Scrapbook
Scrapbook When Frogs Attack Take a minute, won't you please, to acknowledge the sufferings of a too often overlooked class of victims in this war-on-terrorism business and the associated crisis in...
...Saddam's Apologist, cont...
...Are they dead...
...I believe the government is lying," Meyssan has told reporters...
...Even George W. Bush has occasionally joined in the fun...
...Polls Apart President Clinton's habit of polling everything from where to take his vacation to what kind of pet to get has been thoroughly mocked...
...Without missing a beat, the famous Bush smirk crossed the president's face and he replied, 'In this White House, Dee Dee, we don't poll on something as important as national security.'" Green uses this as his point of departure in going after Bush for what the writer apparently believes is an epic case of Washington hypocrisy: President Bush, it turns out, has pollsters...
...L'Effroyable Imposture ("The Appalling Fraud") argues, as its cover-copy indicates, that "Aucun avion ne s'est écrasé sur le Pentagone...
...You can find the full text at majoritywhip.gov...
...Eox News's Greta Van Susteren asked Ritter why Saddam Hussein would welcome him back...
...weapons inspector Scott Ritter...
...It got somewhat overtaken by the president's speech the next day, which may explain why it didn't get more attention, or maybe the media just have too much invested in their demonizing of DeLay...
...Either way, we suspect the "revelation" that the Bush team polls as an adjunct to and not a substitute for policymaking is going to strike people who remember the Dick Morris era as something to be relieved about, not scandalized by...
...We can't verify that, but in the unlikely event the Bush administration is considering sending Ritter, we hope they'll watch his Iraqi-financed propaganda film first...
...Despite this, Ritter claims in a March 26 article for the Albany Times-Union that U.S...
...In his cover story for the latest Washington Monthly, Joshua Green reports an anecdote about a luncheon last year at the White House for former presidential press secretaries...
...Speculation that Scott Speicher, a pilot shot down in Iraq during the Gulf War, might still be alive in an Iraqi prison led to an offer on March 24 from the Iraqi Foreign Ministry "to prove our goodwill...
...He yearned to do what we wanted him to do...
...He is completely untrustworthy...
...So, we should support Israel as they dismantle the Palestinian leadership that foments violence and fosters hate...
...But a more revealing distinction between the two presidencies is this fact, which Green, bizarrely, seems to think reflects unflatteringly on Bush: "While Clinton used polling to craft popular policies, Bush uses polling to spin unpopular ones—arguably a much more cynical undertaking...
...At which point, "former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers piped up, 'What do the poll numbers say?' All eyes turned to Bush...
...Also, Meyssan asks sarcastically, "What became of the passengers...
...We'd like to see the "argument" according to which polling to drum up support for unpopular policies is more cynical than polling to find out what your policy should be in the first place...
...Levy says he will offer the Karzai government "words that carry the weight of deeds, texts that are also acts...
...Not enough time, for example, for the post-Spinozist-Althusserians to come up with an effective response to France's recent wave of synagogue fire-bombings...
...Monsieur Meyssan finds proof for his theory in the official account of the September 11 Pentagon disaster...
...government officials had contacted him about going on the mission...
...One book, in particular, which is Number 1 on the Amazon/France bestseller list and still "flying off the shelves" at the FNAC megastore in Paris...
...the Americans, he contends, deliberately blew up their own Defense Department headquarters...
...Green is smart enough to avoid fleshing out his "arguably" clause...
...The Iraqis offered to receive a team of inspectors, provided it's led by former U.N...
...And since texts are also acts, Thierry Meyssan—along with the thousands of Frenchmen who have bought his ludicrous book—owe the grieving relatives an apology...
...Could a Boeing 757 flying 350 miles per hour and carrying thousands of gallons of combustible jet fuel really get smashed into nothingness merely by the force of a head-on collision with the world's largest con-crete-and-steel office building...
...19, 2001, cover story ("Saddam Hussein's American Apologist"), Ritter was the most dogged U.N...
...Arguably how...
...Where are the wings and fuselage of this so-called American Airlines Flight 77, he wonders...
...You can call that feeble, or you can call it taking one for the team...
...Clinton's impulse was democratic...
...Not so Maureen Dowd, who built a whole column last week around Green's piece, gamely trying to defend the proposition that Bush's polling is more cynical than Clinton's...
...Our guess is that Iraq's invitation has something to do with Ritter's recently released documentary, In Shifting Sands...
...We mean, of course, French political activists and intellectuals, who are stretched awfully thin at the moment...
...As readers of this magazine will remember from Stephen E Hayes's Nov...
...There is national tradition to be upheld—so some of them have flown off to Ramallah, the better to assist a foreign dictator currently murdering Jewish people...
...The president dropped by and discussed some of the domestic security issues the White House was grappling with...
...Why are there no photographs of the wreckage...
...Others are perhaps unaware of the 180-degree turn in Ritter's views...
...no plane crashed into the Pentagon...
...Well, truthfully, not just like Clinton...
...And they do lots of polling...
...Ritter has acknowledged, in an interview with this magazine, that Al-Khafaji is "openly sympathetic with the regime in Baghdad...
...So much thinking to be done, so little time...
...Ritter: "Well, that's actually a good question to be asking the Iraqis because, frankly speaking, I was stunned when I—when I was made aware of this...
...fabrications against Iraq...
...and refute the repeated U.S...
...Here's her best shot: "At least Mr...
...Scrapbook When Frogs Attack Take a minute, won't you please, to acknowledge the sufferings of a too often overlooked class of victims in this war-on-terrorism business and the associated crisis in the Middle East...
...Actually, yes, they are dead...
...Bush's impulse is autocratic...
...Because, lookit: "Even when philosophy went through its Spinozist-Althusserian phase, it still believed thinking could equate to doing...
...Ritter's film was financed by $400,000 from Shakir Al-Khafaji, an Iraqi-American businessman who helps Saddam Hussein put on "expatriate conferences...
...Which is a very American kind of thing to do, as anyone who has studied the mise-en-scène of a Sylvester Stallone movie can tell you...
...weapons inspector in Iraq throughout the mid-1990s, but later converted to the view that Saddam Hussein has been victimized by America...
...But still enough time— always enough time—to read books...
...This would be 11 Septembre 2001: L'Effroyable Imposture, by Thierry Meyssan, president of the leftist think tank Réseau Voltaire...
...During four decades of terrorism, Yasser Arafat has proven his total contempt for human life...
...Here's our favorite passage: No one should expect the people of Israel to negotiate with groups pursuing the fundamental goal of destroying them...
...Incroyable, non...
...Huh...
...Going through the records of the Republican National Committee, Green comes up with an estimate of about $1 million spent on polling in Bush's first year, about half of Clinton's first year spending...
...There are beaux gestes to be made—so French president Jacques Chirac and prime minister Lionel Jospin have dispatched celebrity thinker Bernard-Henri Levy to Afghanistan to help with post-Taliban reconstruction efforts...
...Mr...
...Just like Clinton...
...Arafat and his Authority have been an impediment to peace and a threat to the emergence of moderate Palestinian voices...
...On DeLay, on DeLay House Majority Whip Tom DeLay last week gave the finest speech on events in the Middle East by any official in Washington...
...He wants to do what he (or Cheney & Rove) wants to do—and is desperate only to find a way to shove it down our throats...
Vol. 7 • April 2002 • No. 30
