Friday, December 28, 2007
WHAT DOES THE WANKING MAN WANT? MORE. That's the way it always is with these affirmative action programs. You give them the moon and they want the stars. Andrew Sullivan on Billy Kristol's new New York Times column:He's obviously an extremely talented writer and editor, and I guess some naked partisanship on the right is necessary to balance out Krugman. But ideologically, having both David Brooks and Bill Kristol as the sole representatives of the right-of-center is to focus on a very small neocon niche in a conservative world that is currently exploding with intellectual diversity and new currents of thought. There are about five "national greatness" conservatives out there. Four of them now have columns in the WaPo or NYT: Kristol, Brooks, Krauthammer and Gerson. Thank God, I guess, for the blogosphere. We have no restrictions here, do we? The Times adds another winger, but it's the wrong kind of winger. Eventually they'll need a fold-out section to accomodate all the different conservative gradations (closed-borders, anti-gay, bullshit libertarian, etc) the committee requires, and that isn't even taking into account all the free dispatches Michael Yon will demand the Times run when the eschaton is immanentized.
I don't understand how these guys sustain this level of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, they're constantly announcing the irrelevance of the MSM. On the other, they lobby the Times to staff up with their buddies, as if the paper were some kind of government public works project that isn't keeping up with mandated rightwing hiring quotas.
In Sullivan's case, it may be a form of schizophrenia that comes from being a longtime credentialed magazine writer -- an establishment figure, in other words -- who is also a prominent member of the blogosphere, which is like indie cred for poli-sci nerds and, like all indie cred among the successful, must be maintained by occasional professions that one is Still Down for the Struggle ("There go my cable invites"). As for the rest of them, I reckon they're just full of shit.
Meantime, for added giggles, check out New York Times Op Ed columnist Glenn Reynolds professing surprise that the Times gave Jonah Goldberg a kind review.
UPDATE. Commenter psuedonymous in nc points out that the Times Book Review editor, Sam Tanenhaus, is a self-proclaimed "Man of the Right." Tanenhaus was recently appointed to edit the paper's Week in Review, too. Clearly such tokenism cuts little ice with conservatives. But I caution them: when the last Sulzberger is strangled with the entrails of Bob Herbert, they'll have to find some other publication at which to shake their fists. Maybe they can redirect their followers' Bookmark of Perpetual Outrage to the Huffington Post. But conservatives are famously lovers of tradition and may find the transition difficult. Well, they'll always have Walter Duranty.
9:52 PM by roy edroso
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Thursday, December 27, 2007
PAKISTAN: THE LESS-SHORT VIEW. The Bhutto assassination has already led to unfortunate side-effects, including riots, U.S. Presidential candidate reactions, and what the Pakistani dictator Musharraf, in a piquant bit of Western political usage, calls "the blame game." Al Qaeda has expectedly taken credit; Bhutto herself left a note fingering Musharraf; reporters work their sources, and pundits their traditional decoder rings, for leads.
The flames in Karachi indicate that many Pakistanis will not have patience for this sort of inside-baseball analysis. I note this recent poll showing the unpopularity of Musharraf's regime, and also the poll's interesting provenance. I suspect similar results might have been obtained without the support of John McCain and neocon apparatchiks, but the International Republican Institute's efforts to publicize the discontent in Pakistan suggest that the current (and just about any possible future) Administration would have been much happier dealing with Bhutto.
What do you suppose they think about Nawaz Sharif, who is currently playing it extremely cagey? He's been linked to Al Qaeda, but even Bhutto played footsie with the Taliban once upon a time. And the New York Times reports that our government is now reaching out to Sharif. ("The very fact that officials are even talking to backers of Mr. Sharif, who they believe has too many ties to Islamists, suggests how hard it will be to find a partner the United States fully trusts.") This certainly wouldn't be the first time the U.S. has suddenly rehabilitated a suspect foreign leader, and it's not as if we don't know how to deal with him.
Armageddon may come tomorrow, in which case you may put me down as a fool. But one of the fortunate aspects of global political corruption -- contra Dr. Paul -- is that it presents opportunities for self-correction, at least until the next, inevitable crisis. It's not the best way of doing things, of course. In fact it's pretty sad. But who among our next generation of leaders will handle it any better?
UPDATE. I should have known ol' Ralph "Blood 'n' Guts" Peters wouldn't let me down! In October he wrote a full-throated paean to the Musharraf dictatorship and denounced the infusion of Bhutto's "charisma" into the race. Today he supplies us with the Good Riddance to Bhutto post we've been waiting for:Her country's better off without her. She may serve Pakistan better after her death than she did in life. What good can come from even a dead Bhutto? "Her murder may galvanize Pakistanis against the Islamist extremists who've never gained great support among voters, but who nonetheless threaten the state's ability to govern." That'll be some trick, even with the Pakistan government's hilarious accidental death verdict there to help.
But Peters is not all Blood 'n' Guts today; he spares a tear for the poor, misunderstood dictator Musharraf:But [Bhutto] always knew how to work Westerners - unlike the hapless Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who sought the best for his tormented country but never knew how to package himself. Better get the pointy-heads on that one, General! Maybe they can engineer a fun-loving, Idi Amin persona for Musharraf. Laugh and the world laughs with you!
11:48 PM by roy edroso
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