or Powell's or me• • •
"Mike and Jon, Jon and Mike—I've known them both for years, and, clearly, one of them is very funny. As for the other: truly one of the great hangers-on of our time."—Steve Bodow, head writer, The Daily Show
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"Who can really judge what's funny? If humor is a subjective medium, then can there be something that is really and truly hilarious? Me. This book."—Daniel Handler, author, Adverbs, and personal representative of Lemony Snicket
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"The good news: I thought Our Kampf was consistently hilarious. The bad news: I’m the guy who wrote Monkeybone."—Sam Hamm, screenwriter, Batman, Batman Returns, and Homecoming
December 04, 2007
More Walid Jumblatt
Lebanese politician Walid Jumblatt, speaking after a Gaza suicide bombing in January, 2004:
Yesterday, the Palestinian mother Reem Al-Riyashi sacrificed herself, and by so doing joined the columns of the brave Jihad warriors...It is an act of belief and it is the correct path, because the fall of one Jew, whether soldier or civilian, is a great accomplishment in times of decline, subservience, and submissiveness, as a way to undermine the plan to 'Jewify' all of Palestine.
Dick Cheney, speaking after Jumblatt at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy six weeks ago:
I'm pleased to be among the many participants in the conference, a group that includes your key noter, Walid Jumblatt, from Lebanon. I've met with Mr. Jumblatt on a number of occasions, and I admire the courageous stand he's taking...
More on neocon hero Jumblatt here.
Posted at December 4, 2007 10:54 AMThe only road on the Bush Road Map is I-666 THE HIGHWAY TO HELL. (88 lanes all going one way)
Posted by: Mike Meyer at December 4, 2007 03:41 PM"Palestify" doesn't quite have the same ring, does it? ;-)
Posted by: Dan Coyle at December 4, 2007 05:57 PMThis could get a lot funnier still. There's a fair chance that Jumblat (Lebanon's most accomplished side-switcher, and that's saying something) might be about to swing back to the pro-Syrian camp soon, having decided that March 14 is at road's end. He recently referred to Hizbullah as a "resistance movement" again, after a long period of using less complimentary epithets, and also obliquely hinted that they should perhaps keep their weapons after all ... apparently, the US insistence to bring Syria aboard the Annapolis conference* went a long way to convincing him that Damascus is about to be brought in from the cold again, sooner or later (at the latest, when an upcoming US foreign policy team starts cleaning up the Bush Mid-East mess), and that the anti-Syrian forces in Lebanon will be the first casualty. If he does flip back, he's certain to start firing off attacks on the USA, Israel, Jews etc again, like he did before.
What US politicians don't seem to get, whether friends or foes of his, is that Junblat's whole raison d'être is to always be on the far-out extreme of one team or another in Lebanese politics, in order to make up for the numerically small constituency he controls -- he can't compete outside the Chouf mountain with votes or guns, so the only way he can make himself useful to a patron on the national level is to act as Lebanon's most rabid political attack dog. The only thing that matters to him is that it be the winning team, and that is the only principle he has followed (successfully) since taking power. It's perfectly sensible politics for the leader of a small but well-organized group of people stuck in central Lebanon without natural allys -- and everyone who is someone in Lebanon understands and, if not accepts, then at least expects it of him. Not so, apparently, in the US.
Still, given his past behavior alone, one would need to be a truly magnificient idiot to take his constant bombast for principle. He really, truly doesn't care what the ideological content of his statements are, as long as they pay politically by getting him invited to the corridors of power, wherever they happen to be at any given moment -- Washington, Damascus, Paris, Teheran...
*) in turn to split it from Teheran, to remove Hizbullah from Israel's northern border, so as to get free hands with Iran, for internal American war-craze related reasons... or all at once.
