The South Park Division
Shortly before Christmas, THE SCRAPBOOK read what seemed to be the 800th or so story we’ve seen on Iraqi ingratitude toward Americans. While American soldiers have spent the last eight months getting shot, getting RPG’ed, and getting mortared, many Iraqis, no longer fearful of having relatives disappeared in the night by Saddam’s various goon squads, have tripped upon a new national pastime: whining like little girls.
The latest evidence came when the New York Times’s intrepid John Burns parked himself at a diner in Tikrit, and had a chat with Hatim Jassem, a 35-year-old theology professor. Jassem himself had been a Saddam victim. After warning his brother not to get too close to Saddam’s forces, one of Saddam’s eavesdropping bodyguards imprisoned him for six weeks. “They tortured me,” Jassem said. “I still have the scars on my back–but it could have been worse.”
Though Hassem threw America some bones, admitting that his people would never have been liberated without American intervention, in the middle of the interview, he went from condemning Hussein to castigating U.S. troops for the “humiliation” Saddam was forced to endure during his arrest. That, according to Burns, turned into a 90-minute vinegar session about Americans.
It’s enough to make soldiers want to vent. Now they can–sort of. After a recent trip to Baghdad, U.S. News & World Report’s Mark Mazzetti kindly shared with us a semi-official looking insignia patch that can be purchased at both the base in the Baghdad International Airport and the PX in Camp Doha, Kuwait. Instead of the traditional Ranger tab or airborne patch, it bears the likeness of a smiling camel, surrounded by characters from “South Park”–presumably stand-ins for ugly Americans. Its inscription: “Busting My Ass to Save Yours–Operation Iraqi Freedom.”
When we asked a U.S. Army spokesperson at the Pentagon if it had their seal of approval, she chuckled nervously, saying the patch cannot be worn on uniforms. “I’m sure this is something, let me put it this way,” she struggled. “I can’t imagine it having anything official to do with the Army. The Army would not approve of such a thing. Because the Army wants to ensure soldiers treat people in other countries with dignity and respect, and would never authorize something like that which contains vulgarity. Personally, I use the word all the time. But such a flippant approach to the mission would not be something that the Army would approve of.”
Staying safely on message, she added, “We’re there to help the people of Iraq.” Our sentiments exactly. THE SCRAPBOOK suggests having the patch translated into Arabic, so it can be worn by Iraqis–just as a helpful reminder.
There She Goes Again
That Molly Ivins shore is somethin’ else. The aw-shucks southern gal has been a writin’ and a cussin’ and a truth-tellin’ longer than a newborn calf sucking on the hind teat of . . . well, you get the idea.
Although she’s a graduate of Smith College and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and once worked as the Rocky Mountain bureau chief for the New York Times, this darling of the liberal establishment wants you to think of her as a populist with a pen. Consider these “gems” from recent columns:
* “Well, now, danged if that doesn’t bring us to the subject of lying and the White House.”
* “Denial is not just a river in Egypt.”
* “I thought I would upchuck.”
* “One problem I have with Arnold Schwarzenegger is that he looks like a condom stuffed with walnuts.”
One problem THE SCRAPBOOK has with Ivins is that she recycled that walnuts quote, which she first included in a September column, a month later in an appearance on CNN: “I went out to California to look at this race and came back saying, oh, Gray Davis makes Mr. Rogers look like he was on steroids, and Arnold Schwarzenegger looks exactly like a condom stuffed with walnuts. This was not the most profound observation I have ever made about serious public affairs, but it’s irresistible.”
Another problem: That irresistible observation isn’t hers. It dates back to at least 1987, and credit belongs to Australian journalist and television host Clive James, according to Australian blogger Tim Blair, whose coverage drew our eye to this latest instance of Ivins plagiarism.
Latest? Yup–she’s a repeat offender. In a 1988 Mother Jones piece, Ivins ripped off the inimitable Florence King’s riff on southerners from her 1975 book “Southern Ladies and Gentlemen”: “The typical Southerner,” wrote King,
–Or brags about what an isolationist he is and then votes for Richard Nixon.
–Or brags about what a populist he is and then votes for Barry Goldwater.
–Or brags about what an aristocrat he is and then votes for George Wallace.
–And is able to say with a straight face that he sees nothing peculiar about any of the above.
King later blew the whistle on Ivins. “My name is strewn through this [Mother Jones] article, but never where it counts. She credits me on minor observations, but when the subject is politics–her turf–she plagiarizes me.” Then came the rapier: “Danged if this don’t remind me of an old left-wing quotation: ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.'”
Tear Down This Wall
Not to be missed is the Dec. 31 mea culpa in Slate from Stewart Baker, former general counsel of the National Security Agency (1992-1994), decrying the “wall between intelligence and law enforcement.” Some choice excerpts:
“Earlier this month, as fears of new al Qaeda attacks mounted, the Justice Department announced new FBI guidelines that would allow intelligence and law enforcement agents to work together on terrorism investigations. An ACLU spokesman was quick to condemn the guidelines as creating the possibility of ‘an end run around Fourth Amendment requirements.’ I used to worry about that possibility myself. Not any more. Because the alternative is to maintain a wall of separation between law enforcement and intelligence. That’s what we used to do. And on Sept. 11, 2001, that wall probably cost us 3,000 American lives. . . .
“That ‘wall’ . . . was put in place to protect against a hypothetical risk to civil liberties that might arise if domestic law enforcement and foreign intelligence missions were allowed to mix. It was a post-Watergate fix meant to protect Americans, not kill them. In fact, in 1994, after I left my job as general counsel to the National Security Agency, I argued that the wall should be left in place. . . . I recognized at the time that these privacy risks were just abstract worries, but I accepted the conventional wisdom: ‘However theoretical the risks to civil liberties may be, they cannot be ignored.’ . . .
“I was wrong, but not alone, in assigning a high importance to theoretical privacy risks. In hindsight, that choice seems little short of feckless, for it made the failures of August and September 2001 nearly inevitable.”
Read the whole thing, as they say, at http://slate.msn.com/id/2093344/.
