Well, that old Iraqi quagmire just keeps getting worse and worse, if only for the Democratic Party. What was the straw they were clutching at back in January? Oh, yeah, sure, gazillions of Kurds and Shiites might have gone to the polls, but where were the Sunni? As some of us said at the time, the Sunni'll come out tomorrow. And so they did. On Thursday, they voted in record numbers, leaving Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Democrats frantically scrambling for another disaffected Iraqi minority group they could use as proof that the whole crazy neocon war-for-oil scam was a bust.
(Extra points for "the Sunni'll come out tomorrow.")
The Democratic Party have contrived to get themselves into a situation where bad news from Iraq is good for them and good news from Iraq is bad for them. And as there's a lot more good news than bad these days, that puts them, politically, in a tough spot -- even with a fawning media that, faced with Kerry and Murtha talking what in any objective sense is drivel, decline to call for the men with white coats but instead nod solemnly and wonder whether Bush is living "in a bubble." &hellips;
It's not just that Iraq is going better than expected, but that it's a huge success that's being very deftly managed: The timeframe imposed on the democratic process turns out to have worked very well -- the transfer of sovereignty, the vote on a constitutional assembly, the ratification of the constitution, the vote for a legislature -- and, with the benefit of hindsight, it now looks like an ingeniously constructed way to bring the various parties on board in the right order: first the Kurds, then the Shia, now the Sunni. That doesn't leave many folks over on the other side except Zarqawi and Dean. What do the two have in common? They're both foreigners, neither of whom have the slightest interest in the Iraqi people.…
Bush lied, people dyed. Their fingers. That's what this is about: Millions of Kurds, Shia and Sunnis beaming as they emerge from polling stations and hold up their purple fingers after the freest, fairest election ever held in the Arab world. "Liberal" in the American sense is a dirty word because it's come to stand for a shriveled parochial obsolescent irrelevance, of which ''Good Night, and Good Luck,'' Clooney's dreary little retread of the McCarthy years, is merely the latest example. (Clooney says he wants more journalists to "speak truth to power," which is why I'm insulting his movie.)
Believe it or not, I haven't excerpted all the good parts.
4 comments:
I just read that. It was one of Steyn's best.
I hope the Demcorats take his advice.
Oh, to be able to write like Mark Steyn. Well, as they say, that's why he gets the big bucks.
Barry,
He just uses mental tricks like he learned from Don Black:
"I've always loved the way it captures Ian Fleming's view of Tiffany Case in just a few lines, the sense of a woman damaged by men.
"Diamonds Are Forever/ Sparkling round my little finger/ Unlike men the diamonds linger./ I don't need love/ For what good will love do me?/ Diamonds never lie to me/ For when love's gone/ They luster on."
Don Black wrote those words to John Barry's music, and I was interested to know how he'd dug so deep into the character and the situation to be able to distil it so brilliantly.
Page 73 of Wrestling With Elephants provides the answer:
"John Barry gave Don some advice.
'Don't think of the song as being about a diamond,' he counseled.
'Write it as though she's thinking about a penis.' "
Oh, well. That works, too:
"Diamonds Are Forever/ Hold one up and then caress it/ Touch it, stroke it and undress it.""
We need more Mark Steyns! More O'Rourkes too. I love Lileks and Iowahawk but they need to get out more, if you know what I mean. As in published..and widely.
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