Hey kids, subscribe to Commentary and you’ll receive one (1) complimentary, “full-color 39″ x 26″ World Terrorism wall map includes detailed inset maps highlighting countries battling narco-, Maoist, and Islamist terrorism, icons depicting aspects of world terrorism, political and topographical detail as well as definitions and facts, terrorist organization summaries, and sources and web sites recommended for further research [emphasis mine].” Repeat: it’s a wall map. Is it really possible that Commentards use these things as home decorations? At dinner parties, do they follow up a brisket made into an effigy of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by inviting their guests to sit around staring at maps of the countries they want other people’s children to invade? The ghost of Maimonides is crying somewhere.

Oh, I’m not done with the Commentards yet. Here’s what Sam Munson highlighted as the Comment(ard) of the Day: (more…)

The worst blogger on earth, writing for the worst site on the world wide web (including all the porn), demonstrates the nonideological idiocy undergirding her entire output quite apart from her laughably slavish partisanship, dishonesty, and stupidity:

Rove’s analysis [of state-by-state contests] should put much of partisan punditry into proper perspectiveational polls are fun but largely irrelevant. Remember Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani’s double-digit leads months before the first votes were cast?

Jesus H. Christ. How many confusions is it possible to pack into two short sentences? (more…)

There’s an old wistful joke I heard frequently in my days as a Dissentnik to the effect that if you asked the old New York intellectuals about their favorite flavor of ice cream, their answer would begin with an analysis of the division of labor in ancient Babylon. The roots of the latest round of hostilities among rival Jewish political camps — in addition to the Daniel Levy summary Jim links downblog, check out Todd Gitlin — stretch back at least as far the origin of the admonition within the community not to air out grievances “in front of the goyim.” That’s what makes the apoplexy over Joe Klein’s references to “Jewish neoconservatives” and “divided loyalties” so silly. Head over to Commentary’s “about” page. Notice the fourth tab down on the TOC on the left, “Israel, Jews, & Judaism,” falling underneath “Politics and Society,” “American & the World,” and “Culture & Religion.” Now have a look at their mission statement:

Commentary is America’s premier monthly magazine of opinion and a pivotal voice in American intellectual life. Since its inception in 1945, and increasingly after it emerged as the flagship of neoconservatism in the 1970’s, the magazine has been consistently engaged with several large, interrelated questions: the fate of democracy and of democratic ideas in a world threatened by totalitarian ideologies; the state of American and Western security; the future of the Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture in Israel, the United States, and around the world; and the preservation of high culture in an age of political correctness and the collapse of critical standards. [my emphases]

In other words, the magazine that regards itself as “the flagship of neoconservatism” regards the question of “the future of the Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture in Israel” as on a par with the most important of all political questions. More precisely, of course that’s Commentary’s position. It is a Jewish neoconservative magazine, until recently funded by the American Jewish Committee, whose fundamental political allegiances are to a set of now-familiar foreign policy positions both for the United States and Israel. What exactly is one supposed to make of a group of strutting, ignorant, dishonest, censorious Jewish bullies who accuse other Jews of being anti-Semites and self-loathers for pointing out their divided loyalties when the bullies themselves advertise those divided loyalties prominently on the website of their “flagship” publication? What Joe Klein’s statement of the obvious — and the Commentary apparatchiks’ increasingly embarrassing failure to enforce the equation of stating the obvious with anti-Semitism — has helpfully demonstrated is that these bullies are as powerless as Polonius and his wagging finger unless people choose to be afraid of them. (more…)

Back when depraved torture enthusiast, dissembler, and Princeton admissions error (it happens) Michael Goldfarb officially began collecting paychecks directly from the McCain campaign instead of the Substandard, John Schwenkler tried to make the point that McCain’s hiring of Goldfarb reflected poorly on Honest John given a) Goldfarb’s depravity across a spectrum of issues, and b) Goldfarb’s resemblance to the more sociopathic elements of the Bush administration, the latter of which doesn’t aid Team McCain’s efforts to dodge the “McSame” label. For that, John was taken to task by, among others, Reihan Salam and James Joyner, who noted that Goldfarb was hired to head up the campaign’s online communications — a job for which his work experience from Time.com to the Substandard presumably qualified him, and in which role, in any case, he would not be shaping the candidate or the campaign’s beliefs, but rather, expressing whatever beliefs the campaign instructed him to express. Though true, this defense of Goldfarb (or at least his employment) misses the crux of the matter, which is that yes, Goldfarb was not brought on board to drag the campaign down to his level of loathsomeness; contrarily, one only hires Michael Goldfarb as one’s communications point man if one is already thoroughly loathsome. There is no shortage of talented young-ish McCain-backing writers with ample new media experience who could do a fine job in Goldfarb’s position — the (GOP affiliators among) David Brooks’ Dirty Dozen, incl. Reihan and Ross Douthat, come to mind — without, to put it in McCainian terms, utterly destroying the campaign’s claim to honor. They hired Goldfarb because they never had any honor in the first place.

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Daniel Larison has a lot more to say about the Robert Kaplan “Current” piece in the Atlantic that I linked to the other day — the one in which Kaplan proclaims that we ought to “worship” Israel. Ostensibly, Kaplan’s subject is the prospect of an Israeli strike against Iran, and how that might affect the US presidential election. But Kaplan’s real subject is his own hyperbolic exaggerations of the Iranian threat. E.g., Kaplan writes, “A nuclear arsenal will allow Iran to become a Middle East hegemon like the Great Persia of antiquity, yet it will also encourage countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey to develop their own bombs.” To which Larison responds:

Those who engage in fearmongering about Iran usually save contradicting themselves for separate sentences, but not Robert Kaplan…Pretty clearly, if an Iranian nuclear arsenal inspired other regional states to acquire their own bombs, Iran would not become a Middle East hegemon of any kind, much less a hegemon like “the Great Persia of antiquity.”…If several of those states acquire nuclear weapons in response to an Iranian bomb, and two already have them, what are the odds of Iranian regional hegemony beyond what it currently enjoys? You can legitimately raise the concern that an Iranian bomb would trigger a regional arms race, but you can’t also say that Iran would also dominate the region as in the days of Cyrus and Xerxes at the same time.

Quite so. (By the way, apart from the problems Larison notes with comparing the Islamic Republic of Iran to the Achaemenian Empire, Achaemenian Persia was fairly philo-Semitic and Cyrus is a hero in Jewish tradition. So it’s not the best analogy for those agitating for air strikes.) (more…)

So there are these rules you may have heard about regarding the n-word and some related terminology. They can use it to describe themselves, but no one else can use it to describe them.

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