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
April 30, 2008
BREAKING: Dem. Senator Compares America To Hitler's Germany!!!!!! [Siren]
Rick Perlstein has posted Arkansas Senator William Fulbright's famous 1966 speech on Vietnam, usually titled "The Arrogance of Power":
The causes of the malady are not entirely clear but its recurrence is one of the uniformities of history: power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is peculiarly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God's favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations -- to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image. Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence. Once imbued with the idea of a mission, a great nation easily assumes that it has the means as well as the duty to do God's work. The Lord, after all, surely would not choose you as His agent and then deny you the sword with which to do His will. German soldiers in the First World War wore belt buckles imprinted with the words "Gott mit uns." It was approximately under this kind of infatuation -- an exaggerated sense of power and an imaginary sense of mission -- that the Athenians attacked Syracuse, and Napoleon and then Hitler invaded Russia. In plain words, they overextended their commitments and they came to grief.
It's not all as good as that paragraph—in fact, Fulbright spends some time wondering how the Vietnamese people could be so "shockingly ungrateful"—but it's still amazing that a US Senator (from the South) said it all more than forty years ago.
—Jonathan Schwarz
Posted at April 30, 2008 03:31 PMPerhaps this was your intent in publishing this breaking news, but I note that Bill Clinton was an intern for Sen. Fulbright.
Thus, given the precedent set by the Rev. Wright melodrama, I demand that Hilary spend the next two months reacting to these anti-American comments by someone so close to her inner circle.
I took the "shockingly ungrateful" bit as a rhetorical gambit to meet people where they were. I don't think he believed it.
Posted by: Rick Perlstein at April 30, 2008 04:33 PMFulbright rhymes with Wright.
Posted by: darrelplant at April 30, 2008 04:47 PMTROUBLE IS that Frankenstein,(with his Dracula financed Foreign Policy) has only just stubbed his toe.
Posted by: Mike Meyer at April 30, 2008 07:08 PMI took the "shockingly ungrateful" bit as a rhetorical gambit to meet people where they were. I don't think he believed it.
I don't think Carl Levin believes it when he says the same thing about Iraqis, either, but that doesn't make it any less disgusting and sleazy a maneuver.
It's a rhetoric that reinforces in a serious way attitudes that enable our consistently horrible foreign policy, i.e. U.S. intentions always good; our goals always the expansion of freedom, democracy, and well-being; people on the receiving end of our policy way below our level -- struggling, "young" democracies if fully backed by our govt, ungrateful wogs if less so.
Posted by: Nell at April 30, 2008 08:34 PM
