smCOLUMN NINETY-FOUR, JULY 1, 2003
(Copyright © 2003 The Blacklisted Journalist)
SECTION
THIRTEEN
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sm
COLUMN
NINETY-FOUR,
JULY 1, 2003
(Copyright © 2003 The Blacklisted Journalist)
* * *
BY MAUREEN DOWD
* * *
1. AMERICA'S IMPERIALISTS: HYPOCRISY
AND APPLE PIE
Subject: NYTimes.com Article: Delusions of Power
Date:
From: "venire" venire@znet.com
To: info@blacklistedjournalist.com
April 30, 2003
Hypocrisy & Apple Pie
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
Richard Perle is at ease with neo-imperial swagger.
At the White House Correspondents Association dinner on
Saturday night, the Pentagon's Prince of Darkness lectured Hans Blix as if he
were a colonial subject, instructing him on why an invasion of Iraq had been
justified even though no weapons of mass destruction had yet been found.
Asked afterward how Mr. Blix had reacted, Mr. Perle replied
merrily: "He's a Swedish disarmament lawyer. He's used to a lot of
abuse."
When one partygoer told Mr. Perle that she would miss the
buzzy, standing-room-only "black coffee briefings" on Iraq held by
hard-liners at the American Enterprise Institute, he suggested the neo-cons
might hold another round.
"We'll have green tea briefings on North Korea,"
he said slyly.
On Fox News, Bill Kristol spoke up for a more brazen imperial attitude. "We need to err on the side of being strong," he said.
"And if people want to say we're an imperial power,
fine. If three years from now, we have beaten back these threats and have a
decent regime there, it'll be worth it."
But imperial flair is rare. America is a furtive empire,
afraid to raise its flag or linger too long or even call things by their real names. The U.S. is having a hard time figuring out how to
wield its colonial power, how to balance collegiality with coercion, how to
savor the fruits of imperialism without acknowledging its imperialist hubris.
When Kofi Annan called the Americans in Iraq an
"occupying power" last week, Bush officials freaked. Maybe they would
have preferred Honored Guests.
The Pentagon once more outgunned the State Department this
week, changing the name of a new governing body of Iraqis from "interim
authority" to "transitional government" to signal that the U.S.
would leave quickly and give its Armani-clad puppet, Ahmad Chalabi, an advantage. But it doesn't matter what
euphemistic name is used; if there are too many militant Shiite clerics
involved, Rummy, the real authority, will tell them to take their camels and
vamoose.
"America is the empire that dare not speak its
name," Niall Ferguson, the Oxford professor who wrote "Empire,"
told a crowd at the Council on Foreign Relations here on Monday. He believes
that America is so invested in its "creation myth," breaking away from
a wicked empire, that Americans will always be self-deceiving " and even
self-defeating " imperialists.
"The great thing about the American empire is that so
many Americans disbelieve in its existence," he said. "Ever since the
annexation of Texas and invasion of the Philippines, the U.S. has systematically
pursued an imperial policy.
"It's simply a suspension of disbelief by Americans.
They think they're so different that when they have bases in foreign
territories, it's not an empire. When they invade sovereign territory, it's not
an empire."
Asked in an interview about Viceroy Jay Garner's promise
that U.S. military overlords would "leave fairly rapidly," Mr.
Ferguson replied: "I'm hoping he's lying. Successful empires must be based
on hypocrisy. The Americans can say they're doing things in the name of freedom,
liberty and apple pie. But they must build a civil society and revive the
economy before they have elections.
"From 1882 until 1922, the British promised the
international community 66 times that they would leave Egypt, but they never
did. If they leave Iraq to its own devices, the whole thing will blow up."
Afghanistan offers cautionary lessons. It was the
abandonment by the U.S. after Afghanistan's war in 1989 with the Soviet Union
that stoked the fury of Al Qaeda. The regime of the American puppet Hamid Karzai
is still perilously fragile.
As Carlotta Gall wrote in The Times last weekend, after two
U.S. soldiers were killed by Afghan rebels: "In a very real sense the war
here has not ended. . . . Nearly every day, there are killings, explosions,
shootings and targeted attacks on foreign aid workers, Afghan officials and
American forces, as well as continuing feuding between warlords."
Exiled Taliban leaders have called for a holy war against
the "occupying forces." The religious police are once more harassing
and beating women over dress and behavior, and schools that take little girls
are being attacked and threatened.
Until we can get democracy stabilized in our new colonies,
Mr. Ferguson offers two words of advice: "Better puppets."
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company ##
* * *
2. THE ICEMAN COMETH
Subject: NYTimes.com Article: The Iceman
Cometh
Date:
From: "venire" venire@znet.com
To: info@blacklistedjournalist.com
May 4, 2003
The Iceman Cometh
By MAUREEN DOWD
LONG BEACH, Calif. " The tail hook caught the last cable,
jerking the fighter jet from 150 m.p.h. to zero in two seconds.
Out bounded the cocky, rule-breaking, daredevil flyboy, a
man navigating the Highway to the Danger Zone, out along the edges where he was
born to be, the further on the edge, the hotter the intensity.
He flashed that famous all-American grin as he swaggered
around the deck of the aircraft carrier in his olive flight suit, ejection
harness between his legs, helmet tucked under his arm, awestruck crew crowding
around. Maverick was back, cooler and hotter than ever, throttling to the max
with joystick politics.
This time Maverick didn't just nail a few bogeys and do a
4G inverted dive with a MIG-28 at a range of two meters. This time the Top Gun
wasted a couple of nasty regimes, and promised this was just the beginning. Mav
swaggered across the deck to high-five his old gang: his wise flight instructor,
Viper; his amiable sidekick, Goose; his chiseled rival, Iceman.
MAVERICK: I feel the need . . .
GOOSE: The need for speed!
ICEMAN: You're really a cowboy.
MAVERICK: What's your problem?
ICEMAN: Your ego's writing checks your body can't cash. You
didn't need to take all that water survival training in the White House swimming
pool. The Abraham Lincoln was practically docked, only 30 miles off shore, after
10 months at sea. They had to steer it away from land for you. If you'd waited a
few hours, you could've just walked aboard. You and Rove are making a gorgeous
campaign video on the Pacific to cast you as the warrior president for 2004, but
back on shore, things are ugly. The California economy's bleeding, even worse
than other states'. When you took office, the unemployment rate in San Jose was
1.7 percent; by February of this year, it had risen to 8.5 percent. Your
motorcade didn't bother to stop in the depressed high-tech corridor in Silicon
Valley. Every time you cut taxes and raise deficits while you're roaring ahead
with a pre-emptive military policy, you're unsafe. National unemployment goes up
to 6 percent and you just hammer Congress to pass your tax cut. The only guys
sure about their jobs these days are defense contractors connected to
Republicans and the Carlyle Group, which owns half of the defense plant you visited here. You're dangerous.
MAVERICK: That's right, Iceman. I am dangerous.
ICEMAN: You can fly, Maverick. But you, Cheney and Rummy are strutting around on a victory tour when you haven't found Osama or Saddam or WMD; you haven't figured out how you're going to stop tribal warfare and religious fanaticism and dangerous skirmishes with our soldiers; you don't yet know how to put Afghanistan and Iraq back together so that a lot of people over there don't hate us. And why can't you stop saying that getting rid of Saddam removed "an ally" of Al Qaeda and was payback for 9/11?
You know we just needed to jump somebody in that part of
the world.
MAVERICK: That part of the world is what I call a target
rich environment, sorta like a Democratic debate. Hey, Miss Iceman, why don't
you head to the Ladies Room? John Kerry and John Edwards are already there,
fixin' their hair all pretty-like. Howard Dean's with 'em, trying on a dress,
and Kucinich is hemming it for him.
VIPER: You're arrogant, son. I like that in a pilot. You're
a hell of an instinctive flyer. You're a lot like your old man. He was a
natural, heroic son of a gun. I flew with him in his torpedo bomber in '44. Is
that why you fly the way you do? Trying to prove something by doing the
opposite? He tried to get deficits down. He did it right. And he knew you had to
have wingmen among the allies. You can't buzz the tower of the world every time
you go up. You can't just jettison the Top Gun global rules of engagement.
MAVERICK: Sure I can. Like greed, aggression is good. Aggression has marked the upward surge of mankind. Aggression breeds patriotism, and patriotism curbs dissent. Aggression has made Democrats cower, the press purr and the world quake. Aggression? you mark my words " will not only save humanity, but it will soon color all the states Republican red. Mission accomplished.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company ##
* * *
3. JOUSTING WITH ALI G
Subject: NYTimes.com Article: Is You Wicked?
Date:
From: "venire" venire@znet.com
To: info@blacklistedjournalist.com
May 7, 2003
Is You Wicked?
By MAUREEN DOWD
James Baker, the
former secretary of state who helped make two Bushes president, the first by
sniping at Massachusetts, the second by
snatching away Florida, is an extremely careful man.
A dignified diplomat with a deep fear of ridicule, Mr.
Baker always keeps his suit jacket and his public utterances buttoned.
That is why I was dumbfounded one recent night to see him
being interviewed on HBO by a hip-hop guy wearing fatigues, shades, a skullcap
and bling-bling and talking like a British gangsta/Rasta rapper.
The young man was asking a skeptical and increasingly
impatient Mr. Baker whether it was wise for Iraq and Iran to have such similar
names.
YOUNG MAN: Isn't there a real danger that someone give a
message over the radio to one of them fighter pilots, saying, `Bomb Ira??'
and the geezer doesn't heard it properly and bombs Iran instead of Iraq?
MR. BAKER: No danger.
YOUNG MAN: How does you make countries do stuff you want?
MR. BAKER: Well, the way you deal with countries on foreign
policy issues . . . is you deal with carrots and sticks.
YOUNG MAN: But what country is gonna want carrots, even if
it's like a million tons of carrots that you're giving over there??
MR. BAKER: Well, carrots " I'm not using the term
literally. You might send foreign aid " money, money.
YOUNG MAN: Well, money's better than carrots. Even if a
country love carrots and that is, like, their favorite national food, if they
get given them??
MR. BAKER: Well, don't get hung up on carrots. That's just
a figure of speech.
YOUNG MAN: So would you ever send carrots? You know, is
there any situation??
MR. BAKER: No, no.
YOUNG MAN: What about if there was a famine?
MR. BAKER: Carrots, themselves? No.
The interview was a hilarious classic in the seldom-seen
subgenre of international relations humor.
Mr. Baker could outfox Al Gore but not Ali G. The
31-year-old British satirist, whose new HBO show has already become a cult
favorite among high school and college kids, came to America to do the same sort
of interviews he did in England, putting unwitting V.I.P.'s on the spot.
With his white-gangsta-rapper-wannabe persona, Sacha Baron
Cohen, a brilliant graduate of Cambridge, sends up the vacuity of the culture in
an era when putting people on TV who attract the right demographic is more
important than putting people on TV who know what they're talking about.
But the interviews depend on the subject's not recognizing
Ali G or even realizing that he's a comedian.
Ali G scammed Mr. Baker and others into granting interviews
by sending them flattering letters on fancy stationery from United World
Productions, inviting them to be part of a six-part series for Channel 4 on
British TV aimed at explaining the U.S. Constitution to young people.
With his crew, Mr. Cohen went into Mr. Baker's conference
room in a dark suit and put on his garish Ali G outfit before Mr. Baker came in.
As in England, Mr. Cohen has left a trail of irritated
interviewees in his wacky wake.
Marlin Fitzwater had his doubts when Ali G showed up
wearing a red jumpsuit and high-tops and asked inane questions. Like Mr. Baker,
Mr. Fitzwater figured that Ali G was dressing for his "hippie"
audience. But he ended the interview after Ali G asked him whether Hillary
Clinton drank "from the fairy cup."
"I said, `You're an idiot,' " Mr. Fitzwater
recalled. "I'd never been lied to like that. I was two steps away from
calling the sheriff."
Donald Trump, who walked out of an interview when Ali G
tried to pitch the idea of a glove to eat ice cream cones with, recalled:
"I thought he was seriously retarded. It was a total con job. But my
daughter, Ivanka, saw it and thought it was very cool."
James Woolsey was good-natured when Ali G brought up the
grassy knoll and asked, "Who shot J. R."" Richard Thornburgh was
patient when Ali G misinterpreted the meaning of hung juries. And Brent
Scowcroft didn't flinch when Ali G asked him, "Did they ever catch the
people who sent Tampax through the mail?"
"It was anthrax," Mr. Scowcroft corrected
pleasantly.
Ali G is wicked. And to him, that's a compliment.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company ##
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