From the WSJ Opinion Archives
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So
Long, Sadr
The Associated Press brings some excellent news from Iraq:
Anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr fled Iraq for Iran ahead of a security crackdown in Baghdad and the arrival of 21,500 U.S. troops sent by President Bush to quell sectarian violence, a senior U.S. official said Tuesday.
Al-Sadr left his Baghdad stronghold some weeks ago, the official said, and is believed to be in Tehran, where he has family. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss U.S. monitoring activities, said fractures in al-Sadr's political and militia operations may be part of the reason for his departure.
Clever of them to announce this on the eve of the House vote of no confidence in President Bush's new Iraq strategy.
A headline in the La Crosse (Wis.) Tribune reads, "Hawks Found 'Walking Around Like Chickens' Flying High Again." We're tired of the "chickenhawk" canard, but all the same it's nice to be winning again.
No,
You're an Alcoholic!
"Al-Qaida's No. 2 said President Bush was an alcoholic and a lying gambler
who wagered on Iraq and lost, according to a new audiotape released Tuesday,"
the Associated Press reports:
Ayman al-Zawahri said in the tape that Bush has been forced to admit his failure in Iraq after he was "stubborn" and repeated the "lie, which he became addicted to, that he is winning" in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"Bush suffers from an addictive personality, and was an alcoholic. I don't know his present condition . . . but the one who examines his personality finds that he is addicted to two other faults--lying and gambling," al-Zawahri said in the audiotape.
The headline of this AP dispatch actually reads "Al-Qaida's No. 2 Calls Bush an Alcoholic." Is "terrorist calls American president names" really a news story?
Don't
Tread on Me, Tread on Big Oil
Blogger Bob Krumm has an amusing follow-up on our item
yesterday about Gov. Jim Doyle of Wisconsin, who wants to impose a tax on
oil companies and mandate that they can't pass it on to consumers. Krumm notes
that Doyle spent eight years between public offices in private law practice:
What? Did he not learn in those eight years that for a business owner to stay in business, he has to pay all of his expenses and still sell his product for more than it costs to produce it?
Apparently he did learn, because he said this just last November:
People ought to understand the sales tax is a tax on people it's not a tax on business. . . . So when you say you're going to take away [a sales tax] exemption, you're not talking about a business. You're saying individual people are going to pay a sales tax and I'm not in favor of that.
Of course, when he said that, he was talking about the sales tax exemption that Wisconsin has long bestowed to certain services--including legal services.
It's always good to see a politician take a stand on principle.
Pigs
in Love
We got a kick out of this exchange on a Reuters blog. A reader named Charles
raises this concern:
Perhaps it was an oversight, but your article on the Maine lesbian who adopted her female partner was illustrated with a picture of two pigs nuzzling. I was offended by the juxtaposition--so I can only imagine how lesbians reading the article felt!
The response from Reuters' "GBU editor":
That thumbnail photo was part of a selection of good Reuters pictures from the past 24 hours, and appeared in a similar location alongside every story in that news channel on that day. It had absolutely nothing to do with this story or any of the others.
The pig pic has since been replaced by a photo of a balloon. But we're confused. Why should lesbians be offended? Gay-rights advocates often point to the existence of homosexual behavior in the animal kingdom--gay penguins, lesbian seagulls--as evidence that same-sex attraction is natural.
Well, pigs are animate creatures too! It's nothing but bigotry to suggest that their love is unworthy of respect. This whole kerfuffle just proves that swinophobia is alive and well in America.
'Death
to Valentine's Day!'
That's what "more than 100 members of the Hindu extremist group Shiv Sena"
chanted at an anti-Valentine protest in New Delhi, according to the Associated
Press. We like this chant even better: "People who celebrate Valentine's
Day should be pelted with shoes!"
Valentine's Day is catching on in India, the AP says:
It's a state of affairs that enrages Hindu and Muslim hard-liners, who on Wednesday vented just as they do every Valentine's Day--burning cards, holding rallies and even threatening to beat couples caught canoodling in public, a strict no-no for those who claim to defend traditional Indian values.
"This is a conspiracy to misguide the young people of our country," said Jai Bhagwan Goel, chief of the Shiv Sena's north India branch.
In his hand the card, with its image of a Victorian couple pictured in a tepid peck under a parasol, went up in flames.
"We have come to know that in America, even unmarried girls as young as 11 or 12 years have become mothers . . . and every second man there is divorced," Goel told reporters after reducing several greeting cards to a small pile of ash. "This is their culture--it cannot be accepted here."
Who does this guy think he is, Dinesh D'Souza?
Flower
Power
London's Daily Telegraph reports that sending flowers on Valentine's Day can
contribute to warming--and not just of your sweetie's heart:
The Valentine's Day bouquet--the gift that every woman in Britain will be waiting for next week--has become the latest bête noire among environmental campaigners.
Latest Government figures show that the flowers that make up the average bunch have flown 33,800 miles to reach Britain. . . .
Environmentalists warned that "flower miles" could have serious implications on climate change in terms of carbon dioxide emissions from aeroplanes.
The Telegraph's headline reads "Valentine Bouquets 'Are Bad for the Planet.' " It occurred to us that some neglectful husbands and boyfriends are going to use this as an excuse: I would have sent you flowers, honey, but I wanted to save the planet. Trust us on this one, guys, it won't work.
On the other hand, think of how much more meaningful it now is if you do send flowers. The message: You mean more to me than the whole world. This may be the best thing ever to happen to the floral industry.
She
Should've Untied Herself Before Trying to Drive
"Woman Tied to Scalia Faces DUI Charge"--headline, Daily Herald (DuPage
Count, Ill.), Feb. 14
More
Doritos Too, Dude!
"DEA: More Marijuana Needed for Studies"--headline, Centre Daily Times
(State College, Pa.), Feb. 14
Bottom Stories of the Day
- "Courts May Get Into Carroll Cheerleader Fight"--headline, Dallas
Morning News, Feb. 12
- "Paula Abdul Says She's Never Been Drunk"--headline, Associated
Press, Feb. 13
- "I-95 Debris Annoys Riverside Man"--headline, Greenwich (Conn.) Time, Feb. 14
Enemies:
A Love Story
Linda Quiquivix (pronounced KEE-kee-vicks) is a graduate student at the University
of North Carolina in Chapel Hill who writes for the Daily Tar Heel, a student
newspaper. Last week she penned an extraordinary column titled "Know This,
Future Ex-Boyfriends of Mine":
Friends who know me weren't surprised to learn that my Zionist boyfriend and I broke up last summer shortly after Israel began dropping bombs on Lebanese children. But the friends who really knew me were surprised to learn that I had even dated a Zionist to begin with.
In my defense, I thought he was just Jewish when it all began--a progressive one who was white but had tendencies for black supremacy.
It was awfully open-minded of Miss Quiquivix not to disqualify him for being "just Jewish." No doubt some of her best friends are Jewish. But her description of him as "white but [with] tendencies for black supremacy" is a head-scratcher. If someone black had "tendencies for white supremacy," most people would view him with pity, perhaps mixed with contempt. Yet to hear Miss Quiquivix tell it, her ex's tendency to see himself as belonging to an inferior race was an attraction.
Even so, there was trouble in paradise:
Politically, we aligned well, so I figured that he'd automatically agree with my stance on Israel-Palestine. . . .
But my new progressive boyfriend, who was supposed to help me save the world, would stop short at any criticism of the Israeli government's racist, oppressive policies.
He was supposed to help her save the world? We've heard of rushing into a commitment, but this is ridiculous! Shouldn't they have taken some time to get to know each other first? Indeed they should have, Miss Quiquivix seems to acknowledge:
What's worse, he would sometimes defend [Israel] by saying things like that the land was up for grabs because the Palestinians never had an official state to begin with.
Man, you really think you know your white Jewish boyfriend with tendencies for black supremacy.
It quickly became obvious that, just the same, he didn't know his brown girlfriend with tendencies for anarchism well either. It was probably the anarchism that threw him off the most. I mean, he knew I was brown.
I think. I'm pretty sure it came up in conversation at least once. Like when I told him about the time the Israeli airport police racially profiled me and asked me to strip down to my underwear.
But it's very possible that "strip down to my underwear" was all he took away from that story.
Men! Don't they realize women are more than sex objects? Yet it's very possible that Miss Quiquivix is engaging in what psychologists call "projection." She goes on:
It must have been difficult to date me. My apologies. But whatever. Politics take precedence over penis.
That last sentence expresses one of the most brutish sentiments we've ever encountered in a respectable publication. It also points to a sexual double standard. If a male student at a major university wrote in the school paper that "politics take precedence over ___" (the next word would likely be vulgar rather than clinical, so we'll leave it to your imagination), he'd be run off campus for creating a hostile environment. Yet even if it is tolerable for women to objectify men by reducing us to our genital organs, it certainly isn't ladylike.
Miss Quiquivix continues:
Dating me, and all of the ideology that comes with the territory, was supposed to enlighten him, but I think it might have had the opposite effect. At times I thought he was coming around, but he'd go do stuff like hang the Israeli flag--and over his bed of all places.
We haven't heard the gent's side of the story and are hoping the Daily Tar Heel will commission a rebuttal from him. But based on Miss Quiquivix's account, we'd say the relationship suffered as a result of her unrealistic expectations. It's hard to imagine how she could "enlighten" someone if he had so little self-regard that he would "automatically agree" with her, as she also expected.
It's equally difficult to escape the conclusion that this relationship simply wasn't meant to be. These two had serious issues that they would have had to work out before even considering marriage, much less a commitment to "save the world" together.
And yet. Call us a sentimental old fool, but we still have hope for Miss Quiquivix. All her hostility toward men, and her in-your-face ideological zeal, seems like a self-protective front. Maybe one day the right man will come along--someone who makes her feel secure and good about herself, who shows her that it can be safe to allow herself to be vulnerable.
She'd just better hope he doesn't Google her first.
(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Evan Slatis, Jay Nerby, Mike Glasgow, Charles Brown, Mark Van Der Molen, Scott Wright, Monty Krieger, Michael Nunnelley, Keith Rasmussen, Joseph Tully, Bill Briggs, John Neal, Doug Black and Christopher Fountain. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)
Today on OpinionJournal:
- Review & Outlook: The Bush administration embraces faith-based nonproliferation in its North Korea deal.
- Nathan Gonzales (from RealClearPolitics): Barack Obama has a long track record of not taking a stand.
- Lionel Shriver: Americans disapprove of marital infidelity--in the movies, at least.
