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Wednesday, March 31, 2004

Corn, Rice

David Corn has eighteen questions for Condi Rice.  Actually many of his questions contain multiple questions, so really, there are 58 questions in all.  (Take it easy, David!  We don’t want to scare her off!)

But before we go any further with this Rice thing, what’s all this liberal-media lying about an alleged “flip-flop” on the part of the Administration?  Condi Rice never said she wouldn’t testify to the 9/11 commission.  There has been no stonewalling, no Clintonian dissembling here.  On the contrary, Rice has done everything in her power to cooperate-- why, just this past Sunday, she said, “Nothing would be better, from my point of view, than to be able to testify.  I would really like to do that.” [Real quote!  Not made up!] And why wouldn’t she?  The record clearly shows that for Rice, as for Bush, fighting al-Qaeda was Job One from the moment Bush took office on January 20, 2001-- especially given the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole the previous October-- and remained Job One all through the post-9/11 investigation of Saddam’s role in the attacks.  Let the Democrats spin their disgruntled-bureaucrat conspiracy theories.  Condoleeza Rice has nothing to hide.

--Now, who’ll give me odds that one of the Administration’s media lackeys writes something like this in the next two weeks?  Remember, I get extra points if I predict any specific sentence word-for-word, and special blogger props if any Townhall columnist cribs the entire thing.

Posted by Michael on 03/31 at 01:42 AM
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Tuesday, March 30, 2004

So this is what the Internet is like

Just had DSL installed on the home laptop (though now I have to go and get a wireless router for Nick’s and Janet’s computers).  That’s right, friends, Romans, countrymen, I’ve spent the past three months blogging from a 56K modem dialup.  Like playing ice hockey in sneakers.  Or, as George Williams once said, like sucking air through a cocktail straw.

So much for item number five on my plan for world domination by 2009.  (No, I’m not going to tell you what item six is.) And with my brand new blogging powers, I hereby direct one and all to Eric Alterman’s latest column, the one that concludes,

The far-right smear machine is saying: We will do anything--up to and including McCarthyite attacks on 9/11 widows and orphans--to insure victory in November. We are on the cusp of something extremely ugly in 2004.

By the pricking of my thumbs, something extremely ugly this way comes.  Paid for by Bush/Macbeth 2004.

Posted by Michael on 03/30 at 04:45 AM
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Monday, March 29, 2004

Double-dealing deities

From the front page of today’s New York Times comes a question I hadn’t even thought to ask:

Like Christian booksellers across the country, Bob Fillingane is doing everything he can to prepare the way for “Glorious Appearing,” the climactic installment in the “Left Behind” series of apocalyptic thrillers that goes on sale tomorrow.

Mr. Fillingane, owner of Lemstone Books in Hattiesburg, Miss., has arranged television, radio and newspaper advertisements and even a marquee over the front of his local mall, and next week he will hold a book signing by the authors, Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, on a Bible Belt bus tour from Spartanburg, S.C., to Plano, Tex.

Not that “Glorious Appearing” needs his help, Mr. Fillingane said.

“I really believe that there is a blessing on this series from the Lord,” he said. “Just like with the ‘Passion’ movie, it is all part of the warning we get before Christ returns.” He added, “Many people have asked me, Do you think they will finish the series before Christ comes?”

So this is what the religious right is worried about these days:  will Christ return before the “Left Behind” series is finished?

Well, this raises all kinds of complex eschatological problems, now that I think of it.  First of all, what does the Book of Revelations say about fundamentalist-Christian pulp-fiction writers who are trying to complete their Revelations-based book series before they’re raptured into heaven?  Does Scripture itself predict whether novels about the Final Days will be published during the Final Days?  Do they arrive in bookstores just after the seven-eyed, seven-horned Lamb opens the first of the seven seals (6:1), or do we have to wait until the appearance of the seven-headed, ten-horned dragon (12:3)?  Second, when Christ returns, will He hang out for a while-- maybe even serving as an editorial consultant on the remaining “Left Behind” books-- before initiating the series of events leading to the Apocalypse, or will He just be all about the Apocalypse?

Most important, why would Christ return before LaHaye and Jenkins have finished their work in the first place?  Wouldn’t that be, like, God giving away the ending?  I hate it when people give away the ending.  I hate it even more when omnipotent beings-- who obviously have the power to restrain themselves-- give away the ending.

In all seriousness, let’s turn back to the author, Tim LaHaye:

In an interview last week at his home in Palm Springs, Calif., however, Dr. LaHaye, 77, said that his only agenda was spreading the Gospel, by illustrating both the gruesome perdition ahead for unbelievers and the merciful salvation awaiting faithful Christians. What’s more, he said, he was merely relying on what he considers the literal meaning of the words of the Bible.

“If I invented the story, you’re right, I’d be terribly arrogant,” he said, “but I didn’t invent the story.”

. . . and let’s remember that the LaHaye-Jenkins books aren’t just blockbuster bestsellers (the first eleven installments have sold 40 million copies); they’re documents, based in fact, and spiritual guides for a lot of the people currently running our country.  These would be, of course, the people who believe that God Himself picked our current leader and has been directing our foreign policy since the attacks of September 11.

Yes, I know, you’ve heard this all before.  But then it turns out (in a related story) that God has in fact declared war on America, according to the new Hamas leader, Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi:

“We knew that Bush is the enemy of God, the enemy of Islam and Muslims,” Dr. Rantisi told several thousand Hamas supporters attending a rally at the Islamic University in Gaza City. “America declared war against God. Sharon declared war against God, and God declared war against America, Bush and Sharon.”

What’s up with this?  It sounds to me like this God guy is double-crossing us big time.  I mean, this is the very definition of treason-- whispering in LaHaye’s ear one day and Rantisi’s the next.  What a creep.  And after we went through all that trouble to put Him in the damn Pledge of Allegiance, here He goes and declares war against us.  I say we take ‘Im out.

So, to that end, I’ve joined the VFW-- for Victory over Fundamentalist Wackos at home and abroad.  Flash me a V sign if you’re with me.

UPDATE:  Readers write in and they’re not about the V-- they’re all about the S.  Yes, I did a bad bad thing-- I wrote “Book of Revelations” instead of “Book of Revelation.” Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.  You know, I could go back and fix it, but I think I’ll just leave it there . . . a Real Mistake.  Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Now get off my case already.

Posted by Michael on 03/29 at 09:26 AM
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Sunday, March 28, 2004

Let’s get this much straight. . .

. . . there is no way I can be mistaken for this guy.  It’s just not even remotely possible.  So stop bringing it up already.

TUESDAY UPDATE:  Until yesterday I had never heard of Michael Bubl?© until a former mid-1980s bandmate of mine (Michael Dean, my bassist in Baby Opaque, later of the legendary Bay Area band “Bomb") decided to needle me by asking if people had been confusing me for him.  Then I get an email from one Graeme Bristol in Bangkok, saying, “Come on now, just a little touch-up in Photoshop and, indeed, you’re a teen star!  Moonlighting on weekends.  No wonder you don’t get those papers graded in a timely fashion.  The pressures of the tour, the whining roadies, the adoring fans, the groupies, the backstage parties, the limos in the pool (no, that was that rowdy ne’er-do-well, Keith Moon).” I protested to Mr. Bristol that I did indeed return my papers in a timely fashion, but that yes, the backstage parties were beginning to take their toll, and I appreciate the sympathy.

Then today I open this week’s New Yorker and find the following finely-turned paragraph from one Sasha Frere-Jones, writing on pop phenom Norah Jones:

There are sociological explanations.  Critics point out, accurately, that young artists like Jones, who is twenty-five, and Josh Groban and Michael Bubl?© are selling soothing songs by the seashore to a much older audience.  These artists’ faith in melody and acoustic instruments ostensibly provides evidence that not all musicians below the age of thirty are getting tattooed with runic symbols and sending viruses to each other on tiny, inscrutable batphones.  Record companies have agreed to think that the older audience is their pot of gold.  This is half science-- the percentage of records being bought by listeners above the age of thirty is growing-- and half hearsay.  Older listeners are continually saddled with the calumny that they are too dumb or scared to download music for free.

Damn, I wish I’d written that bit about the runic symbols and the inscrutable batphones.  Anyway, it’s clearly Michael Bubl?© Week here at michaelberube.com, so let the backstage party begin.

Posted by Michael on 03/28 at 02:12 PM
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Saturday, March 27, 2004

Two things about Richard Clarke

Since I can’t very well link to everything he’s said in the past week (though I’d like to) or reproduce it all here (and I’d like to do that too), and since I’m now six or seven news cycles behind his initial appearance on 60 Minutes (though I did catch him on Charlie Rose on Monday from my hotel in New York), I figure I should boil this down to the simplest and most salient terms.

Thing One.  The question of whether Bush could have prevented 9/11 is a nonce question.  Yes, Bush and Cheney and Ashcroft (and Condi, especially, whose job description apparently has something to do with national security) could have paid better attention to Mr. Clarke between January and August of 2001.  But as the testimony to the 9/11 commission is panning out, it can just as easily be argued by Republicans that Clinton should’ve pursued al-Qaeda more aggressively as well (not that they would’ve supported him at the time, of course).  So the pre-9/11 question, politically, is a push-- and substantively, it involves all manner of what-ifs that don’t get to the real point, which is . . . Iraq.  Clarke’s position on Iraq completely validates everything the serious left has been saying between the fall of the Taliban and the present, namely, that military strikes against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan made sense but that the neocon obsession with Iraq has not only enmeshed the US in an occupation but has fulfilled bin Laden’s every prediction.  Clarke’s account of the pre-9/11 Bush White House is bad, yes.  But the real story lies in Clarke’s account of how the post-9/11 Bush White House treated al-Qaeda as a distraction from Obsession One, invading and occupying Iraq.  (As I said in my American Studies Association plenary address last October:  “for Cheney and Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Perle, the whole PNAC crew, it was the other way around: for them, after 9/11, Afghanistan was a distraction from the redrawing of the Middle East beginning with Iraq. . . .  For PNAC, al-Qaeda itself was not even so much a pretext as a distraction. Iraq was Item A from the very start, indeed from the founding PNAC memo of 1998, regardless of who was actually responsible for September 11.") Many thanks to Richard Clarke for bearing me out on this.

Thing Two.  Anyone who’s still an ardent Bush supporter-- after Paul O’Neill, after Clarke, after the debacle of “No Child Left Behind” (and this covers Bush’s foreign and domestic policy, all of it) will simply not be persuaded by anything, anything between now and November.  There’s no point even trying.  Even if we were to come up with photos of Bush having (unsafe!) sex with an intern, at this point, it wouldn’t matter:  within two days the talking points would be out, and all the toadies and lackies would be repeating them.  “The intern was a Democrat and a disappointed office-seeker,” Bill Frist would say.  “Democrats have declared themselves to be the party of hypocrisy,” George Will would write.  “When William Jefferson Clinton had his little dalliance with Miss Lewinsky, no one raised an eyebrow, and the GOP leadership stood behind the President in the fight against genocide and terrorism.  But now that Bush has demonstrated that he, too, is human, the far left is calling for his head.” So don’t even bother going to photoshop on this one.  There is nothing you can do.  There is nothing you can say. After Clarke, Bush’s supporters will stand by their man to the last-- even if he’s found guilty of the murder of Vince Foster.

Posted by Michael on 03/27 at 03:49 PM
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Hey, was that a hiatus?

One week without a new post, well, yes, I guess you could call that a hiatus.  Add to that the fact that the week of March 15-19 was full of half-posts and as-yet-unfulfilled promises, and you’d have to conclude that I’ve hit that deadly part of the semester when it suddenly becomes impossible to find fifteen spare minutes in a day.

The weird thing is that the real crunch time was mid-February to mid-March, during which I had to write two talks and one essay while teaching and parenting and travelling on three consecutive weekends (which is quite clearly a violation of the human rights provisions of the Articles of Academic Coupledom-- many thanks to Janet for holding down the fort).  Then, over “spring” “break” (it never got over 30 degrees, and it wasn’t a break) I graded my undergraduate essays and got ready for a pair of talks at Columbia . . . and then, finally, this week I was free! 

But not really.  I was four weeks behind in responding to mini-papers from my graduate seminar, and for some reason I had no trouble blogging when I was supposed to be writing my talks and my essay, but this week I simply couldn’t leap back into the blogosphere until I’d caught up with my own seminar.  But (pant, pant) I did manage to catch up-- in fact, this evening I managed to clean the damn refrigerator.  If that isn’t caught up, I don’t know what is-- oh yes, the cars need to be cleaned inside and out after a long nasty winter.  Curses.  Then again, Janet and I have managed to go dancing three times in the past week, which is roughly three times more than we’d managed between the years 2001-03, and she just happens to be a fabulous dancer, so it’s not like I’m devoting all my time to Good Works.

Anyway, I really will get back to current affairs and matters academic this week, and I’ll even make good on a couple of past promises, too.  In the meantime, I suggest you visit Adam Kotsko’s site and check the zone-flooding Adam et al. have orchestrated in response to one of those delightful professors who tells his students that gay marriage is a contradiction in terms because 50 percent of gay men have over 500 sexual partners, and so forth.  Flood!  Flood!

Posted by Michael on 03/27 at 02:04 PM
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