But it’s done at the behest of the Iranian government, so that’s okay.
The Walpin firing
The Walpin firing should be a big big story: heavy-handed executive overreach by the President in order to protect a political supporter from charges against him.
Right now it’s not. The NY Times? So far it’s offering the sound of crickets chirping. Don’t trust me; try doing a search yourself on the Times’s website for “Gerald Walpin.” All you’ll find is this from early April, on Walpin’s investigation of Kevin Johnson. But now that Walpin has been fired, and has alleged that the White House did so to protect supporter Johnson—employing some of the niceties Obama’s learned along the way in Chicago—nary a word is heard from the Times (remember, in contrast, how very eager the paper was to air this all-important piece of flim-flam?).
Do the same for Newsweek. Nada. And here’s a piece on how slow the WaPo has been on the uptake, with the usual empty excuses by editors.
In contrast, the Wall Street Journal has an excellent story on the Johnson case and the related Walpin firing (please read the whole thing). I especially like the Orwellian irony of the fact that the hatchet guy for the termination, Norman Eisen, is the “Special Counsel to the President for Ethics and Government Reform.”
This White House isn’t just lying here, it’s lying badly and stupidly. Perhaps Obama has never been under such scrutiny before and therefore is sloppy, or perhaps he knows that even now he is effectively immunized from scandal by the protection the mainstream press will give him. But in any event, here’s the trail of deception and coverup as reported by the WSJ:
[Eisen has stated] that it was “pure coincidence” [that Walpin] was asked to leave during the St. HOPE [Johnson] controversy. Yet the Administration has already had to walk back that claim.
That’s because last year Congress passed the Inspectors General Reform Act, which requires the President to give Congress 30 days notice, plus a reason, before firing an inspector general. A co-sponsor of that bill was [watch for another point of irony here] none other than Senator Obama. Having failed to pressure Mr. Walpin into resigning (which in itself might violate the law), the Administration was forced to say he’d be terminated in 30 days, and to tell Congress its reasons.
White House Counsel Gregory Craig cited a complaint that had been lodged against Mr. Walpin by Mr. Brown, the U.S. Attorney, accusing Mr. Walpin of misconduct, and of not really having the goods on Mr. Johnson. But this is curious given that Mr. Brown himself settled with St. HOPE, Mr. Johnson and his assistant, an agreement that required St. HOPE (with a financial assist from Mr. Johnson) to repay approximately half of the grant, and also required Mr. Johnson to take an online course about bookkeeping.
No doubt some will defend President Obama by saying this is politics as usual. I’m not so sure (if you have examples of the Bush Administration doing something similar, please point it out). But I am sure that it’s irrelevant whether it’s typical or not. Obama ran—and won—on the idea that his politics would be more transparent and more honest than the usual. One thing that is unusual about Obama, though, is the depth of his hypocrisy, and the audacity of his reach.
[NOTE: Ed Morrissey at Hot Air has much more on the White House excuses and Walpin’s reaction. It seems to be a bit like the old Soviet-style accusations of dissidents’ mental instability. Is internment in a mental hospital the next step for Mr. Walpin?
And if Walpin really does have some sort of mental or cognitive problem—which his recent statements don’t seem to suggest at all—would threatening to fire him and giving him an hour to resign instead really be the proper way to handle it?
And here’s a lot of background material from Byron York.]
[ADDENDUM: Don’t sit on a hot stove till these questions get answered.]
Right on schedule: Iran accuses US of meddling
Despite Obama’s heroic efforts to remain uninvolved in the Iranian post-election protests, the Iranian government has accused him of doing so anyway.
Fancy that. As I wrote yesterday [emphasis mine]:
Obama has positioned himself as the un-Bush. This means that making a strong statement of solidarity and support to the Iranian demonstrators is not possible for him either strategically or temperamentally. Commenters at the blogs on the Left defend this course of action by saying that any such statements would only afford the mullahs an opportunity to say that the demonstrators are mere US puppets. But since they’ll say that anyway if they wish at any time they wish no matter what Obama does or doesn’t do…that sort of argument rings hollow and seems mere apologia for the weak response of our current President.
Lawyer-blogger William A. Jacobson adds:
Obama’s statement yesterday that he did not want “to be seen as meddling” all but invited an accusation of meddling.
These accusations appear to be a precurser to, and excuse for, a violent crackdown by the regime, which could start as early as Thursday…
Obama is a novice at this game. At the end of his essay, Jacobson also points out something I’ve been thinking recently: is this Obama’s 3 A.M. test? If so, he’s failing, just as Hillary said he would. Only problem is, Hillary has become his willing henchwoman.
This isn’t just about Obama, either. It’s about an entire point of view widely held by those on the liberal side of things, a misunderstanding of what the Iranian leadership is all about and what they are prepared to say and do. The far Left, on the other hand, may know full well and applaud them. Remember that in the original Iranian Revolution, the Left were major players and originally supported the Ayatollahs.
[NOTE: This may be a good time to republish Part II of my series on the Iranian Revolution. I republished Part I yesterday. You may notice towards the end of the piece there is a discussion that is very pertinent today, about how much ruthlessness should be used against a ruthless regime.
Shapour Bakhtiar took office as Prime Minister of Iran on Jan 6, 1979. He was appointed by the Shah in one of the latter’s final acts in Iran, a country from which the Shah departed on Jan 16.
But Bakhtiar was not the Shah’s man. He was a well-known dissident who was appointed in an effort to show that the Shah was ready to reform in ways that would satisfy those who were proponents of greater freedom and civil liberties in Iran.
The Shah is one of those figures in history who, like Ataturk in Turkey, was faced with the dilemmas common to those who would modernize and Westernize a third-world country, and especially one with a strong traditional Islamic clerical tradition. It is beyond the scope of this post to discuss why Ataturk was able to successfully buck the fairly substantial opposition of religious leaders and the populace in Turkey, and why the Shah’s effort ultimately failed in Iran. Some day I may attempt to tackle that one—but suffice to say for now that the Iranian Shah had the same goal of modernization as Ataturk, but the opposition to his rule was stronger, and his efforts to crush it far more Draconian.
The Shah’s secret police—SAVAK, usually referred to with an adjective such as “dreaded” or “hated” before the acronym—was active in Iran to stifle those who would oppose him. There is a great deal of controversy over just how dreadful SAVAK actually was in the larger scheme of things. Was it a wide-ranging and indiscriminate effort to track down, torture, imprison, exile and/or murder all those who dissented, or who even were thought to dissent, much like the operations of the Soviet KGB? Or was it far more benign, only dealing with those who would violently overthrow the government (such as Khomeini and his henchmen), and using torture only sparingly? If history is written by the victors—and, in this case, the victors so far in Iran have been the Khomeinists—then how can we know the truth about SAVAK?
What we do know, however, is this: there were many protests against the Shah’s modernizing changes, which especially threatened the religious establishment in Iran. For example, religious students demonstrated against land reforms that the Shah had instituted to try to offer the populace of Iran some economic benefits, with the goal (among other things) of increasing his popularity with them.
If that was the Shah’s intent, it backfired, because the land reforms imposed hardships on the Shiite clerical establishment (which had owned some of the land). Khomeini, who was still in Iran at the time, issued a fatwa. Protests were organized, the Shah’s government began to ridicule the clerics as old-fashioned, and more clerics took offense and joined the opposition. In addition, crackdowns on protesters became very brutal—for example, a group of theological students protesting against the opening of liquor stores were killed, and these deaths ultimately reached into the hundreds.
It appears that the Shah was already fighting the same extreme fanatics who were to take over the country in 1979. As often happens, his efforts to stop them had the paradoxical effect of making them martyrs, agitating their sympathizers, and ultimately making the movement against him grow stronger. Had his policies against his enemies—the enemies of modernization—been less heavy-handed, might the movement have died down? Or would it only have grown larger and more powerful more quickly? Unanswerable questions, I’m afraid.
History gave its own answer. I’ve written before about how the Shah had hesitated to have Khomeini executed in 1964 when the latter was imprisoned, because the Shah feared making the already popular and powerful cleric into a martyr. Perhaps if he’d done so others would have filled Khomeini’s shoes and carried on in his name, and history would have taken more or less the same course as it ultimately did.
But perhaps not. Perhaps there was something especially charismatic about Khomeini that would have been lost to the clerics’ cause without his particular presence. Once again, we’ll never know; what we do know is that Khomeini’s life was spared, he was ultimately exiled, and he lived to return to Iran in triumph and take over the government. As unrest and discontent with the Shah was brewing in the late 1970s, Khomeini became the de facto head of the opposition, which was a strange amalgam of restrictive clerics, liberals who supported human rights, and socialists–each with an agenda, each jockeying for position:
Anti-Shah intellectuals, secular and Islamic, moderate and leftist misread developments. They believed that they were using the popular Khomeini and that he could be shunted aside as democracy was established. It was believed that with the success of the revolution the ulama (official community of scholars of Islam) and Khomeini would return to their mosques and schools and perhaps advise the government on Islamic matters.
Such hubris is misplaced. The moral of the story is to never underestimate the power of a demagogue fully bent on acquiring it (the same mistake was made, by the way, by Franz von Papen and Hindenberg. In the waning days of the Weimar Republic, they thought they could “control” that silly-looking upstart, Hitler.)
Which brings us to Bakhtiar. On Bakhtiar’s appointment as the new Prime Minister, Khomeini condemned him, of course, from his exile in France. But Khomeini continued to live his charmed life; Bakhtiar allowed him to return to Iran shortly thereafter. The reason? A combination of Bakhtiar’s own devotion to freedom of speech, and the Shah’s old conundrum: Khomeini was so popular that to try to ban him would cause such public unrest in Iran that it seemed counterproductive. In essence, Bakhtiar, although a far different ruler than the Shah, faced the same dilemma; he resolved it in favor of not suppressing the opposition.
So who was Bakhtiar? Like many Iranians, he’d spent many formative years in France, acquiring graduate degrees in political science, law, and philosophy. But he was also a man of action; residing in France during the Nazi occupation, he fought for the Resistance. Returning to Iran after WWII, he continued his resistance, becoming an opponent of the Shah, who imprisoned him for many years.
Thus Bakhtiar had his bona fides—no patsy of the Shah, he had been one of the leaders of those who were against the Shah’s regime because of its human rights abuses, and he himself had suffered greatly for his bravery. But by the time Bakhtiar came to power it was most decidedly too late, both for him and for the Shah’s modernization program, as well as for the civil rights that Bakhtiar championed. Perhaps the only beneficiary of that campaign for civil rights was Khomeini himself, ironically enough.
Bakhtiar’s regime lasted about two weeks before Khomeini and the clerics took over, establishing the primacy of Sharia law, abolishing most of the rights women had enjoyed, banning alcohol and gambling and a host of other un-Islamic pursuits as well as newspapers, and instituting his own murderous crackdown to stifle all opposition. Khomeini didn’t have to worry about making martyrs of his enemies, nor about whether to allow them to remain in Iran and exercise freedom of speech. Tyranny doesn’t struggle with the same sort of philosophical questions about how much toughness is too much, questions with which its opponents wrestle mightily:
It was announced that any spreading of corruption would be punished by death. A variety of the Shah’s former friends, colleagues and generals were seized, and after trials of a few minutes they were executed immediately – to prevent news spreading to the others who were detained – the executions lasting without stop for several weeks. The bodies of the prisoners were loaded into meat containers and dumped into mass graves. Khomeini dismissing international protests, saying that criminals did not need to be tried, just killed.
Bakhtiar, however, was not one of them—at least, not right away. He left Iran and settled in Paris again. From that venue he organized another resistance—a movement to fight the Islamic Republic of the mullahs. For his pains, he was almost assassinated in 1980; a policeman and a neighbor died, but Bakhtiar lived to fight another day.
In 1991, however, the number of this brave man was finally up. The assassins got their man; Bakhtiar and his secretary were murdered in his home. The assailant later was captured and tried in France. At his trial he admitted to having been sent by the Iranian government.
What lessons can we draw from the life of Bakhtiar? The first is that one can be both committed to freedom and personally courageous, and yet lose the battle against repression and tyranny. The second is more of a question: is it sometimes acceptable (or perhaps even necessary) to use greater ruthlessness, to be willing to use oppressive tools against an enemy that—if successful—would not hesitate to abolish all the civil liberties and the advances for which you are fighting?
This is the dilemma faced not just by Bakhtiar, but by all those who would oppose the likes of Khomeini. How much of a crackdown is too much? How little is too little? At what point do you compromise your own principles so much that you become too much like the enemy you are fighting?
There are no easy answers. Only the questions—and Khomeini’s regime, in its present-day manifestation, Ahmadinejad— remain.]
Montazeri speaks: trouble in Iranian Ayatollah paradise?
This is an indication that those such as Michael Ledeen, who predicted dissent in the upper reaches of the Iranian clergy, were correct.
Yesterday Ledeen wrote:
The other great threat to the regime comes from the upper reaches of the clergy. Do not be surprised to see some senior ayatollahs denounce the regime; many have done so in the past (Ayatollah Montazeri has been under house arrest for years, and Ayatollah Boroujerdi has been subjected to horrible torture for criticizing the lack of freedom in Iran).
And now Montazeri has weighed in just as expected:
“No one in their right mind can believe” the official results from Friday’s contest, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri said of the landslide victory claimed by Ahmadinejad. Montazeri accused the regime of handling Mousavi’s charges of fraud and the massive protests of his backers “in the worst way possible.”
“A government not respecting people’s vote has no religious or political legitimacy,” he declared in comments on his official Web site. “I ask the police and army personals (personnel) not to ‘sell their religion,’ and beware that receiving orders will not excuse them before God.”
As Ledeen wrote (but the McClatchy article neglects to mention) Montazeri is already persona non grata and under house arrest. So it’s unclear how much this means, how large a following he has, or how many allies there are among those ayatollahs who haven’t yet spoken up (perhaps none, perhaps some).
Hot Air has some more background on Montazeri; he’s hardly a newcomer to the scene. The man is courageous; that much I can say. It’s also interesting that he remains alive, even though he had the cojones to criticize Khomeini when the latter was still around. This resulted in Montazeri’s removal and replacement by Khamenei; prior to that, Montazeri was a front-runner for appointment as Khomeini’s successor.
I can’t help but think that, if Montazeri had kept his mouth firmly shut until Khomeini died, Iran would be a much better place today.
A little lightness to brighten your drab day
It’s not all Obama, all Iran, all the time. For instance, there’s Paris Hilton—and her little dog, too:
Watch out for those collarbones.
[NOTE: Photo found on Go Fug Yourself.]
Listening in on the second channel
I like the concept of the second channel, which Richard Fernandez describes with his usual insight here [emphasis mine]:
And in the particular case of Iran, my own emotional curiosity is drawn toward one question alone. Does the current President in his most private moments truly and sincerely wish for the downfall of the regime in Teheran? Because even if he were only to wish it, without acting on it; without initiating a single program to overthrow the Ayatollahs, I believe the message would shine through.
Over at Ann Althouse’s there’s a poll on who is the bigger partisan hack: Glenn Reynolds or Andrew Sullivan. Last I looked Sullivan was winning the hack race by 94 % to 6%. And the reason apparently, is largely Sullivan’s credulity of Obama’s position on gay marriage and his contorted attempts to reconcile his belief in President Obama in despite of the plain facts. Sullivan’s problem was that he was listening to Obama’s words. Other people were clever enough to listen in on the second channel ”” the one that sends signals about who [Obama] is. Clever enough to deduce the truth from coded signals because in certain circles, engagement always means being able to say all things to all men. People learn to read the tea leaves eventually. I think that some Iranians actually know how to listen in on the second channel and they are. They want to know if the current administration is “on their side”. Maybe that’s all the help they want; all the help they need. But are they going to get it?
And it’s one of the reasons that Obama’s tepid words on Iran fall so flat. Listening in on the second channel, we sense absolutely no conviction behind them and no commitment to anything other than keeping the options open for negotiating with Ahmadinejad.
And, looking at the domestic picture, it is at least part of the explanation of why some of us have distrusted Obama from the start, while others are (and remain) starry-eyed.
The Iranian election: Obama speaks (kinda, sorta)
Here are some of the remarks President Obama made yesterday on Iran. I don’t need to analyze them too closely; many others have already done so. But I will say that they highlight Obama’s already-marked tendency towards narcissistic referencing that emphasizes his own personal reaction and/or personal story, as well as his remarkably passive and mealymouthed “evenhandedness” in the international sphere.
Obama has positioned himself as the un-Bush. This means that making a strong statement of solidarity and support to the Iranian demonstrators is not possible for him either strategically or temperamentally. Commenters at the blogs on the Left defend this course of action by saying that any such statements would only afford the mullahs an opportunity to say that the demonstrators are mere US puppets. But since they’ll say that anyway if they wish at any time they wish no matter what Obama does or doesn’t do, and since such statements of strong support in the past have given protesters around the world heart in many countries and at many times (see this for just one example), that sort of argument rings hollow and seems mere apologia for the weak response of our current President.
I wrote “weak response;” some would say “cowardly response.” I don’t think it’s the latter; to be a coward implies that Obama knows that he should be denouncing the regime and supporting the demonstrators in stronger terms, and that he rejects that move because he is afraid. There may be a bit of that involved, but I don’t really think so; if I read Obama correctly, I believe that he is unmoved by the protests and has tunnel vision for his task, which he sees as negotiating with Ahmadinejad and convincing him (whether by the sheer force of Obamalove or the power of logic) to give up his nuclear program.
That this is a delusion on Obama’s part and a misreading of Iran’s intent and ability to deceive is not the point; Obama seems to believe that it will happen, and has staked quite a bit on this belief. And it’s not just about Iran itself. It’s about an entire philosophical approach to international conflict that is as different as night and day from that of Bush and Cheney (Manichaeans who believe in the division of good and evil in the world, and the need for the former to press hard against the latter). Obama is committed to proving that cultural relativism (read “respect for all other countries and their governments”), the talking cure, apologies, meekness, and American non-interventionism pave the way for productive dialogue with the likes of even Ahmadinejad.
Compared to this, a few demonstrators in Iran must seem paltry and unimportant to Obama. The big picture is the power of negotiation. In the meantime, Obama—who once would have been considered, as President of the United States, the “leader of the free world”—doesn’t see himself that way. He sees his role as subtly guiding, through his own measured and nuanced response, this country to a new position as facilitator rather than leader, as the great mediator rather than the great liberator.
I used the word “Manichaean” earlier in this essay. It’s of interest to note that Manichaeism originated in Persia. That country is now known as Iran, and you can bet that, although the mullahs are Shiite Moslems, they have an approach to the world that is profoundly Manichaean in the more general sense, and that whoever heads the US it is the embodiment of evil to them (the “big Satan”). They are most likely to see Obama’s evenhanded refusal to say much of anything to condemn them as evidence of the weakness of the current leader of the Western axis of evil, rather than of the fact that he isn’t evil.
Did I say “leader?” Yes, I did; the world still views the POTUS in this way, whether the current occupant of the office acknowledges it or not. And it’s not a good thing to be considered a weak leader or a weak horse by enemies; Bin Laden was certainly correct on that score.
I mentioned the Persian origins of Manichaeism. Persia was also the birthplace of chess, that game of complex strategic moves and planning. The mullahs are no doubt familiar with that discipline as well, and although in his autobiography Obama claimed to be a chess player, I think he’s a rank amateur compared to them.
That doesn’t mean that I (or anyone else, for that matter) have a clue what will ultimately happen in Iran. With or without Obama’s support, the opposition will either gather enough strength to actually put a dent in the mullahs’ power or it will be crushed. Michael Ledeen, somewhat of an expert on Iran, seems think it at least possible that the regime is currently in trouble. He bases this partly on the fact that there is evidence of defection in both the Revolutionary Guards and the clergy itself. As a commenter on the Ledeen article writes (see #43, “Uzi”):
Two things to look for in a revolution are the moment when the leader or leaders of the ancien regime suffer a sudden loss of nerve, often due to the sudden realization that their position is less secure than they had peviously thought. (Think of James II when Marlborough crossed the field to join the forces of William and Mary or of Nicolas Ceausescu when he suddenly realized that the hundreds of thousands of rent a crowd people he had gathered up for a pro- government demo in front of his palace were chanting anti-government slogans, or of Ferdinand Marcos when part of the leadership of the Phillipenes army came out in support of Corizon Acquino). At moments like that, the old regime leadership start suffering vicarious flashbacks of previously overthrown leaders: Charles I on the scaffold, Moussolini hanging upside-down from a lamp-post, etc. and start looking for the nearest exit. When that happens the game is over and the revolution quickly replaces the disintegtrating ancien regime.
The second possibly determinative development would be for key members of the current leadership to somehow fall into the hands of the revolutionaries (as happened with Louis XVI , Tzar Nicholas, Moussolini, and Ceausescu). This almost always changes the dynamic of the revolution, generally by reason of execution of the outgoing leadership. Obviously Khamenei and Ahmadinejad will be taking precautions, but if they can’t trust their own Revolutionary Guards Corps officers, anything could happen.
Why did the mullahs bother to steal the election?
The consensus is that there’s no way the Iranian election figures are correct, and that things were rigged to allow Ahmadinejad to win. And for a long time it’s also been clear that the mullahs—Khameni in particular—are the ones who are really in charge, anyway.
So why did they bother? Why not just rubber stamp whoever might happen to win, if either candidate would essentially have been under Khameni’s thumb? Why would Khameni want to pull the mask from his own face, and reveal the truth of how corrupt and tyrannical the system is?
I don’t pretend to know the answer, but I do know the question. I’m not completely convinced by Time, either, when it suggests theories such as the following:
Some analysts believe Khamenei is motivated by a desire to prevent Iran from normalizing its relationship with the West, fearing that removing the external “threat” against which it was constructed will fatally undermine the Iranian political system. Ahmadinejad’s critics charged during the campaign that his provocative antics had undermined Iran’s standing in the world, but he certainly functions to restrain any movement toward rapprochement, keeping in place the fear of the “Great Satan” that has been an organizing principle of Iran’s authoritarian clerical regime.
Not that Iran won’t seek agreements with U.S. on areas of conflict that could lead to confrontation. Khamenei may believe that his regime’s best hope of survival is keeping his country on a war-footing against an external enemy, but an actual war would be disastrous for the regime.
Perhaps. But if the tenure of Ahmadinejad predecessor Khatami is any guide, a “reformist” President would be nice window-dressing for Iran, but wouldn’t necessarily give him any sort of real power to change things in a fundamental way—or especially to stop Iran’s nuclear program. So why risk inflaming the huge number of people who voted for Mousavi by so flagrantly and openly cooking the books for Ahmadinejad?
As I said, I don’t know. But I don’t think Obama helped the situation any by playing his own hand even before he became president, leaving himself no wriggle room with Iran. Khamenei and Ahmadinejad must feel they have Obama just where they want him, committed already to negotiating directly with them. Is this at least part of the reason why they felt so emboldened—because they knew they would stand to lose none of the ground and none of the validation they’d already gained from the Obama administration?
Bahukutumbi Raman agrees:
The U.S. has had the Israeli card against Iran. Tehran was always nervous about the possibility of the U.S. encouraging Israel to put Iran in its place if the worst comes to the worst. Obama has thrown away that card much to the relief of Iran.
If Iran spurns Obama’s overtures to it and follows on its nuclear and anti-Israel path, Obama has not kept for himself a fall-back option. In his anxiety to project a “good guy” image of himself right across the Islamic world, including Iran, Obama has unwittingly encouraged hard-line elements such as Ahmadinejad, who have no genuine love for the U.S. and who will lose no opportunity to make the interests of the Islamic world prevail over those of the international community. The U.S. may have to pay a heavy price for Obama’s policy U-turns in the Arab world and towards Iran.
[ADDENDUM: John Bolton weighs in. And I find it darkly humorous that so many people offering mindless ad hominem attacks on Bolton in the comments section there call him the nastiest name they can think of: neocon! Funny way to refer to a guy who was head of his school’s Students for Goldwater group back in high school. But the word “neocon” has become a simple pejorative devoid of all meaning save “evil warmongering relic of the Bush years”—except, of course, for when it’s revised to be a code word for “evil Jewish warmongering relic of the Bush years.”]
A neo-neocon exclusive: how the White House saved or created the “saved or created” meme
It’s not often such things come my way, but I’ve just gotten hold of an audio tape made surreptitiously by an Obama confederate, and I’ve made a transcript of the goings-on.
The place: somewhere in the White House.
The time: early February, 2009.
The cast of characters: Obama and a few top advisers.
The topic: projected unemployment figures.
AIDE 1: Chief, I know you’re good at convincing the public of whatever you want them to think. You were born with the gift of a golden voice [aide 1, despite his youth, is a fervent Leonard Cohen fan].
OBAMA: [Nods]. Yes [deeply and sonorously].
AIDE 1: But figures are figures, and facts are facts. And when the unemployment figures start coming out…
AIDE 2: We’re going to have to say “who are you going to believe, us or your lying eyes?”
OBAMA [Laughs. Deeply and sonorously]
AIDE 1: But how should we frame it? How can you disguise something as clear as that? We make a projection, and we turn out to be wrong, and unemployment increases…
[Pause while all are lost in thought.]
AIDE 3: It’s all in the way the projection is made. We’ve got to figure out something…something…
AIDE 1: Something inherently ambiguous.
AIDE 2: Something inherently unprovable.
OBAMA: Something where the deniability is built in from the start, so I don’t have to backtrack or contradict myself and pretend I’m not. I’m getting tired of doing that.
AIDE 2: But are the American people that dumb? Will they buy it?
OBAMA: Yes.
AIDE 1: They’ve always bought it before, if Obama says it.
[All smile and nod.]
AIDE 3: But if too many jobs are lost, how can we…
AIDE 2: But they won’t all be lost. Some will be saved.
AIDE 1: Wish we could get the people to imagine that without us, there’s be no jobs left in America. That way we’d get credit for every single one that’s…
OBAMA: I’ve got it! [starts singing, to the tune of “Amazing Grace”] I once was lost but now am found/Was blind, but now, I see.
AIDE 3: What?
AIDE 2: What do you see?
OBAMA: [Singing again, same tune] I once was lost but now am saved…
AIDE 3: Those aren’t the words.
AIDE 1: There’s a crack in everything.
OBAMA: [To aide 1] Quit that Cohen stuff. Can’t stand the guy, even if he is a Jew (nods and smiles ruefully to Rahm Emmanuel, who’s sitting in the corner wrapping a dead fish to be sent to Reverend Wright].
[All wait expectantly.]
OBAMA: Don’t you get it?
[All shake heads and say in unison] Tell us, boss.
OBAMA: [Almost to self] I’m good; oh, I’m good. We all know that I need to convince the American people I’m doing something to create jobs [all nod].
AIDE 1: And we know that unemployment’s going to go way up anyway.
OBAMA: Yes. So, instead of just saying I’ll create jobs, I’ll say I’ll “save or create” them. Sounds good, and the beauty of it all is that it’s completely unprovable. You might say that every single job that isn’t lost in America during my administration is one I saved.
AIDES: [Together, in chorus]: Boss, you’re the best! Let’s use it every single time you talk about employment.
[NOTE: While I was researching the background of the phrase “save or create,” I discovered that Obama actually didn’t “create” the phrase itself, despite my fanciful imaginings. However, you might say he “saved” it.
The phrase has been used before in a very particular set of circumstances by the Agriculture Department during the Bush administration, to describe some programs designed to actually “save or create” a limited and circumscribed set of threatened jobs (see this). And here’s a press release with details of the groups receiving the relatively small amounts of money involved (all grants were under a million dollars, and most were well below that figure; how quaint it all seems now!) and how they were required to distribute it):
The loans must be used to start new businesses, expand existing ones, or create or retain jobs. The economic development program provides funding to Rural Utilities program borrowers, usually electric and telephone cooperatives, which then provide the money to support job retention or job creation efforts in their service areas.
Despite my little attempt at humor in the above piece, I think it’s interesting to seriously ponder Obama’s exercise of the phrase. If in fact he was aware it had been used previously—and I have no way of knowing whether he did, but let’s just assume so—he must have sensed it would be incredibly advantageous for him to extend the phrase from a very specific set of threatened rural jobs whose “saving” could be measured, to the “saving” of jobs in general, which cannot.]
A trip back: the Iranian revolution (Part I)
[This is a repeat of a previous post. I thought to re-publish the series I wrote some time ago about the Iranian revolution. This is Part I.]
One of my favorite verses from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (the Fitzgerald translation of the Persian original) is this:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.
Ah, but if only we could go back, to wash out a few of the most terrible words! That’s the deep desire that propels most time travel fantasy: to undo some event that you know led to untold suffering.
The answer given by science fiction—and life—is that it just can’t be done. Even if it could, doing so might cause a cascade of other unforeseen effects. But the wish remains, especially for those happenings that seem to have been unmitigated tragedies for humankind.
One of those events was the triumphal return of Ayatollah Khomeini to Iran from his long exile in Iraq and his short sojourn in France (and Khayyam is an especially apt source to quote for the occasion—since modern day Iran is, of course, ancient Persia).
I was around when Khomeini made his return trip, one that propelled Iran’s own trip back in time to some horrific amalgam of the Dark Ages crossed with the tools of a modern totalitarian state. I noticed Khomeini’s arrival in Iran, although I had no idea of its significance. Neither did most.
He seemed and dark and brooding figure from some stern and gloomy ancient past. Or the sorcerer from Disney’s “Sorcerer’s Apprentice:”
It was difficult to understand the veneration the Iranian people seemed to have for him. In this photo, taken on his return, he looks as though he’s already become a statue:
Here’s an article that chronicled the event. Reportedly, “up to” five million people lined the streets of the capital to witness it. The revolution he had helped orchestrate from Paris (how apropos!) was in motion; its Reign of Terror was about to begin.
The Iranian revolution took almost everyone by surprise, including many of its participants. It was an amalgam of several of the strangest bedfellows in the world—a religious movement to impose a theocracy of strictest Islamic law, a group dedicated to Westernization and classical liberal human rights, and an active Marxist contingent.
All in all, a heady concoction that couldn’t fail to explode. The only question at the beginning was which faction would win out, because they certainly couldn’t all coexist. Khomeini was pretty sure he had an answer to that question. While in exile he had carefully played to the crowd that believed in human rights, but he made it crystal clear once he had consolidated his power that he had no intention whatsoever of following through on that score. Au contraire.
Khomeini addressed the assembled crowd at the Cemetery of Martyrs a few miles south of Tehran on February 1, 1979:
I will strike with my fists at the mouths of [the current Iranian] government. From now on it is I who will name the government.
Khomeni had learned his French lessons well: L’etat, c’est moi.
Shapour Bakhtiar, the newly-minted and ineffectual Prime Minister of Iran at the time–he had less than two weeks to go in that position—replied as follows:
Don’t worry about this kind of speech. That is Khomeini. He is free to speak but he is not free to act.
I almost wrote, “the ineffectual and clueless Bakhtiar.” But I’m glad I didn’t, because when I started to do some research on Bakhtiar himself, I found a man of rare courage and no small prescience, a tragic figure in history who made at least one fatal error.
Iranian election: is there any reason whatsoever…
…why this should be a surprise?
Related: see this and this. And go to memeorandum for a more comprehensive roundup of news articles and blog responses to the Iranian “election.”
So far, Obama has been relatively silent—or worse. I guess he doesn’t want to offend Ahmadinejad before the big summit. Hope. Change. You know.
And even Joe Biden is holding his tongue—sorta.
[ADDENDUM: An update from Michael Totten.]
“Get out and enjoy life”…
…says the 85-year old Bush I.
Of course, his choice of fun activity wouldn’t be mine, but it’s a free country.
So far.