![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Huh... didn't expect to see *this* in Pat Buchanan's Wikipedia entry:
"He is a 4th cousin twice removed from Marilyn Manson."
I guess it makes sense, though, I had heard Marilyn Manson's parents were religious fundamentalists.
I've been just devouring books and Wikipedia articles on politics lately. It appears to have become my latest perseveration topic.
Yesterday I read a whole lot of stuff on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That's such a huge one, I have come back to it many times, but there always seems to be more of the story to dig up.
A few months ago, I watched a BBC miniseries documentary called The Power of Nightmares, on the intersection of two different political movements, neo-conservatism and Islamism, and how despite being very similar in some ways they came to be mortal enemies, and jointly constructed many of the myths that helped fuel the War on Terror during the Bush administration. Actually, I think they go a little bit too far in it, saying even that Al Qaeda was a myth that both sides helped construct, and that no such organization ever really existed. It's true that they both exaggerated the scope and power of Al Qaeda as a threat to the Western world, and if you listen carefully to the details of what they claim, that's possibly all they really mean, however I feel like it is a bit dishonest to put it in such an extreme way like that. All told, it was the most interesting documentary I've ever watched, and should be required viewing for anyone who has something to say about the War on Terror. However, I'm suspicious as to the accuracy of some of the more extreme things they say in it and I do see it as one-sided and exaggerative.
Very similar to the feeling of The Power of Nightmares, I've just started reading a book by Noam Chomsky called Understanding Power. In some ways, he goes even further in his criticisms of US foreign policy, but in other ways I think he's a bit more careful with the facts. I have a similar reaction to him though--extremely interesting, and hard to dismiss, but surely he is exaggerating and a bit paranoid. I need to read more to be sure of that though. Some of the things he says (especially about the media) definitely have the feel of a conspiracy theory to me, although I can't actually pinpoint in what way it would count as a conspiracy theory, and he explicitly rejects most leftwing conspiracy theories, including for example JFK's assassination.
For fiction, I've started reading Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, something that I have meant to pick up for a long time but finally got around to it.
A couple weeks ago I finished listening to the Books-on-Tape version of Joe Klein's Politics Lost, which was nothing eye opening but it was a nice window into the game that politicians play, from a Washington Insider who was directly involved with a lot of the political strategists and pollsters for many years, and eventually quit after being asked to help with one too many attack ads. The main point of his book was to say that politicians should be more "human", taking more risks in what they say and voicing more of their own personal opinions instead of just sticking to the scripts of whatever their strategists determine will maximize their numbers in the polls or their chance of beating their opponent. I'm not sure I agree entirely with that point, though, for a couple reasons. Most of the examples he gives are like Sarah Palin using "You Betcha!" a lot (although this was written before that campaign so he doesn't use that one specifically). Judging by what he says, I think he would have loved her campaign--it was exactly the kind of thing he was calling for. Yes, it makes her seem more human and in Joe Klein's analysis that's what matters for getting votes more than your stance on the issues. But I'm not sure it really means the politician is more genuine. It seems like just another way of playing the game--at least for the strategist who would suggest a candidate who does things like that. And sometimes risky things are risky to say for a good reason... possibly because they are offensive to a lot of people. It's not always right to take risks, nor is it always the best strategy. On the one hand, he quit politics supposedly because it was too mechanical and too dirty, but on the other hand he seems to think he knows how to do it better, but I'm not sure he does.
After Politics Lost, this week I started a new Books on Tape. I'm almost halfway through John Bolton's "Surrender is Not an Option : Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad". I picked this one because I've been reading a lot of leftwing viewpoints lately, and I figured I should make sure I don't just drown in leftwing propaganda, in case the rightwing has something valid to say once in a while. Unfortunately, if this guy is representative of how the right thinks, I feel like they just don't have anything intelligent to say at all. But it's still interesting to me to listen to, because he was the US ambassador to the UN, as well as Undersecretary of State, involved in a lot of important negotiations with foreign countries and nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, although fundamentally he seems like he's just a boneheaded "America, fuck yeah!" idiot. I keep thinking that somewhere in the book he's going to present some kind of argument for why what he did at one point or another was the right thing to do, but he never does... all he ever says is things like "so of course I thought what the liberal beurocrats wanted was stupid and would tie America's hands, so I opposed it." (that's not a direct quote, but that's basically the flavor of most of his dialogue. He narrates it himself, with a bit of a hick accent which makes it all the more funny.) The most disturbing part so far is when he brags about how the proudest moment of his career was when he was able to officially "unsign" the US's support for the International Criminal Court. He explains that the ICC was set up to be able to try individuals for Crimes Against Humanity, but his personal view is that such a thing might be awefully inconvenient for Americans leaders--so he retracted our previous support for it! And of course, this was just a few years before the War in Iraq started, when we started violating Geneva Conventions and torturing prisoners and stuff.
He then goes on to discuss his next big project, which was negotiating with Russia to weasel our way out of the Anti Ballistic Missile treaty we'd signed with them a long time ago, so that we could build a new missile defense system. This was just before 9/11 and it looked like nobody was going to let him do it, but then suddenly 9/11 happened and his dream came true, and the Russian military leaders said "ok, well I guess you can go ahead and start building you ABM system back up, since you have a pretty good excuse... we just need to figure out a way to convince our people that's a good thing, which they're kind of dead set against for some reason." If that hadn't happened, he was considering resorting to a strategy Donald Rumsfeld suggested to him, which was to just meet with the Russians and say "oh by the way, we weren't obeying the stupid treaty anyway, because we've already started building up our missile defenses secretly anyway, so it's null and void!! Now you can break it too... knock yourself out." I swear, listening to this guy, I see very little difference between him and Stephen Colbert, he's almost a self parody. I guess I should have known that, considering the title of his book was "Surrender is Not an Option". Only a true conservative would be proud of *not* considering all the options.
Bolton's book is entertaining and educational from a sheer "OMG I cannot believe they think that way" perspective, but I'm still hoping that somewhere out there, there is some conservative who has articulate views on politics that I can read. It's suprisingly hard to find. My best guess is maybe Christopher Hitchens. I'm not sure he counts as a conservative, supposedly being a fan of Che Guevera, but I did read an article by him criticizing Michael Moore's film Farenheit 9/11 that seemed well written, and he has been a pretty vocal supporter of the War on Terror and the War in Iraq. Other people I have in mind as possibilities are Max Boot and Thomas Sowell. I'm not sure Boot has actually written any books, maybe just articles. But I find it especially intriguing that he has encouraged other neocons to "come out of the closet on imperialism" and to reclaim the word imperialism as the positive word that he sees it as.
P.S. Oh, I almost forgot--I also watched that documentary called Astroturf Wars. Pretty disappointing though. The best part was the clip about American Majority that I already posted to my lj. If you're really bored, you might consider watching it. There are some humorous clips of tea partiers saying stupid things like "Obama is a radical Communist, he's worse than Hilter, he says he wants to destroy the world!" (that's an exact quote), but other than that it's really kind of a waste of time. They hardly make much of a case, and the case they do make is for something not all that surprising or disturbing--namely, that many rich Republicans have been funding tea party rallies.
"He is a 4th cousin twice removed from Marilyn Manson."
I guess it makes sense, though, I had heard Marilyn Manson's parents were religious fundamentalists.
I've been just devouring books and Wikipedia articles on politics lately. It appears to have become my latest perseveration topic.
Yesterday I read a whole lot of stuff on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That's such a huge one, I have come back to it many times, but there always seems to be more of the story to dig up.
A few months ago, I watched a BBC miniseries documentary called The Power of Nightmares, on the intersection of two different political movements, neo-conservatism and Islamism, and how despite being very similar in some ways they came to be mortal enemies, and jointly constructed many of the myths that helped fuel the War on Terror during the Bush administration. Actually, I think they go a little bit too far in it, saying even that Al Qaeda was a myth that both sides helped construct, and that no such organization ever really existed. It's true that they both exaggerated the scope and power of Al Qaeda as a threat to the Western world, and if you listen carefully to the details of what they claim, that's possibly all they really mean, however I feel like it is a bit dishonest to put it in such an extreme way like that. All told, it was the most interesting documentary I've ever watched, and should be required viewing for anyone who has something to say about the War on Terror. However, I'm suspicious as to the accuracy of some of the more extreme things they say in it and I do see it as one-sided and exaggerative.
Very similar to the feeling of The Power of Nightmares, I've just started reading a book by Noam Chomsky called Understanding Power. In some ways, he goes even further in his criticisms of US foreign policy, but in other ways I think he's a bit more careful with the facts. I have a similar reaction to him though--extremely interesting, and hard to dismiss, but surely he is exaggerating and a bit paranoid. I need to read more to be sure of that though. Some of the things he says (especially about the media) definitely have the feel of a conspiracy theory to me, although I can't actually pinpoint in what way it would count as a conspiracy theory, and he explicitly rejects most leftwing conspiracy theories, including for example JFK's assassination.
For fiction, I've started reading Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, something that I have meant to pick up for a long time but finally got around to it.
A couple weeks ago I finished listening to the Books-on-Tape version of Joe Klein's Politics Lost, which was nothing eye opening but it was a nice window into the game that politicians play, from a Washington Insider who was directly involved with a lot of the political strategists and pollsters for many years, and eventually quit after being asked to help with one too many attack ads. The main point of his book was to say that politicians should be more "human", taking more risks in what they say and voicing more of their own personal opinions instead of just sticking to the scripts of whatever their strategists determine will maximize their numbers in the polls or their chance of beating their opponent. I'm not sure I agree entirely with that point, though, for a couple reasons. Most of the examples he gives are like Sarah Palin using "You Betcha!" a lot (although this was written before that campaign so he doesn't use that one specifically). Judging by what he says, I think he would have loved her campaign--it was exactly the kind of thing he was calling for. Yes, it makes her seem more human and in Joe Klein's analysis that's what matters for getting votes more than your stance on the issues. But I'm not sure it really means the politician is more genuine. It seems like just another way of playing the game--at least for the strategist who would suggest a candidate who does things like that. And sometimes risky things are risky to say for a good reason... possibly because they are offensive to a lot of people. It's not always right to take risks, nor is it always the best strategy. On the one hand, he quit politics supposedly because it was too mechanical and too dirty, but on the other hand he seems to think he knows how to do it better, but I'm not sure he does.
After Politics Lost, this week I started a new Books on Tape. I'm almost halfway through John Bolton's "Surrender is Not an Option : Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad". I picked this one because I've been reading a lot of leftwing viewpoints lately, and I figured I should make sure I don't just drown in leftwing propaganda, in case the rightwing has something valid to say once in a while. Unfortunately, if this guy is representative of how the right thinks, I feel like they just don't have anything intelligent to say at all. But it's still interesting to me to listen to, because he was the US ambassador to the UN, as well as Undersecretary of State, involved in a lot of important negotiations with foreign countries and nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, although fundamentally he seems like he's just a boneheaded "America, fuck yeah!" idiot. I keep thinking that somewhere in the book he's going to present some kind of argument for why what he did at one point or another was the right thing to do, but he never does... all he ever says is things like "so of course I thought what the liberal beurocrats wanted was stupid and would tie America's hands, so I opposed it." (that's not a direct quote, but that's basically the flavor of most of his dialogue. He narrates it himself, with a bit of a hick accent which makes it all the more funny.) The most disturbing part so far is when he brags about how the proudest moment of his career was when he was able to officially "unsign" the US's support for the International Criminal Court. He explains that the ICC was set up to be able to try individuals for Crimes Against Humanity, but his personal view is that such a thing might be awefully inconvenient for Americans leaders--so he retracted our previous support for it! And of course, this was just a few years before the War in Iraq started, when we started violating Geneva Conventions and torturing prisoners and stuff.
He then goes on to discuss his next big project, which was negotiating with Russia to weasel our way out of the Anti Ballistic Missile treaty we'd signed with them a long time ago, so that we could build a new missile defense system. This was just before 9/11 and it looked like nobody was going to let him do it, but then suddenly 9/11 happened and his dream came true, and the Russian military leaders said "ok, well I guess you can go ahead and start building you ABM system back up, since you have a pretty good excuse... we just need to figure out a way to convince our people that's a good thing, which they're kind of dead set against for some reason." If that hadn't happened, he was considering resorting to a strategy Donald Rumsfeld suggested to him, which was to just meet with the Russians and say "oh by the way, we weren't obeying the stupid treaty anyway, because we've already started building up our missile defenses secretly anyway, so it's null and void!! Now you can break it too... knock yourself out." I swear, listening to this guy, I see very little difference between him and Stephen Colbert, he's almost a self parody. I guess I should have known that, considering the title of his book was "Surrender is Not an Option". Only a true conservative would be proud of *not* considering all the options.
Bolton's book is entertaining and educational from a sheer "OMG I cannot believe they think that way" perspective, but I'm still hoping that somewhere out there, there is some conservative who has articulate views on politics that I can read. It's suprisingly hard to find. My best guess is maybe Christopher Hitchens. I'm not sure he counts as a conservative, supposedly being a fan of Che Guevera, but I did read an article by him criticizing Michael Moore's film Farenheit 9/11 that seemed well written, and he has been a pretty vocal supporter of the War on Terror and the War in Iraq. Other people I have in mind as possibilities are Max Boot and Thomas Sowell. I'm not sure Boot has actually written any books, maybe just articles. But I find it especially intriguing that he has encouraged other neocons to "come out of the closet on imperialism" and to reclaim the word imperialism as the positive word that he sees it as.
P.S. Oh, I almost forgot--I also watched that documentary called Astroturf Wars. Pretty disappointing though. The best part was the clip about American Majority that I already posted to my lj. If you're really bored, you might consider watching it. There are some humorous clips of tea partiers saying stupid things like "Obama is a radical Communist, he's worse than Hilter, he says he wants to destroy the world!" (that's an exact quote), but other than that it's really kind of a waste of time. They hardly make much of a case, and the case they do make is for something not all that surprising or disturbing--namely, that many rich Republicans have been funding tea party rallies.
