Funny

Via Lisa’s blog.

I used to admire and respect Joe Lieberman, but I no longer can. I gave up on him as I watched the televised Abu Ghraib hearings two years ago and saw him bend over backwards to write off the abuse and torture at American hands as no big deal. Well, it was a big deal. And those who complain that the Iraq War is “the only reason” Lieberman’s party abandonded him today had better understand that the Iraq War is the defining event of our times, right up there with September 11, only far more awful in terms of lives lost and long-term costs for our nation.

I’ve never seen anything quite like the beating “liberal bloggers” took this week from voices in the mainstream media for attacking Lieberman. I’m sorry, but Lieberman let us down and cozied up to the worst president ever. This was his choice. I had no patience for some of the sillier expressions of our disgust with Lieberman – the blackface, the unflattering PhotoShopping, the merciless taunting, the unnecessarily vulgar comments on some of the liberal blogs (though God knows these pale beside what LGF commenters wrote about John Kerry in 2004). But if ever there was a reason or a time to lose one’s temper and blast a politician, this was it. Staying the course in Iraq equals death. This is now a mainstream position. Lieberman was not a centrist on this issue, he was right alongside the worst of the neo-cons. Just look at those who are most indignant at the way poor Joe is being treated – Michelle and Charles and Captain Ed. Not to mention Bill O’Reilly. This should tell us something, when the most die-hard warmongers embrace Joe and decry the way he’s being treated. You needn’t be a genius to know something is amiss.

In all of their arguments, the pro-war side commits the same sin as Lieberman: they equate the war with Iraq with America’s national security. To be against Lieberman is to be for a weak and effette America. You can only prove your commitment to a strong and safe America if you endorse Bush’s reckless and tragic war. This is so maddening, such a shameless contortion of basic logic one barely knows what to say. And when we see intelligent, socially liberal men like Marshall Whitman make this argument (for which I recently removed him from my blogroll) I can only wonder how Bush pulled it off, how, in the wake of 911, he managed to convince normally reasonable people that invading iraq was essential to our national security. At a time when we needed to focus all our might on the true enemy, Bin Laden and his cohorts.

I expect the chattering keyboarders on the right to go wild over the coming days, arguing that today’s primary in Connecticut shows the Democrats are the cut and run party, a party of traitors – all because we stand with the majority of the American people in recognizing this war is malignant, a catastrophe in every conceivable way and far more detrimental in the long term than Vietnam ever was. We all have to brace ourselves for the new wave of Rovian allegations of effeminacy, of weakness, of snail-eating Democrats selling out their country and leaving it helpless and vulnerable. (Being home this week and seeing how the primary is being covered on Fox News, I can state as a fact that this new meme is already in full swing, and it’s just getting started).

And now Joe says he plans to run as an independent, as though he hasn’t caused enough misery for his party as it is. A shame, that someone who could have been remembered as a great Democrat, a proponent of liberal causes like civil rights and a clean environment, decided to hitch his star to the ill-conceived and hideously executed war in Iraq. I don’t rejoice in his defeat. In a way, I feel for him – it seems he scarcely knew what hit him. Yet I am thrilled that Lamont won because it is a sign that sanity is setting in, and that the great moment I have been waiting for for six years may finally be at hand, when Americans recognize Bush for the calamity he is. I firmly believe that despite the crescendo from the raging right, Americans are smart enough to finally see through the lies, the bullshit, the soundbites. Once-rousing phrases (“As Iraq stands up, we shall stand down”) now ring hollow, and we are seeing the Bush administratrion for what it is: an empty, thoughtless, pathetic pseudo-government more fixated on photo-ops than the welfare of its citizens. And we have Iraq, a 21st century Titanic going down before our very eyes, slowly, painfully, pulling down the American way of life with it, as proof positive. Although there is no way at this point to rescue the sinking ship, tonight’s primary is still the first glimmer of light to be seen at the end of a very dark and very long tunnel. So for a moment, let’s place aside the agony of our unwinnable war and think about what will follow, a government purged of toxins like the Bush people, a government that is truly accountable for its actions and that doesn’t snarl “Bring ’em on” at the expense of American lives and ideals.

I remember reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain in college, and its melodramatic but evocative closing line has always stayed with me. (This is from memory, so if I’m off here and there, please be forgiving).

Out of this universal feast of death, out of this extremity of fever, kindling the rain-washed evening sky to a fiery glow, could it not be that Love one day shall mount?”

I want to believe tonight that Love is mounting, and that the cheap props that have held up the desperate and vacuous Bush government are about to collapse and crumble under their own weight. The victory today of Ned Lamont is an important first step, and we must now prepare for the wave of propaganda and hatred that will inevitably follow. For the first time in years, I feel we can overcome this wall of hatred, and that the qualities that made America, for all its faults, such a great and wonderful nation will prevail and triumph.

In the aftermath of the SARS tragedy we were assued China was about to embark on a new course of Glasnost – openness and transparency. The scandal was unveiled in April of 2003, when we were all treated to the monumental press conference announcing the firing of the Beijing mayor and minister of health. It was the dawn of a new age.

Except for the fact that even then, as China aired its dirtiest linen in public in a scene of unprecedented frankness, there were still health risks that the state took pains to conceal, despite the potential harm such silence might pose to its citizens.

China revealed today that its first human death from bird flu was a soldier who died of the H5N1 strain in 2003, two years before the country first publicly acknowledged a human infection.

The confirmation showed that the virus was present in China before the outbreak of the virus was disclosed elsewhere in Asia and raised questions about Beijing’s ability to detect emerging diseases, as well as its transparency.

China’s Ministry of Health began tests on samples from the People’s Liberation Army private only after Chinese researchers published a letter in the New England Journal of Medicine in June saying that a 24-year-old soldier, who was admitted to hospital in November 2003 for respiratory distress and pneumonia and later died, had been infected with H5N1.

The man, identified only by his surname, Shi, was initially thought to have severe acute respiratory syndrome, but recent tests performed with the World Health Organisation (WHO) confirmed the cause as bird flu.

The UN health agency called on Beijing to re-examine other pneumonia cases of unknown origin to ensure better transparency. But a Health Ministry spokesman said the 2003 case was not evidence of an outbreak then and said the Government had no plans to review other cases.

China publicly announced its first human case of bird flu last November, when the virus was sweeping through Vietnam and Thailand. China has reported 20 infections of humans, of whom 12 have died – not including the 2003 case.

Of course, Beijing is saying there’s nothing to see here, and we all should just move along.

Mao Qun’an, a spokesman for the Health Ministry, said there was no need for alarm. ‘People shouldn’t panic. The country’s bird flu surveillance capability is much stronger now than it was two years ago.’

Just one simple question: Why should I believe him? Why should I believe anything he says?

Via the great CDT.

Buffett and Hezbollah
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: August 9, 2006

Warren Buffett. The most important thing you need to know about Israel today and how it has performed so far in the war with Hezbollah is Warren Buffett.

Say what? Well, the most talked-about story in Israel, before Hezbollah started this war, was the fact that on May 5, Mr. Buffett, the Berkshire Hathaway chairman and the world’s most successful investor, bought an 80 percent stake in the privately held Israeli precision tools company, Iscar Metalworking, for $4 billion – Mr. Buffett’s first purchase of a company outside America. According to BusinessWeek, as a result of the deal, Iscar’s owners were ‘likely to pay about $1 billion in capital gains taxes into the Israeli government’s coffers – an unexpected windfall. With the Israeli budget already running a $2 billion surplus, the government is considering slashing value-added tax by one percentage point to 15 percent.’

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Posted by Lisa. Cross-posted at that other place

I’ve been meaning to write about this at length, in the context of some longer “ohmigod the world is going to hell, and I’m panicking” type post, but since I haven’t gotten around to that yet, I want to call your attention to an excellent series in the Los Angeles Times about the dire condition of the earth’s oceans. This is a five-part series, but a few graphs from the first article should give you an idea of just how serious this is – ‘sobering’ doesn’t begin to cover it:

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When will it ever end? Once more, China (soon to be followed by South Korea) protests visits to Yasukuni Shrine not only by Koizumi but by the man considered most likely to succeed him as Japan’s prime minister.

China urged Japan on Monday to stop visits by its leaders to the Yasukuni Shrine for war dead, as speculation grew that Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi would make a pilgrimage next week on the anniversary of Japan’s World War Two surrender.

South Korea, which also suffered under Japanese military aggression, is expected to make a similar demand this week when its foreign minister, Ban Ki-moon, visits Tokyo.

Tokyo’s relations with both Beijing and Seoul have been damaged by Koizumi’s annual visits to Yasukuni since he took office in 2001, and are likely to worsen further if he pays his respects there on August 15.

“We want top Japanese officials to call an immediate halt to visits to Yasukuni, where Class A war criminals are enshrined,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao told reporters during a visit to Tokyo. “Dealing with the history problem based on a correct view of history will be to the benefit of both the Japanese and Chinese peoples,” he added.

Yasukuni is seen by many in Asia as a symbol of Japan’s past militarism. Fourteen wartime leaders convicted by an Allied tribunal as “Class A” war criminals are honored there along with 2.5 million war dead, and a museum within the shrine grounds is often criticized as glorifying war.

Last week media reports said Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe, the front-runner to become Japan’s next prime minister, had secretly paid his respects there in April. China has not specifically criticized the reported pilgrimage by Abe, seen as the most likely candidate to succeed Koizumi when he steps down in September.

South Korea’s Ban is likely to raise the topic in meetings with Abe and Foreign Minister Taro Aso during his visit to Tokyo this week.

“It may be that people mistakenly believe that China’s attitude toward Yasukuni has changed in some ways,” Liu said when asked why China had not issued an immediate condemnation last week. “In fact the attitude of the Chinese government and people to the history problem is consistent and has not changed.”

Abe reiterated on Monday that he would not confirm or deny whether he had made the pilgrimage.

I have said again and again that the only thing stupider than Koizumi’s visits to the despicable shrine is the hysteria these visits whip up in China (and to a lesser extent in S. Korea), keeping alive a near-fanatical hatred of the Japanese, which the CCP shamelessly exploits for its own political purposes. I can only conclude that both sides derive some benefit from the situation, making it worthwhile to persist in this endless game of tug-of-war. Juvenile, idiotic, an exampe of shameless pandering — yes, it’s all of these, on all sides. But there must be a payoff somewhere, so don’t expect to see any changes, any maturing on either side any time soon.

Due to Japan’s level of development, and due to its hideous and sickening crimes throughout the Japanese War of Aggression Against China, I wish with all my heart that they would make the first move and denounce the shrine and cease all visits there. It would be so fascinating to see what would follow. We’d know soon enough whether it’s really “all about the shrine,” or whether the shrine is just an excuse to keep alive a hatred upon which the CCP banks to keep its young people focused on an eternal and convenient enemy. As I said, I think both sides are guilty of exploitation here. I just wish Japan would finally call China’s bluff on the matter. I think we all know what would follow, though I’d love to be proven wrong.

Now this is an example of creative marketing.

A bar in eastern China has come up with a novel way of attracting clients – they are allowed to beat up the staff. The Rising Sun Anger Release Bar in Nanjing lets customers smash glasses, rant and even hit specially trained workers, state media reported.

The owner, Wu Gong, told China Daily that he was inspired to open the bar by his experiences as a migrant worker. Most of his customers were women working in the service or entertainment industries, he said. The bar employs 20 men who have been given protective gear and physical training to prepare them for the job.

Clients can ask the men to dress as the character they wish to attack.

It’s great that a migrant worker in China can rise up like this and become a business owner. And the fact that he got this story into the mainstream media speaks to his marketing prowess. Whether the idea behind the bar is scary as hell and totally bizarre is another conversation.

In his excellent review of John Pomfret’s Chinese Lessons, China hand and Berkeley journalism school dean Orville Schell comments on the source of Pomfret’s concerns for China’s future – its unwillingness to confront its past.

The discontinuity between China’s ‘socialist’ past and ‘capitalist’ present perplexes Pomfret. But it is the unfathomable depth of unexpiated guilt for the brutalization the Chinese heaped on one another under Mao that leaves him most mystified. Since there is little likelihood of public reckoning with the barbarity of the Cultural Revolution as long as the Communist Party rules unilaterally, he sees a basic blockage at the moral heart of China’s spectacular rise. It’s something that makes him very tentative about the future.

So we are left to wonder: Does it matter that there has never been a full public apology for the nightmare of the Communist revolution, that no Chinese leader has ever symbolically knelt down as a form of national penance for the party’s crimes against its people, much as the German Chancellor Willy Brandt did in the Warsaw Ghetto for crimes against the Jews of Europe? Indeed, if the watchword in Germany is now ‘Never forget,’ in China it is ‘Never remember.’

In 1945, the German philosopher Karl Jaspers gave a series of unflinching lectures at the University of Heidelberg on The Question of German Guilt, saying that the nation needed a psychological purification. ‘The temptation to evade this question is obvious,’ he acknowledged. “We live in distress – large parts of our population are in so great and such acute distress that they seem to have become insensitive to discussions.’

Jaspers then entreated his countrymen to understand that their distress could only be relieved by ‘truthfulness toward ourselves.’ As he put it, ‘the guilt question is more than a question put to us by others, it is one we put to ourselves. The way we answer it will be decisive for our present approach to the world and ourselves.’

No philosopher or public figure in China has been permitted to give the kind of open acknowledgment that Jaspers, and many other Germans, did. And, because Chinese media outlets remain tightly controlled, no such ceremonial moment of honest re-evaluation, much less national catharsis, seems likely any time soon.

The issue of whether China ultimately chooses to confront its past or continues ‘hiding behind history’ will almost certainly end up being as important to its future as all the foreign investment, technology transfers, I.P.O.’s and high-rise buildings that now so impress visitors and eclipse the past. As one former classmate, a Red Guard who beat and tortured supposed ‘class enemies’ during the Cultural Revolution, candidly asks Pomfret: ‘How do you think a society where that type of behavior was condoned, no, not condoned, mandated, can heal itself? Do you think it ever can?’

Some are trying, for sure. The most common technique appears to be to half-heartedly acknowledge the “30 percent wrong” part of the picture, but then to sweep it under the table. The brilliance of the “economic miracle” blinds the eye and lets us forget and forgive annoying distractions like June 4 and other warts. The interview I held with a 1989 demonstrator captured it all for me.

Looking back, I firmly believe the government did the right thing, though they could have handled it better. We paid a high price. Our leaders in 1989 could have shown greater human skills and greater negotiating skills. But let’s live with Communism for now and change things one thing at a time. The Chinese now have a much better life than they did 100 years ago.

We are making money now, so forgive, forget, and don’t ask too many questions. I understand this attitude. I would probably harbor it myself if I were in David’s (my interviewee’s) position. China has stood up and it casts an immense shadow. China’s unwillingness to come to terms with its past, however, continues to hobble the country as it is forced to turn to such cheap gimmicks as breathless nationalism, sophomoric propaganda and ruthless censorship in order to deflect attention from its bloody and unhealed past. Pomfret’s point is well taken.

My own review of Chinese lessons can be found here.

I taught English in Beijing when I was twenty years old, in 1979. At the time, being an American in China was such a novelty that my nationality was pretty much all that was required. Luckily for my students (all of whom were older than I was), I had this weird latent Protestant work/guilt ethic streak, and I felt obligated to do a good job, as much as I was totally in over my head. I went to the parents of my best friend with whom I’d traveled to China, professional teachers, and begged them to help me, to tell me what I needed to do to be a good teacher and help my students. I ended up being dragooned into making language tapes for no money at my school, a branch school of a more famous university. And though I knew I was being taken advantage of, to some extent, I didn’t really mind too much. I liked the idea that I was leaving some sort of legacy behind, at the age of 20, that students would be listening to my voice reading these lame essays — lame, but read with decent pronunciation.

In recent years when I’ve traveled to China, I’ve had all kinds of job offers to teach English, just by virtue of my showing up and being able to speak some Chinese. I have no formal training in teaching, and I would have thought that by now, there would be enough qualified folks teaching English that someone like me would not be offered a job as I was more or less walking down the street.

Well, not so much.

Here’s a cautionary tale that compares teaching English in China to the worst sort of sweatshop labor that immigrants to America have traditionally endured:

Tanya Davis fled Jizhou No. 1 Middle School one winter morning in March before the sun rose over the surrounding cotton fields covered with stubble from last fall’s crop.

In the nine months Davis and her boyfriend had taught English at the school in rural north China, they had endured extra work hours, unpaid salaries and frigid temperatures without heating and, on many days, electricity.

Hearts pounding and worried their employer would find a pretext to stop them leaving, the couple lugged their backpacks, suitcase, books and guitar past a sleeping guard and into a taxi.

As they drove away, “the sense of relief was immense,” said Davis, a petite, soft-spoken 23-year-old from Wales. “I felt like we had crossed our last hurdle and everything was going to be OK.”

It’s a new twist on globalization: For decades, Chinese made their way to the West, often illegally, to end up doing dangerous, low-paying jobs in sweatshop conditions. Now some foreigners drawn by China’s growth and hunger for English lessons are landing in the schoolhouse version of the sweatshop.

In one case, an American ended up dead. Darren Russell, 35, from Calabasas, Calif., died under mysterious circumstances days after a dispute caused him to quit his teaching job in the southern city of Guangzhou. “I’m so scared. I need to get out of here,” Russell said in a message left on his father’s cell phone hours before his death in what Chinese authorities said was a traffic accident.

As China opens up to the world, public and private English-language schools are proliferating. While most treat their foreign teachers decently, and wages can run to $1,000 plus board, lodging and even airfare home, complaints about bad experiences in fly-by-night operations are on the rise. The British Embassy in Beijing warns on its Web site about breaches of contracts, unpaid wages and broken promises. The U.S. Embassy says complaints have increased eightfold since 2004 to two a week on average.

Though foreign teachers in South Korea, Japan and other countries have run into similar problems, the number of allegations in China is much higher because “the rule of law is still not firmly in place,” said a U.S. Embassy official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“A number of substandard English language teaching mills have sprung up, seeking to maximize profits while minimizing services,” the U.S. House of Representatives International Relations Committee said in a recent report on Russell’s case. These institutes have become virtual “‘sweatshops’ where young, often naive Americans are held as virtual indentured servants.”

Davis said officials at her school in Hebei province piled on classes without compensation, dragged their feet on repairing leaks in her apartment and would deduct sums from her $625 monthly salary for random taxes and phone calls that were never made. These ranged from $30 to $85, she said.

She recalled nights without electricity when there was nothing to do but sit in candlelight.

The more “we let them get away with, the more they tried to get away with,” said Davis, who now teaches piano in Beijing…

…John Shaff, a graduate from Florida State University, said everything went according to his English-language contract at Joy Language School in the northeastern city of Harbin — until a disagreement over his office hours erupted into a shouting match on the telephone with a school official.

A few hours later, several men led by Joy’s handyman showed up at his school-provided apartment, physically threatening him and cursing him in Chinese, said Shaff, 25. About 10 minutes later, they left, and soon, so did Shaff.

“They were all men who would have been formidable to fight,” Shaff said in a telephone interview from San Francisco, where he now lives. The manager of the Joy chain did not respond to interview requests.

Like Shaff, Darren Russell had a disagreement with the manager of Decai language school in Guangzhou, where he had been promised 20 hours of classes a week. Instead, Decai had him teaching at two schools, where he put in up to 14 hours a day and oversaw 1,200 students, Russell’s mother, Maxine Russell, said in a telephone interview from Calabasas.

The school had troubles with foreign teachers. Two had quit by the time Russell showed up, and a former Decai employee, a Chinese woman who spoke on condition of anonymity, said she left because she was asked to recruit foreign teachers by offering attractive contracts that went unfulfilled.

In April 2005, sick from bronchitis and exhausted from the work hours, Russell told manager Luo Deyi he wanted her to lighten his work load. An argument ensued, Russell resigned and threatened to tell police Luo was operating illegally, the former employee said.

The school then moved him into a low-budget hotel. A week later he was dead. Police told Decai and Russell’s mother that Darren had been killed in a hit-and-run traffic accident. The body was shipped to California.

Maxine Russell, however, said Chinese authorities could not provide consistent witnesses and a time of death. According to the congressional report, which was the outcome of a family request to look into the Russell case, a California mortician who handled Russell’s body said he had suffered a blow to his head and his body did not have bruises and fractures consistent with a car accident. The mortician, Jerry Marek, is a former coroner.

While Maxine Russell and the former Decai employee say Russell was a beloved teacher, Luo, the manager, insists he was often absent from class and his “teaching methods failed to meet the requirement of the school and fit the students.” She said he had been hired on probation, which he failed partly because of a drinking problem.

“It was very strange and irresponsible for them to blame us for their son’s death,” Luo said in a telephone interview.

So, those of you currently teaching English in China — what are your experiences? Rewarding, life-threatening, or somewhere in-between?

cross-posted on the paper tiger

Kevin Sites, Yahoo’s Hot Zone reporter, has what I would characterize as a fair-minded and thorough summary of the war in Lebanon. Some key graphs:

Three weeks in and it’s clear that few are blameless in this conflict: Hezbollah for the kidnapping of IDF soldiers and the barrage of rockets they fire toward northern Israel from southern Lebanon, Israel for what many in the international community consider a disproportionate response to the provocation, and the West, specifically the U.S. and Britain, for not endorsing an immediate cease-fire that could have helped prevent so much death and destruction; the casualties may now include the West’s foreign policy interests in the Middle East.

But once again the biggest loser, it seems, is Lebanon. The country had finally turned the economic and political corner from its devastating civil war in 70s and 80s and was also asserting — with the exception of the presence of the armed Hezbollah militia in the south — a sense of its own sovereignty after Syrian troops departed its soil in March 2005.

Lebanon was more interested in economic growth than military might, pumping billions into hotels, restaurants, resorts and business. The hope was to regain the title of “the Paris of the Middle East,” and for a short time it succeeded.

“Lebanon is just a souk (a marketplace),” said one Beirut businessman during its period of rapid growth. “But it has no political clout whatsoever.”

Except, perhaps, as a pawn of both international and internal forces.

Some Middle East observers believe that Lebanon’s failure to invest in a strong military — one with sovereignty over the entire nation, including the strongholds of Hezbollah’s militia in the south — may have been its undoing.

Sites also points out what few mainstream media stories have mentioned — that cross-border incursions and kidnappings are a common occurence, and a two-way street:

One Middle East source with an intimate knowledge of Hezbollah, who wishes to remain anonymous because he’s still involved in back-channel negotiations, says that Hezbollah’s July 12 kidnapping of the two IDF soldiers was instigated, in part, by the earlier reneging by the Israeli government on a prisoner swap with Hezbollah.

“These kind of kidnappings are perpetrated by both sides,” says the source. “The Israelis have routinely landed helicopters in Lebanon, scooped up people and taken them back to Israel. It’s nothing so extraordinary.”

There are many levels to this unfolding tragedy. None may be greater than the grave undermining of democratic movements and social liberalization in the Middle East. Milt Beardon, a former CIA officer and ME expert, tells Sites why. Not only is Hezbollah “an organic part” of the 40% of Lebanon that is Shia, it has gained credibility in the region:

“Hezbollah is the current darling of everybody in the Middle East,” Bearden says, “mainly because of what they’ve accomplished by not being destroyed.”

“I don’t think anyone really believes you can remove Hezbollah through bombing,” says the source close to Hezbollah. “It’s an organization that is part of the Shia society. In fact, there will be Hezbollahs sprouting up all over the world after this. Groups like Hezbollah and Hamas are bridging that divide and it’s showing how vulnerable many of the Arab governments are.”

And though they’ve shown their vulnerability in this conflict, Bearden believes Arab governments have also found an “out” from the pressure from the West to democratize — since the U.S., to them, no longer seems like an honest broker after its response to Hamas’ and Hezbollah’s election victories in the Palestinian Territories and Lebanon.

“The concept of a tsunami of democracy (in the Middle East) is done for,” Bearden says.

The last six years make it hard to remember a time when the US had some clout as an “honest broker,” back in the days of shuttle diplomacy and the Camp David accords. But our current Cowboy-in-Chief has little interest in such sissy, peacenik stuff, famously shaking off Colin Powell’s calls for engagement in the Israel/Palestinian conflict at the beginning of his administration with the bon mot, “Sometimes a show of force by one side can really clarify things.â€?

Clarity is breaking out all over these days.

More from Sites and Bearden:

As a member of Conflicts Forum, a group of former cold warriors who believe the West has to establish a dialogue with fundamentalist Islamic organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah to peacefully resolve crises like this, Bearden says the U.S. missed important opportunities to head off the violence.

“I’ve been in countless hours of meetings with some of them (Hezbollah) to where I can guarantee you that they would have welcomed a quiet dialogue with the United States,” he says. “We don’t do our fundamental homework anymore. You’ve got to empathize with the enemy to the extent to that you don’t have a cartoon character that you’re fighting, but someone that might be smarter than anybody in your administration.”

Well, that last possibility strikes me as a pretty safe bet. The cartoon characters seem to be on our side, populating an Administration whose language of diplomacy can pretty much be summed up as, “Hulk smash!”

cross-posted at the paper tiger