June 06, 2005

The New York Times and Outing the CIA's Covert Air Wing
— Ace

Good article exploring the possible motivations for the New York Times new policy of "Loose lips sink ships, and that's a good thing:"

A close friend of mine, who is an intelligence specialist in the US Army, departs soon for Iraq. It is quite clear to me that the New York Times article has increased by some significant amount the risk to his life. The forces lethally opposed to the USA are currently under great pressure, perhaps stretched in their own intelligence-gathering mission, and may well find the specifics of the article highly valuable in targeting their efforts. Even if the intelligence services change their contractors and their general pattern of interaction with civilian business, these measures will take time and incur other, unknown risks.

If my friend dies in his tour of duty I shall be thinking very specifically about Mr. Scott, Mr. Grey, and Ms. Williams. Quite likely they would have had nothing particularly to do with this misfortune. However, human nature being what it is, I know that I would not be able to exclude them from my meditations. If the authors were just publishing their article to get a chance at a Pulitzer, I really have no moral quarrel with them at all, any more than I would have with a crocodile that eats a child or a raccoon that raids my larder. However, if they do have a moral identity as human beings, they should know that, if a certain civilian plane comes down over an unnamed Middle Eastern country, and all the US personnel aboard are killed, there is one compatriot who will regard them as murderers. May they think of this as they look in the mirror.

I think the motivation is pretty clear myself. The New York Times opposes virtually all covert action and feels a greater good is accomplished by making it as difficult as possible to engage in such activities.

They are also under the misimpression that the American public opposes this sort of shadow war, and if we only knew "the facts," we'd demand our government shut these programs down.

Talk about living in a coccoon.

This was a reckless and dangerous piece to write. It wouldn't even occur to most people in the media to publish such sensitive details about a very important covert program. But the Times believes it knows better than the American government, the American military, and (of course) the American people, and it "knows" in its collective heart that it's more important to thwart the CIA than to protect national secrets as any good American might.

Thanks to my lovely co-host Karol.

Ask The Ombudsman: RDBrewer notes the Times' "public editor's" email address is public@nytimes.com.

He suggests that you ask the New York Times about its reasoning and justification for revealing such delicate information when the story could easily have been written in broad strokes avoiding any sensitive invormation.

His own letter:

Dear Public Editor:

What could possibly be the justification for publishing C.I.A. Expanding Terror Battle Under Guise of Charter Flights by Scott Shane, Stephen Grey, and Margo Williams? Is there some greater public good here that hasn't been identified in the article or anywhere else? Has there been some transgression of the law? What exactly was being uncovered here and for whom? (Other than the kinds of planes America's enemies might want to consider targeting.) There must be some reason why NYT editors considered it acceptable to increase the risk to American lives with such specifics. What is it?

If one of these planes now goes down, how will the NYT answer questions about causing American deaths?

Posted by: Ace at 08:56 AM | Comments (13)
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Deep Throat and Press Vanity
— Ace

A couple of good points:

A "sustaining myth of journalism," as Epstein wrote 30 years ago in Commentary about the book All the President's Men, holds that reporters pry secrets out of government. What's really going on is slightly less heroic, he believes. When sources leak, they do so for a host of reasons, but most often to damage their official rivals. Journalists suffer from a "blind spot" that keeps them from appreciating the complex infighting taking place inside government bureaucracies.

...

What moved Felt to leak, Woodward writes, were the corrupting political pressures the White House was applying to the FBI. Woodward writes of how threatened the FBI was by a 1970 White House plan, which proposed using the FBI, CIA, and military intelligence to increase surveillance of "domestic security threats." Hoover opposed the Huston plan, as it was known, because it encroached upon the bureau's domestic sleuthing.

Now, if ever there were a corrupt organization, it was J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. With his stash of detailed dossiers on politicians from both parties, Hoover kept all presidents on a short leash and obliged their darker impulses, as when he wiretapped Martin Luther King Jr. at the behest of the Kennedy administration.

...

What Woodward doesn't explain is why Felt thought Nixon's ambitions made him a Nazi, but the FBI's slimy domestic surveillance programs didn't tar the bureau with the same brush. ... The Hoover FBI wanted to be the only semi-fascistic national police force on the scene and would repel all trespassers.

...


Epstein believes reporters err too often by viewing the operations of government as monolithic instead of the "product of diverse and competing" interests. He's especially critical of those who believe Woodward and Bernstein "revealed" Watergate. In his Commentary article, Epstein provides a timeline that credits FBI investigators, federal prosecutors, a grand jury, and congressional committees with unearthing and developing "all the actual evidence and disclosures of Watergate." All the President's Men gives Woodward and Bernstein excessive credit for uncovering Watergate, he writes, because it focuses primarily on the parts of the government's case that were leaked to them, rather than the whole story.

What makes Mark Felt such a satisfying Deep Throat candidate is that he conforms to the Epstein formula of the self-interested leaker. He wasn't an idealist or a whistle-blower or a patriot. He was just another vigilant protector of Washington turf, a player who didn't want his side to lose.

Reading All the President's Men is a bit disappointing, because you do get the sense -- a bit hidden by the narrative -- that mostly what Woodward & Bernstein were doing was leaking info already collected by the grand jury or federal prosecutors. Yes, they were doing their jobs as reporters, but they weren't really detectives. They mostly just leaked the findings of the detectives (sometimes erroneously).

Still a big story, obviously. But it's just a press-sustained myth that Woodward and Bernstein "got" Nixon. They reported on those who were getting Nixon. They didn't find much new information themselves.

Posted by: Ace at 07:56 AM | Comments (18)
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Brainwashing 101
— Ace

Tomorrow's show on Hoist the Black Flag will feature blogger/documentarian Evan Coyne Maloney.

Evan did a well received documentary about leftist indocrination on college campuses, called Brainwashing 101. With fast broadband, the documentary's about 10 minutes to download, and you can check it out here.

We also might have another semi-big guest, but we haven't gotten a confirmation yet.

Posted by: Ace at 07:44 AM | Comments (9)
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What Were You Doing When You Heard the Koran Had Been Flushed?
— Ace

Funny:

"I was on my way to Owen's Pharmacy to pick up medication for my acid reflux, " she said. "When the man on the radio said that a Quran may have been subjected to deliberate and willful binding overflex. I looked at my own self, and said life is so short."

Campbell said she went home and hugged her own books, "not taking any of them for granted."

24 year-old Josh Lupine noted similar reactions on his part.

"I remember studying about the German death camps in school by watching Schindler's List," he said. "It took days for me to get the implied images out of my mind. Then the other day, our coach pulls us aside in the middle of a varsity game and told us about Quran's having bookmarks removed from select 'kill the infidel' passages. I literally felt the cold winds of the Third Reich blowing through that game."

Posted by: Ace at 07:38 AM | Comments (13)
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June 04, 2005

Constantine From American Idol Falls On His Ass
— Ace

Is there anything better than a celebrity falling on his ass?

Sure. An ersatz celebrity falling on his ass.

Also from Nervous Breakdown, who noted the misuse of the NYT quote for the Beth ad campaign, a kinda funny video of Constantine trying to be David Lee Roth and winding up as, well, Constantine.

Posted by: Ace at 09:00 AM | Comments (8)
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Rosie O'Donnell Too Retarded to Comprehend a Bad Review
— Ace

I mentioned that Hallmark was running an ad in Variety to boost Rosie O'Donnell for an Emmy for her roll as "Beth," right?

What I didn't notice was this:

Now, please pay special attention to the last quote [in the advertisement boosting Rosie for an Emmy], the one from the New York Times that reads "...shouts 'first-class production' and 'Emmy bid.'" We remember that New York Times review because Virginia Heffernan, a very funny lady, wrote it. It did not, absolutely, in no way, praise anything about the film. The last line of the review, in fact, reads as thus: "This is a deeply—even thrillingly—embarrassing movie."

I quoted that review -- indeed, that scathing review is what convinced me to live-blog this travesty -- and it was one of the nastiest reviews I've ever read.

But Beth just hears "Emmy bid." Sheesh.

For no particular reason I have to re-link Pat O'Brien talking to Beth.

Thanks to my lovely co-host Karol.

Posted by: Ace at 08:40 AM | Comments (2)
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June 03, 2005

Advice To Commencement Speakers
— Ace

Don't pull an Erica Jong. No one wants to hear your politics at a commencement speech.

Here's how you write a commencement speech:

1) Say something nice about the college you're at. Or, if you're at a sucky college, say something nice about the town. If the town sucks too, relay an amusing anecdote about your own college experience.

It doesn't have to be that amusing. No one's fucking listening to you anyway. They're all batting around beach-balls and making plans on the cell phone for getting extremely drunk once they give their parents the slip.

Well, a couple of people are listening. Usually the proud parents of first-generation college graduates; this commencement will be one of their few moments in a college setting. So don't totally phone it in; Mr. and Mrs. Duk travelled 250 miles to be here.

2) Talk about learning. Also mention social responsibility. VAGUELY. Liberals love it and even conservatives don't mind it. See, conservatives hate this social responsibility shit, but we know it's just expected at these sorts of things, like pretending you can't tell the bride is pregnant at a wedding.

But keep it gassy and vague. And short. Very, very short.

Remember: No one is fucking listening to you anyway, except Mr. and Mrs. Duk, and they could care less about social responsibility. They have a dry cleaning establishment to run. One-hour martinizing is their social responsibility, and God bless 'em for that.

3) Making a winking reference to the consumption of alcohol. No one's listening, but they'll hear that, and cheer.

After all that bullshit about social responsibility you just laid on them, you can at least oblige them by pandering to them.

But don't make any racy comments about sex; remember, Mr. and Mrs. Duk are listening, and they think their daughter Jenny is a virgin. You don't want to provoke any uncomfortable silences at the after-commencement family meal at the local Bennigan's.

4) There will be a part of your speech where you're tempted to say something bad about the Iraq War, George Bush, or Republicans generally. Don't.

Remember that thing about no one listening to you? Well, it's true, but only because you're saying pretty much nothing at all. As soon as you say something interesting -- and here I mean controversial-interesting -- they're going to start listening.

And they will be angry.

Because they don't want to fucking listen to you, jagoff. They're all trying to coordinate moving three kegs up six flights of stairs all done with a fake ID that doesn't match the credit card boosted from Mom and it's hard as fuck to talk on the cell phone with the crowd booing and catcalling. And this is going to get them pissed off.

So shut the fuck up about it, moron.

5) Tell them all how they've accomplished so goddamned much by getting drunk and laid for four years while occasionally attending a class about astronomy and/or romantic poets. (The latter class being taken largely because of the belief that poems would be short, and hence the class a total gut, before fucking finding out that Byron's Don Juan is like six hundred eighty thousand cantos fucking long, and Shelley was apparently paid by the word, too.)

You'll hear sporadic cheers. Don't think that that means anyone was listening to you; they weren't. Mr. and Mrs. Duk were just applauding their daughter and the rest of everyone just started clapping out of respect, erroneously believing that a special needs student had been mentioned or something.

You may be tempted to follow up your mention of academic excellence by taking a shot at George Bush's C-average. Don't, asshole. See those people you're talking to? Half of them are C-average students, or would be if any colleges still gave out any grades lower than a B.

Half of them are also Republicans.

So shut the fuck up. No one's listening to you anyhow.

6) Show the kids you're "down wit' it" by dropping a pop culture reference you erroneously believe to be cutting edge. In 2005, it's just about the right time to be making a reference to Kurt Cobain.

You will hear some scattered chuckles as people laugh at your ignorance. They're not listening to you, but when you say Kurt Cobain, they hear that.

You might also hear groans. This means that a popular student at the school just blew his head off with a shotgun, as Kurt Cobain did, and you picked a very poor "topical" reference, not even inadvertantly funny.

It's probably time to wrap it up.

No big deal; no one's listening anyway. Are you getting this whole "no one's listening deal"?

7) Loudly say "In conclusion..." Everyone will cheer wildly, like they're the first ones who ever thought to cheer at "In conclusion." But say it anyway. They want to cheer, and they've had nothing much to cheer at in you're speech, as they haven't been listening.

Even Mr. and Mrs. Duk are muttering "Oh, thank God it's nearly over" at this point.

Go out on a punchy note. Remember, "George Bush is a Nazi asshole" is not really the sort of "punch" we want here. More like something patterned after Casey Kasem's "Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars."

Honestly, no one's listening, so you can just say "Ten-four, good buddy," and no one will be the wiser.

And that's it.

Remember, you're not the star of the show; the kids and their families are. Ever been to a wedding where the priest or rabbi is far too attention-craved and considers himself a natural performer whose time it is to shine? And then goes on, and on, and on, and on, refusing to give up the spotlight to whom it rightfully belongs?

Don't be that fuckin' guy.

And nothing about sex, Iraq, or George Bush.

That's what the post-commencement mixer with the faculty is for.

Thanks to Dutch Jr. and LauraW for correcting my loose shit on Mr. and Mrs. Duk becoming Mr. and Mrs. Kim at the end of the bit.

Posted by: Ace at 11:44 PM | Comments (50)
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Did Anyone Else Catch "Hit Me Baby One More Time"?
— Ace

You must have. It had the higest ratings for a series debut in years.

Not the best show, though.

You do get to hear some songs you used to like, sung again -- sometimes very badly sung again; did that guy from Flock of Seagulls ever have a voice? -- but the main interest, it turns out, is seeing who aged well and who went all Delta Burke.

Like that Clash guy sang in that Big Audio Dynamite song, Somehow I stayed thin/while the other guys got fa-a-a-at.

Loverboy: What the hell happened to that guy? Good heavens. You're still performing "100 gigs a year," you claim. Cut out the doughnuts for crying out loud. Do some crunches. Fat, drunk, and singing Everybody's Workin' For the Weekend is no way to go through life, son.

Flock of Seagulls: Okay, this guy wasn't ever actually attractive. He just had that hair. Judging from the baseball cap, he doesn't have that anymore. Again: you're a performer. Buff up.

Tiffany: She was either pregnant or just tubby, but she actually looks better than she did as a kid, and seems to have learned to sing in the interim.

Arrested Development: These guys shouldn't even have been on the show. For crying out loud, aren't they a mid-nineties act? They looked, well, ten years older. Kind of a fun group, but I remembered why I hated them: they were the black act that wouldn't shut the fuck up about "positivity" all the goddamned time. A fuckin' hip-hop Up With People. Between cloyingly uplifting messages and the Ghetto Boyz, there has got to be a happy medium for hip-hop.

Anyway... next week's show will feature Sophie B. Hawkins doing Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover (what else? she didn't have any other songs), Wang Chung (hoping for Everyone Have Fun Tonight, unfortunately it will probably be Dance Hall Days), and... wait for it... Night Ranger!

Hmmm... any guesses on what song they'll be doing?

I hated Sister Christian when it was out, because it was 1) ridiculously overplayed and 2) ludicrously cheesy. But damn, I'm looking forward to hearing it again.

Posted by: Ace at 11:11 PM | Comments (20)
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Blogging Killed The EU Star?
— Ace

I derided a BBC report naming bloggers as the villains in the French EU Treaty debacle a couple of days ago. I had to. I had a silly headline about the BBC being idiots I wanted to use.

An interesting column by Chris Caldwell (interesting in a lot of ways, not just this one) shows me to be a moron:

The proceedings smacked to most voters of politicians trying to pull a fast one on them. On the site etienne.chouard.free.fr, a Marseilles secondary-school teacher with a gift for crystalline prose and a weakness for silly pictographs--particularly )--convinced his countrymen almost single-handed that this was the case. (One of the revolutionary developments of the past campaign, largely thanks to Etienne Chouard, has been the rise of blogging in France.) "I haven't read the text and I simply don't have the time--too much work," Chouard wrote late in the campaign. But he warned that the mainstream media were ignoring the main stakes of the constitution. He laid out five of them:

1. A constitution has to be readable to permit a popular vote; this text is unreadable.

2. A constitution doesn't impose a political ideology; this text is partisan.

3. A constitution is revisable; this text is locked in . . .

4. A constitution protects people from tyranny through separation of powers; this one doesn't have real checks and balances and separation of powers.

5. A constitution is not handed down by the powerful; it is established by the people themselves, to protect them from arbitrary power, through an independent constitutional assembly elected for the purpose and disbanded afterwards; this text entrenches European institutions designed 50 years ago by the men in power.

In this light, the answer to the question of why the French and Dutch voted down the European constitution is simple: because they were asked. In the Netherlands, the metaphor on everyone's lips was that of a runaway train. The young PvdA (Labor) party chairman Wouter Bos--who was placed in an awkward position when his party voted resoundingly against the treaty that he had crisscrossed the country urging them to vote for--said: "People had the feeling that they were sitting on a runaway train. For the first time they had the chance to jump off. They had no idea how fast the train was going, or where it was headed."

Damn. Quite a feather in that guy's cap.

The medium really is the message here. It's not that bloggers are terribly gifted polemicists. Some are, most aren't. It's just that technology has reduced costs for the dissemination of information and opinion to zero. Which wouldn't be a big deal if the media (in all nations) were diverse. Then you'd just have further, amateurish opinions and news-hypers to choose from.

But because media institutions tend to be monolithically partisan (always tending to the left, though what the "left" is varies country by country), suddenly having a zero-cost-of-entry Shadow Media can actually make a difference.

Not because bloggers are saying things that no one else is, but for the exact opposite reason: because we're saying things that millions of other people are, only those people never get to register their voices in the establishment media. Or at least those opinions are given short shrift.

A while ago I wrote:

Europeans have a terrific system for managing politically-sensitive disputes: They ignore them. And, better still, they ignore the desires of those on one side of the issue entirely.

When it comes to tough political decisions that emotionally animate a sizable minority -- or even majority -- of voters, Europeans have "evolved" a system whereby they simply deem those who are on the "wrong," meaning "right," side of an issue as "politically extreme," "racist," etc.

This system has the great advantage of suppressing all politics on sensitive issues. Those who want to restrict immigration from Muslim countries are "racist;" therefore, there's no need to consider them. Even though such persons constitute a majority in many European countries.

Branding such persons "racist" and "extreme" helps to suppress actual serious advocacy for certain positions. A large number of people might actually support such measures, but if their politicians are too cowed by, say, the BBC's branding of them as "rightwing extremists," they will soft-sell their program and meekly acquiesce in the status quo.

The system works great-- except, of course, for the small problem that it results in an unresponsive politics which ignores the actual wishes of many people. It's a great way to solve the difficulties of democracy, if you don't mind abandoning actua democracy along the way.

As has been frequently noted, the death penalty is actually politically popular in the UK and much of Europe; but European politicians and their support institutions (i.e., the media) have deemed the death penalty beyond the pale.

And thus, we have the odd situation of nominal democracies existing under a regime of laws they actually don't like, and would change, if given the chance. The laws aren't ever changed because, well, because it's just something that's not done, Old Man.

...

The current European situation mirrors, as usual, American politics of the 1970's. (As we've noted, Europe is always 20-30 years behind America in most categories, including politics.) In the 1970's, most politicians were liberal-- even the Republicans. The American people disagreed strongly with the liberal program, but they found no outlet for their dissent; even Nixon was a liberal.

This resulted in a "surprising" change: Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, and then re-elected by a historic landslide in 1984. And then, in 1994, the liberals' 50 year old strangehold on the House was ended.

What blogging -- the technology, really, not the actual bloggers -- offers is a massive speed-up of that cycle of elite dismissiveness, popular frustration, popular anger, and ultimately popular uprising and political change.

This dovetails nicely with (appropriately enough) Instapundit's discussion of "preference cascades," and how tyrants fall:

Such regimes have little legitimacy, but they spend a lot of effort making sure that citizens don't realize the extent to which their fellow-citizens dislike the regime. If the secret police and the censors are doing their job, 99% of the populace can hate the regime and be ready to revolt against it - but no revolt will occur because no one realizes that everyone else feels the same way.

"This works until something breaks the spell, and the discontented realize that their feelings are widely shared, at which point the collapse of the regime may seem very sudden to outside observers - or even to the citizens themselves. Claims after the fact that many people who seemed like loyal apparatchiks really loathed the regime are often self-serving, of course. But they're also often true: Even if one loathes the regime, few people have the force of will to stage one-man revolutions, and when preferences are sufficiently falsified, each dissident may feel that he or she is the only one, or at least part of a minority too small to make any difference.

An elite can rule against the wishes of the majority of the popuation only so long as the majority of the population doesn't realize it's actually the majority.

So long as those who actually represent the true national consensus falsely believe they hold a minority or even "extremist" view -- a belief imposed on them by a monolithically partisan media -- they will not agitate for change nor express their true political wishes, for belief that such an effort would be futile.

And possibly "extremist."

An elite ruling against the wishes of a voting population is an inherently unsustainable situation. At some point --as with the Reagan Revolution of 1980 -- the house of cards must fall. But sometimes it may take quite a while indeed.

Zero-entry-cost media -- blogging -- doesn't allow that false belief to persist as long as it once could. Again, not because bloggers are saying what the public doesn't already know; but because we're saying what the public damn well knows, but just isn't really sure enough other people know too.

A zero-cost amateur blog in France helped fell a five-hundred page document that took millions of pounds/francs/marks and years to produce. Had easy and rapid connections between like-minded people not been possible, the "constitution" might have passed, simply for lack of public belief that they could actually successfully oppose it.

Millions of people share similar beliefs but incorrectly believe, sometimes, they don't have the power to change things, because the national conversation, moderated by the establishment media, won't admit the possibility of change.

But they're not moderating that conversation anymore. Or, rather, they're partly moderating it, but there are now some boorish voices catcalling from the cheap seats.

And if France can be woken up partly due to a single blog run by a school teacher, who knows what country may be next?

I had meant to ask Daniel Pipes when he was on the show with Karol and I: A lot of Muslims seem to subscribe to the anti-American, jihadist worldview. But to what extent is that a deeply-held actual belief, and to what extent is it parroted because Muslims believe it's the "Islamically correct" sort of thing to say? Could it be that many Muslims are actually not quite as fervent believers in Islamism as it sometimes seems, but are going along with what they think is the bandwagon?

Would the Salem Witch Trials had happened had there been an underground media stating in no uncertain terms that all this "I saw Goodwife Smith dancing with the devil" was pure ass? Would a majority of the Salemites have realized it wasn't quite as dangerous as they imagined to stand up to the religious crazies burning people at the stakes, because they did in fact constitute a majority?

So: what if there are actually quite a few Egyptians or Syrians or Yemenis who "support" Islamism largely because they believe most of their fellow Muslims do? What if free -- in both senses of the word -- communication technology begins letting Muslims know that they're not the only ones fed up with tyrants and constant hectoring and hate from self-styled holy warriors?

Obligatory Natan Sharansky Mention Update: Strange Women Lying in Ponds comments:

In his book, "The Case for Democracy," Natan Sharansky writes that there are three types of people in any "fear society" -- what he calls "true believers," "dissidents," and "double-thinkers." It is always reasonably simple to discern who the dissidents are, but it is nigh impossible, especially for an outsider, to discern the difference between the true believers and the double-thinkers. But his theory is that the vast majority of people in a fear society are double-thinkers, and will openly express their preference once they feel it's safe to do so.

Without doubt most Muslim nations are "fear societies." We can't know yet the ratio of true believers to double-thinkers, but maybe an underground media can encourage the double-thinkers to stop double-thinking.

Posted by: Ace at 10:33 PM | Comments (21)
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Damn, We Might Have To Stop Hating Germany
— Ace

The German people would still be against the war and characteristically contemptuous of the US, but the leadership could change to be a hell of a lot more cordial towards us:

The conservative Christian Democrats and their Free Democratic partners will restore Germany's alliance with the United States and downgrade Berlin's ties with Russia if they win elections in September, leaders from both parties say.

In a series of interviews, they also said that they would review their alliance with France, which they intend to keep strong, but warn Paris not to challenge Berlin to choose between the United States and France, as was the case with the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Damn, that's some sweet music.

Wolfgang Schaeuble, deputy chairman of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) parliamentary group who is in charge of foreign policy, accused Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, a Social Democrat, of undermining trans-Atlantic ties.

"We have great interest in close relations with Russia, but they have to be balanced and should in no way be directed against the Atlantic partnership," said Mr. Schaeuble, who was interior minister under CDU Chancellor Helmut Kohl and helped negotiate Germany's 1990 reunification.

Germany's neighbor Poland should not be left out of German-Russian developments, and Berlin should be more critical of "the state of democracy in Russia," Mr. Schaeuble said.

"All this was not respected by Schroeder, and the closeness with Russia went far too far," he said. "We would change this nonsense and re-establish the balance in German-Russian relations."

Guido Westerwelle, chairman of the Free Democratic Party (FDP), the CDU's junior partner, said Mr. Schroeder has criticized Washington more often than Moscow.

"It is not acceptable that the German government is often very critical of Washington -- sometimes rightfully so -- but stays silent on Russian violations of legal matters," he said. "For example, Mr. Schroeder had nothing to criticize about the verdict in the trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky."

Well, how about that. I didn't know Schroeder had been silent on that.

It's an odd thing: conservative Americans are pro-US. You'd expect conservative Europeans to be pro-Europe and anti-US, but in fact they're pro-US. Mainly. And to the extent they're anti-US, they're anti-US for reasons I respect: national pride and patriotic chauvanism.

The European left seems to hate the West and the idea of the sovereign nation-state generally, and hates the US with a passion as we're the 800 pound gorilla that ain't givin' up the banana for no one.

Posted by: Ace at 10:02 PM | Comments (13)
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