Poor fools. They should never have tried to beat me at this game. What about, "Afghanistan, where the world's most open society confronts the world's most closed one"? "Where American women pilots kill the men who enslave women." "Where the world's most indiscriminate bombers are bombed by the world's most accurate ones." "Where the largest number of poor people applaud the bombing of their own regime." I could go on. (I think No. 4 may need a little work.) But there are some suggested contrasts for the "doves" to paste into their scrapbook.

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The entry of Buchanan as a supposed "insurgent" presidential candidate is itself part of the prearrangement and manipulation. Here we have a loyal Beltway veteran, grown like a mold on the dank sponge of the national security state, and well-known to the powers that be as someone absolutely reliable. He's already shown himself quite willing to play the game of slush funds and matching funds. There's your designated dissident. Just for fun, why not set him up against Donald Trump for the Reform Party nomination, so that even the supposed outsider faction can replicate the only allowable division in American politics -- that between machine-produced clones on the one hand and nutball narcissistic tycoons on the other.

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Aviation is a tool especially shaped for Western hands, a scientific art which others only copy in a mediocre fashion; another barrier between the teeming millions of Asia and the Grecian inheritance of Europe -- one of the priceless possessions which permit the White race to live at all in a pressing sea of Yellow, Black and Brown ... We can have peace and security only as long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races.

The best air force, wrote Lindbergh (who had accepted a large and swastika-infested medal from Reichsmarshall Herman Goering himself) was the German one. Now take another look at the date on the article. It's still springtime for Hitler, but autumn for Poland and, soon, France. Winter is not far behind, for other and lesser peoples.

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The non-facts are these: On June 24, 1981, a 14-year-old peasant girl, unoriginally named Ivanka Ivankovic, unoriginally came across a light that she took to be the Virgin Mary. Not many hours later, three other girls and two boys claimed to have had the identical experience, or sense-impression. Within a matter of weeks, thousands of the credulous had started to appear at the site, and it has now been trampled by millions. Those who turn up have emanated a number of false claims, such as the ability to stare calmly and without harm at the sun (a pointless achievement even if verifiable) and the more acquisitive and medieval capacity to turn their rosary beads into pure gold. Every sort of foolishness is indulged, and every green acre of this once backward village has been transmuted into a knick-knack mall.

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These admissions, which come perhaps a little too late to be termed magnanimous, at least reflect a new confidence and a new candor, born -- at least in part -- from the recognition of Palestinian existence that results from the Oslo accords. (Many of the same recognitions were on show in Israeli TV's 50th anniversary documentary series last year, a series it would be nice to see on an American network.)

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In many cases, the crude cash-flow measure is as useful in deciding on a politician as it is in making a choice at the multiplex; you might as well see the worthless movie that everyone else has seen, or express an interest in the unbearably light "front runner," so as not to be left out of the national "conversation."

The hidden costs, alas, include a complete erosion of the critical faculties. I am as enthralled as the next person by the sheaves of money assembled for George Walker Bush. (What did he do to be shorn at birth of his Herbert?) But I'm even more fascinated by the fact that, as I write, he is about to sign his 93rd death warrant. There was an execution on the day of his inauguration as governor of Texas, which I don't count, and there has been one every two and a half weeks or so ever since.

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Not many of the surviving Kennedy clan possess these features. The venue
of the party was chosen because of the title of his glossy magazine,
which in turn was named for George Washington. In this magazine, young
John had recently written an editorial critical of his family members,
with their endless dreary scandals about booze and drugs and nanny
abuse. "Poster boys for bad behavior," he called them, proving that he
would never be famous as a writer. (He was much better in person than on
the page. Asked by Barbara Walters what he would do if he became
president, he said that his first act would be to call his uncle Teddy
and gloat. His second act would be to cut taxes.)

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One night at the dinner table, I told her: "You know, Daddy is going to run for governor again. If he wins, we would keep living in this house, and he would keep trying to help people. But first we have to have an election.

Skipping lightly over the remainder of that nauseating passage (Hillary Clinton proposed a "role-playing" dinner-table game in which her 6-year-old daughter had to play Gov. Clinton, and then sit and listen to hypothetical abuse of the candidate, until she cried, which she repeatedly did) one notes that the "priorities" and "agenda" haven't altered all that much. First one has to have a house, and then one has to have an election. In between, Daddy -- most ably seconded by Mummy -- makes like he wants to help people.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/07/12/hillary_7/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1999/06/28/china_7/ http://www.salon.com/1999/06/28/china_7/#comments Mon, 28 Jun 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/06/28/china It's always suspicious when Washingtonians start breaking into bad Latin. There may be a quid, you hear them say, and there seems to be a quo. But -- aha -- there's no smoking pro to connect the two. This pseudo-talk combines my least favorite styles: that of the overpaid attorney and that of the overpaid political obfuscator.

Thus, it is not denied that Chinese military-industrial sources managed to transfer an awful lot of money to the Democratic National Committee. Nor is it denied that many tranches of valuable information made their way from American nuclear laboratories into the computer systems of the People's Republic of China. Nor is it denied that large American corporations were eager to share missile and satellite technology with the PRC, and that they, too, were generous to the DNC. All that is denied is that these things have anything to do with one another.

But every one of the Clintonian defenses raises additional suspicions.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/06/28/china_7/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1999/06/17/china_6/ http://www.salon.com/1999/06/17/china_6/#comments Thu, 17 Jun 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/06/17/china Why does President Clinton not emulate his role model, Richard Nixon (at whose funeral he was so husky and forgiving), and deflect domestic and foreign criticism by claiming that his administration's incredible generosity to China -- from nuclear proliferation to human rights to free trade to national security to campaign finance -- constitutes a Nixonian "opening to China," the gambit that earned Clinton's almost-impeached predecessor his legacy?

It's not as if there haven't been quite a number of openings. On numerous crucial elements of administration conduct, the footprint of Beijing is so large as to be unmissable. We hear incessantly from the White House and the State Department and the Pentagon that China is now a "strategic partner." Strategy implies coordination and deliberation. Partnership implies concert. Very well, then, let us inquire: Are the different elements of Clinton's China policy all part of the same design? For some reason, the question when phrased in this way is treated as unwelcome by government spokesmen, who would (oddly enough) prefer us to think of China policy as random, or at least improvised, but by no means as something that can be taken as all of a piece.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/06/17/china_6/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1999/04/05/hitchens_3/ http://www.salon.com/1999/04/05/hitchens_3/#comments Mon, 05 Apr 1999 20:51:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/04/05/hitchens During the Balkan war of 1912, Leon Trotsky was a war correspondent for a group of liberal Russian and Ukrainian newspapers. He understood that pan-Slavic and Christian Orthodox chauvinism was a crucial element in Russian tyranny -- just as it is today in the warped worldview of our ally Boris Yeltsin. Trotsky witnessed atrocities committed in Kosovo, and wrote that Russian indulgence had made it much easier for Serbian and Bulgarian gangs "to engage in their Cain's work of further massacres of the peoples of the Crescent in the interests of the 'culture' of the Cross."

Quoting a Serbian soldier whose civil and political conscience had been revolted, Trotsky reported:

"The horrors actually began as soon as we crossed the old frontier ... The darker the sky became, the more brightly the fearful illumination of the fires stood out against it. Burning was going on all around us. Entire Albanian villages had been turned into pillars of fire -- dwellings, possessions, accumulated by fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers were going up in flames."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/04/05/hitchens_3/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1999/03/16/news_195/ http://www.salon.com/1999/03/16/news_195/#comments Tue, 16 Mar 1999 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/03/16/news In James Baldwin's account of the Atlanta murders, "The Evidence of Things Not Seen," he recalls a dreadful earlier moment from 1965. The swamps and creeks of Mississippi were being dragged for the bodies of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman (done to death by the political ancestors of Bob Barr), and the search parties kept turning up corpses. Examination proved that these were not the cadavers that the authorities were seeking. It took a while for the subject to change, or at least for it to change enough for someone to exclaim: Wait a minute! What are all these other bodies doing in the swamp?

It's one thing to say, with reasonable confidence, that the Oval Office is currently occupied by a war criminal, a rapist and a pathological liar. It's another to ponder the full implications. If half of the many allegations about Clinton's business deals and date rapes are even half-true, then he has been going through political life for years, aware or quasi-aware that any or every telephone call might be the one he has been dreading. That's more stress than most of us could take: Only a certain kind of personality could be expected to endure it. You can look this up under the simpering liberal media description of "Comeback Kid," or you can check it under an entry of an entirely different kind, where the key phrase is "Threat to self and others."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/03/16/news_195/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1999/01/19/news_170/ http://www.salon.com/1999/01/19/news_170/#comments Tue, 19 Jan 1999 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/01/19/news Having watched, with fascinated disgust, the self-abasement of American liberals in front of the promiscuous solipsist President Clinton, I wondered what their reward would be. What did Jesse Jackson and Democrats Barney Frank and Maxine Waters hope to get as they rallied against impeachment and either endorsed or ignored the bombing of Iraq? Did they perhaps think of the president as a potential soul brother, harried by the racist Republican creeps, Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi and Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia (and now South Carolina's Sen. Strom Thurmond and Chief Justice William Rehnquist)?

If so, their solidarity and fellow feeling will be their only reward. On the day that formal impeachment proceedings opened in the Senate, the New York Times found room for the following item on Page A-24. It followed the tradition of the three-headline crib note, with the best reserved for the small print:

Clinton to Pledge $7 Billion for Missile Defense System

But Decision to Build Is to Be Made in 2000

Setting aside money for "Star Wars," for practical and political reasons

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/01/19/news_170/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1998/12/08/news_157/ http://www.salon.com/1998/12/08/news_157/#comments Tue, 08 Dec 1998 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1998/12/08/news In December 1989, the U.S. armed forces descended in strength on Panama City, flattening a few of the poorer barrios, and took Gen. Manuel Noriega prisoner before "extraditing" him on a military aircraft bound for Florida. Some of the niceties were observed (a new Panamanian president was hastily sworn in on the tarmac of an American Air Force base), but not, it is safe to say, all the niceties.

So slight was the attention to international law, in fact, that the Bush administration was forced to depend for endorsement on the only two allies that never deserted it -- namely British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the congressional Democrats. Thatcher declared herself delighted that this thug had been brought to justice. The Democrats checked the polls, as they tend to do, and went along, as they always had. Asked to nominate a pretext for apprehending Noriega, the Bush administration halfheartedly cited the wife of a U.S. Navy lieutenant who had been badly roughed up by the general's goons.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1998/12/08/news_157/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1998/11/18/cov_18featureb/ http://www.salon.com/1998/11/18/cov_18featureb/#comments Wed, 18 Nov 1998 16:44:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/it/1998/11/18/cov_18featureb The annals of our poor and common species are, in part, also the annals of credulity. May I share with you my choicest quotation from the judicious and evenhanded world of last year's book reviews? It is the following:

"Why would Jefferson risk his presidency and his historical reputation by continuing a liaison with Sally Hemings for at least five years after Callender's exposé appeared?"

This exquisite piece of academic obfuscation -- I employ the term "obfuscation" to denote those who discard Occam and who create new woods and new trees where none grew before -- appeared in the March 10, 1997, New Republic. The author, Sean Wilentz, was reviewing Annette Gordon-Reed's brilliant study "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy." The stylistic coincidence is hilarious enough. Between January and August of this year, Clinton partisans like Wilentz used up acres of everybody's time in the same way, as if to suggest that patriarchs and presidents wouldn't gamble other people's chips on their own gratification. (Also to suggest that, if they did, it was the fault of disreputable journalists like Callender for pointing it out.) On the cusp of the November elections, Wilentz resurfaced and sponsored a quickie historians' petition, rallying the profession to the side of President Clinton. The most eminent "signer" of this declaration was Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who was not known to me before as a historian of any kind, but who presumably squeezed in as a composer of profiles in Democratic opportunism. No sooner was the election a thing of the past -- history, you might say -- than Schlesinger appeared in full fig at the White House to receive, along with the more energetic and deserving Fats Domino, the National Humanities Medal.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1998/11/18/cov_18featureb/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1998/10/20/news_133/ http://www.salon.com/1998/10/20/news_133/#comments Tue, 20 Oct 1998 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1998/10/20/news I-->I cannot understand why you are taking the side of the Clintons in their struggle to stay in the White House. Last week, you suggested that I put our disagreement into the epistolary form, so here it is.

After eight years of Reagan and four years of Bush, a "New Democrat" arose to say, not that the Republicans have moved the country too far to the right, but that the Democratic Party is too much identified with the New Deal! No skill in theorem was necessary, in 1992, to see that a vote for Clinton was a vote to confirm the rightward shift. (On two crucial matters of foreign policy, namely Cuba and Israel, Clinton actually ran against Bush from the right. And by saying that his objective was "to end welfare as we know it," he located the problem in the morals of the underclass rather than in the conduct of the overclass.) I apologize for starting with such an obvious point; obvious enough, I should have thought, to anyone who -- like you -- supported Jerry Brown at the time.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1998/10/20/news_133/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1998/09/29/news_119/ http://www.salon.com/1998/09/29/news_119/#comments Tue, 29 Sep 1998 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1998/09/29/news Now that the Iranian government has disowned the mercenary and murderous elements of Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwah against Salman Rushdie -- leaving only the hysterical and uncomprehending denunciation of his novel to stand, as the mother of all bad reviews -- there is an occasion to celebrate a huge moral victory. The new regime of President Mohammad Khatami won a democratic election, and has been groping for its own sake toward a version of "separation" between clerisy and politics: It made this gesture of repudiation for good and sufficient reasons having to do with its own society.

So who will now say that a lone novelist "brought it all on himself" by "insulting Islam"? The insult to Islam, as Rushdie and his supporters argued all along, was the assumption that the Muslim culture itself demanded blood sacrifice. No doubt Iran's confrontation with the Taliban played its part in Khatami's decision, as did other considerations of realpolitik. (Changes of mind are not dictated by God, either.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1998/09/29/news_119/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1998/09/23/news_114/ http://www.salon.com/1998/09/23/news_114/#comments Wed, 23 Sep 1998 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1998/09/23/news On Aug. 20, President Clinton personally ordered the leveling of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant on the outskirts of Khartoum. More or less simultaneously, another flight of cruise missiles was dropped on various parts of Afghanistan and also -- who's counting? -- Pakistan, in an apparent effort to impress the vile Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden, of course, hopes to bring a "judgmental" monotheism of his own to bear on these United States, and is thus in some peoples' minds a sort of Arab version of Ken Starr.

Sources in U.S. Intelligence apparently claimed that there was only one "window" through which to strike at bin Laden, and that the only time they could hope to hit his Afghan fastness by this remote means was on the night of Monica Lewinsky's return to the grand jury. Let's assume they were correct. After all, they helped build and equip his camps and they may know something we don't (even if they ended up missing him). Furthermore, the hideous Taliban regime is not available for the receiving of diplomatic notes, has even executed some Iranian envoys and seems in other ways to be deaf to shame.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1998/09/23/news_114/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1998/08/31/news_104/ http://www.salon.com/1998/08/31/news_104/#comments Mon, 31 Aug 1998 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1998/08/31/news "The evil that men do lives after them/The good is oft interred with their bones."

Mark Anthony's valediction to Julius Caesar is fictional, unlike the graveside oratory of Pericles or Lincoln. But this time last year, the fictional had easily surpassed the real in the obsequies for Diana, Princess of Wales. Instead of a hyperactive debutante who had ricocheted around the scene with a series of ill-chosen but well-born or well-heeled boyfriends, alighting here on an astrologer, there on an aromatherapist and there again on a signature charity, we were presented with a Lady Bountiful or Fairy Godmother, without whose luminous presence the poor of the world were left unfriended, untended and alone.

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