fighting words
Daughter of Destiny
Benazir Bhutto, 1953-2007.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Thursday, Dec. 27, 2007, at 1:34 PM ET
The sternest critic of Benazir Bhutto would not have been able to deny that she possessed an extraordinary degree of physical courage. When her father was lying in prison under sentence of death from Pakistan's military dictatorship in 1979, and other members of her family were trying to escape the country, she boldly flew back in. Her subsequent confrontation with the brutal Gen. Zia-ul-Haq cost her five years of her life, spent in prison. She seemed merely to disdain the experience, as she did the vicious little man who had inflicted it upon her.
Benazir saw one of her brothers, Shahnawaz, die in mysterious circumstances in the south of France in 1985, and the other, Mir Murtaza, shot down outside the family home in Karachi by uniformed police in 1996. It was at that famous address—70 Clifton Road—that I went to meet her in November 1988, on the last night of the election campaign, and I found out firsthand how brave she was. Taking the wheel of a jeep and scorning all bodyguards, she set off with me on a hair-raising tour of the Karachi slums. Every now and then, she would get out, climb on the roof of the jeep with a bullhorn, and harangue the mob that pressed in close enough to turn the vehicle over. On the following day, her Pakistan Peoples Party won in a landslide, making her, at the age of 35, the first woman to be elected the leader of a Muslim country.
Her tenure ended—as did her subsequent "comeback" tenure—in a sorry welter of corruption charges and political intrigue, and in a gilded exile in Dubai. But clearly she understood that exile would be its own form of political death. (She speaks well on this point in an excellent recent profile by Amy Wilentz in More magazine.) Like two other leading Asian politicians, Benigno Aquino of the Philippines and Kim Dae-jung of South Korea, she seems to have decided that it was essential to run the risk of returning home. And now she has gone, as she must have known she might, the way of Aquino.
Who knows who did this deed? It is grotesque, of course, that the murder should have occurred in Rawalpindi, the garrison town of the Pakistani military elite and the site of Flashman's Hotel. It is as if she had been slain on a visit to West Point or Quantico. But it's hard to construct any cui bono analysis on which Gen. Pervez Musharraf is the beneficiary of her death. The likeliest culprit is the al-Qaida/Taliban axis, perhaps with some assistance from its many covert and not-so-covert sympathizers in the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence. These were the people at whom she had been pointing the finger since the huge bomb that devastated her welcome-home motorcade on Oct. 18.
She would have been in a good position to know about this connection, because when she was prime minister, she pursued a very active pro-Taliban policy, designed to extend and entrench Pakistani control over Afghanistan and to give Pakistan strategic depth in its long confrontation with India over Kashmir. The fact of the matter is that Benazir's undoubted courage had a certain fanaticism to it. She had the largest Electra complex of any female politician in modern history, entirely consecrated to the memory of her executed father, the charming and unscrupulous Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had once boasted that the people of Pakistan would eat grass before they would give up the struggle to acquire a nuclear weapon. (He was rather prescient there—the country now does have nukes, and millions of its inhabitants can barely feed themselves.) A nominal socialist, Zulfikar Bhutto was an autocratic opportunist, and this family tradition was carried on by the PPP, a supposedly populist party that never had a genuine internal election and was in fact—like quite a lot else in Pakistan—Bhutto family property.
Daughter of Destiny is the title she gave to her autobiography. She always displayed the same unironic lack of embarrassment. How prettily she lied to me, I remember, and with such a level gaze from those topaz eyes, about how exclusively peaceful and civilian Pakistan's nuclear program was. How righteously indignant she always sounded when asked unwelcome questions about the vast corruption alleged against her and her playboy husband, Asif Ali Zardari. (The Swiss courts recently found against her in this matter; an excellent background piece was written by John Burns in the New York Times in 1998.) And now the two main legacies of Bhutto rule—the nukes and the empowered Islamists—have moved measurably closer together.
This is what makes her murder such a disaster. There is at least some reason to think that she had truly changed her mind, at least on the Taliban and al-Qaida, and was willing to help lead a battle against them. She had, according to some reports, severed the connection with her rather questionable husband. She was attempting to make the connection between lack of democracy in Pakistan and the rise of mullah-manipulated fanaticism. Of those preparing to contest the highly dubious upcoming elections, she was the only candidate with anything approaching a mass appeal to set against the siren calls of the fundamentalists. And, right to the end, she carried on without the fetish of "security" and with lofty disregard for her own safety. This courage could sometimes have been worthy of a finer cause, and many of the problems she claimed to solve were partly of her own making. Nonetheless, she perhaps did have a hint of destiny about her.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2180952/
Friday, December 28, 2007
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Ron Paul on Meet the Press
Apart from foreign policy and earmark issues I think Paul acquitted himself well. But on those issues... as usual, Paul talks coldly and theoretically about terrorism, an issue where politicians are expected to bit their lips and hum "Have You Forgotten?" On earmarks, he just didn't bring together Fact A and Fact B in a convincing manner, and he lucked out in Russert's frenzy to move to the next question. His answers on the Civil Rights Act and Lincoln were rough, but those are the sorts of things you can be esoteric about.
Friday, December 21, 2007
Article published Dec 21, 2007
Scientists doubt climate change
December 21, 2007 By S.A. Miller
- More than 400 scientists challenge claims by former Vice President Al Gore and the United Nations about the threat of man-made global warming, a new Senate minority report says. The scientists — many of whom are current or former members of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that shares the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Mr. Gore for publicizing a climate crisis — cast doubt on the "scientific consensus" that man-made global warming imperils the planet. "I find the Doomsday picture Al Gore is painting — a six-meter sea level rise, 15 times the IPCC number — entirely without merit," said Dutch atmospheric scientist Hendrik Tennekes, one of the researchers quoted in the report by Republican staff of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. "I protest vigorously the idea that the climate reacts like a home heating system to a changed setting of the thermostat: just turn the dial, and the desired temperature will soon be reached," Mr. Tennekes said in the report. Sen. James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, said the report debunks Mr. Gore's claim that the "debate is over." "The endless claims of a 'consensus' about man-made global warming grow less-and-less credible every day," he said. After a quick review of the report, Gore spokeswoman Kalee Kreider said 25 or 30 of the scientists may have received funding from Exxon Mobil Corp. Exxon Mobil spokesman Gantt H. Walton dismissed the accusation, saying the company is concerned about climate-change issues and does not pay scientists to bash global-warming theories.
"Recycling of that kind of discredited conspiracy theory is nothing more than a distraction from the real challenge facing society and the energy industry," he said. "And that challenge is how are we going to provide the energy needed to support economic and social development while reducing greenhouse-gas emissions." The Republican report comes on the heels of Saturday's United Nations climate conference in Bali, Indonesia, where conferees adopted a plan to negotiate a new pact to create verifiable measurements to fight global warming in two years. In the Senate report, environmental scientist David W. Schnare of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said he was skeptical because "conclusions about the cause of the apparent warming stand on the shoulders of incredibly uncertain data and models. ... As a policy matter, one has to be less willing to take extreme actions when data are highly uncertain." The hundreds of others in the report — climatologists, oceanographers, geologists, glaciologists, physicists and paleoclimatologists — voice varying degrees of criticism of the popular global-warming theory. Their testimony challenges the idea that the climate-change debate is "settled" and runs counter to the claim that the number of skeptical scientists is dwindling. The report's authors expect some of the scientists will recant their remarks under intense pressure from the public and from within professional circles to conform to the global-warming theory, a committee staffer said. Several scientists in the report said many colleagues share their skepticism about man-made climate change but don't speak out publicly for fear of retribution, according to the report. "Many of my colleagues with whom I spoke share these views and report on their inability to publish their skepticism in the scientific or public media," atmospheric scientist Nathan Paldor, professor of Dynamical Meteorology and Physical Oceanography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said in the report. The IPCC has about 2,500 members.
HEATED DEBATE The following are comments from some of the more than 400 scientists in a Republican report on global warming:
•"Even if the concentration of 'greenhouse gases' double, man would not perceive the temperature impact." Oleg Sorochtin of the Institute of Oceanology at the Russian Academy of Sciences
•"I find the Doomsday picture Al Gore is painting — a six-meter sea level rise, 15 times the [U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] number — entirely without merit. ... I protest vigorously the idea that the climate reacts like a home heating system to a changed setting of the thermostat: just turn the dial, and the desired temperature will soon be reached." Atmospheric scientist Hendrik Tennekes, former research director at the Netherlands' Royal National Meteorological Institute
•"The hypothesis that solar variability and not human activity is warming the oceans goes a long way to explain the puzzling idea that the Earth's surface may be warming while the atmosphere is not. The [greenhouse-gas] hypothesis does not do this. ... The public is not well served by this constant drumbeat of false alarms fed by computer models manipulated by advocates." David Wojick, expert reviewer for U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
•"The media is promoting an unprecedented hyping related to global warming. The media and many scientists are ignoring very important facts that point to a natural variation in the climate system as the cause of the recent global warming." Chief Meteorologist Eugenio Hackbart of the MetSul Meteorologia Weather Center in Sao Leopoldo-Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
•"There's no need to be worried. It's very interesting to study [climate change], but there's no need to be worried." Anton Uriarte, a professor of physical geography at the University of the Basque Country in Spain
Source: Sen. James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee
Scientists doubt climate change
December 21, 2007 By S.A. Miller
- More than 400 scientists challenge claims by former Vice President Al Gore and the United Nations about the threat of man-made global warming, a new Senate minority report says. The scientists — many of whom are current or former members of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that shares the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Mr. Gore for publicizing a climate crisis — cast doubt on the "scientific consensus" that man-made global warming imperils the planet. "I find the Doomsday picture Al Gore is painting — a six-meter sea level rise, 15 times the IPCC number — entirely without merit," said Dutch atmospheric scientist Hendrik Tennekes, one of the researchers quoted in the report by Republican staff of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. "I protest vigorously the idea that the climate reacts like a home heating system to a changed setting of the thermostat: just turn the dial, and the desired temperature will soon be reached," Mr. Tennekes said in the report. Sen. James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, said the report debunks Mr. Gore's claim that the "debate is over." "The endless claims of a 'consensus' about man-made global warming grow less-and-less credible every day," he said. After a quick review of the report, Gore spokeswoman Kalee Kreider said 25 or 30 of the scientists may have received funding from Exxon Mobil Corp. Exxon Mobil spokesman Gantt H. Walton dismissed the accusation, saying the company is concerned about climate-change issues and does not pay scientists to bash global-warming theories.
"Recycling of that kind of discredited conspiracy theory is nothing more than a distraction from the real challenge facing society and the energy industry," he said. "And that challenge is how are we going to provide the energy needed to support economic and social development while reducing greenhouse-gas emissions." The Republican report comes on the heels of Saturday's United Nations climate conference in Bali, Indonesia, where conferees adopted a plan to negotiate a new pact to create verifiable measurements to fight global warming in two years. In the Senate report, environmental scientist David W. Schnare of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said he was skeptical because "conclusions about the cause of the apparent warming stand on the shoulders of incredibly uncertain data and models. ... As a policy matter, one has to be less willing to take extreme actions when data are highly uncertain." The hundreds of others in the report — climatologists, oceanographers, geologists, glaciologists, physicists and paleoclimatologists — voice varying degrees of criticism of the popular global-warming theory. Their testimony challenges the idea that the climate-change debate is "settled" and runs counter to the claim that the number of skeptical scientists is dwindling. The report's authors expect some of the scientists will recant their remarks under intense pressure from the public and from within professional circles to conform to the global-warming theory, a committee staffer said. Several scientists in the report said many colleagues share their skepticism about man-made climate change but don't speak out publicly for fear of retribution, according to the report. "Many of my colleagues with whom I spoke share these views and report on their inability to publish their skepticism in the scientific or public media," atmospheric scientist Nathan Paldor, professor of Dynamical Meteorology and Physical Oceanography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said in the report. The IPCC has about 2,500 members.
HEATED DEBATE The following are comments from some of the more than 400 scientists in a Republican report on global warming:
•"Even if the concentration of 'greenhouse gases' double, man would not perceive the temperature impact." Oleg Sorochtin of the Institute of Oceanology at the Russian Academy of Sciences
•"I find the Doomsday picture Al Gore is painting — a six-meter sea level rise, 15 times the [U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] number — entirely without merit. ... I protest vigorously the idea that the climate reacts like a home heating system to a changed setting of the thermostat: just turn the dial, and the desired temperature will soon be reached." Atmospheric scientist Hendrik Tennekes, former research director at the Netherlands' Royal National Meteorological Institute
•"The hypothesis that solar variability and not human activity is warming the oceans goes a long way to explain the puzzling idea that the Earth's surface may be warming while the atmosphere is not. The [greenhouse-gas] hypothesis does not do this. ... The public is not well served by this constant drumbeat of false alarms fed by computer models manipulated by advocates." David Wojick, expert reviewer for U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
•"The media is promoting an unprecedented hyping related to global warming. The media and many scientists are ignoring very important facts that point to a natural variation in the climate system as the cause of the recent global warming." Chief Meteorologist Eugenio Hackbart of the MetSul Meteorologia Weather Center in Sao Leopoldo-Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
•"There's no need to be worried. It's very interesting to study [climate change], but there's no need to be worried." Anton Uriarte, a professor of physical geography at the University of the Basque Country in Spain
Source: Sen. James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
You scumbag, you maggot / You [delightful same-sex couple]
Posted on December 18, 2007, 3:34pm Michael C. Moynihan
According to a report in The Daily Telegraph, BBC radio has removed the word "faggot" from that classic boozy Christmas song, The Pogues "Fairytale of New York." Pogues lyricist and singer Shane McGowen was asked to comment, but his answer was completely incoherent:
BBC Radio 1's decision to remove the word "faggot" from the classic Christmas song Fairytale of New York has roused the ire of Telegraph readers.Music lovers of all political stripes and sexual orientations have posted messages on Telegraph.co.uk attacking the corporation's censorship of the re-released song by The Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl.
[...]
BBC bosses said they had decided to remove the word faggot from the song, which experts believe could pip X Factor winner Leon Jackson to the Christmas No 1 slot, because it is a word that "members of our audience would find offensive".But The Guardian is reporting that BBC execs have bent to the will of their thoroughly un-PC constituents, the British taxpayers, and promised that the song will remain unmolested:
Since this story was published earlier today, Radio 1 controller Andy Parfitt has reversed the decision to censor the song Fairytale in New York. In a statement released tonight, Parfitt said: "After careful consideration, I have decided that the decision to edit the Pogues song was wrong." So there you have it, "faggot" is back in.It may have been done with the most progressive of intentions, but BBC Radio 1's decision to censor a lyric from Kirsty MacColl and Shane McGowan's Christmas standard Fairytale of New York looks rather to have backfired this morning.A decision by Radio 1 chiefs has meant that Fairytale, a ballad apparently conducted between two rowing drunks, has been edited so as to obscure the lines "You cheap lousy faggot" and "an old slut on junk", a decision that was criticised this morning by MacColl's own mother.
Full Guardian story here. "Fairytale of New York" video, starring Mr. Matt Dillon, here.
Posted on December 18, 2007, 3:34pm Michael C. Moynihan
According to a report in The Daily Telegraph, BBC radio has removed the word "faggot" from that classic boozy Christmas song, The Pogues "Fairytale of New York." Pogues lyricist and singer Shane McGowen was asked to comment, but his answer was completely incoherent:
BBC Radio 1's decision to remove the word "faggot" from the classic Christmas song Fairytale of New York has roused the ire of Telegraph readers.Music lovers of all political stripes and sexual orientations have posted messages on Telegraph.co.uk attacking the corporation's censorship of the re-released song by The Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl.
[...]
BBC bosses said they had decided to remove the word faggot from the song, which experts believe could pip X Factor winner Leon Jackson to the Christmas No 1 slot, because it is a word that "members of our audience would find offensive".But The Guardian is reporting that BBC execs have bent to the will of their thoroughly un-PC constituents, the British taxpayers, and promised that the song will remain unmolested:
Since this story was published earlier today, Radio 1 controller Andy Parfitt has reversed the decision to censor the song Fairytale in New York. In a statement released tonight, Parfitt said: "After careful consideration, I have decided that the decision to edit the Pogues song was wrong." So there you have it, "faggot" is back in.It may have been done with the most progressive of intentions, but BBC Radio 1's decision to censor a lyric from Kirsty MacColl and Shane McGowan's Christmas standard Fairytale of New York looks rather to have backfired this morning.A decision by Radio 1 chiefs has meant that Fairytale, a ballad apparently conducted between two rowing drunks, has been edited so as to obscure the lines "You cheap lousy faggot" and "an old slut on junk", a decision that was criticised this morning by MacColl's own mother.
Full Guardian story here. "Fairytale of New York" video, starring Mr. Matt Dillon, here.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
On Francisco Franco
On Francisco Franco written by Charles Few Americans know much about Francisco Franco, leader of the winning side in the Spanish C...
