VICE: Ron Paul, Part III: The Enpaulening

Today, on Vice, we have to deal with Ron Paul, Part III: The Enpaulening. There was the first version, and it was ugly and real, not like what we expected. It was like First Blood.

Then the replies made it all a vengeful, direct attack on something that was right. Like Rambo: First Blood Part II. We had to kill — even the made-up crap. We had to look the bad thing in the eye and say, "Aaauughhh!!!" Now, the third part, like Rambo III, it's about Afghanistan. We need to get the bad guys out. We need to fight them. Only the bad guys are us and Ron Paul is... right?

He is. Click the man who has delivered over 4,000 babies to be delivered to the Vice article that reconsiders Ron Paul:


One thing that couldn't be addressed in the Vice piece, for space constraints, is that Paul is the only major politician on the radar of the 24-hour news who rejects any premise for invading or interfering with Iran, which pairs the most sensible attitude on the matter with the most easily maligned candidate. The United States either has troops, drones or sympathetic regimes surrounding Iran, and American foreign policy wonks daily advocate either an invasion or terroristic strikes on sites within its borders.

Increasingly, our justification for striking at Iran is its angry opposition to the fact that we surround Iran, threaten to bomb it and may already be doing so via clandestine strikes and assassinations. We practice a bullying foreign policy, and then we act surprised when that policy backfires. Our only solution is to double down on that bellicosity and violently eradicate the same antipathy that we've directly engendered.

Lastly, while you're there, feel free to keep clicking the MORE button and dig on those comments. There's probably a 5-1 ratio of negative to positive responses, which is sort of entertaining when it's not a stone bummer.

Jonathan Swift Ate Caylee Anthony Because He Was Really Fat

I rarely relish an opportunity to not know something, but the Casey Anthony trial furnished me with the dual concepts of something horrible and something easily ignored. Despite Facebook's best baiting attempts, the topic never mattered.

Yesterday, though, a smart guy I know wrote a smart thing about crass jokes and emotional crassness relating to the trial. He was right. The guy who makes the dead baby joke and runs to the comfort of "too soon?" just after making it knows that the joke is always too soon. He relies on the simple step of conceptual proximity to seem daring, when in fact he's anything but. The fact is that "too soon?" is the shuddering refrain of the coward and the idiot, the self-promoting worry that buries actual human concern, promotes the speaker as "interesting" and pushes real dialogue and real understanding far away from the discourse.

Click here to keep reading on GQ.com.

Wailing Walls: Slouching from Benghazi, Part I

Note: As Libya descends into civil war, we, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? turn for insight to General Rehavam "Gandhi" Ze'evi, former Israeli Minister of Tourism. Having faked his assassination in the Mt. Scopus Hyatt Hotel, the General has been in deep cover, in Judea and Samaria, posing as an American goy pursuing graduate studies in the Middle East. In his free time, he enjoys saying very little about himself, because he's terrified of Kachist/Islamist extremist internet aficionados.


The Skirt from Sirte
by GENERAL REHAVAM "GANDHI" ZE'EVI

If there's a Middle Eastern dictator most likely to be Ceaucescued, lashed with electric cable to the missus on Christmas morning and Kalashnikoved off this mortal coil, it's Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi, Leader and Guide of the Revolution, Bedouin Father of Africa, a man with the vanity and physique of John Travolta, but with an even worse record in bombing.

Speaking in relative terms with the rest of the Arab world, Libya is a backwater, Tripoli a stodgy desert strip with a measly six million inhabitants (Cairo has twenty million in its environs). Gaddafi barely treads water against the sea of neighborhood Arab tyrant brethren. The Syrian Hafez al-Assad, "Butcher of Hama" and father of Bashar, always had the best torturers, frying recalcitrant Islamists on super-heated bedsprings or cracking their spines in the kampfy "German Chair." The urbane yet ruthless King Hussein of Jordan had the best spooks; no other country would have had a Mukhabarat handler in the room when an Al Qaeda double agent greased seven CIA agents with a bomb belt.

Even Saddam Hussein (believe it or not) led the Arab world in development, achieving ninety-plus literacy rates and nearly-First World medical access, prior to his Iranian misadventures. For a diva like Muammar, this is some rough hummus to choke down. Gaddafi was always the Lisa "Left-Eye" Lopes of the Arab League: petulant, a little out-of-place, unbalanced, and jealous enough to burn down that which tested him. And now he's headed out like Left-Eye, hurtling into a ravine spinning over and over, his passengers strapped in and unable to bail out.

Wailing Walls: An Introduction

Note: As tensions again rise in the Middle East, we, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? turn for insight to General Rehavam "Gandhi" Ze'evi, former Israeli Minister of Tourism. Having faked his assassination in the Mt. Scopus Hyatt Hotel at the start of the Second Intifada, the General has been in deep cover, in Judea and Samaria, posing as an American goy pursuing graduate studies in the Middle East and slowly learning Arabic, focusing especially on settlement activity in East Jerusalem. In his free time, he enjoys saying very little about himself, because he's terrified of Kachist/Islamist extremist internet aficionados.


'Now the Aktion Begins' 

by GENERAL REHAVAM "GANDHI" ZE'EVI

"Let me tell you about what I saw every morning."

Arieh gingerly stirred his cappuccino with a silver sugar spoon. He was less like the sober, Glock-toting wheeler-dealer I’d seen on Arutz Sheva than a soggy springer spaniel. It was winter in Jerusalem; the Western Wall Plaza was slick with rain. Arieh looked snug in his olive wool sweater and chocolate-colored corduroy slacks, sipping from an impossibly fluffy mug of cappucino. Even his black felt kippah, pinned over his thinning hair, looked soft. One of my companions, a jocular Moroccan, had wagered me twenty shekels Arieh had at least eight kids; I was sticking at six.

The man before us didn’t betray any such vitality, lisping as he answered, "Six kids." His gentle, open-handed gestures toward the window were the airy movements of my sincere, gay high school guidance counselor. I could almost picture Arieh and me stretched out on the Mount of Olives, sharing a Dannon Activia yogurt and running through SAT prep.

"Every day, walking from French Hill to Mount Scopus" — at this, he gestured beyond the obstructive silver dome of Al Aqsa Mosque, unbelievably close to the plate glass windows of the bistro where we sat — "I looked down at the Temple Mount. And every day, I remembered what it said in Tanakh. Once the Third Temple is built, the fresh water beneath the temple — you know of the tunnels beneath? The fresh water will flow out of the Dome of the Rock, east," he gestured once again towards the Mount of Olives, "down, down, down through Judea and Samaria, down the slopes and into the Dead Sea, which will be made fresh again. The Jordan will flow with this water."

Happy Martin Luther King Day: Fuck You, Leno

The old maxim that you can judge a man's character by the company he keeps seemed to specifically bite Jay Leno in the ass over the last couple weeks. Semi-retired comedians Jerry Seinfeld and Paul Reiser spoke up in his defense, prompting some clever people to observe on Twitter that if they were overpaid comics who stopped being funny decades ago, they'd stick up for Leno, too.

Allowing Leno's friends to cast an instructive light on the man himself seemed fair when Reiser wrote a disingenuous op-ed piece for The Huffington Post called, "A Teachable Leno moment." With at least one of them declaring his personal knowledge of him to be a legitimate yardstick, analogy was let loose. Others doubtless crafted more generous comparisons, but to me Paul Reiser apologizing for Leno was a lot like Rudolf Hess parachuting into Scotland to try to explain that Hitler guy.

Reiser's one of those comics like Leno who a few people insist was absolutely brilliant but whose brilliance remains a mystery (or one of those remotely plausible facts) to just about everyone. You can find proof of it if you go looking, but most people aren't going to go looking since the evidence they have on hand doesn't make the effort seem worth it. Reiser abandoned his comic role early and often, beginning with Barry Levinson's Diner and reaching its apotheosis in the TV series Mad About You. Along the way he played supporting roles in several movies, including Aliens, in which his weaselly corporate whore character Burke was confronted and probably later impregnated by aliens to use his body as a generative husk for something more profitable to them. Retrospectively this role seems career-defining.

'The Ayatollah Begs to Differ'

Many fans of Iranian-American writer Hooman Majd doubtless became familiar with him when he plugged his book on The Daily Show. During an amusing back-and-forth with host Jon Stewart, Majd outlined parallels between misperceptions of the U.S. abroad and of Iran in the U.S. and between religious conservatives in both countries. While Stewart riffed off the comparisons, Majd came off as funny, knowledgeable and urbane and, as is often the case, there for much too little time. The same can be said for his book, The Ayatollah Begs to Differ.It's smart, funny and sophisticated; reading it is a pleasure. But it's a shame to finish it and wonder what else could be written.

Majd was born and raised in Iran before the 1979 Islamic Revolution. He was a student in England during Ayatollah Khomeini's rise to power, and he now lives in New York, where he has served as the translator for both former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami (he and Khatami are distant cousins whose families come from the same small village) and current president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In sum, Majd is something of a native son and a western cosmopolite. He's fluent in both languages and worlds, in both liberal secular democracy and in Islamic Iran.

His background and current life seem to inform the structure of The Ayatollah Begs to Differ. It's written in a breezy style that dips periodically into broader thematic aspects of Iran but mostly flits in and out of revealing — but not necessarily fully anchored and thematically explored — anecdotes. The reader can envision Majd the Raconteur, telling these stories while at table with a dozen Americans, holding a glass of burgundy and tilting his head back to remember detail.