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January 30, 2003BREAKING NEWS: SADDAM TO SEEK EXILEBaghdad Public Radio: Flash! 1-30-03 Saddam Hussein accepts asylum offer. 
January 27, 2003
Le plus on leur baise le cul, le plus ils nous chient sur la tete. --from Red Gold America has been attacked and faces a formidable enemy and we turn to the nations of the world for moral support in our fight and what do we get from our former French allies—the finger. The French government, the French press, and the French intellectual establishment, members of the French elite all—eaters of oysters, drinkers of premier crus, and lovers of polysyllabic words and nuanced politics. They love to make fun of Americans, and especially of George W. Bush. Americans are crude, simple, inarticulate, and tasteless; Bush is depicted in the French press dressed in a cowboy outfit with a moronic smile and toting two shootin’ irons. It’s time to remember a few things: In 1940 the great French Army—the largest and best among the Western Europeans—surrendered to the Germans in 43 days. And because of the rapidity with which the great French Army capitulated, it suffered the fewest casualties of any of the so-called Allies. France was liberated by an Anglo-American army, not a French force. The Free French were not even told when D-Day was scheduled, and took no part in D-Day. A small French force was allowed to participate in Operation Anvil—the invasion of southern France in August of 1944. The invasion of southeast France along the Riviera was accomplished by the American Seventh Army, which consisted of three divisions, and these three divisions chased Germany’s Nineteenth Army out of southern France. Two of those three divisions were made up largely of cowboys from Oklahoma, the Forty-fifth, and Texas, the Thirty-sixth. The Texas division was made up of guys from little towns like Galena Park and Melissa where, for a few dollars a month, they joined the National Guard, which became federalized at the beginning of the war. The division was blooded in the brutal Italian Campaign the year before, and then in late summer of 1944 the Thirty-sixth started on its mission to free southeastern France. Starting with St. Raphael, they drove northward through Cannes, Grasse, Gap and Grenoble, places these boys had never heard of before they left home and had no plans to visit. They had worked on farms and ranches back home, in shops as mechanics, in stores as clerks, but they were cowboys at heart. Not very verbal or grammatical, they wore cowboy hats mostly, the cheap kind made of straw, and talked about everyday things, but not their cowboy values—being a square shooter, and being upright and honest men. They’d never heard of Voltaire, or Rousseau, or Chateau Petrus—but they liberated southern France, something the great French Army couldn’t do. The Thirty-sixth Infantry—the Texas cowboys—closed with the German Nineteenth Army as they retreated north along the Rhone. At Montelimar the Americans blocked their retreat and a major week-long struggle ensued until many thousands of Germans surrendered and many hundreds of Texans lay dead, like Pvt. Cecil Lewis from Houston, killed in action, or Sgt. George W. Rivers, Jr. from Tuxedo, killed in action, cowboys who had never heard of Montelimar and had never planned to visit. The Thirty-sixth worked its way northeast, fighting the retreating Germans and liberating French town after town. On September 2 the Division entered Lyons and it was greeted by throngs of civilians who came out of hiding to applaud their liberation. The elderly shook hands and threw flowers; the young sought autographs and climbed aboard Jeeps and trucks. They fought their way week by week through the winter and the Vosges Mountains and then through Alsace to the Rhine and into Germany. Their last cowboy adventure occurred in Austria in May, a few days before the end of the war. The Texas division had heard rumors that a number of important French personages were being held captive by the SS in a castle near Worgl, Austria, so they sent a tank crew and a handful of infantrymen of the Thirty-sixth to investigate. The patrol climbed the mountain to the twelfth-century Alpine castle of Itter where Edoard Daladier and Paul Reynaud, former prime ministers; General Maurice Gamelin, former commander of the French Army; General Maxime Weygand, commander of the French Army at the time of the French surrender; Mme Alfred Cailliau, sister of General Charles DeGaulle; Michel Clemenceau, son of the French statesman; and Jean Borotra, French tennis star, were being held captive. When the patrol reached the castle, although the German commandant surrendered it, it was still surrounded by a large force of SS troops which began to attack as soon as they realized that the American group was so small. Their artillery knocked out the lone American tank and blasted gaping holes in the old castle. Captain John Lee, the officer in charge of the expedition, organized his small force and because the castle occupied the high ground and was surrounded by a moat they were able to withstand with minimum losses the repeated storm trooper assaults. At three in the afternoon, long after the defenders had run out of ammunition, another detachment of the Thirty-sixth drove through the SS ranks and opened the road to the castle. So let’s remember, you French bastards, the Texas cowboys who went to France even though they never planned to visit, and who remain there to this day.
January 24, 2003MANNERS AND MORALS: THE GERMANS ENLIGHTEN THEIR INFERIORS The New York Times’ David Sanger (To Some in Europe, the Major Problem Is Bush the Cowboy, January 24) quotes the sophisticated Hans-Ulrich Klose, vice-chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in the German Parliament, looking down his nose at red-neck George W. Bush. “Much of it is the way he talks, this provocative manner, the jabbing of his finger at you….It’s Texas, a culture that is unfamiliar to Germans.”
January 23, 2003FRENCH PERFIDY"To the French lying is simply talking". - Fran Lebowitz The utopian fantasists in our State Dept., having persuaded Pres. Bush to place his faith in the UN are now obliged to face reality. Will they? Colin Powell, the chief utopian, argued against deposing Saddam in 1991 in favor of the wishful fantasy that military defeat would be sufficient to defang him. It wasn't, for in Saddam's psychopathic world of brute force, survival against the United States constitutes victory and is concrete evidence of our weakness. Saddam would never allow an enemy to escape alive if he had the opportunity to kill him, for it would indicate weakness and would embolden his foes. Thus after the '91 war he redoubled his efforts to acquire devastating weaponry against what he sensed was a pusillanimous foe, while we politely looked away. The danger steadily grew while our President turned his attention to more pressing matters, like obtaining sexual favors from interns in the oval office. Meanwhile, despite his disastrous advice in 1991 Colin Powell rose to ever greater power. He proved himself the quintessential diplomat whose faith lies in written agreements and who believes the way to peace is via empathic concern for our adversaries. Powell is a gifted, smooth as silk negotiator, who seems to have persuaded the President to treat the UN as a serious international body, rather than what it is, a collection of mostly authoritarian and autocratic governments, run by thugs with more in common with Saddam than with us. The nature of this body was again made clear by the recent overwhelming election of Libya to head the Human Rights commission. This placed the UN beyond parody. Yet our State Dept utopians continue to pay deference to the many countries in that august body, including some of our putative "allies", who were only too happy to see the United States suffer the blows of 9-11. The one benefit of our seemingly endless diplomacy at the UN is the emergence of a new clarity; we now know a lot more about our "allies", France and Germany. They are working tirelessly to persuade the world that the great threat to global security emanates not from Iraq, but from the power of the United States. By appeasing Saddam through the farcical Hans Blix "inspections" (Hans Blix seems able to find his table at Rao's more easily than he can locate Baghdad.) they pursue a policy that enmeshes us in endless UN process and requires us to ask permission before we can act. While the leaders of France and Germany speak of 'peace' what they have in mind is postponing action by the United States indefinitely. They are effectively supporting Saddam, hoping, in the tradition of appeasement, that he will turn his anthrax and Sarin against the United States rather than against his European trading partners. No doubt they will express eloquent sympathy when the U.S. counts the casualties in the next bioterror assault, courtesy of Saddam's laboratories. And what of the endless cant about not going to war except as a last resort? Have we forgotten we are at war, a war declared on us on 9-11, that Saddam continues to wage war on his own people and on American and British pilots, and that he quite openly supports suicide terror aimed at America's one democratic ally in the Middle East? Horsefeathers thinks it requires no Sherlock Holmes to deduce that Saddam is intimately involved with anti-American terror groups around the globe. With all this, the behavior of France and Germany can best be understood as dupicitous acts of realpolitik by countries lacking in military might, aimed at taming and weakening America's global power. Another powerful explanation has been offered by Steven den Beste who suspects that France and Germany wish to conceal the fact that for years, in violation of the UN embargo, they've been selling Saddam ingredients for his WMD programs. Countries change their national character about as readily as individuals. William Safire documents the treachery of the French, who played Colin Powell like a violin, assuring him of support and then turning on him. Yet Powell insisted to Jim Lehrer that he had not been sandbagged by the French. Not at all; perhaps it had all been a misunderstanding that requires a bit more consultation and discussion over a fine Burgundy. We would suggest that our diplomats be forced to read Mark Twain on the French. Long before the French added the art of appeasement to their highly developed art of cuisine he commented: "There is nothing lower than the human race-- except the French." He added: "The French are the connecting link between man & the monkey." However, if our multicultural diplomats find Mark Twain politically incorrect and therefore not worth reading, Horsefeathers would recommend the contemporary wit, Fran Lebowitz who made the following observation: "The French probably invented the very notion of discretion. It's not that they feel that what you don't know won't hurt you, they feel that what you don't know won't hurt them. To the French lying is simply talking." Hopefully even Colin Powell will awaken from his Dream of Reason-- the fantasy that all differences are due to misunderstandings and can be worked out through rational dialogue. If he does not, let us hope the President takes the policy reins out of the hands of the utopians and places them in the hands of the realists--Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Cheney. The hour is late, the peril grows and the temporizers are gaining strength. Peace follows victory. Hurry up please, it's time.
January 20, 2003ANNOUNCING THE NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN "PEACE IN OUR TIME" AWARD3d runner up: California's powerful Democratic state legislator, John Burton. At Sunday's "peace" rally in San Francisco he said "...the President is fucking with us...(and) is full of shit..." while suggesting that America, not Iraq is the world's greatest problem. 2d runner up: Imam Musa speaking at Sunday's rally in Washington:"We won't get any justice as long as that criminal Congress is up there. We're calling for revolution. It's revolution time, brothers and sisters. We have to get rid of greedy murderers and imperialists like George Bush in the White House." 1st runner up: Damu Smith, head of "Black Voices for Peace," speaking at the Washington rally asserted that “Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, that’s the Axis of Evil.” And the winner is: the organizers of all the anti-American, pro-terror weekend rallies, the Communist Worker's World Party's front organization, A.N.S.W.E.R.
January 18, 2003WHY THE JEWS? THE UTOPIAN TEMPTATION As the airways filled with anti-American, anti-Capitalist tirades from "peace protesters" on this cold January Sunday in 2003, I was reminded of my earliest acquaintance, more than 60 years ago with the contradictions of the human heart and mind. It came as a youngster while I was dandled on my grandmother's knee. This beloved woman was an emigre from Minsk to the United States. She was also a devoutly committed Communist revolutionary who traded her family's Judaism for belief in the inevitable Revolution of the proletariat. She worked tirelessly on behalf of local Communists seeking to undermine Capitalism, even though America had given her opportunities undreamt of in her native Russia. I recall fruitless debates she had with her son-in-law, my father, who mistakenly thought rational persuasion could alter her utopian views. I resented the persuasive logic of his arguments because I loved my grandmother and wanted her to be right, yet I couldn't help realizing how illogical her views were. For all her talk of "scientific socialism" and the iron laws of Marxist dialectic, I realized she possessed unshakable faith that resembled the religion she had renounced as "the opiate of the masses". I recall my father announcing to her one day that Stalin had signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler, and her denial that this was possible; he showed her the New York Times the next day with its complete account of this world historical event but she dismissed the reports as capitalist lies. Soon thereafter, scarcely missing a beat, she was explaining how Stalin's brilliant tactical maneuver would help bring the happy day of world revolution when the proletariat would overthrow their capitalist oppressors. Her devotion to Uncle Joe was so unquestioning that I remember, like a bolt of troubling adult understanding, thinking that if Stalin gave the order for her to execute her family, myself included, she would do it for the cause.
January 17, 2003FEEDING THE CROCODILE"Each one hopes that if it feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last" Historical circumstances change but human nature remains constant. Utopian longings are eternal. After war was declared on us on 9-11 there was a brief shocking realization that there were people who actually wished to kill us, the more the better, preferrably in as barbaric and indiscriminate a fashion as possible. Time, we were told, was not on our side and realism prevailed as we quickly struck back in Afghanistan. Does anyone remember how we were warned by the hand-wringers of impending catastrophic losses in the cold mountain snows, how the Arab street would erupt, how multitudes would starve and we'd bog down for years in guerilla warfare? None of this happened. However, the utopian impulse coupled with the therapeutic stance quickly re-emerged as our media elites and chattering punditocracy assured us that it was our failure to address the complaints of the aggrieved that brought destruction upon us. Who wants to believe that hordes of people simply hate us and wish to see us dead? What was needed was talk; after all that's what our logorrheic artists, authors, and academics do best. Liberalism, once a body of muscular ideas, has devolved into a stance, a pose, an attitude of moral superiority that makes it unnecessary to do anything more than sneer at the President's mispronunciations to establish one's intellectual and moral superiority. And that seemed the primary aim of the chattering class--the self flattering assertion of moral and intellectual superiority. Any action the President proposed taking was dismissed out of hand as the dangerous cowboy belligerence of a man who lacked their deeper understanding.
JUST GIVE THE IRAQIS JOB OPPORTUNITIES AND A FREE MARKET AND THEIR HEARTS AND MINDS WILL FOLLOW
Would you believe in 2003 that something similar could happen in Iraq, and that in forty or fifty years the Iraqi national sport might be baseball? If there is a war, and if we free the Iraqis by armed occupation, we will indeed have an opportunity of a century. But let’s get a few basic things straight. It will take longer than the eighteen months that the White House optimistically projects. It could take a decade or more—but that needn’t be burdensome, expensive or difficult. If we administer the oil wells, in addition to giving the Iraqi people their own patrimony for the welfare of the country, rather than for presidential palaces or the development of weapons of mass destruction, a portion could be returned to the United States for the costs of occupation and military administration. In addition, the military need only use a small fraction of its professional army for the work of occupation and military police. The bulk of the force could be mustered from our military reserves for periods of three or four month rotations. This would free our fighting army for other military needs and give our reserves a training experience that would be neither dangerous nor unfairly prolonged. This unique opportunity in nation building would require as much unilateral decision making as possible—as was the case with Japan immediately after the end of World War II. It would indeed be a formidable diplomatic challenge to keep the United Nations and France and Russia in particular from meddling. If all of the above were accomplished—a unilateral occupation force under control of the United States paid for by part of the proceeds from Iraqi oil—and the American people were comfortable with the challenge of giving the gift of American political values and economic ideas to the Iraqi people at no cost to us, then the first order of business would be to pacify the country and bring stability, law, and order with as little disturbance to the Iraqi people as possible. This, of course, would mean helping to restore the country’s infrastructure. The essential features of this nation building challenge would be to plant the seeds of American values and nurture them until they are not only viable but sturdy enough to grow and propagate themselves. If we export these ideas and methods to the Iraqi people and help them adapt and fine tune the system so that it fits their own cultural values, then at some point in time—five, ten or fifteen years from now—the United States can fold its tent and go home with the feeling that it has enriched a people and been enriched in return. The trick is to do good by doing well, and to demonstrate that it is possible to do so by using American ideas and methods. By planting the seeds of democracy and freedom to choose in a free market it would be possible to produce enough fruit for both America and Iraq to profit and prosper from the seed money—the private capital supplied by American and Iraqi bankers and protected by governmental guarantees and subsidies, American and Iraqi, to reduce risk. American and Iraqi businessmen would provide the skill and imagination to create large and small businesses which would give Iraqi citizens jobs and a regular income. And at some point in time these privately held businesses could become public and owned and operated for the benefit of their shareholders as well as their workers. In order for this commercial development to occur we would have to help the Iraqis create a democratic constitution akin to ours, which would substitute for secular and religious dictatorship—no Saddam, no king, and no religious courts—the rule of laws. Then a modern meritocratic bureaucracy could be formed to administer legal, political, and commercial institutions adopted by the people—a process that would be enhanced by the pursuit of commercial activity, but might take a generation or more. And it is from this cadre that eventually governmental leaders would emerge. Parallel to law building and the development of modern commercial institutions, the United States should encourage the development—out of private and/or public funds—of western-style schools for all children and young people who wish them. Let the old schools compete with the new and see which wins. And businessmen must be encouraged to start western-style newspapers—even English-language ones—television stations, and computer networks. Let the new media compete with the old and see which wins…. ….Now fast forward to 2053, and turn to the headlines on the sports pages of the Tigris Times (owned by the Murdoch Corporation) and read that the Baghdad Dromedaries won the pennant of the Middle East League, and that Mohammed Mohammed (Momo to his fans) pitched a shut-out for the New York Yankees.
January 12, 2003CONFESSIONS OF A FLAG-WAVERHorsefeathers is honored to present a guest blog by the distinguished author, Diane Ravitch* Many teachers and professional organizations have debated the question: What lessons should we teach our children about the attacks of September 11th? Some have responded that we should emphasize tolerance, others have said patriotism, some have recommended that we teach about America's commitment to freedom, others have advised us to recognize America's history of cultural imperialism. One of my academic colleagues recently argued in a published column that the question, "What lessons should we teach?" is the wrong question because it implies that teachers should transmit a single viewpoint about the attacks. Those who are attempting to answer the question, he claimed, break into two predictable camps: "the flag-wavers and the self-haters." Both camps allegedly share a deeply undemocratic assumption: that kids should agree with what they are taught and with those who teach them. Instead, my colleague argues, students should be presented with the views of both the "flag-wavers and the self-haters" and be allowed to make up their own minds, to come to their own conclusions about September 11th. Someone needs to say a word for teaching America's core values and for waving the flag when appropriate. Here is my explanation. Children are not born with an innate belief in the values of a free society. They are not born believing in the importance of freedom of speech, religion, expression, and the other freedoms and rights that we hold dear. They are not born believing in the right to form and organize groups independent of the government. If they were, the world would be a freer, more democratic place than it is. But our daughters and sons do not enter the world knowing these things. They are profoundly vulnerable to what adults teach them, for good or for ill. If anything, we have ample evidence that churches, schools, the law, and the other institutions of society can be used to teach intolerance and hatred for those whose speech, religion, dress, and ideas differ from our own. It makes no sense for parents, for society, or for schools to take a hands-off attitude towards children and assume that they will figure it all out for themselves. Some might conclude that it is OK to discriminate against people who are different; some deduce that it is OK to silence dissident voices; some might decide that it is OK to tie Matthew Shepard to a fencepost and leave him to die. No, I think we must defend and teach the values that we believe in, not because they are ours, but because they are the values that make a free, democratic, multiethnic, multiracial, multireligious society possible. Without the civil liberties and political rights that undergird democratic society, we could see those rights and liberties whittled away by forces of passion, intolerance, religious hatred, and ignorance. Where does the flag fit into this discussion? For the overwhelming majority of Americans, the flag is a symbol of our rights and freedoms. It is a symbol of the sacrifices that others have made over the years so that we might live in freedom, free to argue with each other, free to sneer at our elected officials, free to practice our religion or no religion at all. Now comes the confession. One of my earliest family photographs shows me and a couple of my siblings in Houston, Texas, holding and waving small American flags. It was taken when I was 6 in 1944. Why were we waving the flag? My uncle Herman was in the South Pacific, a sergeant in the U.S. Army, fighting the Japanese. He saw combat in some very bloody battles; many of his friends were killed, some while detained in Japanese POW camps. We were waving it for him and other American soldiers and sailors. Why were we waving the flag? My family is Jewish. My mother arrived in America in 1917, my father's family earlier. In 1944, my mother's remaining family in Bessarabia was being processed into incinerators, as was my father's remaining family in Poland. None survived the war. We were waving the flag for them. We were waving the flag, too, for the American G.I.'s who were fighting and dying in Europe to stop the madman who had unleashed the war. We knew that they were fighting and dying for us. Since 1960, I have lived in New York City where, over the years, I have not seen too many flags except for the annual veterans' parades, which were sparsely attended. All that changed on September 11, 2001. On that infamous date, I rushed to the harbor and arrived in time to see the second plane strike the second tower. It was right in front of me. I stood there watching people burn to death, watching massive flames and smoke pouring out of the two buildings, watching the sky above me fill up with confetti, the detritus from people's desks. People whose only "crime" was to come to work in the morning. My neighborhood in Brooklyn that day was covered by a thick layer of ash that blew across the harbor. By noon, the ash blanketed the cars on the street, the dust so thick in the air that it was like night-time-on a day that began with a brilliant blue sky. A neighbor who lived across the street from me died at the top of one of the towers; she was a vice-president of Morgan Stanley. Everyone knew someone who died, and everyone knew people who had barely survived. Overnight the flags began to appear in my neighborhood. This is a neighborhood that typically votes 90% Democratic. People who never owned a flag suddenly had one hanging over their front door, attached to their car antenna, pinned to their chest. Most of the flags remained in place all year. They all came back again as the one-year anniversary of the attacks approached. Why are people wearing and displaying and "waving" the flag? They are saying, in the shortest short-hand that they know, that we treasure our nation's ideals. We are part of a national community that has struggled to achieve its rights and freedoms, and we are determined to support and defend that national community and those rights and freedoms. Part of the ongoing struggle involves teaching our children what those rights and freedoms are, how precious they are, how easily they have been lost in the past, and how important it is to understand and defend them. I will continue to wave the flag, because I continue to love the ideals that our country represents. If others disagree, so be it. It's a free country. *Diane Ravitch is a Research Professor at New York University and a trustee of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. Ravitch is the editor of many publications, including the annual Brookings Papers on Education Policy. She edited The Schools We Deserve, Debating the Future of American Education, and The American Reader. She has many books to her credit including Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms; National Standards in American Education: A Citizen's Guide; What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? (with Hoover distinguished visiting fellow and Koret Task Force member Chester Finn Jr.); The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805–1973; and The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945–1980. Her publications have been translated into many languages. Her articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Brookings Review. Ravitch, a historian of education, has lectured on democracy and civic education throughout the world.
"TIME IS NOT ON OUR SIDE"- GEORGE W. BUSH"I have to speak to you about St. George and the Dragon. I have been "Diplomacy is the art of saying 'nice doggy' until you can find a rock." As Inspector Clouseau—Hans Blix-- and his merry band of see-no-evil, UN inspectors scurry about eager to avert military action vs. Saddam by finding nothing, the question arises: How long does it take to find a rock, or how long does it take for our smart weapons to find Iraq? There is now a clear danger that the search for Saddam’s WMD’s will become an end in itself. Whereas once there was talk by the President that time was not on our side, now we hear we must take our time. Why? Surely the degraded Iraqi army doesn’t require the slow motion buildup of forces we are witnessing. Even the Brits are saying we should wait until the fall, but if the fall, why not beyond that? Each day’s delay in prosecuting the final phase of the ongoing war with Iraq creates doubt of our seriousness of purpose. That doubt invites our adversaries to believe they can prevail by exploiting our reluctance to act. Already there are consequences to our delay: North Korea is behaving as if the United States is not a serious power capable of inflicting serious pain on those who challenge it. After years of appeasement the architects of that failed policy urge us to continue down the same road. There is another, more effective road, but that one runs through Baghdad. Until our adversaries realize we are capable and willing to inflict great harm they will continue to press us. Mr. President, hurry up please.
January 08, 2003SADDAM SEEKS ASYLUM ON NEW YORK’S WEST SIDE Several days ago the Financial Times of London reported that Arab states will ask Saddam Hussein to stand down if a military campaign becomes imminent. “…officials said an initiative offering Mr. Hussein asylum might have a chance of success if he were convinced he could not avoid a war to topple his regime. Identifying a haven for Mr. Hussein is a secondary issue. ‘If he accepts, there will be a land for him. Where he goes is not a big problem,’ said an Arab official.” In the meantime behind the scenes bids for Mr. Hussein’s residency from various major cities around the world are being accepted. Unconfirmed reports from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, suggest that Mr. Hussein’s first choice for his asylum city is none other than The Big Apple. Horsefeathers’ source was one of the 7000 Saudi princes who asked not to be identified because he said that he had a pretty good deal in the Royal Family and didn’t want to lose his perks or his tongue just yet. He said that the Family was very touchy about these things and you could end up in some wadi somewhere, pushing up date palms. Our source said that the buzz around the palace was that there was a better than fifty-fifty chance that Saddam would choose New York City, if he could get a good enough deal. Asked why Saddam was so keen on coming to the Big Apple to settle, he said he thought Saddam was tired of Kebab and baklava every night and was looking for some variety. Also he said that he had heard that New York, New York was his favorite song, and wanted to try to make it there so he could make it anywhere. His other favorite was I Did it My Way. Our source implied that Saddam understood these songs as kind of political anthems and he wouldn’t be surprised if Saddam ran for mayor of New York in 2005. A quick survey of major realtors in Manhattan came up with an Arabic speaking broker who claimed that her firm had been contacted by both the Saudis and the Saddam government. She said that she had spoken to the Iraqi representative to the UN several times during the last month. She asked that her firm not to be identified. But she did acknowledge that Mr. Hussein would need a residence with 63 bedrooms and at least 2 bathrooms. He needed room for his family and fifty members of his Republican Guard. Money was apparently no problem, Mr. Hussein was willing to pay up to 15 million barrels of crude a year. The real estate broker admitted that there were very few locations around that would be suitable for Mr. Hussein. “The best possibility is the new Time Warner building on Columbus Circle. We were able to get an option on 12 floors with quite a good view of the park. The management agreed that it would be all right for Mr. Hussein to stand on his balcony and shoot off his rifle every once in a while as long as he didn’t aim it any of the other tenants.” Would Saddam be happy in that location, Horsefeathers asked. “Oh, yes,” she replied, “He has a membership at the New York Athletic Club on Central Park South where he plans to keep in shape. Also, it’s not far from the Harvard Club. He’s been offered a faculty appointment at the University if he comes to America. And he loves the vitality of the West Side. He’s heard that Zabar’s has a large selection of smoked sturgeon and halvah. He’s a bit of a nut about pistachio halvah. But,” she said doubtfully, “It all depends on what Bloomberg offers.” What did she mean? Well, apparently San Francisco, Boston, London, and Paris are offering very good deals to him. Horsefeathers immediately contacted Mayor Bloomberg’s office. What about this rumor we asked the mayor. “It’s no secret around here,” he said hopefully. “We want him. We’re making bids for the Democratic Convention and Republican conventions in ’04. The Olympics in 2012. Why not Saddam? He’s not coming with weapons of mass destruction and we need revenue.” Horsefeathers raised the obvious question. What about the large population of Jews in the city? Wouldn’t they mind? “I spoke to Mr. Hussein about that, but he said not to worry. He said he loves all Jews who don’t live in Israel. And he plans to give Mt Sinai a large hospital ‘The Saddam Hussein Pavilion.’” So what’s the deal we’re offering him? The Mayor smiled triumphantly. “Front row tickets to all the Jets, Yankees, and Knicks games in perpetuity, six permanent parking permits for anywhere in the city, and a real estate tax abatement for five years. And we just threw in a sales tax abatement for ten years. Paris will never beat that.”
January 07, 2003ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD DEMOCRAT ANNOUNCES PRESIDENTIAL BID: LOVE-CHILD OF CLINTON AND STREISAND RUNS FOR NOMINATION DECLARES FIRST PRIORITY GLOBAL WARMING: “WE MUST KEEP SNOWS ON KILIMANJARO FROM MELTING”
Since Al Gore dropped out of the race a number of senior Democratic senators have started reaching for the torch: John Kerrey, Dick Gephardt, Joe Lieberman. But the party was surprised on Thursday when John Edwards, the boyish-looking junior senator from North Carolina, threw his hat into the ring. He has had only four years of senatorial experience and no political experience to speak of before 1998. This youthful presidential aspirant is apparently what inspired young Clinton Streisand to get into the race: “Jeez, he doesn’t look any older than I do.” Senator Edwards is actually 49, but some of his Republican colleagues like to tease that he didn’t start shaving until he took his senate seat. Young Clinton Streisand looked optimistic as he stood on the lawn of his mother’s Beverly Hills estate: “I called this conference to announce that I was setting up a committee to explore the possibility of running for the nomination for president in 2004.” He wore a red T shirt with the message “The Love-Child Candidate 2004,” his hip-hugger jeans quite a bit lower than his hips, with fashionably filthy bottoms. He stood arms akimbo, with one foot on his skate board, coolly fielding question from the press: Q: Did Senator Edwards’ candidacy have anything to do with today’s hurried announcement? Clinton Streisand: Well, actually I been thinkin’ about this for a coupla years. Since my dad left office. But sure, Senator Edwards had somethin’ to do with it. It sounds to me like America wants youth and inexperience for their leaders. And hell, if they want youth and inexperience I’m their guy. Q: What makes you want to be president, Mr. Streisand? C-Str: That’s a good question, Maureen. I guess it’s because I want to be a champion for the regular people—you know, people like my mom and dad. And another thing is that my mom always wanted to be president, that influenced my thinking a lot. She used to say that Reagan was such a lousy actor—if he could do it she could. So I figured if I did it she could be the First Mom. Q: Campaigning in politics is hard on the candidates’ family? Have you thought about that? C-Str: Well, Maureen, I did. We talked about it a lot, Mom and Dad and me. There’s nothing more important than Family. They know it will be hard for us, but what was more important was that we thought that it was right for the country. C-Str: I’m glad you asked that, Maureen. My Mom and I think that the most important crisis facing America today is the fact that the snow on Kilimanjaro is melting. Some people will ask what that has to do with America, Kilimanjaro is in Africa. And they’re right. Kilimanjaro is in Africa. But all mountains are brothers, right Mom? And it’s all because of global warming and the military–industrial complex… Q: Do you have a solution, sir? C-Str: You bet I do—Skateboards! The press conference ended abruptly at this point when the young contender jumped on his skateboard leaving the admiring press in his dust.
HORSEFEATHERS PICK GARNERS 'BEST OF YEAR' HONORBilly Joe Shaver's "Freedom's Child" was voted Best Americana Recording of 2002 by the readers of Austin Americana's Musicalternatives eNewsletter.
January 03, 2003HORSEFEATHERS NOMINATES JOURNALIST FOR MORAL CONFUSION AWARD: First nomination of 2003. JIMMY CARTER BROODS, FEELS HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN NOMINATED
And his experiences during that time have taught him the following truths: (1) War is hell; (2) The romance of war is a myth; (3) Neither politicians nor the press can be counted on to tell the truth about war. Happily, most of us understood these cynical little truths of everyday life just about the time we were ready to leave home and didn’t need 15 years on the front lines to discover them. Hedges turns out to be a modern Candide with the cognitive apparatus of a teenager who never outgrew his adolescence or his religious otherworldliness. He was born the son of a Christian Minister and he says that his book is “…a product of the education I received in English literature and Christian theology, at Colgate University and Harvard University.” He has a master of Divinity degree from Harvard. It is clear from reading his book that the man loves to hate war. But the book is not about war, it is about Hedges and his journey from worldly innocence to utter confusion. Apparently he has been seeing his wartime experiences through ideological spectacles—part political, part theological—and they have kept him from understanding the realities of war, politics, or human nature. He has been seeing things the way he thinks they ought to be, not the way they are. And now—guess what—he is disillusioned. Terence Smith says, “Reading the book, I got the impression that you wrote it in a kind of fury, and that fury was maybe partly directed at yourself.” And Hedges responds: “Yes, a fury. It was a hard book to write. Parts of the book were very painful to write. If there was a fury, it was a fury at all the lies that are used to justify war, all the myths of war—all of the things that we’re told about war that I had to find out the hard way and very painfully are not true. And if there’s a fury at that, it’s the mendacity of the entire enterprise.” Unfortunately, the book is also about this man’s psychopathology. He has been covering every war he could find for the past fifteen years and, as he himself suggests, he became a war addict—not the soldier of fortune kind who becomes addicted to action and fighting, but the kind who searches out and finds, pain, suffering, terror, and injustice wherever he can, the kind who gets some queer pleasure from a sense of outrage when he finds the suffering he is looking for. Two or three of these assignments, or even a couple of years’ worth would demonstrate that Hedges was a serious, conscientious and very brave journalist. But fifteen years of the worst kind of war—third-world war—interminable, anarchic, ruthless, chaotic and completely outside of the Geneva Conventions? Wars fought by barbarians with other barbarians and where there is no right or wrong, but only thrust and counter-thrust? Who but a man who has lost his way in life would choose to live like that for fifteen years? And yet he seems vaguely proud of his life, his suffering. Even now he doesn’t really get it. When we’re young most of us yearn for novelty and adventure of some sort. But there comes a time when we want to settle down to a regular life with someone we love and who loves us. Apparently Hedges loved to hate war more than to love people. The book is overflowing with the pornography of war—showing us endless details of horrors, suffering and injustice, all in the service of moralizing against the possibility of the reader falling victim to the addiction of war the way Hedges had. Although he says that his fury is directed only at “all the lies that are used to justify war, all the myths of war….” he tells us the following: “When I finally did leave [El Salvador, after five years], my last act was, in a frenzy of rage and anguish, to leap over the KLM counter in the airport in Costa Rica because of a perceived slight by a hapless airline clerk. I beat him to the floor as his bewildered colleagues locked themselves in the room behind the counter. Blood streamed down his face and mine. I refused to wipe the dried stains off my cheeks on the flight to Madrid, and I carry a scar on my face from where he thrust his pen into my cheek. War’s sickness had become mine.” You don’t have to listen too carefully to hear the pride and triumph in his victimhood associated with this mad outburst. The last sentence is supposed to justify his behavior—‘see what war can do to people.’ Horsefeathers. War isn’t sick—it’s not a person—it just is what it is, a complex social phenomenon that has horrific consequences but is sometimes necessary because it is the lesser of two evils. This man needed a few years on the couch long before he ever heard his first shot fired. War didn’t make him sick, he made war into a sickness—his obsessive love-hate relationship with war and pain. The trouble is that he and his publishers have tried to transmute psychopathology into moral philosophy. Hedges wants his 15 year obsessive preoccupation with war and suffering to be recognized as the credentials of a war expert. And one of the galling aspects of the interviews on PBS, National Public Radio, and other venues is the uncritical, even worshipful acceptance of the generalizations which Hedges authoritatively tosses off. But because war for him is a passion, even an obsession, he is no more able to teach us about war than an addict can teach us about addiction. He can tell what it is like to be an addict (which he does repetitively) but not much more than that. In fact that is Hedges’ main message. He says that for him war heightened his sense of excitement, gave him a high and something to live for—to report on life at its extremes. And this was more pleasurable than the boredom of everyday life. Of course there is a grain of truth to this observation. Everyday life can often be boring and frustrating, but we all manage to get by creating everyday novelties and excitements for ourselves—we go to the theater, have parties, play tennis, and go on holidays. But this is only true in countries that are free and democratic. And it is important to note that almost all of Hedges’ life as a moral masochist and collector of injustices has been spent in dictatorships, in states of civil war, anarchy, chaos and barbarism. The only war he has covered in which the United States has taken part with ground forces is the Gulf War and in that one he managed to get himself captured and mistreated by the Iraqis despite the fact that 400,000 other Americans—soldiers—managed not to get captured and mistreated. It is clear that this man’s mind is a catastrophe waiting to happen. What he is afraid of is that you and I are like him—with his needs and passions. He’s afraid we’ll become, like him, war addicts. “…as long as we find in patriotism and the exuberance of war our fulfillment, we will never understand those who do battle against us, or how we are perceived by them….We will never discover who we are. We will fail to confront the capacity we all have for violence….” It may be true that everyone has a capacity for some degree of violence—some more, some less. But what Hedges hides behind this generalization is the high degree of his own capacity to give and take violence. “…. And we will court our own extermination. By accepting the facile cliché that the battle under way against terrorists is a battle against evil, by easily branding those who fight us as the barbarians, we, like them, refuse to acknowledge our own culpability. We ignore real injustices that have led many of those arrayed against us to their rage and despair.”
“I was with young Islamic militants in a Cairo slum a few weeks after the [Gulf] war….These militants spent their days at the mosque. They saw the Persian Gulf War for what it was, a use of force by a country that consumed 25% of the world’s petrol to protect its access to cheap oil. The message that was sent to them was this: We have everything and if you try to take it away from us we will kill you. It was not a message I could dispute.” It is too bad that Hedges could not bring himself to tell his militant young friends that the reason they have nothing and have no hope for the future is that their government deprives them of education, freedom, and democracy, and that they have fallen under the sway of self-destructive theocratic leaders who will get them nothing but death rather than paradise. But he is as confused as they are. He makes no distinction between good wars, bad wars, and ambiguous wars, which most wars turn out to be. He would never agree that the American Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II were unambiguously good wars, that they were fought for important moral and political principles that were worth fighting for and even worth dying for. If I knew his address I would send Mr. Hedges a cheerful get-well card and hope that he recovers his mental balance soon.
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