Daily Ramblings:
Seeing The Real You ...07/13/2005 09:55:25 pm
Blair is right.
Mr Blair said
security measures alone would not deal with what
was more than an isolated criminal act.
"It is an extreme and evil ideology whose
roots lie in a perverted and poisonous
misinterpretation of the religion of Islam,"
he said.
Mr Blair met Muslim MPs on Wednesday morning to
discuss how to tackle "this evil within the
Muslim community".
"In the end, this can only be taken on and
defeated by the community itself," he said.
Essentially the same as what a "hate
site" like Little Green Footballs has been
saying almost since September 12th, 2001, along with
many other individuals in this country and across the
world who have been vilified for it. And it is a
simple statement of fact that is beyond the capacity
of so many to swallow. Namely, that there is "an
evil within the Muslim community." Its true
scope has not been scientifically measured, but when
peaceful-seeming golden boys who like cricket will
happily blow themselves and crowds of innocents to
pieces because of it, it's safe to say that it is way
beyond what most people have allowed themselves to
believe.
Conservative
leader Michael Howard said anyone who nurtured
resentment against Muslims would be behaving in
the way terrorists wanted.
He said: "It will take us a long time to
come to terms with the fact that these attacks
appear to have been committed by those who were
born and brought up in our midst."
I don't know how much time you want to take, Mr.
Howard, to "come to terms" with it. The
truth is that people like you are entrusted with the
responsibility of facing these problems before they
lead to innocent people being massacred in the subway
- and you have been a miserable failure at doing so.
Your opportunist political posturing against Blair's
steadfastness in the war in Iraq has been revolting,
and I really don't know what I'd be doing if I were a
conservative in Britain - but I sure wouldn't be
voting for you.
Liberal
Democrat leader Charles Kennedy said everyone
shared "a sense of national dismay" on
hearing the bombers were British.
Everybody should keep stressing that the vast
majority of Muslims totally condemned the
bombings, he said.
Evidence for that last statement, Mr. Kennedy? The
spontaneous Muslim peace marches ever since July 7th,
perhaps? According to what we're learning about the
bombers, it seems fair to assume that a week or so
ago people would have thought that they would
have condemned bombings like these. But then they
picked up their rucksacks, got on the trains, and
committed bloody mass murder. Nobody wants to believe
the worst about anyone, but deliberately turning your
face away again and again from such glaring facts,
while "stressing" over and over again these
rosy things that are far from certain, is an
abdication of your duty to the people who elected
you.
Labour's Shahid
Malik, whose Dewsbury constituency was the scene
of police raids in the bombing investigation,
said the Muslim community faced a "massive
wake-up call".
Mr Malik added: "The challenge is
straightforward - that those voices that we have
tolerated will no longer be tolerated."
Amen to that sentiment, but let's hope it's more
than just a sentiment.
Bringing this all back home: Dylan once complained
that, for all the interpreting of his songs that
people do, no one ever thought of playing Ballad Of A Thin Man
against something like the violence in the
Middle East. Reading and hearing a lot of these
reactions to the emerging facts about the London
bombers, I'm hearing a helluva lot of Mr. Joneses ...
You raise up your head
And you ask, "Is this where it is?"
And somebody points to you and says
"It's his"
And you say, "What's mine?"
And somebody else says, "Well what is?"
And you say, "Oh my God
Am I here all alone?"
Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?
Permalink
Time To Move On ...07/12/2005
11:28:37 am
It was the mantra during the years of unrelenting
scandal emanating from the Clinton White House.
Facing credible allegations of obstruction of
justice, perjury, as well as sexual predation dating
back years and continuing during his time in the
White House, the best that President Clinton's
defenders could come up with was, "It's time to
move on." Indeed, some of his supporters
organized themselves into a group called
"MoveOn.org," - crowning the concept of
"moving on" as their central and guiding
principle. Later, when President Clinton moved on out
of the White House, and President Bush moved on in,
the group retained its name, merely deciding to
change what it was intended to convey. Now, it was
"time to move on" from President Bush,
generally. Their ads during the 2004 election were
famous for both their mean spiritedness and lack of
efficacy. Altogether, their allegiance to nothing so
much as the shifting meanings of "moving
on" just about sums up the incoherence,
opportunism and intellectual feebleness of the
American left these days.
That said ... today I'm buying. With regard to
Karl Rove's alleged revelation to a journalist
regarding Joseph Wilson's wife, I believe that it is
now time to move on. It is time to put the politics
of personal destruction behind us, and allow Karl
Rove to get back to work for the American people.
In all seriousness, RWB
will await the result of the legal proceedings to
make any final judgment, but contrast Rove's
inarguable cooperation with the prosecutor and the
grand jury to the interminable stone-walling of
Clinton and some of his aides. It was that evasion
and stone-walling that forced us all to go through
over a year of lurid Lewinsky coverage, and
distracted the President and others in D.C. from
effectively carrying out their jobs (and that's
putting it kindly). Rove has willingly testified
under oath, and early on released the journalists he
spoke to from any obligation to confidentiality. He
is obviously willing to let this ride on the basis
that he did not reveal Valerie Plame's name (he did
not even know it) and did not knowingly out her as an
undercover CIA agent. It will be for lawyers and
judges to argue and apply the law.
Rove was providing some context to the assertions
of Joseph Wilson, in the press, to the effect that
there was no possibility that Saddam Hussein had
tried to purchase uranium from Niger - because the
administration had sent him to speak to some old
buddies there and they had assured him such a thing
had not happened. Wilson was portraying himself as
the administration's go-to-guy on the subject - as if
his own trip to Niger was the sole basis for any
determination about uranium and Saddam. By trumpeting
his own importance so loudly in the press, he
effectively made his wife an issue, because the truth
was that he had been recommended within the CIA for
that trip to Niger by his wife. In doing that, she
unknowingly set the wheels in motion that would end
up blowing her cover as a CIA employee. And by going
the route of public attacks on the Bush
administration (lapped up by the mainstream media),
Joseph Wilson made it extremely unlikely that her
role would remain a secret.
Was there one person who supplied all the
information that made her name and status public, or
was it one plus one plus one plus one ending up
equalling four? It remains to be seen, but portraying
this as some deliberate and vengeful act by Rove is
ridiculous. He was talking to journalists, as he's
expected to, and providing background context as he
knew it, in the usual way. The idea that someone as
smart as Rove would knowingly expose an undercover
agent is absurd.
Nevertheless, the feeding frenzy in the press will
continue. They are always looking for the next
Watergate, in addition to the next Vietnam, and doing
whatever they can to make both a reality. There's
nothing new here. It's time to move on.
Permalink
Addendum 07/12/2005
12:15:36 pm: And as I was
reminded by visitor Mike, there are now 992 days
remaining until Sandy Burglar can regain his security clearance.
Death Is Not The End ...07/11/2005 03:58:15 pm
... And neither is the autopsy. Kudos to Nat
Hentoff, here in the Washington Times, for
refusing to forget the lonesome death of Terri
Schiavo.
I called this judicial murder,
the longest public execution in our history.
Despite Michael Schiavo's bronze marker on her
grave, I have not changed my mind.
Permalink
There's A Battle Outside And It Is Ragin'
...07/08/2005 09:50:42 am
It's pretty clear that the London bombings did not
cause as many deaths as the terrorists would have
hoped. This can be partly attributed to the bravery
and resourcefulness of both the victims and the
rescuers. Terrorists always anticipate that blind
panic will help their cause. It is to be hoped that
the spirit of stoicism and unity that many Britons
have been displaying will only strengthen and
continue.
Some of-course did not need to see the war come to
London to know that they already were at war. Melanie
Phillips today has some harsh truth-telling to deliver:
It was
nauseating to witness the Mayor of London, Ken
Livingstone, deliver his ringing condemnation of
terrorism yesterday — the same Ken
Livingstone who invited the terrorism supporter
and Islamic extremist Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi to
speak in the capital last summer and physically
embraced him on the platform.
And five months ago, a new
Metropolitan Police Commissioner was appointed - one
who, in a time of war with Islamofascism, has made
issues of "diversity" one of his top
priorities.
While
few would disagree that the Met has to be
sensitive to the needs of ethnic minorities, Sir
Ian’s obsession with attacking
‘Islamophobia’ is now raising serious
concerns among certain police officers and
security sources. It is getting in the way of the
job the police are called upon to do. Officers
who try to address the delicate issue of
terrorism and its supporters within the Muslim
community now find themselves in danger of being
accused within their own force of Islamophobia.
The situation has become so grave that some
members of the security services no longer trust
the Met with sensitive counter-terrorist
information. Law-abiding and patriotic Muslims
– and the great majority are just that --who
try to give the police vital information about
extremists sometimes find to their dismay and
disbelief that it is not acted upon. And
throughout, there is a woeful dearth of Islamic
experts and a disastrous paucity of insightful
and informed analysis.
And yesterday the old school British leftist Tony
Benn was doing the rounds and shamelessly
blaming Britons themselves for the torn up bodies in
the London Underground:
Well, it is a
product of the war. I think of everyone killed
everywhere as a product of the war, every
Palestinian, every Israeli, every Iraqi, every
Afghan, every American, every Spaniard, every
Britain is a victim of the war. And I suppose our
immediate concern is to protect London,
obviously. That's our thought to look after the
people who have been injured and the bereaved,
but you do have to think about this. And when I
hear the President and the Prime Minister saying,
we will beat them, we will beat them, they are
full of hate, and we are not, and we are killing
people there, I think it will inevitably ask --
lead people to think and ask: Is there another
way forward? And I was with Scott Ritter last
night, whom you know very well, talking about the
decent Americans who are really concerned and
worried about what's happening, and with the
casualties you are suffering, enormous, what is
it, 1,750 service men and women killed and 8,000,
7 to 8,000 injured, bound to consider this and to
ask, is this the only way? Is it really necessary
that we should continue as if there's no
alternative? What is the alternative? What could
you do. Are there injustices that if they were
resolved might ease the tension? But the tragedy
is innocent people are killed. And that is
people's first concern, but I feel the same for
people bombed in Baghdad as I do in London or New
York. I'm bound to.
So, he represents a significant and loud
constituency who will react to this attack by
demanding retreat and conciliation, blissfully
unaware of the fact that in order to negotiate a
peace, you must first have a negotiating partner. And
there is none here. There is only a toxic
movement of extreme Islamists who regard the West as
being filled with infidels deserving of death, and
who regard Muslims who do not support them as
apostates deserving of death. Any demand given in to
will only confirm their perception that the West is
too decadent and weak to defend itself, and will
leave only more demands to be made, up to and
including requiring all women to be covered, the
banning of music, movies and non-Islamic art, and the
imposition of all of other aspects of Sharia law.
For those who react to hearing this by thinking
that such a notion is too utterly ridiculous to even
be considered or feared, please remember that the
idea of creating a super-race of Aryans,
exterminating Jews, the disabled, and homosexuals,
and having a world where everyone swore loyalty to a
nutty little man with a funny moustache was also utterly
ridiculous. This fact did not, however, prevent
World War II. In fact, it was precisely the inability
of so many to recognize the seriousness of intent of
the Nazi movement that allowed it to embolden,
strengthen and indeed triumph to the degree that it
did - coming terrifyingly close to engulfing Britain
itself, but for the fantastic work of those few to
whom so many owed so much.
Now, in other words, is not the time to give up
Czechoslovakia. And while I do not believe that the
British will do that, the battle will go on amongst
ourselves - on both sides of the Atlantic - to
maintain the confidence needed to repel this enemy.
Permalink
London ...07/07/2005
08:27:15 am
Just offering a prayer for the victims of the
attacks this morning in London.
Permalink
Hindsight 20/20 ...07/05/2005
09:15:27 pm
Herewith
is a transcript made by yours truly, RWB,
of Bob Dylan's 1985 TV interview on the
ABC show "20/20." (It is the
inauguration of a new and amazing feature here on RightWingBob.com,
one I call "Interviews.")
This interview is significant for a few reasons.
It was Dylan's first ever proper (if you rate it as
"proper") television interview, and the
only one he has done to date other than December
2004's interview with Ed Bradley for CBS's "60
Minutes." Indeed, that show was promoted as
Dylan's "first TV interview in 20 years."
This is the previous interview to which they were
referring.
Like the "60 Minutes" segment,
it's disappointing in its brevity (15 minutes, much
of which is old footage being played) and the
relative lack of knowledge of the interviewer.
Nevertheless, it probably is more substantive than Ed
Bradley's piece, in that Dylan appears less wary of
and/or hostile to the interviewer, and some fairly
significant topics are touched upon.
You can read
it and judge for yourself. Especially interesting
to me are some things mentioned in the voice-over,
where the ABC newsman seems to be referring to things
which Dylan said during their discussion, but which
are not actually seen during the part of the
interview which is aired. E.g.:
"He believes in the resurrection, he
says, but he also delved intensely into his own
religious heritage: Orthodox Judaism."
And:
"Dylan says he believes there will be a
new beginning, a Messianic Kingdom eventually."
Bear in mind that this was in 1985, and some
argued (and some inexplicably still argue) that Dylan
had shed his belief in Christ after 1981's Shot Of Love album like
some kind of worn-out fad. It's clear enough to
people who have ears to hear that this wasn't the
case, but anyhow, here apparently was an example of
Dylan going on-the-record both about Christ, and
about his simultaneous acceptance of his own
Jewishness - but ABC just choosing not to make that
part of the on-air interview.
What else to say? There's the bit about the We
Are The World record and Live-Aid
concert, which I already wrote about here.
There is the direct question about whether Dylan
considers his own work to be "poetry," and
his rather straightforward and quite humble response.
This, by the way, is a part of the interview that
appears to be significantly edited. What a shame -
and one wonders what else was left on the
cutting-room floor, and even now may be in a can
somewhere at ABC.*
Y'know, it's funny - on these two occasions that
Dylan did a TV interview, much was made of the idea
that he's some kind of hermit or recluse (far from
true, considering all of the print interviews he's
done) and what a big occasion this was as a result.
Yet, in both instances, they ended up taking a few
brief clips from apparently longer interviews and
filling up the rest of a mere quarter-hour segment
with old footage and editorializing.
Kinda sums it up, doesn't it? That is, it sums up
the mainstream media's attitude to Dylan through the
years. "We want you Bob! Tell us what you think,
talk to us." Then when he does, it's,
"Well, OK, that's not we expected. We'll use a
little bit of that but mainly we'll just continue
telling people what we think you're
about."
What was it you wanted
You can tell me, I'm back,
We can start it all over
Get it back on the track,
You got my attention,
Go ahead, speak.
What was it you wanted
When you were kissing my cheek?
Interview
transcript.
Permalink
* 07/06/2005
09:36:40 am: Someone who is much better
informed than I tells me that there are
outtakes from this interview in circulation. So, down
the road we may revisit this ...
Let's See The Taliban Do This ...07/04/2005 08:44:16 am
Click
here for full item ...
Early On One Frosty Morn' ...07/02/2005 01:31:32 pm
A couple of links to things that touch on Dylan in
a more interesting way than the Guardian: This piece by Charles Taylor
discusses Southern stereotypes, and how those that
buy into them miss the point of some great music, and
ends with a consideration of Bob Dylan singing "Dixie"
in his film Masked & Anonymous.
And then there's this (thanks to Jay for the link
some time ago): Dylan Republicans - from the
American Spectator. Not really about Dylan, per se,
but nice to see someone else making a connection like
that. Actually I think he's wrong when he says that
Dylan was aiming The Times They Are A' Changin'
at "rich, white Republicans." He picks up
on the irony of how it seems to apply more to the
stultified left these days, but fails to see that
Dylan, even as such a young man, was writing songs
that would last; songs which speak to truths of human
nature and are not beholden to the erratic winds of
political activism.
Well, it's progress ...
Permalink
Heat Up Some Coffee Grounds ...07/02/2005 09:59:48 am
So the Guardian gave us two reactions to Dylan's
Starbuck's deal, neither one of which faced the
simple fact that RWB
referred to here - namely that the old ways
of selling music to the public are decaying, thanks
to technological advances, and this can be seen as
just an experiment in doing things differently.
Anyone who regularly gets music from free online
sources can hardly throw stones at an artist and/or
record company that looks for new ways of selling it.
Nevertheless, there's a few things to note in what
was said in those two columns. John Harris makes this remark
about Dylan (which might lead some to believe he's
been reading RightWingBob.com):
His brief spell
as an alleged leftist firebrand came to a close
some time in 1964, and even his most agitationary
lyrics tended to ask far more questions than they
ever answered. In fact, I tend to cleave to the
idea that Dylan has long been more of a political
conservative than his more romantically minded
admirers might be prepared to admit. For possible
evidence, one need only survey the rum statements
made during his born-again phase about
"homosexual politics", or his
gloriously right-on final words at the US leg of
Live Aid: "It'd be nice if some of this
money went to American farmers." Throw in
his lifelong contrarian streak, and you start to
understand why he might have chosen to offload
some of his tunes to the 'Bucks. Indeed, he
probably chortled as he did it.
He goes on to engage in some kind of extrapolative
fantasy where people in the not too distant future
will believe that Dylan and other iconic artists
actually got their start in places like Starbucks,
instead of places like The Gaslight. Yeah, well, I
guess he was due to submit a new column. The constant
fetishizing of Dylan's early years in the Village by
writers and documentarians is hardly going to let
anyone forget that whole story.
Meanwhile, Mike Marqusee writes as though
he's finding his own thesis on Dylan increasingly
hollow - the idea that Dylan wrote great songs of
social consciousness that speak for the left, but
just failed as a human being to live up to them
(especially with his avoidance of anti-Vietnam-war
protest). He's repackaging his book "Chimes Of
Freedom - The Politics Of Bob Dylan's Art" as
"Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and The
Sixties." It's fair to think he regards Dylan as
pretty wicked these days - and that's what he thinks
of Starbucks too:
With its
corporate regimentation and single-minded
dedication to maximising profit, Starbucks is
diametrically opposed to the ethos of the
Gaslight. In fact its cut-throat policies have
pushed independent coffee houses out of business.
Yet it likes to present itself as the inheritor
of the old coffee-house ambience - informal, hip
and socially responsible. It calls its low-paid
workers "partners".
Spare me the tears for the poor oppressed
Starbucks' employees, please. Someone who can't tear
his mindset out of an idealized fantasy of 1964 seems
to see every issue as a chance to join hands and sing
"We Shall Overcome." It's called
capitalism, Mike, and it's the reason why people have
jobs and the ability to buy iPods and digital cameras
and crummy books about Dylan. Former socialist
paradises like Russia, China and even Vietnam are
crying out for more of it, while wanna-be socialist
paradises like France and Germany wonder why they
have such chronically high unemployment. Starbucks
has figured out a way to sell a lot of coffee to a
lot people who want to buy it. They are neither
saints nor villains but simply a collection of people
who have succeeded, for the time being, in the
marketplace.
And that, of-course, is the ultimate unforgivable
sin in the blinkered world view of the knee-jerk
leftist, which, as the world-at-large may be
beginning to understand, Bob Dylan is assuredly not.
Permalink
A Charge To Keep ...07/01/2005
06:35:37 pm
All this blather about the Supreme Court, what
with Sandra Day O'Connor's retirement, and in
particular all this blather about what kind of judge
President Bush "might" send up, completely
ignores (purposefully no doubt) what he's already
said unequivocally on the subject. Both in the 2000
and in the 2004 elections, where this was an issue,
and on the occasions when it came up in debates,
George W. Bush said he favored "strict
constructionists." Though the term itself is
disliked by some, it is understood to mean the same
as "originalist," i.e. a judge who, like
Antonin Scalia or Robert Bork, believes the only
objective and safe way of interpreting the
constitution is based on sticking to what it meant when
it was written. The challenge is applying the
meaning and original intent of this written law to
unanticipated questions and dilemmas. It can be done
in way that can be meaningfully argued, debated, and
supported.
This is as opposed to those who believe in a
"living" constitution, where, for example,
a fundamental "right" to abortion can be
found, even though an originalist would have to say
that the constitution is silent on the
subject. A "living" constitution can be
found to say literally anything a judge would like it
to say.
George W. Bush, by the way, won both of those
elections just mentioned, after he clearly expressed
his preference for originalist judges. In 2004, he
even said specifically that he would nominate judges
like Antonin Scalia.
I think that this is one of those areas where
President Bush knows exactly what he believes, knows
the importance of the issue to the future of the
country, and will do exactly what he has said he
would do. So no one should be wondering what kind of
judge President Bush will nominate; the question is
what the Democrats (and some lily-livered
Republicans) are going to do about it.
Three words occur to me in relation to all this.
Bring. It. On.
Permalink
Highway 61 Revisited, Revisited ...07/01/2005 09:57:47 am
Here's an mp3 sample of Highway 61 Revisited
(file here for a little while, may be
unreliable) from the 6/24/05 show in
Montclair, NJ (which I wrote about here).
I just like it. It's a song that it seems to me Dylan
has only gotten better at performing down through the
years, and he clearly relishes it. He's having a lot
of fun with the vocals on this outing, syncopating
and sliding around mischievously. And almost 6
minutes into the performance, Dylan and the band do
something rather unusual for them, to my mind at
least: They take it down, allllll the wayyy downnnn,
so much so that you'll think there's something wrong
with the audio - Dylan's piano and the guitars
trading barely audible riffs. Then it's all the way
back up for the finish.
Now the rovin' gambler he was
very bored
He was tryin' to create a next world war
He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor
He said I never engaged in this kind of thing before
But yes I think it can be very easily done
We'll just put some bleachers out in the sun
And have it on Highway 61.
Permalink
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