Remembering 9/11, 2011

I never seem to do anything for 9/11. I know I should. Call some friends, agree ahead of time to get together, have some kind of blast for 18 or 19 of us, but it always escapes my mind. I used to be better organized.

I can never seem to remember where I was on its anniversary, either. Take two years ago: I'm pretty sure I was at a ballgame, but I couldn't tell you one way or the other. I know I published this piece at two in the morning; after that, I'm unsure. The only "where I was on 9/11" piece I've ever read worth a tinker's damn was David J. Roth's, and, aside from that, all others read like the works of self-aware wannabe talking heads who cast their eyes at a burning hellscape and said, "Memorize where you were at this moment, precious voice, because this can be your generation's JFK assassination."

I know I was at a ballgame somewhere around September 11, 2011, because last night, purely by accident, I found an old note I'd dictated on my iPhone for myself, and it immediately brought back the circumstances surrounding it. I was standing in line at a Tampa Bay Rays game, waiting to go to the bathroom.

Busta Poesy: Amanda Palmer's Unpublished Paeans to What's on TV

In a week that saw major global earthquakes, a bombing at a marathon, a city shut down, a series of deadly shootouts, the defeat of even a toothless piece of gun-control legislation, the Internet and the New York Post proudly labeling several innocent people as terrorists, hate crimes against Muslims, and a massive and deadly explosion in Texas—well, after a week like that, it takes some serious stones to make it about you. Amanda Palmer doesn't have a modesty problem.

You might have heard of Amanda Palmer. A punk rocker turned folk singer, she embraced the leveling social-justice agitation of both genres, married it to Kickstarter's DIY funding, asked for $100,000 from fans to make an album and wound up being given $1.2 million. Then she used most of the money on frivolous shit and paying off personal debts, while expecting local musicians to play on her tour for free, and fans to feel rewarded by the same "HERE IS A GIFT CERTIFICATE FOR ONE (1) HUG" lazy compensation she was doling out for a donation total smaller by a factor of 11.

Palmer clearly exhibited significant difficulty in picking up context clues from even her own personal history in music. Thankfully, her degree of obtuseness extends beyond shitkicker balladeering and fan plunder. After bearing witness to the horrors in Boston, Palmer published "A Poem for Dzhokhar," addressed to the alleged Boston bomber who was captured in a boat after a frightening daylong manhunt. Her poem—35 aired-out lines of lowercase e.e. crummy—does an excellent job of cataloging the ennui of privileged insipidity. Which is to say, it sings a song of Amanda Palmer to Amanda Palmer that, one supposes, Dzhokhar might eventually overhear by accident. It is glurge clickbait, the kind of thing that appears in your inbox only after being forwarded by that one grandmother who had parts of her brain suffocate for a little while.

Naturally, we here at Et tu, Mr. Destructo? were flabbergasted. More importantly, all of us received extensive CIA training in remote viewing. Using only the power of extra-sensory perception, we were able to individually "hack" Amanda Palmer's brain, gaining access to as-yet unwritten poems dedicated to other tragic events in the national news cycle. We have presented these unpublished poems below. However, as remote viewing is sometimes inexact, we have added our names to each poem to account for how different viewers interpreted the raw Palmer data. Thank you for your indulgence.

GAWKER: Obama Mouthpiece to Journalists—'Stop Snitching'

The most recent article from The Nation's Jeremy Scahill profiled the imprisonment of Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye. For covering American cluster bomb strikes in Yemen and the radicalization of Yemeni citizens and their support for Al Qaeda, Shaye has been beaten and tortured, imprisoned for two years and, at America's request, seen a presidential pardon from Yemen's Ali Abdullah Saleh indefinitely tabled.

You'd think that more bloggers would be furious about this. Extending a blithe imperial hand across the globe to support the torture and imprisonment of journalists is exactly the sort of half-assed fascism they were rabid about back when George W. Bush was exporting America's headaches to our Dracula in Cairo, Hosni "Drown People in Barrels of Shit" Mubarak.

Click on the pic of Jay "Stop Snitching" Carney to continue reading on Gawker.

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.

Happy 9/11, Everybody!

Note: For MrDestructo.com's counterpoint on the remembrance of 9/11, please consider Flavor Flav's "9/11 Is NOT a Joke."

Weirdly serious or threatening signage is par for the course in Florida, something I've gone into before. Even official government signage gets in on the act. The oddest thing I've ever seen on a county sheriff's/county road construction sign read, "REMEMBER TO LOCK YOUR DOORS!" with the exclamation point and everything. I saw it on a midnight drive, by an upscale gated community, on a road that sees almost zero traffic after dinnertime. Still, there it was, flashing urgently. Given the area's crime rate and the sign's complete absence of utility for all but the 5pm commute, it might as well have said, "BEWARE OF SHARKBITE."

The following was sent in by reader Katye, who was driving on State Road 54 in Pasco County and saw one of those emergency notification signs making sure that, when it came to September 11th, she'd never forget. (Update: I was being facetious about the "never forget" thing, but Katye responded to say that there is indeed an ominous "NEVER FORGET" sign just down the road as well.)

Wailing Walls: Bela Lugosi's Dead, Part III

Note: After the death of Osama Bin Laden, 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. He last joined us for Bela Lugosi's Dead, Part II: The Real Story Sucks: Bin Laden, the ISI and a Dawood Sandstorm.


Killing the Bastard Bin Laden, Stage IV of the American Fever Dream
by GENERAL REHAVAM "GANDHI" ZE'EVI

"And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird."
— Revelation 18:2

"An America that uses its military power less promiscuously, more intelligently and in a targeted and focused manner might once again gain the world’s respect and fear, if not affection."
— Fareed Zakaria, Time, May 20, 2011

The boozy cheering of the blood-mad spectator echoes across a lacuna in the brittle American soul. Never forget the slaughter of 9/11 and never forget that the brick and mortar of this nation was slapped atop a continent-wide Indian burial ground. The American Revolution was an assertion of human worth that has been studied and admired by everyone from Simon Bolivar to Ho Chi Minh. And since that clinching moment at Yorktown, America has paved the low road over any peoples in its way and assumed it would pay no price.

The world should embrace America the way cattle egrets dote on elephants, and America should elevate the world in the same way, a symbiotic beneficence between the gentle giant and the greater multitude of the flock. Instead, usually, we shirk, creep away from the trajectory of our best instincts and better potential, a fiend loping off into the weeds to kill something. We'd rather be a pack of hyenas than anything as noble as an elephant. Those cannibals will eat almost anything when hungry — bones, metal pots, their shit and their children. They should be hunted to extinction, yet they roam free and plentiful on the African continent; elephants and buffalo and other noble animals are always the endangered creatures.

Of course we would misname a strutting punk like Bin Laden "Geronimo"; when you hunt in the high grass, you don't care if you've bagged a gazelle or garbage. They're all something to be torn apart. There is no moral symmetry in which Osama and Geronimo can be compared; a reedy child-murdering sybarite like Bin Laden doesn't deserve to be so much as incinerated in the same sentence as an actual freedom-fighter like Geronimo. The only thing they share is a status as enemy of America, to be disposed of like every other villain. In the eerie silence of falling footsteps pursuing their quarry into a back bedroom, safety off to eject Osama's intellect onto a greasy daybed, the SEALs ran kill-confirmation through their heads, lest they be the lucky triggerman: "GERONIMO... ENEMY KIA."

Those three garbled little words constitute an express elevator to the bowels of the American soul, to the same killing rage that metastasized in the heart of every pioneer. We can hear the deafening roar of our forefathers in that hidden, potent store of true bloody-murder grit, adrenaline from beyond the grave, a hypernationalist virus that grips like tetanus and holds on harder: "FASTER. KILL, KILL, KILL. EXTERMINATE THE BRUTES."

Wailing Walls: Bela Lugosi's Dead, Part II

Note: After the death of Osama Bin Laden, 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. He last joined us for Bela Lugosi's Dead, Part I: A Shadow of Ourselves.


The Real Story Sucks: Bin Laden, the ISI and a Dawood Sandstorm
by GENERAL REHAVAM "GANDHI" ZE'EVI

We're being lied to with all the crude smugness of an Irish Setter with crumbs on his whiskers, oblivious as to who ate all the kaiser rolls off the counter. This horseshit bandage being spun around Osama's powder-burned chancres is enough to make any decent self-loathing American want to attempt a header off the Golden Gate. We have no decoder rings, yet, with the power of elementary deduction, we can cut through the web of lies ensnaring Lady Liberty.

In Part I of this piece, I told you about Al Qaeda, the most comically monstrous gang of murdering cretins to never have starred in a Roald Dahl novel. That group's "BFG" was recently introduced to the concept of mind-expanding hollowpoint bullets, a door of perception Mr. Bin Laden may not have been entirely prepared to traverse.

No matter. No one goes straight to the shrink when they find themselves fixated on the idea of carving 666 onto their bus driver's forehead or tearing apart their Keurig machine to see if the CIA has installed a tracking device in the coffee filter. It takes some building up to a point where one can accept they are nuts, and that is what a general practitioner is for — a medical hand who can gently break it to those clad only in tinfoil that it might be worth trying the Thorazine. The calorie-free, sociopathic banality of this Bin Laden hit is similarly more digestible if we first admit: one, that this official narrative does not make a great deal of sense; and, two, that it is a terrifying indication of how little the "War on Terror" has achieved.

If you want to accept the truth of the Bin Laden killing, you have to accept that you will be condemned as paranoid, unstable and soft on hard terror. From where I sit, true-blue madness and narcissistic delinquency came from the depravity of the American jubilation over the murder of that withered old Saudi lecher, but that will have to wait until Part III. Our task today is much more rote. Busting the lies of fat-necked warmongers and armchair militarists is always a boring, thankless, easy job, but it's an important one.

Wailing Walls: Bela Lugosi's Dead, Part I

Note: After the death of Osama Bin Laden, 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. He last joined us for Slouching from Benghazi, Part III: The Libyan War Is Decadent and Depraved.


A Shadow of Ourselves
by GENERAL REHAVAM "GANDHI" ZE'EVI

"Terror is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue."
— Robespierre

The warm waters of the Persian Gulf deserve better than the pollution of Osama Bin Laden's leaking carcass. The return of that croaked wraith to the sea marks but the final sunnah in his jihad against the world — against the blue Satan. It is criminal that Bahrain's placid pearl oyster beds, or the verdant coral reefs of Marrawah, or even the rusting, awesome shells of supertankers sunk during the Iran-Iraq war, may someday house a shred of Osama's beard. An image shadows me, of a serene whale shark, peacefully gliding along the seabed, filter feeding upon krill and algae, ignorantly sucking up a Bin Laden testicle. The miasma of his putrefying body will infect fish eggs and psychologically warp bottlenose dolphin calves, twisting them into angry teenagers their parents will not recognize.

Osama Bin Laden, the Most Evil Man in History, is fish food, will never be seen again in any recognizable, corporeal form. The fear, the banality, the panic he provoked will remain behind, streaks of blood in the water charting his descent. Many village experts have obligingly explained to us that Bin Laden was a failure. This is true one minute and false the next. The Arab revolutionary movements of this year are a more bracing repudiation than two Navy SEAL stingers to the eye; they killed Bin Laden before we did.

But we must face it: Bin Laden tossed a pocketful of seeds and woke up in a rainforest. He wagged the dog. If anything, the failures of his nearest and dearest efforts, frightfully modest in comparison to the destruction of the American Empire, only serve to highlight the enormity of the scalps he pocketed. Historians will be hard-pressed to find an agitator who castrated an empire using less money and exerting less energy than Bin Laden. His jackal pack induced a full-court psychological meltdown with a disgusting ease. His coalition of Salafist mutants, rejected from polite company in every corner of the Middle East, conspiratorial failures of Arab capital who could've stepped out of a Conrad thriller and kept on bumbling — this was the drifting garbage mound that beggared a superpower.

Here is the cautionary tale the last decade has telegraphed to every person on the face of the earth with working eyes, ship-shape ears, and no cable: a reedy rich boy Tusken Raider with a voice like static can burn three thousand helpless human souls as if they were garbage, find comfort in the arms of America's South Asian allies, then spend six years in a leafy dacha growing tomatoes, dyeing his beard and napping.

Get Ready for the 'Maritimers'

From the New York Times (emphases mine):

Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the most devastating attack on American soil in modern times and the most hunted man in the world, was killed in a firefight with United States forces in Pakistan on Sunday, President Obama announced.

A crowd gathered to celebrate outside the White House Sunday night as news of Osama bin Laden's death spread.

In a dramatic late-night appearance in the East Room of the White House, Mr. Obama declared that “justice has been done” as he disclosed that American military and C.I.A. operatives had finally cornered Bin Laden, the Al Qaeda leader who had eluded them for nearly a decade. American officials said Bin Laden resisted and was shot in the head. He was later buried at sea.

You can write this script in your head. Our non-American president fabricated the non-murder of the greatest enemy of all Americans to distract from "real" truths about his birth certificate. Barack Obama fake-killed Osama bin Laden to keep us from noticing how much of a Muslim or a fake American he was all along.

I know! It almost makes no sense, but that's what makes conspiracies true. You keep adding multiple implausible conditions because you can't help it. A true thing is what happens when you say white is black. But a dire conspiracy is when you say that you're not a Kenyan Muslim because you went to college in New York and you killed a guy near Islamabad, but you ditched his corpse in the Indian Ocean, and you're totally home free. Connect the dots.

Or not. Get ready for the "Maritimers." They'll know the truth about bin Laden's body. They'll read it off blogs and everything.

EDIT: from The Guardian:

Burial at sea is rare in Islam, though several Muslim websites say it is permitted in certain circumstances.

One is on a long voyage where the body may decay before the ship reaches land. [Ed. Like a journey to America.] The other is if there is a risk of enemies digging up a land grave and exhuming or mutilating the body – a rule that could plausibly be applied in Bin Laden's case.

Twitter Ephemera: Bin Laden's Dead—A Whole GWOT'a Love

The head of a virally propagating organization is dead, doubtless already replaced by a lieutenant trained to do just that. The organization itself has for years been superannuated and supplanted by more vigorous, less known and less hunted organizations. And for all the adulation about killing a voice and a grainy image nearly 10 years out from their last crime and 17 out from their first, it cannot undo the fact that their Mission Accomplished moment took only a day, in what seems like another lifetime.

The object of terror is to use an enemy's fear to leverage himself into positions into which you cannot put him by direct force. With two-score men, borrowed planes and some lessons down in Florida, a millionaire recluse clown with bizarre hairstyling convictions tantalized and lured a nation of 300 million people into breaking its back economically and militarily on a nation that hasn't been conquered — at anything other than its own pleasure — since the days of Alexander. The economic woes and military overextensions engendered by our lust for vengeance remain. So, too, do the main tools of recruitment for Islamic terrorists, according to a study by the Bush/Rumsfeld Pentagon: American troop presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as our uncritical support for the state of Israel.

Bin Laden is dead. Long live Bin Laden.

To anyone paying attention to the Middle East over the last decade, this conclusion was inescapable even in the full rush of excitement in the moments after bin Laden's death. And if that's the case, all ensuing parties are an absurdity — like high-fiving someone for acing a years-out-of-date Bar Exam practice test for a state he doesn't live in. At that point, all you can do is make a joke: the rush of emotions are weightless, suspended by nothing. You look up and wonder how the coyote can keep walking across an empty chasm, between two cliffs, separated by ten years, and you realize that it's only because he isn't even curious enough to look down.

But it's hard enough to express simpler ideas than this on Twitter, so the jokes below had to suffice. Clicking the timestamps will direct you to the original tweet and its place in the timeline.

Wailing Walls: Slouching from Benghazi, Part II

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. This piece is continued from Part I: The Skirt from Sirte.


The Magical Monied Muammar's Comeback Tour, or: 'The Most Disgusting Story Ever Told'
by GENERAL REHAVAM "GANDHI" ZE'EVI

The only Tea Party worth a damn on this whole godawful planet is in Libya. And unlike our morbidly obese Rascal-scootering Glock fetishists ardently fighting for the right to die of untreated diabetes, the Libyan Tea Party is standing and fighting and dying and maybe going to lose. How fitting that a bloody, highly fluid totaler kreig is taking place today in Libyan cities like Tobruk, the same place that another Desert Fox, Herr Rommel, hunted the Brits for months during World War II. As Gaddafi regains military momentum to a degree I thought impossible, his forces sweep through recaptured cities like the sludge of a tsunami, smearing city blocks, whole families annihilated as if by the flick of the Colonel's finger.

I am positive that despite the crushing losses of cities like Brega, Ras La'nuf and Azawiya, rebel morale is higher than that of their adversaries — if only because, if the rebel front collapses, Benghazi and everyone in it will be subject to a Saddam vs. Shia kind of payback, a scouring that will make Hama seem like a mere urban redevelopment project.

In 1989, following the U.S. "Gulf of Sidra" air strikes, Gaddafi put down a brief internal revolt with ferocity, leaving a few unlucky protestors hanging like pirates on the lampposts of Tripoli. Gaddafi's odious war-criminal son, commando leader Khamis Gaddafi, subjected the city of Zawiya to a relentless artillery siege before taking it, concussing it into sand. The Khamis Brigade has since retaken the oil refinery port a half hour outside of Tripoli, and the retribution has been swift: mass executions, Sabra and Shatila style corpse-bulldozing, even the destruction of safe haven mosques. Now they surround Benghazi, seat of the revolution, trying to drive the revolutionaries into the desert and, failing that, demolish the city. There will be no mercy, as there hasn't been thus far.

I am torn on the issue of external military intervention. Perhaps it could provide Gaddafi the black eye the rebels need to slough him off. But it will mark the beginning of the Libyan War, full stop. And frankly, I doubt the motivations of intervention's most forceful advocates, and you should too. David Cameron is the kind of Tory who drove Lord Byron to die in Greece, and the egocentric Sarkozy still smarts from Gaddafi's role in strangling his beloved Mediterranean Union in the crib.

As I alluded to last time, Gaddafi has spent the past fifteen years ingratiating himself with the "good guys," flipping over small-fry terrorist schemers, churning the oil, scrapping his two-bit nuke program. This is a pretty impressive feat for a guy who made his name sponsoring full-throated bloody murder against American and British civilians. Those governments might not give a shit about anyone else in the world, but killing their people is sure as fuck off-limits. Gaddafi nearly killed Margaret Thatcher herself through his IRA support, hit U.S. servicemen several times in Europe, and downed Pan Am Flight 103, at a cost of two hundred and seventy Brits and Yanks.

We live in a world where Obama's kaffeeklatch with toothless ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers was a major campaign issue, yet Gaddafi — a man so radically unhinged and pathologically vainglorious that he makes Saddam look like Thomas Pynchon — was embraced by a startling coalition of Western elites. The difference was that he could buy them. These supplicants pocketed blood money ripped from the heart of Libya. The darkest stain, the damn spot that won't come out for decades, came from Gaddafi's billfold, crumpled and stuffed into the pockets of owl-eyed trans-Atlantic mediocrities dispatched to Tripoli with all the dignity of a bachelor party stripper van. Gaddafi has spent the last two decades buying respectability, and my, what a bargain it is when you know the right people. They deserve to be hounded into suicides for this, to never live this down. So let's name names.

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: Death On The Nile

Note: As Egypt struggles toward democracy, 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 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.


Out, Out, Long Candle
by GENERAL REHAVAM "GANDHI" ZE'EVI

There was a joke in the mid-nineties among CIA functionaries about how to brief Bill Clinton on the prospect of regime change in Iraq. "Mr. President, we cannot definitively predict the identity of Saddam's successor, but we know his first name: General."

You'll remember, dear reader, that far from his pre-2008 Iowa Jefferson-Jackson dinner assertion that he had "opposed the Iraq [War] from the beginning," Clinton had in fact been an open, rather zealous proponent of icing Saddam Hussein's leprous mafia government once and for all. Bubba spent two terms as president dropping thousands of tons of bombs on Iraq, financing all sorts of creepy, terroristic exile groups and engineering a truly monstrous sanctions program which succeeded only in enriching Ba'athist cronies and killing a few hundred thousand kids. While most people have forgotten about the sanctions (with some exceptions), the joke became newly relevant this past week. As with all CIA information on Iraq, the Langley water cooler brigade were totally wrong with their "Saddam successor" joke. But replace "Saddam" in that punchline with the name of Hosni Mubarak, and by Allah, that joke is dead-on. It explains exactly what finally happened last week.

Mubarak was going to survive so long as the Army didn’t view his continued presence as constituting an immediate liability. And Mubarak’s unbelievable Mr. Magoo speech two Thursdays ago — an incoherent word salad of Arab nationalist boilerplate and paternalistic condescension — finally did the trick. The media was awash with leaked assurances that Mubarak was about to submit to the inevitable and bow out, a buzzing zeitgeist playing soundtrack to the odd new images of the day. The Supreme Council of the Egyptian military — which last met, I think, when Ariel Sharon’s tank column was surging towards Cairo during the 1973 War — suddenly convened a televised meeting, in which Mubarak and churlish dungeonmaster Umar Suleiman happened to be absent. Hassan al-Roueini, the general tasked with security in the Cairo Governate, had the most fun assignment: go to Tahrir Square and tell all the protestors, "All your demands will be met today."

Tuesdays with Marty: 6/01/10

Note: Tuesdays with Marty is a recurring segment on Et tu, Mr. Destructo? highlighting the opinions of our publisher, Marty Peretz. Mr. Peretz wishes to make it absolutely clear that he is neither responsible nor liable for any content in this site, including but not limited to words, ideas, images, and things implied by said means of communication, in addition to other forms of communication not involving the above methods, whether established or theoretical in nature.


How Palestine Was 'Lost'
by MARTY PERETZ

Two powerful dramas ended in the last seven days. The first described an island of miracles to which only some could return, a place of refuge and possibility surrounded by a forbidding sea and malicious forces. Indeed, the Lost finale was a special event destined to be long remembered by fans of television—Vincent the dog lying down beside the hero, Jack Shephard (how appropriate), now at peace, as his spirit moves on to a new challenge.

The Right Kind of Terrorism

Last weekend you might have seen two links posted on your Facebook or sent to your inbox repeatedly. The first, by the brilliant Tim Wise, asks us to, "Imagine the Tea Party Was Black." The second, a slickly produced video from the Republican Governor's Association, asks us to "Remember November," a cynical distortion borrowing from the movie V for Vendetta. While there have been several thoughtful pieces about both, no one has mentioned that the impulses driving both pieces of theater are the same.

Wise's piece speaks for itself, and you should read it if you have the time. Assuming you're swamped: it recalls conservative actions and rhetoric from the past two years and asks if we'd countenance the same actions from non-whites. His best example is the recent teaparty gathering in Washington in which whites armed with assault rifles announced that they were willing to start another revolution if they didn't get their way in government. This is little more than a threat of coming bloodshed — their common "the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants" signs say as much — a gunpoint extortion of the body politic. If black citizens armed themselves under a Republican administration and issued a list of demands, FOX News would howl and run a 24/7 graphic of Flavor Flav wearing a dynamite-laden clock above a chyron: "AMERICA'S BLACKS: A TICKING TIME BOMB?"

GOP 2010: Mindless Terror, Now with Collectibles!!!

Yesterday, Politico published a piece of investigative journalism whose ramifications could be sharply negative for the Republican National Committee. Good for them! You knew they'd have it in them — eventually... reluctantly. You can almost picture beads of sweat erupting on the tech guy's face as he queued the update, each keystroke resounding in his ears like a hammer striking an anvil.

In the piece, Politico excerpted details from a leaked 72-page RNC document explaining how to better raise funds for 2010 GOP campaigns. Politico summarized the RNC strategy thus:

The Republican National Committee plans to raise money this election cycle through an aggressive campaign capitalizing on “fear” of President Barack Obama and a promise to "save the country from trending toward socialism."

In neat PowerPoint pages, it lifts the curtain on the often-cynical terms of political marketing, displaying an air of disdain for the party’s donors that is usually confined to the barroom conversations of political operatives...

[The] RNC has shifted toward a reliance on small donors, but the document reveals extensive, confidential details of the strategy for luring wealthy checkwriters, which range from luxury retreats in California wine country to tickets to a professional fight in Las Vegas...

One page, headed “The Evil Empire,” pictures Obama as the Joker from Batman, while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leaders Harry Reid are depicted as Cruella DeVille and Scooby Doo, respectively.

Newsweek: Thanks for Making Me Feel Okay About Killing

It took just days, but there's already a video game where you can destroy the tentacular federal agency attempting to destroy your life. And here's the great thing: just like in reality, there's no way to lose! Sure, here it's impossible not to strike the building. But in real life, surely even a failure to hit the target is a can't-miss opportunity to point up the illegitimacy of... I dunno... government. Or whatever.

Even at this point, no one is really sure why Joe Stack flew a plane into an IRS building and murdered a man in the process. But, irrespective of whatever answers about his life might be forthcoming, they're bound to offer far less entertainment than the reactions his actions have inspired. I realize by now this news is about a week old — which, given the subject, is perfectly fitting — but Newsweek magazine treated THA STACK ATTACK as occasion to share an open discussion amongst all staffers about what constitutes terrorism. The results ran the gamut from stupid and hilarious to stupid and loathsome.

The Swiss Are Assholes

Poor Muammar Qaddafi. First, no one can spell his name the same way from year to year. In fact, I'm pretty sure I had to switch spellings during semesters in college once. Also, "Khadafy" looked way cooler, kind of like a split between Wrath of Khan and a blaxsploitation film. Second, he spent a good chunk of the 2000s being a poster boy for the efficacy of the Bush Doctrine after he renounced terrorism. But then he made one nutty UN speech, got a new president who didn't need him to prop up the notion that "the bombs-away system works!" and suddenly he's no longer that necessary.

Third, he can't even beat his servants in a Swiss hotel. What a bunch of bullshit. Look, you don't keep running a shithole like Libya for the money. If you want to run a country with shaky economic development, tribal conflict, violent crime and an arid climate just for the money, eventually you pull a Carlos Salinas de Gortari, rob the company store and set yourself up in a bigass house in Ireland, where there's water, beer and redheads who are reliably crazy in the right room of the house.

No, you run Libya for the perks: getting to use swords, firing guns in the air, buying really old missiles and whaling on dudes. I can't even comprehend how the Swiss don't get that last part. They spent 1300-1550 kicking the shit out of everyone in Europe for the money, mainly jabbing them with sticks. Then they got so bored they spent the next 450 years basically daring anyone to fuck with Popes just for another excuse to do something. The Swiss are assholes.

Tuesdays with Marty: 2/16/10

Note: Tuesdays with Marty is a recurring segment on Et tu, Mr. Destructo? highlighting the opinions of our publisher, Marty Peretz. Mr. Peretz wishes to make it absolutely clear that he is neither responsible nor liable for any content in this site, including but not limited to words, ideas, images, and things implied by said means of communication, in addition to other forms of communication not involving the above methods, whether established or theoretical in nature.


The Super Bowl and a Realistic, Focused Approach to Middle East Conflict
by MARTY PERETZ

A mere eleven days ago, fans of the National Football League were treated to yet another stellar Super Bowl in a decade abundant with them. From the four contests featuring the New England Patriots, all decided by less than a touchdown, to last year's last-minute heroics sending the Pittsburgh Steelers over the Arizona Cardinals and seasoned man of faith Kurt Warner, most of these games have been a testament to athletic struggle to last the ages.

The game two weekends ago differed slightly, however, as the combatants represented not only the best of their respective football conferences but also two different modalities of thought and action, and in this offered two lessons in leadership.

Tuesdays with Marty: 9/29/09

Note: Tuesdays with Marty is a recurring segment on Et tu, Mr. Destructo? highlighting the opinions of our publisher, Marty Peretz. Mr. Peretz wishes to make it absolutely clear that he is neither responsible nor liable for any content in this site, including but not limited to words, ideas, images, and things implied by said means of communication, in addition to other forms of communication not involving the above methods, whether established or theoretical in nature.


President Obama's Essential Unseriousness About Fighting Terrorism
by MARTY PERETZ

I don't know whether the public sincerely buys into the hollow, hateful delusion of the United Nations, and I certainly don't care. The UN is billed as a sort of clearinghouse for world opportunities and a chance to make the world a better, safer place. And, on some level, it is. Simply put, last week President Obama knew precisely where and when a few smart bombs or cruise missiles could have instantly and irreversibly improved world stability, and he did nothing. Indeed, he did far less than nothing, as instead of acting, he chose to talk. You know, like Neville Chamberlain.