Monday,
March 7 2005
THE VISION THING: In
an otherwise thoughtfully argued piece, Fareed Zakaria claims that
Bush's
Middle East 'vision thing' is a product of his ignorance:
"Bush's
capacity to imagine a different Middle East may actually be
related to his relative ignorance of the region. Had he traveled
to the Middle East and seen its many dysfunctions, he might
have been disheartened. Freed from looking at the day-to-day
realities, Bush maintained a vision of what the region could
look like."
Personally,
I think it was the sight of two fully loaded jetliners disappearing
into the sides of the twin towers that drove Bush's "capacity
to imagine a different Middle East," not some speculative
assertion that he didn't have a clue about what was happening
on the ground in the Arab world.
Still, Zakaria's
point may help explain why some liberals from the newly self-styled
"reality-based
community" have never quite been able to get their heads
wrapped around a push for democracy in the region.
EXPORTING
NONSENSE: One thing I've noticed from spending a lot
of time on the international op-ed pages recently is that some
of the worst anti-American sentiment you'll find doesn't come
from the native columnists but from "special" guest
contributors from America. More often than not these people hail
from the academic left.
One of the
worst examples I've seen is this
piece by Joseph P. Lawrence, Professor of Philosophy from
Holy Cross, appearing last month in the Turkish newspaper Zaman.
The article is an abomination and a tour de force of moral relativism.
In addition to calling the pursuit of a protective missile defense
system "demonic" and "beyond even the wildest fantasy
of Hitler", Lawrence peddles this absurdity:
Freedom,
we must remember, is nothing if it is not the possibility of
both good and evil. How else can one defend God in the shadow
of Auschwitz but in that most traditional manner: He has left
us free? As ardently as we desire to destroy the tyrant, God
has let him be. To conduct lives that reflect the goodness of
God requires the fulfillment of an unattainable imperative:
"love thy enemy." For that reason alone, no earthly
power has a right to invoke the authority of God. Indeed, what
is that invocation other than the proof that evil can become
real, regardless of whether its face is that of some foreign
Ayatollah or of the President of the United States of America?
We have been warned to beware of the false messiah. It is a
warning we should take seriously.
Is it any
wonder America has such a difficult time battling world opinion
when some of our own citizens are busy helping to export this
kind of nonsense around the globe?
STONECIPHER'S KERIK PROBLEM: First Bernie Kerik pulled
his nomination to be Homeland Security Chief because of a nanny
problem that had nothing to do with a nanny. Now the The
Washington Post reports that Harry Stonecipher, the CEO of
Boeing, has been forced to resign due to an affair with a female
employee that was "inconsistent" with the company's
code of conduct. Except, as the Post notes:
"The
investigation determined the relationship was consensual and
had no effect on the conduct of the company's business,"
according to the statement. The woman, the statement said, did
not report directly to Stonecipher.
However,
"the Board concluded that the facts reflected poorly on
Harry's judgment and would impair his ability to lead the company,"
Platt said in the statement.
In
a conference call with analysts and reporters, Platt said the
affair lasted a few weeks after the first of the year. The affair
itself was not a violation of the company's code of conduct
and the internal investigation did not find Stonecipher influenced
the female employee's career or salary, he said. Nor was the
female asked to resign.
But
the investigation, which included correspondence between the
two, did show that Stonecipher showed poor judgment in a way
that could cause embarrassment to the company, Platt said.
A consensual
affair that didn't violate company policy and didn't include harassment?
Stonecipher is married, so obviously he's a cad. Still, Boeing
is either setting a new standard by delving into and making moral
judgments about the personal lives of its executives or this is
a convenient excuse to toss Stonecipher overboard for some other
reason.
SOME
BRIEF FUN AT TPM'S EXPENSE: I simply cannot resist. Josh
Marshall - you know: the intellectual lefty with a knack for writing
and once the proprietor of a blog that wasn't stupendously single-minded
and soporific - gets
back to his roots this morning with an interesting discussion
of Joe Klein hitting Paul Krugman upside the head yesterday (metaphorically
speaking) on Meet
the Press.
However,
a mere 582 words into the post Josh writes, "I want to leave
the longer discussion of this issue to another post. But just
to briefly describe what I'm getting at...."
One thousand
seventy-one (1,071) words later I was not only questioning Josh's
commitment to brevity, I was thoroughly dreading a "longer
discussion of this issue." - T. Bevan 2:32 pm Link
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