Dennis Miller op-ed in WSJ

[luckydevil]

Thought this was pretty funny

http://opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110003453

'Why Are We in Iraq?'

Meet Norman Mailer, Third Cousin of the Rational Op-Ed.

BY DENNIS MILLER

Monday, May 5, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT

"With their dominance in sport, at work and at home eroded, Bush thought white American men needed to know they were still good at something. That's where Iraq came in. . . .

"The great white stars of yesteryear were for the most part gone, gone in football, in basketball, in boxing, and half-gone in baseball. . . . On the other hand, the good white American male still had the Armed Forces."--Norman Mailer, writing in the London Times' op-ed page last week

When The Wall Street Journal asked me to react to Mr. Mailer's latest daft screed, I almost took a pass. I've never written an opinion piece for a newspaper before, and furthermore I know as much about Norman Mailer as I do about Mary Quant. I think they were both kinda hot for a few minutes in the '60s.

Other than a vague recollection that Mr. Mailer once played Boswell to Jack Henry Abbott's Samuel Johnson, I really only remember one other pertinent fact about him. But, what the heck, if you're going to take a stab at something new, why not take a stab at it with Norman Mailer.

Mr. Mailer was the Father of the Nonfiction Novel and now he can also claim lineage as the distant, addled Third Cousin of the Rational Op-Ed. Studying at the Sorbonne as a young man obviously made a deep impression on him because this thing reads like Jacques Chirac's Dream Journal.

With six marriages under his belt, one would assume Mr. Mailer has a stranglehold on warfare. One would be wrong.

His basic contention is that we went to war with Iraq because with the dominance of white American men in the boxing ring, the office and the home front eroded, George W. Bush thought they needed to know they were still good at something. Mr. Mailer has a degree in aeronautical engineering from Harvard so he had to know that argument wouldn't fly. But then again, maybe this claptrap is just a grand put-on. The fact that I and many others can't differentiate anymore does not augur well for Norm's legend.

You know something, the only "race" that really occurred to me during the war was our Army's sprint to Baghdad. Conversely, Mr. Mailer appears to see just race in our armed forces, right down to the "Super-Marines," as he calls them. It seems that Mr. Mailer notices color in people even when they're wearing camouflage. He then goes on to speak about racial subsets in the world of sports. Now, when I watch baseball, football and basketball, I see uniforms and skills. Mr. Mailer evidently sees races and nationalities. He's like a Casey Stengel/William Shockley hybrid. "Why'd you send the rook' back to Triple A, Skip?" "Well, he was gettin' around on the fast ball but he still couldn't hit the bell curve."

Ironically, Mr. Mailer seems to see everything in the world in terms of black and white, except of course, good and evil.

He also fancies himself a boxer, a "champeen," but stuff like this will just sully his record. He's now a club fighter, a pug, a tomato can that Warhol no doubt gave him. He constantly uses boxing metaphors and yet refuses to give President Sugar Ray Bush any credit for his startling TWKO (Three-Week Knock Out).

A guy like Mailer hates a guy like Bush because Mailer thinks of himself as infinitely smarter than Bush and yet President Bush is the most powerful man on the planet and old Normy's connecting through Atlanta and flying on prop planes to a community college that's so far out in the sticks the mail rider has yet to arrive with the message that The Great Mailer is currently more out of the loupe than a jeweler with conjunctivitis. All so he can scoop up a submicroscopic honorarium and the accolades of star-struck locals and 18-year-olds who mistakenly think Mr. Mailer wrote "Gravity's Rainbow."

He feels there's no connection between the secular state of Iraq and radical fundamentalist terrorists. Not true. Abu Abbas was recently recaptured there after Europe practiced catch-and-release with him many years back. Abu Nidal was found shot to death last year in his Baghdad apartment. Police suspect fair play.

And while I don't want to appear to pick more nits than a father-and-son Spider Monkey team who know they're being followed by a National Geographic film crew, Mr. Mailer's wrong when he says that only one-half of our country was for the war: 70% is one-half only if the whole is considered to be 140%.

Mr. Mailer at one time challenged and provoked. Now he just provokes. Norman Mailer has become Norman Maine, a former matinee idol whom loved ones best keep an eye on, because if this is the best he can now muster, he'll no doubt be walking purposely into the surf off Provincetown any day now. And as Mr. Mailer's prostate gradually supplants his ego as the largest gland in his body, he's going to have to realize, as is the case with all young lions who inevitably morph into Bert Lahr, that his alleged profundities are now being perceived as the early predictors of dementia.

I empathize with Mr. Mailer in one regard, though. Although he's clearly abdicated the lucid throne, it must be hellish for someone who can still arrange words so beautifully--i.e., "the question will keen in pitch"--to wake up every morning and have it slowly dawn on him that he's effectively been rendered totally irrelevant.

Mr. Miller is a comedian.

[Kilmer17]

Glad to see him take up a cause.

The other pieces that are attributed to him are really from LARRY Miller. He was on Sajak last night and spoke about it.

[Glenn X]

Dennis has inspired me to change my sigline. (And I know he said this. I saw and heard him say it on HBO during his Raw Feed comedy special.)

[Atlanta Skins Fan]

Originally posted by luckydevi

Thought this was pretty funny

'Why Are We in Iraq?'

Meet Norman Mailer, Third Cousin of the Rational Op-Ed.

BY DENNIS MILLER

Monday, May 5, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT

When The Wall Street Journal asked me to react to Mr. Mailer's latest daft screed, I almost took a pass. I've never written an opinion piece for a newspaper before, and furthermore I know as much about Norman Mailer as I do about Mary Quant. I think they were both kinda hot for a few minutes in the '60s.

You guys are chasing the bouncing ball tossed by the WSJ. Don't be tools.

The WSJ is a fine paper in many respects, arguably one of the two or three best in the nation. From its Page One jounalism to its business coverage, it can't be beaten in terms of depth and quality, though obviously it has an agenda. Its editorial and op-ed pages are also masterful, but slavishly in service of the barons and the chicken-hawk neo-conservatives.

These guys are good. Any time you finish reading a WSJ op-ed piece, you should check your pockets and your silverware. So, too, in this case, with the Dennis Miller piece on Mailer.

The first thing you should ask is, why did the WSJ ask Dennis Miller to take down Norman Mailer? (That's what it was -- a take-down, a drive-by shooting.) Was it simply that Mailer wrote a daft op-ed piece in the London Times?

Obviously not. The WSJ has more important things to tend to, if that's all it was. The Mailer piece *was* daft, but that's just misdirection by the WSJ -- the bouncing ball. They just looked for the dumbest thing Mailer has written recently, and sent the car for Dennis Miller.

Next, why Dennis Miller? Several reasons. First, being relegated to being taken out by Dennis Miller is itself a put-down, which is part of the unspoken joke here. Second, they knew Dennis Miller's trade is personal attack by innuendo, so even when discussing a topic as important as the invasion of Iraq (remember: tens of thousands killed -- this is actually not funny), Miller could be counted on to take down Mailer with innuendo about his age, book sales, number of marriages, etc. And Miller could be counted on to turn something admirable -- that Mailer gives talks at community colleges -- into an insult. Finally, using Miller for the drive-by insulates the WSJ from a counter-attack by Mailer or his supporters: hey, we didn't write it.

So the fundamental question is, why did the WSJ feel it necessary to take down Mailer? Obviously it wasn't the daft London Times piece, which didn't merit a response. Far more likely it was Mailer's more substantial work close to home. Such as: Mailer's 7,000-word anti-war speech , given in San Francisco in February and published in the New York Review of Books on March 27.

This speech and others by Mailer made him a mild threat, in that he was one of the few recognizable names in America to vocally oppose the war.

The thing that you need to understand about these people -- the Wolfowitz cabal, the powers behind the media, the WSJ editorial team -- is that if you oppose their interests, they *will* take you out. There are hundreds of ways to do that, but you can count on it. Which is why few people of stature will take a stand against them anymore, because life is short, and we probably can't make a difference anyway.

I urge you to read Mailer's entire speech by following the link above. For those with short attention spans, here are a few highlights:

It is probably true that at the beginning of the present push of the administration to go to war, the connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were minimal. Each, on the face of it, had to distrust the other. From Saddam's point of view, bin Laden was the most troublesome kind of man, a religious zealot, that is to say a loose cannon, a warrior who could not be controlled. To bin Laden, Saddam was an irreligious brute, an unbalanced fool whose boldest ventures invariably crashed....

[After the Bush administration war buildup] al-Jazeera offered a recorded broadcast by bin Laden that gave a few hints that he and Saddam were now ready, conceivably, to enter into direct contact, even though he called the "socialists" in Baghdad "infidels."

In short, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein had opposing world views and were not collaborators -- but could conceivably have been driven together *because* of the Bush war buildup. Self-preservation can make even enemies friends.

This is in line with my broader feeling that the Bush administration's war mongering will in fact *cause* radical Islamic elements to acquire WMDs, as a means to their survival.

More:

The European edition of Time magazine had been conducting a poll on its Web site: "Which country poses a greater danger to world peace in 2003?" With 318,000 votes cast so far, the responses were: North Korea, 7 percent; Iraq, 8 percent; the United States, 84 percent....

Harold Pinter no longer chose to be subtle in language:

"...The American administration is now a bloodthirsty wild animal. Bombs are its only vocabulary. Many Americans, we know, are horrified by the posture of their government, but seem to be helpless.

"Unless Europe finds the solidarity, intelligence, courage and will to challenge and resist American power, Europe itself will deserve Alexander Herzen's declaration —'We are not the doctors. We are the disease.'"

According to Reuters, on February 15 more than four million people "from Bangkok to Brussels, from Canberra to Calcutta...took to the streets to pillory Bush as a bloodthirsty warmonger."

If Bush's legitimacy was in question then from the start, his performance as president was arousing scorn. When he spoke extempore, he sounded simple. When more articulate subordinates wrote his speeches, he had trouble fitting himself to the words.

And then there was the stock market. It kept sinking. Slowly, steadily, unemployment rose. The CEO scandals of the corporations became more prominent.

America had been putting up with the ongoing expansion of the corporation into American life since the end of World War II. It had been the money cow to the United States. But it had also been a filthy cow that gave off foul gases of mendacity and manipulation by an extreme emphasis on advertising. Put less into the product but kowtow to its marketing. Marketing was a beast and a force that succeeded in taking America away from most of us. It succeeded in making the world an uglier place to live in since the Second World War. One has only to cite fifty-story high-rise architecture as inspired in form as a Kleenex box with balconies, shopping malls encircled by low-level condominiums, superhighways with their vistas into the void; and, beneath it all, the pall of plastic, ubiquitous plastic, there to numb an infant's tactile senses, plastic, front-runner in the competition to see which new substance could make the world more disagreeable. To the degree that we have distributed this crud all over the globe, we were already wielding a species of world hegemony. We were exporting the all-pervasive aesthetic emptiness of the most powerful American corporations. There were no new cathedrals being built for the poor— only sixteen-story urban-renewal housing projects that sat on the soul like jail.

Then came a more complete exposure of the economic chicanery and pollution of the corporations. Economic gluttony was thriving at the top. Criminal behavior was being revealed on the front pages of every business section. Without September 11, George W. Bush would have been living in the nonstop malaise of uglier and uglier media. It could even be said that America was taking a series of hits that were not wholly out of proportion to what happened to the Germans after World War I, when inflation wiped out the fundamental German notion of self, which was that if you worked hard and saved your money, you ended up having a decent old age. It is likely that Hitler would never have come to power ten years later without that runaway inflation. By the same measure, September 11 had done something comparable to the American sense of security.

For that matter, conservatism was heading toward a divide. Old-line conservatives like Pat Buchanan believed that America should keep to itself and look to solve those of its problems that we were equipped to solve. Buchanan was the leader of what might be called old-value conservatives, who believe in family, country, faith, tradition, home, hard and honest labor, duty, allegiance, and a balanced budget. The ideas, notions, and predilections of George W. Bush had to be, for the most part, not compatible with Buchanan's conservatism.

Bush was different. The gap between his school of thought and that of old-value conservatives could yet produce a dichotomy on the right as clear-cut as the differences between Communists and socialists after World War I. "Flag conservatives" like Bush paid lip service to some conservative values, but at bottom they didn't give a damn. If they still used some of the terms, it was in order not to narrow their political base. They used the flag. They loved words like "evil." One of Bush's worst faults in rhetoric (to dip into that cornucopia) was to use the word as if it were a button he could push to increase his power. When people have an IV tube put in them to feed a narcotic painkiller on demand, a few keep pressing that button. Bush uses evil as a narcotic for that part of the American public which feels most distressed. Of course, as he sees it, he is doing it because he believes America is good. He certainly does, he believes this country is the only hope of the world. He also fears that the country is rapidly growing more dissolute, and the only solution may be—fell, mighty, and near-holy words—the only solution may be to strive for World Empire. Behind the whole push to go to war with Iraq is the desire to have a huge military presence in the Near East as a stepping stone to taking over the rest of the world.

More directly (even if it is not at all direct) a war with Iraq will gratify our need to avenge September 11. It does not matter that Iraq is not the culprit. Bush needs only to ignore the evidence. Which he does with all the power of a man who has never been embarrassed by himself. Saddam, for all his crimes, did not have a hand in September 11, but President Bush is a philosopher. September 11 was evil, Saddam is evil, all evil is connected. Ergo, Iraq.

The President can also satisfy the more serious polemical needs of a great many neocons in his administration who believe Islam will yet be Hitler Redux to Israel. Protection of Israel is OK to Bush, electorally speaking, but it is also obligatory, especially when he cannot count on giving orders to Sharon that will always be obeyed. Sharon, after all, has one firm hold on Bush. With the Mossad, Sharon has the finest intelligence service in the Near East if not in the world. The CIA, renowned by now for its paucity of Arab spies in the Muslim world, cannot afford to do without Sharon's services.

These are all good reasons Bush can find to go to war. As for oil, allow Ralph Nader a few statistics:

"The United States currently consumes 19.5 million barrels a day, or 26% of daily global oil consumption.... The US [has to import] 9.8 million barrels a day, or more than half the oil we consume....

"The surest way for the US to sustain its overwhelming dependence upon oil is to control the sixty-seven percent of the world's proven oil reserves that lie below the sands of the Persian Gulf. Iraq alone has proven reserves of 112.5 billion barrels, or 11% of the world's remaining supply.... Only Saudi Arabia has more."

I would add that once America occupies Iraq, it will also gain a choke-hold on Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Near East. One can also propose that we wish to go into Iraq for the water. To quote a piece by Stephen C. Pelletiere in The New York Times of January 31:

"There was much discussion over the construction of a so-called Peace Pipeline that would bring the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates south to the parched Gulf states and by extension, Israel. No progress has been made on this, largely because of Iraqi intransigence. With Iraq in American hands, of course, all that could change."

So, yes, oil is a part of the motive, even if that can never be admitted. And water could prove a powerful tool to pacify a great many heated furies of the desert. The underlying motive, however, still remains George W. Bush's underlying dream: Empire!

What word but 'empire' describes the awesome thing that America is becoming?" wrote Michael Ignatieff on January 5 in The New York Times Magazine:

"It is the only nation that polices the world through five global military commands; maintains more than a million men and women at arms on four continents; deploys carrier battle groups on watch in every ocean; guarantees the survival of countries from Israel to South Korea; drives the wheels of global trade and commerce, and fills the hearts and minds of an entire planet with its dreams and desires."

From Timothy Garton Ash in The New York Review of Books, February 13:

"The United States is not just the world's only superpower; it is a hyperpower, whose military expenditures will soon equal that of the next fifteen most powerful states combined. The EU has not translated its comparable economic strength—fast approaching the US $10 trillion economy— into comparable military power or diplomatic influence."

Perhaps the most thorough explanation of this as yet unadmitted campaign toward Empire comes from the columnist Jay Bookman of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Back on September 29, five months ago, he wrote:

"This war, should it come, is intended to mark the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire, seizing sole responsibility and authority as planetary policeman. It would be the culmination of a plan 10 years or more in the making, carried out by those who believe the United States must seize the opportunity for global domination, even if it means becoming the "American imperialists" that our enemies always claimed we were."

Back in 1992, a year after the final fall of the Soviet Union, there were many on the right in America, early flag conservatives, who felt that an extraordinary opportunity was now present. America could now take over the world. The Defense Department drafted a document which, to quote Jay Bookman once more,

"envisioned the United States as "a colossus astride the world, imposing its will and keeping world peace through military and economic power. When leaked in its final draft form, however, the proposal drew so much criticism that it was hastily withdrawn and repudiated by the first President Bush....

"The defense secretary in 1992 was Richard Cheney; the document was drafted by [Paul] Wolfowitz, who at the time was defense undersecretary for policy."

Now he is deputy defense secretary under Rumsfeld.

Afterward, from 1992 to 2000, this dream of world domination was not picked up by the Clinton administration, and that may help to account for the intense, even virulent hatred that so many on the right felt during those eight years. If it weren't for Clinton, America could be ruling the world.

Obviously that document, "Project for the New American Century," projected prematurely in 1992, had now, after September 11, become the policy of the Bush administration. The flag conservatives were triumphant. They could seek to take over the world. Iraq could be only the first step. Beyond, but very much on the historical horizon, are not only Iran, Syria, Pakistan, and North Korea, but China.

The argument that we succeeded in building democracy in Japan and Germany and therefore can build it anywhere does not necessarily hold. Japan and Germany were countries with a homogeneous population and a long existence as nations. They each were steeped in guilt at the depredations of their soldiers in other lands. They were near to totally destroyed but had the people and the skills to rebuild their cities. The Americans who worked to create their democracy were veterans of Roosevelt's New Deal and, mark of the period, were effective idealists.

Iraq, in contrast, was never a true nation. Put together by the British, it was a post–World War I patchwork of Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, and Turkomans, who, at best, distrusted one another intensely. A situation analogous to Afghanistan's divisions among its warlords could be the more likely outcome. No one will certainly declare with authority that democracy can be built there, yet the arrogance persists. There does not seem much comprehension that except for special circumstances, democracy is never there in us to create in another country by the force of our will. Real democracy comes out of many subtle individual human battles that are fought over decades and finally over centuries, battles that succeed in building traditions. The only defenses of democracy, finally, are the traditions of democracy. When you start ignoring those values, you are playing with a noble and delicate structure. There's nothing more beautiful than democracy. But you can't play with it. You can't assume we're going to go over to show them what a great system we have. This is monstrous arrogance.

The President, when talking to a group of reverends from the major denominations, told them,

"You know, I had a drinking problem. Right now, I should be in a bar in Texas, not the Oval Office. There is only one reason that I am in the Oval Office and not in a bar: I found faith. I found God. I am here because of the power of prayer."

That is a dangerous remark. As Kierkegaard was the first to suggest, we can never know for certain where our prayers are likely to go, nor from whom the answers will come. Just when we think we are at our nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.

"Our war with terror," says Bush, "begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end...until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated." Plus, asks Eric Alterman in The Nation, what if America ends up alienating the whole world in the process? "At some point, we may be the only ones left," Bush told his closest advisers, according to an administration member who leaked the story to Bob Woodward. "That's OK with me. We are America."

Speaking to the Senate, Robert Byrd said,

"Many of the pronouncements made by this administration are outrageous. There is no other word. Yet this chamber is hauntingly silent. On what is possibly the eve of horrific infliction of death and destruction on the population of the nation of Iraq—a population, I might add, of which over 50 percent is under age fifteen—this chamber is silent."

Democracy, I would repeat, is the noblest form of government we have yet evolved, and we may as well begin to ask ourselves whether we are ready to suffer, even perish for it, rather than readying ourselves to live in the lower existence of a monumental banana republic with a government always eager to cater to mega-corporations as they do their best to appropriate our thwarted dreams with their elephantiastical conceits.

See, the WSJ doesn't come after you when you write a lightweight, daft op-ed in the London Times.

But when you give a speech like this, and when that speech is reprinted in full in the New York Review of Books -- that's when they send the car.

Mailer knew they'd take him out, but he has the balls to stand up against these goons. Do you?

[Kilmer17]

Sorry, I forgot to put on my tin hat before I read that. Can someone living in this century give me a synopsis.

[luckydevil]

Does the WSJ have an "agenda", sure

Does the NYT and La Times have an "agenda", yes they do

For god sakes Robert Scheer of the La times is a hardcore marxist

[The Evil Genius]

Originally posted by Kilmer17

Sorry, I forgot to put on my tin hat before I read that. Can someone living in this century give me a synopsis.

Forget the tin hat, I am anxiously awaiting the newspaper that Jerry, er I mean, ASF is going to start writing.

[Golgo-13]

Originally posted by Kilmer17

Sorry, I forgot to put on my tin hat before I read that. Can someone living in this century give me a synopsis.

:laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :rotflmao: :rotflmao: :notworthy

[Glenn X]

ARE YOU A VICTIM OF MIND CONTROL?

[fansince62]

Glenn...crack me up!!!!

what difference does it make anyway? Mailer wields...ohhhh....about zero influence......

[phishhead]

After reading your entire post ASF, I found this to be probably the most disturbing:

"Our war with terror," says Bush, "begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end...until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated." Plus, asks Eric Alterman in The Nation, what if America ends up alienating the whole world in the process? "At some point, we may be the only ones left," Bush told his closest advisers, according to an administration member who leaked the story to Bob Woodward. "That's OK with me. We are America."

[fansince62]

oh my gosh...alienating the whole world in the process...now there's a profundity rife with policy implications........I didn't realize our security hinged so critically on "being liked".......as it appears the left argued during the perfunctory UN debates...............but phish....you are free to believe in sinister ends and the ultimate inequities and cruelties of the American system........oh btw...Bush can't act alone............it is a system with multiple power nodes.........

[luckydevil]

Phish what is your answer , do nothing?. This isnt a popularity contest. Winston Churchill was not very popular and liked by Europe when he warned the world about Nazi Germany

[phishhead]

Fansince.........(btw, why so many periods?) Yeah, I know Bush doesn't act alone. I think just about anybody, whether they know politics or not, knows that.

Luckydevi, I think that question is better suited for the know it all's on here. And I'm sure you know the exact folks I'm talking about.

Now, the problem I have with the Bushie quotes are this:

"At some point, we may be the only ones left" - Now doesn't that sound a bit crazy? Like we are the only country worth existing? Like all other civilizations and cultures should die, and fade away? Since anything that isn't American, is terrorism? Or am I looking at this quote, the wrong way? Enlighten me, please.

The second quote: "Now thats OK with me, We are America."

I think this quote explains it self. I mean really... who gave us the crown to claim that we're divine?

Maybe I'm looking at it the wrong way or something?

[Glenn X]

phishhead, with all due respect, your problem seems to be that you perceive any time anyone says, "Hey, the U.S. is a pretty darn great country and one worth fighting for," as meaning, "The U.S. is the only country worth existing NOW OR EVER!!! In fact, all other nations should CEASE TO EXIST!!!"

It's pretty clear to me that you have a perception problem, sir. You should probably get that checked out, my man.

BTW, here's a piece of free advice: Never trust anything that Eric Alterman says. The guy's a liar and a communist sympathizer.

http://216.247.220.66/archives/rogues/nobile1-21-99.htm

http://www.nationalreview.com/daily/nr020999.html

Eric Alterman and his publisher, Victor Navasky, are the last of the true believers. Writing in The Nation's Feb. 15 issue, Alterman suggests that perhaps Alger Hiss wasn't a communist spy after all. He offers no details -- mainly because he can't. History seems to have made up its mind on this one: Hiss was a traitor. For the very latest on this non-controversy, see Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev's excellent new book, The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America--the Stalin Era. Alterman should move on to another hopeless cause, such as Sidney Blumenthal.

[Sarge]

I have no problem being the last one's left. unlike the rose colored liberal utopia, where everyone gets a trophy no matter if you are first or tenth, there are no trophies for second place in the real world.