BuzzMachine

I’d like to thank…
: The Pulitzers have been announced and the big guys trounced the rest of the industry. The NY Times took most, winning for the Nation Challenged section, for photography, and for Thomas Friedman; the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and LA Times took most of the rest. Good for them all.

If I ran a paper, I wouldn’t even enter these contests. In most years — when there isn’t an earth-shattering event such as 9.11 to give the big guys with the big resources the edge — The Pulitzers and other prizes skew journalism away from the audience, motivating papers to create long, boring, self-important pieces that are aimed at fellow journalists, not at the people who buy and read and need newspapers.

4/5ths
: I keep telling Nick Denton I want him to hire me when he starts his next company. Here’s why:

I intend my next company to be different. No more late nights. No more monomaniac workaholics. Less heat, more light. If I keep my nerve, I

Objects
: The squeegee that saved lives in an elevator of the World Trade Center on 9.11 is being donated to the Smithsonian. “It’s collected not as a squeegee handle itself,” the curator tells the Washington Post, “but as evidence of life’s affirmation.”

If you never read the amazing story of this by Jim Dwyer in the New York Times, read it now.

How does ‘King George’ sound?
: Robert Cooper, a British diplomat, argues in the Guardian that what the world needs now is a new form of colonialism.

The troublespots in the world, he says, are “premodern states — often former colonies — whose failures have led to a Hobbesian war of all against all: countries such as Somalia and, until recently, Afghanistan.” He also lists Chechnya and other former Soviet lands, every major drug-producing country in the world, major parts of South America, Burma, and much of Africa. Their threat:

The pre-modern state may be too weak even to secure its own territory, let alone pose a threat internationally, but it can provide a base for non-state actors who may represent a danger to the postmodern world. If drug, crime, or terrorist syndicates use pre-modern bases for attacks on the more orderly parts of the world, then the organised states may have to respond. If they become too dangerous for established states to tolerate, it is possible to imagine a defensive imperialism. The West’s response to Afghanistan can be seen in this light.

How should we deal with the pre-modern chaos? To become involved in a zone of chaos is risky; if the intervention is prolonged it may become unsustainable in public opinion; if the intervention is unsuccessful it may be damaging to the government that ordered it. But the risks of letting countries rot, as the West did Afghanistan, may be even greater.

Right. Zone of chaos = quagmire = Vietnam = death = political defeat = military defeat. So what’s Cooper’s solution?

What is needed is a new kind of imperialism, one compatible with human rights and cosmopolitan values: an imperialism which aims to bring order and organisation but which rests today on the voluntary principle.

We already have voluntary imperialism of the global economy through institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank. These multilateral institutions provide help to states wishing to find their way back into the global economy and into the virtuous circle of investment and prosperity. In return they make demands which, they hope, address the political and economic failures that have contributed to the original need for assistance.

The second form of postmodern imperialism might be called the imperialism of neighbours. Instability in your neighbourhood poses threats which no state can ignore.

But terrorism is precisely what makes this impossible. So with all good intention, we take on an imperialistic, colonial, avuncular relationship with Afghanistan and Palestine and a couple of former Soviet states and a few fun spots in South America and Africa and what would we get for our expense and trouble and risk? Attacks, that’s what.

Nice try.

Busy, busy, busy
: Oprah’s just so darned busy. She can’t do her book club anymore because she’s so darned busy. (Jonathan Franzen: Stand down.). She can’t go to Afghanistan because she’s so darned busy.

I say that Martha Stewart should be the new Oprah.

Oprah’s just too darned busy to be Oprah.

Can’t tell the players without…
: A Who’s Who of murderous slime.

Biting the hand that feeds
: William Quick bites the hand that feeds his blog, moving back to Blogspot (to get the free bandwidth) but complaining about Blogger. Bloggers are tough customers.

Poop
: Jamie Lee Curtis gets a patent on a new diaper.

There’s a reason they call it ‘insta’
: Says David Warren:

“What do you make of Bush’s speech? Cave in? Or prelude to something bigger?”

This was the question flashed at me by an American blogger within seconds of President Bush concluding his address on Thursday. The speed of modern thought is astonishing, impressive.

The answer here.

Dear Mr. Ayatollah
: Andrea Harris has nice things to say about my Age of Emotions post, below (of which I am rather proud, if I do say so myself) and then she one-ups me. I won’t quote it so I keep my PG rating.

Blogrolling
: Reid Stott tackles the same issues I tackled in my post on the Age of Emotions (below) and the same ones Matt Welch did in a good post. Read them all.

: Eric Olsen has thoughtful posts on whether there are one or two wars in the Middle East — a war for Palestinian sovereignty and/or a war of murderous Islamic fundamentalist anti-Semites. Are they one and the same? Read him, Norman Podhoretz, Amos Oz, and Charles Johnson on the topic.

: Read Charles Johnson on many topics.

: Virginia Postrel did a far better job than I could have finding the bull in Norah Vincent‘s thin-as-electrons analysis of blogs as conservative voices that tweak big, liberal media. I’m media. I’m blog. What does that make me? Confused? [via known liberal Matt Welch}

: Tal G takes a stroll in Israel and he sees: “2 camera crews (I think one was British; the other spoke French) .. and a car with multiple Danish flag stickers and “TV” written with masking tape on the side. This latter trick (the “TV” thing) is done I think by most journalists that drive around the Palestinian territories. At the risk of oversimplifiying, it’s code for “don’t shoot me”. ”

: Jacob Shwirtz on why we should rebuild at WTC: “I would rather be able to bring my children to a redeveloped World Trade Center (with appropriate historical markings, etc.), than a World Trade Cemetery.”

: Jim Treacher has found his blog voice, all right. He gives big-time Salon a better punchline for the George W Bush meets Ozzy Osbourne for dinner story: ” ‘Perhaps Ozzy and George could share their ’70s memory.’ Because it’s singular, see? Between the two of them? Okay, but it was worth every penny you paid for it.”

: I asked whether there were any pro-Palestinian blogs (since every blog I see has the good sense to be against terrorism). Here are a few from readers: Electronic Intifada, Common Dreams. That’s all? Majority rules.

: The new Rossi is up. That always makes me happy. This time, it’s about her feeling old. Since she’s probably about half my age, that makes me feel doubly old.

: Matthew Yglesias finally has larger TYPE. I was afraid his font was just another young person’s way to make me feel old.

: I’m only 47. Yes, only.

: I wish I had time to read half of what den Beste writes. But I don’t. I’m getting old. I have only so much time left.

: Via Relapsed Catholic, why do people say Jesus H. Christ? “The H stands for Harold, as in, “Our Father, who art in heaven, Harold be thy name” (snort).”

: Mark Steyn is great and note that bloggers are not bigoted about print wretches; we all love him. Here’s why: “All civilized people can agree that killing Jews is wrong. Well, killing six million of them 60 years ago is wrong. Killing a couple of dozen every 48 hours or so, that’s a different matter. The official position of Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister, speaking from his beach in Barbados, is that Israel’s response to the Passover massacre is “disproportionate.”” Read on.

: I, too, miss Thomas Nephew but fear not; I’ve heard from him; he’s safe but busy.

: Great Welch post on the insecurity of the gatekeepers.

Iranian criminals
: In the Tehran Times, Ayatollah Khamenei says America is in league with “Zionist crimes” and calls for an oil embargo against Israel and its allies (read: us). It gets better/worse:

On Bush’s calling the Palestinians “terrorist” the Leader asked, “Can a nation which has been a victim of Israeli suppression and crimes for years and sends its young people out to defend them be called terrorist?… Referring to the failure of Adolph Hitler’s Nazism and the U.S. defeat in Vietnam, the Leader said that the U.S. logic of the bully was doomed to failure too.

So this is Iranian logic: A nation that straps bombs to its young to murder cannot be called terrorist but we can be likened to Hitler? What oil-soaked slime they are.

The Age of Emotions
: The keyword of this war has become “humiliation.”

In their often-pathetic effort to find tit-for-tat criticism of the Israelis for retaliating against Palestinian suicide-murderers, the Pope, The New York Times, and now even the President have complained that Israeli is “humliating” Palestinians and have urged them to stop.

Humiliation is suddenly a sin akin to murder — even sending your own children to murder, even accepting money for their deaths. In what world is humiliation equivalent to terrorism? In a world where emotions matter most.

It’s not happening just in the Middle East, of course. Emotions rule America.

This is now a country where politicians and artists and educators and business people who “offend” can come under attack from anyone — leftie PC harpies or rightie fundamentalist loons — and lose their jobs.

Listen to the streets, where “disrespect” is a verb and a justification for a fight.

“Humiliation,” “offense,” “disrespect” — these are only emotions. But we’ve made them real. We’ve made them weapons.

Calling Dr. Freud! Calling Dr. Freud! Look what you have done:

A century of therapy and psychoshit has brought us to the Age of Emotions, when feelings — not intelligence, not reason, not law, not morality, not ethics — but self-centered feelings can drive political discourse and even war.

It’s time to take the world off the couch and off its meds and wake up to the obvious: Terrorism and murder and terrorists and murderers are permanently evil and they don’t get time off that sentence because their feelings are hurt; they can’t use that as an excuse to commit their evils.

To hell with the emotions of the terrorists. And I don’t give a damn if that offends you.

Instapundit v. Economist
: I side with Instapundit. Glenn Reynolds is quite right when he complains about this line in The Economist:

Yet Palestine does not fit the September 11th template. For this is terrorism harnessed to a deserving cause: the independent statehood that America itself has taken pains to say it supports.

There is no mitigating factor that justifies terrorism.

Now that we are a victim of mass terrorism, we should understand that in our very soul.

I even got into a fight with my minister about this and he recalled it just this weekend: He, like others, says that the conditions the Palestinians have lived in and their goal for a state are sympathetic. But that has absolutely no relation to their actions of late. Can anything justify selling your children to murder? Could anything justify the Holocaust. Of course not.

Spade meet spade
: Am I blind? Perhaps I just have a narrow world view but I can’t find one blogger who is siding with the Palestinians against the Israelis. (Can you?)

So how come Bush is finding it so hard to call a terrorist a terrorist?

I feel a need to restate the obvious, following George Orwell’s “famous dicta” as paraphrased by Norman Podhoretz (see below): “There comes a point when the primary duty of an honest man is to restate the obvious.”

The painfully obvious:

Terrorists are the enemy. Terrorists are our enemy. Period.

Newspeak
: In the Jerusalem Post, Norman Podhoretz takes George Bush to task for waffling not just on the politics of the war in the Middle East but also on the language of it. Never, says Podhoretz…

…did he permit himself to be bamboozled by the idea so dear to so many denizens of those communities that “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Taking the opposite position, he declared repeatedly that terrorism was itself evil, under any and all circumstances. From which it followed that there could be no such thing as a good terrorist.

Right. It has become known as the Bush doctrine: a terrorist is a terrorist; anyone who harbors a terrorist is a terrorist. Unless, apparently, his name is Yasser.

Podhoretz says it with greater subtlety. He complains about Bush falling prey to the phrase “circle of violence” to describe what’s happening over there in hell now.

A linguistic child of the concept of moral equivalence, the words “cycle of violence” allow of no distinction between terrorist attacks and retaliation against them. They allow of no distinction between the deliberate murder of civilians and the inadvertent harm done to civilians in a military action. And in the context of the “Arab-Israeli conflict” (itself a deceptive label for what should actually be called “the Arab war against Israel”), to speak of a “cycle of violence” is to conjure up a Hatfield-McCoy type of feud between equally irrational parties….

Bush’s occasional surrender to the “cycle of violence” cliche has, in short, marked the limit of his power to resist political speech that defends the indefensible, and befogged the incandescent clarity about terrorism he began to achieve after September 11.

Podhoretz says Bush is leaving it to Donald Rumsfeld to be honest and blunt, as he was just the other day

Sounding like Bush when he had been at his best, Rumsfeld declared: “Murderers are not martyrs. Targeting civilians is immoral, whatever the excuse. Terrorists have declared war on civilization, and states like Iran, Iraq, and Syria are inspiring and financing a culture of political murder and suicide bombing.”

Amen. Amen. Amen.

Bush’s word waffling worried Podhoretz greatly:

As a Jew, I tremble for the harm that may come to Israel through President Bush’s loss of clarity — and with it his ability to restate the obvious. But as an American who believes with all his heart and soul in the necessity of my country’s war against terrorism, and in the justice of our cause, I also worry about the moral and intellectual and strategic damage done to that cause by the refusal to face the plain truth that the despots who tyrannize over most of the Muslim world hate the United States, “the Great Satan,” even more than they hate Israel, “the Little Satan.”

The pen can be mightier than the sword. It can also be weaker.

Is Yasser Arafat a terrorist?
: That is the simple question of the day.

I just watched an anchor on FoxNews go ballistic on the point.

The pressure is on from the right to get George Bush to hold to his own Bush doctrine and declare that those who harbor (or sponsor or breed) terrorists are terrorists.

The diplomatic, strategic, and tactical complications are obvious.

But the line is clear: We were attacked by terrorists. Terrorists are our enemy now, too.

Is Yasser Arafat a terrorist?

Absolut pundit
: He‘s back.