand humor to be dependent on irony and understand irony in turn to be a sign of intellect, we may reasonably conclude that the actual intellectuals produced by such a movement as this will be rather mediocre. Perhaps we should check to be sure. Or, rather, I'll go check; you stay here with the rifle and guard the women. Our supply of water ought to last for two more days, assuming we don't have any more incidents like we had this morning. At any rate, there are enough sleeping pills in the medical kit for everyone to die painlessly. But we're not planning to die, friend; our goal is to live. Lock the door behind me and don't open it for anyone, no matter what goods they may offer for barter. And for God's sake, keep checking the radio.
Like O'Rourke, Charles Krauthammer is a refuge from liberalism who eventually became a highly effective advocate of conservatism. Unlike O'Rourke, Krauthammer is just as talented today as he's ever been. Also unlike O'Rourke, Krauthammer was never particularly talented, as shall soon be demonstrated at grueling length.
These things being relative, he is today considered - rightfully - to be among the Republican Party's greatest intellectual assets. In a profile piece that appeared in mid-2009, Politicos Ben Smith proclaimed the Canadian-born commentator to be a coherent, sophisticated and implacable critic of the new president and a central conservative voice in the Age of Obama. Around the same time, New York Times mainstay David Brooks characterized him as the most important conservative columnist right now. When Krauthammer was presented with an award that summer by Rupert Murdoch in recognition of his having done a lot of whatever it is that makes Rupert Murdoch happy, Dick Cheney himself was on hand to congratulate the veteran commentator. In liberal terms of achievement, this is somewhat akin to winning an award from Noam Chomsky while being fêted by the ghost of Louis Brandeis.
Krauthammer's prestige is such that, when foreign publications find themselves in need of someone to explain the conservative outlook, they are likely to turn to our chapter subject. In October of 2009, Der Spiegel published a particularly comprehensive interview in which Krauthammer held forth largely on foreign policy. Among other things, he derides Obama as a wide-eyed amateur who lacks the columnist's own grounding in reality:
I would say his vision of the world appears to me to be so naïve that I am not even sure he's able to develop a doctrine. He has a view of the world as regulated by self-enforcing international norms, where the peace is kept by some kind of vague international consensus, something called the international community, which to me is a fiction, acting through obviously inadequate and worthless international agencies. I wouldn't elevate that kind of thinking to a doctrine because I have too much respect for the word doctrine.
In pronouncing judgment upon a president's competence with regards to foreign policy, Krauthammer thereby implies that he himself knows better. It is a fine thing, then, that we may go through the fellow's columns from the last ten years and see for ourself whether this is actually the case. Whatever shall we find? Oh, it shall be such an exciting escapade!
***
In 1999, NATO sought to derail yet another potential humanitarian disaster in the Balkans by way of an air bombing campaign against Serbia. Krauthammer promptly denounced Bill Clinton in a column that begun thusly:
Our columnist seems to have since changed his mind on the propriety of playing golf in the midst of conflict, but then if we are to concern ourselves with every little thing for which he has denounced his opponents while giving a pass to his allies, we will be forever distracted, so knock it off. Better for us to note that Krauthammer uses the term "genocide" in quotes and implies such a characterization to be the work of the foolish Clintonian State Department; the intent here is to cast suspicion on Clinton's judgment. And in the very next paragraph, when Krauthammer asserts that NATO intervention thus far has led to "savage ethnic cleansing, executions of Kosovar Albanian leaders, the forced expulsion of more than 100,000 Kosovars" - with no such terminology being put in quotes this time - the intent is to cast even greater suspicion on Clinton's judgment.On Monday, as "genocide" was going on in Kosovo (so said the State Department), Bill Clinton played golf. The stresses of war, no doubt. But perhaps we should give him the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he needed to retreat to shaded fairways to contemplate the consequences of his little Kosovo war.
Krauthammer goes on to argue that air strikes would be insufficient to force Serbian forces from Kosovo. Bizarrely enough, he even tries to convince his readers that General Wesley Clark agreed with him over Clinton, quoting the then-NATO commander as telling Jim Lehrer, we never thought that through air power we could stop these killings on the ground. No doubt due to space constraints, Krauthammer leaves out the rest of Clarks answer, in which it is explained that the person who has to stop this is President Milosevic and that the purpose of the air campaign was to force him to do just that - which it did.
Even after the Kosovo campaign proved successful, Krauthammer remained ideologically committed to chaos in the Balkans, having also predicted in 1999 that NATO involvement would sever Kosovo from Serbian control and lead inevitably to an irredentist Kosovar state, unstable and unviable and forced to either join or take over pieces of neighboring countries. When an ethnic Albanian insurgency arose in Macedonia along its border with UN-administered Kosovo in 2001, he felt himself vindicated, announcing that the Balkans are on the verge of another explosion, making several references to Vietnam, and characterizing our continued presence in the region as a quagmire. The violence ended within the year, having claimed less than 80 lives. Kosovo has since joined both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and is now recognized by three of five permanent members of the Security Council; as of late 2009, Macedonia is preparing for membership in NATO as well as the European Union.
Like most others who had cried apocalypse in Kosovo, Krauthammer bumbled into the Afghanistan war in a haze of amnesia and inexplicable self-regard. When New York Times contributor R.W. "Johnny" Apple wrote a piece in late October proposing that the conflict could develop into a "quagmire," our columnist ridiculed him for using a term that he himself had mistakenly applied in his Balkans-as-Vietnam column from earlier in the year. The Apple article in question proved to be among the more prescient compositions of that period; unlike Thomas Friedman, who was in those days proclaiming that Afghans don't really mind having bombs dropped on them and was otherwise engaged in the inexplicable application of scare quotes around the word "civilians," Apple predicted that civilian casualties would become a major source of discontent among the population and that this might very well be problematic for U.S. efforts to win them over. He ended the piece by pointing out that there exists "a huge question about who would rule if the United States vanquished its foe. Washington never solved that issue satisfactorily after the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, and solving it in Afghanistan, a country long prone to chaotic competition among many tribes and factions, will probably not be much easier." And, of course, he was right.
Long after others had abandoned the illusion of quick and longterm success in Central Asia, Krauthammer was still mocking anyone foolish enough to express concerns about whether the illusion had been illusory. "Before our astonishing success in Afghanistan goes completely down the memory hole, let's recall some very recent history," Krauthammer politely suggested in a December 2004 column. "Within 100 days, al Qaeda is routed and the Taliban overthrown. Then the first election in Afghanistan's history. Now the inauguration of a deeply respected democrat who, upon being sworn in as legitimate president of his country, thanks America for its liberation.... What do liberals have to say about this singular achievement by the Bush administration? That Afghanistan is growing poppies." This was indeed noted by liberals of the time - along with a whole range of other concerns that Krauthammer does not bother to address, with one exception:
The other complaint is that Karzai really does not rule the whole country. Again the sun rises in the east. Afghanistan has never had a government that controlled the whole country. It has always had a central government weak by Western standards.As it turns out, this "deeply respected democrat" won the 2009 election by deeply undemocratic means, further de-legitimizing himself in the eyes of Afghans already angry over the corruption that marks not only Karzai's cabinet but also certain members of his own family. The former monarch's authority, meanwhile, has not so much been "gradually extended" as it has dissipated to such an extent that he controls only Kabul and a few other regions, and American analysts are now virtually united in their contempt for the fellow.
But Afghanistan's decentralized system works. Karzai controls Kabul, most of the major cities, and much in between. And he is successfully leveraging his power to gradually extend his authority as he creates entirely new federal institutions and an entirely new military.
"What has happened in Afghanistan is nothing short of a miracle," Krauthammer continued. In the days before its new, miraculous age, after all, "Afghanistan had suffered under years of appalling theocratic rule, which helped to legitimize the kind of secularist democracy that Karzai represents."
Question: What kind of secularist democracy proclaims Islam to be its official religion, holds that none of its civil laws may violate the teachings of Islam, and punishes conversion from Islam by death?
Answer: Why does Charles Krauthammer have a fucking Pulitzer Prize?
Oops, I answered a question with another question. Luckily, Krauthammer himself poses yet another question in the same column: "The interesting question is: If we succeeded in Afghanistan, why haven't we in Iraq?"
Question: If we succeeded in Afghanistan, why haven't we in Iraq?
Answer: Because our nation's foreign policy is informed in large part by people who thought we had succeeded in Afghanistan.
On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 11:05 AM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
Just a matter of time before he comes across the other evidence.