Anselm Feuerbach, Medea (1878)

Größers wolltest auch du, aber die Liebe zwingt

All uns nieder, das Leid beuget gewaltiger,

Doch es kehret umsonst nicht

Unser Bogen, woher er kommt. [MORE . . .]

The week began with the forgotten Josiah Mitchell Morse, (who as of May 14 has been granted his Wikipedia page) and ends with the very few sentences from his typewriter that are remembered online. The first is a bonbon, a letter Morse wrote to the New York Times, in 1989:

To the Editor:

Here is a true story about Samuel Beckett that is not in any of the many books about him.

In the summer of 1971 a student of mine at Temple University went to Europe without taking along enough money. When he was down to his last few centimes, walking along a Paris street, wondering what to do, he saw Samuel Beckett coming toward him…(continued)

[MORE . . .]

Once more I’m going to return to the topic of those blogger roundtables organized by the Pentagon, which I have discussed several times since last summer and most recently last month. In that last item, I discussed the New York Times story that revealed how the Pentagon worked with retired military officials and prepared them to serve as supposedly independent media “analysts.” That was part of a broader Defense Department media program that included the blogger roundtables, and which looked for “surrogates” to whom Pentagon talking points could be fed.

Since I first wrote about the topic, bloggers who participated attacked me for, they said, falsely portraying the roundtables as a media manipulation effort. They were strictly independent, the bloggers wrote, and even noted that a few liberal-types took part. In a 2007 post at The D-Ring called “How Harper’s sensationalizes blogger outreach,” Steve Field wrote: [MORE . . .]

From the Star-Tribune:

What would prompt Bloomington mayor Gene Winstead to vogue down a Mall of America runway modeling a t-shirt and Zubaz? Nothing short of the unveiling of the official line of Republican National Convention clothing, which took place at the mall’s rotunda Tuesday. Cyndi Lesher, president of the convention’s local host committee, said she’d wear the pink polo shirt she had on again. “It’s a decent color,” she said. She’s right–and what kind of quality is that for a convention outfit? The clothes, made by Minnesota company St. Croix Promotions and Retail, sport plenty of the aforementioned fashion don’ts, but in a restrained way–almost too restrained. One sky-blue T-shirt’s screenprint is a colorful drawing of the St. Paul skyline with a little airplane toting a “MSP 2008″ sign. On another shirt, a donkey and an elephant hold a communal sign reading “Let’s Party!”

A few weeks back I posted an item about a 2005 Senate trip Barack Obama made to Azerbaijan during which he lobbied dictator Ilham Aliyev on behalf of McDonald’s and complained about obstacles faced by the company in opening restaurants in Baku, the Azeri capital. A Westerner residing in Baku subsequently sent me the following note:

Obama should be happy to know that McDonald’s is now thriving in Baku, with four locations, including one in the swanky, central Fountain Square. Every day Baku’s growing elite, clad in the most ostentatious plastic outfits that money can buy, parade in and out while techno music is pumped through the speakers, giving the place more the feel of a nightclub than a fast-food joint. Speaking of Obama, Azerbaijanis are generally suspicious of him because of his connections to the Armenian lobby and his public support for the recognition of the genocide. And speaking of Armenia, I’ve been told by a number of proud Azerbaijanis that there are no McDonald’s restaurants in Armenia. Obviously the future belongs to Azerbaijan!

[MORE . . .]

Will Perry is the son of Bob Perry, a major funder of the Swift Boat Vets and the G.O.P. Will is also a G.O.P. donor, although he gives less than his father. From the Fort Bend Star:

I don’t like to write about divorces. There’s seldom a happy ending and it is such nasty, personal business. But when egregious actions occur…I reserve the right to expose those actions to the public…Under questioning by Laura Perry’s attorney, Will Perry admitted he has been a sexual addict for many years, but had quit attending Sex Addicts Anonymous in January, 2008. He said he had sex with “probably” 20 prostitutes since his marriage. During this testimony, Mrs. Perry left the courtroom and her uncontrollable sobs in the hall could be heard inside. A chart in Will Perry’s handwriting that he had drawn several years ago tracing his sexual addiction blamed his sexual addiction problems on his father who he claimed was an alcoholic and verbally abusive.

A number of readers complained to me or to Harper’s about that delightful Hillary-as-Hitler video I posted the other day, which was created by comedian James Adomian. But the public has spoken (or rather, clicked), and the critics appear to be in the minority:

First uploaded to YouTube May 7, “Hillary’s Downfall” has tallied more than 300,000 views. The bump in views skyrocketed Adomian’s account to the sixth-most-viewed comedian slot this week, into the realm of YouTube web comedy staples like Michael Buckley and College Humor’s video channel…”I don’t have the resources to release my complaints in real time, like on a talk show,” said Adomian. “So I thought it was cathartic to imagine what it would be like in Hillary’s bunker when they got the bad news [that she’d lost the nomination].”

That’s the question raised by this terrific Wall Street Journal story. The firm is GlobalOptions, an extremely well-connected company run by, among others, former FBI and CIA officials. The Kazakh government apparently retained GlobalOptions to monitor, and possibly seek to derail, a Justice Department investigation into James Giffen, an American oilman who is suspected of paying tens of millions of dollars in bribes to President Nursultan Nazarbayev.

Dariga Nazarbayeva, the Kazakh president’s powerful daughter, reportedly lined up the services of the private-security firm. (I met Dariga a few years ago at a reception at the Washington offices of GlobalOptions. She invited me to visit Kazakhstan and told me that if I took her up on the invitation I was certain to meet some beautiful local women. Quite a strange encounter.) In addition to being extremely “murky” in its operations, GlobalOptions was also (as I reported a few years ago) an Iraq war profiteer.

I know Hillary Clinton is hard up for dough, but should her campaign really have taken money from a suspected (and subsequently convicted) kickback conspirator? In June of 2007, attorney Melvyn Weiss donated $4,600 to Clinton’s campaign, the legal maximum. By then Weiss was reportedly under investigation for paying kickbacks to people who served as lead plaintiffs in class-action lawsuits that netted his New York law firm hundreds of millions of dollars in fees.

Weiss was indicted on those charges three months later. He agreed to plead guilty this March and did so formally in April. According to a story at cbsnews.com, the “kickback scheme allowed the firm’s attorneys to be among the first to file litigation and secure the lucrative position as lead plaintiffs’ counsel.” The story said that Weiss’s firm “made an estimated $250 million over two decades by filing legal actions on behalf of professional plaintiffs who received $11.3 million in kickbacks,” and that Weiss was ordered to “pay nearly $10 million in fines and forfeiture penalties, and could be sentenced to up to 33 months in prison at a later hearing.” [MORE . . .]

Some readers of Martin Amis’s new collection of essays, The Second Plane: Terror and Boredom (Alfred A. Knopf), have found the marriage of nouns in its subtitle a consternation, an inglorious instance of Martin Aimless. “[H]e repeatedly draws a nonsensical analogy between terrorism and boredom,” wrote Michiko Kakutani, [MORE . . .]

From: Gary McCardell

Subject: Exclusive Video: Hillary in the Führerbunker, by Ken Silverstein, May 12, 2008

On your website, Ken Silverstein posted a link to a video political parody showing a movie portrayal of Hitler in his bunker raging insanely at his defeat with subtitles as though it were Hillary Clinton reacting to the primary results in Indiana and North Carolina. [MORE . . .]

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports that Sheldon Adlelson, a major donor to the G.O.P., has been questioned by police as part of a corruption probe. S. Daniel Abraham of Slim-Fast, a big Democratic donor, is also being questioned. Worth reading.

The Washington Post reports today that Barack Obama and John McCain are both working to

freeze out “527″ groups—named after a provision in the tax code—which are not allowed to openly support a candidate but have helped define recent elections through negative advertising.

[MORE . . .]

Josiah Mitchell Morse

Josiah Mitchell Morse was blessed, by birth, with a beautiful American name, but such luck hasn’t been enough to ensure him and his work a place in the cultural memory. As of this morning, for example, a Wikipedia search assures us of Morse’s insignificance, offering only a grim ‘there is no page titled…’ alert. Using an earlier measure of a culture’s indifference to the strenuous exertions of its members, we might gauge Morse’s irrelevance, thus: none of his serious, funny, learned, angry, angering books has remained in print. [MORE . . .]

Sidney Blumenthal has written for The New Republic, the Washington Post, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, and most recently served as Washington editor to Salon.com and as a contributor to The Guardian. He is one of America’s foremost political commentators, and also has a noteworthy track-record of political engagement. He served as an assistant and senior advisor to President Bill Clinton and is currently a senior advisor to Hillary Clinton. He was also executive producer for the Oscar Award-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side. Blumenthal has just published a collection of essays entitled The Strange Death of Republican America. I put six questions to him on the subject of his current book.

1. You have modeled your book, at least to a degree, on George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England, the 1935 classic of modern political historiography that linked the demise of the Liberal Party to dramatic external changes–the political ascendancy of trade unionism, the civil war in Ireland, and so forth. But there’s a difference, isn’t there? When Dangerfield wrote the Liberal Party really was on the verge of extinction. But today you’re effectively forecasting doom for the Republicans. Not only do the Republicans cling to power in the Executive Branch, they have arguably succeeded in a sweeping reallocation of power from the other branches to the Executive. And they have greatly consolidated their control of the Judicial branch. Only in the legislature have the Democrats staged a comeback, and even there the margins are narrow and they rest on a single election in 2006. Admittedly George W. Bush has emerged as the most unpopular president of modern times, but America has developed a very stable two-party system, and part of that stability comes from a party’s rejection of its failed leaders. In the 2008 presidential race, the Republicans rejected the two candidates who positioned themselves as Bush’s heirs (Romney and Giuliani) in favor of John McCain, the man who was Bush’s nemesis in 2000. Don’t the signs point to an internal realignment within the G.O.P. that positions the party to hold on to the only part of the government that seems to matter, the Executive? Doesn’t that make your prognosis premature? [MORE . . .]

Barack Obama recently severed all links with Robert Malley, an informal Middle East policy adviser, after the latter “confessed” that he had met with the Palestinian group Hamas. And in a recent interview, Obama said, “We don’t do nuance well in politics and especially don’t do it well on Middle East policy…It’s conceivable that there are those in the Arab world who say to themselves, ‘This is a guy who spent some time in the Muslim world, has a middle name of Hussein, and appears more worldly and has called for talks with people, and so he’s not going to be engaging in the same sort of cowboy diplomacy as George Bush,’ and that’s something they’re hopeful about. I think that’s a perfectly legitimate perception as long as they’re not confused about my unyielding support for Israel’s security.”

This prompted Luca Menato, my favorite correspondent from overseas, to write: [MORE . . .]

Caught in the Web, 1860.

U.S. military reports on the interrogation of four captured Shia militia members concluded that Hezbollah was training small groups of Iraqi insurgents in Iran. John Bolton, ex-ambassador to the United Nations, said that attacking Iran was “really the most prudent thing to do”; the Iraqi government said that it would conduct its own inquiry. “We do not want to start a conflict with Iran,” said Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh. “We need our own government documentation of this interference, not from the Americans, not from the media.” The U.S.-backed government of Lebanon tried to dismantle Hezbollah's extensive telecommunications network there, and Hezbollah temporarily seized half of Beirut. “The hand that touches the weapons of the resistance,” said Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, “will be cut off.” One Wing, a bald eagle that lost its other wing in the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, died of a heart tumor, shortly after the death of its mate, The Old Witch; three northern elephant seals were found shot in the head, lying in pools of blood, in San Simeon, California, near the Hearst castle. Oil exceeded $125 a barrel. Refined french-fry grease was 32 cents per pound, up 20 cents from 2006. [MORE . . .]

Well, I may be soft on Hillary, but this is very funny. (Not safe for work or for the easily offended.)

Doug Goodyear, who had been picked by John McCain’s campaign to run the G.O.P. convention this summer, resigned over the weekend after Newsweek reported that a lobbying firm he heads once represented Burma. The DCI Group–Goodyear is its CEO–“was paid $348,000 in 2002 to represent Burma’s military junta, which had been strongly condemned by the State Department for its human-rights record and remains in power today,” said Newsweek.

Some of McCain’s allies, the magazine added, worried that Goodyear’s selection to run the convention “could fuel perceptions that McCain—who has portrayed himself as a crusader against special interests—is surrounded by lobbyists.” (Since McCain is, in fact, surrounded by lobbyists, it’s easy to see the source of that “perception.”) [MORE . . .]