SPYvSPY writes "In a move that emphasizes the differences between the blog media and big media, the so-called 'Open Source Media' group changed their name back to 'Pajamas Media' in response to public criticism, including (presumably) yesterday's posting on Slashdot. Regardless of any political bent in their coverage, Pajamas Media acknowledged the public's criticisms and did something about it with remarkable speed, frankness and good humor."
BTW this comment is great:
They change their name and get lots of publicity. They change it back, they got lots more publicity, and praise on Slashdot. Is that about right? Seems the name change did exactly what it was meant to.
Laurent Murawiec, of the Hudson Institute, is author of the new book Princes of Darkness : The Saudi Assault on the West. Formerly an analyst at the Rand Corporation, in 2002 he gave an infamous briefing at the Pentagon to the Defense Policy Board about Saudi Arabia. NRO Editor Kathryn Lopez spoke to him about the book and the kingdom. Just a taste: Lopez: Is Saudi Arabia our enemy? Is it fundamentally evil?
Murawiec: Let's look at facts rather than speeches. The Al-Saud family is indistinguishable from the Wahhabi sect. They have been wedded like Siamese twins since 1744. The sect lends Islamic legitimacy to the sword of the ruler, the ruler extends the writ of the sect. The one cannot exist without the other. The Wahhabi creed is a nasty, bigoted belief system. It considers itself the sole repository of authentic Islam, and views all other Muslins as heretics, apostates, and schismatics, hence, deserving of death. It considers Jews and Christians as Satanic enemies that should be killed when opportunity arises. Jihad is integral to Wahhabism. Whenever the Saudi royals have had opportunity to manifest and implement the creed, they have. King Faisal gave his every visitor a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Read the sermons and the fatwas and the schoolbooks that pour out of Saudi mosques, universities, imams, and predicators, from TV and media: "death to Jews, Christians, Hindus, Shiites" is a permanent singsong. That's the Saudi-Wahhabi creed in action. Now, since they have needed us to protect them from regional predators, Iran, Saddam in his time, Nasser earlier and so on, they have honed in a nice trick which allows them to emit friendly noises from one corner of their mouth when they speak English, and in hateful tones from the other, Arabic side. When senior Saudi clerics issue fatwas that call for the killing of Americans in Iraq, when Saudi state TV airs these bloodcurdling calls for jihad against America, how can one but conclude that they are no friends, but enemies? The new Saudi ambassador here, Prince Turki, called our toppling of Saddam "a colonial war." Seventy percent of the jihadis we have captured in Iraq are Saudis. King Abdullah, Prince Nayef the interior minister, Prince Sultan and Turki have all repeatedly stated that Israel was behind 9/11 â not the 15 of 19 hijackers that were Saudis â and behind all terrorist incidents in Saudi Arabia! King Abdullah twice in the last few years threatened the U.S. with a new oil embargo. With such friends, who needs enemies? The Saudi royals? Talibans with oil and a good p.r. company. The regime? It is evil, and therefore it is our enemy, and it behaves accordingly.
Lopez: What do you anticipate Saudi Arabia looking like in ten years?
Murawiec: Split in its original component parts conquered between 1910 and 1934 by Ibn Saud as his sword was carving him an empire: Hasa, the predominantly Shiite eastern province with the oil, along the Gulf coast; Hijaz, the Red Sea province open to international trade since the dawn of history; Asir, largely Shiite, brutally wrested from Yemen... and these segments then trying to enter some form of association, perhaps with others in the peninsula.
Posted by: Steve ||
11/22/2005 10:10 ||
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#1
Read the sermons and the fatwas and the schoolbooks that pour out of Saudi mosques, universities, imams, and predicators, from TV and media: "death to Jews, Christians, Hindus, Shiites" is a permanent singsong. That's the Saudi-Wahhabi creed in action.
Marawiec seems to have it right. The Saudis are not our friends. Well duh, no big whoop to the rest of us.
BY BRENDAN MINITER
Tuesday, November 22, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
Shortly after stepping off a plane at Dulles Airport last week, Rep. Duncan Hunter was on a cell phone delivering a surprisingly stern message to a few reporters. Coverage of the debate in the Senate to "ban" the use of torture, the Armed Services Committee chairman said, was inaccurate and unfair.
Mr. Hunter's beef was that it is already illegal for any American to torture someone overseas and such a crime is punishable of up to 20 years in prison, or execution if the torture victim dies. To underscore his point, Mr. Hunter followed up on Tuesday with a press release noting that "contrary to widespread media reports, torture is [already] banned under American criminal laws." The release included copies of the applicable criminal code.
Democrats might have seen this as a signal not to push too hard on the war lest they risk uniting a fractured Republican Party. But they didn't heed it. By midweek Rep. John Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat, introduced a resolution aimed at pushing political moderates to oppose the war in Iraq. His plan called for "redeploying" U.S. troops out of Iraq over the next six months, leaving a "rapid reaction force" in the region and then pursuing U.S. goals through "diplomatic" means. It was a crafted political proposal that was meant to be an alternative to "staying the course" while not calling for outright withdrawal. It was a return of "peace without victory." And it backfired.
The Murtha resolution was intended to allow Democrats to have their cake and eat it too--to oppose the war while confusing the issue by pretending to support the war's aims of a free and democratic Iraq. Instead of fighting on the ground staked out by Democrats, Republicans chose clarity. Mr. Hunter introduced a simple, one-paragraph resolution calling for immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Late Friday night the House voted the resolution down 403-3.
Anyone who thinks that vote was simply cheap political theater and not connected to the larger debate on how to fight the war on terror hasn't been watching Mr. Hunter and the other defense hawks in the House over the past four years. It's not an accident that the House hasn't passed the "torture ban" that John McCain and John Warner pushed through the Senate. Nor is it a coincidence that intelligence reform stalled in the House last year until it was amended to insure that troops in the field would still have the intelligence they need.
It's not lost on Mr. Hunter, or on Reps. Steve Buyer, John Kline and many others, that Iraq is the most visible front in the war on terror and is therefore a symbol for whether the political elites of this nation have what it takes to confront global terrorist networks. If politicians can't stomach going after terrorists who openly attack U.S. soldiers, they won't have what it takes to go after terrorists who hide in some of the most remote or ungoverned reaches of the world.
It should now be clear--if it wasn't already--that the Democratic Party is the party of withdrawal. Had John Kerry won the election last year, the U.S. would today be packing its bags and preparing to leave Iraq under something similar to the Murtha plan. The fallout from that would be disastrous. "Rapid reaction force" or not, Iraq would descend into political chaos and then perhaps fall under the power of a dictator. Maybe Saddam Hussein himself would return, though there is no shortage of Saddam wannabes in that part of the world. Following that, no U.S. president for a generation or maybe two would have the political muscle to topple a rogue regime anywhere. In the meantime, the U.S. would be on the run, while terrorists and the dictators who nurture them would have the upper hand.
It turns out, however, that the politics of national security favor staying the course. Both the president and vice president have hit back hard in this debate, noting the importance of winning in Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney yesterday called for an open and clear debate, but he forcefully argued that the war was and remains in this nation's interests because it allows the U.S. to combat terrorists in the heart of the Middle East. He also took on the idea that by invading Iraq the U.S. has made itself more of a target for terrorists. "We were not in Iraq on Sept. 11 and the terrorists hit us anyway," he told the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.
And in Congress, fighting the war remains the one issue that continues to rally the GOP. Before Mr. Murtha's resolution, the Republican Party seemed hopelessly split and unable either to cut spending or to make the president's tax cuts permanent. After the Murtha resolution, Republicans quashed the earmark for the "Bridge to Nowhere" in Alaska (though the state still gets to keep the money for it), passed $50 billion in spending cut, and, of course, soundly rejected the idea of withdrawing from Iraq. Suddenly Republicans seem to understand why they are in the majority.
#1
Murtha's proposal reminds me of Nixon's "Peace with Honor" withdrawl from Vietnam. Didn't work then and won't work now.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
11/22/2005 14:29 Comments ||
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#2
standing up to cowards, liars, and blowhards injects spine even in the the most invertebrate RINO
Posted by: Frank G ||
11/22/2005 17:38 Comments ||
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I TOLD YOU SO!!!
This article is BULLSH%T! It says: John Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat, introduced a resolution aimed at pushing political moderates to oppose the war in Iraq. His plan called for "redeploying" U.S. troops out of Iraq over the next six months, leaving a "rapid reaction force" in the region and then pursuing U.S. goals through "diplomatic" means. It was a crafted political proposal that was meant to be an alternative to "staying the course" while not calling for outright withdrawal.
Here is the actual wording:
Therefore be it Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, that:
Section 1. The deployment of United States forces in Iraq, by direction of Congress, is hereby terminated and the forces involved are to be redeployed at the earliest practicable date. blah, blah, blah.
IS HEREBY TERMINATED. IS HEREBY TERMINATED. IS HEREBY TERMINATED. That means what it means. I told you this was how they would play it.
Rumours of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's death may be exaggerated. He was reported by several Arab TV networks to have been among eight terrorists who self-detonated in Mosul on Sunday. Still, whether or not he's sleeping with the fishes or the 72 virgins, he's already outlived whatever usefulness he had to the jihad. On Friday, the allegedly explosive "Arab street" finally exploded, in the largest demonstration against al-Qa'eda or its affiliates seen in the Middle East. "Zarqawi," shouted 200,000 Jordanians, "from Amman we say to you, you are a coward!" Also "the enemy of Allah" - which, for a jihadist, isn't what they call on Broadway a money review.
The old head-hacker was sufficiently rattled by the critical pans of his Jordanian hotel bombings that he issued the first IRA-style apology in al-Qa'eda's history. "People of Jordan, we did not undertake to blow up any wedding parties," he said. "For those Muslims who were killed, we ask God to show them mercy, for they were not targets." Yeah, right. Tell it to the non-Marines. It was perfectly obvious to Ali Hussein Ali al-Shamari and his missus what was going on when they strolled into the ballroom of the Radisson Hotel. Still, Mr Zarqawi has now announced his intention to decapitate King Abdullah. "Your star is fading," he declared. "You will not escape your fate, you descendant of traitors. We will be able to reach your head and chop it off."
Good luck, pal. I don't know what Islamist Suicide-Bombing For Dummies defines as a "soft target" but a Jordanian-Palestinian wedding in the public area of an hotel in a Muslim country with no infidel troops must come pretty close to the softest target of all time. Even more revealing, look at who Zarqawi dispatched to blow up his brother Muslims: why would he send Ali Hussein Ali al-Shamari, one of his most trusted lieutenants, to die in an operation requiring practically no skill?
Well, by definition it's hard to get suicide bombers with experience. But Mr Shamari's presence suggests at the very least that the "insurgency" is having a hard time meeting its recruitment targets. Though it's much admired in the salons of the West, armchair insurgents such as Michael Moore seem to have no desire to walk the walk. Mr Moore compared the Zarqawi crowd to the "Minutemen" of America's revolution, pledged to take to the field of battle at a minute's notice. Alas, the concept of self-destructing Minutemen depends on the often misplaced optimism of the London bus stop: there'll be another one along in a minute.
Mrs Shamari's brother, Thamir al-Rashawi, Zarqawi's right-hand man and the "Emir of al-Anbar" (i.e., the Sunni Triangle), was killed by US troops in Fallujah last year. Her other two brothers and her brother-in-law all died in engagements with the enemy this year. Sending a surviving member of your rapidly dwindling inner circle to blow up a Palestinian wedding is not a sign of strength.
True, he did manage to kill a couple of dozen Muslims. But what's the strategic value of that? Presumably, it's an old-fashioned mob heavy's way of keeping the locals in line. And that worked out well, didn't it? Hundreds of thousands of Zarqawi's fellow Jordanians fill the streets to demand his death.
Did they show that on the BBC? Or are demonstrations only news when they're anti-Bush and anti-Blair? And look at it this way: if the "occupation" is so unpopular in Iraq, where are the mass demonstrations against that? I'm not talking 200,000, or even 100 or 50,000. But, if there were just 1,500 folks shouting "Great Satan, go home!" in Baghdad or Mosul, it would be large enough for the media to do that little trick where they film the demo close up so it looks like the place is packed. Yet no such demonstrations take place.
Happily for Mr Zarqawi, no matter how desperate the head-hackers get, the Western defeatists can always top them. A Democrat Congressman, Jack Murtha, has called for immediate US withdrawal from Iraq. He's a Vietnam veteran, so naturally the media are insisting that his views warrant special deference, military experience in a war America lost being the only military experience the Democrats and the press value these days. Hence, the demand for the President to come up with an "exit strategy".
In war, there are usually only two exit strategies: victory or defeat. The latter's easier. Just say, whoa, we're the world's pre-eminent power but we can't handle an unprecedently low level of casualties, so if you don't mind we'd just as soon get off at the next stop.
Demonstrating the will to lose as clearly as America did in Vietnam wasn't such a smart move, but since the media can't seem to get beyond this ancient jungle war it may be worth underlining the principal difference: Osama is not Ho Chi Minh, and al-Qa'eda are not the Viet Cong. If you exit, they'll follow. And Americans will die - in foreign embassies, barracks, warships, as they did through the Nineties, and eventually on the streets of US cities, too.
As 9/11 fades into the past, that's an increasingly hard argument to make. Taking your ball and going home is a seductive argument in a paradoxical superpower whose inclinations on the Right have a strong isolationist streak and on the Left a strong transnational streak - which is isolationism with a sappy face and biennial black-tie banquets in EU capitals. Transnationalism means poseur solutions - the Kyotification of foreign policy.
So, just as things are looking up on the distant, eastern front, they're wobbling badly on the home front. Anti-Bush Continentals who would welcome a perceived American defeat in Iraq ought to remember the third front in this war: Europe is both a home front and a foreign battleground - as the Dutch have learnt, watching the land of the bicycling Queen transformed into 24-hour armed security for even minor municipal officials. In this war, for Europeans the faraway country of which they know little turns out to be their own. Much as the Guardian and Le Monde would enjoy it, an America that turns its back on the world is the last thing you need.
Posted by: Steve ||
11/22/2005 11:36 ||
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#1
Steyn must have been a neurosurgeon in his past life. That pen is one nasty scalpel...
PRAGUE--On Oct. 27, 2001, the New York Times reported (erroneously) that 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta "flew to the Czech Republic on April 8 and met with [an] Iraqi intelligence officer," helping to give credence to the so-called Prague connection. It subsequently cast doubt on it, editorializing in November 2005 that the alleged meeting between the hijacker and the Iraqi was part of President Bush and his team's "rewriting of history" based on nothing more than a false tale "from an unreliable drunk." But was the putative Prague connection solely an invention of the Bush administration--or was it the product of an incomplete intelligence operation?
To sort out the confusion, I met earlier this month in Prague with Jiri Ruzek, chief at the time of the Czech counterintelligence service, BIS. Mr. Ruzek is in a position to know what happened. He personally oversaw the investigation of Iraq's alleged covert activities that began, with full American collaboration, nearly two years before Mr. Bush became president and resulted, some five months before the 9/11 attack, in the expulsion of Ahmad al-Ani, the Iraqi intelligence officer alleged to have met with Atta. I also spoke with ex-Foreign Minister Jan Kavan, who headed the intelligence committee to whom Mr. Ruzek reported, and to Ambassador Hynek Kmonicek, who, as deputy foreign minister at the time, handled the al-Ani expulsion for the foreign ministry. According to them, here's how the Prague connection developed.
The proximate cause for BIS interest in al-Ani was a sensational revelation of Jabir Salim, the Iraqi consul who defected in Prague in December 1998. Mr. Salim said in his debriefings that the Mukhabarat, Iraq's intelligence service, had given him $150,000 and tasked him with carrying out a covert action against an American target in the Czech Republic: Using a freelance terrorist, he was to blow up the headquarters of Radio Free Europe in Wenceslas Square, in the heart of Prague.
This intelligence about state-sponsored terrorism was taken very seriously by both America and the Czech Republic. The U.S., for its part, doubled security at the Radio Free Europe facility and began its own countersurveillance, including photographing suspicious individuals in Wenceslas Square. The BIS did what counterintelligence services do in such circumstances: It sought to penetrate the Iraq Embassy by recruiting Arabic-speaking employees familiar with its operations. The source the BIS used, according to Mr. Ruzek, was neither unreliable nor a drunk.
Ahmad al-Ani was Jabir Salim's replacement at the embassy. Soon after he arrived in March 1999, he was picked up by U.S. countersurveillance cameras. The interest in him intensified after the BIS learned from its penetration of the embassy that he was attempting to acquire explosives and contact foreign-based Arabs. Then, on April 9, 2001, the BIS's source in the embassy reported that al-Ani had gotten into a car with an unknown foreign Arab. After the car managed to elude BIS surveillance, concern mounted that he was in the process of recruiting his bomber, and, since the BIS could not find the mystery Arab, Mr. Ruzek decided to act pre-emptively. He recommended to Foreign Minister Kavan that al-Ani be immediately expelled from the Czech Republic. He was given 48 hours to get out of Prague on April 19--and he returned to Baghdad.
On Sept. 11, Mohamed Atta's picture was shown on Czech television, and the next day the BIS's source in the Iraqi Embassy dropped a bombshell. He told his BIS case officer that he recognized Atta as the Arab who got in the car with al-Ani on April 9. Mr. Ruzek immediately relayed the secret information to Washington through the CIA liaison. The FBI sent an interrogation team to Prague, which, after questioning and testing the source, concluded that there was a 70% likelihood that he was not intentionally lying and sincerely believed that he saw Atta with al-Ani. The issue remained whether he had mistaken someone who resembled Atta for the 9/11 hijacker. Meanwhile, records were found showing that Atta had applied for a Czech visa in Germany in 2000, and made at least one previous trip to Prague (from Bonn, by bus, on June 2, 2000, flying to Newark, N.J., the next day).
Less than a week after Mr. Ruzek shared the BIS's confidential information with American intelligence, it was leaked. The Associated Press reported, "A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the United States has received information from a foreign intelligence service that Mohamed Atta, a hijacker aboard one of the planes that slammed into the World Trade Center, met earlier this year in Europe with an Iraqi intelligence agent." CBS named al-Ani as the person meeting with Atta in Prague.
Mr. Ruzek was furious. He considered what he had passed on to the FBI to be unevaluated raw intelligence, and its disclosure not only risked compromising the BIS's penetration in the Iraqi Embassy but also greatly reduced the chances of confirming the intelligence in the first place. In Baghdad, al-Ani, through an Iraqi spokesman, denied ever meeting Atta. In Prague, Czech officials who had not been fully briefed added to the confusion. Prime Minister Milos Zeeman, wrongly assuming that the meeting had been confirmed, stated on CNN that Atta and al-Ani had met to discuss Radio Free Europe, not the 9/11 attack.
Meanwhile, pressure on Mr. Ruzek mounted. Richard Armitage, Colin Powell's deputy, complained to Prime Minister Zeeman that Mr. Ruzek was not cooperating in resolving the case, even though Mr. Ruzek had extended unprecedented access to the FBI and CIA, access that included allowing their representatives to sit on the task force reviewing the case. He was also warned by a colleague in German intelligence that he could become entangled in a heated hawk-versus-dove struggle over Iraq.
Mr. Ruzek decided that if this was an American game, he did not want to be a part of it. So he threw the ball back in the CIA's court, taking the position that if al-Ani did meet Atta for a nefarious purpose, it would have been not on his own initiative but as a representative of the Mukhabarat. The answer was not in Prague but in Iraq's intelligence files; and the CIA and FBI would have to use their own intelligence capabilities to obtain further information about al-Ani's assignment. That more or less concluded the Czech role in the investigation.
The FBI had by this time established that Atta checked out of the Diplomat Inn in Virginia Beach and cashed a check for $8,000 from a SunTrust account on April 4, 2001, and was seen again in Florida on April 11, 2001. But it could not account for his movements during this period (or how he used that money), though there was no record of Atta using his passport to travel outside the U.S. The CIA also drew a blank, and Director George Tenet testified on June 18, 2002 before a Joint Committee of Congress: "Atta allegedly traveled outside the U.S. in early April 2001 to meet with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague, we are still working to confirm or deny this allegation. It is possible that Atta traveled under an unknown alias since we have been unable to establish that Atta left the U.S. or entered Europe in April 2001 under his true name or any known aliases."
Al-Ani was captured by the CIA in Baghdad in 2003, and he remains in detention in Iraq. Though no one has been allowed to interview him, he told the CIA that he was not anywhere near Prague at the time of the meeting. Although Mr. Ruzek termed al-Ani's claim of being elsewhere "pure nonsense," the CIA had evidently found it could go no further with the vexing case. Mr. Tenet, on March 9, 2004, told a closed session of the Senate Armed Service Committee, "Although we cannot rule it out, we are increasingly skeptical such a meeting occurred."
Before 9/11, when the investigation into al-Ani's activities was initiated, both the CIA and the BIS took deadly serious the allegation of state-sponsored terrorism directed against Radio Free Europe. Both agencies cooperated in attempting to thwart it, accepting the information furnished by the BIS penetration agent as sufficiently reliable to expel al-Ani. After 9/11, with Iraq now on the Bush administration's agenda, the subject of state-sponsored terrorism became a political hot potato, as Mr. Ruzek learned, that could easily burn anyone who touched it. So hot that if the CIA even questioned al-Ani about the instruction he had concerning blowing up Radio Free Europe, it never disclosed the answers to the BIS. So, like many other intelligence cases that become politicized, the Prague connection, and all that led up to it, was consigned to a murky limbo.
Mr. Epstein, author of "The Big Picture" (Random House, 2005), is writing a book on the 9/11 Commission.
Posted by: Steve ||
11/22/2005 13:55 ||
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I read with ashen resignation that Maureen Dowd, the professional spinster of the New York Times, will soon birth a book, no doubt parthenogenetically, called Are Men Necessary? The problem apparently is that men have not found Maureen necessary. Hell hathâŠ. Clearly there is something wrong with men.
I weary of the self-absorbed clucking of aging poultry.
Why is Maureen hermetically single? For starters, she is not just now your classic hot ticket. Sheâs not just over the hill, but into the mountains, to Grandmotherâs house we go. She probably gets more daily maintenance than a 747, but she still looks as though a vocational school held an injection-molding contest and everyone lost. That leaves her with only her personality as bait. The prognosis is grim.
Was that ungentlemanly? She makes a career of being disagreeable about men. Whatâs sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose, say I.
Reading her unending plaints, one concludes that she is deeply in loveâwith herself, and too loyal ever to cheat with a man. Behind her writing you always hear the little voice, âIâm so wonderful, so eliteâŠwhy doesnât somebody marry me?â (Well, Maureen, I can give you a few ideas. Youâre a pain in the assâŠ.) âIâm so smart, Iâm so powerful, Iâm so, sooo elite, so talented, soâŠspecial.â As, in their way, are ingrown toenails. âIâm successful, shriek. Men hate me because Iâm smart. They feel threatened because Iâm so wonderful.â
Actually, Maureen, you are no more threatening, or appealing, than somebody elseâs gym socks. I suspect that men donât like you because you arenât likeable.
Now, precisely why are you so wonderful? Clearly you arenât stupid. You are a competent if sophomoric writer. Dummies canât do that. But Iâll tell you what, Sweet Potato: I donât think I know anyone who would want to go out with you. As best I can tell, should you have an original thought, it would need counseling, for depression and loneliness.
Smart women are an attraction of Washington, at least the parts off the cocktail circuit. They made fifteen years in that wretched city bearable for me. I knew women with serious brains, golden-girl biochemists at NIH, a gal who ran a federal positron-emission tomography lab, weirded-out computer techs, startlingly good writers and chicks who had popped scores you wouldnât believe on tests at NSA that arenât supposed to exist. Theyâd eat you for lunch, Maureen.
Now, I know that people at the New York Times have ample self-esteem, and indeed come coated with it to a depth of inches. How about we have a little understanding here. In journalism as in politics, advancement has little to do with merit. Have you checked the contents of the White House lately? Dan Rather and Connie Chung are pinnacles of anything at all? Iâve been around this game as long as you have and I know how the scam works. Getting to the upper ranks of journalism is a matter of luck, sexual sharing, brown-nosing, and staying carefully within the bounds of the regnant politics of the newsroom.
You are journalistic glitter, MaureenâReporter Barbie, a literary Streisand. While working for the Times is perhaps nothing to be ashamed of, Iâd keep quiet about it.
Maureenâs agonizing does however provide exegesis of the American female mind at a curious moment. Again and again their question seems to be, what form of pretense is needed to achieve marriage? Must I feign sex-kittenhood? Be a calculated suck-up who always laughs at his jokes? Hide my brains? The underlying idea is that they must commit some fraud to attract a man. This of course implies that they arenât attractive without committing fraud.
Iâll give them that.
Those of us who have wives from Mexico, Thailand, the Philippines, Chile, or China view Maureen as being a very strange creature indeed, perhaps expelled from a geothermal vent. (âHi! Iâm Fred. Whatâs your phylum?â) Like Maureen, so many gringas donât seem to know who they are, what they are, what they want to be, or how to get there. I think of a tinkertoy construction made by an insane two-year-old: a lot of protruding parts that donât fit together.
By contrast foreign women are psychologically coherent. They are sexy because they are women and like being sexy, not as a Vaudeville act or marketing tool. Resentment is not their primary emotion. They love their children and regard raising them as a pleasure, not an imposition of which they are ashamed.
If you read Maureen and her littermates, you realize that they are those most uncomfortable of women, heterosexual man-haters. For example, Maureen, from her new book: âMen, apparently, learn early to protect their eggshell egos from high-achieving women. The girls said they hid the fact that they went to Harvard from guys they met because it was the kiss of death.â
Who would marry that? Yet it is classic Maureen, snotty, catty, hostile. As for her own Kevlar ego, thereâs this, from her interview with Howard Kurtz: âEven after a decade of writing a New York Times column, she admits to being âvery thin-skinnedâ about criticism. âI'm just not temperamentally suited to it,â Dowd says. âThe first couple of years I spent curled up on the floor and crying.ââ
Oh.
The drumbeat of animosity is never missing from her hetero-anguished feminism. Men are vain, frightened, immature, unreliable, treacherous, fascinated by gewgaws, obsessed with sex, and unfaithful. Several questions arise. If men are so bad, why does Maureen want one? What kind of men has she been running around with? Those closely resembling herself, it sounds as if. Most to the point, why would any man want anything to do with such a woman?
This confusion and hostility has made the American woman into an internationally acclaimed shrew. Yes, there are degrees, and perhaps more exceptions than examples, but talk to white men from Washington to Hong Kong and you see the same shudder.
These gals are wound too tight. Recently I was aboard a highway bus in an American enclave in Mexico. A gringa wanted to get off where there was no stop. The driver didnât understand her. In Mexico they speak Spanish, a point which apparently had eluded her. She began yelling at him abusively. (Verbatim quote: âYouâre the worst! You suck! Youâre the worst!â)
They do this. People notice. A friend somehow found himself talking with a gringa who had one of those puffy little white dogs you could buff a truck with. He said, âCute little thing. Iâve got a real dog.â This mild witticism set her into yelling. A follow-up by Fred Reed from a post last February. I like Fred. I thought some of other Rantburgers would enjoy this.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
11/22/2005 07:14 ||
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#1
I weary of the self-absorbed clucking of aging poultry.
Oh I've simply gotta steal that line, thank you.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
11/22/2005 8:14 Comments ||
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#3
Poor Mo. Must suck being the Oldest Broad In The Club every friggin night.
But I'm glad she's around. If she wasn't, we'd have to make her up and that would take some work.
#9
Thanks Hyper, I needed that. But drop the flannel. A tucked in shirttail makes my balls itch.
BTW, David Gest is available to walk down the aisle.
Posted by: ed ||
11/22/2005 13:26 Comments ||
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#10
but she still looks as though a vocational school held an injection-molding contest and everyone lost. That leaves her with only her personality as bait. The prognosis is grim.
I love Fred's writing style.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
11/22/2005 15:26 Comments ||
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#11
"Will Someone For God's Sake Marry Maureen?"
Actually, there are many viable candidates that would suit Ms. Dowdy. However, as a Christian, Jesus commands me to be charitable to the poor, the lame, the blind, and the deaf. I pray that you excuse me, for I cannot participate in good conscience.
#16
I wouldn't do her with yours. Bitchy, high-school-girl-cliquish, angry, and forever pissed that she has no man in her life with all the God's gifts she has to offer? Sounds like something Bill Clinton should be sentenced to...oh wait, he is...
Posted by: Frank G ||
11/22/2005 19:12 Comments ||
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#17
Well Maureen, I guess oral sex is completely out of the question?
#18
Men are vain, frightened, immature, unreliable, treacherous, fascinated by gewgaws, obsessed with sex, and unfaithful.
Wait, and women aren't? Am I missing something? The only possibly debatable point is gewgaws,and having worked at Hallmark before, I can assure you that Hell hath no fury like a woman who cannot buy that figurine in a different color.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
