Political Culture: The Last Good Bombing
Thursday, July 24th, 2008 by Jon Cummings
Nearly lost amid the fantastic PR (so far) and blind luck of Barack Obama’s Middle East tour – and the horror show that has been John McCain’s pathetic, flailing response to it – an astonishing story has developed in deepest Serbia this week. Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader who oversaw the rape of Sarajevo, the massacre at Srebrenica and the slaughter of more than 100,000 Muslims during the early 1990s, was finally captured in Belgrade after years in hiding.
The sizzle in this steak is partly in the circumstances: Karadzic, living under the name Dragan Dabic, was masquerading as a long-haired and bearded alternative-medicine guru who claimed to be able to treat everything from impotence to autism. (Thank goodness for that client who demanded an investigation after his erection not only lasted longer than four hours, but spent the whole time watching Judge Wapner and insisting it was “a very good driver.”)
Seeing Karadzic’s pompadour and sloe-eyed mug again, after all these years, couldn’t help but place Obama and McCain’s squabbling over Middle East politics into a fresh context. After all, here was a guy who, at the time of his disappearance in 1995, had been supervising a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing for four years. Here was a guy who, in cahoots with his buddy Slobodan Milosevic, brought nearly a decade of war, rape and outright genocide to the former Yugoslavia in order to make that land safe for a single ethnic group.
These were guys, in short, who needed to be Gotten Rid Of, and fast. Sounds a lot like the argument against Saddam Hussein, doesn’t it? Sure, if we’re talking about the aggressive, gassy Saddam of 1990-91, and not the boxed-in, sanctioned-to-his-eyeballs, no-fly-zoned (and, let’s not forget, no-WMD’d) Saddam of 2002-03. (more…)




In my continuing consumerist sprint to reject Robert’s admonition, last month I took Catie (now 6) to see an opening-weekend screening of Kit Kittredge: An American Girl. And what a glorious day it was! Having already dressed ourselves up and taken ourselves to a matinee of Wicked at Hollywood’s legendary Pantages Theatre, Catie and I booked across town to the Grove for the perfect nightcap to our daddy-girl culture-fest. After a leisurely and purchase-filled roam around American Girl Place, the colossal retail center of the AG empire, we crossed the street and settled into a pair of newfangled multiplex stadium-seats to take in the doll franchise’s first big-screen adventure.
There are, of course, massive floods up and down the Mississippi River – a “500-year flood” that has taken out levees up and down the Iowa-Illinois border, according to the Army Corps of Engineers. The enormous damage to homes and lives has often taken a backseat to worries about the damage to the Midwest corn crop. (Less ethanol next winter! More food riots in Africa!)
The media has treated these three developments separately, but to me they’re all part of the same story. Simply put, our nation’s disastrous energy policy is breaking us financially – and when it’s not busy doing that it’s getting us killed around the world, or avoiding the middleman and ravaging us at home via the type of extreme weather that just might portend a climate-change apocalypse. Out-of-control oil prices, Middle East instability and global warming are related problems that require a unified solution. It inevitably will be the task of the next president, even if it’s John McCain, to begin the long-delayed process of weaning this nation (and eventually the world) off of oil and other fossil fuels.
The weekend was a wall-to-wall weepfest on MSNBC, starting with the raw emotions of Friday evening (when Keith Olbermann’s makeup people couldn’t keep enough pancake on his cheeks to hide the tears, and the pain showed through even on Andrea Mitchell’s surgically improved and/or heavily Botoxed face). By Saturday, an hourlong tribute hosted by Tom Brokaw was running on a loop, and on Sunday Brokaw moved over to the mothership to serve as ringmaster for a televised wake on Meet the Press.
Now, I’ve become accustomed to seeing Bibles for sale in the book department at Target; I’ve spent a bit of time in Christian bookstores (mostly as a teenager, if I remember correctly, because one such store was on my paper route); and it’s not unusual to see the occasional Judeo-Christian trinket (not to mention a Buddha or any number of feng-shui fountains) in a boutique or tchotchke shop. And I’ve heard about the trend toward businesses that wear their religion on their sleeves, from realtors to banks to hair salons. (There was even 


Lieberman seems to have had the same reaction to 9/11 as, say, Dennis Miller – and each man has completely lost his bearings as a result. (Neither is very funny these days, either.) Most recently, Lieberman has become front man for the latest assault on Internet free speech, in his guise as chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. (Why Democrats are allowing him to chair anything more significant than a Passover seder at this point is beyond me.) Among other things, he has written a
I bring this up because the debate over gay marriage too often begins and ends with this sort of name-calling. Proponents of gay rights are viewed by conservative Christians as “sodomites” who are acting “against God’s will” and are surely “doomed to hellfire.” Opponents of gay marriage are “bigots” who are “on the wrong side of history” and will someday find themselves “in the dustbin of history with Bull Connor” – and even, yes, Hitler. Both sets of characterizations are intended to disparage the morality, even the humanity, of the opposing side – and while they are a natural temptation, they serve only to stifle the debate rather than move it in one direction or the other.
So Olbermann ignored the fact that Bush was responding to a rather leading question when he warned of another al Qaeda attack: “If we were to pull out of Iraq next year, what’s the worst that could happen, what’s the doomsday scenario?” Lobbed a softball, Bush drove it out of the park in tried-and-true “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” fashion. What else was he supposed to do? Yet Olbermann chose to attack Bush’s statement for all the “vote Democratic and your children will die” innuendo he could wring out of it – at the same time shoving Bush’s golf comment into the same rhetorical box that already brimmed with statements like “if you want to do something for your country, go shopping” and Laura’s “No one suffers more than the president and I do.”
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