wtf?

Scott Lemieux reads my Brooks-Burke-Oakeshott-Bush piece, and “raises me one“, by finding this “astonishing outpouring” from Brooks’ 2003 archive.

Oakeshott was epistemologically modest. … But the fog didn’t make Oakeshott timid. He believed we should cope with the complex reality around us by adventuring out into the world, by playfully confronting the surprises and the unpredictability of it all. … We can’t know how Oakeshott would have judged the decision to go to war in Iraq, but it is impossible not to see the warnings entailed in his writings. … I try to reply to these warnings. I concede that government should be limited, prudent and conservative, but only when there is something decent to conserve. Saddam sent Iraqi society spinning off so violently, prudence became imprudent. … Because of that legacy, we stink at social engineering. Our government couldn’t even come up with a plan for postwar Iraq—thank goodness, too, because any ‘’plan’’ hatched by technocrats in Washington would have been unfit for Iraqi reality. I tell Oakeshott that the Americans and Iraqis are now involved in an Oakeshottian enterprise. They are muddling through, devising shambolic, ad hoc solutions, and learning through bumbling experience. In the building of free societies, every day feels like a mess, but every year is a step forward.

I fold. This has to be one of the most deeply and offensively stupid op-ed columns I’ve ever read. I don’t know whether even at the time Brooks was able to convince himself that these claims were true; they read to me as a self-consciously weak effort to cover up for a disaster in the making. As Scott says,

The Iraq War is a case in which Burkean conservatism (or its Foucauldian variants) has a great deal of wisdom to offer, and it’s advice is “it was an extraordinarily stupid idea.” That Brooks tried to turn this theoretical line into a defense of the war tells you what you need to about him.

The struggle to build a revolutionary vanguard party of the workers and peasants has never been easy here in the United States. The line of march is tortuous, the peasants rowdy, and it often happens that a group must split. Usually one of the resulting entities will keep the original name, while the other will assemble a new one from the standard combinatoire. (As Dwight Macdonald explained when the Socialist Workers Party begat the Workers Party, “Originality of nomenclature was never our strong point.”)

Once in a while both groups will lay claim to the orginal name, however. The usual practice in that case is to distinguish them by adding some identifying term in parentheses. And so the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (Fight Back), which publishes a newspaper called Fight Back, is distinct from the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (Red Star). The latter refers not to the name of its journal but to the rather well-turned logo found on its homepage.

Within the past few days, an organization known as the Communist League has undergone mitosis, which nowadays means that each of the by-products has a website. I have examined the statements by each faction, but am still no wiser about the issues that require a tightening of ranks in the leadership of the workers and peasants. Yet it is clear that one side is ahead in the fight for hegemony—the one with the Cafe Press store offering very cool Communist League merchandise.

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This bloggingheads segment features one of the nastiest political slurs that I’ve seen in a while: David Frum engaging in a public episode of histrionic soul-searching about how he and his fellow conservatives have made Mark Schmitt (Mark Schmitt! ! !) into Charles Lindbergh. The background can be found in a previous bloggingheads debate where Mark politely pointed out that it was difficult for liberals like him to fully embrace the public commemoration of September 11, however they felt about it privately, because of the way that these commemorations had been politicized by Bush and Giuliani. This apparently was sufficient to brand Mark (who is a friend of mine) as the modern incarnation of a notorious isolationist Hitler-fancying anti-Semite. I’m not sure precisely why this particular slur is so attractive to soi-disant conservative ‘public intellectuals’ – but the ease with which people like Goldberg and Frum reach for it in order to smear people whom they simply don’t agree with suggests that they are (a) vicious and deranged (b) dishonest, or (c ) some combination of the above.

Well, it’s been months and months since my last contribution to this fine blog, but this time, folks, I have a real excuse: the dog ate my August, and it’s all Janet’s fault. Janet, you may recall from months and months ago, is married to me. We learned in mid-July that Janet would need surgery to keep a couple of bones in her neck from pressin’ on her spinal cord. Those bones have now been put back in their proper places, and Janet’s recovering the way people do when they’re told that their surgery has been a “complete success.” (That’s how the neurosurgeon felt about it; now we gradually find out what the patient thinks.) As for me, the minute I learned the surgery would take place on August 28 and that Jamie would have no summer camp in August, I realized that I would very likely have to spend every spare waking second of my summer trying to finish a draft of the book I’ve been talking about for the past couple of years, The Left At War: The Totalitarian Temptation from Hume to Human League. So I made my apologies to my fellow CTers via “electronic” mail, and let them know that I probably wouldn’t be posting again for quite some time. And though I know this will mortify Janet no end, I thought I’d offer CT readers a closeup of the X-ray that started the whole thing:

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So Laurie, the lucky duck, got a copy of the Atlas of Creation, the amazingly large-format, glossy-photo-laden, funtastic creationist slice of life, courtesy of whoever is bankrolling its author Adnan Oktar. It’s a fantastic educational resource for our three-year-old: she’s already excited about cutting out the photos of the bunnies and fishies, etc, and making them into collages, puppets and so on. Strongly recommended.

Eszter blogged a couple of days ago about the rather addictive project that she and I are engage in over at Flickr. There are lots of changes to my perception of the world, along the lines suggested by Dorothea Lange’s words “A camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera”. But not all of that change in awareness is perceptual. I’ve come to realise just how much petty harassment people suffer for pursuing a fairly innocent hobby. The worst I’ve had to put up with myself is being pestered by a security guard for photographing university buildings. But many people in London get stopped by the police and questioned under terrorism legislation. Generally, this isn’t much more than a minor annoyance, but there are places where it is much much worse. One guy, who was present at our last Flickr meet in Bristol, is a teacher working in Thessaloniki, Greece. He was brave enough to take some pictures of the Greek police on a demonstration. This earned him a dislocated shoulder, fractured nose, multiple bruising and smashed glasses. Story and pictures here .

Alan Wofle (no, sorry, I mean Wolfe ) is quoted in the New York Times Review of Books

As Alan Wolfe puts it, “Everyone’s read ‘Things Fall Apart’ ” — Chinua Achebe’s novel about postcolonial Nigeria — “but few people have read the Yeats poem that the title comes from.”

Having just written a post with a title taken from that poem in the assumption that many/most CT readers would get the allusion, I perhaps have a little too much skin in this game to be entirely objective. But this seems to me to be a frankly bizarre assertion (about the poem, not the Achebe novel). The poem is so well known that minatory prognostications about slouching towards Bethlehem have passed beyond cliche into kitsch – Christopher Hitchens had a very funny review of one of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s books a few years ago which belaboured it, inter alia, for trotting the rough beast out yet again (I wonder: does it ever chase after the owl of Minerva when it’s let out for its night-time pee???). Am I wrong here? Are there vast multitudes of the canon-educated public, which is what Wofle (damn! I did it again) is supposed to be talking about, who don’t know Yeats’ poem?? I’d find it surprising (but I’ve surely been wrong about many weightier things than this).

Via The Valve.

So, was Gonzales’ resignation yesterday specifically timed to happen just as the Daily Show started a two week hiatus? Inquiring (and very disappointed) minds would like to know. Not even to mention the revelations about Larry Craig’s bathroom misdemeanours. It’s very suspicious that the court judgment should have been handed down on August 8 – but that Roll Call should only have published the details yesterday. I seem to recall that the last time the Daily Show went on holiday, there was a similar outbreak of political scandals (the Libby case judgement etc). As they say, developing …

1. Read Henry’s post on Facebook. Signed up out of curiosity and masochistic desire to have smallness of social network confirmed.
2. Joined the University of Arizona network. Noodling around, saw the profile for Joe Grad Student from my department. Looked at his list of friends.
3. Noticed that one of Joe Grad Student’s friends looked familiar. Realized I knew him. He had been a year ahead of me in Secondary School in Ireland in the late 1980s. Jaysus.

Writing about the LaRouche Youth Movement finally allowed me to use some of the research material piling up for a novel that’s never quite come together.

Maybe it was the anxiety of influence. Lyndon LaRouche always seemed like a character right out of Thomas Pynchon.
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Via Matt Yglesias comes the latest family full-court press from the Kagans, who get to author policy and neutrally report on it at the same time:

The new strategy for Iraq has entered its second phase. Now that all of the additional combat forces have arrived in theater, Generals David Petraeus and Ray Odierno have begun Operation Phantom Thunder, a vast and complex effort to disrupt al Qaeda and Shiite militia bases all around Baghdad in advance of the major clear-and-hold operations that will follow. The deployment of forces and preparations for this operation have gone better than expected, and Phantom Thunder is so far proceeding very well.

I saw Kagan on TV for the first time recently in that Frontline Documentary on Iraq. My immediate impression was that he looked like just the sort of tabletop war nerd who had whiled away many happy hours as a child thinking up names like “Operation Phantom Thunder,” and who had managed to parlay this into a career. This was confirmed by what he said when asked about his participation in a Camp David meeting with Bush and his advisers:

Was it the first time you’d been to Camp David?
Oh, yeah, sure. … It was a very cool experience. They flew [us] up on a Chinook from Fort McNair, which is also a cool experience, to fly along the Potomac like that. It’s a beautiful place, and it was quite a good setting, I think.

What fun. Still, “Phantom Thunder”? Looks like we’re running out of tough-sounding modifiers for the word “Thunder.” We’ve had Blue Thunder and before that there was Operation Rolling Thunder, which sounds better than “Operation Bombing Vietnam To No Real Purpose.” “Phantom Thunder” clearly isn’t one of the classics. Let’s see … “Operation Flash of Thunder”? “Operation Thundercats”? “Operation Grabpot Thundergust”?