Political Football

This is a piece of James Taranto’s “Best of the Web” 12/17/08 produced by the Wall Street Journal online – a particularly good day – and good read…

Foot in Mouth
In the twilight of his presidency, George W. Bush gave Iraqis a final opportunity to thank him for liberating their country. But as Agence France-Presse reports, one Iraqi “journalist,” Muntazer al-Zaidi, seems to have preferred the old regime:

Zaidi jumped up as Bush was holding a press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on Sunday, shouted “It is the farewell kiss, you dog” and threw two shoes at the US leader.

The shoes missed after Bush ducked and Zaidi was immediately wrestled to the ground by security guards and frogmarched from the room.

Zaidi seems to have borrowed the idea from some hippie in Oregon, who in February 2005, as the Associated Press reported at the time, tossed a shoe at Richard Perle, a former assistant defense secretary. Perle was debating Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee and a proponent of the Iraqi status quo ante, at Portland’s Pacific University. The unidentified footwear-flinging freak shouted “Liar! Liar!” at Perle.

As for Zaidi’s heel-hurling, AFP reports it was “hailed by many in the Arab world as an ideal parting gift to the unpopular US president,” and it actually quotes Arabs praising this silly action:

“Throwing the shoes at Bush was the best goodbye kiss ever . . . it expresses how Iraqis and other Arabs hate Bush,” wrote Musa Barhoumeh, editor of Jordan’s independent Al-Gahd Arabic newspaper. . . .

“All US soldiers who have used their shoes to humiliate Iraqis should be brought to justice, along with their US superiors, including Bush,” said Ali Qeisi, head of a Jordan-based Iraqi rights group, calling for Zaidi’s release.

“The flying shoe speaks more for Arab public opinion than all the despots/puppets that Bush meets with during his travels in the Middle East,” said Asad Abu Khalil, a popular Lebanese-American blogger and professor at Stanislaus University in California at angryarab.blogspot.com.

If these comments are representative, they tell you something about the intellectual impoverishment of Arab culture (and of the culture of American higher education, habitat of both Asad Abu Khalil and, one presumes, the Portland Perle projectile perpetrator). Zaidi is a hero in the view of these men for his childish, impotent and potentially (though not actually) harmful expression of unreasoning rage.

Meanwhile, AFP reports that “Saddam Hussein’s former lawyer Khalil al-Dulaimi said he was forming a team to defend Zaidi and that around 200 lawyers, including Americans, had offered their services for free.” Of course Dulaimi did not end up doing all that well by his last high-profile client, who as far as we know is still dead. If Zaidi is smart, he’ll hold out for a white-shoe firm.

Uday and the Lions
Don’t get Thomas Schaller wrong. He misses Saddam Hussein as much as the next Salon writer does:

Look: Bush has wreaked havoc on Iraq. Death, dismemberment, disfiguring, displacement and political disarray are all part of his tragic legacy. Al-Zaidi has many legitimate reasons to be angry.

Yet there is this caveat:

But his actions and the subsequent lionizing of him are not helpful.

Somehow this reminded us of a July 2003 report in the Times of London:

A chief executioner to one of Saddam’s sons has revealed how he helped drag two victims into a cage to be devoured by lions.

The executioner said that he was ordered to seize two 19-year-old students and take them to a farm of Uday Hussein, Saddam’s oldest son who was killed by American forces last week.

As soon as they arrived the students were dragged to a cage containing the lions and forced inside. “I saw the head of the first student literally come off his body with the first bite,” he said. He then had to stand and watch the animals devour the two young men: “By the time they were finished there was little left but for the bones and bits and pieces of unwanted flesh.”

He was told later that the two young men “had competed with Uday where some young ladies were concerned.”

“Lionizing” meant something quite different back when Saddam was in power.

The Neediest Cases
It’s easy to think of the economic downturn in abstract terms: the rising unemployment rate, the falling Dow Jones Industrial Average. But behind these numbers is a great deal of human suffering, and reporters at the New York Times have been laboring heroically to tell the stories of the people who are hurting. Here is one such story:

Jodi Hamilton began her senior year of high school in Woodcliff Lake, N.J., this fall on the usual prosperous footing. Her parents were providing a weekly allowance of $100 and paying for private Pilates classes, as well as a physics tutor who reported once a week to their 4,000-square-foot home.

But in October, Jodi’s mother lost her job managing a huge dental practice in the Bronx, then landed one closer to home that requires more hours for less money. Pilates was dropped, along with takeout sushi dinners, and Jodi’s allowance, which covers lunch during the week, slipped to $60. Instead of having a tutor, Jodi has become a tutor, earning $150 a week through that and baby-sitting.

“I just thought it would be responsible to get a job and have my own money so my parents didn’t have to pay for everything,” said Jodi, who is 17. “I always like to be saving up for something that I have my eye on–a ring, a necklace, a handbag.”

We cried because we had no Kobe beef until we met a girl who had no sushi.

Accountability Journalism
This is what now passes for “news” at the Associated Press:

When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, global warming was a slow-moving environmental problem that was easy to ignore. Now it is a ticking time bomb that President-elect Barack Obama can’t avoid.

Since Clinton’s inauguration, summer Arctic sea ice has lost the equivalent of Alaska, California and Texas. The 10 hottest years on record have occurred since Clinton’s second inauguration. Global warming is accelerating. Time is close to running out, and Obama knows it. . . .

Mother Nature, of course, is oblivious to the federal government’s machinations. Ironically, 2008 is on pace to be a slightly cooler year in a steadily rising temperature trend line. Experts say it’s thanks to a La Nina weather variation. While skeptics are already using it as evidence of some kind of cooling trend, it actually illustrates how fast the world is warming.

USA Today has a smart op-ed piece today noting the similarity between global warmism and religious myths of apocalypse. There seems to be a basic human need to believe the end is nigh. Perhaps it somehow diverts us from contemplating our own inevitable demise.

Biden Brings Back the Bucket
If the idea of having Joe Biden a heartbeat away from the presidency worries you, this report from Politico will offer some reassurance–at least as long as Barack Obama’s heart continues to beat:

Joe Biden is laying plans to significantly shrink the role of the vice presidency in Barack Obama’s White House, according to an official familiar with his thinking. . . .

Biden will not begin every day with his own intelligence briefing before sitting in on the president’s. He will not always be the last person Obama speaks to before making a decision.

He also will not, as a transition official calls it, operate a “shadow government” within an Obama administration. . . .

Biden’s goal of restoring the office to its “traditional role” is something he and Obama agreed on before the Delaware senator was named to the Democratic ticket, the transition official said.

As part of that understanding, Biden is unlikely to have a specific docket of issues.

The traditional role of the vice presidency was best described by John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner, vice president during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first two terms, who said the position was “not worth a bucket of warm spit.” (Actually, rather than “spit,” FDR’s No. 2 used a vulgar term for No. 1.)

Although it may be that Obama is looking to uphold another tradition, from his hometown of Chicago: no-show jobs.

Trackback This Post | Subscribe to the comments through RSS Feed