On supporting the rebels and striking at a king

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s not been a good day for the Libyan rebels, whoever they might be. Despite air support from the coalition, they have lost some ground.

Qaddafi has some words to say on their identity. There’s no reason to believe him, of course, although it would be highly ironic if he turned out in this case to be correct:

In an open letter to the international community, meanwhile, Gadhafi called for a halt to the “monstrous assault” on Libya and maintained that that the rebels were supported by the al-Qaida terrorist network.

“What is happening now is providing a cover for al-Qaida through airstrikes and missiles to enable al-Qaida to control North Africa and turn it into a new Afghanistan,” he said…

I wonder whether the Obama administration has pondered what would be the result if Qaddafi holds out. He has shown himself to be no stranger to the support of terrorism himself, and he might be even more strongly motivated to retaliate by supporting terrorism against Western countries who aided and abetted those who tried to unseat him. Have Obama and his advisers considered the old adage “when you strike at a king you must kill him” in deciding to go against Qaddafi without seeking his death?

[NOTE: I had long thought that quote came from Machiavelli or some other cynical realist who specialized in the study of the workings of power in the world. It surprised me to discover it was actually said by Ralph Waldo Emerson to Oliver Wendell Holmes, in response to an essay by the latter critiquing Plato.]

Does it really matter if Obama didn’t write Dreams?

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Parker” asks a question I often see:

Does it matter who wrote Obama’s books? Even if Obama was not the author and it could be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt would the MSM care? Would the MSM cover such a story? Would the legions of Obama worshippers care? Its Obama’s association with people like Ayers, Dohrn, Wright, Pfleger, etc. that matters because that is what formed his socialist ideology and fuels his narcissistic personality. Ayers, etc. (and the MSM) are what psychologists term ”˜enablers’.

…In the end I don’t care who wrote Obama’s books, I want him out of the oval office come January 20, 2012.

So, would people care? My answer is that it depends on how strong and incontrovertible the proof is, and who the people are.

Anything less than a smoking gun would, just as Parker says, convince no one who is not already convinced that Obama is a poseur and an incompetent anyway, and therefore does not matter. But if extraordinarily strong evidence were to surface, it would cast waves of doubt through at least some people, the more naive ones who had truly believed in him as an intelligent and righteous man. Some of these people still exist, and some of them are independent swing voters, and so they matter quite a bit.

Trust is supported by a foundation that can come down all at once, like the proverbial house of cards. And although other political figures have certainly been shown to have had their books gostwritten—some have been up-front about this fact, while some have hidden it—no previous political figure’s ghostwritten book (at least to my knowledge) has had two characteristics that would be true of Obama’s: (a) the book is not incidental to their reputation, but instead is an important part of the evidence for their qualification for office; and (b) the ghostwriter is both an avowed terrorist and a person the politician has claimed to barely know.

In Obama’s case, each thing matters (at least, theoretically) more than usual, due to the suspicions already floating around that he is not all that qualified or experienced, and that he “palled around” with terrorists such as Ayers. He already has spent so much time denying those things that proof of them would be likely to hit quite a few people and cause a shockwave.

Once that sort of doubt is introduced about who Obama really is, and once his ability to lie with a straight face is fully perceived, there comes an almost inevitable speculation on just how many people were covering up for Obama and who these helpers and groomers might have been. If what was heretofore seen as a fringe element on the right (we could call them the “bookers” rather than the “birthers”) were to be proven correct, it opens the door to all sorts of other doubts about the information coming from the left and the MSM, and can cause a cascade of change.

How many people would actually have such an experience? I don’t know. I’ve written a great deal about the process of political change, and it’s my contention that only some people are capable of really taking in the information that would allow them to acknowledge they’ve been duped and/or mistaken, and to accept the need to revise their thinking. But real proof that Ayers wrote Dreams would be exactly the sort of catalyst that could spark such change in what I believe would be a significant number of people.

[NOTE: Although I’ve speculated here on “what if,” I don’t think definitive proof of this sort will ever be forthcoming.]

Natalie Portman, Vivien Leigh, and the dance double

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s a bit funny to me that the film “Black Swan” is about doubling—a woman taken over by another self—and that Portman is being haunted by a double in real life: Sarah Lane, the woman who alleges she did 95% of Portman’s actual dancing (see also this and this).
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The studio says otherwise, that Portman did about 85% of her own dancing. Well, I guess it depends how one defines “dancing.” Is it backbends and arm movements? Or is it the whole package? Because when I saw the movie, I was paying attention to what Portman was and wasn’t doing, and it was clear to me (when I was not being distracted by gore) that a lot of the dancing was not Portman.

That’s because the legs and body of a working dancer in tip-top shape are different from those of an ordinary person, even an elite athlete (which Portman is not) or a thin person who’s in shape and has had some ballet lessons (which Portman is). It was clear to me that the majority of the full body shots of Portman’s character dancing on stage in performance—as opposed to upper-body shots or even some full-body shots of movement in rehearsal—were of someone else.

I knew it without any need to look at the head, which was grafted on in a special effect anyway. The carriage of the dancer is different and more upright and strong and yet pliant; Portman’s is either slightly languid or slightly rigid. The legs are more spectacularly muscled; Portman’s are more frail. The center of gravity is like a plumb line through the body, something one can almost draw; Portman lacks this quality.

It can’t be faked, nor can it be learned in a year of training. I’m sure Portman did as well as anyone could have, but it simply is not possible to do what they are alleging she did and be able to perform such feats, unless her previous training had made her close to professional ballet soloist material in the first place.

One of the beefs I had with the film was that the dancer they used, Sarah Lane, although gifted and competent and a soloist with American Ballet Theater, was not of the spectacular star quality the film describes and demands. That’s perhaps a small quibble—and it would have cost them a lot more to hire a true star in the ballet firmament, rather than Lane. No disrespect meant to Lane, who’s been slighted enough by the filmmakers and Portman already. But although she’s a wonderful dancer and has a worthy career, she’s not dancing leads such as the Swan Queen yet in her regular dancing gig.

At this point you may wonder how Vivien Leigh got into the title of this post. The topic of ballet in films reminded me of one of my favorite tear-jerkers, “Waterloo Bridge,” in which Leigh plays a ballet dancer who falls in love with an officer right before he goes off to WWI and she falls on hard times. Thanks to YouTube, we have a clip of a scene where Leigh is supposed to be dancing in a ballet that’s supposed to be “Swan Lake,” without the aid of technical wizardry as in “Black Swan.”

Unlike “Black Swan,” the dancing in “Waterloo Bridge” is purely incidental to the plot. Not only is there no real attempt to make it seem as though Leigh is especially skilled, but the film doesn’t even use the actual choreography of the well-known “Swan Lake,” just a pastiche of excerpts from the music and some generic moves, with dancers garbed in costumes that are a cross between those of “Les Sylphides” and the headdresses of the swan corps.

But Leigh does a game job of waving her arms around, looking slim and pretty, and making goo-goo eyes at Robert Taylor at the same time. Dance-wise, the most authentic thing about the movie is the stern and nasty dance mistress, shades of a number of old-time dance teachers I’ve known. She was played in the film by Maria Ouspenskaya, a Russian emigre actress who actually ran a dance school in Hollywood in the 30s, among whose pupils was the future Marge Champion.

Enjoy the esthetic of yesteryear—the technical wizardry was zippo, but the rest of it was pretty fine:

Is Ayers admitting he wrote “Dreams From My Father?”

The New Neo Posted on by

The short answer is: no, he’s making a joke.

Jack Cashill, whose book Deconstructing Obama has come out recently, believes that the joke (or, as he puts it, the final “retreat into irony”) hides the preceeding truthful admission:

With his final comment, the Ayers-friendly audience laughed in relief. The media will laugh nervously upon seeing the video as well. The White House will not.

Watch the clip yourself and see what you think of Ayers’ affect:

I think that at the very least the clip is interesting. Ayers is a highly intelligent and wily guy who likes to put things over on all of us. His statement about his legal status in an interview with David Horowitz in the early 80s, “Guilty as hell, free as a bird””America is a great country,” says a lot about his attitude towards guilt, innocence, admission of guilt and innocence, and joking.

Does his admission in the clip mean he really wrote Obama’s memoir? Of course not. But his behavior is certainly ambiguous. Note that the questioner does not bring up the topic of the questioned authorship—Ayers does, and we know the best defense is a good offense. Note also how quick Ayers is to praise Dreams—before the man finishes asking his question. And note how eager Ayers is to differentiate the supposedly excellent Dreams from Obama’s later hack work, The Audacity of Hope. Is he trying to disavow any connection with the latter?

Ayers’ delivery is deadpan. He smiles only at the end, after the audience has finally gotten that it’s a joke and laughed. Earlier, you can hear the original questioner’s surprised, “You wrote that?” in response to Ayers’ “joke,” which he doesn’t seem to get is a joke. That’s because Ayers’ deadpan demeanor is very convincing; he seems completely serious. Is that because he is, or is he just a comedian with great delivery?

And is Ayers’ smile at the end just a mockery of the silliness of those who would believe he wrote Obama’s book? Or a mockery of those who think he did not?

The Reagan assassination attempt

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s been thirty years since President Reagan was shot by John Hinckley, and this piece contains some interesting and previously unknown facts about the incident, including how very close Reagan came to dying. His Secret Service agent that day, Jerry Parr, appears to have made a number of quick decisions that probably saved Reagan’s life.

Selling the Libyan rebels the rope

The New Neo Posted on by

There is a famous quote from Lenin that shows a remarkable understanding of the West:

The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.

Lenin was talking about the urge to do business. And of course he was wrong about who would hang whom first—at least, so far. But he was correct about the West’s lack of instinct for shrewd self-preservation, particularly today.

Case in point: Libya. When the uprising first spread to that country, I wondered in my very first post on the subject about the answer to a simple question: who are the rebels? It seemed not tangential to the issue, but basic.

If we as a country are going to put blood and treasure behind a movement in a civil war, we’d best know what that movement represents. In Libya, the fact that our government does not seem to know, and that pundits are answering the question with facts that are very, very troubling, is shocking (even though I thought my capacity to be shocked by what Obama does had been worn out).

In the Telegraph, one can find this description of al Qaeda influence in the movement. Andrew McCarthy takes up the topic in greater detail in National Review (please read the whole thing):

…[T]he rebels are a mixed bag. The strongest faction, particularly in ideological influence, is the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been in Libya for 70 years. There are also militant groups, such as Hasadi’s LIFG, that have ties to al-Qaeda, though they do not necessarily agree with bin Laden’s decision in the 1990s to take the violence global. In addition, there are Islamist organizations (such as the National Front for the Salvation of Libya) that claim to be non-violent and that oppose Qaddafi because they have come to regard him as non-Muslim, an apostate whose eccentric brand of Islam is seen as heterodox, and who persecutes his Muslim people. Moreover, there are undoubtedly al-Qaeda operatives in the mix, because al-Qaeda goes wherever the action is.

To describe these factions is not to discount the existence of some secular opposition to Qaddafi: some leftists who see an opportunity, and even some Western-influenced freedom fighters. Interventionists delude themselves, though, when they portray the latter as predominant, as the face of the rebels…

We’ve seen this show before. The rebels are not rebels ”” they are the Libyan mujahideen. Like the Afghan mujahideen, including those that became al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the Libyan mujahideen comprise different groups. What overwhelmingly unites them, besides opposition to Qaddafi, is sharia. The Libyan mujahideen will exploit us but never befriend us. If they succeed, so be it. But we have no vital interest in orchestrating that success, even if it would mean a thug like Qaddafi finally gets his just deserts. If we empower them, we will eventually rue the day.

Mark Steyn has a more colorful way of putting it:

Now suddenly [Qaddafi’s] got to go ”“ in favor of “freedom-loving” “democrats” from Benghazi. That would be in eastern Libya ”“ which, according to West Point’s Counter Terrorism Center, has sent per capita the highest number of foreign jihadists to Iraq. Perhaps now that so many Libyan jihadists are in Iraq, the Libyans left in Libya are all Swedes in waiting. But perhaps not. If we lack, as we do in Afghanistan, the cultural confidence to wean those we liberate from their less-attractive pathologies, we might at least think twice before actively facilitating them.

Steyn also has some more general observations on the new American way of war. I happen to be in agreement; I believe that limited involvement and commitment are inherently problematic:

There are arguments to be made for being on the other side of the world for decades on end if you’re claiming it as sovereign territory and rebuilding it in your image, as the British did in India, Belize, Mauritius, the Solomon Islands, you name it. Likewise, there are arguments to be made for saying, sorry, we’re a constitutional republic, we don’t do empire. But there’s not a lot to be said for forswearing imperialism and even modest cultural assertiveness, and still spending 10 years getting shot up in Afghanistan helping to create, bankroll and protect a so-called justice system that puts a man on death row for converting to Christianity.

Libya, in that sense, is a classic post-nationalist, post-modern military intervention: As in Kosovo, we’re do-gooders in a land with no good guys.

I have never believed that the rebels in Libya (or for that matter, even the protesters in Egypt) are controlled or led by “good guys.” Oh, there may be some in that crowd, but they are probably in the minority (perhaps even the vast minority, for all I know). What’s more, however many they are, they are very likely to be overpowered in the chaos to come by the bad guys. Iran is the template, although the winners in Egypt and Libya will not look exactly like the ayatollahs of Iran.

But we will have sold them the rope with which they will attempt to hang us.

Watch out for Georgians with knives

The New Neo Posted on by

This kind of Georgian, and this sort of knife:

I don’t know which seems more dangerous, the leaping up and crashing down on the knees, or the throwing of the daggers. I do know, however, that I agree wholeheartedly with one of the commenters at YouTube: “Kinda makes your blood tingle.”