a berlin blog
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a berlin blog |
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Wednesday, December 31, 2003 Groovy SidesThese days I'm listening to and hugely enjoying new music by a couple of old hippies, Steve Earle and Neil Young. Earle's eighteen-month-old album Jerusalem has an infamous song on it called John Walker's Blues, which got him banned from country radio in 2002. And Neil's album Greendale is all about a fictional town on the California coast; I like that for obvious reasons. Both records have lots of growly, bluesy, distorted guitar, which makes me wish I had an amplifier lying around. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 6:18 PMWednesday, December 24, 2003 Merry Christmas, and...... some very light holiday blogging: Josh Marshall has a reasonable run-down of the Saddam fraud story. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 7:26 PMSunday, December 21, 2003 The Crown Prince Abdullah Dye Job Award 
Radio Free Mike hereby inaugurates an award for people in public life who fail to control their goatee dye, and our first-ever nominee is Theoden, from The Return of the King (at left). posted by Michael Scott Moore | 8:46 PM Hobbiton, USAI have a piece on a strange Northern-California roadside attraction in this week's San Francisco Chronicle Magazine. I just saw The Return of the King last night, so — in a way — good timing. Only I didn't think the movie was so great. The first two installments had fewer drawn-out moments of Middle-Earth cheesiness. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 3:11 PMThursday, December 18, 2003 Moore contra MooreTwo recent posts on this blog seem at odds: Last Wednesday I called the war in Iraq a frame-up job, and basically called Saddam a fall guy in the war on terrorism. Not that he's innocent, just that the stated charges don't hold up. Then on Sunday I was happy to see him caught. Do I contradict myself? ("Very well, I contradict myself.") Actually, no. My friend Marc and my blowhard namesake, Michael Moore, were both quick to call Saddam's capture a big charade, if only because "we supported his regime," in the ’80s (writes Moore). "We liked Saddam because he was willing to fight the Ayatollah."Moore's right about that, and I won't try to defend my own government's history of propping up evil strongmen. But if he seriously thinks September 11 was just a crime, and not an act of war that had to change our posture towards Iraq along with the entire Middle East, he's a damn fool. And if he can't celebrate the bloodless capture of a man who consciously modeled himself on Hitler — if Moore is so vain about his public image, and so concerned about the partisan damage that a clearly good thing like nabbing Saddam might wreak — then he's nothing but a jabbering head. A partisan robot, like Limbaugh or Coulter — names you never see on this blog because I don't take them seriously. The question is not whether the U.S. is culpable in creating Saddam or Osama bin Laden. Of course we are. But if we created them, we can also take them out. Moore thinks American guilt should equal passive, apologetic American foreign policy. It should not. After 9/11 I'd even argue we had a responsibility to remove the relevant monsters. It just had to be clear that Saddam was relevant. Right now, it isn't. What we have instead of a clear victory is a fishy-looking war, a world that mistrusts us, and a president who doesn't even seem to realize that he lacks the moral stature to carry off the conquest of an oil-rich nation his father once invaded. Lying about it, naturally, didn't help. Bush bullied his way into this war for quiet strategic reasons, insulted allies who could have helped, flubbed the post-war planning, and in general acted like an arrogant twit with more power than he knows how to handle responsibly. And if we re-elect him, he'll try it again. But the smoke and mirrors don't mean the end of Saddam's career is somehow a bad or laughable thing. This war, like any great event, is a deep contradiction — perhaps a mistake — which standard-wavers with too much partisan feeling to hold a pair of opposite ideas in their heads can never hope to understand. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 11:15 PM Theater townLast week I bitched that San Francisco was not a world-class theater town — and certainly not because of Angels in America — but that was before I saw the Shotgun Players collaboration with Art Street on The Death of Meyerhold, which is the best original play developed here since I can remember. It's better than Angels, in fact. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 8:31 AMSunday, December 14, 2003 Saddam's Six-Foot HoleNow Iraqis are dancing in the streets. I think it's tremendous news that he was caught so casually — not just humiliated in a hole, but also alive, recognizable, with money and a pistol but no other emblem of power. The Economist has a good round-up. Instapundit naturally does, too. NPR has a timeline. Bobbie Allen quotes Shakespeare, ambiguously. Al Bawaba isn't sure if the beard is real. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 7:15 PMGood Lord, they caught himLying with rats. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 6:49 PMThursday, December 11, 2003 Shabby Police WorkMy good friend Marc Levy agrees with Andrew Sullivan on the framing of James Yee. (Levy and Sullivan almost never agree, so it amuses me to point this out.) Yee was the Guantanamo chaplain arrested and thrown into solitary for "terrorist activities," but charged with — um, sleeping around. Levy and Sullivan are both right to be outraged, but Sullivan needs to understand that the reason so many people are pissed about the war in Iraq is similar: not because they liked Saddam, or wished he were still in power, or hate George Bush, or anything like that (though people who feel that way are easy to find). No, the problem is that our war in Iraq was a frame-up job.After 9/11, Bush found himself in the boots of a town sheriff after a senseless murder. The town needed someone to hang. The Taliban were a good start, but only a start; the real killers were still at large. They lived — it turns out — in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, but those were inconvenient places for them to be. Iraq made a much better story. It was also a more strategic place to occupy. So Bush and his deputies blew a lot of steam about Saddam's threat to world peace, his nasty-weapons arsenal, maybe his links to Al Qaeda. We had a well-televised war. The world saw Saddam punished, massively, on trumped-up charges. Not quite fair, but we'd moved in strong on an unsavory thug and it looked liked justice was served. This — to quote Sullivan — is called framing someone. I don't mind that Saddam is off the street. He was an evil bastard, and I can even see how Iraq might be an easier place to improve by invasion than either Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. Just go easy on the swagger, okay? Let's not pretend the real crooks are in jail. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 8:40 AM Wednesday, December 10, 2003 A Good Thing Narrowly AvertedNewsom beats Gonzalez. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 8:09 AMTuesday, December 09, 2003 RedesignThe blog's being revamped, as you see. Things may shift around without due notice. Today we made war on serifs. Alignments will change next; then maybe color. Feedback (or jokes) are welcome. Our editor codes in clumsy, self-taught HTML, so he's not sensitive about this. If anyone can explain how to redefine h3 and h4 style-sheet settings from within the Blogger template, he'd be grateful.posted by Michael Scott Moore | 8:54 PM Sunday, December 07, 2003 Angels in AmericaIt amounts to heresy for a San Francisco theater critic not to like Tony Kushner, but I'm sorry, I don't. Angels started here, in the old Eureka Theater, and the play stands as evidence to some people that San Francisco is still a vibrant theater town. Well, the scene here is livelier and more consistent than some outsiders think; but it's not world-class, and it certainly isn't great because of Angels.The actor Ed Hooks calls San Francisco theater a "fragile invalid" in a little essay at the bottom of this page. That's wrong, in my opinion. But he's right that the air in this town can be sanctimonious, and Angels is an epic, two-part indulgence in sanctimony. Mike Nichols' HBO version might improve on the original — I'll know after tomorrow. But in general it's bracing to read Sullivan on Kushner after all the blowjobs the playwright gets from Frank Rich. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 1:19 AM Wednesday, December 03, 2003 Bird is the Word 2Marc Levy defends his turkey post from the charge of being "absolutely fucking nuts" (see below) — and does a pretty good job, I think — with a hideous turkey pun thrown in for good measure — and Tobias Else just wrote a kind e-mail to say he didn't mean to restrict his reading of my novel to Freud. Fair enough. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 9:15 AMWinner, and new championThe winner of the Fall 2003 Bob Dylan Fantasy Pool is Christian Reiser, of Graz, Austria. Christian wins a signed copy of Too Much of Nothing for guessing better than anyone else which songs Bob would play on his recent European tour. (Trivium: In London Bob seems to have played "Romance in Durango" for the first time live since 1976.) (UPDATE: In recognition of which we've changed the RFM motto.)Anyway: Congratulations, Chris! posted by Michael Scott Moore | 2:14 AM Al Qaeda and Saddam, againAt Radio Free Mike we've been arguing for at least a year that Laurie Mylroie needed a good public shakedown. Mylroie's books girded the neo-con theory that Saddam was in cohoots with Al Qaeda. Her argument turned out to be a major force in last year's drive to war, but our public debate was so blurred we never got a good clear look at just what Wolfowitz and Perle and Cheney — and, for a while, our editor — really believed. Which makes this Washington Monthly piece by Peter Bergen long, long overdue. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 1:51 AMTuesday, December 02, 2003 Better than the Schwarzie campaignIt seems the Democratic candidate for mayor in San Francisco is trying to scuttle his run-off opponent by cooking up weird protests of an appearance by Al Gore. Gavin Newsom, the Democrat, will get support from Gore — in person — next Tuesday. An e-mail claiming to be from the (Green) Matt Gonzalez camp went around last week encouraging people to "Stop Newsom. Stop Gore. Stop the Democrats!!" The thing is, this e-mail originated from a Gavin Newsom campaign office.The Examiner, in a fit of real reporting, writes: "While it is nearly impossible to determine with 100 percent accuracy who was responsible for publicizing the anti-Gore event, the originating Internet protocol address on the e-mail belongs to an organization called GavinNewsomFor and carries the same address -- 216.100.140.9 -- as e-mails sent from Newsom's campaign office." Newsom's campaign says what really happened is, the Gonzalez campaign hacked into their computer system to send the e-mail. Uh-huh. But notice who's making hay out of the matter. Gonzalez' people consistently say, "This is a hoax. There is no protest," while Gavin's campaign manager denies sending the e-mail on the one hand but gets in a dig with the other, by pointing out "that protesters have attempted to disrupt several Newsom events along the campaign trail" and that he "would never want Gore's visit to be marred by a noisy street demonstration." Especially not a phantom one. If San Francisco ends up with the first big-city Green mayor after next Tuesday, it's because of crap like this. We have not gone completely insane. Newsom is a machine Democrat in thrall to the same moneyed interests that corrupted Brown. He's a career politician, groomed for the job, who thinks he deserves to be mayor. He also has no idea how to pull off his own dirty tricks. I don't agree with Gonzalez on everything, but the man is honest and bright in a way Newsom will never be. However (from later in the same piece): "A man with Gonzalez signs in his car was arrested last week after doing donuts in front of Newsom's Fillmore offices." Well, at least we're mature. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 1:53 AM | |
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